Predator's gold

27

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?”

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.