by Philip Reeve
Tom went with them, trying not to look too eager, reminding himself that Wren would probably not be here. He shuffled along among the other visitors, peering at a display of crab-cams and then at a limpet called Spider Baby which stood on a dais in the centre of the hall. Whoever had put it there had given it a dramatic pose, rearing back on its four hind legs and waving its front feet in the air, as if it were about to lash out at the visitors. Families posed in front of it to have their photographs taken, the children making scaredy faces, or sticking out their tongues at the looming machine.
Beyond the limpet, in a straw-lined cage, captive Lost Boys squatted and stared at the passing crowds. Sometimes one would fling himself at the bars, shouting abuse, and the visitors would scuttle away, frightened and delighted, while one of the burly attendants poked the savage with an electric prod. Tom felt sorry for the Lost Boys, and almost relieved that Wren was not among them.
Nearby, a pretty young woman in Aquarium livery was pointing out details to a group of children. Tom waited until she had finished, then approached her. “Excuse me,” he asked, “could you tell me how many limpets were taken?”
The pretty young woman was really very pretty. Her smile almost dazzled Tom. “Nineteen in total, sir,” she said, “and three destroyed at sea.”
“And was one of them called the Autolycus?”
The smile faded. Flustered, the woman riffled through her exhibition notes. Nobody had ever asked her about a particular limpet before. “Let me see…” she muttered. “I believe… Oh yes! The Autolycus was one of the first limpets we caught, way over in the western seas, far from the parasite lair.” Her smile returned. “She must have been swimming off on a burgling mission when we snapped her up…”
“And the crew?”
The young woman was still smiling, but her eyes were troubled; she was starting to wonder if Tom were some kind of weirdo. “You’d have to ask Mr Shkin, sir. Mr Nabisco Shkin. All the captives are property of the Shkin Corporation.”
“And what’s the Shkin Corporation?” asked Hester, who had just been told the same thing by a second-hand balloon salesman at the air-harbour.
“Slaves,” said the man, spitting a black jet of tobacco juice on to the deckplate at his feet and winking at her. “All them boys and girls they fished up are all slaves now, and serve them right, I say.”
A slave, thought Hester, as she strode away through the increasingly busy streets. The shadows of airships and balloon-taxis slid over her as they poured into the air-harbour to offload more cackling crowds of tourists. A slave. Hester shouldered a group of language students off the pavement. How was she going to break this to Tom? That his beloved little girl was cooped up in a slave-hold somewhere, or enduring who-knew-what at the hands of cruel owners…
To make matters worse, she had learned that her plan of buying an airship would not work. Prices had rocketed since she’d last been aboard a city, and the gold that she had taken from Grimsby wouldn’t buy so much as a spare engine pod at the second-hand airship yards.
She spent some of it at a stall behind the harbour instead, buying a pair of jet-black sunglasses to hide her missing eye, and a headdress of silver discs that more or less concealed the scar on her forehead. She bought a new veil, too, and an ankle-length black coat with many buttons to replace the shabby thing she’d worn all the way from Anchorage. Walking on, she found her mood improving. She liked this city. She liked the sunshine and the crowds, the jangle of slot-machines, the tatty frontages of the hotels. She liked being among people who did not know her, and could not guess what lay beneath her veil. She liked the handsome young aviators who smiled at her as she strode past, their eyes drawn to this mysterious woman with her hidden face and long, lean body. And – although she didn’t quite admit it to herself – she liked life without Wren. She was almost glad that the girl had got herself kidnapped.
She stopped to study a street-plan and then crossed a footbridge over the Sea Pool and headed aft to Old Steine. There was no sign of Tom at the tables outside The Pink Café. Hester considered having a coffee while she waited for him, then decided that she couldn’t afford one at Brighton prices. She wandered around the long curve of the Steine instead, looking at the shop-fronts, until she came to one that stopped her short.
It was a shabby building which had once been a theatre. A cheery pink sign above its door proclaimed The Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, and posters announced: Re-live Mayor Pennyroyal’s Adventures on Five Continents and a Thousand Cities! Educational and Entertaining! In the window a waxwork of Pennyroyal, chained to the floor of a cardboard dungeon, raised and lowered its head, peering quizzically at a crescent-shaped blade which swung to and fro above it on a pendulum.
Mayor Pennyroyal? Hester had often wondered what had become of the fake explorer after he shot Tom and stole the Jenny Haniver. She had assumed that the gods would have punished him by now for all his lies and tricks; they’d had sixteen years to think of a suitable come-uppance, after all. Instead, they seemed to have rewarded him. Pennyroyal was alive. And Pennyroyal knew what she had done. She had told him herself, in the Aakiuqs’ smashed-up kitchen, while she was getting ready to murder Masgard and his huntsmen.
She handed a bronze coin to the man at the ticket booth, and went inside.
It seemed as though Brighton’s other visitors had found better ways of educating and entertaining themselves, for the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience was almost deserted. There was a dusty, museum smell, and another smell, tantalizing and out-of-place, which was even more familiar. Hester wandered past unimpressive artefacts in glass cases, past a reconstruction of an Ancient land-fill site which Pennyroyal had once excavated. Paintings and waxwork dioramas showed Pennyroyal battling a bear, escaping from air-pirates, and almost being sacrificed by a cult of Old-Tech-worshipping female warriors – all scenes from Pennyroyal’s best-selling books, and all total fibs. Only one of the paintings meant anything to Hester. It showed Pennyroyal, sword in hand, fighting off a horde of savage Huntsmen, while at his side a beautiful young woman expired prettily. It was only after she had stared at the picture for a minute or more that Hester noticed the martyred girl wore an eye-patch and had a fetching little scar on her cheek.
“Gods!” she said aloud. “Is that bimbo supposed to be me?”
Her voice sounded loud in the empty, echoey rooms. As it faded Hester heard footsteps and the man from the kiosk put his head round the door and asked, “Everything all right, madam?”
Hester nodded, too angry to speak.
“Magnificent painting, eh?” the curator said. He was a friendly man, middle-aged, with a few strands of sandy hair combed carefully across his bald head. He came and stood next to Hester and beamed proudly at the picture. “It’s inspired by the closing chapters of Predator’s Gold, in which his worship does battle with the Huntsmen of Arkangel.”
“Who’s the girl?” asked Hester.
“You haven’t read Predator’s Gold?” asked the man, surprised. “That is Hester Shaw, the aviatrix who sells Anchorage to the Huntsmen. She redeems herself, the poor creature, by dying at Pennyroyal’s side, cut down by the chief of the Huntsmen, Piotr Masgard.”
Hester turned away quickly, climbing a dusty metal staircase towards the upper floor of the museum, barely seeing the displays she passed, her head filled with panicky, racing thoughts. Everything was ruined! Pennyroyal didn’t just know what she’d done, he’d written a book about it! There were paintings! Even if Pennyroyal had twisted the facts, the truth was still there, in black and white on the pages of his book. Hester Shaw had sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen. And when Tom found out…
Would he still love her, if he knew what she was really like?
She reached the top of the stairs. The familiar smell was stronger up here, and Hester remembered suddenly what it was; a mixture of aviation fuel and lifting gas. She looked up.
The whole upper storey was a single, glass-roofed room, and in its centre, on metal stanchions, sat an ai
rship. It was old and tattered, and the name painted along its flank was The Arctic Roll, but Hester would have known that clinker-built gondola and those much-repaired Jeunet-Carot engine pods anywhere. She had lived in those narrow cabins for two years, and flown halfway around the world beneath that old red gasbag. It was the Jenny Haniver.
“Ugly old tub, ain’t she?”
Hester had not realized that the curator had followed her up the stairs, but here he was, standing just behind her and smiling amiably. “Hester Shaw bequeathed her to Professor Pennyroyal with her dying breath, and he flew her home to Brighton through polar storms and swarms of air-pirates.”
A wooden walkway had been built beside the gondola. Half listening to the curator, Hester climbed the steps and peered in through the dusty windows, remembering the ship’s real history. There was the stern cabin, with the narrow bunk where she used to sleep with Tom. There was the pilot’s seat where she had spent so many long watches. There, on the scuffed planking of the flight-deck floor, Wren had been conceived…
She sniffed the air. “She smells ready to fly…”
“Yes indeed, madam. Aviatrix, are you?”
Hester looked round at him with a start, wondering if he had guessed who she was, but he was just being friendly. “Yes,” she said, and then, because he looked as if he wanted to know more, “I’m Captain Valentine of the Freya.”
“Ah!” said the curator, satisfied, and nodded to the Jenny again. “She’ll be leading the fly-past of historic ships tomorrow, Ms Valentine.”
Hester touched the cool underside of an engine pod and imagined it roaring into life. She was starting to recover from her shock. After all, Tom knew that Pennyroyal was a liar. Why would he believe anything the old fraud said about her? Beneath her veil she smiled her crooked smile.
“It should be a very fine display,” the curator was saying, smiling up at her. “There’s going to be a re-enactment of one of Professor Pennyroyal’s most desperate adventures; a battle between The Arctic Roll and a bunch of old air-tugs dressed up as pirate ships. Real rockets and everything…”
Hester looked around the big room. “How do you get her out?”
“Eh?” said the curator. “Oh, the roof opens. Opens right up, like a docking hangar. The mayor will just fly her out.”
Hester nodded, and checked the time by her pocket watch. She had forgotten her meeting with Tom, and she was already twenty minutes late. She went back downstairs with the curator hurrying behind her. In the souvenir shop near the exit she helped herself to a copy of Predator’s Gold and flipped a couple of coins at him to pay for it.
“If I might make so bold, Ms Valentine,” said the curator, rummaging in his cash-box for change, “I was wondering whether you might care to accompany me to the display tomorrow, and perhaps to dinner afterwards?”
But when he looked up, the mysterious aviatrix was gone, and the exit door was swinging softly shut.
Hester walked briskly across the Old Steine towards the café, stuffing Pennyroyal’s book into her pocket. The curator’s foolish, flattering request made her feel attractive and mysterious again, and the panic she had felt earlier had completely vanished. She knew now that everything would be all right. She would show Tom the book, and they would laugh together at all Pennyroyal’s lies about her. Then she would spring Wren from the slave-pens, and they would reclaim the Jenny Haniver and fly away together.
The tables outside the café were busy, but there was still no Tom. She turned around, looking for him, annoyed. It was not like Tom to be late, and she wanted to tell him her plans.
“Hester?” asked one of the slave-girls from the café, approaching with a folded piece of paper in her hand. “You are Hester, ain’t you? The gentleman said you’d be coming. He asked me to give you this.”
The paper was a handbill advertising the Aquarium. On the back, in his neat handwriting, Tom had pencilled, Dearest Het, I will see you back at the SW. Wren has been taken as a slave; I am going to a place called the Pepperpot to see about buying her back…
24
THE REQUIEM VORTEX
The air-fleet had made good time since leaving Shan Guo. They had crossed the sequinned turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and were sweeping westward now over the hills of Jabal Hammar. The four destroyers flew in line astern, and around them the air throbbed and tore with the roar of engine pods as an escort of fighter airships – Murasaki Fox Spirits and Zhang Chen Hawkmoths – scoured the sky for townie privateers.
Through a slit in the armoured gondola of the Stalker Fang’s flagship Requiem Vortex Oenone Zero peered towards the distant ground. Nothing moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of passing towns. Jagged bite-marks pitted the hillsides, where mining towns had scooped out gutfulls of ore-bearing rock.
When she first heard that she was to go with her mistress on this mysterious expedition, Oenone had felt glad. Isolated in the sky, aboard the Stalker’s flagship, surely she would find a chance to use her weapon? But the world she had seen on the way, scarred and ruined by Municipal Darwinism, made her wonder afresh if she really had the right. She hated the war, but she hated Traction Cities too. By killing Fang, might she not be handing victory to them? If the Green Storm collapsed, the whole earth might soon look like those wrecked rubble-heaps below her. She did not want that on her conscience.
“Still finding reasons not to do what you came here for, Oenone,” she told herself, in the disappointed tone her mother had used when Oenone was a child, and shirked her schoolwork. “What a coward you are!”
She looked ahead, into a brownish haze that she knew was made partly from the exhaust smoke of cities. Beyond it somewhere lay the Middle Sea, not far off now. Oenone tried to crush her doubts. A battle was coming, and she knew enough about battles to feel sure that there would be moments of such chaos and confusion that she would be able to unleash her device upon the Stalker Fang without anyone understanding what she had done.
She turned from the gun-slit and climbed up into the thundering passageways inside the envelope. As she neared the officers’ mess she could hear the voices of some of her comrades, and she paused at the open door, unnoticed, listening.
“She says we are to target only Brighton!” Lieutenant Zhao the gunnery officer was saying, pitching her voice low for fear the Stalker Fang might hear. “Why Brighton? I’ve read the intelligence reports. Brighton is the least of cities, the merest pleasure-raft.”
“She has spies of her own,” said Navigator Cheung, staring into his empty cup as though he could divine the Stalker’s plans from the tea-leaves there. “She has deep-cover agents who report to nobody but her.”
“Yes, but why would she have placed one aboard Brighton?”
“Who knows? There must be something important about the place.”
“Such as?” Zhao shook her head. “There are fat predator towns lurking in these hills below us. Why must I save my rockets for Brighton when I could be blowing the tracks off predator towns?”
“It is not for us to question her orders, Zhao.”
That came from the expedition’s second in command, General Naga. Oenone saw the junior officers stiffen and bow their heads at the sound of his voice. Naga had been with the Green Storm since its foundation. There was a famous photograph of him, young and handsome, raising their thunderbolt banner over the wreck of Traktiongrad; Oenone had had a poster of it on her bedroom wall when she was a girl. But Naga was not young any more, and not handsome either; his hair was grey, his long, ochre face seamed and scarred. He was thirty-five; an old man by the standards of the Green Storm military. He had lost an arm at Xanne-Sandansky and the use of his legs at the air-siege of Omsk, and he could only walk and fight because the Resurrection Corps had built him a powered metal exoskeleton.
“I don’t like this mission,” he admitted, the segments of his mechanical armour scraping as he leaned across the table. “Brighton
is no threat to us, and I hear it’s spent the summer hammering those parasite brigands up in the north Atlantic. I was a cadet at Rogues’ Roost when they attacked our airbase there. I lost good friends to those devils, and I’m glad Brighton’s sorted them out. But orders are orders, and orders from the Fire-Flower…”
He stopped suddenly, sensing Oenone standing in the doorway. “Surgeon-Mechanic,” he said gruffly, turning towards her. His mechanical hand clamped on his sword-hilt; his exoskeleton clanked and hissed, making a clumsy half-bow. Behind him, Oenone saw fear on the faces of the junior officers as they recognized her. She knew what they were thinking. How long has she been there? How much did she hear? Will she tell the Stalker? Even Naga was afraid of her.
“Please, forgive me,” she said, bowing formally to the general and again to the officers at the table. She went into the mess, poured a glass of jasmine tea which she did not want, and drank it quickly, in silence. Everyone’s eyes lingered on her. They were almost as wary of her as they were of the Stalker Fang herself, and she felt glad of that, because it proved that they did not suspect her real motives.
But someone aboard the Requiem Vortex suspected her. As she left the mess and climbed the companion-ladders to her cabin high among the reinforced gas-cells, Shrike watched from the shadows, and waited patiently for her to make her move.
25
THE PEPPERPOT
Afternoon was turning into evening as Tom walked towards the Pepperpot through streets filled with carnival. A procession was moving slowly along Ocean Boulevard, with pretty girls and boys dressed up as mermaids cavorting on electric floats, giant dancing puppets of the sea-gods, paper lanterns shaped like fish and serpents twirling on long poles, and drag-queens in enormous feathery hats showering down confetti from low-flying cargo balloons. Through gaps between the white buildings Tom kept glimpsing the sea, and once, with a scream of engines, a patrol of those unlikely flying machines came hurtling low over the rooftops. Tom clapped his hands over his ears and turned to watch them pass. He would have been thrilled by them when he was younger, but now they just reminded him of how dangerous the world was, and how much it had altered while he’d been away. The more he saw of it, the more he longed to find Wren and return to the peace of Vineland.