The metal door opened, splashing Tom with yellow light. He was so glad to get away from the birds that it seemed a relief when the guards grabbed him. They pinned his arms behind his back and held his flailing legs and someone jammed the muzzle of a Weltschmerz automatic under his chin. “Thank you,” he kept blurting out, and “Sorry,” as they manhandled him inside and slammed the door and flung him down on the cold floor. He was picked up and carried and set down while voices dinned from the low roof. Rocket projectors were firing outside. The voices spoke Airsperanto, with eastern accents and a lot of dialect words he couldn’t grasp.
“Is he alone?” A woman’s voice, oddly familiar.
“We think so, Commander: the (something) found him on the stair.”
The woman spoke again. Tom didn’t catch what she said, but she must have been asking how he had come here, because one of the other voices answered, “Balloon. A two-man balloon. Our batteries shot it down.”
Something that sounded like swearing. “Why didn’t the watch towers see it coming?”
“The sentry said it just appeared.”
“There wasn’t a balloon,” Tom whispered, confused.
“The prisoner, Commander…”
“Let’s have a look at him…”
“Sorry,” Tom mumbled, tasting blood. Somebody shone a flashlight in his face, and when he could see again he saw that the girl who looked like that girl Sathya was stooping over him, only she didn’t just look like Sathya, she was Sathya. “Hello. Thank you. Sorry,” he whispered. She peered through the blood and the straggles of wet hair, and her eyes went wide and then fierce and narrow as she recognized him.
After months of having not enough to watch, the Lost Boys suddenly had too much. They jostled each other in front of the screens, struggling to make out what was going on among the Drys. Caul, pushing his way to the front, glimpsed Tom being hurried along in a scrum of white-uniformed guards. On another screen the commander’s office lay empty, her evening meal half eaten on her desk. A third showed aviators gathering by their airships in the big hangar, as if the Green Storm imagined Tom’s arrival might be the beginning of an attack. The rest of the screens were filled with scurrying darkness. Dozens of remote crabs had been waiting outside the Roost’s sewage outlet, and now the Lost Boys were taking advantage of the uproar to send them scuttling up into the base. Swarming out of a broken toilet, the little machines darted through an air-vent and scattered into the ducts and flues of the Facility, cutting their way through security grilles and disabling sensors, their noise drowned out by the honking sirens.
In the midst of it all Caul felt the post shudder as the Screw Worm docked. A moment later Wrasse came pushing in through the airlock, looking tense and excited, snapping out questions about the Green Storm’s response time.
“They’re quick,” one of his boys replied.
“I’m glad Uncle didn’t send me to check them out!”
“Some kind of trained birds guarding the stairway, they’re what first raised the alarm.”
“We’ll be ready for them.”
Caul tugged and tugged at the sleeve of Wrasse’s jacket until the older boy looked round, annoyed. “You’re supposed to be waiting for Tom!” Caul shouted. “What if he escapes? How will he get clear without the Screw Worm? ”
“Your boyfriend’s had it, Dry-lover,” said Wrasse, shoving him away. “Don’t worry. It’s all going as Uncle planned.”
Keys in the lock, the jolt of the door kicked open. The noises jerked Hester awake. She scrambled up, and Sathya strode into the cell and knocked her down again. Soldiers were crowding in, dragging a sodden, dripping figure between them. Hester didn’t know who it was, not even when Sathya lifted the wet head and showed her that bruised, blood-drizzled face, but she saw the long leather aviator’s coat and thought, Tom has a coat like that, and that made her look again, even though it couldn’t possibly be him.
“Tom?” she whispered.
“Don’t pretend to be surprised!” screamed Sathya. “Do you ask me to believe you weren’t expecting him? How did he know you were here? What had you planned? Who are you working for?”
“Nobody!” said Hester. “Nobody!” She started to cry as the guards forced Tom down on his knees beside her. He had come to rescue her, and he looked so frightened and so hurt, and the worst of it was that he didn’t know what she’d done: he’d come all this way to try and save her, and she didn’t deserve to be saved. “Tom,” she sobbed.
“I trusted you!” Sathya shouted. “You ensnared me just as you did poor Anna, playing so innocent, making me doubt myself, and all the time your barbarian accomplice was on his way here! What was your plan? Is there a ship waiting? Was Blinkoe in league with you? I suppose you meant to kidnap Popjoy and take him to one of your filthy cities so that they could have his Stalkers?”
“No, no, no, you’ve got it all twisted round,” Hester wept, but she could see that nothing she could say would convince the girl that Tom’s sudden appearance was not part of some Tractionist plot.
As for Tom, he was too cold and shocked to take in much of what was happening, but he heard Hester’s voice and looked up and saw her crouching beside him. He had forgotten how ugly she was.
Then Sathya grabbed him by his hair and forced his head down again, baring his neck. He heard her sword come out of its scabbard with a slithery hiss, heard a rattle and scrabble in the ducts on the ceiling, heard Hester saying, “Tom!” He shut his eyes.
On the Lost Boys’ screens the drawn sword was a flare of white. Sathya’s voice came tinnily over the crabs’ radios, shouting insane things about plots and betrayal.
“Do something!” Caul yelled.
“He’s only a Dry, Caul,” warned Skewer, not unkindly. “Leave it!”
“We’ve got to help him! He’ll die!”
Wrasse threw Caul aside. “He was always going to die, you fool!” he shouted. “Do you think Uncle really planned to let him go, with what he’s seen? Even if he got the girl out, my orders were question ’em and kill ’em. Tom’s just supposed to create a diversion.”
“Why?” wailed Caul. “Just so you can move a few more cameras inside? Just so Uncle can see what’s in the Memory Chamber?”
Wrasse punched him, flinging him against the control panels. “Uncle worked out what’s in the Memory Chamber months ago. Those aren’t just cameras. They’re bombs. We’re going to move them into position, give the Drys a few hours to settle down again, then blow the lot and go in and do some real burgling.”
Caul looked at the screens, tasting the blood that was spilling from his nose. The other boys had drawn back from him, as if caring too much about Drys was something they could catch like the flu. He started to raise himself, and saw the pad of hooded red buttons near his hand. He stared at them a moment. He’d never seen controls like those before, but he could guess what they must do.
“No!” someone shouted. “Not yet!”
In the instant before they reached him, he flipped up the hoods of as many buttons as he could and brought both his fists down on them hard.
The screens went dead.
28
Something hit him in the back and he went forward, face on the cold floor, thinking, This is it, I’m dead, but he wasn’t dead, he could feel the dampness of the stone against his cheek and when he rolled over he saw that an explosion had brought the ceiling down: a big explosion, judging by all the rubble and the dust, and he would have expected it to make a noise, but he hadn’t heard anything, and he still couldn’t hear anything, even though quite large chunks of the roof were coming down and people were flailing about waving torches and shouting with their mouths wide open, no, there was just a whine and a whistle and a buzz going on somewhere inside his skull, and when he sneezed it made no sound, but small, hot fingers closed around his hand and tugged at him and he looked up and saw Hester, white in the sweep and flare of a torch-beam like a floodlit statue of herself except that she was mouthing something at him, tugging and tugging him and pointing towards the doorway, and he scrambled out from under the thing that had fallen on him, which turned out to be Sathya, and he wondered if she was badly hurt and if he should try to help her, but Hester was pulling him towards the door, stumbling over the bodies of men who were quite definitely dead, stooping under the remains of a heat-duct which was all twisted open and smoking as if it had exploded from inside, and as he looked back somebody fired a gun at him and he saw the flash and felt the bullet flick past his ear but he couldn’t hear that either.