Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

The thought made his heart ache—or maybe that was the result of the climb from Crouch End. He swallowed one of his green pills and went with Clytie through the entrance to the Womb.

Inside the shadowy hangar New London waited, squatting heavily on its oily stanchions and looking less likely to take to the air than any object Tom had ever seen. Small figures were running about on its hull, gesticulating at one another. The Engineers seemed to be having trouble with one of their Magnetic Repellers. Tom scanned the crowd of onlookers for Wren and saw her standing near the front with Angie and Saab and a few other young people whose names he could never remember. He felt proud of her, and glad that she was settling in here and making friends. Seeing her from a distance, he was reminded of Katherine Valentine; she had something of Katherine’s grace and liveliness, the same quick, dazzling smile. It had never struck him before, but then he had not given much thought to Katherine before he’d returned to London. Now that he had noticed it, the strange likeness was inescapable.

Wren seemed to sense him staring at her; she turned and saw him, standing on tiptoe to wave at him over the sea of heads. Tom waved back and hoped it was not bad luck to compare her to poor, ill-fated Katherine.

A handbell started to ring. “This is it,” said Clytie. Engineers bustled through the crowd, warning people to stay back near the hangar walls. Everyone fell quiet, looking up expectantly. In the silence they heard Dr. Childermass, who was aboard the new city, call out, “Ready everybody? Now!”

There was a humming sound that rose quickly until it was too high to hear. Nothing else happened. One of the stanchions near the new city’s stern gave a long groan, as if it shared everyone’s disappointment. Then the other stanchions began to creak and squeak as well, and Tom realized that it was because they were relaxing; New London, whose dead weight they had supported all these years, was no longer pressing down on them. Scraps of rust came whispering down like November leaves. A forgotten paintbrush fell from a gantry and clattered on the Womb floor. The Magnetic Repellers swiveled slightly as Engineers in the city’s control rooms realigned them, but they still looked like big, misty mirrors; no crackling lightning, no mystical glow, just a faint flicker in the air around them, like a heat haze.

Slowly, slowly, like some ungainly insect taking flight, New London rose from its scrap-metal cradle and turned a little, first to one side, then the other. It edged forward, and again Tom sensed that faint hum. “It works!” people started to whisper, glancing at one another’s faces, making sure that they were not imagining this.

This was how it must have felt when the first airship flew, thought Tom, or when the divine Quirke first switched on London’s land engines. Lavinia Childermass’s machines were going to change the world in ways he could not imagine. Perhaps by the time Wren’s grandchildren were born, all cities would hover. Perhaps there would be no need for cities at all…

There was a sharp crack. Smoke squirted from some of the vents in New London’s keel. The heat-haze ripple around the repellers vanished, and the hovering city dropped gracelessly back onto its stanchions with a bellow of straining metal. The spectators groaned in disappointment, pressing themselves against the walls of the Womb as the stanchions swayed and workers ran forward to steady them.

“It don’t work!” complained a woman standing close to Tom.

“It’s a dud!” said another.

Lavinia Childermass appeared among the unfinished buildings at the edge of New London’s upper hull. The Womb’s acoustics and her own nervousness made her speech almost impossible to hear, but as Tom pushed his way to the exit, he caught a few fragments of what she was saying: “A small problem with the Kliest Coils … mustn’t give up … much work still to do … fine tuning … adjustments … wait a few more weeks …”

But do we have a few more weeks? Tom wondered. For as he stepped outside, he heard the drone of Green Storm airships heading west, and another sound, which he thought at first was thunder and then realized was the rumble of immense guns, somewhere beyond the western horizon.

“I see you’re feeling better.”

“This is better?”

“Well, conscious. That’s an improvement.”

Hester rubbed her eye and tried to bring the ceiling into focus. She felt as thin as water, as if her whole body were just a damp stain drying slowly on this hard horsehair bed. A ghost leaned over her and solidified into someone she ought to know. She began to remember Airhaven; the girl she’d sprung from Varley’s freighter, Lady Naga. She remembered the blow on her head, the fight on Strut 13.

“You’ve been very ill.” Oenone talked like a doctor, and had changed her sackcloth dress for some kind of white military tunic, but she still looked like a schoolboy. Hester stared at her taped-together spectacles and crooked teeth. “You’ll be all right now; the wound is healing well.”

Hester remembered airships; the Shadow Aspect and then that big Green Storm job. Taking off into thunder. People yelling at each other; her yelling; Grike holding her. Grike must be disappointed that she’d survived. She raised her head from the pillow to look for him, but he was not there. She was alone with Oenone in a square ivory-colored room. Metal shutters had been folded open to let afternoon light in through a big window. On a chair in the corner her clothes were piled up, neatly folded, her pack and boots beside them on the floor. A couple of her larger guns were propped against the wall, solid and somehow reassuring in this unfamiliar space.

“What is this place?”

“We’re at Forward Command,” Oenone said. “It’s an old Traction City that the Storm took years ago.”

“Not in Shan Guo, then?”

“Not yet. The Fury was badly damaged when we left the line. The cities broke through faster than anyone expected, and their flying machines were everywhere. We limped this far, and we’ve been stuck here ever since. General Xao is here too. She’s trying to organize a second line of defense, and she’s promised to send us on our way as soon as the Fury can be repaired. But at the moment her mechanics are too busy keeping fighting ships airworthy to work on the Fury. There’s heavy fighting going on north and south of here. This place is just an island in an ocean of hungry cities…”

Hester half listened, trying to order her vague memories of her illness and the journey east. She knew now how Theo had felt after she’d rescued him from Cutler’s Gulp. She wished she’d shown him more sympathy.

“What about the others?” she said.

“Mr. Grike is here, quite undamaged. He sat with you all the time you were ill, but today General Xao has persuaded him to go out to the front-line trenches to help build the defenses. Manchester and a dozen other cities are closing in on us from the west, so she needs all the help she can get. I’ve sent word to him that you were stirring; he’s bound to be here soon. He’ll be delighted that you’ve pulled through.”

“I doubt it,” said Hester. “What about Theo?”

Oenone hesitated. “Professor Pennyroyal is here too. He’s been flirting shamelessly with General Xao—”

“Theo? What about Theo?”

Oenone looked down, hiding behind her annoying black bangs.

“Gods and goddesses!” Hester heaved herself sideways off the bed. She tried to stand, but her head swirled. Something tugged at her arm, and she looked down and saw a transparent plastic tube emerging from the flesh beneath her elbow, attached to an upturned bottle on a stand beside her bed. She cried out in horror and disgust.