Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  Yet Brighton was still a popular holiday spot. Its upper-class visitors had all deserted it (the luxury hotels were in ruins, or had been converted into strongholds by Lost Boys) and no more happy families came aboard to fill the cheaper guest-houses and frolic in the Sea Pool, but there was a certain sort of person – well-off artists from the comfortable middle-tiers of cities which the war had never touched, and spoilt young men who fancied a little adventuring before they settled into the careers their parents had bought them – who thought the new Brighton edgy and exciting. They were thrilled to rub shoulders in the clubs and bars with real criminals and mutineers; they loved it when some Lost Boy and his entourage came swaggering into the restaurant they were eating in; they thought the slicks of sewage lapping against the promenades, the raucous, never-ending music and the dead bodies heaved overboard at dawn were signs that Brighton was somehow more real than the cities they had come from. Some of them were robbed during their stay, all of them were fleeced, and a few were found down alleyways in Mole’s Combe and White Orc with their pockets emptied and their throats cut, but the survivors would go home to Milan and Peripatetiapolis and St Jean Les Quatre-Mille Chevaux and bore their friends and relatives for years to come with stories of their holiday in Brighton.

  There were some like that among the passengers of the launch that set off from the beach where Cairo was parked, but most had darker reasons for visiting Brighton. They were drug-dealers out to push wire and hashish, or thieves, or gun-runners, or shifty-looking men who had heard that in Brighton these days you could buy anything. And up at the bows, drenched in the spray that crashed over the gunwales every time the launch shoved its blunt nose through a wave, Fishcake stood staring at the approaching resort and wishing he had stayed safe ashore.

  In his hidey-hole aboard Cairo it had been an easy thing to please his Stalker by promising to steal her a limpet, but now that the rusty flanks of Brighton were rising above the swell ahead he was starting to have serious doubts. He kept remembering that his fellow Lost Boys saw him as a traitor. The last time he encountered any of them they had made it plain that they wanted to kill him in a number of inventive ways, and he had been forced to jump overboard and take his chances in the surf. He had assumed that the Brighton authorities would have rounded them up by now, but listening to his fellow passengers talk it seemed that he’d been wrong; the Lost Boys were the Brighton authorities.

  The launch swung across Brighton’s decaying stern, past dirty paddle-wheels and derelict promenades and a district called Plage Ultime where a whole row of limpets was stabled on a dirty metal quay. A girl standing nearby, a traveller from some rich city, said to her boyfriend, “Ugh! Those horrible machines! Like great big spiders!”

  “Lost Boy submarines!” the boy said. “You can buy pleasure trips aboard them and see the city from beneath. And that’s not all they’re used for. Lost Boys are still pirates at heart. I’ve heard stories of little towns that have crossed Brighton’s path and never been seen again…”

  “Ugh!” said the girl again, but she looked delighted at the thought of boarding a city where real, live pirates lived.

  Fishcake did not share her enthusiasm. Returning seemed less and less like a good idea.

  The launch entered a channel of calm, filthy water between the central hull and the outrigger district of Kemptown. Abandoned pleasure-piers arched overhead, their corroded gantries sending down a rain of rust-flakes as Brighton shifted on the swell. The voices of the launch crew echoed across the narrowing gap to dockers waiting on the mooring stair. Smells of oil and brine. A dead cat bobbed in a mat of drifting scum. The launch backed its engines, and the other passengers began to gather their bags and pat their clothes, checking that wallets and money-belts were still secure, but Fishcake just turned up his collar and tugged down the peak of his greasy cap and wished that he could stay aboard the launch and let it take him back to Cairo.

  His Stalker, who was standing silently beside him, wrapped in the long, hooded robe that he had stolen for her from the Lower Souk, seemed to sense his fear. Her steel fingers closed gently on his arm, and she whispered, “There is nothing to be afraid of. I am with you.”

  She was Anna today. He took her hand in his and held it tight and felt a little braver. He did not even worry too much when a gust of wind snatched his cap off and sent it whirling up into the sunlight.

  Two tiers above, in a fortified hotel on Ocean Boulevard, a Lost Boy named Brittlestar jerked round to stare as the lost cap went whirling past his window.

  “What was that?” he demanded.

  His friends and bodyguards fingered the weapons in their belts and said they didn’t know. One of his slaves said she thought it was just a hat.

  “Just a hat?” hissed Brittlestar. “Nothing is just anything! It meant something! Where did it come from? Whose was it?”

  The bodyguards, friends and slaves swapped weary glances. Brittlestar was growing increasingly paranoid, and sometimes at night he woke the whole gang as he thrashed around in his sleep and screamed about Grimsby and somebody called Uncle. The bodyguards and friends were starting to think it might soon be time to pitch him overboard and offer their services to some less sensitive Lost Boy like Krill or Baitball.

  Brittlestar, the hem of his silk dressing gown swooshing behind him over the expensive carpets, went rushing to the room where he kept his screens. All the Lost Boys had screens, and all had crab-cameras which they sent sneaking about Brighton to spy on other Lost Boys. Everyone had grown quite used to the scraping of the machines’ metal feet inside the city’s ventilation shafts, and the echoey, rattling fights which broke out when two rival cameras met. Sometimes at dawn the pavements beneath air-vents were littered with torn-off metal legs and shattered lenses, the debris of desperate battles that had raged through the shafts all night.

  “Everything means something!” Brittlestar assured his followers, as they gathered in the doorway to watch him grapple with the screen-controls. “You say it’s a hat, I say it’s a sign. It could be a message from Uncle!” Brittlestar had been dreaming a great deal about Uncle lately. Uncle kept whispering to him. He had come to believe that the old man was still alive, and would soon punish his Lost Boys for letting themselves be captured by Brighton.

  But it was not Uncle he saw when he trained one of his cameras on the group of visitors disembarking at the Kemptown Stair. He wasn’t sure who he was seeing at first, only that there was something familiar about the little boy leading the cripple in the black robe. Then one of his slaves, a woman named Monica Weems, who had once worked for the Shkin Corporation and had a better memory for faces than Brittlestar, suddenly pointed at the screen and said, “Look! Look, master! It’s little Fishcake!”

  Little Fishcake hurried his Stalker along litter-strewn pavements under the colonnades at the city’s edge, past boarded-up cafés and looted amusement arcades, out at last into the metallic sunlight of Plage Ultime. To The Beach, said a stencilled sign on a white wall, and Fishcake and his Stalker followed where it pointed, past abandoned hotels and empty swimming pools, past the gigantic housings of the resort’s Mitchell & Nixon engines, down to the hard where the limpets waited.

  There was a chain-link fence around the hard, and a padlock on the gate, but fences and padlocks meant nothing to the Stalker. She snapped the lock and Fishcake pushed the gate open and ran among the limpets, feeling a strange nostalgia for the old days in Grimsby. Their armoured cabs and crook-kneed legs, patched with barnacles and gull-droppings, gave the limpets the appearance of enormous, prehistoric crabs. Fishcake knew them all; the Sea Louse and the Thermoclyne Girl, the Hagfish 2 and the Finny Denizen, but he settled on the smallest, sleekest, newest one, the Spider Baby. It stood closer to the water than the rest, and had a board propped against its foreleg offering pleasure trips beneath the city, so he hoped it might already be fuelled.

  He looked for his Stalker, but he had left her behind. Poor thing, stomping along on that table leg, she could
n’t keep up with him! He started to walk back through the zigzag shadows under the limpets, calling out, “Anna! Come here! I need you to open the hatch!”

  With a howl of electric engines two bugs came speeding out of the streets beneath the engine-housings and through the open gate on to the limpet-hard. They were driving much too fast, and both were overloaded, with men and boys packed into their small cabins and standing on the roofs and running boards. Fishcake, noticing the swords and flare-pistols and harpoon-guns that they were waving at him, turned to run, but the only way out was through the gate, which the men spilling from the bugs quickly pushed shut. Whimpering, Fishcake veered towards the sea, but the Drys were all around him, and with them, staring at him, was a boy he knew; a tall, thin, highly-strung, red-headed boy named –

  “Brittlestar,” said Brittlestar. “Remember me? ’Cos I remember you, Fishcake.” He was carrying a spear-gun. “You’re the sneak, ain’t you? The one as told Shkin where Grimsby lay? Don’t think I’ve forgot. We none of us have, we Lost Boys. Maybe when I show ’em that I’ve caught you they’ll give me a bit of respect. Maybe Uncle will spare me, when he comes to punish us. Maybe—”

  Somehow, suddenly, Fishcake’s Stalker was standing behind Brittlestar. She gripped his chin and his red hair and twisted his head round so sharply that the noise of his neck snapping echoed across the hard like a gunshot. The last thing Brittlestar saw was his own surprised face reflected in her bronze mask. His finger tightened on the trigger of his spear-gun, which was pointing at the sky. A silver harpoon shot up into the sunlight, up through the steam from the idling engines, high into the clear air above the city.

  Fishcake had just enough of his wits left to throw himself down beside Brittlestar’s flapping body as bullets began to bang and whine among the parked limpets. He watched the harpoon rise higher and higher, slower and slower, until it seemed to hang for a moment suspended in the blue sky, a flake of silver among all the gliding gulls. His Stalker bared her claws. As the harpoon started to fall she began killing Brittlestar’s gang one by one, finding them by their scent and the sound of the guns they shot at her. By the time the harpoon clattered on the deckplate at the far side of the hard, they were all dead.

  The Stalker sheathed her claws and helped Fishcake to stand, asking him gently if he were damaged.

  “Anna?” said Fishcake, surprised. “I thought you had turned into…”

  “The other is still asleep, I think,” his Stalker whispered, and patted at her robe, which was smouldering where someone had fired a flare-pistol at her.

  “I didn’t think you would be so…” said Fishcake awkwardly, looking at the blood that smeared her hands and sleeves. On the deckplate beside him Brittlestar had stopped flapping and lay still. Fishcake remembered how, in Grimsby, Brittlestar had always been rather kind to him. He said, “I thought it was only her that would do things like that.”

  His Stalker said, “I have had to kill people sometimes. I had forgotten, but I remember now. I used to be quite good at it. In my work for the League. And at Stayns that time, to save poor Tom and Hester…”

  “You know Tom and Hester?” asked Fishcake, almost more shocked by those names than by the sudden deaths of Brittlestar and his crew.

  But his Stalker had taken him by the wrist and was leading him briskly towards the limpet he had chosen. She did not bother to answer his question, and as she climbed the boarding ladder and started to force the heavy hatches open she was hissing to herself about Shan Guo and ODIN. Kind, murderous Anna had sunk once more beneath the surface of her mind, and she was the Stalker Fang again.

  8

  ON THE LINE

  Wren had been dreaming about Theo, but what he had been saying or doing in her dream she did not know; the details, which had seemed so vivid and so clear just a moment before, all faded in an instant as she woke. Her father was shaking her gently and calling her name.

  “Bother,” she mumbled. “What is it?”

  She was in her bunk aboard the Jenny Haniver, snuggled beneath a lot of furs and blankets, because although it was spring the Bird Roads were still cold. Outside her porthole the sky was dark. She sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “What is it?” she asked, more clearly this time. “Is something wrong? You’re not ill?”

  “No, no,” said Tom, “and I’m sorry to wake you early, but there’s a sight ahead that you won’t want to miss.”

  Wren’s father believed firmly that there were certain sights in the world which were so beautiful, or awesome, or educational, that Wren would never forgive him if he let her sleep through them. He often recalled his own first glimpse of Batmunkh Gompa, and his first sight of the Tannhäuser volcano-chain, and several times during the journey east he had dragged Wren out of her bunk to see a beautiful sunrise or the approach of some fine city. Wren, who was a teenager and needed her sleep, was not always as grateful as he expected.

  But on this particular morning, when she came grumpily on to the flight-deck and saw what was framed in the Jenny’s nose-windows, she forgave him at once.

  They were flying low, and beneath them stretched the same featureless, rut-scarred plain that they had been passing over for days. To the south, a white-ish smear of mist hung over the Rustwater Marshes and the Sea of Khazak, but that was not what Tom had woken her for. Ahead, rising like mountains into a murk of their own smoke, stood more Traction Cities than Wren had yet seen in her life. Lighted windows and furnace-vents shone like jewels in the pre-dawn dark. Towns and cities which Wren would once have thought impressive were rolling to and fro, but they were dwarfed by the colossal, armoured ziggurats at the eastern edge of the cluster, ziggurats whose ten or fifteen tiers of homes and factories rose from base-plates a mile across, all armoured like medieval knights and prickly with guns and the mooring-gantries of aerial warships. The Jenny Haniver had arrived at the line which marked the easternmost boundary of Municipal Darwinism. She was flying into one of the great city-parks of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft.

  Fourteen years earlier, while Wren was busy learning to crawl and alarming her parents by eating stones, beetles and small ornaments, the Green Storm had swept down from their strongholds in the mountains of Shan Guo to spread war and destruction across the Great Hunting Ground. Their air-fleets and Stalker armies had surged westward, herding terrified Traction Cities ahead of them and destroying any that did not flee fast enough. Then Arminius Krause, the burgermeister of Traktionstadt Weimar, had sent envoys to eleven other German-speaking cities and proposed that they join together and turn to face the Storm before every mobile town and city was driven off the western edge of the Hunting Ground into the sea.

  And so the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was born. The twelve great cities, swiftly joined by others, swore that they would eat no mobile town until the Green Storm was destroyed. They would survive instead by devouring Mossie ships and forts and static settlements until they had made the world safe again for Municipal Darwinism, which every civilized person knew was the most natural, sensible and fair way of life ever devised.

  They turned, they fought, and they forced the startled Green Storm to a stalemate. Now, a broad ribbon of no-man’s-land wriggled across the Hunting Ground from the southern fringes of the Rustwater Marshes to the edges of the Ice Wastes, marking the boundary between two worlds. To the east of it the Green Storm were struggling to plant new static settlements and reclaim for their farmers land which had been ploughed up and polluted by centuries of Municipal Darwinism. To the west, life went on almost as before, with cities hunting towns and towns hunting villages; the only difference was that most mayors sent a portion of their catch to feed the Traktionstadts.

  Over the years there had been all manner of battles as each side tried to break the line. Stretches of churned mud and empty marsh changed hands again and again, at the cost of thousands of lives, but always, when the months-long thunder of thrust and counter-thrust had faded, the line remained much as it had been before, a river of dead ground wi
nding across a continent.

  Now that the truce seemed to be holding, some of the braver merchant cities and industrial platforms from the west had come to see the line for themselves, and trading clusters had formed around each concentration of Traktionstadts. The Jenny Haniver was flying into one of them. Tom took her low, beneath the grey lid of the cities’ smoke, and Wren peered down at the upper-works of cities and merchant towns, and then down again to the earth, where smaller towns were scuttling along the narrow ridges of land between deep trenches made by larger cities’ tracks. She saw tiny scavenger-villes down there, and speedy fighting-suburbs which Tom said were called harvesters. The sky was filled with other airships, balloon-taxis and lumbering sky-trains. Once a squadron of ungainly flying-machines roared rudely across the Jenny’s bows. “Air-hogs!” said Tom, and grumbled about old-fangled inventions and pilots who had no respect for the ways of the Bird Roads, but Wren was thrilled; the flapping, tumbling machines reminded her of the Flying Ferrets, those brave aviators whom she had seen in action over Cloud 9.

  A fighting city called Murnau slipped by outside the windows, a colossal armoured wedge, wormholed with gun-slits and sally-ports. Its tiers were long triangles, narrowing to a sharp prow where a ram jutted out beneath the city’s jaws. It was breathtakingly big and powerful-looking, but the sky was brightening quickly now, and Wren could see five or six similar cities in the distance, stretching off in a long line down the western edge of the Rustwater Marshes. Some looked even bigger than Murnau.