Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Wolf stared at the burning horizon. “What of Murnau?”

“Can’t say. There’s interference on every frequency now. But it looks like the Mossies have found themselves a new toy.” He waited for an order. None came. “Do you want us to turn back, or what?”

“Turn back?” The notion was mildly surprising to Wolf. He considered it for a while, then shook his head. “Do you know what survived best after the Sixty Minute War, Hausdorfer? Rats and roaches. It’s true. I read it in a history book. Cockroaches and rats. So let the old cities burn. It’s Harrowbarrow’s time now. A time for cunning, creeping things. Fire up the engines. Steer straight on to London.”

Hester and her companions had watched from the gun slits of General Xao’s new headquarters as the fire from the sky reached down and touched the cities that were closing in on Forward Command, turning them one by one into plumes of blazing fuel and incandescent gas. Grike was with them but saw nothing. The pulses of energy from the mysterious weapon upset the equally mysterious machines inside his head, making his eyes go blank and his armored body shudder helplessly. Lesser Stalkers, who did not have Grike’s strength or Oenone Zero on hand to tend to them, fared even worse. At dawn the defenders of Forward Command found their battle-Stalkers scattered in the trenches like fallen lead soldiers. But by then it did not matter, for on the western plains, where cities and suburbs and flocks of airships had been massed, there was now nothing but smoke.

“What have they done to the sky?” asked Hester, looking from the window at breakfast time. She was still feeling weak from her head wound. She thought at first that the marbled haze that hung over the rooftops was the first sign of a relapse; something gone wrong with her eye or her brain. But a glance at the frightened faces of Oenone and Pennyroyal told her that they could see it too.

The sun rose, pink and shrunken. Flakes that looked like snow were drifting down everywhere. “Snow?” Pennyroyal complained. “In summertime?”

“it is ash,” announced Grike. ” the sky is full of ash.”

General Xao took advantage of the lull in the fighting to have the Fury repaired. “We cannot make contact with Shan Guo,” she told her guests. “The new weapon seems to have interfered with our radio sets. So I am sending you home to Naga with a message. We need orders. Are we to advance? Recapture the ground they took from us? Or do we simply wait for them to surrender?”

Oenone looked at the columns of smoke rising from the dead Traction Cities. She said, “I can’t believe Naga had such a thing and never told me of it. I can’t believe he used it. All those lives gone. It’s horrible!”

Xao bowed. “Personally, I agree. But let’s not say it too loudly, Excellency. My people are most impressed with the new weapon.”

And it was true; as they walked to the docking pan where the Fury lay, the four companions could hear the cheers and songs of victory rising from the lower levels of Forward Command and from all the trenches and fortifications around about. Gunshots popped like champagne corks as relieved.

Green Storm soldiers loosed off some of the ammunition they had been saving for the cities at the sky instead. When a bullet skipped off the metal pavement a few feet ahead of them, they assumed at first it was a spent round falling. “Sweet Poskitt!” cried Pennyroyal indignantly. “They’ll have somebody’s eye out in a minute!”

Only when a flushed, furious-looking soldier lurched out into their path, working another round into the chamber of his carbine, did they understand that the bullet had been aimed at Oenone.

“Aleutian!” the soldier shouted. He pointed her out to his comrades, who were hurrying up behind him. “There she is, friends! The Aleutian traitor who tried to destroy the Wind-Flower and set up Naga in her place!”

Grike stepped in front of Oenone and unsheathed his finger-glaives. The soldier’s companions drew back hastily, but he held his ground, still shouting. “Your time is over, Aleutian! She is risen! We have all heard the stories! A Stalker killing a thousand townies aboard Brighton! An amphibious limpet found on the sacred mountain! The Stalker Fang has returned!”

Hester pulled out her gun, but Oenone caught her wrist before she could shoot the angry soldier. “No. Leave him. Who knows what he’s been through?”

Already some of General Xao’s men were hurrying from the docking pans to pull the troublemaker away. As they seized him, the man screamed, “Naga could not have made the cities burn like this! This is her victory! The Stalker Fang has returned to Tienjing and killed the crippled coward! Fly home, Aleutian, so she can kill you, too!”

Xao’s men bundled him away. Oenone was shaking. Hester took her arm and guided her quickly toward the docking pan. “Don’t worry. He’s mad. Or drunk.”

“I have heard the same rumors from other once-born here,” said Grike. ” the idea that their old leader had returned was a comfort to them when defeat seemed inevitable.”

“But Fang is dead, isn’t she?” Pennyroyal said, trying to shield himself behind the Stalker. “You smashed her.”

“She is dead,” said Oenone. “She must be…”

But she was still trembling slightly half an hour later as the Fury carried her into the stained sky and began the journey homeward to Tienjing.

London. The night giving way to lightless dawn. Fog everywhere. Fog on the edge of the wreck, where the debris merges into green scrub country; fog in the wreck’s heart, where it rolls among the steep mounds of corroded deck plate. Fog on the Womb road, fog on the rust hills. Fog creeping into the cabins and huts of Crouch End, fog hovering around blind lookout posts and lifeless windmills, fog drooping on the steering vanes and rigging of the Archaeopteryx in her secret hangar. Fog piled so deep over the plain that Stalker-birds on watch above can see nothing of London beyond a few tall spires of debris that rise out of the vapor like jagged islands breaking from a white sea.

Wren woke from unsettling dreams to the drip, drip, drip of moisture falling from the eaves; Theo beside her (so at least he hadn’t been a dream); her father still not home. She slipped reluctantly away from Theo’s warmth and roamed through the chilly hut, peeking into each room. “Dad? Daddy?”

His letter crunkled beneath her feet as she came back to Theo. Her head was still stuffed with sleep; she had to read his short message twice before she started to understand.

Her cry woke Theo, and she thrust the letter at him.

My dear Wren,

By the time you read this, I shall already be in the air. I’m sorry to leave without saying good-bye, but, as you wrote once to me, “you would only try to stop me.” I don’t want to be stopped, and I don’t want to remember you crying and upset, or angry at me. I will remember you always as I saw you tonight, safe with Theo.

I am going to try and explain to the Green Storm that New London is not a threat to them. This new weapon has changed everything, but I believe General Naga is a good man, and perhaps if I can make him understand that we Londoners are not so very different to his own people, he will let us go in peace. Perhaps I can even persuade him to stop using the weapon. I have to try.

I hope I shall be back in a few days, to see New London leave, but if I die, it really doesn’t matter; the truth is, Wren, I am dying anyway. The doctor I saw in Peripatetiapolis told me that. I have been dying for a long time, and I shall soon be dead, with or without any help from the Green Storm.