Predator's gold hcc-2

by Philip Reeve

  “Right. Sentimental reasons, then,” muttered Hester. She tensed, expecting another blow, but it did not come. Sathya turned away from her towards the window.

  “You destroyed one of our units over the Drachen Pass three weeks ago,” she said.

  “Only because they attacked my ship,” Hester replied.

  “She is not your ship,” the other girl snapped. “She is… She was Anna’s. You stole her, the night Anna died, you and your barbarian lover, Tom Natsworthy. Where is he, by the way? Don’t tell me he has abandoned you?”

  Hester shrugged.

  “So what were you doing alone aboard Arkangel?”

  “Just betraying a few cities to the Huntsmen,” said Hester.

  “I can believe that. Treachery is in your blood.”

  Hester frowned. Had Sathya dragged her all the way here just to be rude about her parents? “If you mean I take after my mother, well, she was pretty stupid digging up MEDUSA, but I don’t think she actually betrayed anybody.”

  “No,” Sathya agreed. “But your father…”

  “My dad was a farmer,” cried Hester, feeling suddenly and strangely angry that this girl could stand there and insult the memory of her poor dead dad, who had never done anything but good.

  “You are a liar,” said Sathya. “Your father was Thaddeus Valentine.”

  Outside, snow fell like sifted icing sugar. Hester could see icebergs ploughing through the comfortless grey of the winter sea. In a tiny voice she said, “That isn’t true.”

  Sathya pulled a sheet of writing-paper from the folder on her desk. “This is the report that Anna wrote for the League’s High Council, that day she brought you to Batmunkh Gompa. What does she say about you…? Ah, yes: Two young people: one an adorable young Apprentice Historian from London, quite harmless, the other a poor, disfigured girl who I am sure is the lost daughter of Pandora Rae and Thaddeus Valentine. ”

  Hester said, “My dad was David Shaw, of Oak Island…”

  “Your mother had many lovers before she married Shaw,” said Sathya, in a voice crisp with disapproval. “Valentine was one of them. You are his child. Anna would never have written such a thing if she had not been certain.”

  “My dad was David Shaw,” snivelled Hester, but she knew it wasn’t true. She had known it in her heart these two years past, ever since her gaze met Valentine’s over the body of his dying daughter Katherine. Some sort of understanding had crackled between them then like electricity, a half-recognition that she had crushed as quick and as hard as she could, because she didn’t want him for a father. She had understood, though, deep down. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to kill him!

  “Anna was wrong about you, wasn’t she?” Sathya said, turning away, going to stand at the window. The snow had passed; patches of sunlight dappled the grey sea a lighter grey. She said, “You weren’t lost, and Tom wasn’t harmless. You were both in league with Valentine all along. You used Anna’s kindness to get inside Batmunkh Gompa and help him burn our Air-Fleet.”

  “No!” said Hester.

  “Yes. You lured Anna to a place where he could murder her, and then you stole her ship.”

  Hester shook her head. “You’re so wrong!”

  “Stop lying!” shouted Sathya, rounding on her again. There were tears in her eyes.

  Hester tried to remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. It had mostly been a blur of flames and running, but she had a feeling that Sathya had not acted very well. For all her fighting talk, Sathya had let her beloved Anna run off to tackle Valentine alone, and Valentine had killed her. Hester knew quite well that you didn’t forgive yourself for things like that. Instead you blotted out the memories, or sank into despair.

  Or you found someone else to blame. Like Valentine’s daughter.

  Sathya said, “You will pay for what you did. But first, perhaps, you can help to make amends.” She took a gun from her desk and gestured to a small door on the far side of her office. Hester walked towards it, not really caring where she went, or whether Sathya was going to shoot her. Valentine’s daughter, she kept thinking. Valentine’s daughter goes through a doorway. Valentine’s daughter goes down some iron steps. Valentine’s daughter. No wonder she had such a temper. No wonder she had been able to sell a city full of good people to Arkangel with barely a squeak from her conscience. She was Valentine’s daughter, and she took after Daddy.

  The steps led to a tunnel, then a sort of antechamber. Two guards watched Hester coldly through the tinted glastic visors of their crab-shell helmets. A third man stood waiting beside a heavy steel door; a twitchy little pink-eyed rabbit of a man, gnawing nervously at his fingernails. The argon-lamps on the walls bounced bright reflections off his bald scalp. Between his eyebrows was a red wheel.

  “He’s an Engineer!” said Hester. “A London Engineer! I thought they were all dead…”

  “A few survived,” said Sathya. “After London exploded I was put in charge of the squadron sent out to round up survivors escaping from the wreck. Most were sent to slave-labour camps deep in League territory, but when I interrogated Dr Popjoy, and learned what his work had been, I realized he might be able to help us.”

  “Help you with what? I thought the League hated Old-Tech?”

  “There have always been some in the League who believed that to defeat the cities we should use their own infernal devices against them,” said Sathya. “After what you and your father did at Batmunkh Gompa their voices began to be heard more loudly. A secret society of young officers was formed; the Green Storm. When I told them about Popjoy they saw his potential at once, and agreed to let me set up this facility.”

  The Engineer bared big yellow teeth in a nervous grin and said, “So this is Hester Shaw is it? She may be helpful. Yes, yes. Someone who was ‘in at the kill’, so to speak. Her presence in the Mnemonic Environment may provide just the trigger we’ve been seeking.”

  “Get on with it,” snapped Sathya, and Hester saw that she, too, was extremely nervous.

  Popjoy pulled a series of levers on the door, and the massive electro-magnetic locks released with hollow thuds and clangs, like docking clamps disengaging. The guards tensed, wraiths of steam scrolling from the funnels of their bulky machine-guns as they flipped the safety catches off. All this security wasn’t designed to keep people out, Hester realized. It was meant to keep something in.

  The door swung open.

  Later Hester would learn that the Memory Chamber was a decommissioned fuel-tank: one of dozens of steel globes clumped in the corries of Rogues’ Roost, but at first sight it seemed just an insanely huge room, with rusty walls curving up to form a dome above her and down to make a bowl below. All over the walls big pictures had been fixed; grainy blow-ups of people’s faces, photographs of London and Arkangel and Marseilles, a silk-painting of Batmunkh Gompa in an ebony frame. Loops of scratchy film repeated endlessly on whitewashed panels: a little golden girl with pigtails laughing in a meadow; a young woman drawing on a long-stemmed pipe and blowing smoke at the camera.

  Hester felt suddenly sick with fear, and did not know why.

  A walkway ran around the edge of this spherical vault, and a narrow footbridge stretched from it to a platform in the centre, where a monk-like figure stood robed in grey. Hester tried to hang back as Sathya and Popjoy started along the bridge, but one of the guards was behind her, pushing her firmly forward. Ahead, Sathya reached the central platform and touched the arm of the one who waited there. She was crying silently, her face shining with tears in the dim light. “I’ve brought you a present, dearest,” she said softly. “A visitor. Someone you’re sure to remember!”

  And the robed figure turned, the grey cowl fell aside, and Hester saw that it was — no, that it had once been — Anna Fang.

  20

  THE NEW MODEL

  Dr Popjoy had done good work for his new masters. Of course, he and his fellow Engineers had spent many years studying Stalker technology. They had learned much from Shrike, the mechanized b
ounty-killer who had once adopted Hester. They had even made Stalkers of their own; Hester had seen squads of the Resurrected Men marching through the streets of London on the night MEDUSA went off. But comparing those lurching, mindless creatures to the thing that stood before her now was like comparing a tatty old cargo balloon to a brand new Serapis Cloud Yacht.

  It was slender and almost graceful, and not very much taller than Miss Fang had been in life. Its face was hidden by a bronze death-mask of the aviatrix and the ducts and flexes which sprouted from its skull-piece were gathered neatly behind its head. The faint, curious twitchings of its head and its hands as it peered at Hester seemed so human that for a moment she almost imagined the Engineer had succeeded in bringing Anna back.

  Sathya started talking, quick and brittle. “She doesn’t remember yet, but she will. This place acts as her memory, until her own memories come back to her. We’ve collected photographs of everyone she ever knew, everywhere she went, the cities she fought against, her lovers and her enemies. It will all come back to her. She’s only been resurrected for a few months, and…”

  She stopped suddenly, as if understanding that her stream of hopeful chatter was only making the horror of what she had done more horrible. Echoes of her words went whispering off around the inside of the old fuel-tank: “And, and, and, and, and…”

  “Oh, Gods and Goddesses,” said Hester. “Why couldn’t you let her rest in peace?”

  “Because we need her!” yelled Sathya. “The League has lost its way! We need new leaders. Anna was the best of us. She will show us the path to victory!”

  The Stalker flexed its clever hands, and a slender blade slid from each fingertip, snick, snick, snick.

  “This isn’t Anna,” Hester said. “Nobody comes back from the Sunless Country. Your tame Engineer may have managed to get her corpse up and about, but it isn’t her. I knew a Stalker once: they don’t remember who they were in life; they aren’t the same person; that person’s dead, and when you stick one of those Old-Tech machines in their head you make a new person, like a new tenant moving into an empty house…”

  Popjoy began to chuckle.

  “I hadn’t realized that you were an expert, Miss Shaw. Of course, you would be referring to the old Shrike model; a very inferior piece of work. Before I installed the Stalker machinery in Miss Fang’s brain I programmed it to seek out her memory-centres. I have every confidence that we will be able to re-ignite the memories which lie buried there. That’s what this chamber is for; to stimulate the subject with constant reminders of her former life. It’s all a question of finding the right mnemonic trigger — a smell, an object, a face. That’s where you come in.”

  Sathya shoved Hester forward until she was standing only a few inches from the new Stalker. “Look, dear!” she said brightly. “Look! This is Hester Shaw! Valentine’s daughter! You remember how you found her in the Out-Country and brought her to Batmunkh Gompa? She was there when you died!”

  The Stalker leaned close. In the shadows behind its bronze mask a dead black tongue licked withered lips. Its voice was a dry whisper, a night-wind blowing through valleys of stone. “I do not know this girl.”

  “You do, Anna!” urged Sathya, with awful patience. “You must! Try and remember!”

  The Stalker glanced up, scanning the hundreds of portraits on the walls and floor and ceiling of its spherical prison. Anna Fang’s parents were there, and Stilton Kael, who had been Anna’s master when she was a slave in the salvage-yards of Arkangel. Valentine was there, and Captain Khora, and Pandora Rae, but there was no picture of Hester’s disfigured face. It focused its mechanical eyes on her again, and its long claws twitched. “I do not know this girl. I am not Anna Fang. You are wasting my time, little once-born. I wish to leave this place.”

  “Of course, Anna, but you must try to remember. You must be yourself again, before we take you home. Everyone in the League’s lands loved you; when they hear you have returned they will rise up and follow you.”

  “Ah, Commander,” muttered Popjoy, backing towards the bridge. “I think we should withdraw now…”

  “I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker.

  “Commander, I definitely think…”

  “Anna, please!”

  Instinctively, Hester grabbed Sathya and dragged her backwards. The claws scythed past an inch from her throat. The guard levelled his machine-gun and the Stalker hesitated just long enough for them all to scurry back across the bridge. As they reached the door the man stationed outside pulled a heavy, red-handled lever. Red warning lights came on amid a rising buzz of electricity. “I am not Anna Fang!” Hester heard the Stalker shout, as she bundled out after the others into the antechamber. Glancing back in the instant before the guards slammed and locked the door, she saw it watching her, its claws jerking and glinting.

  “Fascinating,” said Popjoy, making notes on his clipboard. “Fascinating. With hindsight, it may have been a tad unwise to install the finger-glaives so early…”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sathya demanded.

  “It’s hard to be entirely sure,” admitted Popjoy. “I imagine the new memory-seeking components which I added to the basic Stalker-brain are clashing with its tactical and aggressive instincts.”

  “You mean it’s mad?” asked Hester.

  “Really, Miss Shaw, ‘mad’ is such an unhelpful term. I would prefer to say that the former Miss Fang is ‘differently sane’.”

  “Poor Anna,” whispered Sathya, stroking her throat with the tips of her fingers.

  “Don’t worry about Anna,” said Hester. “Anna’s dead. Poor you is what you mean. You’ve got a mad killing machine in there, and your stupid guns aren’t going to keep it penned in for ever. It could climb down off that platform! It could reach the door and-”

  “The bridge is electrified, Miss Shaw,” said Popjoy firmly. “The girders under the platform are electrified. The inside of the door is also electrified. Even Stalkers dislike massive electric shocks. As for the guns, I am pretty sure the former Miss Fang does not yet understand her new strength; she is still wary of them. That may well be a sign that she does indeed possess lingering memories of her earlier, human incarnation.”

  Sathya glanced at him, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “Yes. Yes, doctor. We must not give up. We will bring Hester here again.”

  She turned away smiling, but Hester had seen the panicky look behind Popjoy’s spectacles. He had no idea at all of how to restore the dead aviatrix’s memories. Surely even Sathya must soon realize that this attempt to bring her friend back from the Sunless Country was doomed. And when she did, there would be no more reason for her to keep Hester around.

  I’m going to die here, she thought, as guards took her back to her cell and locked her in. Either Sathya or that mad thing will kill me, and I’ll never see Tom again, and I’ll never rescue him, and he’ll die too, in the slave-pits of Arkangel, cursing me.

  She leaned against the wall and slid slowly down until she was kneeling, curled into a little miserable knot. She could hear the sea hissing between the rocks of Rogues’ Roost, as cold as the voice of the new Stalker. She could hear small bits of paint and cement falling from the damp-rotted roof of her cell, and faint, scratchy noises in the old heat-duct that reminded her of Anchorage. She thought about Mr Scabious, and Sathya, and about the desperate, hopeless things that people did to try and hold on to the people they loved.

  “Oh, Tom! Oh, oh, Tom!” she sobbed, imagining him safe and happy in Anchorage, with no idea that she had set great Arkangel on his tail.

  21

  LIES AND SPIDERS

  A week went by, and then another and another. Anchorage swung west, creeping along the northern edge of Greenland with survey-sleds sent out ahead to sound the ice. No city had come this way before, and Miss Pye did not trust her charts.

  Freya felt as if she had wandered into unmapped territory, too. Why was she so unhappy? How had everything gone so wrong, when it had all seemed to be going so ri
ght? She could not understand why Tom didn’t want her. Surely, she thought, wiping a hole in the dust on her dressing-room mirror to study her reflection, surely he cannot still be missing Hester? Surely he can’t prefer her to me?

  Sometimes, sniffling with self-pity, she concocted elaborate schemes to win him back. Sometimes she grew angry and stomped along the dusty corridors muttering all the things she should have said during their argument. Once or twice she found herself wondering whether she could order him to be beheaded for high treason, but Anchorage’s executioner (a very ancient gentleman whose post had been purely ceremonial) was dead, and Freya doubted that Smew could lift the axe.

  Tom had moved out of his suite in the Winter Palace into an abandoned apartment in a big, empty building on Rasmussen Prospekt, not far from the air-harbour. Without the Wunderkammer or the margravine’s library to distract him, he devoted his days to feeling sorry for himself and wondering how to get Hester back, or at least find out where she had gone.

  There was no way off Anchorage, that much was certain. He had pestered Mr Aakiuq about fitting out the Graculus for long-range travel, but the Graculus was just a tug; she had never flown more than half a mile from the air-harbour before, and Mr Aakiuq claimed it would be impossible to give her the bigger fuel-tanks she would need if Tom was to take her back east. “Besides,” the harbour master added, “what would you fill them with? I’ve been checking fuel levels in the harbour tanks. There’s almost nothing left. I don’t understand it. The gauges still read full, but the tanks are nearly empty.”

  Fuel was not the only thing that had been going missing. Unconvinced by Scabious’s talk of ghosts, Tom had been asking around in the engine district for anyone who might know something of Hester’s mysterious friend. Nobody did, but they all seemed to have their own tales of figures glimpsed in corners of the district where no one should be, and of tools set down at a shift’s end and never seen again. Things vanished from lockers and bolted rooms, and an oil-tank on Heat Exchange Street had run dry, even though the gauges showed it nearly full.