Philip Reeve: A Darkling Plain

The Stalker Fang limped around her chamber. Her bronze face was lit by the winking lights on the heap of machinery by the green numbers that flicked and squiggled on her Goggle Screens. Through the open doorway Tom and Hester watched, and each time her eyes were turned away from him, Tom made another little movement, easing himself closer to Hester, until he was able to reach out and touch the knife in her belt.

“Not long now,” the Stalker whispered, glad of this audience to whom she could explain her work.

Tom was thinking of Wren, hoping that New London would go nowhere near the Tannhäusers or any of the other mountains ODIN was to target. “Why volcanoes?” he asked. “I still don’t see how that can make the world green…”

The Stalker’s fingers spidered over ivory keyboards. “You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn’t only Traction Cities that poison the air and tear up the Earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It’s human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys. The Green Storm would never have understood that, which is why I didn’t tell them about my plans for ODIN. If we are really to protect the good Earth, we must first cleanse it of human beings.”

“That’s insane!” cried Tom.

“Inhuman, perhaps,” the Stalker admitted. “The ash of volcanoes will choke the sky and shroud the Earth in darkness. Winter will reign for hundreds of years. Mankind will perish. But life will survive. Life always does. When the skies clear at last, the world will grow green again. Lichens, ferns, grasses, forests, insects; higher animals eventually. But no more people. They only spoil things.”

“Anna would not want that,” said Tom.

“I am not Anna. I just use her memories to understand the world. And I understand that humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys that the good Earth cannot support. All human civilizations fall, Tom, and all for the same reason: Humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever.”

Tom struggled to rise, wondering if he could reach the machine, smash it, and pull out all those complicated cords and ducts. The Stalker Fang seemed to read his thoughts; the long blades slid out of her fingertips.

“Do be sensible, Tom,” she whispered. “You’re very ill, and I’m a Stalker. You’d never make it, and Hester wants you to stay alive for as long as you can. She loves you very much, you know.”

She moved behind her pile of machinery, making some adjustment to the cables that trailed up through the ceiling to the antenna on the roof. Tom tugged the knife out of Hester’s belt, and she fumbled it from him and clasped it between her hands, sawing awkwardly at the old ropes the Stalker had used to tie her wrists.

As he crept across the causeway, Pennyroyal tried to keep calm by imagining how he would describe all these adventures to his enthralled readership. Caution urged that I should stay away from that dreadful house, hut the fate of whole cities hung in the balance, and my poor companions were prisoners within. I knew that to run would leave an irredeemable blot on the honor of the Pennyroyals! (And I do need that key, Poskitt-damn-it!) My faithful native companion, Fishcake (can that be his real name?), led me to the end of the fatal causeway and would go no farther. I would not have allowed it anyway, for I could never let one so young risk his life in mortal combat with the Stalker. (Stalkeress? Stalkerine? Gods, I hope it doesn’t come to actual combat! I wish that lad had had the nerve to come instead of me; the beastly little coward…) It was a little unsettling, I confess, but as I went on alone through the gathering darkness, I began to feel curiously nerveless. I have found myself in a lot of dicey situations over the years, and what I’ve learned is that it’s always best to remain cool, collected, and— GREAT POSKITT’S HAIRY ARSE WHAT’S THAT?

Only an owl!

Only an owl…

Shuddering, Pennyroyal took a nip of brandy from his secret hip flask and started hunting along the water’s edge for Tom’s anti-Stalker gun. The boy had said that Hester had dropped it here somewhere. Pennyroyal didn’t mean to go any closer to that damned house without it. Ah! There it was. Still humming. Looked undamaged. A dashed odd-looking weapon, but they don’t call me Dead-eye Pennyroyal for nothing! Setting the stock of the strange gun firmly against my shoulder (is that where it’s supposed to go?), I resumed my catlike progress…

The Stalker Fang was busy with her machinery. From time to time the words and numbers crawling across the Goggle Screen were replaced with a furry, grayish picture. Tom realized that he was seeing what no human being had seen for millennia: the world from space, viewed through the eye of ODIN. Oddly, it was not very impressive.

Could ODIN really destroy humanity? Surely it would break, or run out of power, or something in that crazy stack of old machinery that the Stalker was using to talk to it would go wrong, and that would be the end of her plans. It made him angry that he and Hester had come so far and sacrificed so much to avert such a tatty effort. At least MEDUSA had looked worth dying for; its entrails had filled a cathedral, and its cobra hood had towered over London. This new weapon was just space junk, controlled by a mad old Stalker from a place that looked and smelled like a teenager’s bedroom…

Beside him, Hester gave a little grunt of triumph as the knife severed the rope on her wrists. She stooped to start work on the one that bound her ankles.

The Stalker Fang was talking to ODIN again, tapping at her ivory keys, whispering the codes to herself as she conducted her bargain-basement apocalypse. Sometimes she whispered something to Tom and Hester too: “Just think, my dears—all that pretty lava …” Anna Fang had liked having someone to talk to, and the Stalker she had become had inherited the taste. When Hester whispered, “Now!” and Tom rolled off the bed and stood up, she said, “Where are you going?”

“Come on!” hissed Hester, her arm around him, supporting him, dragging him toward the nearest window. She hadn’t Tom’s education, and she hadn’t really followed the Stalker’s rambling talk. All she cared about was saving Tom. She refused to believe that there was no hope at all.

But Tom knew there was little point in trying to outrun the Stalker Fang, who turned and came toward them as they neared the window. He twisted around to face her. Hester was still trying to drag him to the window, but Tom shook free of her. He had come to Shan Guo to talk, not to fight; if Naga wouldn’t listen to him, perhaps this Stalker might. I am not Anna, she had said, just a bundle of Anna’s memories… But what was anyone but a bundle of memories?

Tom reached out to her. “We can’t stay,” he said. “We have a daughter. She’ll need us.”

The Stalker’s eyes flickered. “A daughter …”

“Her name’s Wren.”

“A daughter …” She clapped her hands together with a clang. “Tom, Hester … How wonderful! When I, when Anna first saw you together, she, I knew you were meant for each other! And now you have a baby girl.”

“She’s not a baby girl anymore,” said Hester. “She’s a great big stroppy young woman.”

“We brought her up,” said Tom, “we kept her safe; we taught her things; she learned to fly the Jenny Haniver… And now you want to kill her along with everybody else.”

The Stalker shrugged—an odd movement for a Stalker; it made her armor grate. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette, Tom. Or is it the other way around? Where is she, this daughter of yours?”