by Jay Barnson
Fifty yards ahead, a stand of trees blocked the way.
She braced herself for the impact.
The control room was spinning. Valerie’s head hurt, and her eyes stung. She wiped them and saw blood on her hand. Then she heard a throaty roar and stood up from where she’d been thrown against the control panel.
Nomad sat on flat ground—the tough bird had smashed through the trees and settled, upright, on sandy soil. Bushes around the aircraft writhed, tendrils reaching out toward it. If they got around the landing wheels, they’d pin the ship down and begin to digest it—and Valerie. She didn’t have much time.
The roar came again, and then the animal that made it came into sight. An armour-plated body twelve feet tall, on six thick legs tipped with razor-sharp claws a foot long. A behemoth. Five thousand pounds of muscle, teeth, and venom.
She grabbed the engine lever, letting out an involuntary yelp of relief when it started on the first pull. It would take ten seconds for the engine to get to speed, before she could engage the propellers. The behemoth could reach the ship in three, and it would come through the hull as if it was made of paper.
“Come on,” she hissed, urging the engine to speed up. The behemoth scratched at the ground with a front foot. It charged. Valerie slammed the prop lever home, and the flyer shot forward. The wings bit air and the aircraft lifted. There was an impact, the sound of tearing metal, and Valerie was thrown to the deck—but when she got up, Nomad was airborne and climbing, the clockworks steering it up to safe altitude and turning it back on course for Syberia.
Syberia City came into sight as Nomad came out of a bank of clouds. Hairs rose on Valerie’s neck when she saw it. The city was green. Vegetation covered every building. Smokestacks were covered in vines. Tendrils hung from the disc’s edges. It looked like a fragment of jungle, suspended in the air.
Syberia was infested with surface life. If she landed there, spores would get into the machinery—they always did, eventually, filters or not—and take root, disabling the flyer. She’d be stuck on a dead city and wouldn’t survive for more than a few hours.
She was on the verge of panic. She couldn’t land to refuel, but without refuelling, she’d never make it to the next port of call. She had to make a decision, fast. There was, perhaps, a minute before the clockworks docked the aircraft.
A quick end when the flyer smashed into the ground was better than being slowly eaten alive by some jumped-up flower—of that there was no question. She would take the chance—dock, refuel as quickly as she could manage on her own, and get back into the air. Spores would germinate. All she could do was hope to get to the next destination before the aircraft was disabled.
She rushed to make sure all the hatch seals were secure, then returned to the control cabin. The ship had lined itself up with the docking rail—and Valerie’s jaw dropped when she saw that the dock was clean, and that there were people there. Syberia wasn’t dead, after all.
Valerie looked over the green city from the safety of an enclosed platform on a tower high above the docks.
Mercer, the city manager, explained what had happened. “This was one of the Royal Cities until a couple of years ago. City Twenty-three.” He glanced up at the sky. “Something cracked the dome—we think a flyer crashed into it. Spores got in, got a grip, and the people couldn’t stop the growth. They evacuated.”
“Why did you save it?”
“We couldn’t do otherwise. If we’d left it alone, with no-one here to keep the power on, it would have fallen. There’s fuel, oil, chemicals, all kinds of pollutants that would have contaminated the surface. So we came aboard after they’d gone, repaired the dome, and we’re cleaning away the vegetation, little by little. It’ll be a few more years, yet, but eventually this will be another Free City.”
Valerie was tempted to ask why they didn’t think to give it back to the people who’d lived here before. But she held her tongue. These people had shown her nothing but courtesy, and she—and her home city—were at their mercy. It wouldn’t do to appear hostile.
Quite apart from that, her professional curiosity had been aroused. “How do you keep the city flying? How do you keep the growth from fouling the suspensors?”
Mercer grinned. “Actually, it isn’t that hard. I’ll show you.”
Valerie followed as he led the way back down to the dock, and into the city’s basement maintenance tunnels. A few minutes later they were in one of the observation rooms under the city, a few dozen yards from one of the suspensors. Valerie looked over the huge, square panel and its vents. It was free of greenery. “Surely you don’t have people out there cleaning them while they’re running?” She was horrified by the possibility.
“We don’t have to do a thing. There’s something about the suspensors the flora doesn’t like. It won’t grow on them.”
“The metal, perhaps?”
Mercer shook his head. “The surveillance towers on top are made of the same thing, and they’re covered. It could be anything—chemicals, perhaps, or something to do with radiant particles. We’re simple engineers and chemists here. We need an expert—and I understand you know more than most about the physical sciences.”
Valerie stared at the man. “Are you suggesting—?”
“We could use someone like you. If we could find the answer, we might make this city habitable in a fraction of the time.”
Valerie’s heartbeat quickened, and she felt a little breathless. These people were doing something important here, something that would benefit millions, and offering to make her a part of it. But they were the enemy. Weren’t they?
“I have to help my city. I can’t stay.”
“I’m not suggesting that you should. But you could come back.”
Mercer took her to a building in the cleared zone where she could stay until the morning. “My people are working on your ship—clearing dragonfly smut from the engine, and patching the skin where your behemoth tore it open. They tell me you did the right thing, by the way—clearing the engine before you tried to land. If you’d landed first, the behemoth would have shredded you before you could have done anything.”
“It wasn’t planned. I was in a panic.”
Mercer shrugged, and smiled. “They’ll run a spore sweep and replace all your filters. It’ll be ready by dawn.”
Valerie thanked him, and he left. She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Thoughts of helping to create a restored, living city filled her mind. Then came sleep, and with it dreams of walking without fear through the gardens of Syberia.
Castrovalva hovered above the February Desert. Mercer had explained that in the event of a catastrophe, the desert region was the best place for the city to fall. The contaminants that the city guarded wouldn’t get into ground water or the oceans. If the worst happened, it could be cleaned up.
Valerie began to understand what the Free Cities cared about. They were trying to protect the surface life. Every organism down there was vicious, venomous, and extremely tough. Nature had made them that way. They did what they did to survive—not out of hate, or spite, or greed, or cruelty. The Free Citizens saw themselves as part of the world, not its enemy.
They cared about each other, too. They didn’t watch each other constantly, suspicious of everything.
Valerie had known one way of life—the Royal Cities’ way. And now she’d been shown another way, and she’d obstinately denied that it was better. But no longer. She was a scientist, and good scientists didn’t ignore facts that didn’t fit a pet theory. But that was what she’d done since the minute she’d landed on Belvedere.
Her feelings were a twisted knot in her belly. Shame at her own stubbornness mixed with the sense of betrayal at the lies she’d grown up believing, and anger that millions of people were still kept subdued by those same lies.
Now she knew the truth, and with that came a bright spark—a feeling of liberation and hope. The Rogues were a myth, invented by her own leaders to validate an oppressive system of rule. If she
returned to City Twenty-seven, she’d die. They’d execute her, and her body would be dropped in a sewer to end up as food for the surface life. Her name would be just another given out over the loudspeakers as a Rogue spy.
The truth about the Free Cities implied something else, too. Danforth was no government agent. He couldn’t be, or he would have known that same truth. He wouldn’t have sent her to Belvedere unprepared. So what was he up to?
It took three days for the dock workers on Castrovalva to line the flyer’s cargo hold with shielding. That done, automatons carried in the twenty boxes and stacked them according to Valerie’s instructions before sealing the hold.
Her plan required one more piece of equipment: a shielded suit. The one the dock people let her take was old, and had obviously seen a lot of use. The brass helmet was marked with gouges, the lead glass of the faceplate scratched, and the canvas of the suit itself had more patches than she could count—but they assured her the lead lining was intact. All was ready.
“City Twenty-seven has drifted west of where it was when you left,” said Carter, the dock navigation expert. “Belvedere has moved some way to the north, too. So you won’t be using the same refuelling stops. I’ve set your clockworks for an optimal route to get you back to your home as quickly as possible.”
Valerie’s mind balked at Carter’s use of the word ‘home,’ but she pushed the feeling aside. “How long to get there, then?”
“Thirty-three days, assuming no delays.”
Valerie had been travelling for forty-six days. She’d get back with just one day to spare. It was going to be a close thing. “I’d better get going.”
Carter nodded. “Indeed. Safe travels, Miss McGrath.”
The flyer docked with Lilyrock seven days later. The city was aptly named; underneath, most of its structure had been built from sparkling blocks of bubble-granite carved from the mountains in the southern polar region, and the city buildings above were festooned with lilies—a mutated variant of the carnivorous form found on the shores of the April Sea.
The city was all white and green above and all rainbow colours below, where the crystal rock splintered the sunlight into its components. Valerie caught her breath at its beauty and toyed with the idea of staying to explore, but questions were a weight on her mind. Who was Danforth working for? Was the city in danger? She wanted the answers, and time was short. She had to move on.
Five days later, as she passed over the May Woods, she noticed a streak of yellow and brown cutting through the green of the trees below. She considered flying lower to see what it was, but then she saw the cause—off to the north, faded by haze, was a city. It trailed smoke, and Valerie knew that it could only be one of the Royal Cities.
She squinted at the tainted woods as the flyer passed over the stain, and her eyes followed the trail of damage along the ground in the direction of the city. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily, as if she could smell the odour of sewage.
The Free City of Xochil floated over the July Wetlands, bathed in sunlight. Valerie wandered over the pale, polished wood bridges, taking the air while the flyer was being readied. It would be her last stop before City Twenty-seven.
Seventy-two days had passed since she’d left. According to Carter’s figures, it was seven days from Xochil to her starting point. Carter had called it ‘home.’ Valerie no longer felt any such connection to the place.
She’d arrive with not one day to spare, but two. As Carter had pointed out, she’d flown around the globe, always travelling eastward. When she returned to City Twenty-seven, she would have experienced seventy-nine days—but in the city, only seventy-eight days would have passed.
She was tempted to spend an extra day aboard Xochil—the Flower City, as they called it, because of the petal-shaped layout of its roads and the bright painted colours of the curving buildings and walkways. But the weight of the eighty-day deadline pressed on her soul.
Danforth hadn’t told her the whole truth; of that much she was certain. She didn’t believe him, but she couldn’t risk being wrong, with eight million lives at stake. And she needed to know. The only way to be sure was to return, before her time ran out.
As she flew on toward City Twenty-seven, she stood at the rear port and watched Xochil floating like a rose blossom against cream-white clouds until it faded into the distance and the dusk.
Valerie relaxed in the pilot’s chair, occasionally looking up from her book spool to scan the horizon and the low, rolling hills idly. She was four days out from Xochil and two days from City Twenty-seven, and wondering what would happen when she arrived there. Would Danforth be surprised? She’d been away a lot longer than either of them had expected. He might have given up on her. Perhaps he’d even sent someone else, following her trail, to locate the protonium.
She didn’t really care if he had. The far more important question was whether there any truth at all in what he—
The bang from the rear of the aircraft shook the deck and she dropped the book spool, startled. She jumped for the passageway and ran back to the engine room, the source of the sound.
A grating noise came from the engine. Something inside it was broken, but she couldn’t fix it without stopping it, and that meant landing—and that was out of the question. Those low, rolling hills were covered in deadly greenery. Touching down meant death.
She scurried back to the controls. She resisted the temptation to take over; the clockworks were doing their best to keep the motor running, and there was no way she could do the job any better. She glanced at the moving chart. There were no cities closer than Twenty-seven.
She scanned the ground ahead, looking for any place that might be safe long enough to make repairs, but she knew it was futile. Nowhere on the surface was safe.
The grating got louder, and then came a screech of complaining metal. The engine seized, and the only sound was the rushing of air against the hull. Valerie forced down the panic and grabbed the wheel, doing her best to keep the aircraft in a shallow glide. She looked for a place that was flat and clear of rocks and trees.
Then she saw it—off to the north, a smear of red, prominent against the green. Possibly it was nothing. But if she landed on the vegetation, her chance of surviving was zero. Whatever lay in that rusty patch could be no worse. She turned Nomad toward it. It was a good way off, and she hoped the flyer would make it.
Not one patch, she saw as she got closer, but a cluster of half a dozen or so. And the flyer wasn’t going to make the distance, even to the closest of them. She’d come down at least a hundred yards short.
Nomad bumped and shuddered as her tyres skimmed across the vines and creepers. Then the wheels touched down fully, and the aircraft rolled on, over the vegetation, and came to a halt twenty yards inside an area of ruddy ground.
Valerie’s nerves were strung tight as she surveyed the fractured, rocky terrain. Dry, brown strands crossed the surface, and Valerie was surprised to realise that they were dead creepers. Something in this area had killed the plants. And, just possibly, given her a chance of surviving beyond a few minutes. She would have to move fast, though.
She unstrapped herself from the pilot’s seat—and froze when, in the corner of her vision, something moved. There, where the red ground gave way to the venomous vegetation, half a dozen crab-lizards scuttled from side to side, their claws waving in the air in frustration. Two of them came forward, onto the bare rock, but retreated back onto the greenery, hissing. Whatever had killed the vegetation, the animal life didn’t like, either.
The flyer lurched, and she grabbed the panel for support as, outside, rocks shifted, throwing up red dust. A quake. Another, smaller tremor shook the craft, then all was still.
Valerie’s heart thumped in her ears. She laboured to even her breathing and calm herself. She drove herself into motion and dashed back to the engine room.
Valerie pulled the inspection and maintenance panels from the casing and used a gaslight to see inside. The ground under the flyer quivered at
intervals, making it shudder and creak.
It took half an hour to diagnose the engine failure. A crank pin had loosened, then sheared, causing one crank to rotate unevenly. Meanwhile, the broken pin fragment had blocked a coolant duct, and that had caused the overheating.
She needed to know if her situation had gotten any worse and took a minute to dash back to the control room and look out. More crab-lizards had come and were trying to cross the rocky ground to get to the flyer. They’d been joined by two behemoths. As she watched, petrified, one of the big beasts took two paces toward her. She screamed, stepping back involuntarily. With a roar, it spun round and ran back to the green growth. She forced herself to breathe again.
A flicker of motion caught her eye. The compass dial on the panel had gone crazy. It spun clockwise, then stopped. It flicked back and forth a few times, then spun anticlockwise.
Seismic activity. Magnetic disturbances. City suspensors vibrated and generated fluctuating magnetic fields. The suspensors on Syberia had been free of plant life. Magnetism and vibration. Could that be the key? Could it be that simple?
Something was keeping the plants and animals away. Whatever it was could end at any second. She hurried back to the engine and carried on working.
Valerie worked steadily for six hours, her nerves taut, half expecting a behemoth—or something worse—to tear its way in through the hull at any instant. She continually fought the urge to return to the control room to watch what was happening outside.
Dismantling the engine piece by piece, she was finally able to dismount the damaged crank. There was no spare in the maintenance supplies. She’d have to remove that crank and plug the open piston’s steam valves. The engine would be running on two cylinders instead of three, and she’d be lucky to maintain half speed—and to reach City Twenty-seven before the eighty-day deadline. But at least she’d be off the ground.
Valerie replaced the last of the covers and dashed back to the control room, wiping the oil from her hands on a rag as she ran. The sun was a warm, orange ball on the horizon. Behemoths, crab-lizards, ten-foot fire weevils, and hundreds of other creatures clambered over each other at the border between the green life and the barren red, trying to get closer to the flyer. And each time one of them moved onto bare ground, it would turn, screeching, and fight its way back.
