Predator's gold

9

Far to the south, beyond the margins of the ice, an island rose from a cold sea. Black it was, and jagged, streaked with the droppings of gulls and skuas which made their homes upon its ledges. The noise of the birds could be heard from miles away as they clanged and shrieked and squabbled, diving into the surf for fish or wheeling in great flocks about the high summit, sometimes perching on the roofs of the squat buildings which clung there, or on the rusting handrails of the precarious metal walkways which jutted from the sheer cliffs like bracket fungus on a dead tree-stump. For although the place looked uninhabitable, people lived there; airship hangars had been blasted out of the rock, and clusters of spherical fuel-tanks huddled like spiders’ eggs in narrow crevices. This was Rogues’ Roost, where Red Loki and his legendary band of air-pirates had built their eyrie.

Loki was gone now, and there were still the scars of rocket explosions on some of the buildings to show that he had not gone willingly. A Green Storm assault unit had come down upon this place one calm night, butchered the pirates and taken control of the Roost, establishing a base that no hungry city could come at.

The sun was setting, the red and purple and smoky orange smeared across the eastern sky making the island look even more sinister than usual as the Temporary Blip came chugging in from windward. Gun emplacements swivelled like armoured heads, tracking the plump old airship. As she edged in towards the main hangar her escort of Fox Spirits flew circles around her, like farm dogs chivvying a reluctant ewe into a fold.

“What a dump!” complained one of Widgery Blinkoe’s wives, peering out through the gondola windows.

“You told us reporting that old airship would bring us luck and money,” agreed another. “You said we’d be sunning ourselves on a raft resort, not trailing out here off the edge of the world.”

“You promised new dresses, and slaves!”

“Silence, wives!” shouted Blinkoe, trying to concentrate on his steering-levers while ground-crew guided him into the hangar with coloured flags. “Show some respect! This is a Green Storm base! It is an honour to be asked here: a sign that they value my services!” But in truth he was as dismayed as them at being summoned to Rogues’ Roost. After he radioed his sighting of the Jenny Haniver to the Storm’s base in the Tannhausers he’d expected a thank you and perhaps a nice payment. He had certainly not expected to be jumped by a flight of Fox Spirits as soon as he left Airhaven and dragged all the way out here.

“Well, really!” grumbled his wives, nudging each other.

“It’s a pity the Green Storm don’t respect him as much as he respects them!”

“Value his services, indeed!”

“Think of the business we’re losing, trailing out here!”

“My mother warned me not to marry him.”

“So did mine!”

“Mine, too!”

“He knows this is a fool’s errand! See how worried he looks!”

Mr Blinkoe was still looking worried as he stepped out of the Temporary Blip in the chaotic, echoey hangar, but his expression changed to an indulgent smile when a pretty subaltern came hurrying up to salute him. Widgery Blinkoe had a weakness for pretty young women, which was how he had ended up marrying five of them, and although those five had all turned out to be rather shrill and headstrong and tended to gang up on him, he could not help toying with the thought of asking the subaltern to become number six.

“Mr Blinkoe?” she asked. “Welcome to the Facility.”

“I thought it was called Rogues’ Roost, my dear?”

“The commander prefers us to call it the Facility.”

“Oh.”

“I’m here to take you to her.”

“Her, eh? I hadn’t realized there were so many ladies in your organization.”

The girl’s smile vanished. “The Green Storm believes that both men and women must play their part in the coming war to defeat the Tractionist barbarians, and make the Earth green again.”

“Oh, of course, of course,” said Mr Blinkoe quickly. “I couldn’t agree more…” He didn’t like that sort of talk: war was so terribly bad for business. But the past few years had been bad for the Anti-Traction League: London had rolled almost to the gates of Batmunkh Gompa, and its agents had burned the Northern Air Fleet. That had meant that there were no spare ships to come to the aid of the Spitzbergen Static when Arkangel attacked it last winter, and so the last great Anti-Tractionist city of the north had been swallowed into the predator’s gut. It was only natural that some of the League’s younger officers had grown impatient with the dithering of the High Council, and itchy for revenge. Hopefully it would all come to nothing.

Trailing after the subaltern, he tried to judge the strength of this little base. There were a couple of well-armed Fox Spirits standing ready on docking pans, and a lot of soldiers in white uniforms and bronze crab-shell helmets, all wearing armbands with the lightning-flash symbol of the Green Storm. Heavy security, he thought, his gaze slipping quickly over their steam-powered machine guns. But why? What was going on out here at the back-end of nowhere that warranted all this? A line of troops tramped past, carrying big metal cases stencilled Fragile and Top Secret, tightly locked. A little bald-headed man wearing a transparent plastic coat over his uniform was fussing at the soldiers. “Do go carefully now! Don’t jostle! Those are sensitive instruments!” Sensing Blinkoe’s gaze, he glanced towards him. There was a small tattoo between his eyebrows, in the shape of a red wheel.

“What exactly is it you’re doing here?” Blinkoe asked his escort, following her out of the hangar and along damp tunnels and stairways, climbing up and up through the heart of the rock.

“It’s secret,” she said.

“But surely you can tell me?”

The subaltern shook her head. She was a rude, officious, military sort of girl, Blinkoe decided; not sixth-Mrs-Blinkoe-material at all. He turned his attention to the posters tacked to the passage walls. They showed League airships raining down rockets on mobile towns, beneath angry slogans that exhorted the reader to DESTROY ALL CITIES. Between the posters were stencilled signs pointing the way to cell-blocks, barracks, various gun-platforms, and to a laboratory. That seemed strange, too. The Anti-Traction League had always been sniffy about science; they thought any technology more complicated than an airship or a rocket projector was barbaric, and best ignored. Clearly the Green Storm had different ideas.

Mr Blinkoe began to feel a little afraid.

The commander’s office was in one of the old buildings on the summit of the island. It had once been Red Loki’s private quarters, and the walls had been decorated with saucy murals which the commander had primly whitewashed over. The whitewash was thin, though, and here and there faint, painted faces were beginning to show through, like the ghosts of dead pirates looking on in disapproval at the Roost’s new tenants. In the far wall, a big circular window looked out at nothing much.

“You’re Blinkoe? Welcome to the Facility.”

The commander was very young. Mr Blinkoe had hoped she’d be pretty, but she turned out to be a stern-looking little minx, all cropped black hair and a hard, peat-coloured face. “You are the agent who sighted the Jenny Haniver at Airhaven?” she asked. Her hands kept clenching and flexing, like fidgety brown spiders. And the way she stared at him with those great dark eyes! Blinkoe wondered if she was slightly mad.

“Yes, Your Honour,” he said nervously.

“And you’re sure it was her? There is no mistake? This is not some story you cooked up to defraud the Green Storm of money?”

“No, no!” said Blinkoe hastily. “Gods, no; it was the Wind Flower’s ship, as clear as day!”

The commander turned away from him and walked to the window, peering out through the salt-frosted glass at the swiftly darkening sky. After a moment she said, “A wing of Fox Spirits was scrambled from one of our secret bases to intercept the Jenny. None of them returned.”

Widgery Blinkoe was uncertain what to say. “Oh dear,” he ventured.

She turned towards him again, but he couldn’t see her expression, standing as she was against that luminous window. “The two barbarian infiltrators who stole the Jenny Haniver from Batmunkh Gompa may have looked like Out-Country urchins, but they were really highly trained agents in the pay of London. No doubt they used their infernal cunning to outwit and destroy our ships, then fled north into the Ice Wastes.”

“It’s, um, perfectly possible, Commander,” agreed Widgery Blinkoe, thinking how unlikely it sounded.

She came close to him, a short, slight girl, her eyes burning into his. “We have many Fox Spirits. The Green Storm grows stronger every day. A great many League commanders are on our side, and are prepared to send soldiers and ships to strengthen our bases. What we lack is an intelligence network. That is why we need you, Blinkoe. I want you to find me the Jenny Haniver, and the barbarians who fly her.”

“That’s, um, well, that might, yes,” said Blinkoe.

“You will be paid well for your services.”

“How well? I don’t want to seem mercenary, but I do have five wives to support…”

“Ten thousand when you deliver the ship here.”

“Ten thou — !”

“The Green Storm rewards its servants well,” the commander assured him. “But we punish those who betray us, too. If you breathe a word of this, or of what you have seen at the Facility, to anyone, we will find you, and kill you. Quite painfully. Do you understand?”

“Eep!” squeaked Blinkoe, turning his hat around and around in his hands. “Um, may I ask why? I mean, why this ship is so important? I thought she might have sentimental value, as a sort of symbol for the League, but she hardly seems worth-”

“She is worth what I am offering you.” The commander smiled for the first time; a thin, cold, pained little smile, like someone thanking a distant relative for attending a funeral. “The Jenny Haniver and the barbarians who stole her could be vital to our work here,” she said. “That is all you need to know. Find her and bring her to me, Mr Blinkoe.”