She stopped, remembering her predicament. Shkin was watching her, as careful and calculating as ever. Maybe giving her the book had just been a way of testing her, seeing if she would stick to her story about Anchorage in the face of all Pennyroyal’s lies.
“Interesting,” Shkin said, and snapped his fingers at one of the guards, who stepped smartly forward to clamp a pair of pretty silver manacles on Wren’s wrists. “I always suspected that His Worship’s tales of adventure were somewhat embroidered. I think it is time we took you up to meet him.”
Wren was led down the stairways of the Pepperpot to a garage, where a sleek black bug stood waiting. “What about Fishcake?” she asked as Shkin’s men pushed her inside. “What have you done with poor little Fishcake?”
“He will be remaining at the Pepperpot.” Shkin settled himself beside her on the bug’s backseat and checked his pocket watch. “Cloud 9,” he told the driver, and the bug set off, out into the dingy streets of the Laines, a district of antique shops and cheap hotels that filled most of Brighton’s middle tier.
In other circumstances Wren would have been fascinated by the passing shop fronts packed with junk and Old Tech, the strangely dressed people, the tier supports plastered with the handbills of hopeless fringe theater companies. Now, however, she was too busy wondering how she was going to keep herself alive. It would all be a matter of timing, she decided. If she were clever enough and kept her nerve, she might still be able to get herself out of Shkin’s hands without Pennyroyal ever realizing who she really was…
The bug climbed a long ramp to the upper tier. Clearing tourists out of the way with blasts of its hooter, it sped along Ocean Boulevard, the oval promenade that ringed Brighton’s upper city. It passed hotels and restaurants, palm trees and crazy-golf courses, fairgrounds, floral clocks, and bingo parlors. It crossed a bridge that spanned the shallow end of the Sea Pool, a lake of cleaned and filtered seawater fringed by artifical beaches. At last it arrived in the Old Steine, the circular plaza where the thick steel hawsers that tied Cloud 9 to Brighton were attached.
The floating deck plate hovered about two hundred feet above Wren’s head. Looking up, she could see a glass-walled control room jutting from its underbelly like an elaborate upside-down greenhouse. Men were moving about inside, operating banks of brass levers that adjusted Cloud 9’s trim and altitude. Small engine pods were mounted all around the deck plate’s edge, and Wren presumed that in rough weather they would be used to keep Cloud 9 on station above the city. On this windless afternoon only a few were switched on, acting as fans to blow Brighton’s exhaust smoke away from the mayor’s palace.
In the middle of the Old Steine, where the Cloud 9 tow-lines were bolted to huge, rusty stanchions, a yellow cable car waited to take visitors up to the Pavilion. As Shkin’s bug squeaked to a stop beside it, red-coated soldiers came hurrying to study the papers of Shkin and his men and run Old Tech metal detectors over their clothes.
“There was a time when just about anyone was allowed to go up and wander in the Pavilion gardens,” said Shkin. “That’s all changed since the war started. There’s no fighting in our part of the world, of course—the African Anti-Tractionists have no stomach for the Green Storm’s crusade—but Pennyroyal is still terrified that saboteurs or terrorists might take a potshot at him.”
That was the first Wren had heard about the war between the cities and the Storm. It explained why there were all those big, ugly gun batteries on the city’s esplanades, and why security was so tight.
“Purpose of your visit to Cloud 9, Mr. Shkin?” asked the commander.
“I have an interesting piece of merchandise to show to the mayor.”
“I’m not sure His Worship is buying slaves at the moment, sir.”
“Oh, he will not want to miss the chance of adding this one to his staff. I suggest you let us up without further delay, unless you wish to spend the rest of your career down on Tier Three, picking pubes out of the Sea Pool filters…”
There were no more objections. Shkin and his party were ushered quickly aboard, the cable car shuddered, and Wren, looking from its big windows, saw Brighton fall away below her. “Oh, look!” she murmured, entranced, but Shkin and his men had seen it all before.
Suddenly the howl of supercharged engine pods filled the cable car and swift shadows came flickering across its windows. Beyond the web of Cloud 9’s hawsers, a flock of fierce, spiky shapes cut through the afternoon sky. Wren shrieked, imagining that there had been an explosion up on Cloud 9 and that this was the debris raining down, but the shapes veered in formation and hurtled away across Brighton’s rooftops, their shadows speeding across the busy streets.
“But they’ve got no envelopes!” Wren cried. “No gasbags! How do they stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!”
Some of Shkin’s men laughed. The slave trader himself looked faintly pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. “Not impossible,” he said. “The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm’s air fleets. There is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological advances…” He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines. “This lot are called the Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air force, hired by our esteemed mayor to protect his palace…”
Wren turned to the window again as the machines sped by. They were fragile-looking contraptions, all string and balsa wood and varnished paper, their cockpits stripped down to a bucket seat and a nest of control sticks. Some had two batlike wings, others three or four or ten; some flapped along beneath black, creaking things like broken umbrellas. On their massive engine pods were painted hawks and sharks and naked ladies and raffish, devil-may-care names: Damn You, Gravity! and Bad Hair Day; Contents Under Pressure and Delayed Gratification NOW. A begoggled aviatrix waved at Wren from the cockpit of something called the Combat Wombat. Wren waved back, but the squadron was already pulling away, dwindling to a cluster of specks far off above the sea.
Wren was trembling as the cable car carried her up through the belly of Cloud 9 to its terminus in the Pavilion gardens. She had always believed that Dad and Miss Freya knew everything there was to know about the world outside Anchorage-in-Vineland, but clearly it had changed a lot in the sixteen years since they had crossed the ice. They had known nothing about this terrible war, which was almost as old as she was, and she doubted they could even imagine the bizarre flying machines she had just seen. It made her feel even farther away from them.
The pang of homesickness faded as her minders led her out of the upper cable-car terminus and along graveled paths toward the hub of Cloud 9, where the sugar-pink minarets and meringue domes of Pennyroyal’s palace rose from gardens filled with palm trees and cypresses, follies and fountains. Flocks of gaudy parakeets wheeled overhead, and above them Cloud 9’s transparent gasbags shone in the sunlight like enormous bubbles.
“Your business?” asked a house slave, stepping out to bar Shkin’s way.
“Nabisco Shkin,” the slave dealer replied, and that was enough; the man bowed and stammered something and waved the visitors on, up an elegant white staircase to a broad sundeck. At the heart of the sundeck was a pool. In the middle of the pool, adrift on his air bed in a gold lame swimming costume, a cocktail in one hand, a book in the other, his round face tilted to the sun, lounged Nimrod Pennyroyal.