Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

Theo and Wren fled and found a spindly ladder leading up through the sousaphone maze of ducts and tubes that coiled above their heads. Condensation fell on them like warm rain as they dragged themselves up under the curve of the suburb’s armor. At the top of the ladder was a hatch; it took both of them to twist the heavy handles and heave it open. Daylight came pouring in, and fresh, cold wind. Wren looked down the ladder and saw flashlights moving on the catwalk below; men gathering to stare at her and point. Then Theo, who was already through the hatch, reached back to pull her up into the open air.

At least I’ll die in daylight, she thought, lying panting on the filthy armored back of Harrowbarrow. A narrow walkway ran along the suburb’s spine, without handrails. On either side of it a few hundred feet of battered armor sloped down to the suburb’s edges, where the tracks ground by, clogged with earth and hunks of rust. Beyond them the spires and spikes of ruined London sped past.

Theo slammed the hatch shut behind them and started to drag Wren away from it ; shouting something about Kobold’s men following them up, but before they had gone very far, the metal around them suddenly erupted in sparks and little spurts of smoke and dust, and she realized they were being machine-gunned—not very accurately, thank Quirke.

Theo flung himself down, half on top of her, as a plump white shape soared above the wreckage to larboard. Through the spray of rust and soil flung up by Harrowbarrow’s tracks Wren saw that it was a rather elderly-looking airship with the markings of the Green Storm, gun turrets swiveling to squirt fire at the racing suburb.

“The Storm are here!” she shouted.

“We’re friends!” Theo yelled. Wren held on to him to save him from being thrown off Harrowbarrow’s back as he waved his arms and shouted, “Help! Help!” But to the aviators in that ship he was just another flea-size shape creeping about on the suburb they’d been ordered to destroy; they swung their guns toward him again, and Wren heard the bullets swishing overhead as she pulled him down beside her.

A few yards from where they lay a circular hatch cover slid open in the suburb’s armor, and a revolving gun emplacement popped up like a jack-in-the-box. It had been built on the turntable of an old fairground carousel from a coastal pleasure town that Harrowbarrow had eaten long ago, and as it spun around and around, cheerful calliope music came from it, along with puffs of gun smoke and streamers of white steam. The barrels of its four long guns recoiled rhythmically into their armored housing as they fired, lacing the sky above the suburb with cannon shells. The airship that had shot at Wren and Theo burst into flames and was left quickly behind as the suburb went thundering on. Overhead, two other ships veered away, envelopes and tail fins filling with ragged holes.

The coming of Harrowbarrow could be heard in the Womb by that time. As the Londoners struggled aboard their new city with whatever possessions they had managed to save, the scrap-metal clangor of the approaching suburb filled the sky outside and echoed around the central hangar.

A Green Storm runner came to find Naga, who was waiting on the open stretch of deck plate at New London’s stern. “Our airships can’t hold her, sir. The Belligerent Peony has just been downed. Only the Fury and the Protecting Veil are left.”

“Pull them clear,” ordered Naga. “Tell the ground troops to get aboard this … machine.” He turned as Lavinia Childermass came running out of the stairwell that led down to her engine districts. “Well, Londoner?”

“We are ready, I think,” the old Engineer said.

“Good. The harvester suburb is nearly upon us. I am going aboard my airship. I shall try to hold it off as long as I can, but it is strong. Best pray that your New London is fast.”

“It is fast,” promised Dr. Childermass as Naga turned away, his stomping armor carrying him toward the boarding ladders up which squads of Green Storm troopers were hurrying. She ran after him, jostled by passing soldiers. “You should stay, General! The birth of a town is a great event!”

Naga turned, and bowed, and hurried on. “Good luck, Engineer!” she heard him shout. She watched him go, thinking how strange it was that he should turn out to be New London’s midwife. Then, remembering her position, she went haring back to her own post. The deck plates were trembling as, one by one, her assistants threw the starting levers of the Childermass engines. By the time she reached her command room in the heart of the underdeck, the faint whine of the repellers had risen to a pitch beyond her hearing, and there was an odd, bobbing movement in the floor. New London was airborne.

She reached for the speaking tube that linked her to the lord mayor’s navigation room, high in the new town hall. “Hello! Ready?”

“Ready,” came Garamond’s voice, muffled and peevish. Lavinia Childermass hung the tube in its cradle and looked at the scared, expectant, grimy faces of her crew. Even down here she could hear the crash and rattle as Harrowbarrow shouldered its way toward her through the debris fields. She nodded, and her people sprang to their controls.

Outside the Womb, Naga watched Harrowbarrow’s scouts scurry aside as the noise of their suburb’s approach grew louder. He fired his pistol at a couple of them, to speed them on their way. The sky above those rust hills west of Crouch End was filling with dust and debris, as if a scrap-metal geyser had erupted there. And suddenly the hills themselves shifted, slithered, bulged and burst apart, and tearing through them came Harrowbarrow’s brutal snout.

The Womb lurched and seemed to settle. At its northern end Peabody’s men had set off their explosive charges, and with a dreamy slowness the tall, corroded doors at the hangar mouth fell forward, crashing down into the rust and rubble outside.

Harrowbarrow ground its way over the ruins of Crouch End, bright rags of curtains and carpet snagging on its clawed tracks. The cruiser Protecting Veil fired a flight of rockets at it and rose out of range before the one remaining swivel gun on Harrowbarrow’s back could swing around to target her. The Fury swooped toward the Womb, and Naga ran forward and leaped aboard as she hovered for a moment just above the ground. By the time his armor had hauled him through the hatch and onto the flight deck, the ship was high again. An aviatrix came running to him with reports, but Naga waved her away, tense as an expectant father. He went to a gun slit and peered down at the mouth of the Womb.

“Come on!” he muttered. “Come on!”

Crouching on Harrowbarrow’s spine, Wren and Theo tried to shield each other as the rust hills broke over the suburb like a wave. Giant fists and fangs of metal came clattering and scraping over the armor, some tumbling high into the air, some caroming over the hull so close that Wren felt the wind of them as they whisked past her. Then they were gone, Crouch End was being crushed beneath the tracks, and ahead, on the crest of the next ridge, the Womb lay waiting. “Look!” she shouted. “Theo! Look!”

From the open doorway of the old hangar New London was emerging, the magnetic mirrors on its flanks shining like sovereigns. It hovered outside the Womb for a moment, dipping a little, uncertain of itself. A newborn city, thought Wren, like something from the olden days, and she wished and wished that her father could be here with her to see it.

Righting itself, New London started to move, the heat haze shimmer beneath its hull increasing as it put on speed, hovering away northward across the debris field. And Harrowbarrow swung northward too, the jolt of its snarling engines throwing Wren off her balance as it began powering in pursuit of the new city. She sprawled awkwardly backward, afraid for a moment that she would roll down the slope into the endlessly grinding teeth of the suburb’s tracks, but she managed to find a handhold. As she clawed her way back to Theo, she saw the hatch they had come through heave open again and Wolf Kobold climb out.