Predator's gold

PART TWO
19

Ice-water woke her: a storm of it, driving her sideways across a cold stone floor and thrusting her against a wall of white tiles. She gasped and screamed and gurgled. Water filled her mouth. Water plastered draggled hair across her face so that she couldn’t see, and when she raked it aside there was not much to see anyway, only a chill white room lit by a single argon-globe, and men in white uniforms aiming hosepipes at her.

“Enough!” shouted a female voice, and the storm ceased, the men turning away to hook the hoses’ dribbling snouts over a metal frame bolted to the wall. Hester choked and cursed and spewed water out on to the floor, where it swirled away into a central drain. Dim flickers of memory came back to her, of Arkangel, and a merchant: of surfacing from sleep in the cold, rattly hold of the Jenny and finding that she was tied up. She had struggled and tried to shout, and the merchant had come, all apologetic, and there had been that hornet-sting on her neck again, and darkness. He had drugged her and kept her drugged, and while she was under he had flown her from Arkangel to whatever this place was…

“Tom!” she moaned.

Booted feet came sloshing towards her. She looked up snarling, expecting the merchant, but this wasn’t him. This was a young woman in white, with a bronze badge on her breast that marked her out as a subaltern in the Anti-Traction League, and an armband embroidered with green lightning.

“Dress her,” barked the subaltern, and the men dragged Hester upright by her wet hair. They didn’t bother towelling her, just forced her weak limbs into the arms and legs of a shapeless grey overall. Hester could barely stand, let alone resist. They pushed her barefoot out of the shower-room and along a dank corridor, the subaltern leading the way. There were posters on the walls with pictures of airships attacking cities and handsome young men and women in white uniforms gazing at a sunrise beyond a green hill. Other soldiers passed, their boots loud under the low roof. Most were not much older than Hester, but all wore swords at their sides, and lightning-bolt armbands, and the shiny, smug expressions of people who know they are right.

At the end of the passage was a metal door, and behind the door was a cell; a tall, narrow tomb of a room with a single window very high up. Heat-ducts snaked across the crumbling concrete ceiling, but gave out no warmth. Hester shivered, drying slowly in her scratchy overalls. Someone flung a heavy coat at her and she realized that it was her own, and pulled it on gratefully. “Where are the rest?” she asked, and had trouble making them understand, what with her teeth chattering and the after-effects of the merchant’s drugs numbing her already-clumsy mouth. “The rest of my clothes?”

“Boots,” said the subaltern, taking them from one of her men and throwing them at Hester. “The rest we burned. Don’t worry, barbarian: you won’t need them again.”

The door closed; a key turned in the lock; booted feet marched away. Hester could hear the sea somewhere far below, hissing and sighing against a stony shore. She hugged herself against the cold and started to cry. Not for herself, or even for Tom, but for her burned clothes; her waistcoat with Tom’s photograph in the pocket, and the dear red scarf he had bought for her in Peripatetiapolis. Now she had nothing left of him at all.

The darkness beyond the high, small window faded slowly to a washed-out grey. The door rattled and opened and a man looked in and said, “Up, barbarian: the commander’s waiting.”

The commander was waiting in a big, clean room where the vague forms of dolphins and sea-nymphs showed faintly through the whitewash on the walls and a circular window looked out over a cheese-grater sea. She sat behind her big steel desk, brown fingers drumming out manic little patterns on a manilla folder. She stood up only when Hester’s guards saluted. “You may leave us,” she told them.

“But Commander — ” said one.

“I think I can handle one scrawny barbarian.” She waited till they were gone, then came slowly around the desk, staring at Hester the whole way.

Hester had met that fierce, dark stare before, for the commander was none other than the girl Sathya, Anna Fang’s fierce young protegee from Batmunkh Gompa. She did not feel particularly surprised. Ever since she reached Anchorage her life had taken on the strange logic of a dream, and it seemed only right that she should meet a familiar, unfriendly face here at the end of it. Two and a half years had passed since their last meeting, but Sathya seemed to have aged much more than that; her face was gaunt and stern, and in her dark eyes there was an expression that Hester couldn’t read, as if rage and guilt and pride and fear had all got mixed up inside her and turned into something new.

“Welcome to the Facility,” she said coldly.

Hester stared at her. “What is this place? Where is it? I didn’t think your lot had any bases left in the north, not since Spitzbergen got scoffed.”

Sathya only smiled. “You don’t know much about my lot, Miss Shaw. The High Council may have withdrawn League forces from the arctic theatre, but some of us do not accept defeat so calmly. The Green Storm maintain several bases in the north. Since you will not be leaving here alive, I can tell you that this facility is on Rogues’ Roost, an island some two hundred miles from the southern tip of Greenland.”

“Nice,” said Hester. “Come here for the weather, did you?”

Sathya slapped her hard, leaving her dazed and gasping. “These were the skies where Anna Fang grew up,” she said. “Her parents traded in these regions, before they were enslaved by Arkangel.”

“Right. Sentimental reasons, then,” muttered Hester. She tensed, expecting another blow, but it did not come. Sathya turned away from her towards the window.

“You destroyed one of our units over the Drachen Pass three weeks ago,” she said.

“Only because they attacked my ship,” Hester replied.

“She is not your ship,” the other girl snapped. “She is… She was Anna’s. You stole her, the night Anna died, you and your barbarian lover, Tom Natsworthy. Where is he, by the way? Don’t tell me he has abandoned you?”

Hester shrugged.

“So what were you doing alone aboard Arkangel?”

“Just betraying a few cities to the Huntsmen,” said Hester.

“I can believe that. Treachery is in your blood.”

Hester frowned. Had Sathya dragged her all the way here just to be rude about her parents? “If you mean I take after my mother, well, she was pretty stupid digging up MEDUSA, but I don’t think she actually betrayed anybody.”

“No,” Sathya agreed. “But your father…”

“My dad was a farmer,” cried Hester, feeling suddenly and strangely angry that this girl could stand there and insult the memory of her poor dead dad, who had never done anything but good.

“You are a liar,” said Sathya. “Your father was Thaddeus Valentine.”

Outside, snow fell like sifted icing sugar. Hester could see icebergs ploughing through the comfortless grey of the winter sea. In a tiny voice she said, “That isn’t true.”

Sathya pulled a sheet of writing-paper from the folder on her desk. “This is the report that Anna wrote for the League’s High Council, that day she brought you to Batmunkh Gompa. What does she say about you…? Ah, yes: Two young people: one an adorable young Apprentice Historian from London, quite harmless, the other a poor, disfigured girl who I am sure is the lost daughter of Pandora Rae and Thaddeus Valentine. ”

Hester said, “My dad was David Shaw, of Oak Island…”

“Your mother had many lovers before she married Shaw,” said Sathya, in a voice crisp with disapproval. “Valentine was one of them. You are his child. Anna would never have written such a thing if she had not been certain.”

“My dad was David Shaw,” snivelled Hester, but she knew it wasn’t true. She had known it in her heart these two years past, ever since her gaze met Valentine’s over the body of his dying daughter Katherine. Some sort of understanding had crackled between them then like electricity, a half-recognition that she had crushed as quick and as hard as she could, because she didn’t want him for a father. She had understood, though, deep down. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to kill him!

“Anna was wrong about you, wasn’t she?” Sathya said, turning away, going to stand at the window. The snow had passed; patches of sunlight dappled the grey sea a lighter grey. She said, “You weren’t lost, and Tom wasn’t harmless. You were both in league with Valentine all along. You used Anna’s kindness to get inside Batmunkh Gompa and help him burn our Air-Fleet.”

“No!” said Hester.

“Yes. You lured Anna to a place where he could murder her, and then you stole her ship.”

Hester shook her head. “You’re so wrong!”

“Stop lying!” shouted Sathya, rounding on her again. There were tears in her eyes.

Hester tried to remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. It had mostly been a blur of flames and running, but she had a feeling that Sathya had not acted very well. For all her fighting talk, Sathya had let her beloved Anna run off to tackle Valentine alone, and Valentine had killed her. Hester knew quite well that you didn’t forgive yourself for things like that. Instead you blotted out the memories, or sank into despair.

Or you found someone else to blame. Like Valentine’s daughter.

Sathya said, “You will pay for what you did. But first, perhaps, you can help to make amends.” She took a gun from her desk and gestured to a small door on the far side of her office. Hester walked towards it, not really caring where she went, or whether Sathya was going to shoot her. Valentine’s daughter, she kept thinking. Valentine’s daughter goes through a doorway. Valentine’s daughter goes down some iron steps. Valentine’s daughter. No wonder she had such a temper. No wonder she had been able to sell a city full of good people to Arkangel with barely a squeak from her conscience. She was Valentine’s daughter, and she took after Daddy.

The steps led to a tunnel, then a sort of antechamber. Two guards watched Hester coldly through the tinted glastic visors of their crab-shell helmets. A third man stood waiting beside a heavy steel door; a twitchy little pink-eyed rabbit of a man, gnawing nervously at his fingernails. The argon-lamps on the walls bounced bright reflections off his bald scalp. Between his eyebrows was a red wheel.

“He’s an Engineer!” said Hester. “A London Engineer! I thought they were all dead…”

“A few survived,” said Sathya. “After London exploded I was put in charge of the squadron sent out to round up survivors escaping from the wreck. Most were sent to slave-labour camps deep in League territory, but when I interrogated Dr Popjoy, and learned what his work had been, I realized he might be able to help us.”

“Help you with what? I thought the League hated Old-Tech?”

“There have always been some in the League who believed that to defeat the cities we should use their own infernal devices against them,” said Sathya. “After what you and your father did at Batmunkh Gompa their voices began to be heard more loudly. A secret society of young officers was formed; the Green Storm. When I told them about Popjoy they saw his potential at once, and agreed to let me set up this facility.”

The Engineer bared big yellow teeth in a nervous grin and said, “So this is Hester Shaw is it? She may be helpful. Yes, yes. Someone who was ‘in at the kill’, so to speak. Her presence in the Mnemonic Environment may provide just the trigger we’ve been seeking.”

“Get on with it,” snapped Sathya, and Hester saw that she, too, was extremely nervous.

Popjoy pulled a series of levers on the door, and the massive electro-magnetic locks released with hollow thuds and clangs, like docking clamps disengaging. The guards tensed, wraiths of steam scrolling from the funnels of their bulky machine-guns as they flipped the safety catches off. All this security wasn’t designed to keep people out, Hester realized. It was meant to keep something in.

The door swung open.

Later Hester would learn that the Memory Chamber was a decommissioned fuel-tank: one of dozens of steel globes clumped in the corries of Rogues’ Roost, but at first sight it seemed just an insanely huge room, with rusty walls curving up to form a dome above her and down to make a bowl below. All over the walls big pictures had been fixed; grainy blow-ups of people’s faces, photographs of London and Arkangel and Marseilles, a silk-painting of Batmunkh Gompa in an ebony frame. Loops of scratchy film repeated endlessly on whitewashed panels: a little golden girl with pigtails laughing in a meadow; a young woman drawing on a long-stemmed pipe and blowing smoke at the camera.

Hester felt suddenly sick with fear, and did not know why.

A walkway ran around the edge of this spherical vault, and a narrow footbridge stretched from it to a platform in the centre, where a monk-like figure stood robed in grey. Hester tried to hang back as Sathya and Popjoy started along the bridge, but one of the guards was behind her, pushing her firmly forward. Ahead, Sathya reached the central platform and touched the arm of the one who waited there. She was crying silently, her face shining with tears in the dim light. “I’ve brought you a present, dearest,” she said softly. “A visitor. Someone you’re sure to remember!”

And the robed figure turned, the grey cowl fell aside, and Hester saw that it was — no, that it had once been — Anna Fang.