Predator's Gold

by Philip Reeve

  Tom patted the pocket of his coat. Another roller lifted and twisted the Screw Worm. “Well then,” he said nervously, wondering if it was too late to turn back.

  “I’ll be waiting right here,” promised Wrasse, with that faint, suspicious smile. Tom wished he could trust him.

  He climbed quickly up the ladder, trying to think only of Hester, because he knew that if he thought for one moment about all the soldiers and guns in that fortress above him he would lose his nerve. A wave sloshed over the Screw Worm as he sprang the hatch, drenching him in ice-cold water; then he was out on the hull, in the dark and the cold fresh air, the noise of the sea loud around him. He squeezed himself into the struts under the jetty as another wave heaved past, then groped his way up on to the top. He was soaked through and already beginning to shiver. As he ran towards the stairs the jetty bucked beneath him like an animal, straining at its tethers, trying to shrug him off.

  He climbed fast, glad of a chance to get warm. Birds whirled above him in the twilight, the movement startling him. Just think of Hester, he kept reminding himself, but even remembering the best of his times with her could not quite blot out his growing fear. He tried to stop thinking altogether, told himself he had a job to do, but the thoughts kept slipping into his brain. This was a suicide mission. Uncle was just using him. That story about needing a spy inside the Roost hadn’t been the whole truth, he was sure of that now. And the listening post, with all its guns – he’d seen how shocked Caul looked when he caught a glimpse of those. He’d been set up. He was a pawn in a game whose rules he couldn’t fathom. Maybe he should just surrender himself to the Green Storm; shout for the sentries and give himself up. They might not be as bad as everyone said, and at least he’d have a chance of seeing Hester…

  A black shape dropped out of the twilight. He flung his arms up and turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut. There was a hoarse cry, and he felt a beak strike his head; a sharp, painful blow like a tap from a small hammer. Then a flapping and fluttering of wings, and nothing. He looked up and around. He’d heard about this; about sea-birds that attacked anyone who came near their nesting-grounds. High above him, thousands wheeled against the gathering dark. He started to hurry up the stairs, hoping that they didn’t all get the same idea.

  He had made it up another flight before the bird came at him again, sweeping in from the side with a long, guttural squawk. He had a better look at it this time; wide, grubby wings like a raggedy cloak, and the eyes glinting green above the open beak. He struck at it with his fist and his forearm and flung it away. As he hurried on up he felt pain and looked down to see blood welling out of three long cuts on the side of his hand. What sort of bird was this? Its talons had gone straight through his best leather mittens!

  Another shriek, shrill and close enough to be heard through the racket of the birds overhead. Wings flapped around his head, a confusion of feathers, batting at his face and his hair. He could smell a chemical smell, and this time he saw that the green glare in the bird’s eyes was not the reflection of the lights above. He pulled out the gun Wrasse had given him and struck at the thing. It whirled away to windward, but an instant later more claws raked his scalp; he was being attacked by two of the creatures.

  He started to run, up and up, with the birds – if they were birds – squabbling and screeching around him, sometimes lunging in to strike at his head or his neck. There were only two of them – the other birds were minding their own business, circling the island’s summit. Only two, but two were more than enough. Little flashes of light rebounded from razor-blade claws and clacking metal beaks; wings stuttered and snapped like flags in a gale. “Help!” he shouted, pointlessly, and “Get off! Get off!” He thought of running back down to the safety of the waiting limpet, but the birds flung themselves at his face when he turned, and the door was close now, only one more flight of stairs to go.

  He scrambled up, slithering on the icy steps, holding up his hands in his slashed mittens to try and protect his head. He could feel hot trickles of blood running down his face. In the last light of the dying day he saw the door ahead and flung himself at it, but he was too busy fending off the darting beaks and slicing claws to fumble with the lock-pick. In desperation, he raised the gun and aimed it upwards. A flat crack echoed from the cliffs, and one of the green-eyed birds dropped away, trailing a long plume of smoke behind it as it plunged towards the surf. The other drew back, then swept down again. Tom hid his face, and the gun slipped from his bloody hands and bounced off the handrails and fell away from him into the dark.

  The white blade of a searchlight beam slashed across the cliff-face, stabbing at him through the whirlwind of wings and flapping shadow. He cowered against the door. A siren started to howl, then another and another, long echoes bounding from the cliffs. “Wrasse!” he shouted. “Caul! Help!”

  It seemed impossible that everything had gone so wrong so quickly.

  A voice crackled over the Screw Worm’s radio. “They’ve got him.”

  Wrasse nodded calmly. Uncle had told him that it would probably go this way. “Get those crabs moving,” he told the radio. “We’ve only got a few minutes before they realize he’s all on his own.”

  He began pressing buttons, throwing switches. A hatch on the hull opened to release a battered old cargo balloon. As the balloon drifted up into the storm of birds and searchlight beams around the island’s summit, the Screw Worm’s magnets came free of the jetty one by one, and it folded its legs and sank into the surf like a stone.

  The metal door opened, splashing Tom with yellow light. He was so glad to get away from the birds that it seemed a relief when the guards grabbed him. They pinned his arms behind his back and held his flailing legs and someone jammed the muzzle of a Weltschmerz automatic under his chin. “Thank you,” he kept blurting out, and “Sorry,” as they manhandled him inside and slammed the door and flung him down on the cold floor. He was picked up and carried and set down while voices dinned from the low roof. Rocket projectors were firing outside. The voices spoke Airsperanto, with eastern accents and a lot of dialect words he couldn’t grasp.

  “Is he alone?” A woman’s voice, oddly familiar.

  “We think so, Commander: the (something) found him on the stair.”

  The woman spoke again. Tom didn’t catch what she said, but she must have been asking how he had come here, because one of the other voices answered, “Balloon. A two-man balloon. Our batteries shot it down.”

  Something that sounded like swearing. “Why didn’t the watch towers see it coming?”

  “The sentry said it just appeared.”

  “There wasn’t a balloon,” Tom whispered, confused.

  “The prisoner, Commander…”

  “Let’s have a look at him…”

  “Sorry,” Tom mumbled, tasting blood. Somebody shone a flashlight in his face, and when he could see again he saw that the girl who looked like that girl Sathya was stooping over him, only she didn’t just look like Sathya, she was Sathya. “Hello. Thank you. Sorry,” he whispered. She peered through the blood and the straggles of wet hair, and her eyes went wide and then fierce and narrow as she recognized him.

  After months of having not enough to watch, the Lost Boys suddenly had too much. They jostled each other in front of the screens, struggling to make out what was going on among the Drys. Caul, pushing his way to the front, glimpsed Tom being hurried along in a scrum of white-uniformed guards. On another screen the commander’s office lay empty, her evening meal half eaten on her desk. A third showed aviators gathering by their airships in the big hangar, as if the Green Storm imagined Tom’s arrival might be the beginning of an attack. The rest of the screens were filled with scurrying darkness. Dozens of remote crabs had been waiting outside the Roost’s sewage outlet, and now the Lost Boys were taking advantage of the uproar to send them scuttling up into the base. Swarming out of a broken toilet, the little machines darted through an air-vent and scattered into the ducts and flues of the Facility,
cutting their way through security grilles and disabling sensors, their noise drowned out by the honking sirens.

  In the midst of it all Caul felt the post shudder as the Screw Worm docked. A moment later Wrasse came pushing in through the airlock, looking tense and excited, snapping out questions about the Green Storm’s response time.

  “They’re quick,” one of his boys replied.

  “I’m glad Uncle didn’t send me to check them out!”

  “Some kind of trained birds guarding the stairway, they’re what first raised the alarm.”

  “We’ll be ready for them.”

  Caul tugged and tugged at the sleeve of Wrasse’s jacket until the older boy looked round, annoyed. “You’re supposed to be waiting for Tom!” Caul shouted. “What if he escapes? How will he get clear without the Screw Worm?”

  “Your boyfriend’s had it, Dry-lover,” said Wrasse, shoving him away. “Don’t worry. It’s all going as Uncle planned.”

  Keys in the lock, the jolt of the door kicked open. The noises jerked Hester awake. She scrambled up, and Sathya strode into the cell and knocked her down again. Soldiers were crowding in, dragging a sodden, dripping figure between them. Hester didn’t know who it was, not even when Sathya lifted the wet head and showed her that bruised, blood-drizzled face, but she saw the long leather aviator’s coat and thought, Tom has a coat like that, and that made her look again, even though it couldn’t possibly be him.

  “Tom?” she whispered.

  “Don’t pretend to be surprised!” screamed Sathya. “Do you ask me to believe you weren’t expecting him? How did he know you were here? What had you planned? Who are you working for?”

  “Nobody!” said Hester. “Nobody!” She started to cry as the guards forced Tom down on his knees beside her. He had come to rescue her, and he looked so frightened and so hurt, and the worst of it was that he didn’t know what she’d done: he’d come all this way to try and save her, and she didn’t deserve to be saved. “Tom,” she sobbed.

  “I trusted you!” Sathya shouted. “You ensnared me just as you did poor Anna, playing so innocent, making me doubt myself, and all the time your barbarian accomplice was on his way here! What was your plan? Is there a ship waiting? Was Blinkoe in league with you? I suppose you meant to kidnap Popjoy and take him to one of your filthy cities so that they could have his Stalkers?”

  “No, no, no, you’ve got it all twisted round,” Hester wept, but she could see that nothing she could say would convince the girl that Tom’s sudden appearance was not part of some Tractionist plot.

  As for Tom, he was too cold and shocked to take in much of what was happening, but he heard Hester’s voice and looked up and saw her crouching beside him. He had forgotten how ugly she was.

  Then Sathya grabbed him by his hair and forced his head down again, baring his neck. He heard her sword come out of its scabbard with a slithery hiss, heard a rattle and scrabble in the ducts on the ceiling, heard Hester saying, “Tom!” He shut his eyes.

  On the Lost Boys’ screens the drawn sword was a flare of white. Sathya’s voice came tinnily over the crabs’ radios, shouting insane things about plots and betrayal.

  “Do something!” Caul yelled.

  “He’s only a Dry, Caul,” warned Skewer, not unkindly. “Leave it!”

  “We’ve got to help him! He’ll die!”

  Wrasse threw Caul aside. “He was always going to die, you fool!” he shouted. “Do you think Uncle really planned to let him go, with what he’s seen? Even if he got the girl out, my orders were question ’em and kill ’em. Tom’s just supposed to create a diversion.”

  “Why?” wailed Caul. “Just so you can move a few more cameras inside? Just so Uncle can see what’s in the Memory Chamber?”

  Wrasse punched him, flinging him against the control panels. “Uncle worked out what’s in the Memory Chamber months ago. Those aren’t just cameras. They’re bombs. We’re going to move them into position, give the Drys a few hours to settle down again, then blow the lot and go in and do some real burgling.”

  Caul looked at the screens, tasting the blood that was spilling from his nose. The other boys had drawn back from him, as if caring too much about Drys was something they could catch like the flu. He started to raise himself, and saw the pad of hooded red buttons near his hand. He stared at them a moment. He’d never seen controls like those before, but he could guess what they must do.

  “No!” someone shouted. “Not yet!”

  In the instant before they reached him, he flipped up the hoods of as many buttons as he could and brought both his fists down on them hard.

  The screens went dead.

  28

  UNTIE THE WIND

  Something hit him in the back and he went forward, face on the cold floor, thinking, This is it, I’m dead, but he wasn’t dead, he could feel the dampness of the stone against his cheek and when he rolled over he saw that an explosion had brought the ceiling down: a big explosion, judging by all the rubble and the dust, and he would have expected it to make a noise, but he hadn’t heard anything, and he still couldn’t hear anything, even though quite large chunks of the roof were coming down and people were flailing about waving torches and shouting with their mouths wide open, no, there was just a whine and a whistle and a buzz going on somewhere inside his skull, and when he sneezed it made no sound, but small, hot fingers closed around his hand and tugged at him and he looked up and saw Hester, white in the sweep and flare of a torch-beam like a floodlit statue of herself except that she was mouthing something at him, tugging and tugging him and pointing towards the doorway, and he scrambled out from under the thing that had fallen on him, which turned out to be Sathya, and he wondered if she was badly hurt and if he should try to help her, but Hester was pulling him towards the door, stumbling over the bodies of men who were quite definitely dead, stooping under the remains of a heat-duct which was all twisted open and smoking as if it had exploded from inside, and as he looked back somebody fired a gun at him and he saw the flash and felt the bullet flick past his ear but he couldn’t hear that either.

  And then they were hurtling down a stairway. Through other doors. Slamming them silently shut behind them. They paused for breath, bent double, coughing, and he tried to make sense of what had happened. The explosion – the heat-duct…

  “Tom!” Hester was leaning close to him, but her voice sounded far away, blurring and wobbling as if she were shouting underwater.

  “What?”

  “Ship!” she shouted. “Where’s your ship? How did you get here?”

  “Submarine,” he said, “but I expect it’s gone.”

  “What?” She was as deaf as him.

  “Gone!”

  “What?” Torches flashed through the dust and smoke at the far end of the corridor. “We’ll take the Jenny!” she yelled, and began pushing Tom towards yet another stairway. It was dark, like the corridor, and full of smoke, and he began to realize that there had been other explosions, not just the one in the cell. In some corridors lights still flickered, but in most the power was down. Groups of frightened and bewildered soldiers hurried about with torches. It was easy enough for Tom and Hester to see them coming and hide, squeezing into deep doorways or ducking down rubble-strewn side passages. Slowly, Tom’s hearing came back, and the whistling in his ears gave way to the steady, anxious honking of alarms. Hester shoved him into the mouth of a stairway as more people scurried past – aviators this time. “I don’t even know where we are,” she grumbled, when they had gone. “It all looks different in the dark.” She looked at Tom, her face piebald with dust. Grinned. “How did you manage that explosion?”

  It had been the toughest decision of Wrasse’s life. For a moment he nearly lost it, down there in the Ghost of a Flea, staring in panic at the blank screens. All Uncle’s plans in ruins! Everything they’d worked for wrecked! The crabs blown before most of them were even in position!

  “What do we do, Wrasse?” one of his boys asked.

  Only two
things they could do. Go home, and let Uncle skin them alive for coming back empty-handed. Or go for it.

  “We’ll go for it,” he decided, and felt his strength return as the others started running for guns and nets and gadgets, strapping torches to their heads, dragging Caul away. “Skewer, Baitball, you lot on the cameras, you stay here; the rest of you come with me!”

  And so, as the Green Storm panicked and argued and tried to fight the fires the crabs had started, as searchlights prodded the sky and rocket batteries fired salvo after salvo at imaginary attackers, a sleek, customized limpet detached itself from the listening post and swam up to the jetty. The Lost Boys bundled out, running quickly and silently up the same stairs Tom had climbed an hour before.

  Near the top a Stalker-bird found them, and one boy went over the handrail and screaming down into the surf. Another was winged by gunfire from an emplacement on the cliffs and Wrasse had to finish him off, because Uncle’s orders were to leave no one behind for the Drys to question. Then they were at the door, and through it, following their sketchy floor-plans towards the Memory Chamber, leaving boys behind at this junction and that to guard the escape-route. Panicking Green Storm soldiers blundered through the smoke and the Lost Boys killed them, because that was in Uncle’s orders too; leave no witnesses.

  The Memory Chamber’s guards had fled. The massive locks dismayed Wrasse for only a moment; the power was out, and when he heaved at the door it swung sweetly open. The Lost Boys’ torches lit up a bridge stretching to a central platform where someone paced like a caged wild thing. A gleaming bronze mask swung suddenly towards the light.

  They flinched back, all of them. Only Wrasse had been given any idea what it was they were being sent to steal, and even he had never actually seen it. Uncle had warned him not to confront the thing face on; Take it by surprise, his orders said, from above or behind; get the nets over it and the grapples on before it knows what’s happening. But there was no time for that now, and even if there had been, Wrasse wasn’t sure it would have worked. It looked so strong! For the first time in his life he began to wonder if Uncle really did know best.