Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Hester glanced at Sathya, but Sathya would not look at her, just followed Popjoy towards a door in the far wall. It was fitted with a magnetic lock like the ones on the door of the Memory Chamber. The Engineer’s long fingers went spidering over the ivory keys, punching in a code. The lock clunked and whirred, and the door swung open to reveal a cave of ice where strange statues waited under plastic covers.

  “You see, those old Stalker builders lacked imaginative flair,” explained Popjoy, his breath smouldering as he scurried around the big freezer-cabinet, unveiling his creations. “Just because a Stalker needs a human brain and nervous system, that doesn’t mean it has to be limited to a human shape. Why stick to two arms and two legs? Why only two eyes? Why bother with a mouth? These fellows don’t eat, and we haven’t built them for their sparkling conversation…”

  The frosty plastic sheets were dragged aside, exposing steel-plated centaurs with twenty arms and caterpillar tracks instead of legs, spider-Stalkers with clawed feet and machine-gun turrets in their bellies, Stalkers with spare eyes in the back of their skulls. On a slab near the front of the cabinet lay something half-finished, made from the corpse of poor Widgery Blinkoe.

  Hester put a hand to her mouth, gulping and gasping. “That’s the man who drugged me at Arkangel!”

  “Oh, he was only a paid agent,” said Sathya. “He knew too much. I had him liquidated the night he brought you in.”

  “And what if all his wives come searching for him?”

  “Would you come searching for Blinkoe, if you were his wife?” asked Sathya. She wasn’t even looking at the dead spy; her gaze lingered on the other Stalkers, and on Popjoy.

  “Anyway!” said Popjoy brightly, flicking the shrouds back into place. “Better step back outside, before these chaps overheat; there’s a slight danger of decomposition before they’re quickened.”

  Hester couldn’t bring herself to move, but Sathya pulled her back into the laboratory, saying, “Thank you, Dr Popjoy, this has been most interesting.”

  “A pleasure, dear lady,” replied the Engineer, with a flirtatious little bow. “Always a pleasure. And soon, I’m certain, we shall find a way to restore your friend Anna’s memory… Goodbye! And goodbye, Miss Shaw! I shall look forward to working with you after your execution.”

  Out of the laboratory, down a short tunnel, through a door which opened on to a rusty walkway running across the cliff-face. The wind boomed, roaring down over the ice from the top of the world. Hester gauged its direction before she leaned over the handrail to be sick.

  “You asked me once why the Green Storm was backing my work here,” said Sathya. “Now you know. They’re not interested in Anna, not really. They want Popjoy to build them an army of Stalkers so that they can seize power inside the League and begin their war against the cities.”

  Hester wiped her mouth and stared down at the tumbled creamy tongues of foam licking through narrow passages in the rocks. “Why tell me?” she asked.

  “Because I want you to know. Because when the bombs start falling and the Green Storm’s Stalkers are unleashed, I want someone to know that it’s not my fault. I did all this for Anna. Only for Anna.”

  “But Anna would have hated it. She wouldn’t have wanted a war.”

  Sathya shook her head miserably. “She thought we should attack cities only when they threatened our settlements. She never agreed that city people were all barbarians; she said they were just misguided. I thought that when Anna was herself again she would show us all a new way; something stronger than the old League and less fierce than the Green Storm. But the Storm are becoming more and more powerful, their new Stalkers are almost ready, and Anna is still lost…”

  Hester felt her face twisting into a sarcastic smile and looked quickly away before Sathya noticed. It was hard to stomach all these ethical worries coming from a girl who had murdered old Blinkoe without a qualm, but she sensed an opportunity. Sathya’s doubts were like a loose bar in a gaol window; a weakness which she might be able to work at. She said, “You should warn the League. Send a messenger to the High Council and tell them what your friends are doing here.”

  “I can’t,” said Sathya. “If the Storm found out about it I’d be killed.”

  Hester just kept looking at the sea, tasting the salt spray on her lips. “Then what if a prisoner escaped?” she asked. “They couldn’t blame you for that, could they. If a prisoner who knew what was happening here escaped and stole an airship and flew away, that wouldn’t be your fault.”

  Sathya looked up sharply. Hester felt herself trembling at the sudden prospect of escape. She could leave this place! There would still be time to save Tom! She felt proud of the way she was preying on Sathya’s unhappiness; it seemed to her a clever, ruthless thing to do, and worthy of Valentine’s daughter.

  “Let me escape, and take the Jenny Haniver,” she said. “I’ll fly to League territory. Find someone trustworthy, like Captain Khora. He’ll bring warships north and retake this place. Throw Popjoy’s new creatures into the sea before they can be used.”

  Sathya’s eyes shone, as if she could already imagine the handsome African aviator leaping from the gondola of his Achebe 9000 to help her out of the trap she had made for herself. Then she shook her head.

  “I can’t,” she said. “If Khora saw Anna in her present state – he might not understand. I can’t let anything disrupt my work with her, Hester. We’re so close now. Sometimes I can feel her, looking out at me from inside that mask… And anyway, how can I let you go? You helped to kill her.”

  “You don’t still believe that,” said Hester. “Not any more. Or you’d have killed me already.”

  Two tears went tracking down Sathya’s face, silvery against the darkness of her skin. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have doubts. But I have doubts about so many things.” Suddenly she hugged Hester, pulling her face against the starched, scratchy shoulder of her tunic. “It’s good to have someone to talk to. I’m not going to kill you. When Anna is better, she will be able to tell me herself whether you were to blame for her death. You must stay here until Anna is better.”

  26

  THE BIG PICTURE

  If you could look down on the world from somewhere high above – if you were a god, or a ghost haunting one of the old American weapon platforms which still hang in orbit high above the pole – the Ice Wastes would look at first as blank as the walls of Hester’s cell; a whiteness spread over the crown of the poor old Earth like a cataract on a blue eye. But look a little closer, and there are things moving in the blankness. See that tiny speck to the west of Greenland? That is Anchorage, a screen of survey-sleds spreading ahead of it as it wriggles its way between glacier-slathered mountains and across uncharted stretches of sea-ice. Wriggles carefully, but not too slow, because everyone aboard carries with them the memory of the parasite which stole poor Tom away, and the fear that more might erupt at any moment through the ice. Watches are set in the engine district now, and patrols inspect the hull each morning, searching for unwelcome visitors.

  What no one aboard suspects, of course, is that the real danger comes not from below but from another speck (larger, darker) which is creeping towards them from the east, skids up, tracks down, hauling its great bulk across the hummocked spine of Greenland. It is Arkangel. In its gut Wolverinehampton and three small whaling towns are being torn apart, while deep in its Core, in the ivory-panelled office of the Direktor, Piotr Masgard is urging his father to increase the city’s speed.

  “But speed is expensive, my boy,” the Direktor says, rubbing his beard. “We caught Wolverinehampton; I’m not sure it’s worth crashing on westward after Anchorage. We may never find it. It may all be a trick. They tell me the girl who sold their course to you has vanished.”

  Piotr Masgard shrugs. “My songbirds often fly away before the catch. But in this case I have a feeling we’ll see her again. She’ll be back to claim her predator’s gold.” He brings his fists down hard on his father’s desk. “We have
to get them, Father! This isn’t some scruggy whale-town we’re talking about! This is Anchorage! The riches of the Rasmussens’ Winter Palace! And those engines of theirs. I checked the records. They’re supposed to be twenty times more efficient than anything else on the ice.”

  “True,” admits his father. “The Scabious family has always guarded the secret of their construction. Scared a predator might get hold of it, I suppose.”

  “Well, now one will,” says Masgard triumphantly. “Us! Imagine, Søren Scabious could soon be working for us! He could redesign our engines so that we need half as much fuel and catch twice as much prey!”

  “Very well,” his father sighs.

  “You won’t regret it, Papa. Another week on this course. Then I’ll take my Huntsmen out and find the place.”

  And if you were a ghost, up there among the endlessly tumbling papers and pens and plastic cups and frozen astronauts, you might use the instruments of that old space-station to peer down through the waters into the secret halls of Grimsby, where Uncle sits watching on the largest of his screens as the Screw Worm pulls out of the limpet pens, Caul at the controls, Skewer for crew, carrying Tom Natsworthy away to Rogues’ Roost.

  “Zoom in, boy! Zoom!” snaps Uncle, savouring the glow of the limpet’s running lights as it fades into the underwater dark. Gargle, seated beside him at the camera controls, obediently zooms. Uncle pats the boy’s tousled head. He’s a good boy, and will be useful up here, helping him with his archives and his screens. Sometimes he thinks he likes them best, the little helpless, gormless ones like Gargle. At least they’re no trouble. That’s more than can be said for soft, strange boys like Caul, who has been showing the nasty symptoms of a conscience lately, or for rough, ambitious ones like Skewer, who have to be watched and watched in case one day they turn the skills and cunning Uncle has given them against him.

  “It’s gone, Uncle,” Gargle says. “Do you think it’ll work? Do you think the Dry will make it?”

  “Who cares?” Uncle replies, and chuckles. “We win either way, boy. It’s true I don’t know as much as I’d like to about what’s going on in the Roost, but there have been some clues in Wrasse’s reports. Little things, but to a man of my genius they all add up. A London Engineer… That coffin arriving from Shan Guo, packed in ice… The girl Sathya mithering on about her poor dead friend. Elementary, my dear Gargle.”

  Gargle stares at him with wide, round eyes, not understanding. “So… Tom?”

  “Don’t worry, boy,” says Uncle, ruffling his hair again. “Putting that Dry inside is just a way of distracting the Green Storm’s attention.”

  “Distracting it from what, Uncle?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, boy, you’ll see.”

  27

  THE STAIRS

  The Lost Boys had established their listening post just off the eastern side of Rogues’ Roost, where black cliffs dropped sheer into forty-fathom water. One of Red Loki’s burned-out airships had foundered there during his battle with the Green Storm, and in the creel of its barnacled ribs three limpets had docked together to form a makeshift base, locking their long legs across each other’s bodies like crabs in a lobster pot. The Screw Worm eased itself into the tangle, and an airlock on its belly linked to the hatch on the roof of the central limpet, Ghost of a Flea.

  “So this is Uncle’s new recruit?” asked a tall youth, waiting inside the hatchway as Caul, Skewer and Tom climbed through into the stale, cheesy air. He was the oldest member of Uncle’s gang Tom had yet seen, and he was looking Tom up and down with a strange, condescending smile, as if he knew a joke that Tom wouldn’t understand.

  “Tom’s girlfriend is Hester Shaw, the prisoner in Rogues’ Roost,” Caul started to explain.

  “Yeah, yeah. Uncle’s message-fish got here way ahead of you. I’ve heard all about these lovebirds. Mission of mercy, eh?”

  He turned away along a narrow passage. “His name’s Wrasse,” whispered Caul, following with Tom and Skewer. “He’s one of the first ones.”

  “First at what?” Tom asked.

  “One of the first that Uncle brought down to Grimsby. One of the leaders. Uncle lets him keep half of everything he brings home. He’s Uncle’s right hand.”

  Uncle’s right hand led them into a hold that had been cleared of cargo and fitted out as a surveillance station. Other boys, each younger than Wrasse but older than Skewer or Caul, lounged about looking bored or sat hunched over control panels in the blue half-light, watching a bank of circular screens which filled an entire wall. This place was crowded. Caul had never heard of so many boys being assigned to a single job. Why would Uncle send so many, just to spy? And why were so many of the screens dead?

  “You’ve only got three crabs working!” he said. “We were running thirty aboard Anchorage!”

  “Well, this isn’t like burgling city-folk, limpet boy,” snapped Wrasse. “The Green Storm are hard-core. Guards and guns everywhere, all the time. The only way in for a crab-cam is up a sewage pipe that leads to an abandoned toilet-block on the western side. We managed to get three cameras up that and into the heat-ducts, but the Drys heard noises and started getting inquisitive, so we can’t move ’em about much, and we haven’t tried putting any more in. We wouldn’t even have those three if Uncle hadn’t sent us his latest models; remote-control jobs with no cables to trail around. Couple of other special features, too.”

  That smile again. Caul glanced at the long control desks. Piles of notes lay among the abandoned coffee-cups, listing timetables, shift-patterns, the habits of the Green Storm sentries. A cluster of fat red buttons caught his eye, each protected by its own glastic hood. “What do those do?” he asked.

  “Never you mind,” said Wrasse.

  “So what do you reckon’s going on up there?” asked Skewer.

  Wrasse shrugged, flicking from channel to channel. “Dunno. The places that Uncle’s most interested in – the laboratory, and the Memory Chamber – we haven’t been able to get into at all. We can eavesdrop in the main hangar, but we can’t always understand what’s going on. They don’t talk Anglish or Nord like real people. Jibber and jabber away in Airsperanto and a lot of funny eastern languages. This girlie’s their leader.” (A dark head filled the screen, glimpsed from an odd angle, through the blurred grille of a ventilator in her office ceiling. She reminded Tom a bit of that girl who’d been so rude to him in Batmunkh Gompa.) “She’s crazy. Keeps going on about some dead friend of hers as if she’s still alive. Uncle was very interested in her. Then there’s this charming character…”

  Tom gasped. On the screen Wrasse was pointing to, someone sat hunched at the bottom of a deep, well-like room. The picture was so blurred and underlit that if you stared too long it stopped looking like a person at all and dissolved into a soup of abstract shapes, but Tom didn’t need to look for long.

  “That’s Hester!” he shouted.

  The Lost Boys grinned and chuckled and nudged each other. They’d seen Hester’s face on their screens, and they thought it a great joke that anyone should care about her.

  “I’ve got to get to her,” Tom said, leaning closer, wishing he could reach through the glass of the goggle-screen and touch her, just to let her know that he was there.

  “Oh, you will,” Wrasse said. He took Tom by the arm and pulled him through a bulkhead door into a small compartment, the walls lined with racks of guns, swords, pikes. “We’re all ready. Got our instructions from Uncle. Got our plans laid.” He chose a small gas-pistol and handed it to Tom, then a curious little metal device. “Lock-pick,” he said.

  Behind him in the operations room Tom could hear a rising buzz of activity. Nobody was looking bored now; through the half-open door he could see boys hurrying to and fro with papers and clipboards, flicking switches on the long banks of camera controls, trying on headphones. “You’re not sending me inside now?” he asked. “Not right now?” He’d expected time to prepare himself; maybe some sort of briefing about whatever the Lost Boys had learned of
the layout inside Rogues’ Roost. He hadn’t imagined being pushed into action as soon as he arrived.

  But Wrasse had him by the arm again, and was propelling him back through the operations room, back along the tangle of passageways. “No time like the present,” he said.

  An old metal stairway zigzagged down the cliffs on the western side of Rogues’ Roost, and at its foot an iron jetty jutted into the surf, sheltered by long spurs of rock. It had sometimes been used for supply boats to tie up at back in the pirate days, but no boat had come since the Green Storm took over, and already the jetty was looking tatty and unloved, eroded by rust and the unresting sea.

  The Screw Worm surfaced in its shadow just as the sun sank into a thick bank of fog on the horizon. The wind had died almost to nothing, but there was still a heavy swell running, and surf crashed over the limpet’s carapace as its magnetic grapples made contact with the jetty.

  Tom looked up through the wet windows at lights coming on in the buildings high above him, and felt as if he were about to be sick. All the way from Grimsby he had been telling himself it would be all right, but here in the swell beneath the jetty he could not believe that he would ever get inside this Green Storm stronghold, let alone escape again with Hester.

  He wished that Caul were here, but Wrasse had piloted the Screw Worm himself, making Caul stay back aboard the Ghost of a Flea. “Good luck!” the boy had said, hugging him in the airlock, and Tom was beginning to realize just how much good luck he would need.

  “The stairs lead to a door about a hundred feet up,” Wrasse said. “It’s not guarded: they don’t expect an attack from the sea. It’ll be locked, but nothing our tools can’t handle. Got the lock-pick?”