Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Tom had not realized until now how much he missed the company of other historians. Hester was always happy to hear the odd facts and stories that he recalled from his Apprentice days, but she could offer little in return. She had lived by her wits since she was just a child, and although she knew how to jump aboard a speeding town, how to catch and skin a cat and how to kick a would-be robber exactly where it hurt most, she had never bothered learning much about the history of her world.

  Now, here was Professor Pennyroyal, his amiable personality filling the Jenny’s flight deck. He had a theory or an anecdote about everything, and listening to him made Tom feel almost nostalgic for the old days in the London Museum when he had lived surrounded by books and facts and relics and scholarly debate.

  “Now take these mountains,” Pennyroyal was saying, gesturing out of the starboard window. They were following a long spur of the Tannhäusers southward, and the glow of lava in an active caldera flickered over the explorer’s face. “These are to be the subject of my new book. Where did they come from? They weren’t here in Ancient times, we know that from the maps which have survived. So how did they spring up so quickly? What caused them? It’s just the same in far Shan Guo. Zhan Shan is the highest mountain on earth, and yet it’s not mentioned at all in the Ancient records. Are these new mountains just the result of natural vulcanism, as we’ve always been told? Or are we looking at the results of Ancient technology gone atrociously wrong? An experimental power-source, perhaps, or a terrible weapon! A volcano-maker! Think what a find that would be, Tom!”

  “We’re not interested in finding Old-Tech,” said Hester automatically. She was at the chart table, trying to plot a course, and Pennyroyal was annoying her more and more.

  “Of course not, dear girl!” cried Pennyroyal, looking at the bulkhead beside her (he didn’t trust himself yet to look at her awful face without wincing). “Of course not! A very noble and sensible prejudice. And yet—”

  “It’s not a prejudice,” snapped Hester, pointing a pair of dividers at him in a way that made him fear she might do him serious mischief. “My mum was an archaeologist. An explorer and adventurer and historian, just like you. She went to the dead lands of America and dug something up and brought it home. Something called MEDUSA. The rulers of London got to hear about it and sent their man Valentine to kill her for it. He did this to my face while he was about it. He took it to London and the Engineers there got it working and Bang! It backfired, and that was the end of that.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Pennyroyal, rather chastened. “Everybody knows of the MEDUSA event. Why, I can remember exactly what I was doing at the time. I was aboard Cittàmotore, in the company of a delightful young woman named Minty Bapsnack. We saw the flash light up the eastern sky from half a world away…”

  “Well, we were right next to it. We flew through the blast-wave, and we saw what was left of London next morning. A whole city, Tom’s city, burned to clinker by something my mum dug up. That’s why we steer well clear of Old-Tech.”

  “Ah,” said Pennyroyal, thoroughly uncomfortable now.

  “I’m going to bed,” said Hester. “I’ve got a headache.” It was true; a few hours of Pennyroyal’s lecturing had set a fierce, throbbing pain behind her blind eye. She went to the pilot’s seat, meaning to kiss Tom goodnight, but she didn’t like to with Pennyroyal looking on, so she quickly touched his ear, said, “Call me when you need a break,” and headed aft to the stern cabin.

  “Whoops!” said Pennyroyal, when she had gone.

  “She’s got a bit of a temper,” admitted Tom, embarrassed by Hester’s outburst. “But she’s lovely really. She’s just shy. Once you get to know her…”

  “Of course, of course,” said Pennyroyal. “One can see at a glance that beneath that somewhat unconventional exterior she’s absolutely, um…” But he couldn’t think of anything good to say about the girl, so he let his voice trail away and stood looking through a window at the moonlit mountains, the lights of a small town moving on the plains below.

  “She’s wrong about London, you know,” he said at last. “I mean, wrong about it being burned to clinker. I’ve spoken to people who’ve been there. There’s a lot of wreckage left. Whole sections of the Gut lie ruined in the Out-Country west of Batmunkh Gompa. Why, an archaeologist of my acquaintance, a charming young woman by the name of Cruwys Morchard, claims to have actually been inside one of the larger fragments. Sounds extraordinary; charred skeletons scattered everywhere, and great chunks of half-melted buildings and machinery. The lingering radiations from MEDUSA cause coloured lights to bob among the debris like will-o’-the-wisps… or should that be wills-o’-the-wisp?”

  It was Tom’s turn to grow uncomfortable. The destruction of his city was still a raw wound inside him. Two-and-a-half years on, the afterglow of that great explosion still lit his dreams. He didn’t want to talk about London’s wreck, and so he steered the conversation back towards Professor Pennyroyal’s favourite subject: Professor Pennyroyal.

  “You must have travelled to some very interesting places, I suppose?”

  “Interesting! Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Tom! The things I’ve seen! When we touch down at Brighton air-harbour I’ll go straight to a bookseller’s and buy you my complete works. I’m amazed you’ve not come across them before, a bright young fellow like you.”

  Tom shrugged. “I’m afraid they didn’t keep them in the London Museum Library…”

  “Of course not! The Guild of so-called Historians! Pah! Dusty old farts… Do you know, I applied to join them once. Their Head Historian, Thaddeus Valentine, turned me down flat! Just because he didn’t like the findings of my trip to America!”

  Tom was intrigued. He didn’t like hearing his former Guild dismissed as dusty farts, but Valentine was different. Valentine had tried to kill him, and had murdered Hester’s parents. Anybody Valentine had disapproved of was all right by Tom.

  “What did you find in America, Professor?”

  “Ah, well, Tom, thereby hangs a tale! Should you like to hear it?”

  Tom nodded. He couldn’t leave the flight deck tonight, with this wind blowing up from the south, and he would be glad of a good story to keep him alert. Anyway, Pennyroyal’s talk had awakened something in him, a memory of simpler times, when he had huddled under his bedclothes in the Third Class Apprentices’ dorm and read by torchlight the stories of the great explorer-historians, Monkton Wylde and Chung-Mai Spofforth, Valentine and Fishacre and Compton Cark.

  “Yes please, Professor,” he said.

  4

  HOME OF THE BRAVE

  “North America,” said Pennyroyal, “is a Dead Continent. Everyone knows that. Discovered in the year 1924 by Christopher Columbo, the great explorer and detective, it became the homeland of an empire which once ruled the world, but which was utterly destroyed in the Sixty Minute War. It is a land of haunted red deserts, poison swamps, atomic-bomb craters, rust and lifeless rock. Only a few daring explorers venture there; archaeologists like Valentine and your young ladyfriend’s poor mother, out to salvage scraps of Old-Tech from the ancient bunker-complexes.

  “And yet one hears rumours. Stories. Tales told by drunken old sky-dogs in run-down air-caravanserais. Yarns about airships that have been blown off course and found themselves flying over a very different sort of America: a green landscape of forests and grasslands and vast blue lakes. About fifty years ago a flyer named Snøri Ulvaeusson was supposed to have actually landed in a green enclave he called Vineland, and made a map of it for the Lord Mayor of Reykjavik, but of course when modern researchers went looking for the map they found no trace of it in the Reykjavik library. As for the other accounts, the punchline is always the same: the airman spends years trying to find the place again, but never can. Or else he sets down his ship only to find that the greenery which looked so inviting from above is really only toxic algae blooming on a crater-lake.

  “But true historians like ourselves, Tom, know that within such legends there oft
en lurks a seed of truth. I gathered together all the stories I’d heard, and decided that there was something there worth following up. Is America really dead, as wise men like Valentine have always told us? Or could there be a place, far to the north of the dead cities which the Old-Tech hunters visit, where rivers of meltwater spilling from the edge of the Ice Wastes have washed away the poisons and made the Dead Continent begin to flower again?

  “I, Pennyroyal, resolved to discover the truth! Back in the spring of the year ’89 I set out to see what I could find. Myself and four companions, aboard my airship the Allan Quatermain. We crossed the North Atlantic, and soon touched down upon the shores of America, near a place that the ancient charts call New York. It was as dead as we’d been promised; a series of vast craters, their sides fused by the intense heat of that millennia-old conflict into the substance known as Blast Glass.

  “We took off again and flew west, into the very heart of the Dead Continent, and that was when disaster struck. Storms of an almost supernatural ferocity wrecked my poor Allan Quatermain in the midst of an immense, polluted wilderness. Three of my companions perished in the smash, the fourth died a few days later, poisoned by some water from a pool which looked clear, but which must have been tainted with some ghastly Old-Tech chemical – he turned blue, and gave off a scent of old socks.

  “Alone, I staggered on into the north, crossing the Plain of Craters where once the legendary cities of Chicago and Milwaukee stood. I had given up all thought of finding my green America. My only hope now was that I might reach the edge of the Ice Wastes and be rescued by some wandering band of Snowmads.

  “At last, even that hope faded. Weak from exhaustion and lack of water, I lay down in a dry valley between great black jagged mountains. In despair I cried out, ‘Is this really to be the end of Nimrod Pennyroyal?’ and the stones seemed to answer, ‘Yup.’ All hope was gone, d’you see? I commended my soul to the Goddess of Death and shut my eyes, expecting to open them again only as a ghost in the Sunless Country. The next thing I knew I was wrapped in furs and laid in the bottom of a canoe, and some charming young people were paddling me north.

  “These were not fellow explorers from the Hunting Ground, as I at first supposed. They were natives! Yes, there is a tribe of people actually living in the northernmost parts of that Dead Continent! Until then, I had accepted the traditional story – the story which I’m sure you were told by your Guild of Historians – that the few poor souls who survived the fall of America fled north on to the ice and mingled with the Inuit, producing the Snowmad race we know today. Now I understood that some had stayed behind! Savage, uncivilized descendants of a nation whose greed and selfishness once brought the world to ruin – and yet they had enough humanity to rescue a poor starving wretch like Pennyroyal!

  “By signs and gestures I was soon able to converse with my rescuers. They were a girl and boy, and their names were Machine Washable and Allow Twelve Days For Delivery. It seemed that they had been on an expedition of their own when they found me; digging for Blast Glass in the ruins of an ancient city called Duluth. (I discovered, by the way, that the members of their savage tribe prize a Blast Glass necklace just as much as any well-dressed lady in Paris or Traktiongrad. Both my new friends wore armlets and earrings of the stuff.) They were very skilled at surviving among the dreadful deserts of America; turning over stones to catch edible grubs, and finding drinkable water by observing the growth-patterns of certain types of algae. But that wasteland was not their home. No, they had come from further north, and now it seemed they were returning with me to their tribe!

  “Imagine my excitement, Tom! Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings of the world. To begin with, nothing but barren rock, pierced here and there by time-ravaged stones or twisted girders which were all that remained of some great building of the Ancients. Then, one day, I spied a patch of green moss, and then another! A few more days of northing and I began to see grass, ferns, rushes clustering on either bank. The river itself grew clearer, and Allow Twelve Days caught fish, which Machine Washable cooked for us over a fire each evening on the shore. And the trees, Tom! Birches and oaks and pines covered the landscape, and the river opened into a broad lake, and there upon the shore were the rude dwellings of the tribe. What a sight for a historian! America alive again, after all those millennia!

  “How I lived with the good people of the tribe for three years, I shall not bore you with. Nor how I rescued the chief’s beautiful daughter Zip Code from a ravening bear, how she fell in love with me, and how I was forced to make my escape from her angry fiancé. Nor even how I travelled north again, up on to the ice, and so returned, after many more adventures, to the Great Hunting Ground. You can read about it all in my interpolitan bestseller America the Beautiful when we reach Brighton.”

  Tom sat for a long time without speaking, his head filled with the wonderful visions which Pennyroyal’s account had painted. He could hardly believe that he had never heard of the professor’s great discovery before. It was world-shattering! Monumental! What fools the Guild of Historians must have been, to turn away such a man!

  At last he said, “But did you never go back, Professor? Surely a second expedition, with better equipment…”

  “Alas, Tom,” sighed Pennyroyal. “I could never find anyone to fund a return trip. You must remember that my cameras and sampling equipment were all destroyed in the wreck of the Allan Quatermain. I took a few artefacts along with me when I left the tribe, but all were lost along my journey home. Without proof, how could I hope to fund a return expedition? The word of an Alternative Historian is not enough, I find. Why,” he said sadly, “to this day, Tom, there are people who believe I never went to America at all.”

  5

  THE FOX SPIRITS

  Pennyroyal’s voice was still blaring away on the flight deck when Hester woke the next morning. Had he been there all night? Probably not, she realized, washing her face at the small basin in the Jenny’s galley. He’d been to bed, unlike poor Tom, and had now come back down, lured by the smell of Tom’s morning cup of coffee.

  She turned to look out of the galley porthole while she cleaned her teeth – anything rather than face her own reflection in the mirror above the basin. The sky was the colour of packet custard, streaked with rhubarb cloud. Three small black specks hung in the centre of the view. Flecks of dirt on the glass, thought Hester, but when she tried to rub them away with her cuff she saw that she was wrong. She frowned, then fetched her telescope and studied the specks for a while. Frowned some more.

  When she reached the flight deck Tom was preparing to turn in for a nap. The gale had not abated, but they had flown clear of the mountains now and although the wind would slow them down there was no longer any danger of being blown through a volcanic plume or dashed against a cliff. Tom looked tired but contented, beaming at Hester as she ducked in through the hatchway. Pennyroyal sat in the co-pilot’s seat, a mug of the Jenny’s best coffee in his hand.

  “The professor’s been telling me about some of his expeditions,” Tom said eagerly, standing up to let Hester take the controls. “You wouldn’t believe the adventures he’s had!”

  “Probably not,” agreed Hester. “But the only thing I want to hear about at the moment is why there’s a flight of gunships closing in on us.”

  Pennyroyal squawked with fear, then quickly clamped a hand over his mouth. Tom went to the larboard window and looked where Hester pointed. The specks were closer now, and clearly airships; three of them, in line abreast.

  “They might be traders, heading up to Airhaven,” he said hopefully.

  “That’s not a convoy,” Hester said. “It’s an attack formation.”

  Tom took the field-glasses from their hook under the main controls. The airships were about ten miles off, but he could see that they were fast and well-armed. They had some sort of green insignia painted on their envelopes, but otherwise they were completely white. It made them look absurdly sinister: the ghosts
of airships, racing through the daybreak.

  “They’re League fighters,” said Hester flatly. “I recognize those flared engine-pod cowlings. Murasaki Fox Spirits.”

  She sounded scared, and with good reason. She and Tom had been careful to avoid the Anti-Traction League these past two years, for the Jenny Haniver had once belonged to a League agent, poor dead Anna Fang, and while they had not exactly stolen her, they knew the League might not see it that way. They had expected to be safe in the north, where League forces were spread thinly since the fall of the Spitzbergen Static the year before.

  “Better go about,” said Hester. “Get the wind on our tail and try to outrun them, or lose them in the mountains.”

  Tom hesitated. The Jenny was much faster than her wooden gondola and scrapyard engine pods made her look, but he doubted she could outrun Fox Spirits. “Running would just make us look guilty,” he said. “We’ve done nothing wrong. I’ll talk to them, see what they want…”

  He reached for the radio set, but Pennyroyal grabbed his hand. “Tom, no! I’ve heard about these white ships. They aren’t regular Anti-Traction League at all! They belong to the Green Storm, a fanatical new splinter-group who operate out of secret airbases here in the north. Extremists, sworn to destroy all cities – and all city people! Great gods, if you let them catch us we’ll all be murdered in our gondola!”

  The explorer’s face had turned the colour of expensive cheese, and pinheads of sweat gleamed on his forehead and his nose. The hand that gripped Tom’s wrist was shaking. Tom couldn’t imagine at first what was wrong. Surely a man who’d survived as many adventures as Professor Pennyroyal could not be scared?