Predator's gold

28

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.

He hid his fear as best he could. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what Uncle wants. Let’s nick it.”

The Lost Boys raised their guns, their blades, the ropes and chains and magnetic grapples and heavy throwing-nets that Uncle had equipped them with, and began to edge across the bridge.

And the Stalker flexed its hands and came to meet them.

Gunfire popped and bickered, though it was hard to tell where, with the echoes all mixed up, rebounding along the low corridors. Tom and Hester ran on, following Hester’s vague mental map of the airbase. They began to pass bodies: three Green Storm troopers in a heap; then a young man in mismatched dark clothes, a furze of fair hair under his black wool cap. For a jolting instant Tom thought it was Caul, but this boy was older and bigger; one of Wrasse’s crew. “The Lost Boys are here!” he said.

“Who are they?” asked Hester. Tom didn’t answer, too busy trying to grasp what was going on, and what part he had played in it all. Before she could ask again a storm of noise interrupted, booming somewhere nearby; gunfire, massed at first but thinning, growing patchy and frantic and spiked with shrieks; then one last, bubbling scream and silence.

Even the sirens had stopped.

“What was that? ” asked Tom.

“How should I know?” Hester took the dead Lost Boy’s torch and ducked down another stairwell, dragging Tom after her. “Let’s get out of here…”

Tom followed gladly. He loved the feeling of her hand holding his, guiding him. He wondered if he should tell her so, and whether this was the moment to apologize for what had happened back in Anchorage, but before he could say anything they reached the bottom of the stairs and Hester stopped, breathing hard, motioning for him to stay still and quiet.

They were in a sort of antechamber, where a circular metal door stood wide open.

“Oh Gods and Goddesses!” said Hester softly.

“What?”

“The power! The locks failed! The electric barrier! It’s escaped!”

“But what?”

She took a deep breath and crept towards the door. “Come on!” she told Tom. “There’s a way through to the hangar…”

They stepped together through the door. Just above their heads hung a thick haze of gunsmoke, filling and hollowing like a white awning. The shadows were full of the drip of falling liquid. Hester shone her torch along the bridge, sweeping the beam over puddles and scrawls of blood, over patterns of bloody footprints like the diagram of some violent dance, past drips of blood falling from the curved roof high above. Things lay on the bridge. At first they looked like bundles of old clothes, until you looked closer and began to make out hands, faces. Tom recognized some of those faces from the listening post. But what had they come here for? What had happened to them? He began to shake uncontrollably.

“It’s all right,” said Hester, flicking her torch towards the central platform. Empty, except for a blood-sodden grey robe abandoned like a cast-off chrysalis in the very centre. The Stalker had left; doubtless hunting for fresh victims in the maze of rooms and corridors above them. Hester took Tom’s hand again, leading him quickly around the outer edge of the chamber to the door that she had gone through so often with Sathya and the others, on the Stalker’s good days. In the stairway beyond, the air moaned softly, like the voices of ghosts. “This leads to the hangar where the Jenny ’s kept,” she explained, hurrying down and down with Tom behind her.

The stairs ended; the passage made a tight dog-leg and widened suddenly into the hangar. In the jitter of Hester’s torch-beam Tom glimpsed the Jenny Haniver ’s patched red envelope hanging above him. Hester found a panel of controls on the wall and pulled on one of the levers. Pulleys grumbled into life somewhere up on the dark roof and flakes of rust came showering down as wheels turned and hawsers tightened, heaving open the huge storm-doors at the hangar mouth. The widening gap revealed a narrow landing-apron jutting from the cliff outside, and fog, fog all around the Roost, a dense white dreamscape of hills and folds and billows veiling the sea. Above it the sky was clear, and the light of stars and dead satellites reached into the hangar, revealing the Jenny Haniver on her docking pan, revealing the line of bloody footprints on the concrete floor.

From the shadows under the Jenny ’s steering vanes stepped a tall shape, blocking the way back to the door. Two green eyes hung in the dark like fireflies.

“Oh Quirke!” Tom squeaked. “Is that — ? That’s not a — ? Is it?”

“It’s Miss Fang,” said Hester. “But she’s not herself.”

The Stalker walked forward into the spill of light from the open storm-doors. Faint reflections slithered over its long steel limbs, its armoured torso, the bronze mask of its face, glinting on small dents and scars which the Lost Boys’ useless bullets had made. Their blood still dripped from the Stalker’s claws and covered its hands and its forearms like long red gloves.

The Stalker had enjoyed the massacre in the Memory Chamber, but when the last of the Lost Boys was dead it had not known what to do next. The smell of gunsmoke and the muffled sounds of battle echoing down the corridors aroused its Stalkerish instincts, but it regarded the open door cautiously, remembering the electric barriers which had sprung up last time it tried to leave. At last it chose the other door, drawn by feelings it did not understand, down to the hangar and the old red airship that waited there. It had been circling the Jenny in the darkness, running its metal fingers over the grain of her gondola planking, when Hester and Tom came bursting in. Its claws sprang out again and the fierce yearning to kill crackled through its electric veins like a power-surge.

Tom turned, thinking to run out on to the apron, but crashed against Hester, who slipped on the bloody floor and went down hard. He bent down to help her, and suddenly the Stalker was standing over them.

“Miss Fang?” Tom whispered, looking up into that strange, familiar face.

The Stalker watched him crouching over the girl on the blood-speckled concrete, and a little meaningless flake of memory fluttered suddenly into the machinery of its brain, itchy and confusing. It hesitated, claws twitching. Where had it seen this boy before? He had not been among the portraits on the walls of its chamber, but it knew him. It remembered lying in snow with his face staring down. Behind the mask its dead lips shaped a name.

“Tom Nitsworthy?”

“Natsworthy,” said Tom.

That alien memory stirred again inside the Stalker’s skull. It did not know why this boy seemed so familiar, only that it did not want him to die. It took a step backwards, then another. Its claws slipped back into their sheaths.

“Anna!”

The voice, a brittle scream, echoed loudly in the cavernous hangar, making all three of them look towards the door. Sathya stood there, a lantern in one hand and her sword in the other, her face and hair still white with plaster-dust, blood dribbling from the wound on her head where shrapnel from the exploding duct had caught her. She set the lantern down and walked quickly towards her beloved Stalker. “Oh, Anna! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I should have known you’d be here, with the Jenny…”

The Stalker did not move, just swung its metal face to stare down at Tom again. Sathya stopped short, noticing for the first time the figures huddled at its feet. “You’ve caught them, Anna! Well done! They are enemies, in league with the intruders! They were your murderers! Kill them!”

“All enemies of the Green Storm must die,” agreed the Stalker.

“That’s right, Anna!” Sathya urged. “Kill them now! Kill them, like you killed those others!”

The Stalker put its head on one side. The green light from its eyes washed Tom’s face.

“Then I’ll do it!” Sathya shouted, striding forward, lifting her sword. The Stalker made a quick movement. Tom squealed in terror and felt Hester scrunch closer to him. Steel claws blazed in the lantern light, and Sathya’s sword clattered on the floor, her hand still wrapped around the hilt.

“No,” said the Stalker.

For a brief time there was silence, while Sathya stared at the blood which came in unbelievable jets from the stump of her arm. “Anna!” she whispered, falling to her knees, crumpling forward on to her face.

Tom and Hester watched, not speaking, not breathing, crouched as still and small as they could, as if in their stillness the Stalker might forget them. But it turned, gliding back towards them, and raised its dripping claws again. “Go,” it whispered, pointing towards the Jenny Haniver. “Go, and do not cross the path of the Green Storm again.”

Tom just stared, crouched against Hester, too scared to move, but Hester took the Stalker at its word and eased herself up and backwards, dragging him with her, urging him towards the airship. “Come on, for the gods’ sake! You heard what it said!”

“Thank you,” Tom managed to whisper, remembering his manners as they edged past the Stalker and up the Jenny ’s gangplank. The inside of the gondola smelled cold and strange after her long grounding, but when Hester switched on the engines they came sputtering to life with their old, familiar shudder, their roar filling the hangar. Tom eased himself into the pilot’s seat, trying not to look out at the thing which stood watching him, its armour gaudy with the green and red reflections of the running-lights.

“Is she really going to let us go?” he asked. His teeth were chattering, and he was trembling so violently that he could barely grip the controls. “Why? Why doesn’t she kill us like the others?”

Hester shook her head, switching on instruments, heaters. She was remembering Shrike, and the strange emotions which had prompted him to collect broken automata, or rescue a disfigured, dying child. But all she said was, “It’s an it, not a she, and we can’t know what it’s thinking. Just go, before it changes its mind.”

The clamps released, the pods swung into take-off position, and the Jenny lifted uncertainly from its pan and edged out into the night, grazing a vane on the hangar wall as it went. The Stalker walked out on to the landing-apron, and watched as the old airship pulled clear of Rogues’ Roost, dropping into the fog before the Green Storm’s rocket batteries could decide whether she were friend or foe. And again that strange half-memory brushed moth-like against the Stalker’s mind; the once-born called Tom kneeling over it in snow and saying, “Miss Fang! It’s not fair! He waited until you were dazzled!”

For a moment it felt an odd satisfaction, as though it had returned a favour.

“Which way?” asked Tom, when Rogues’ Roost was a mile behind him in the fog and he felt calm enough to speak again.

“North-west,” Hester replied. “Anchorage. I’ve got to go back there. A terrible thing’s happened.”

“Pennyroyal!” guessed Tom. “I know. I worked it out just before I left. There wasn’t time to tell anyone. You were right about him. I should have listened to you.”

“Pennyroyal?” Hester was staring at him as if he’d spoken in a language she didn’t understand. She shook her head. “Arkangel is on their tail.”

“Oh, great Quirke!” whispered Tom. “Are you sure? But how could Arkangel have learned Anchorage’s course?”

Hester just took the controls and locked in a course, north by north-west. Then turned, her hands behind her, clutching the edge of the control panel so hard it hurt. She said, “I saw you kissing Freya — and I–I — ” Patches of silence formed between her words like ice. She wanted to tell him the truth, she really did, but as she looked at his poor, scratched, frightened face she found she couldn’t bear to.

“Het, I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I mean, me too.”

“What are we going to do?”

“About Anchorage?”

“They can’t go on if there’s only a dead continent ahead of them, and they can’t turn back if Arkangel’s behind.”

“I don’t know,” said Hester. “Let’s just get there first. Then we’ll think of something.”

“But what?” Tom started to ask, but he didn’t finish, because Hester had taken his face between her hands and was busy kissing him.

The sound of the Jenny Haniver ’s engines grew fainter and fainter until at last not even the Stalker’s ears could hear it. The memory that had prompted it to spare Tom and Hester was fading too, vanishing like a dream. It switched its eyes to night-vision and went back into the hangar. Sathya’s severed hand was cooling fast, but her body still showed a fuzzy blur of warmth. The Stalker padded to where she lay, lifted her up by her hair and shook her till she woke and started whimpering.

“You will prepare airships, and weapons. We are leaving the Facility.”

Sathya gurgled at her, her eyes bulging with pain and fear. Had the Stalker been waiting for this all along, while she kept it locked in the Memory Chamber, showing it photographs and playing it poor Anna’s favourite music? But of course, this was what it had been built for! Had she not told Popjoy to bring Anna back ready to command the League? “Yes, Anna,” she sobbed. “Of course, Anna!”

“I am not Anna,” said the Stalker. “I am the Stalker Fang, and I am tired of hiding here.”

Other once-born were edging into the hangar now; soldiers and scientists and aviators shocked and leaderless in the smoky aftermath of their battle with the mysterious intruders. Dr Popjoy was with them, and as the Stalker turned to face them they pushed him quickly to the front. Trailing Sathya like a broken doll, the Stalker went close to him, close enough to smell the salt sweat oozing out of his pores and hear the sharp staccato of his frightened breath. “You will obey me,” it said. “Your prototypes must be quickened at once, Doctor. We will return to Shan Guo, gathering our forces from the other Green Storm bases as we go. Elements of the Anti-Traction League who resist us will be liquidated. We will take control of shipyards, training camps, weapons factories. And then we will unleash a storm that will scour the Earth clean of Traction Cities for ever.”