by Philip Reeve
“Here! In here!” he said, and a moment later her veiled face appeared at the grille.
“I got your note,” she said. He ducked away from the door, and her gun punched holes in the lock. She kicked the door open.
“Where’s Fishcake?” asked Tom. “You didn’t hurt Fishcake? He was here just a minute ago! He had a picture! Wren’s on Cloud 9!”
Hester pulled her veil down and kissed him quickly. She smelled of smoke and her dear, ugly face was flushed. “Shut up and run,” she said.
He ran, ignoring the warning stabs of pain in his chest. Outside the door of his cell the corridor made a tight turn. Two men lay dead at the corner. Neither of them was Fishcake. Tom clambered gingerly over the corpses and followed his wife up some stairs, past some more bodies. Smoke hung in the air. Shouts and screams came from somewhere under foot.
“What’s happening?” he asked. “What’s going on down there?”
Hester looked back at him, grinning. “Someone’s let the Lost Boys out. Careless, eh? We’d better go out the top way.”
The lights went out, all at once. Tom crashed into Hester, who steadied him and said very calmly, “Don’t worry.”
There was inkish darkness for as long as it took Tom’s heart to make five stuttering beats, then dull red lights came on. “Emergency generator,” said Hester.
Tom trailed after her, through a series of deserted offices, where the blood-red light shone on the brass handles of filing cabinets and the ivory keys of typewriting machines. He wondered where Hester had found her new coat and what had happened to the old one. He was still wondering when they ran into a bunch of Shkin Corporation men hurrying in the opposite direction. “Get down!” shouted Hester, knocking Tom to the floor. “Not you!” she added, as the guards dived for cover.
The office filled with smoke and stabs of flame and a terrible noise. Not all of the men had guns, and the ones who did fired wildly. Bullets slammed against the walls, smashed the water cooler, and ripped pages from a calendar on the desk. Tom hid behind a filing cabinet and watched as Hester shot the men down one by one. He had not been with her when she fought the Huntsmen, and he had always imagined that she must have been angry and afraid, but there was a terrible calm about her now. When her gun was empty she put it down and killed the last man with a typewriter, the carriage-return bell jingling cheerfully while she smashed in his skull. When she picked up her gun and started to reload it, she was smiling. Tom thought she looked more alive than he had ever seen her before.
“All right?” she asked, pulling him to his feet.
He wasn’t, but he was shaking too badly to tell her so, so he just followed her again, up more stairs, and found himself again in the neat reception area where he had spoken to Miss Weems. Her chair was empty now, the sign on the door turned to CLOSED, the guard gone from his post outside. Fireworks boomed and crackled above the rooftops, punching shafts of pink and emerald light through gaps in the blinds. Hester shot the lock off the door and pushed it open, but as Tom crossed the room he heard frightened breathing, then a whimper.
He went down on his knees and peered beneath Miss Weems’s desk.
Fishcake’s pale, terrified face looked out at him.
“Fishcake, it’s all right!” Tom promised, as the boy scrabbled back deeper into the shadows. He waved at Hester to keep her away. “It’s only Fishcake,” he told her, looking round.
“Leave him, then,” said Hester.
“We can’t,” said Tom. “He’s alone, and frightened, and he’s been working for Shkin. If the other Lost Boys find him they’ll tear him to pieces. Just a figure of speech,” he added unconvincingly, as Fishcake moaned with terror.
“That’s his fault,” said Hester, poised in the doorway, eager to go. “Leave him.”
“But he told me where Wren is.”
“Fine,” said Hester angrily. “He’s told you. So we don’t need him. Leave him.”
“No!” said Tom, more sharply than he meant to. Beneath the desk his hand found Fishcake’s, and he hauled the Lost Boy out. “He’s coming with us. I promised.”
Hester stared at the boy and the boy stared at Hester, and for a moment Tom thought she was going to shoot Fishcake where he stood, but a thunderous howl of defiance and rage came echoing up from the depths of the Pepperpot, the roar of Lost Boys on the war-path, and she stuffed her gun away and slipped through the door, holding it open so that Tom could drag the scared, quaking child with him out of the building and down the steps into the plaza. Huge, reverberating bangs were rebounding from the walls of the surrounding buildings, and dazzling flashes lit up the sky. Fireworks are so much louder than they were when I was little, Tom thought, and looking up, saw fierce white airships swooping over the city at rooftop height, raining down rockets from their armoured gondolas.
“Great gods and goddesses!” shouted Hester. “That’s all we need!”
“What is it?” whined Fishcake, clinging tight to Tom. “What’s happening?”
What was happening was that a squadron of Fox Spirits had been detached from the main body of the Green Storm fleet to silence Brighton’s air defences. The MoonFest celebrations were disintegrating into panic as the aviators mistook the firework displays in Queen’s Park and Black Rock for anti-aircraft fire and started strafing them. As carnival processions writhed across Ocean Boulevard like beheaded snakes the Requiem Vortex cut through the smoke above them, powering towards Cloud 9. Ahead stood the armoured mountains that were Kom Ombo and Benghazi, smaller towns and suburbs snuggling around their skirts.
“A whole cluster of them!” shouted General Naga, gleeful as a huntsman who has just spied the fox. “That big one ate Palmyra Static a few summers back!” His mechanical armour grated and hissed as it spun him round to face the Stalker Fang, raising his one arm in a jerky salute. “So this is why you brought us west, Excellency! I knew it could not be for that moth-eaten raft resort! Permission to lead the attack…”
“Silence,” whispered the Stalker Fang. The fires of Brighton shimmered in her bronze face. “The cluster is irrelevant. The other ships will keep those city’s batteries and fighters busy, and ensure that the Brightonians do not attempt to help their mayor. Our target is the flying palace. Prepare boarding parties.”
Naga had followed the Stalker unquestioningly for sixteen hard years, but this was almost too much for him. As his sub-officers scrambled to relay her orders and fetch sidearms and battle-armour he stood for a moment looking as if he’d been slapped. Then, recalling what became of officers who disputed the Stalker Fang’s commands, he hurried to obey.
Wren and Theo ran to the other side of the control room just in time to see the sky between Brighton and the shore blossom with gaudy explosions of flak from Benghazi’s air-defence cannon. The crackling, shifting light slid across the envelopes of four big warships and countless fighters.
“A Green Storm Aerial Attack Unit,” Theo said.
“Oh, Quirke!” whispered Wren, thinking of her father. “Do you think they’ll sink Brighton? My dad’s down there! Theo, he’ll be killed, and it’ll all be my fault!”
“They aren’t here for Brighton,” said Theo, taking her hand. “They’ve come for the book! Whoever it was who set the gull on guard and killed these men must have called these ships here, and they’ve cut us adrift so we can be boarded more easily.”
From somewhere outside came the screech of air-raid alarms, like fingernails dragging down the blackboard of the sky.
“We’ve got to get away,” said Wren.
“How?” asked Theo.
“On the Peewit, of course. I don’t suppose anybody had time to drain her fuel tanks after last night.”
Theo shook his head. “Even if we made it to the boat-house, the Storm would shoot us down before we were out of Cloud 9’s airspace.”
“But the Peewit’s a yacht, not a warship!”
“The Storm don’t care about details like that.”
“But don’t you know codes an
d passwords and things? Couldn’t you radio them and tell them you’re one of their own people?”
“Wren, I’m not one of their people,” said Theo. “Not any more. I failed them. If they capture me, they’ll have me killed, and sent to Batmunkh Tsaka.”
Wren wasn’t sure what that meant, but she could see that he was scared, perhaps as scared as she was. The control room shook as something hit the deckplate overhead, and a rain of sparks and burning wreckage came tumbling down past the windows. She looked up into Theo’s face and tried to sound brave. “Theo,” she said, “my dad’s waiting for me in Brighton, and your mother and father are waiting for you in Zagwa, and they’ll all be really miffed if we just hang about up here and let ourselves get killed. Come on. We have to try!”
Still holding hands, they ran up the stairs to the ground-floor entrance, the door the murderer must have left by. It opened into a corridor outside the kitchens. There was no one about. Above them they could hear screams and shouts and the rumble of feet as people fled the ballroom. Explosions in the sky outside splashed skewed diamonds of sour yellow light on the floor under the kitchen windows, and glinted on fallen pans and trays of sweetmeats dropped by slaves who had left in a hurry.
They ran to the nearest exit; and blundered out into the gardens in front of the Pavilion. Crowds of party guests were hurrying across the lawns like frightened sheep. There was no way off Cloud 9, but they wanted to get as far as they could from the Pavilion for fear the Green Storm were about to bomb it. Anyway, they were wealthy, and used to getting everything they needed. Even if the cable car was gone, surely there would be a ship there, or an air-taxi, or some plucky Brightonians organizing a rescue with air-pedaloes and sky-yachts?
Not wanting to be caught up in the stampede, Theo pushed Wren into the shelter of one of Pennyroyal’s abstract statues. They huddled together and watched moonlit exhaust-trails billow in the sky around Cloud 9 like skeins of spider-silk as the Flying Ferrets buzzed and tumbled, hurling themselves at the Storm’s airships. It was as if each ship had a seed of fire inside of it, and the Flying Ferrets were patiently probing for it with streams of incendiary bullets. When they found it the airship would begin to glow from inside like a MoonFest lantern, then blinding patterns of light would chequer the envelope, and finally the whole thing would become a dazzling pyre, casting eerie shadows from the cypress-groves as the wind carried it past Cloud 9.
But the airships were fighting back, and so were the clouds of Resurrected eagles and condors which flew with them. The birds descended in flapping black clouds upon the Ferrets’ flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them they made easy targets for the airships’ rockets and machine-cannon. Wings were shredded, fuel-tanks blew apart, rotor-blades came flipping and fluttering across the Pavilion’s lawns like bits of an exploding venetian blind. The Bad Hair Day, its wings ripped off, plunged burning into the cable-car station. The Group Captain Mandrake veered sideways into the Wrestling Cheese and both machines crashed together through the flank of a Green Storm destroyer and went down with it, a vast barrel of fire sinking gracefully towards the sea.
Just off the edge of the gardens a larger ship circled, waiting for the fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armoured island from a sea of smoke. A fat airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling, twirling things that looked like silver seed-pods until they struck a fortress or a gun-emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the beat of a huge drum.
“Tumblers,” Theo muttered.
“What, those silver things?” asked Wren. “No, those are bombs. You can tell by the way they go off bang. You told me you used to fly Tumblers.”
Theo nodded.
“You mean those things have pilots? But they’ll be blown to bits!”
Another nod.
“Then how come…?”
“How come I’m not dead?” Theo shook his head and would not look at her. “Because I’m a coward,” he said. “I’m a coward, that’s why.
The Requiem Vortex prowled through the veils of smoke and ash that hung above the coast. Panic had broken out among the clustered towns and cities there, who all assumed the Green Storm fleet had come for them. Some were running for the shelter of the desert; some inflated buoyancy-sacs and splashed into the sea; some took advantage of the confusion to try and eat their neighbours. Benghazi and Kom Ombo launched clouds of fighter airships, which were torn apart by the faster, fiercer Fox Spirits and by flocks of Stalker-birds.
A gas cell had exploded somewhere near the Requiem Vortex’s stern, and spidery Mark IV Stalkers were crawling around on the sheer sides of her envelope, training extinguishers on the blaze. There was damage to the steering vanes, too, and frantic voices echoing from the speaking-tubes claimed that the rear gondola had been destroyed.
The once-born on the bridge were pale and tense; Shrike could see their faces shining with sweat in the hellish light that blazed in through the windows. Beneath her steel helmet Oenone Zero was weeping with fear. The radio crackled out distress calls and damage reports from other ships; the Sword Flourished In Understandable Pique had been rammed amidships and was going down in flames; the Autumn Rain From The Heavenly Mountains was rudderless and drifting into the flank of Benghazi. Someone aboard a doomed corvette kept screaming and screaming until their signal suddenly cut out.
The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman, she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent-city.
“Follow that building,” she said.
The ships which had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle other targets, but the raft resort’s troubles were not over. Its engine room was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its moorings as the attack began, and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and saffron flame, leaking burning rafts of fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge was either dead or at the mayor’s party.
In all the confusion no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside the Pepperpot; not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the sewage farms of the under-tier, and the stinking filter-beds beneath the sea-pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them. Arming themselves with spanners and pool-rakes and meat tenderizers, they swarmed up the city’s stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, fled for their lives, spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor-launches.
Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no longer attached to the rest of Brighton.
29
THE UNEXPLODED BOY
Wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow of the big statue, their backs to the plinth which it perched on. A few glasses of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets’ machine-cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm’s guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked. “These Tumbler things?”
“No.”
“You might as well. There’s not much else to do.”
Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a so
ft voice that she could barely hear over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.
“It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater,” he said. “Enemy suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back towards the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artefact that mustn’t be allowed to fall into townie hands…”
Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots scrambled for their ships
“The waiting was worst,” he said. “Strapped into our ships, hanging there in the racks in the Tumbler-bay with the doors open under us. You could see the guns going off below. Then the order – ‘Tumblers away!’ and we went for it.”
They went for it; releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn’t zigzag through ground-fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo eager for glory and ready to die in the name of a world made green again?
“The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg,” he told Wren. “I hit somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I was heading for an armoured fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of silage bales. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t killed, just knocked out for a minute or two. I suppose that’s why the Tumbler didn’t blow. They’re supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there’s a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t bring myself to…”