Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

But first he must be certain that the Shaw girl can make no more trouble.

The car comes sighing to a halt outside one of the upper laboratories. A squat, white-coated barrel of a woman stands waiting at the entrance, hopping nervously from foot to foot. Evadne Twix is one of the best Engineers in London. She may look like someone’s dotty auntie and decorate her laboratory with pictures of flowers and puppies (a clear breach of Guild rules), but when it comes to her work she is utterly ruthless. “Hello, Lord Mayor,” she simpers, bowing. “How lovely to see you! Have you come to visit my babies?”

“I want to see Shrike,” he snaps, brushing past, and she dances along in his wake like a leaf in the slipstream of a passing city.

Through her laboratory they go, past startled, bowing Engineers, past glittering racks of glassware—and past tables where rusting metal skeletons are being painstakingly repaired. Dr Twix’s team has spent years studying the Stalkers, the Resurrected Men whose remains turn up sometimes in the Out-Country—and lately they have had more than just remains to work on.

“You have completed your researches on Shrike?” asks Crome as he strides along. “You are certain he is of no further use to us?”

“Oh, I’ve learned everything we can, Lord Mayor,” twitters the doctor. “He’s a fascinating piece of work, but really far more complicated than is good for him; he has almost developed his own personality. And as for his strange fixation with this girl… I shall make sure my new models are much simpler. Do you wish me to have him dismantled?”

“No.” Crome stops at a small, round door and touches a stud that sends it whirling open. “I intend to keep my promise to Shrike. And I have a job for him.”

Beyond the door hang shadows and a smell of oil. A tall shape stands motionless against a far wall. As the Lord Mayor steps into the room two round, green eyes snap on like headlights.

“Mr Shrike!” says Crome, sounding almost cheery. “How are we today? I hope you were not asleep?”

“I DO NOT SLEEP,” replies a voice from the darkness. It is a horrible voice, sharp as the squeal of rusty cogs. Even Dr Twix, who knows it well, shudders inside her rubber coat. “DO YOU WISH TO EXAMINE ME AGAIN?”

“No, Shrike,” Crome says. “Do you remember what you warned me of when you first came to me, a year and a half ago? About the Shaw girl?”

“I TOLD YOU THAT SHE IS ALIVE, AND ON HER WAY TO LONDON.”

“Well, it seems you were right. She turned up just as you said she would.”

“WHERE IS SHE? BRING HER TO ME!”

“Impossible, I’m afraid. She jumped down a waste-chute, back into the Out-Country.”

There is a slow hiss, like steam escaping, “I MUST GO AFTER HER.”

Crome smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that. One of my Guild’s Goshawk 90 reconnaissance airships has been made ready for you. The pilots will retrace the city’s tracks until you find where the girl fell. If she and her companion are dead, all well and good. If they are alive, kill them. Bring their bodies to me.”

“and then?” asks the voice.

“And then, Shrike,” Crome replies, “I will give you your heart’s desire.”

It was a strange time for London. The city was still travelling at quite high speed, as if there was a catch in sight, but there was no other town to be seen on the grey, muddy plains of the north western Hunting Ground, and everybody was wondering what the Lord Mayor could be planning. “We can’t just go driving on like this,” Katherine heard one of her servants mutter. “There are big cities further east, and they’ll scoff us up and spit out the bones!” But Mrs Mallow the housekeeper whispered back, “Don’t you know nothing, Sukey Blinder? Ain’t Mr Valentine himself being sent off on a hexpedition to spy out the land ahead? Him and Magnus Crome have got their eye on some vast great prize, you can be sure of it!”

Some vast great prize perhaps, but nobody knew what, and when Valentine came home at lunchtime from another meeting with the Guild of Engineers Katherine asked him, “Why do they have to send you off on a reconnaissance flight? That’s a job for a Navigator, not the best archaeologist in the world. It’s not fair!”

Valentine sighed patiently. “The Lord Mayor trusts me, Kate. And I will soon be back. Three weeks. A month. No more. Now, come down to the hangar with me, and we’ll see what Pewsey and Gench have been doing to that airship of mine.”

In the long millennia since the Sixty Minute War, airship technology had reached levels that even the Ancients had never dreamed of. Valentine had had the 13th Floor Elevator specially constructed, using some of the money that Crome had paid him for the Old-Tech he found on his trip to America, twenty years before. He said she was the finest airship ever built, and Katherine saw no reason to doubt him. Of course he didn’t keep her down at the Tier Five air-harbour with the common merchantmen, but at a private air-quay a few hundred yards from Clio House.

Katherine and her father walked towards it through the sunlit park. The hangar and the metal apron in front of it were busy with people and bugs as Pewsey and Gench set about loading the Elevator with provisions for the coming flight. Dog went hurrying ahead to sniff at the stacks of crates and drums: tinned meat, lifting gas, medicines, airship-puncture repair kits, sun lotion, gas-masks, flame-proof suits, guns, rain-capes, cold-weather coats, map-making equipment, portable stoves, spare socks, plastic cups, three inflatable dinghies and a carton labelled “Pink’s Patent Out-Country Mud-Shoes - Nobody Sinks with Pink’s!”

In the shadows of the hangar the great airship waited, her sleek, black, armoured envelope screened by tarpaulins. As usual, Katherine felt a rising thrill at the thought of that huge vessel lifting Father up into the sky—and a sadness too, that he was leaving her; and a fear that he might not return. “Oh, I wish I could go with you!” she said.

“Not this time, Kate,” her father told her. “One day, perhaps.”

“Is it because I’m a girl?” she asked. “But that doesn’t matter. I mean, in Ancient times women were allowed to do all the same things men did, and anyway, the air-trade is full of women pilots. You had one yourself, on the American trip, I remember seeing pictures of her…”

“It’s not that, Kate,” he said, hugging her. “It’s just that it may be dangerous. Anyway, I don’t want you to start turning into an old ragamuffin adventurer like me; I want you to stay here and finish school and become a fine, beautiful High London lady. And most of all I want you to stop Dog from peeing over all my crates of soup…”

When Dog had been dragged away and scolded they sat down together in the shadow of the hangar and Katherine said, “So will you tell me where you are going, that is so important and dangerous?”

“I am not supposed to say,” said Valentine, glancing down at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh, come on!” she laughed. “We’re best friends, aren’t we? You know I’d never tell anybody else. And I’m desperate to know where London is going to! Everyone at school keeps asking. We’ve been travelling east at top speed for days and days. We didn’t even stop when we ate Salthook…”

“Well, Kate,” he admitted, “the fact is, Crome has asked me to take a look into Shan Guo.”

Shan Guo was the leading nation of the Anti-Traction League, the barbarian alliance which controlled the old Indian sub-continent and what was left of China, protected from hungry cities by a great chain of mountains and swamps that marked the eastern limits of the Hunting Ground. Katherine had studied it in Geography. There was only one pass through those mountains, and it was protected by the dreadful fortress-city of Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall, beneath whose guns a hundred cities had come to grief in the first few centuries of Traction. “But why there?” she asked. “London can’t be going there!”