Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“So why didn’t you knock us out and carry us into the Out-Country?” asked Wren.

“Good question,” grumbled one of the committee men, glaring at Garamond.

“It wasn’t practical!” said Garamond huffily. “They came in by airship, not on foot. They seemed like scavengers, not castaways. And Mr. Natsworthy here doesn’t look any too healthy. If my lads had chloroformed him, he might never have woken up…”

Tom started to protest that there was nothing wrong with him; that he would have positively welcomed a good, bracing dose of chloroform. Luckily, before an argument could develop, the food arrived: bread and butter, apple crumble and home-baked biscuits, elderflower wine in old tin water bottles.

“I see you have learned to live off the bare earth,” said Wolf Kobold softly. “Just like the Mossies.”

Clytie Potts smiled brightly at him; she was taken with this handsome young newcomer, and missed the faint edge of disgust in his voice. “Oh, we grow all sorts of things in the patches of soil between the rust heaps. It’s very fertile. Some of the survivors were workers in the agricultural districts before MEDUSA, and they have taught us all about growing food. And our scavenging teams find all sorts of things among the ruins: tinned goods, sugar, tea. There are fewer than two hundred people in London now, so we’ve enough for everyone.”

“We hunt, too,” said Angie eagerly. “Rabbits and birds and things make their ’omes in the debris fields…” She stopped as Mr. Garamond turned to glare at her; the other youngsters had been made to wait outside, and Wren suspected that Angie wasn’t supposed to be in the committee room at all.

“And Clytie brought in a few goats and sheep aboard that ship of hers,” added the quiet, elderly lady Engineer.

“But I don’t understand,” Tom was saying. “I mean, how did you survive at all? How do you come to be here? I thought…”

“You thought we were all dead,” said Pomeroy kindly, “which, by the way, is what I thought about you; that villain Valentine told me you’d fallen down a waste chute in the Gut. I’ve felt guilty ever since about having sent you down there that night. Wine?”

He filled a motley collection of tin beakers and enamel mugs, and another of the committee handed one to each of the newcomers while Pomeroy sat beaming at them, gathering his thoughts. Then, while they ate and drank, he told them of the last hours of London; of how the tension between the Guild of Historians and Crome’s power-hungry Engineers had ended with open warfare in the halls of the museum, and of how Katherine Valentine and Apprentice Engineer Pod had set off up the secret stairway called the Cat’s Creep to try and stop MEDUSA being used.

“Soon after that,” he said, “the Engineers attacked in force, and things grew rather confused. We fought like tigers, of course, but they had Stalkers and things, and they drove us back into the Natural History section. There weren’t many of us left by that time; Arkengarth and Pewtertide and Dr. Karuna had all been killed, and Clytie here was hurt pretty badly. I decided to make a last stand behind that old model of the Blue Whale—it had been taken down from the ceiling for some reason, and was lying on the floor, where it made a passable barricade. And as we crouched behind it, waiting for those Resurrected fellows to come and finish us, suddenly, boom! The building started to come apart at the seams…”

“Mr. Pomeroy threw me in through the whale’s mouth,” said Clytie Potts, looking sadly down at her hands as she spoke, as if the memories still upset her.

“Yes,” agreed Pomeroy, “and then, with extraordinary presence of mind, I jumped in after her. Just in time! I think the whole of Tier Two must have given way at that point. Light blazed in at me through every rent and bullet hole in the whale’s hide, and I felt it start to roll, to slide, to tumble through the air! After that I don’t remember much. Surfing down the sides of disintegrating cities inside fiberglass whales isn’t really my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I passed out fairly promptly.”

“The whale eventually came to rest between two fallen tier supports over on the southern edge of the main debris field,” explained Clytie, taking up the story. “Some workers from the salvage yards found it there, and helped us out. That was when I saw what had happened to the city. It was … oh, I can’t begin to describe it. There was fire everywhere, and dirty smoke boiling into the sky, and explosions going off all the time, so there was always wreckage rattling down, and ash falling softly everywhere, like black snow. And sometimes, out of the middle of the ruins, a huge claw of white light would come crackling, groping its way across the ground as if it were feeling for us…”

“Yes, those were dicey times,” said Pomeroy, nodding solemnly. “The League was about, too, hungry for revenge. We watched some of our fellow survivors venture out of the wreckage to give themselves up to a League patrol, and they were all shot on the spot. So Clytie and me and our salvage-yard friends decided to stay put. After a while we started to make contact with other little groups of survivors, and we banded together and wondered what to do. We thought about sneaking back west along the track marks, but where would that get us? Just into the slave holds of some scavenger town, probably, where we’d be no better off than with the League. So in the end we decided to stay here. London might have come a cropper, but it was still London, eh? Still home…”

His colleagues all nodded and muttered agreement, and Pomeroy gave the wall of the committee room an affectionate pat, which made it wobble alarmingly.

“We moved into Crouch End because it seemed safe from sprites,” explained Clytie, “and we were hidden here from the air patrols that the League kept sending over in those early days. There’s a big section of the Gut lying fairly undamaged about a half mile east of here, and we salvaged a lot of useful stuff from it; even a trunk full of money. So later, when the League patrols thinned out a bit, some of us were able to sneak out and buy the Archaeopteryx and start picking up a few other things we needed.”

“It must have been dangerous,” said Tom, thinking of his own experience of crossing the Green Storm’s lines.

“Impossible, sometimes,” admitted Clytie. “But we usually manage a few trips a year…”

“Collecting Old Tech, I gather,” said Wolf Kobold.

Clytie looked uncertain. Several of the councillors shifted uncomfortably in their salvaged chairs.

“And what about these Engineers?” Wolf Kobold went on, nodding at the bald-headed man and woman. “You seem very friendly with them, considering it was all their fault that London exploded in the first place.”

The lady Engineer said softly, “Not all of our Guild supported Magnus Crome and his insane plans. Those of us who opposed him were banished to lowly jobs in the prisons and factories of the Deep Gut. I suppose that’s what saved us. All Crome’s supporters were with him on Top Tier when MEDUSA failed.”

“We’ve been very glad of our Engineers over the years,” said Angie’s father, the wiry former laborer. “They’ve knocked together all sorts of handy contraptions for us— bicycle-powered electric hot plates, solar collectors, windmills, lifting gear. Electrical guns that can knock out the Green Storm’s mechanized spy birds. Dr. Abrol here”—he pointed to the other Engineer, who grinned modestly—“has built a receiver that allows us to listen in on the Storm’s radio traffic, so we’ll have fair warning if they ever do come looking for us. And Dr. Childermass, our deputy mayor, used to be head of the Mag-Lev Research Division. It’s she—”