Predator's gold

25

Time had passed slowly for Hester. There was not much difference between day and night at Rogues’ Roost, except that sometimes the little square of window high in the wall of her cell turned from black to grey. Once the moon peeked in at her, a little past full, and she realized that it must be more than a month since she left Tom.

She sat in a corner, ate when her guards shoved food in through the flap in the door, squatted over a tin bucket if nature called. She mapped the courses of Anchorage and Arkangel as best she could in the mould on the walls, trying to calculate where and when the great predator city would catch up with its prey. Mostly she just thought about being Valentine’s daughter.

There were days when she wished she had killed him when she’d had the chance, and others when she wished that he was still alive, for there was a lot she would have liked to ask him. Had he loved her mother? Had he known who Hester was? Why had he cared so much about Katherine and not at all about his other child?

Sometimes the door would be kicked open and soldiers would come and take her to the Memory Chamber, where Sathya waited with Popjoy and the thing that had been Anna Fang. A huge, ugly photograph of Hester’s face had been added to the other portraits on the walls of the mnemonic environment, but Sathya still seemed to feel that it would help to have Hester there in person while she patiently repeated stories of Anna Fang’s life to the impassive Stalker. The anger she had felt towards Hester seemed to have faded, as if part of her understood that this scarred and undernourished girl was not really the ruthless London assassin she had imagined. And Hester, in turn, slowly began to understand a little more about Sathya, and why she was so determined to bring the dead aviatrix back.

Sathya had been born on the bare earth, in a squatter camp of curtain-doored caves dug into the wall of an old track-mark down in the town-torn south of India. In the dry season her people had to uproot themselves every few months to escape being crushed under the tracks of some passing city, Chidanagaram, or Gutak, or Juggernautpur. When the rains came the world melted into slurry beneath their shoeless feet. Everyone talked of the day when they would move to some settled static in the uplands, but as Sathya grew older she began to understand that they would never really make the journey. Simply surviving took up all their time and energy.

And then the airship came. A red airship flown by a tall, kind, beautiful aviatrix, putting in to make repairs on her way north after a mission to the island of Palau Pinang. The children of the camp hung round her, fascinated, listening eagerly to the tales of her work for the Anti-Traction League. Anna Fang had sunk a whole raft-city which threatened to attack the Hundred Islands. She had fought battles with the air-scouts of Paris and Cittamotore, and planted bombs in the engine-rooms of other hungry cities.

Sathya, standing shyly at the back of the crowd, saw for the first time that she didn’t have to live the rest of her life like a maggot. She could fight back.

A week later, halfway to the League’s capital at Tienjing, Miss Fang heard noises in the Jenny Haniver ’s hold and found Sathya crouched amid the cargo there. Taking pity on the girl, she paid to have her trained as a League aviator. Sathya worked hard, learned well, and was soon a wing-commander in the Northern Air-Fleet. Three quarters of her pay went south each month to help her family, but she seldom thought about them — the League was her family now, and Anna Fang was her mother and her sister and her wise, kind friend.

And how had she repaid all that kindness? By climbing with a squad of Green Storm activists to the ice-caves of Zhan Shan, where the League laid its greatest warriors to rest, and stealing the aviatrix’s frozen corpse. By bringing her here to Rogues’ Roost, and letting Popjoy work his horrible alchemy on her. In spite of herself, Hester felt more and more sorry for the other girl as she watched her trying to cajole memories out of the Stalker. “I am not Anna Fang,” the thing insisted again and again in its dune-grass voice. Sometimes it grew angry, and they had to leave. Once there were no sessions for several days, and later Hester learned that it had killed a guard and tried to break out of the Chamber.

On good days, when the creature seemed biddable, they all went together down an armoured passageway which led from the Memory Chamber to the nearby cargo hangar where the Jenny Haniver was berthed. In the narrow confines of the gondola Hester was forced to re-enact everything she remembered of her two short voyages with the aviatrix, and Sathya told again the old story of how Anna had built this airship, stealing one part after another from the Arkangel salvage yard where she had been a slave, secretly piecing the Jenny together under the nose of her brutish master.

The Stalker watched her with its cold green eyes and whispered, “I am not Anna Fang. We are wasting time. You built me to lead the Green Storm, not languish here. I wish to destroy cities.”

One night Sathya came alone to the cell. The trembly, staring, haunted expression in her face was more intense than ever, and there were purple shadows under her eyes. Her nails were gnawed down to the quick. A strange idea flicked into Hester’s mind as she sat up to meet her visitor: She is in a prison of her own.

“Come,” was all Sathya said.

She led Hester along deep midnight tunnels to a laboratory, where racks of test tubes welcomed them with cheerless grins. Dr Popjoy was crouched at a workbench, his bald head gleaming in the light of an argon-lamp as he tinkered with a delicate piece of machinery. Sathya had to call his name several times before he grunted, made a few last adjustments and stepped away from his work.

“I want Hester to see everything, Doctor,” Sathya said.

Popjoy’s pink eyes blinked wetly, focusing on Hester. “Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, if word got out… But I suppose Miss Shaw won’t be leaving here alive, will she? At least, not in the conventional sense!” He made snuffling noises that might have been laughter, and beckoned his visitors forward. As Hester followed Sathya between the benches she saw that the thing he had been at work on was a Stalker’s brain.

“Remarkable piece of machinery, eh, my dear?” said Popjoy proudly. “Of course, it needs a corpse to infest. Lying around out here it’s just a clever toy, but wait until I stick it in a stiff! A dash of chemicals, a soupcon of electricity and bingo!”

He danced nimbly across the laboratory, past racks of glass retorts, past dead flesh in jars and half-built bits of Stalker. On a T-shaped stand a big dead bird perched, watching the visitors with glowing green eyes. When Popjoy reached out a hand to it, it stretched its ragged wings and opened its beak. “As you can see,” the Engineer said, petting it, “I don’t limit myself to resurrecting human beings. Prototype Stalker-birds already patrol the skies around the Facility, and I’m considering other ideas — a Stalker-cat, and maybe a Stalker-whale that could carry explosives under a raft-city. In the meantime, I’ve been making some great strides in the field of human resurrection…”

Hester glanced at Sathya, but Sathya would not look at her, just followed Popjoy towards a door in the far wall. It was fitted with a magnetic lock like the ones on the door of the Memory Chamber. The Engineer’s long fingers went spidering over the ivory keys, punching in a code. The lock clunked and whirred, and the door swung open to reveal a cave of ice where strange statues waited under plastic covers.

“You see, those old Stalker builders lacked imaginative flair,” explained Popjoy, his breath smouldering as he scurried around the big freezer-cabinet, unveiling his creations. “Just because a Stalker needs a human brain and nervous system, that doesn’t mean it has to be limited to a human shape. Why stick to two arms and two legs? Why only two eyes? Why bother with a mouth? These fellows don’t eat, and we haven’t built them for their sparkling conversation…”

The frosty plastic sheets were dragged aside, exposing steel-plated centaurs with twenty arms and caterpillar tracks instead of legs, spider-Stalkers with clawed feet and machine-gun turrets in their bellies, Stalkers with spare eyes in the back of their skulls. On a slab near the front of the cabinet lay something half-finished, made from the corpse of poor Widgery Blinkoe.

Hester put a hand to her mouth, gulping and gasping. “That’s the man who drugged me at Arkangel!”

“Oh, he was only a paid agent,” said Sathya. “He knew too much. I had him liquidated the night he brought you in.”

“And what if all his wives come searching for him?”

“Would you come searching for Blinkoe, if you were his wife?” asked Sathya. She wasn’t even looking at the dead spy; her gaze lingered on the other Stalkers, and on Popjoy.

“Anyway!” said Popjoy brightly, flicking the shrouds back into place. “Better step back outside, before these chaps overheat; there’s a slight danger of decomposition before they’re quickened.”

Hester couldn’t bring herself to move, but Sathya pulled her back into the laboratory, saying, “Thank you, Dr Popjoy, this has been most interesting.”

“A pleasure, dear lady,” replied the Engineer, with a flirtatious little bow. “Always a pleasure. And soon, I’m certain, we shall find a way to restore your friend Anna’s memory… Goodbye! And goodbye, Miss Shaw! I shall look forward to working with you after your execution.”

Out of the laboratory, down a short tunnel, through a door which opened on to a rusty walkway running across the cliff-face. The wind boomed, roaring down over the ice from the top of the world. Hester gauged its direction before she leaned over the handrail to be sick.

“You asked me once why the Green Storm was backing my work here,” said Sathya. “Now you know. They’re not interested in Anna, not really. They want Popjoy to build them an army of Stalkers so that they can seize power inside the League and begin their war against the cities.”

Hester wiped her mouth and stared down at the tumbled creamy tongues of foam licking through narrow passages in the rocks. “Why tell me?” she asked.

“Because I want you to know. Because when the bombs start falling and the Green Storm’s Stalkers are unleashed, I want someone to know that it’s not my fault. I did all this for Anna. Only for Anna.”

“But Anna would have hated it. She wouldn’t have wanted a war.”

Sathya shook her head miserably. “She thought we should attack cities only when they threatened our settlements. She never agreed that city people were all barbarians; she said they were just misguided. I thought that when Anna was herself again she would show us all a new way; something stronger than the old League and less fierce than the Green Storm. But the Storm are becoming more and more powerful, their new Stalkers are almost ready, and Anna is still lost…”

Hester felt her face twisting into a sarcastic smile and looked quickly away before Sathya noticed. It was hard to stomach all these ethical worries coming from a girl who had murdered old Blinkoe without a qualm, but she sensed an opportunity. Sathya’s doubts were like a loose bar in a gaol window; a weakness which she might be able to work at. She said, “You should warn the League. Send a messenger to the High Council and tell them what your friends are doing here.”

“I can’t,” said Sathya. “If the Storm found out about it I’d be killed.”

Hester just kept looking at the sea, tasting the salt spray on her lips. “Then what if a prisoner escaped?” she asked. “They couldn’t blame you for that, could they. If a prisoner who knew what was happening here escaped and stole an airship and flew away, that wouldn’t be your fault.”

Sathya looked up sharply. Hester felt herself trembling at the sudden prospect of escape. She could leave this place! There would still be time to save Tom! She felt proud of the way she was preying on Sathya’s unhappiness; it seemed to her a clever, ruthless thing to do, and worthy of Valentine’s daughter.

“Let me escape, and take the Jenny Haniver, ” she said. “I’ll fly to League territory. Find someone trustworthy, like Captain Khora. He’ll bring warships north and retake this place. Throw Popjoy’s new creatures into the sea before they can be used.”

Sathya’s eyes shone, as if she could already imagine the handsome African aviator leaping from the gondola of his Achebe 9000 to help her out of the trap she had made for herself. Then she shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said. “If Khora saw Anna in her present state — he might not understand. I can’t let anything disrupt my work with her, Hester. We’re so close now. Sometimes I can feel her, looking out at me from inside that mask… And anyway, how can I let you go? You helped to kill her.”

“You don’t still believe that,” said Hester. “Not any more. Or you’d have killed me already.”

Two tears went tracking down Sathya’s face, silvery against the darkness of her skin. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have doubts. But I have doubts about so many things.” Suddenly she hugged Hester, pulling her face against the starched, scratchy shoulder of her tunic. “It’s good to have someone to talk to. I’m not going to kill you. When Anna is better, she will be able to tell me herself whether you were to blame for her death. You must stay here until Anna is better.”