Predator Cities x 4 and The Traction Codex

by Philip Reeve

  “Enough!” he said, holding up his hand to stop the man who was reading out Cynthia’s words. “Naga, you should not listen to any more of this. Two things are clear. We cannot trust the Zagwans. And the truce with the Tractionist barbarians must end. My division is ready to attack tomorrow, if you command it.”

  “And mine,” said several other officers, all at once.

  “Destroy All Cities!” shouted another, seizing on a Green Storm slogan from simpler times before the truce began.

  “No,” said Naga angrily.

  There was a mutter of surprise from everyone in the chamber. Even Cynthia had to remember she was playing a deaf mute and stop herself from crying out.

  “No!” the poor fool said again, thumping the table-top with his mechanical hand. “Oenone would not have wanted to see the world go tumbling back into war on her account.”

  “But Naga,” insisted General Dzhu, “she must be avenged.”

  “My wife did not believe in vengeance,” said Naga, trembling. “She believed in forgiveness. If she were here she would say that the actions of a few townies in the sand-sea do not mean that none of them can be trusted. We must continue to work for peace, for her sake.” He looked straight at Cynthia, who modestly averted her gaze. “What of this girl? What reward can we offer her? She has been brave, and loyal.”

  Annoying, having to wait while someone wrote down his question on a piece of paper before she could scribble her answer. She allowed herself a little smile as she wrote it, and it pleased her to think that everyone else in the room thought she was smiling because she was such a good, loyal girl.

  I ask only that I be allowed to serve General Naga just as I served his beloved wife.

  15

  THE INVISIBLE SUBURB

  Dawn found the Jenny Haniver above the scarred brown moors of no-man’s-land. The cheerful cluster of cities that surrounded Murnau had sunk below the south-western horizon sometime in the small hours, and the only city in sight now was a far-off, armoured hulk called Panzerstadt Winterthur, grumbling north on sentry duty. The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft and the Storm each kept watch on this region out of habit, for they had been outflanked before, but neither seriously imagined the other launching an attack across this marshy, pockmarked landscape, which only grew uglier and less inviting as the light increased. There was nothing down there beneath the mist except the immense track-marks of towns.

  Some of the older marks were a hundred yards across, steep-walled canyons running straight into the east, their bottoms filled with loose shale and chains of boggy ponds. Looking down at them, Tom thought he recognized the tracks of London, which he and Hester had followed long ago. Soon he would follow them again. This time, Quirke willing, they would lead him home.

  “Well, I can’t see a suburb anywhere,” said Wren, wrapping her wet hair in a towel as she came through from the galley, where she had been washing in the sink. The lemony scent of her shampoo filled the flight-deck as she went to each window in turn, looking down at the slabs and slopes of mud all shining in the grey dawn. “Nothing!”

  “We must be patient,” said Tom, but he could not help feeling uneasy. It did not seem like Wolf Kobold to be late… He circled again. The Jenny felt light and playful, as if pleased to be back in the sky. Her holds were empty, on Wolf’s instructions; presumably he envisaged himself flying home from the wreck of London with a shipload of loot. But where was he?

  The radio gave a sudden crackle and began to squeal. It had been tuned in advance to a frequency which Wolf had provided, so it seemed safe to assume that the shrill, ear-splitting noise coming out of the speakers was the call sign of Harrowbarrow’s homing beacon.

  Tom scrambled over to turn down the volume, while Wren ran back to the windows. The land below them was as featureless as ever. “I can’t see any suburbs,” said Wren. “It must still be over the horizon.”

  “Can’t be,” said Tom, wincing as the signal increased again. “It sounds as if we’re right on top of it.”

  It was Wren who spotted the movements in a broad track-mark about a mile to the east. The pools of water there were emptying away, and the trees and bushes that had grown around them were starting to move, turning and twisting and falling one against another. The floor of the track-mark heaved upwards into a high dome of earth, which split and slithered and fell away to reveal a bank of immense, spiralling drill-bits and then a scarred, armoured carapace. A grey fist of exhaust smoke punched into the sky.

  “Great Quirke!” murmured Tom.

  In the Wunderkammer at Anchorage-in-Vineland there had been the shell of something called a horseshoe crab. Later, when she was trying to explain what Harrowbarrow looked like, Wren would often compare it to that crab. The suburb was small – barely a hundred feet across, and about three times that in length. It was entirely covered by its armoured shell. The front end was a broad, blunt shield, into which the drill-bits were being retracted now that it was on the surface. (The shield also covered Harrowbarrow’s ugly mouth-parts, and could be raised when it wanted to tear chunks off the small towns it hunted, or gobble up a Green Storm fort.) Behind the shield, Harrowbarrow tapered to a narrow stern, protected by overlapping plates of armour. Several of the plates were sliding aside, and Wren glimpsed heavy tracks and wheels beneath them, and a metal landing apron which slid out slowly on hydraulic rams, flickering with landing lights.

  “Is that where we’re meant to put down?” asked Wren.

  Tom said that he supposed it must be. “Kobold said his place was specialized,” he said wonderingly, “but I had no idea…”

  He didn’t like the look of this place, but he told himself that it was just the first step on the way to London, and guided the Jenny carefully down on to the landing platform.

  Wolf Kobold was waiting, ready to answer all their questions. It was nearly a week since Wren had seen him, and she had forgotten just how striking he was. The grey dawn and the landing lights and the wind flapping his coat-tails about made him look more handsome and piratical than ever. But Wren had always had a soft spot for pirates and at least Wolf’s smile was friendly and welcoming.

  Not so his town. All she could see beneath the folded-back armour were blocks of drab grey flats, punched with tiny windows. The people looked grey and drab too as they hurried forward to take the travellers’ bags; stocky; scowling scavengers in capes and overalls, with goggles or beetlish dust-masks shielding their eyes from the gathering daylight.

  “No, Harrowbarrow does not exactly burrow,” Wolf was saying, in answer to something Tom had asked him. “We cannot bore through bedrock or anything like that – it would be far too slow a way to get about! But there are great many nice deep track-marks crisscrossing our world, and their bottoms are mostly filled with loose shale and silt and tumble-down; more than enough of it to hide this little place.”

  They watched while his men secured the Jenny Haniver to the mooring apron, and then followed him through an alley between the metal buildings and forward along Harrowbarrow’s central street. Stairways rose from it to the second storeys of the buildings, poky tenements squashed in under the armoured roof. Others led down through the deckplate to engine-rooms whose heat came up through the pavement and the soles of the travellers’ boots. An alcove between the snaking air-ducts held an eight-armed image of the Thatcher, all-devouring goddess of unfettered Municipal Darwinism.

  “Is this your first visit to a harvester?” Wolf asked, watching his guests’ faces as they walked along beside him. “We make no pretence at gentility here, as the larger cities do. It’s a good, sound place, though. It was a scavenger once, till it got captured by a hunting city up in the Frost Barrens. They thought it might be useful for the war-effort, so they delivered it to Murnau whole, and my father gave it to me to knock into shape. I’ve recruited people from other harvester-suburbs to help me. Rough types, but loyal.”

  The whole place smelled like a stove; smoke and hot metal. Wren thought that if she had to live undergroun
d she would take every chance to go outside and breathe fresh air, but the Harrobarrovians did not seem inclined even to venture out on to the landing apron; they stayed in the shadowed parts of their suburb, and those whose business took them into the daylight hid their eyes behind sunglasses and goggles and wrapped themselves up against the cold in pea-jackets and grey felt mufflers.

  “Not many women aboard,” said Wolf, with a sideways look at Wren. (She couldn’t tell if he were apologizing to her for the lack of female company or hinting at how pleasant it was to have a visit from a pretty aviatrix. Both, maybe.) “No families live here. It’s a hard life aboard Harrowbarrow. You mustn’t mind my lads if they stare.”

  And stare they did, their mouths hanging open in their stubbly faces, as their young mayor led his visitors up a rackety moving staircase into the Town Hall, a crescent-shaped building which stood on stilts, overlooking the dismantling yards inside the suburb’s jaws. It was ugly, and rather small, but Wolf had furnished it well. There were hangings and tapestries to hide the metal walls, and well-chosen works of art, and when his servants closed the shutters to hide the views of machinery outside, it had a homely feel.

  Wolf took them to a long, narrow dining room, the ceiling painted blue with little white clouds as a reminder of the sky outside. “You have not breakfasted, I trust?” he asked, not waiting for an answer as he ushered them to seats around the dining table, making sure that Tom took the place of honour at the head. Another man entered; elderly, short and sallow, with pocked skin and complicated spectacles. Wolf greeted him warmly and held out a chair for him, too. “This is Udo Hausdorfer, my chief navigator,” he explained. “When I am away, it is he who keeps things running smoothly. One of the best men I know.”

  Hausdorfer nodded, blinking at each of the guests in turn. If he was one of the best men Wolf knew, Wren would not have liked to meet the rest, for Hausdorfer looked like a villain to her. But she could see that Wolf liked him; more than liked him – if she had not known better she would have taken them for father and son. She could not help thinking how much more at ease Wolf was with this shifty-looking old scavenger than he had seemed with his real father.

  Serving women with eyes like bruises moved silently about carrying plates and dishes and pots of coffee. Kobold smiled at his guests and raised his cup.

  “My friends! How pleasant to have new faces at my table! I am happy to say that we have real, fresh coffee, taken from a scavenger town we ate last Tuesday. The fruits of the hunt!”

  “You are still hunting?” asked Tom. “I thought the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft had sworn not to eat other towns until the war was won…”

  Wolf laughed. “A silly, sentimental notion.”

  “I thought it rather noble,” said Tom.

  Wolf looked thoughtfully at him as he slurped his coffee. Then, setting down his cup with a clatter, he said, “It may be noble, Herr Natsworthy, but it is not Municipal Darwinism.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Tom.

  “I mean that I have lived aboard Murnau, and I have seen at first hand the way our great Traction Cities have tied themselves up in petty rules and taboos.” He speared a kipper with his fork and used it to point at Tom. “The big cities are finished! Even if they win this war, do you think the Traktionstadts will ever hunt again as real cities should? Of course not! They will cry, ‘Oh, we must not hunt Bremen; Bremen gave us covering fire when we bogged down on the Pripet Salient,’ or, ‘It would be wrong to chase little Wagenhafn, after all that Wagenhafn did for us in the war.’ That is why they cannot defeat the Mossies, you see. They insist on helping each other, and as soon as you start helping others, or relying on others to help you, you give away your own freedom. They have forgotten the simple, beautiful act which should lie at the heart of our civilization: a great city chasing and eating a lesser one. That is Municipal Darwinism. A perfect expression of the true nature of the world; that the fittest survive.”

  “And yet you’re part of their alliance,” argued Tom. “You fight in their war.”

  “For the moment, because it suits us. The Storm must be smashed. But I never let my people forget that we are free. We hunt alone, and we eat whatever we can cram into our jaws.”

  Tom looked unhappy. Wren hoped he was not about to say something that would offend Wolf. “You make Harrowbarrow sound no better than a pirate suburb,” he mumbled at last.

  Wolf was not offended. He laughed. “Thank you, Herr Natsworthy! I have always suspected that piracy is the purest form of Municipal Darwinism!”

  “But you’re only temporary mayor of this place, aren’t you?” asked Wren. “I mean, you’re heir to Murnau…”

  Wolf shrugged, and ate his kipper. “I shall never take over my father’s job. Not if he begged me. Why rule a lumbering mountain full of merchants and old women when I could be out here, hunting, free? Places like this are the future now. When the Mossies and the big cities finish tearing each other to pieces in this endless war, Harrowbarrow and others like it will inherit the earth.”

  “Gosh, well, I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Wren stammered. She was sure he was wrong, but he was so certain of himself that she could not think of a counter-argument.

  Wolf laughed again. “I’m so sorry. I should not talk politics at breakfast time! And I have not even filled you in on the details of our journey. We shall set off soon, heading due east across no-man’s-land. If all goes well we should reach the Storm’s outer defensive line sometime after midnight. I have found just the place for the Jenny Haniver to cross unnoticed. Until we reach it, you must make yourselves at home. You are my guests.”

  He bowed, and his eyes were fixed on Wren. Tom wondered if there was still time to pull out of this expedition; or at least to find some excuse to take Wren back to Murnau, away from this attractive, dangerous young man. But he so wanted her to see London…

  And anyway, it was too late. Through the thin walls came the scrape and boom of the suburb’s armour sliding shut, and the dull bellow of its engines starting up again. Harrowbarrow crawled on its way along the bottom of its chosen track-mark, gathering speed, shoving its bank of drills into the earth, working itself deeper until it was just an unlikely, moving mound, like a rat under a rug, grinding eastward towards the rising sun.

  16

  FISHCAKE ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

  Remember little Fishcake and his Stalker? Not many people do. The death of Brittlestar and the theft of the Spider Baby had been a surprise to Brighton, but the other Lost Boys had instantly started to squabble among themselves for possession of Brittlestar’s slaves and houses, and by the time the bullets and the battle-frisbees stopped flying nobody remembered the odd events which had sparked off all the trouble.

  A few days later a raft-town cruising in the cratermaze east of the Middle Sea reported losing fuel from its storage-tanks, and the captain of a submersible diving for blast-glass on the crater floors claimed to have seen a strange craft swim by above him, silhouetted against the sunlit surface. But the captain was a drunkard, and the few people who believed his story just shook their heads and muttered that the Lost Boys must be up to their old tricks again.

  From crater to flooded crater the Spider Baby crept north and east. It crossed a spur of the Great Hunting Ground, swimming along flooded track-marks and scuttling nervously over the ridges between them, while the ground shook beneath the weight of prowling cities. It crept through the Rustwater Marshes, and found its way at last into the Sea of Khazak. The sea had been a battlefield not long before, and there were sunken suburbs and drowned airships lying all over its silty floor. Fishcake burgled their rusting fuel-tanks, and surfaced in a cleft on the rocky shore of the Black Island to recharge the limpet’s batteries. Then he submerged again and pressed on eastward.

  The Spider Baby had passed beyond the edge of Lost Boy charts weeks earlier, but Fishcake’s Stalker seemed to have a map of this country in her mind. Beyond the sea a broad river curved down out of the eastern hills. Fish
cake did as she told him, following the river east, past Green Storm airbases and under bridges rumbling with convoys of half-tracks and armoured trains. Pontoons had been stretched across the river in case townie raiders tried to sneak inland in boats, but the Spider Baby slid under them, passing like a ghost through the lands of the Storm.

  “Why don’t you make yourself known?” asked Fishcake, looking through the periscope at settled statics, farmland, the green lightning-bolt banners flapping confidently from forts and temples. “These are your people, aren’t they? When they see that you’re alive…”

  “They betrayed me,” his Stalker hissed. “The once-born have failed me. They follow Naga now. I shall make the world green again without them.”

  “But you’ll have me, won’t you?” said Fishcake nervously. “I can help you, can’t I?”

  His Stalker did not answer him. But later, while he was resting, he woke to find her sitting at his side. She was Anna again, and she touched his hair with her cold hand and whispered, “You are a good boy, Fishcake. I am so glad of you. I should have had a son of my own. I should have liked to watch a child grow, and play. I never see you play, Fishcake. Would you like to play a game?”

  Fishcake felt himself turn hot with shame. “I don’t know any games,” he murmured. “They didn’t – at the Burglarium – I mean, I don’t know how to.”

  “Poor Fishcake,” the Stalker whispered. “And poor Anna.”

  Fishcake huddled himself on her lap, wrapping his arms around her battered metal body and laying his head against her hard chest, listening to the tick and shush of the weird machines inside her. “Mummy,” he said quietly, just to find out what shape the word made in his mouth. He did not remember calling anybody that before. “Mummy.” He was crying, and the Stalker comforted him, stroking his head with her clumsy hands and whispering an old Chinese lullaby that Anna Fang had heard in her own childhood, on the Bird Roads, long ago.