Traction City

by Philip Reeve

  “Leave her,” says Anders sternly. “We need her. The boy’s right. We can’t ask him to face this danger for us. Miss Fang can do it.”

  “What, you mean take her off to Sternstacks with us?” Nutter can’t begin to mask his contempt. “Let her talk to this creature, and turn it against us? Or run off into the dark first chance she gets?”

  By way of answer to the last point, Anders brings the handcuffs from his pocket and locks Fang’s thin wrists together again. “If she runs, Nutter, you can shoot her. And if she says more than ten words to this Collector before I attach the charge to him, my name’s not Karl Anders.”

  7

  It’s a funny thing, but now he knows what it is, Smiff can’t get the Stalker out of his head. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened in his small life, that robed giant barging past him, pruning Costa’s boys like weeds. It seems a pity not to get another look at it; a proper look like, before Sergeant Anders blows its mean old machine soul to the Sunless Country.

  When they’ve gone, Anders and Nutter with the girl between them, leaving Constable Pym to mind the shop, he sits a while longer by the station stove. Eyes the biscuit tin, but knows the nice ones are all gone. He sits and thinks about his Stalker, and wonders what it’s doing now.

  Constable Pym has his long nose in those filing drawers again. As soon as that girl said her name he knew he’d seen it somewhere. He flicks through the file marked S and soon finds what he’s looking for. An alert issued nearly a year back, brought to London a month or so ago by some wandering aeronaut. Anna Fang. Escaped Slave: Wanted for Theft of Money and Airship Parts by the Direktorate of Arkangel. There’s a grainy photograph of the girl, younger and acne-speckled, but that stripe of white hair is unmistakable.

  Eager to share this latest breakthrough (his second in one night!) Pym turns to show the sheet to Smiff. “Hey, look at this! No wonder she hates Traction Cities!”

  But Smiff is gone. The biscuit tin’s gone with him.

  8

  It’s a long way to Sternstacks, downhill along the dingy, steeply tilted streets that skirt the central Engine District, leading past the Engineers’ great experimental prison at Piranesi Plaza. “That’s where you’re headed for,” Nutter tells the girl with a leer. “All sorts of toys they’ve got in there for loosening Anti-Tractionist tongues. Literally, sometimes.”

  Luckily the streets are almost deserted. The only people they pass are harried engine-minders hurrying from one emergency to another, with no time to wonder where two policemen are going, or why the girl they have with them is handcuffed. They pass down Shallow Street, which isn’t shallow at all tonight but canted at an angle that makes them shuffle and stagger like comedy drunks. At the street’s end, litter that has slid down from higher districts near the city’s prow has collected in drifts against the plinth of the statue of Charles Shallow himself, one of London’s first and least-favourite Lord Mayors.

  At Sternstacks they step out of the iron shadow of the tiers above into air that’s cold and almost fresh. Fang tilts her face up hoping to see stars, but she’s out of luck. All around her the huge exhaust stacks of the city rise, taller than any tower she’s ever seen, some striped like garter snakes, some so fat that lesser stacks and flues twine round them like ivy round a giant tree. From their high snouts the smoke and smuts and filthy gas of all the city’s engines fume, forming a cloud that blots out the sky.

  “I found a whole parasite town up there in that lot once,” says Nutter. “A little flying place called Kipperhawk. They’d anchored it to London’s stern with hawsers and it was hanging in the smokestream, sieving out minerals and such. Cheeky cloots.”

  “It’s a town-eat-town world,” says Anders.

  They walk past darkened offices and workshops to the place where the little railway track emerges from Mortlake. A line of trucks is being unloaded there by men in the orange jackets of the fuel corps, the fuel emptied into hoppers which will feed the ancient Godshawk engines which still stand here, too old and feeble to power London’s usual travels, but still useful when there’s a big push on. Anders goes over to the foreman. “Seen anyone come out of Mortlake tonight?”

  “Mortlake?” The man looks at him like he’s crazy. “What’s up? Costa’s boys causing trouble?” He peers past Anders, trying to ogle Fang through the ripple of hot air escaping from his engines. “Who’s the girl?”

  “Police business,” says Anders.

  “Suit yourself. But if you see my ’prentice on your travels, send him to me, would you? I haven’t seen him since last tea break.”

  “It’s here,” says Anders, when he gets back to where Nutter and the girl are waiting. “An apprentice from that fuel gang has vanished. The Collector has collected himself another hand.”

  Even Fang has the decency to look a little nervous as they head sternwards. There is no one about. Walkways lead aft between huge horizontal ducts. The ducts steam, filling the air with mist. Smuts drifting down from above swirl in the mist like snow gone bad. Sometimes there’s actual snow as well. By the time they get near to the high barriers at the stern, visibility is down to a few yards. Anders stumbles over the body of the fuel-team apprentice before he sees it. It lies where the collector left it, in a sticky dark puddle in the middle of the street.

  “So much for your theory,” Anders tells the girl. He takes out his handkerchief and spreads it over the dead boy’s face. “He’s younger than you, and your Stalker didn’t show him any pity.”

  “What now then?” asks Nutter.

  Men appear silently and all around; their rubber-soled shoes make no sound on the deck plates and their long, white rubber coats blend perfectly with the drifting steam. Four Engineers with pale bald scalps and the red cogwheel symbol of their Guild tattooed on their foreheads. Two carry sleek guns; a third is weighed down by something vaguely gunlike but so huge, and so encrusted with wires and coils and dials, that it’s hard to tell.

  “Is there a problem, sergeant?” asks the leader, a senior Guildsman, his eyes invisible behind faceted goggles.

  Anders steps forward, half hoping that in the Sternstacks murk these newcomers won’t notice Fang. But they have noticed her, of course; the eyes of the three gunmen are creeping all over her. He chooses his reply with care. The Guild of Engineers started out as London’s mechanics and technicians, but on a mobile city mechanics and technicians are men of great importance, and over the centuries the Engineers have come to wield huge power. Upsetting them could end a man’s career.

  “Murder, sir,” he says. “Three scavengers dead.”

  “And the girl?” asks the Engineer, goggles glittering like flies’ eyes as he swings them towards Fang.

  “A witness, sir, assisting us with our enquiries.”

  The goggles swing back to Anders. “These Scavengers. Were they mutilated?”

  “Their right hands had been taken off, sir.”

  “Mmm,” says the Engineer. Behind him the man with the big gun-thing shifts position, adjusting its weight. The others stand still as statues (which isn’t very still on London’s shuddery decks). Black smuts settle on their white coats; they are speckled like Dalmatians.

  “You may return to your station,” the Engineer says. “We have this situation under control. Your witness will remain with us.”

  From the corner of his eye Anders see Fang turn her face to look at him. She’s wondering what he’ll do. He’s wondering the same thing himself. It’s a surprise when he hears himself say, “No.”

  The Engineer raises one well-pruned eyebrow.

  “She’s in my custody.” says Anders. “For her own protection.”

  “You have questioned her?” asks the Engineer.

  “Oh, we know about the Stalker, sir.”

  The Engineer doesn’t so much as twitch a nostril. They must be great poker players, Anders thinks, if games of poker are permitted
in that cheerless Engineerium of theirs. But his men start at that word, “Stalker”.

  “I didn’t realize the Engineers knew about it, sir.”

  “The Guild of Engineers know everything,” the Engineer snaps. “One of our survey teams encountered the creature known as the Collector three weeks ago, when London first entered these hills. We subdued it and brought it aboard. We were keeping it under observation in one of the old Wombs.”

  “Not keeping it under very good observation, were you?” splutters Nutter. “It’s killed a dozen men on Base Tier. . .”

  “That was part of the experiment,” says the Engineer. “We wished to see how it behaved in the mobile-urban environment. London is no longer the largest or fastest city in the Great Hunting Ground. If we are to compete with the new megalopolises we may need to adjust our hunting strategies. If we could reproduce these Stalkers and insert them into the engine districts of prey cities they could prove useful. However, this Stalker has proved less controllable than we had hoped. We have lost contact with the Engineers who we put into Mortlake to study it. It has been decided to shut down the experiment.”

  “That contraption will kill it?” asks Anders, pointing at the big gun-thing.

  “It is already dead.” The Engineer permits himself a cold smile. “As are you, sergeant. We cannot have mere policemen prying into the business of our Guild.”

  He steps aside. The two gunmen behind him raise their weapons. Anders tries to think of something to say and finds that he is empty of words. But before the Engineers can shoot, something comes trundling at them down the slope of the deck, a small thing, cylindrical, rattling and clanking as it rolls into the open space between Engineers and policemen.

  “Bomb!” shouts a voice, out of the vapours and the swirling snow.

  The Engineers stare at the thing just long enough for Anders to butt their chief aside and swing a punch at the nearest gunman. He grunts and goes backwards, crashing into the one with the giant Stalker-gun, which goes off, arcing blue lightning everywhere. In the jagged light of it Anders sees the girl Fang swing a high kick into the face of the second gunman, who drops his weapon as he falls. She doesn’t see the leading Engineer stepping towards her from behind, drawing a shiny silver pistol. But Nutter does, and throws himself between girl and gun as it goes off. Then Anders has the Engineer by his rubber collar. He wrenches the gun out of the man’s hand. The fly’s-eye goggles shatter as he drives his head against the nearest duct.

  Something bumps against the toes of Anders’s boot and he looks down and sees that it’s the bomb. Only it isn’t a bomb; it’s the biscuit tin from Airdock Green police station. Smiff stands in the swirling steam, staring at the felled Engineers.

  “I followed after you, Sarge,” he says.

  Anders finds that he’s too shocked to say anything. The dazed Engineers are grovelling on the deck. He kicks their guns away and goes to Nutter, who’s crouched by a duct, hand pressed to the wound in his shoulder. Fang stands watching him. “He saved me,” she says. “Why’d he do that?”

  Nutter groans, looking like he wonders the same thing.

  “Because you’re a human being and so’s he,” says Anders, moving Nutter’s hand and studying the wound. “Also, it’s his job.”

  “Blimey,” says Nutter, his face pale grey, tears running down it.

  “You’ll be all right,” Anders promises him, although he’s not sure how, because even if he can get Nutter patched up there’s going to be trouble coming down on them for assaulting an Engineer Security Team. “Come on. . .”

  9

  He heaves Nutter up, yells for Fang and Smiff to follow and sets off up the deck’s steep slope, all thought of hunting the Collector gone, starting the long walk back to Airdock Green. They’ve gone ten paces when he hears a voice behind shout, “After them!”, and a bullet flicks past him and spangs off a stanchion. He wishes he’d hidden those men’s guns better, or brought them with him, or thought to hit them harder. It occurs to him, as he pulls Nutter into the feeble shelter of an alleyway, that he should perhaps have killed them.

  Nutter has fainted. Anders lays him down, says to Fang, “Take care of him,” and quickly undoes her handcuffs. Then he creeps back to the alley’s end. There’s an old shrine there to Sooty Piet, the god of the Engine District. Ander’s crouches behind it and peers out between the beer bottles and sheafs of lucky money that have been propped against the plinth as offerings.

  The Engineers are making their way towards him, leaning forward like mountaineers as London heaves itself up a steep ridge and the slope of the street grows more extreme. There are five of them, and for a moment Anders wonders where the fifth one came from, before he realizes that the one at the back is far too tall to be an Engineer, and that his eyes are stabbing rods of green light through the mist.

  “Watch out!” he shouts. He can’t help himself. He’d leap out into his hunters’ path to warn them of the threat, but Smiff has crept behind the shrine with him, and holds him back.

  “No, sarge!”

  One of the Engineers shrieks as the Stalker scythes him down. The others turn. The giant gun-thing goes off again, scrawling its blue lightning all over the Stalker, but it seems the Engineers have miscalculated; the current doesn’t seem to bother him. The electricity wraps around him like tinsel round a Quirkemas Tree as he cuts down two other Engineers and then finally turns his attention to the one who’s shooting him, reaching through the lightning to wrench the big gun apart, and its operator too.

  Smiff tries to pull Anders away, but the policeman can’t help himself. He keeps watching as the Stalker sets about its work, quickly and carefully removing the right hand of each dead Engineer. Silhouetted in the backlit steam, its spiky outline and jerky movements make it look like a shadow puppet. It pulls back the sleeves of its robe, and Anders sees that while its left hand is a nightmare gauntlet of iron and blades, the right is missing; its arm ends at the wrist in a jutting metal prong and a tangle of rusty wires.

  Carefully the Stalker takes one of the freshly severed hands and shoves it on to the stump. The fingers jerk. Anders imagines electricity flowing into the hand, filling it like a glove. The Stalker raises it up in front of its face, into the light of those witch-green headlamp eyes. It turns the new hand this way and that, considering. Then it tears it off, throws it aside, and reaches for another.

  “Is that what this is about?” whispers Anders. He’s talking to himself. He doesn’t even realize that he’s spoken aloud until the thing turns its huge head towards him and the beams of its eyes come groping for him through the vapours.

  How could it have heard him, over all the noise of London? But it has.

  It puts down the hand it’s holding and comes towards the shrine. Anders knows there’s no escape for him. The best he can hope for is to buy some time so that the others can escape. “Run!” he tells Smiff, and stands to meet the Collector.

  As he steps out in front of it, Fang’s knapsack nudges his hip like a reminder.

  “Is that what this is all about?” he asks.

  The Stalker is very close. It moves slowly, as if perhaps the Engineers’ lightning did it some damage after all. Its head is half helmet, half skull. From the helmet part long tubes and cables trail, plugged into ports on the armour which Anders sees gleaming under its torn and ragged robes. The skull parts are thinly papered with old skin. The lamps that are its eyes flare slightly as he asks his question. It stops and stands there in front of him, braced against the rolling of the deck, bladed hand half raised. Maybe it isn’t used to being talked to. In all its years of hunting and killing probably nobody’s said anything to it more interesting than “Aaaargh!”

  “So you lost a hand, and so now you’re looking for another?” says Anders. “Trying and trying to find a replacement. But you never can, can you? They’re always too big or too small or too hairy or the wrong colour. So yo
u keep on searching. . .”

  The Stalker twitches its head and the eyes flicker. “Must . . . repair. . .” it says. Its teeth are metal. Its voice rasps through them like a rusty file.

  “Repair?” Anders fights the urge to look to his right, down the alley, to see if his companions have escaped. How many years? he thinks. How many hands? His own right hand is busy in Fang’s knapsack, fingering the smooth curve of the demolition charge. He keeps talking. “You need to adapt, my friend. People lose hands and arms and legs and all sorts of things, but they learn to live without them. I lost my whole family; my wife and daughter, killed when London ate our town. That was worse than losing a hand. But I adapted, see?”

  The Stalker has lost interest. “Repair,” it says, and its head tilts downwards, looking to size up Anders’s hand. Feeling in the knapsack, he turns the switches on the demolition charge; safety off, then the detonator. He remembers, as he draws the charge out, that he has no idea how long the fuse is set for.

  “Here,” he says.

  The Stalker doesn’t seem to know what the charge is. It doesn’t seem to care. It watches Anders’s hand as he reaches out and lets the charge’s magnets clamp it to its armour, through its robes. Anders can guess what it’s thinking. Is this the right one at last? Is this finally the new hand I need? And he surprises himself with a thought of his own: Poor old thing.

  But he’s not hanging about to let it try his mitt for size. As soon as its clawed gauntlet starts to reach for him he turns and runs, glancing back just once. The Collector is lumbering after him, the demolition charge pinned to its robes like a tacky brooch with one red light on it, red as a ruby.

  He doesn’t hear the explosion. There is only his sudden running shadow, flung on the deck plates in front of him. Then something hits him in the back like Sooty Piet’s shovel. He feels the sorts of sensations that fools pay good money for in fairgrounds. Time gets stretched out, and when it finally gets a grip on itself Anders learns that the demolition charge has not just destroyed the Collector, it has blown a big, roughly circular hole in the deck plate. Through this hole gravity and the steep slope of the deck are dragging him. He claws for a grip at its raggedy edge. He hangs there by his slowly slipping fingertips, grunting as they strain with the effort of supporting his whole heavy policeman’s body.