The Stalker Fang ignored it all. Standing calmly beside the helmsman, she gazed out at Cloud 9 as it drifted slowly away from its parent city.
“Follow that building,” she said.
The ships that had attacked Brighton had quickly veered away to tackle other targets, but the raft resort’s troubles were not over. Its engine room was in flames, and half its paddle wheels were wrecked. It had slipped its moorings as the attack began and was now adrift, trailing black smoke and saffron flame, leaking burning fuel. Everyone who could have taken charge was either dead or at the mayor’s party.
In all the confusion, no one paid any heed to the alarms jangling inside the Pepperpot, not until the Lost Boys overpowered the last of their guards and came swarming out to join the fun. From the engine rooms and the sewage farms of the undertier and the stinking filter beds beneath the Sea Pool, the slaves of Brighton saw their chance and rushed to join them. Arming themselves with wrenches and pool rakes and meat tenderizers, they swarmed up the city’s stairways, looting antique shops and setting fire to art galleries. The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, fled for their lives, spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor launches.
Indeed, so much was happening, and so dense a pall of dirty smoke hung above the battered city, that hardly anyone had noticed Cloud 9 was no longer attached to the rest of Brighton.
Chapter 29
The Unexploded Boy
Wren and Theo, waiting for the battle to subside, sat down in the shadow of the big statue, their backs to the plinth that it perched on. A few glasses of punch had been abandoned there earlier in the evening, and Wren drank one. How long had this nightmare been going on? Five minutes? Ten? It seemed a lifetime. Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets’ machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm’s guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked. “These Tumbler things?”
“No.”
“You might as well. There’s not much else to do.”
Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a soft voice that she could barely hear over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.
“It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater,” he said. “Enemy suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back toward the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artifact that mustn’t be allowed to fall into townie hands…”
Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots scrambled for their ships.
“The waiting was worst,” he said. “Strapped into our ships, hanging there in the racks in the Tumbler bay with the doors open under us. You could see the guns going off below. Then the order—’Tumblers away!’—and we went for it.”
They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn’t zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?
“The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg,” he told Wren. “I hit somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I was heading for an armored fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of silage bales. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t killed, just knocked out for a minute or two. I suppose that’s why the Tumbler didn’t blow. They’re supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there’s a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t bring myself to…”
“Of course not,” said Wren softly. “You’d missed your target. You couldn’t blow up workers. Civilians. It would have been murder.”
“It would,” said Theo. “But that’s not what stopped me. I just didn’t want to die.”
“Bit late to decide that, wasn’t it?”
Theo shrugged. “I just sat there and cried. And after a while, they came and defused my Tumbler and dragged me out and took me away. I thought they were going to kill me. I wouldn’t have blamed them. But they didn’t.
“All my life I’d been hearing stories about the cruelty of the barbarians, the way they tortured prisoners, and maybe some are like that, but these ones tended me like I was one of their own sons. They fed me, and explained how sorry they were that they’d have to sell me as a slave. They couldn’t afford to keep Green Storm prisoners aboard, you see, for fear we’d band together and revolt. But I wouldn’t have revolted. They’d made me realize how wrong the Storm are. How stupid it all is, this fighting.”
He looked up at Wren. “That’s why I gave up on the Storm. And now, when they catch me and they find out what I am and what I did, they’re going to kill me.”
“They won’t!” promised Wren. “Because we won’t let them catch you! We’ll get away somehow…”
A growl of engines drowned her out. She stood up cautiously and looked out across the gardens. A huge, battle-scarred white airship was shoving her way in through Cloud 9’s rigging.
“Great gods!” said Theo, looking over Wren’s shoulder. “That’s the Requiem Vortex] That’s her ship!”
Snub-nosed projectors mounted on the airship’s engine pods swiveled this way and that, effortlessly blasting any Flying Ferret that came within range. The Visible Parity Line and the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Machiney were smashed apart by rockets, showering shreds of balsa wood and singed canvas over the crowds who cowered on the Pavilion lawns. An ornithopter called Is That All There Is? fluttered around the airship like a gnat pestering a dinosaur, but it could not pierce the reinforced envelope, and after a few seconds a flight of Stalker birds found it and ripped it into kindling. Damn You, Gravity! plunged toward the airship’s gondola in a desperate attempt to ram it, but more rockets battered it aside, and it went plowing through the flank of one of Cloud 9’s outer gasbags. The Pavilion shuddered, the screaming guests on the lawn began to scream still louder, and the whole deck plate tilted steeply as some of the gas that had been supporting it went spewing into the night.
Orla Twombley and the other surviving Ferrets, realizing that they could do no more, turned tail and sped away.
Wren shielded her face against the dust and smoke as the Requiem Vortex swung her engine pods into landing position and touched down on the lawns of Cloud 9. Party guests who had fled the Pavilion earlier now came fleeing back past Wren and Theo’s hiding place, or stood their ground and fashioned flags of surrender out of shirtfronts and napkins. Redcoats hared through the shrubbery flinging down their weapons and trying to rid themselves of their fancy uniforms. Machine guns nattered among the ornamental palms. From the open hatches of the warship’s gondolas spilled spiky armored shapes.