Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Tom felt pleased by the way the rekilling of the birds lifted his fellow Londoners’ spirits, but he could not help wondering whether shooting them had been wise. Might it not just make their masters even more suspicious about what was happening inside the wreck?

Chudleigh Pomeroy told him not to fret. “Those birds have seen nothing that would make the Storm think we’re anything but a rabble of squatters. Even if they had, the Storm have bigger worries than us. By the time they get around to sending airships over, New London will be gone.”

Tom surreptitiously touched wood. He knew the Engineers were working as hard as they could to perfect the Childermass engines, but he could not help thinking of the failed test yesterday. What if the next test was a failure too?

He wished he could do more to help. He had been moved when Chudleigh Pomeroy had asked him to become Head Historian, and he took his relic collecting seriously, but he knew that it was a made-up job, not really necessary. New London was about the future, not the past.

With lunch over, Pomeroy announced that he was going to the Womb, and Tom volunteered to go with him. He had repaired the Jenny Haniver often enough, after all; he was sure the Engineers could find some small welding or wiring task to entrust him with aboard their new city. But they had not gone more than twenty yards from Crouch End when the danger bell began to ring again.

“Merciful Quirke!” exclaimed Pomeroy, turning back toward the entrance. “How are we supposed to get anything done at all with these incessant interruptions? I’ve a good mind to write a stiff letter to General Naga and tell him it just ain’t neighborly…”

Tom had grown quite used to the sight of distant Stalker-birds, but those new carcasses strung up outside the canteen made him uneasy. He glanced at the sky as he hurried Pomeroy toward shelter, and he was glad he had. The birds had returned in force, and they were not circling dots this time, but hurtling black shapes, dropping like missiles out of the sun.

“Get down!” he shouted, shoving Pomeroy to the ground just as a bird swept over, its steel claws whisking past a fraction of an inch above the old man’s head. The danger bell was jangling again, and on the road to the Womb people were scattering and shouting. Saab Peabody, who’d downed a spy bird earlier, came running out of Crouch End with his lightning gun at the ready, keen to add another to his tally. A bird came down on him, flailing its razor claws at his face, and he dropped the gun and fell blinded and screaming. Other birds were crashing through the beanpoles in the vegetable gardens, harrying a small, terrified group of children as their teachers tried to herd them into the safety of Crouch End. Even in there, among the cozy huts, the dead wings flapped.

Tom watched it all, trembling, doing his best to shelter Pomeroy. Saab seemed to have passed out; his lightning gun had fallen only a few feet away, and in his younger days Tom might have tried to reach it and do something heroic, but he was terrified of having another seizure, and so scared of the birds that he could barely move.

Wren, Theo, and Cat had just emerged out of the rust hills west of Crouch End when the attack began. They all heard the bell clanging, and the two girls stared without really understanding as the people below them scattered before the swift, swooping shapes of the birds.

“That’s Dad!” said Wren, seeing Tom pinned to the ground beside Pomeroy, about thirty feet away. She turned to Theo, but Theo had already seen Tom for himself, and he was sprinting toward him through the bird-scoured sunlight.

Cat started to sob with panic. Wren snatched her crossbow and clicked the safety catch off. They acted very military, these young Londoners, but it had always been a game for them till now; they’d never seen real violence before. Wren had, and although she knew she would shake like jelly later, for the moment she was very calm. She took aim at a bird as it plunged toward Theo, and put a bolt through its body just before it reached him. One crossbow bolt would not rekill a Stalker-bird, but the blow was enough to throw it off course, and Theo ran on without even knowing the danger he had been in.

The bird’s attention had been drawn to Wren. It swerved toward her. She grabbed another bolt from Cat’s quiver, but the bird would be upon her long before she could reload. She dropped the bow, snatched up a twisted length of iron drainpipe from the mounds of wreckage beside the path, and smashed it out of the air as its claws came reaching for her. Then Cat grabbed a shard of metal too, and together they beat the thrashing bird to pieces.

Theo was halfway to Tom before he realized that he hadn’t a plan. He had only started running because he wanted Wren to see that he was brave, and because he had always thought that Mr. Natsworthy really couldn’t look after himself. Bird shadows whisked across the ground; the reflections of wings flashed up at him from puddles. He wasn’t even armed…

A little way beyond Tom and the old man a silvery gun lay on the ground. Theo threw himself at it, feeling claws rip the air above him as he dived. He rolled over, fumbling with the gun, feeling for a trigger among its complicated array of wires and tubes. He wished it had been something simpler— all soldiers knew that you couldn’t rely on that sort of back-engineered Old Tech garbage—but he told himself that beggars can’t be choosers, and pointed the gun at a passing bird. When he squeezed what he hoped was the trigger, a bolt of pure lightning dropped the bird limp and smoldering at his feet. Startled, he stood up, swinging the gun toward another bird. When he had brought down four of them, the others started to notice him, but by then Londoners were shooting at them too—gaudy crackles of energy leaping from other guns like his, smoking birds and showers of feathers falling all around.

And then, quite suddenly, the attack was over. A lone bird soared eastward, too high to be touched by the bolts of lightning that crackled up at it. The danger bell clanged on and on and on until someone went to tell the girl who was ringing it that she could stop now. People appeared nervously from the holes and clefts where they had been hiding, brushing rust flakes from their clothes, silent and pale with shock. The injured moaned; their friends shouted for help.

“Why did they attack?” people were asking. “Why now? After all these years…”

“That wasn’t a real attack,” said Theo, starting to shiver a little as he imagined what could have happened to him if those had been heavy assault birds instead of a reconnaissance flock. “That was a probe; they want to test your strength.” He stared about, getting his first real look at this unlikely settlement.

The Londoners stared back at him, wondering where he had sprung from, this young man in the uniform of their enemy.

Tom stood slowly and started to help Chudleigh Pomeroy stand too. His heart was beating very hard, but he did not feel ill; his only worrying symptom was a hallucination that would not fade; he seemed to see Theo Ngoni standing before him, clutching a lightning gun.

“Hello, Mr. Natsworthy,” said the hallucination, with a nervous wave.

And then Wren came running—dirty, and with a cut on her forehead, but otherwise unharmed, thank Quirke—running to hug him and ask was he all right? and say, “It’s Theo, Daddy; Theo’s here; you remember Theo; Theo’s come all the way from Africa to find us.”

It was not a good time for a young Anti-Tractionist in a Green Storm greatcoat to arrive in London. People were frightened and angry, shaking their fists toward Shan Guo and asking what they had ever done to make the Mossies attack them. Things might have gone badly for Theo if it had not been for the fact that he had shot down five of the nightmare birds. “That don’t signify anything,” insisted Mr. Garamond. “That could all be part of their plan, to make us accept him so he can murder us all in our beds!” But Pomeroy told him to put a sock in it; the young man had saved him, and a lot of other people besides, and he, for one, was ready to welcome him.