Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

His captors dropped him unceremoniously on the deck. He rolled over and saw them crouching in a gap between two ducts. Caul’s long hands had gripped a section of the deckplate and he was lifting it; opening it; a camouflaged manhole.

“Stop!” shouted Scabious, close now, shadow flashing between the ducts astern. Caul’s friend swung his gas-pistol up and squeezed off another round, holing a duct which began to gush a great white geyser of steam.

“Tom!” yelled Scabious. “I’ll fetch help!”

“Mr Scabious!” Tom cried, but Scabious was gone; Tom could hear his voice shouting for aid in some neighbouring tubeway. The lid of the manhole was open, blue light shafting up through steam. Caul and the other stranger picked him up and swung him towards it. He had a glimpse of a short companionway leading down into a dim, blue-lit chamber, and then he was falling, like a sack of coal dropped into a cellar, landing hard on a hard floor. His captors came clattering down the ladder, and the hatch above him slammed shut.

A round-roofed hold, stuffed with plunder like a well-filled belly. Blue bulbs in wire cages. A smell of damp and mildew and unwashed boys.

Tom struggled to sit up. In the fall down the companionway one of his hands had come free of the net, but just as he realized this, and before he could free himself entirely, Caul grabbed his arms from behind and Caul’s friend, the boy called Skewer, squatted in front of him. Skewer had holstered his gas-pistol, but there was a knife in his hand; a short blade of pale metal with a serrated edge. It flashed blue in the blue light as he pressed it against Tom’s throat.

“No, please!” squeaked Tom. He didn’t really think the strangers had gone to all the trouble of kidnapping him just to murder him, but the blade was cold, and the look in Skewer’s pewter-coloured eyes was wild.

“Don’t, Skewer,” said Caul.

“Just so he knows,” Skewer explained, drawing the knife away slowly. “Just so he’s clear what’ll happen if he tries anything fancy.”

“He’s right, Tom,” said Caul, helping Tom to stand. “You can’t escape, so you’d better not try. You won’t be very comfy if we have to lock you in a cargo container…” He pulled a cord from his pockets and bound Tom’s wrists together. “This is just till we’re away from Anchorage. We’ll untie you after, if you behave.”

“Away from Anchorage?” asked Tom, watching Caul’s fingers tie the complex knots. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” said Caul. “Uncle wants to see you.”

“Whose uncle?”

A circular door in the bulkhead behind Caul whirled open suddenly, like the iris of a camera. There were banks of dodgy-looking equipment cluttering the room beyond, and a third boy, startlingly young, who shouted, “Skewer, we’ve got to GO!”

Caul grinned quickly at Tom, said, “Welcome aboard the Screw Worm! ” and ran through into the new room. Tom followed, shunted forward by Skewer’s firm hand. This strange, blue-lit kennel was not some undercroft of Anchorage as he’d thought at first, but it clearly wasn’t one of Professor Pennyroyal’s parasite towns either. It was a vehicle, and this was its control-room; a crescent-shaped cabin with banks of dials and levers all around and bulbous windows looking out into a rushing darkness. On six oval screens above the controls grainy blue views of Anchorage flickered: the Scabious Spheres, the stern-gallery, Rasmussen Prospekt, a corridor in the Winter Palace. On the fifth screen Freya Rasmussen was sleeping peacefully. On the sixth, Scabious led a gang of engine-workers towards the secret manhole.

“They’re on to us!” said the youngest of the burglars, sounding very scared.

“All right, Gargle. Time to go.” Caul reached for a bank of levers. They had a home-made look, like everything else aboard this craft, and they grated and creaked as he pulled them, but they seemed to work. One by one the pictures on the screen folded up and dwindled to white dots. The cabin filled with a metallic hiss as the camera-cables which had infested Anchorage’s air-ducts and plumbing like the tendrils of an invasive weed were reeled quickly in. Tom imagined people all over the city looking up in surprise at the sudden rush and rattle in their heating-ducts. In the cabin, the noise of the reels rose to a deafening shriek and then ended in a series of dull clangs as the crabs were jerked home into ports on the hull above his head and armoured lids closed over them. As the echoes of the last one faded he heard another, fainter clanging; Scabious and his engine district workers hacking at the camouflaged hatch with picks and hammers.

Caul and Skewer stood side by side at the controls, their hands moving quickly and confidently over the crowded panels. Tom, who had always taken great care of the Jenny Haniver ’s instruments, was shocked by the state of these: rusty, scuffed and dirty, levers grating in their slots, dials cracked, sparks flashing blue each time a switch was tripped. But the cabin began to shake and hum and the needles in the crazed gauges flickered and Tom saw that this stuff worked. This machine, whatever it was, might be about to snatch him away from Anchorage before Scabious and the others could do anything to save him.

“Going down!” whooped Skewer.

There was a new sound, not unlike the one made by the Jenny Haniver ’s mooring clamps when they disengaged from a docking pan. Then an awful sensation of falling, as the Screw Worm dropped free from its hiding place on Anchorage’s underbelly. Tom’s stomach turned over. He grabbed a handle on the bulkhead behind him for support. Was this an airship? But it was not flying, just falling, and now came a great juddering shock as it landed on the ice beneath the city. The huge shapes of gantries and skid-supports rushed past beyond the windows, half hidden by a spray of greyish slush, and then suddenly the city was gone and he was looking out across open, moonlit snowfields.

Gargle checked his instruments. “Thin ice bearing east-by-north-east-a-half-east, about six miles,” he squeaked.

Tom still had little idea of the size or shape of the Screw Worm, but watchers on the upper tier saw it clear in the moonlight now as it shot out from beneath the city, narrowly avoiding the drive-wheel. It was a house-high metal spider, its fat hull supported by eight hydraulic legs, each ending in a broad, clawed disc of a foot. Black smoke spurted from exhaust-ports on its flanks as it ran eastward, back along the track made by Anchorage’s runners.

“A parasite!” growled Scabious, dashing out on to a maintenance platform above the drive-wheel to watch it go. Anger bubbled up inside him, forcing apart the locks and bolts with which he had fastened down his feelings since his son died. Some filthy parasite clinging to his city like a tick! Some thieving parasite-boy tricking him into believing that his Axel had returned!

“We’ll stop them!” he shouted to his people. “We’ll teach them to steal from Anchorage! Tell the Wheelhouse ready about! Umiak, Kinvig, Kneaves, with me!”

Anchorage dug in its starboard ice-rudders and came about. For a while nobody aboard could see anything for the glittering curtains of snow the runners had flung into the air. Then the parasite appeared again, a mile ahead, veering north-east. The city put on speed to give chase, while Scabious’s people heaved the jaws open and gnashed them to clear the ice that had formed on the banks of steel teeth. Searchlights fumbled across the snow, stretching the parasite’s crooked running shadow ahead of it. Closer, closer, until the jaws were snapping so near to the thing’s stern that a puff of smoke from its exhausts was trapped inside. “Once more!” bellowed Scabious, standing on the floor of his city’s small gut. “This time he’s ours!”