“Miss Natsworthy! Mr. Ngoni! Thank Quirke you’re safe!” shouted Mr. Garamond, helping them from the gondola. No thanks to you, Wren felt like saying, but then she realized that he already knew that, and that his clumsy hug was his way of saying sorry, and she hugged him back.
The new city had a curious feel; there were none of the tremors and half-muffled shocks and lurches that you felt aboard a Traction City, just a sense of dreamlike movement, and of speed. But perhaps not quite enough speed, for Harrowbarrow filled the view astern, its mouthparts opening to reveal a hot gleam of furnaces and factories inside.
“You’d have thought they’d stop when Kobold died,” said Theo.
“They don’t know,” Wren replied. “Or maybe they do, and they don’t care. Mr. Hausdorfer and the others can handle a simple chase without their master. Harrowbarrow never cared about Wolf the way Wolf cared about Harrowbarrow.”
She didn’t want to talk about Wolf. The way he had looked at her when he’d realized she’d killed him would stay with her always. She tried to tell herself that it was good she felt so guilty and so soiled by what she’d done. Better that than to be like her mother, and not care. But it did not feel good.
She took Theo’s hand, and together they went to stand among the other Londoners at the stern rail. Behind them, Naga was giving orders to his surviving officers, telling Subgeneral Thien, “You will return to Batmunkh Gompa with the Protecting Veil. My wife believes that the Stalker Fang controls the new terror weapon. Help her find it and destroy it.”
“Yes, Excellency…”
“And New London is to be granted safe passage through our territories.”
“Yes, Excellency…”
“Now I want everybody off the Fury before I take her up.”
“But Excellency, you cannot fly alone!”
“Why not? I flew alone at Xanne-Sandansky and Khamchatka. I flew alone against Panzerstadt Breslau. I should be able to handle a filthy little barbarian harvester like this.”
Thien understood; he bowed and saluted and started shouting orders. Wren, looking round to see what all the excitement was about, saw the Fury’s crew jumping down onto the deck plates, saw Naga heaving himself aboard. She looked away. What was happening astern was far more interesting than anything the Storm could do. She barely noticed when the Fury took off again.
Harrowbarrow was driving toward them through sprays of wet earth. Its armor was holed, there were fires on its upper decks, and one of its tracks was grinding, but Hausdorfer didn’t care. He’d been skeptical about this place his master had brought them so far to eat, but now he’d seen it move, seen it fly, he understood what young Kobold had been on about. “More power!” he screamed into his speaking tubes. “Open the jaws! They are defenseless! They are ours!”
Naga turned the Fury toward the oncoming suburb and took her down almost to ground level. She was a good ship; he enjoyed the way she answered to his touch on the wheels and levers, and the purr of her powerful engines when he switched them to ramming speed. As Harrowbarrow’s jaws opened, he aimed straight at the red glow of the furnaces in her dismantling yards.
When the Harrowbarrovians started to understand what he was planning, guns began firing from inside the jaws, shattering glass in the gondola windows, starting fires.
A shell from a hand cannon punched through Naga’s breastplate, but his armor kept him upright, and his mechanized gauntlets gripped the helm, keeping the blazing ship on course. The suburb was closing its jaws, but not quickly enough. Naga fired all the Fury’s remaining rockets, and watched them streak ahead of him into its maw. “Oenone,” he said, and her name, and the thought of her, went with him into the light.
The blast was brief; a sunflower blossoming in the dusk, stuffed with shrapnel seeds. There was a blunt, muffled boom and then other sounds; thuds and squelches as large fragments of wreckage rained down into the Out-Country. Aboard New London no one cheered. Even the soldiers of the Storm, who had grown up singing jolly songs about the destruction of whole cities, looked appalled. One or two small pieces of debris landed on the deck, plinking like dropped coins. Wren stooped to pick up one that fell near her. It was a rivet head from Harrowbarrow’s hull, still warm with the heat of the explosion. She put it in her pocket, thinking that it would make a good exhibit for the New London Museum.
What was left of Harrowbarrow—the broken stern section, half filled with fires—settled into the Out-Country mud. It would be part of the landscape soon, like old London. The survivors, stumbling clear, stared about in bewilderment. Some looked toward the debris fields that filled the southern horizon, wondering what sort of life they would be able to make there. Others ran after New London, shouting out for help, begging their fellow Tractionists not to leave them here defenseless in the lands of the Storm. But New London was beyond earshot, pulling away from them quickly across the vast, dark plain, smaller and smaller, until it was only a fleck, a gleam of amber windows dwindling in that enormous twilight.
Chapter 52
Last Words
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.”