Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“Nothing to worry about, Wren,” he said. “It seems my forward rocket batteries just shot down a Green Storm warship. The savages are in London already.”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry!” He laughed at the look of dismay upon her face. “We have dealt with the Green Storm before. My lookouts say that these ships are old; a ragbag of freighters and transports. Naga clearly doesn’t think your London friends are worth sending a real unit to deal with. We shall crush them easily.”

He shouted instructions at Hausdorfer, and the navigator shouted in turn down the speaking tubes beside the helm. The suburb increased its speed, and shocks came trembling through the deck and walls of the bridge as it butted massive chunks of rusting metal aside and track plates and sections of old building went tumbling over the hull or were crunched and crushed beneath the heavy tracks. Wren braced herself against the chart table. Wolf Kobold put his arm around her. “It will be all right,” he promised. “In an hour we’ll be there. Thank you for this shortcut, Wren. I won’t forget it.”

Maybe there would be no sprites, thought Wren. Or maybe they were striking Harrowbarrow’s hull already, dozens of them, doing no harm at all against its thick armor. Maybe all she had achieved by her ruse was to ensure that New London would be devoured even sooner.

And would it really be so bad if it was? It would serve the Londoners right for what they’d done to her. And good might come of it. She imagined Harrowbarrow growing strong and glorious on Dr. Childermass’s technology; a hovering city many tiers high. And she could be chatelaine of it all. Perhaps Wolf would make her Frau Kobold, lady mayoress of his new city. After her time in the debris fields the thought of a life surrounded by his tasteful furnishings and books seemed quite attractive. And she would tame him, make him treat his workers and his captives fairly…

“We’re entering your valley, Wren,” said Wolf warmly, listening to another report from Hausdorfer, who was taking a turn at the periscope. “The way is clear ahead, just as you promised.”

Theo and Jake ran through some trackless tangle of debris, pushing past wires and hawsers, girders, fallen tier supports like felled redwoods. Their clothes were singed and charred by the fires they had escaped from as the Archaeopteryx came down. They did not know where they were, or where they were going, and they could not hear each other speak because of the immense din of engines and scraping, grinding, tearing, squealing metal, which seemed to come from all around them, and from the sky above them, and up through the ground beneath their running feet.

A cleft between two rubble heaps ahead. A sort of path— or more likely just a streambed, where water sluiced down off the heights of the wreckage when it rained. Jake ran toward it, shouting something. Theo started to hurry after him and then glimpsed a sign in the debris, half hidden by the scales of rust that were avalanching down the sides of the heaps as they shook and shifted under the weight of the nearby suburb. A crude skull and crossbones. DANGER.

Theo remembered something Wren had told him about Electric Lane.

“Jake!”

Ahead of him Jake was stumbling out through the cleft into a broad, fire-stained valley. “Watch out!” Theo hollered over the noise that made it impossible to hear even his own thoughts. “Come back! The lightning will get you!”

“What?”

Something got Jake, but it wasn’t lightning. An immense steel snout burst out from the steep wall of wreckage that formed the far side of the valley. Jake started to run back toward Theo, and a segment of clawed steel track came down on him like a giant’s foot; a wheel two stories tall rolled over him and on, and then another and another. The suburb’s engines whinnied and growled as it dragged itself free of the wreckage and started to turn, making ready to speed east along the valley. Only a small suburb, but from where Theo stood it seemed world filling: an armored escarpment pocked and pitted with tiny windows, gun slits, air vents, hatch covers, and a stitchwork of rivets; people inside it somewhere all unaware of the boy they had just squashed beneath their tracks.

Theo scrambled backward as the wreckage he stood on began to slide and toss, churned into restless waves. He tried running, but the broad, flat fragment of deck plate he chose to run across began to tilt steeper and steeper, until he was climbing a hill, crawling up a cliff, struggling to keep a fingerhold upon a sheer wall. He fell, struck some other piece of wreckage, windmilled, tumbled down the valley’s side, and landed hard in mud and water at the bottom.

He lay there shivering, glad of the brackish water seeping through his clothes because its cold touch told him he was still alive. “Thank God!” he whispered. “Thank God!” And then, opening his eyes, realized that there was not as much to be thankful for as he had thought.

The stunted trees that grew around the edges of the pool he lay in were charcoal statues. Beyond them was Harrowbarrow. A steel tsunami, rolling straight toward him, tumbled debris foaming and frothing ahead of it. Theo pushed himself up and started to run, but from the wreckage ahead of him an immense brightness burst, crackling overhead, flinging his jittery shadow on the rust flakes at the edge of the pool.

Electricity, in blinding skeins, tied Harrowbarrow to the valley walls. Lightning tiptoed across its metal hide, licked in through windows and silo mouths, set fire to scraps of vegetation clinging to the tracks and bow shield. The engine roar faltered and failed, and in its place was a crackling, crinkling, cellophane noise, like God crumpling his toffee wrappers.

In the dancing blue light Theo splashed through the shallows and flung himself at the only thing that was not made of metal—a boulder, dredged from the earth by London’s tracks. He scrambled onto its dry top, praying that his movements and his wet clothes would not draw the surging electricity down on him. Above his head the sky was hidden by a cage of blue fire; Harrowbarrow was scrawled with scribbles of light. Sparks chased through the debris around the boulder’s foot, and the wet mud fizzed. A tree caught fire with a woof and burned like a match.

Then, abruptly, the storm ceased. A few last sparks, yelping like ricochets, arced across the gaps between Harrowbarrow and the valley walls. Wreckage slithered down around the suburb’s tracks with a sliding clatter. Smoke shifted slowly, smelling of ozone. Theo remembered to breathe.

Harrowbarrow lay silent, motionless, its armor scarred by smoldering wounds where the sprites had touched.

“Wren?” said Theo into the silence. “Wren?”

General Naga stood on the sloping floor of the Womb and looked up at New London. He could see himself reflected in the long curve of the tiny city’s underside, and again in one of those strange, dull mirrors that hung beneath it. Why would anyone build such a thing? Could Natsworthy have been telling the truth? Did the Londoners believe that this contraption would actually fly?

He tried to force his doubts aside. He was a soldier—he was used to doing that; but today, for some reason, the doubts stayed, nagging. If this mad city was really all that London’s Engineers had been building, then where was the transmitter that controlled the new weapon? Had Oenone been telling him the truth too? Had he shamed and struck her for no reason?

The soldiers he had sent aboard New London were returning, climbing down one of the steep boarding ladders. The young signals officer he had put in charge of the search ran across the oily floor and saluted. “Excellency, we have found no sign of a transmitter. Certainly nothing powerful enough to reach the orbital weapon.”