Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  “Hester?” said Tom, starting forward, restrained by Caul. “What have you heard about Hester?”

  In the shadows behind Uncle’s chair two guards, surprised at Tom’s sudden movement, drew their swords. Uncle waved them back. “Caul’s reports were right then?” he asked. “You’re Hester Shaw’s sweetheart? Her lover?” There was a nasty, wheedling edge to his voice now, and Tom felt himself blush as he nodded. Uncle watched him for a moment, then chuckled, “It was the airship that first made me sit up and take notice. Jenny Haniver. That’s a name I recognize, oh yes. That’s that witch Anna Fang’s ship, ain’t it?”

  “Anna was a friend of ours,” said Tom.

  “A friend, eh?”

  “She died.”

  “I know.”

  “We sort of inherited the Jenny.”

  “Inherited her, did you?” Uncle let out a long, sniggering laugh. “Oh, I like that, Tom! Inherited! As you can see, I’ve got a lot of stuff down here that me and my boys have inherited. I wish we’d taken you ten years ago, Tom; we could have made a Lost Boy of you.” He laughed again, and went back to settle in his chair.

  Tom looked at Caul, then at Skewer, who was on his feet again, his face still branded with the red imprint of Uncle’s hand. Why do they put up with him? Tom wondered. They’re all younger and stronger than he is; why do they do his bidding? But the answer flickered on the walls all round him, on looted goggle-screens of every shape and size, where blue images of life in Grimsby moved, and faint, overheard conversations drizzled from the speakers. Who could challenge Uncle’s power, when Uncle knew everything that they said and did?

  “You mentioned something about Hester,” he reminded the old man, straining to be polite.

  “Information, Tom,” said Uncle, ignoring him. Surveillance-pictures danced in the lenses of his spectacles. “Information. That’s the key to it all. The reports my burglars send back to me all fit together like the bits of a jigsaw. I probably know more than any man alive about what goes on in the north. And I pay attention to odd little details. To changes. Changes can be dangerous things.”

  “And Hester?” asked Tom again. “You know about Hester?”

  “For example,” Uncle said, “there’s an island, Rogues’ Roost, not far from here. Used to be lair to Red Loki and his sky-pirates. Not a bad sort, Red Loki. Never troubled us. Occupied different niches in the food-chain, him and me. But now he’s gone. Kicked out. Murdered. It’s home to a bunch of Anti-Tractionists now. The Green Storm, they call themselves. A hard-line faction. Terrorists. Troublemakers. Have you ever heard of the Green Storm, Tom Natsworthy?”

  Tom, still thinking about Hester, scrabbled for an answer. He remembered Pennyroyal shouting something about the Green Storm during that chase above the Tannhäusers, but so much had happened since that he could barely recall a word of it. “Not really,” he said.

  “Well, they’ve heard of you,” said Uncle, leaning forward in his chair. “Why else would they have hired a spy to keep watch for your airship? And why else would your girlie be their house guest?”

  “Hester is with them?” gasped Tom. “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what I said, ain’t it?” Uncle sprang up again, rubbing his hands together, cracking the joints of his fingers as he circled Tom. “Though ‘house guest’ isn’t quite the phrase I’m looking for, perhaps. She ain’t comfortable exactly. Ain’t happy, exactly. Stuck in a cell, all alone. Taken out now and then for who knows what – questionings, torturings…”

  “But how did she come there? Why? What do they want with her?” Tom was flustered, not sure if Uncle was telling the truth or having some sort of joke at his expense. All he could think of was Hester, imprisoned, suffering. “I can’t stay here!” he said. “I must get to this Roost place, try and help her…”

  Uncle’s smile came back. “Of course you must, dear boy. That’s why I brought you down here, isn’t it? We got common interests, you and me. You’re going to go and save your poor girlie from the Roost. And me and my boys are going to help you.”

  “Why?” asked Tom. He had a trusting nature – too trusting by half, Hester always used to say – but he was not so naive that he trusted Uncle. “Why would you want to help me and Hester? What’s in it for you?”

  “Ooh, good question!” Uncle chuckled, rubbing his hands together, knuckles cracking like a string of squibs. “Come, let’s eat. Dinner is served in the Map Room. Caul, my boy, you come with us. Skewer, lose yourself.”

  Skewer slunk out like a naughty dog, and Uncle ushered the others out of the chamber of screens by a back way, up twining staircases to a room lined from floor to rafters with wooden shelves. Rolled and folded maps had been crammed tightly into every chink of space, and sad, pasty-looking boys – failed burglars, barred from limpet-work – clambered from shelf to shelf, locating the charts and street-plans which Uncle needed to prepare fresh burglaries, replacing those he’d finished with. This is where poor little Gargle will end up, thought Caul, for he knew that after the reports he’d had from Anchorage Uncle would never send the boy out burgling again. It made him sad for a moment, imagining how the rest of Gargle’s life would be spent bird’s-nesting among these cliffs of parchment or tinkering with Uncle’s spy-cameras.

  Uncle settled himself at the head of the table, switching on a little portable goggle-screen beside his plate so that he could keep watch on his boys even while he ate. “Sit down!” he cried, gesturing generously at the food laid out on the table, the waiting chairs. “Eat! Eat!”

  There was nothing to eat in Grimsby except what the Lost Boys stole, and the Lost Boys stole only what boys who have no one to nag them about balanced diets and no-snacks-between-meals eat. Sugary biscuits, cheap, soapy chocolate, bacon sandwiches oozing grease, thin rounds of algae bread smeared thick with garish spreads, glasses of ill-chosen wine that kicked like airship fuel. The only concession to healthy eating was a tureen of boiled spinach in the centre of the table. “I always make sure the boys bring back a bit of greenstuff,” explained Uncle, dishing up. “Helps keep the scurvy at bay.” It spattered on to Tom’s plate like something dredged from a blocked sump.

  “So why am I helping you, you ask,” said Uncle, eating quickly and talking with his mouth full, his eyes darting constantly to his goggle-screen. “Well, Tom, the fact is this. It ain’t so easy to spy on a place like Rogues’ Roost as it is aboard a city. We’ve had a listening post set up there for months, and we still don’t know what the Green Storm are up to. They’re serious bunnies. We can barely get any crab-cams inside, and I daren’t send one of my boys in; nine chances out of ten he’d be picked up by the sentries. So I thought I’d send you instead. You get a chance to rescue Hester, and I get to learn a bit about the Roost.”

  Tom stared at him. “But your boys are trained burglars! If they can’t go in without getting caught, what makes you think I can?”

  Uncle laughed. “If you got caught, it wouldn’t matter. Not to me. I’d still learn a lot about their security from watching how you got on, and if they questioned you you couldn’t give away any of my secrets. You don’t know where Grimsby lies. You don’t know how many limpets I’ve got. And they probably wouldn’t believe you anyway. It’ll just look as if you were acting alone, out of love for your girlie. How sweet!”

  “It sounds as if you’re expecting them to catch me,” said Tom.

  “Not expecting, exactly,” Uncle protested. “But we have to be prepared for all eventualities, Tom. With a bit of luck, and some help from my boys, you’ll get in, get the girl, get out, and we’ll all be sitting round this table again in a few days’ time listening to Hester tell us why the Green Storm are getting all secret and military on my patch.”

  He stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth and turned back to his screen, flicking idly from channel to channel. Caul stared unhappily at his plate, shocked at what Uncle was suggesting. It sounded as if he just meant to use Tom as a sort of expendable, two-legged crab-cam…

&nb
sp; “I won’t go!” said Tom.

  “But Tom!” cried Uncle, looking up.

  “How can I? I want to help Hester, but it would be madness! This Rogues’ Roost place sounds like a fortress! I’m a historian, not a commando!”

  “But you’ve got to go,” said Uncle. “Because it’s Hester in there. I’ve read Caul and Skewer’s sad little reports about you. The way you love her. The way you’ve tortured yourself since you drove her away. Think how much worse it’ll be if you don’t try to save her now you’ve got the chance. She’s probably being tortured for real. I don’t like to imagine the things those Green Storm are doing to her. They blame her for murdering old Anna Fang, you know.”

  “But that’s not fair! It’s ridiculous!”

  “Maybe that’s so. Maybe that’s what poor Hester’s telling the Green Storm interrogators right now. But I don’t suppose they believe her. And even if they do eventually decide she’s innocent, they’re hardly going to send her on her way with an apology, are they? It’ll be a bullet in the head and over the cliffs with her. Can you picture that, Tom? Good. Get used to it. If you don’t try and help her, you’ll be seeing it every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life.”

  Tom pushed back his chair and strode away from the table. He wanted to find a window, to look at something other than Uncle’s leering, knowing face, but there were no windows in the Map Room and nothing to look out at anyway except cold water and the roofs of a drowned city.

  On a board near the door a huge chart had been pinned up, showing Rogues’ Roost and the trenches and ridges of the sea floor around it. Tom stared at it, wondering where Hester was, what was happening to her among those little squares of buildings marked in blue on the island’s summit. He shut his eyes, but she was waiting for him in the dark behind his eyelids just as Uncle had promised.

  It was all his fault. If he hadn’t kissed Freya, Het would never have flown off like that, never been captured by the agents of the Green Storm. Freya was in danger too, but she was far away and there was nothing he could do to help her or her city. He could help Hester though. He had one chance in ten of helping Hester.

  He calmed himself as best he could, trying to make his voice sound steady and unafraid as he turned back to face Uncle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  “Capital!” chuckled Uncle, clapping his mittened hands. “I knew you would! Caul will take you to the Roost aboard his Screw Worm, first thing tomorrow.”

  And Caul, looking on, felt himself dragged in two directions at once by rip tides of emotion such as he’d never felt: fear for Tom, of course, but elation too, because he’d been so afraid that Uncle would punish him for what he’d done in Freya’s city, but here he was, commander of the Screw Worm still. He stood up and went to Tom, who was leaning on his chair-back, staring at his hands, looking trembly and sick. “It’s all right,” he promised. “You won’t be alone. You’re with the Lost Boys now. We’ll get you into that place and out again with Hester, and everything will be all right.”

  Uncle flicked quickly through the channels on his goggle-screen, because there was no telling what devilry boys might get up to if they weren’t watched all the time. Then, beaming at Tom and Caul, he topped up their glasses with more wine to wash down the pack of half-truths and outright lies he’d fed them.

  25

  THE CABINET OF DR POPJOY

  Time had passed slowly for Hester. There was not much difference between day and night at Rogues’ Roost, except that sometimes the little square of window high in the wall of her cell turned from black to grey. Once the moon peeked in at her, a little past full, and she realized that it must be more than a month since she left Tom.

  She sat in a corner, ate when her guards shoved food in through the flap in the door, squatted over a tin bucket if nature called. She mapped the courses of Anchorage and Arkangel as best she could in the mould on the walls, trying to calculate where and when the great predator city would catch up with its prey. Mostly she just thought about being Valentine’s daughter.

  There were days when she wished she had killed him when she’d had the chance, and others when she wished that he was still alive, for there was a lot she would have liked to ask him. Had he loved her mother? Had he known who Hester was? Why had he cared so much about Katherine and not at all about his other child?

  Sometimes the door would be kicked open and soldiers would come and take her to the Memory Chamber, where Sathya waited with Popjoy and the thing that had been Anna Fang. A huge, ugly photograph of Hester’s face had been added to the other portraits on the walls of the mnemonic environment, but Sathya still seemed to feel that it would help to have Hester there in person while she patiently repeated stories of Anna Fang’s life to the impassive Stalker. The anger she had felt towards Hester seemed to have faded, as if part of her understood that this scarred and undernourished girl was not really the ruthless London assassin she had imagined. And Hester, in turn, slowly began to understand a little more about Sathya, and why she was so determined to bring the dead aviatrix back.

  Sathya had been born on the bare earth, in a squatter camp of curtain-doored caves dug into the wall of an old track-mark down in the town-torn south of India. In the dry season her people had to uproot themselves every few months to escape being crushed under the tracks of some passing city, Chidanagaram, or Gutak, or Juggernautpur. When the rains came the world melted into slurry beneath their shoeless feet. Everyone talked of the day when they would move to some settled static in the uplands, but as Sathya grew older she began to understand that they would never really make the journey. Simply surviving took up all their time and energy.

  And then the airship came. A red airship flown by a tall, kind, beautiful aviatrix, putting in to make repairs on her way north after a mission to the island of Palau Pinang. The children of the camp hung round her, fascinated, listening eagerly to the tales of her work for the Anti-Traction League. Anna Fang had sunk a whole raft-city which threatened to attack the Hundred Islands. She had fought battles with the air-scouts of Paris and Cittàmotore, and planted bombs in the engine-rooms of other hungry cities.

  Sathya, standing shyly at the back of the crowd, saw for the first time that she didn’t have to live the rest of her life like a maggot. She could fight back.

  A week later, halfway to the League’s capital at Tienjing, Miss Fang heard noises in the Jenny Haniver’s hold and found Sathya crouched amid the cargo there. Taking pity on the girl, she paid to have her trained as a League aviator. Sathya worked hard, learned well, and was soon a wing-commander in the Northern Air-Fleet. Three quarters of her pay went south each month to help her family, but she seldom thought about them – the League was her family now, and Anna Fang was her mother and her sister and her wise, kind friend.

  And how had she repaid all that kindness? By climbing with a squad of Green Storm activists to the ice-caves of Zhan Shan, where the League laid its greatest warriors to rest, and stealing the aviatrix’s frozen corpse. By bringing her here to Rogues’ Roost, and letting Popjoy work his horrible alchemy on her. In spite of herself, Hester felt more and more sorry for the other girl as she watched her trying to cajole memories out of the Stalker. “I am not Anna Fang,” the thing insisted again and again in its dune-grass voice. Sometimes it grew angry, and they had to leave. Once there were no sessions for several days, and later Hester learned that it had killed a guard and tried to break out of the Chamber.

  On good days, when the creature seemed biddable, they all went together down an armoured passageway which led from the Memory Chamber to the nearby cargo hangar where the Jenny Haniver was berthed. In the narrow confines of the gondola Hester was forced to re-enact everything she remembered of her two short voyages with the aviatrix, and Sathya told again the old story of how Anna had built this airship, stealing one part after another from the Arkangel salvage yard where she had been a slave, secretly piecing the Jenny together under the nose of her brutish master.

  The
Stalker watched her with its cold green eyes and whispered, “I am not Anna Fang. We are wasting time. You built me to lead the Green Storm, not languish here. I wish to destroy cities.”

  One night Sathya came alone to the cell. The trembly, staring, haunted expression in her face was more intense than ever, and there were purple shadows under her eyes. Her nails were gnawed down to the quick. A strange idea flicked into Hester’s mind as she sat up to meet her visitor: She is in a prison of her own.

  “Come,” was all Sathya said.

  She led Hester along deep midnight tunnels to a laboratory, where racks of test tubes welcomed them with cheerless grins. Dr Popjoy was crouched at a workbench, his bald head gleaming in the light of an argon-lamp as he tinkered with a delicate piece of machinery. Sathya had to call his name several times before he grunted, made a few last adjustments and stepped away from his work.

  “I want Hester to see everything, Doctor,” Sathya said.

  Popjoy’s pink eyes blinked wetly, focusing on Hester. “Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, if word got out… But I suppose Miss Shaw won’t be leaving here alive, will she? At least, not in the conventional sense!” He made snuffling noises that might have been laughter, and beckoned his visitors forward. As Hester followed Sathya between the benches she saw that the thing he had been at work on was a Stalker’s brain.

  “Remarkable piece of machinery, eh, my dear?” said Popjoy proudly. “Of course, it needs a corpse to infest. Lying around out here it’s just a clever toy, but wait until I stick it in a stiff! A dash of chemicals, a soupçon of electricity and bingo!”

  He danced nimbly across the laboratory, past racks of glass retorts, past dead flesh in jars and half-built bits of Stalker. On a T-shaped stand a big dead bird perched, watching the visitors with glowing green eyes. When Popjoy reached out a hand to it, it stretched its ragged wings and opened its beak. “As you can see,” the Engineer said, petting it, “I don’t limit myself to resurrecting human beings. Prototype Stalker-birds already patrol the skies around the Facility, and I’m considering other ideas – a Stalker-cat, and maybe a Stalker-whale that could carry explosives under a raft-city. In the meantime, I’ve been making some great strides in the field of human resurrection…”