And then they were hurtling down a stairway. Through other doors. Slamming them silently shut behind them. They paused for breath, bent double, coughing, and he tried to make sense of what had happened. The explosion — the heat-duct…
“Tom!” Hester was leaning close to him, but her voice sounded far away, blurring and wobbling as if she were shouting underwater.
“What?”
“Ship!” she shouted. “Where’s your ship? How did you get here?”
“Submarine,” he said, “but I expect it’s gone.”
“What?” She was as deaf as him.
“Gone!”
“What?” Torches flashed through the dust and smoke at the far end of the corridor. “We’ll take the Jenny! ” she yelled, and began pushing Tom towards yet another stairway. It was dark, like the corridor, and full of smoke, and he began to realize that there had been other explosions, not just the one in the cell. In some corridors lights still flickered, but in most the power was down. Groups of frightened and bewildered soldiers hurried about with torches. It was easy enough for Tom and Hester to see them coming and hide, squeezing into deep doorways or ducking down rubble-strewn side passages. Slowly, Tom’s hearing came back, and the whistling in his ears gave way to the steady, anxious honking of alarms. Hester shoved him into the mouth of a stairway as more people scurried past — aviators this time. “I don’t even know where we are,” she grumbled, when they had gone. “It all looks different in the dark.” She looked at Tom, her face piebald with dust. Grinned. “How did you manage that explosion?”
It had been the toughest decision of Wrasse’s life. For a moment he nearly lost it, down there in the Ghost of a Flea, staring in panic at the blank screens. All Uncle’s plans in ruins! Everything they’d worked for wrecked! The crabs blown before most of them were even in position!
“What do we do, Wrasse?” one of his boys asked.
Only two things they could do. Go home, and let Uncle skin them alive for coming back empty-handed. Or go for it.
“We’ll go for it,” he decided, and felt his strength return as the others started running for guns and nets and gadgets, strapping torches to their heads, dragging Caul away. “Skewer, Baitball, you lot on the cameras, you stay here; the rest of you come with me!”
And so, as the Green Storm panicked and argued and tried to fight the fires the crabs had started, as searchlights prodded the sky and rocket batteries fired salvo after salvo at imaginary attackers, a sleek, customized limpet detached itself from the listening post and swam up to the jetty. The Lost Boys bundled out, running quickly and silently up the same stairs Tom had climbed an hour before.
Near the top a Stalker-bird found them, and one boy went over the handrail and screaming down into the surf. Another was winged by gunfire from an emplacement on the cliffs and Wrasse had to finish him off, because Uncle’s orders were to leave no one behind for the Drys to question. Then they were at the door, and through it, following their sketchy floor-plans towards the Memory Chamber, leaving boys behind at this junction and that to guard the escape-route. Panicking Green Storm soldiers blundered through the smoke and the Lost Boys killed them, because that was in Uncle’s orders too; leave no witnesses.
The Memory Chamber’s guards had fled. The massive locks dismayed Wrasse for only a moment; the power was out, and when he heaved at the door it swung sweetly open. The Lost Boys’ torches lit up a bridge stretching to a central platform where someone paced like a caged wild thing. A gleaming bronze mask swung suddenly towards the light.
They flinched back, all of them. Only Wrasse had been given any idea what it was they were being sent to steal, and even he had never actually seen it. Uncle had warned him not to confront the thing face on; Take it by surprise, his orders said, from above or behind; get the nets over it and the grapples on before it knows what’s happening. But there was no time for that now, and even if there had been, Wrasse wasn’t sure it would have worked. It looked so strong! For the first time in his life he began to wonder if Uncle really did know best.
He hid his fear as best he could. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what Uncle wants. Let’s nick it.”
The Lost Boys raised their guns, their blades, the ropes and chains and magnetic grapples and heavy throwing-nets that Uncle had equipped them with, and began to edge across the bridge.
And the Stalker flexed its hands and came to meet them.
Gunfire popped and bickered, though it was hard to tell where, with the echoes all mixed up, rebounding along the low corridors. Tom and Hester ran on, following Hester’s vague mental map of the airbase. They began to pass bodies: three Green Storm troopers in a heap; then a young man in mismatched dark clothes, a furze of fair hair under his black wool cap. For a jolting instant Tom thought it was Caul, but this boy was older and bigger; one of Wrasse’s crew. “The Lost Boys are here!” he said.
“Who are they?” asked Hester. Tom didn’t answer, too busy trying to grasp what was going on, and what part he had played in it all. Before she could ask again a storm of noise interrupted, booming somewhere nearby; gunfire, massed at first but thinning, growing patchy and frantic and spiked with shrieks; then one last, bubbling scream and silence.
Even the sirens had stopped.
“What was that? ” asked Tom.
“How should I know?” Hester took the dead Lost Boy’s torch and ducked down another stairwell, dragging Tom after her. “Let’s get out of here…”
Tom followed gladly. He loved the feeling of her hand holding his, guiding him. He wondered if he should tell her so, and whether this was the moment to apologize for what had happened back in Anchorage, but before he could say anything they reached the bottom of the stairs and Hester stopped, breathing hard, motioning for him to stay still and quiet.
They were in a sort of antechamber, where a circular metal door stood wide open.
“Oh Gods and Goddesses!” said Hester softly.
“What?”
“The power! The locks failed! The electric barrier! It’s escaped!”
“But what?”
She took a deep breath and crept towards the door. “Come on!” she told Tom. “There’s a way through to the hangar…”
They stepped together through the door. Just above their heads hung a thick haze of gunsmoke, filling and hollowing like a white awning. The shadows were full of the drip of falling liquid. Hester shone her torch along the bridge, sweeping the beam over puddles and scrawls of blood, over patterns of bloody footprints like the diagram of some violent dance, past drips of blood falling from the curved roof high above. Things lay on the bridge. At first they looked like bundles of old clothes, until you looked closer and began to make out hands, faces. Tom recognized some of those faces from the listening post. But what had they come here for? What had happened to them? He began to shake uncontrollably.
“It’s all right,” said Hester, flicking her torch towards the central platform. Empty, except for a blood-sodden grey robe abandoned like a cast-off chrysalis in the very centre. The Stalker had left; doubtless hunting for fresh victims in the maze of rooms and corridors above them. Hester took Tom’s hand again, leading him quickly around the outer edge of the chamber to the door that she had gone through so often with Sathya and the others, on the Stalker’s good days. In the stairway beyond, the air moaned softly, like the voices of ghosts. “This leads to the hangar where the Jenny ’s kept,” she explained, hurrying down and down with Tom behind her.