Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  “Where is she?” Naga demanded. “What have you done with the Stalker Fang?”

  “SHE IS DEAD,” said Shrike. He could barely see the soldiers; the scarred face filled his mind. “THE STALKER FANG IS DEAD. SHE IS TWICE-DEAD. I HAVE DESTROYED HER.”

  Naga said something more, but Shrike did not hear. He had a feeling that he was flying apart, dissolving into rust, and all that held him together was that memory, that face. She was the child whom he had saved, the only good thing that he had ever done. “HES… HEST…”

  Forgetting the soldiers, he started to run. Stalkers came at him and he smashed them aside. Bullets danced on his armour, but he barely noticed. Damage warnings flashed inside his eyes, but he did not see them. “HESTER!” he howled, and the gardens swallowed him.

  32

  THE FLIGHT OF THE ARCTIC ROLL

  On Ocean Boulevard, beneath a lid of smoke, streamers and paper hats lay in drifts on the tilting pavements, the debris of street-parties that had ended suddenly when the air-attack began.

  Tom, Hester and Fishcake crept along in the shadows, trying to avoid the gangs of looters and rebellious slaves who roamed the smashed arcades. Troupes of flames were dancing on the stage of the open-air theatre, and every few minutes the deckplates shook as one of the gas-tanks at the air-harbour exploded, sending wreckage sleeting across the rooftops and prickling the Sea Pool into a thousand white splashes. The elaborate, tattered costumes of dead carnival-goers stirred gently in the night air like the plumage of slaughtered birds.

  “They’re still rioting on the under-decks,” said Tom, listening to the noises that came echoing up the stairwells. “How are we going to get back to the Screw Worm?”

  Hester laughed. She was still feeling happy and proud at the way she had been able to free Tom from Shkin’s lock-ups, and even his insistence on bringing Fishcake with him had not dented her good mood for long. “I forgot!” she said. “Can you believe it? In all the excitement it went clean out of my head. Tom, we don’t need the Screw Worm any more. After all, we can’t fly up to Cloud 9 in a limpet, can we?”

  “You mean an airship?” asked Tom doubtfully. “How can we hope to get hold of an airship? They’ve been pouring out of the air-harbour ever since the battle, and all overloaded by the sound of them.”

  Hester stopped walking and stood and beamed at Tom, while Fishcake cowered behind him. “The Jenny Haniver is here,” she said. “In Pennyroyal’s stupid museum. She’s been waiting for us, Tom. We’ll steal her. We used to be good at that.”

  She explained quickly, and then they hurried on towards the Old Steine. Shouting and the sound of smashing glass came through the smoke, and sometimes shots rang out. The bodies of minor council officials and promising performance artists dangled from the lampposts. Hester walked with her gun ready, and Fishcake watched her, and remembered the promise he had made to kill her. He wished he had the nerve to do it, but she scared him too much. And there was something about the way she looked at Tom, a tenderness, that unsettled him and made him think she might not be entirely evil, and that it might be lovely to live with the Natsworthys. Shyly, he took Tom’s hand.

  “Did you mean it, what you said?” he asked. “About me coming with you? You’ll really take me home with you to Vineland?”

  Tom nodded, and tried to smile encouragingly. “We just have to make a stop at Cloud 9 on the way…”

  But when they reached Old Steine, he saw the severed hawsers strewn around the cable-car station. Cloud 9 had gone.

  “Oh, Quirke!” he shouted. “Where is it?”

  It had never occurred to him that it would not still be hanging there; damaged like the rest of Brighton, but airborne, and with Wren somewhere aboard it waiting to be rescued. Now he saw how foolish he had been. That flying palace with its cloud of gasbags must have been a sitting duck for the Storm’s air destroyers.

  “Wren…” he whispered. He could not believe that the gods had brought her so close to him, only to snatch her away.

  Hester took his hand and gripped it hard. “Come on, Tom,” she said. “If we can get off this dump we might still find the stupid place, ditched in the sea or adrift. It’s Pennyroyal who runs it, remember: he won’t have put up much of a fight.”

  She pointed to the stained white frontage of the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience. The front wall had a few nasty cracks in it and was sagging out over the pavement. The doors had been blown off their hinges, too, and as Hester led Fishcake and Tom inside she began to feel a terrible fear that she was too late, that some other desperate refugee would have come here before her and taken the Jenny away. But when she ran up the stairs she found the old airship sitting where she had left her. The glass roof had shattered, scattering shards across the floor and the Jenny’s envelope, but she looked completely undamaged. She had actually been cleaned up a bit since Hester last saw her, and a large number 1 had been pasted to her flank ready for the regatta. There were even a couple of small rockets in her rocket-racks.

  Behind her, Tom reached the top of the steps and stopped. “Het,” he said. “Oh, Het –” Tears ran down his face, and he laughed at himself as he wiped them away. “It’s our ship!”

  “What a pile of junk!” exclaimed Fishcake, pulling on a coat that he’d taken from one of the waxworks down below.

  “Fishcake, see if you can turn the lights on,” Tom said, and climbed up into the gondola. The old ship smelled like a museum. He ducked under dangling flexes and ran his hands over the control panels, recognizing the familiar instrument-arrays. Lights came on in the room outside, shining in through the Jenny’s freshly squeegeed windows.

  “Remember how it works?” asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the sort of whisper you would use in a temple.

  “Oh yes,” Tom whispered back. “You don’t ever forget…” He reached out reverently and pulled a lever. An inflatable dinghy dropped from a compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over. He shovelled it under the chart table and tried another lever. This time the Jenny shivered and shifted, and the museum was filled with the rising thunder of her twin Jeunet-Carot engines.

  Outside, hands clamped over his ears, Fishcake was coughing in the exhaust smoke and shouting, “How do you get it out?”

  “The roof opens,” Hester yelled back, pointing upwards.

  Fishcake shook his head. “I don’t think so…”

  Tom killed the engines. Leaning out of the Jenny’s hatch he looked up at the ceiling. With the lights switched on it was easy to see why no one else had bothered coming in here to steal the Jenny. A huge hawser, one of the cables which had once linked Brighton to Cloud 9, had crashed down across the Nimrod Pennyroyal Experience, smashing the glass above the Jenny Haniver and buckling the delicate struts and girders of the roof.

  “Oh, Quirke almighty!” cried Tom. He was starting to get the feeling that his god was playing games with him. If he survived this, he was going to think seriously about finding himself a different deity.

  He ran back to the flight-deck, and Hester. “The roof’s smashed. We’ll never get her out!”

  “Someone’s coming!” yelled Fishcake, peering from one of the museum windows. “A big gang of them. Lost Boys, I bet, come to see what the noise was about!”

  Hester stared through the Jenny’s nose windows at the roof. “Reckon we could shift that debris?”

  Tom shook his head. “That hawser is fatter than the two of us put together. We’re trapped in here!”

  “Don’t worry,” Hester said. “We’ll think of something.” She closed her eye, concentrating, while Fishcake ran from window to window outside, hollering something else about Lost Boys. Then she looked up at Tom, and grinned.

  “Thought of something,” she said.

  She started flipping switches on the long, dusty control desks. The Jenny Haniver lurched, throwing Tom backwards. Amid all the racket of engines starting up and docking clamps releasing he didn’t realize at first all of what Hester had done. Then, as the shock wave of the twi
n explosions bowed the windows, as the Jenny lifted and surged forward, he saw that she had emptied the rocket projectors into the damaged front wall, blasting it into the street and leaving a hole large enough to let the little airship out into the sky.

  “You’ve forgotten Fishcake!” he yelled, over the long screech of an engine pod grazing the museum wall.

  “Oh dear!” Hester shouted back.

  “Go back!”

  “We don’t need him, Tom. Not Wanted On Voyage.”

  Tom scrambled back to the open hatch and reached out, shouting Fishcake’s name. The boy was running towards the lifting gondola, hands outstretched, face white and horrified beneath a clown-mask of powdered plaster. Over the roar of the engines and the dull hiss of the explosion still echoing in his ears Tom could not hear the words, but he didn’t need to. “Come back!” Fishcake was shouting, as the Jenny Haniver rose through the smoke and dust and swung across an Old Steine full of the startled, up-turned faces of Lost Boys and looters, up into the sky where she belonged. “Don’t leave me! Mr Natsworthy! Please! Come back! Come back! Come back!”

  The Jenny Haniver flew on, weaving unsteadily this way and that, because Tom and Hester were struggling with each other at the controls.

  “For Quirke’s sake!” Tom shouted. “We’ve got to turn back! We can’t just leave him behind!”

  Hester pulled his hands free of the steering-levers and flung him aside. He crashed against the chart table and fell heavily, shouting out with pain. “Forget him, Tom!” she screamed. “We can’t trust him. And he said the Jenny was a piece of junk! He’s lucky I didn’t knife him!”

  “But he’s a child! You can’t just leave him! What will happen to him?”

  “Who cares? He’s a Lost Boy! Have you forgotten what he did to Wren?”

  The Jenny came up suddenly into clear air and moonlight. The smoke lay like a field of dirty snow fifty feet beneath the gondola, with the fire-flecked upper-works of Kom Ombo and Benghazi poking out of it a few miles to larboard. Airships were buzzing about, but none showed an interest in the Jenny Haniver. Hester scanned the sky ahead, and far away towards the south saw the tattered envelopes of Cloud 9. She pointed the Jenny’s nose at it, locked the controls and knelt beside Tom. He looked up with an odd expression, and she suddenly realized that he was afraid of her. That made her laugh. She took his face between her hands and kissed him, and licked away the salt tears that had gathered at the corners of his mouth, but he turned his head away. She started to feel afraid herself. Had she gone too far this time?

  “I’m sorry,” she told him, though she wasn’t. “Look, Tom, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I panicked. We’ll turn back if you like.”

  Tom pulled away from her and scrambled up. He kept remembering the strange smile which had flickered on her face as she led him from the Pepperpot. “You enjoy it,” he said. “Don’t you? Like when you killed all those people at Shkin’s place, you were enjoying it…”

  Hester said, “They were slavers, Tom. They were villains. They were the ones who sold Wren. They sold our little girl. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

  “But…”

  She shook her head and gave a cry of frustration. Why could he not understand? “Look,” she said, “we’re just little people, aren’t we? We always have been. Little small people, trying to live our lives, but always at the mercy of men like Uncle and Shkin and Masgard and Pennyroyal and … and Valentine. So yes. It feels good to be as strong as them; it feels good to fight back, and even things up a bit.”

  Tom said nothing. By the light of the instrument panels she could see a fresh bruise forming on his head where it had struck the chart table. “Poor Tom,” she said, leaning over to kiss it, but he twitched away again, staring at the fuel gauges.

  “The tanks are only half full,” he said. “You knew that when we took off. If we go back we might never reach Wren. Anyway, those slaves will have got poor Fishcake by now.”

  Hester shrugged awkwardly and wished he’d let her hold him. His obsession with the Lost Boy angered her. Why did Tom have to be so concerned about other people all the time? She controlled herself. “Fishcake will be able to look after himself,” she promised.

  Tom looked hopefully at her, wanting to believe her. “You think so? He’s so young…”

  “He must be twelve if he’s a day. I lived alone in the Out-Country when I wasn’t much older than that, and I did all right. And I didn’t have his Burglarium training.” She touched Tom’s face. “We’ll find Wren,” she promised. “Then we’ll find fuel, and go back to Brighton and get Fishcake, when things have calmed down a bit.”

  She put her arms around him, and this time he did not pull away, although he did not exactly hug her back. She kissed him, and ran her fingers through his thinning hair. She hated fighting with him. And she hated Fishcake, for making them argue like this. She hoped the other Lost Boys were already using his nitty little head for a football.

  33

  DEPARTURES

  Theo and Wren had not waited for the Storm to recapture them. They were running away through the gardens when they heard the Stalker Fang’s death-cry echoing between the trees.

  “What was that?” Wren wondered, stopping, shocked by the awful, lonely sound.

  “I don’t know,” said Theo. “Something bad, I think.”

  They ducked into the shrubbery as another Green Storm squad went running past. The soldiers’ helmets blinked with orange light. Peeking behind her, Wren saw that the Pavilion was starting to burn.

  “Theo! It’s on fire!”

  “I know,” he said. He was standing near to her; near enough that, in the firelight, she could make out the goose pimples on his bare chest, and see that he was shivering slightly in the chilly air. Suddenly he put his arms around her. “You should let the Storm take you, Wren. Cloud 9 is going down. You might be safer as a prisoner. I can’t let them take me, but you could. They seemed all right, Naga and that Zero woman. You should go back.”

  “What about you?” she asked. “I can’t just leave you here.”

  “I’ll be all right,” he said, and then said it again, trying to sound more certain about it. “I will be all right. This place is sinking slowly. It’ll come down in the desert and I’ll try and make my way south; there’s a static settlement in the Tibesti mountains, south of the sand-sea. Maybe I could make it on foot.”

  “No,” said Wren. She pulled herself away from him, because when he was holding her her brain stopped working and she found herself wanting to agree with everything he said, but she knew deep down that he was talking rubbish. Even if he survived Cloud 9’s fall, setting out across the desert on foot would be suicide. “I’m staying with you,” she said, “We’re going to find a way off, and that’s final. Come on. We’ll head back to the aërodrome. Maybe there’s a flying machine that’s still usable…”

  She set off through the smoky gardens, feeling unaccountably hopeful and rather pleased with herself, but when they reached the aërodrome again she saw that it had been destroyed more completely than she’d realized. The Ferrets’ prefab hangars and barracks had been ripped open and scattered, and of the machines that had been caught on the ground only scorched shards remained. But among the ruins of the summerhouse where she had spoken to Orla Twombley the previous night she found a couple of fleece-lined leather tunics hanging incongrously from a coat-stand which still stood upright and undamaged amid the rubble. That seemed some sort of consolation. She threw one to Theo, who pulled it on gratefully, hanging up his silver wings like an angel banished from heaven.

  Snuggling into the other jacket, Wren tried to think of a new plan. “All right,” she said. “Maybe we will end up in the desert. We’ll need water, and food. And a compass would be useful…”

  Theo wasn’t listening. A rustling in the foliage beyond the ruins had caught his attention. He gestured for Wren to be quiet.

  “Oh, gods!” she whispered. “Not the Storm again?”

&
nbsp; But it was only Nimrod Pennyroyal. Shkin’s first shot had slammed against the Tin Book in his robe pocket, breaking several ribs, and the second had grazed his temple, knocking him out and covering one side of his face with blood, but he had regained his senses, and dragged himself down to the aërodrome with the same idea as Wren and Theo, of finding some way off Cloud 9. Looking up plaintively at them from the shrubbery he whispered, “Help!”

  “Leave him,” said Theo, as Wren went towards him.

  “I can’t,” said Wren. She wished she could. After all the things he’d done, Pennyroyal didn’t deserve her help; but not helping him would make her as bad as he was. She knelt down beside him and tore a strip from the bottom of her tunic to bandage his head.

  “Good girl,” Pennyroyal whimpered, as she worked. “I think my leg’s broke, too, from when I fell… That devil Shkin! The beast! He shot me! Shot me and flew off!”

  “Well, now you know how poor Tom Natsworthy felt,” said Wren. Blood soaked through her makeshift bandage as soon as it was in place. She wished she’d paid more attention to Mrs Scabious’s first-aid lessons back in Vineland.

  “That was entirely different,” Pennyroyal said. “It was – Great Poskitt! How do you know about Tom Natsworthy?”

  “Because I’m his daughter,” said Wren. “What Shkin told you about me was true. Tom’s my dad. Hester’s my mother.”

  Pennyroyal made gurgly noises, his eyes bulging with terror and pain. He watched Wren tear another strip of fabric from her clothes, looking as if he expected her to strangle him with it. “Isn’t there anybody on this flaming deckplate who is who they say they are?” he asked weakly, and went heavy and limp in Wren’s arms.

  “Is he dead?” asked Theo, coming up behind her.

  Wren shook her head. “It’s just a flesh wound, I think. He’s fainted. We have to help him, Theo. He saved us from Cynthia.”