Predator's Gold (4 page)

“Alone, I staggered on into the north, crossing the Plain of Craters where once the legendary cities of Chicago and Milwaukee stood. I had given up all thought of finding my green America. My only hope now was that I might reach the edge of the Ice Wastes and be rescued by some wandering band of Snowmads.

“At last, even that hope faded. Weak from exhaustion and lack of water, I lay down in a dry valley between great black jagged mountains. In despair I cried out, ‘Is this really to be the end of Nimrod Pennyroyal?’ and the stones seemed to answer, ‘Yup.’

All hope was gone, d’you see? I commended my soul to the Goddess of Death and shut my eyes, expecting to open them again only as a ghost in the Sunless Country.

The next thing I knew I was wrapped in furs and laid in the bot om of a canoe, and some charming young people were paddling me north.

“These were not fellow explorers from the Hunting Ground, as I at first supposed.

They were natives! Yes, there is a tribe of people actually living in the northernmost parts of that Dead Continent! Until then, I had accepted the traditional story – the story which I’m sure you were told by your Guild of Historians – that the few poor souls who survived the fall of America fled north on to the ice and mingled with the Inuit, producing the Snowmad race we know today. Now I understood that some had stayed behind! Savage, uncivilized descendants of a nation whose greed and selfishness once brought the world to ruin – and yet they had enough humanity to rescue a poor starving wretch like Pennyroyal!

“By signs and gestures I was soon able to converse with my rescuers. They were a girl and boy, and their names were Machine Washable and Allow Twelve Days For Delivery. It seemed that they had been on an expedition of their own when they found me; digging for Blast Glass in the ruins of an ancient city called Duluth. (I discovered, by the way, that the members of their savage tribe prize a Blast Glass necklace just as much as any well-dressed lady in Paris or Traktiongrad. Both my new friends wore armlets and earrings of the stuff.) They were very skilled at surviving among the dreadful deserts of America; turning over stones to catch edible grubs, and finding drinkable water by observing the growth-patterns of certain types of algae. But that wasteland was not their home. No, they had come from further north, and now it seemed they were returning with me to their tribe!

“Imagine my excitement, Tom! Going up that river was like going back to the earliest beginnings of the world. To begin with, nothing but barren rock, pierced here and there by time-ravaged stones or twisted girders which were all that remained of some great building of the Ancients. Then, one day, I spied a patch of green moss, and then another! A few more days of northing and I began to see grass, ferns, rushes clustering on either bank. The river itself grew clearer, and Allow Twelve Days caught fish, which Machine Washable cooked for us over a fire each evening on the shore. And the trees, Tom! Birches and oaks and pines covered the landscape, and the river opened into a broad lake, and there upon the shore were the rude dwellings of the tribe. What a sight for a historian! America alive again, after all those millennia!

“How I lived with the good people of the tribe for three years, I shall not bore you with. Nor how I rescued the chief’s beautiful daughter Zip Code from a ravening bear, how she fell in love with me, and how I was forced to make my escape from her angry fiancé. Nor even how I travelled north again, up on to the ice, and so returned, after many more adventures, to the Great Hunting Ground. You can read about it all in my interpolitan bestseller America the Beautiful when we reach Brighton.”

Tom sat for a long time without speaking, his head filled with the wonderful visions which Pennyroyal’s account had painted. He could hardly believe that he had never heard of the professor’s great discovery before. It was world-shattering!

Monumental! What fools the Guild of Historians must have been, to turn away such a man!

At last he said, “But did you never go back, Professor? Surely a second expedition, with better equipment…”

“Alas, Tom,” sighed Pennyroyal. “I could never find anyone to fund a return trip. You must remember that my cameras and sampling equipment were all destroyed in the wreck of the Allan Quatermain. I took a few artefacts along with me when I left the tribe, but all were lost along my journey home. Without proof, how could I hope to fund a return expedition? The word of an Alternative Historian is not enough, I find. Why,” he said sadly, “to this day, Tom, there are people who believe I never went to America at all.”

5

THE FOX SPIRITS

Pennyroyal’s voice was still blaring away on the flight deck when Hester woke the next morning. Had he been there all night? Probably not, she realized, washing her face at the small basin in the Jenny’s galley. He’d been to bed, unlike poor Tom, and had now come back down, lured by the smell of Tom’s morning cup of coffee.

She turned to look out of the galley porthole while she cleaned her teeth – anything rather than face her own reflection in the mirror above the basin. The sky was the colour of packet custard, streaked with rhubarb cloud. Three small black specks hung in the centre of the view. Flecks of dirt on the glass, thought Hester, but when she tried to rub them away with her cuff she saw that she was wrong. She frowned, then fetched her telescope and studied the specks for a while. Frowned some more.

When she reached the flight deck Tom was preparing to turn in for a nap. The gale had not abated, but they had flown clear of the mountains now and although the wind would slow them down there was no longer any danger of being blown through a volcanic plume or dashed against a cliff. Tom looked tired but contented, beaming at Hester as she ducked in through the hatchway. Pennyroyal sat in the co-pilot’s seat, a mug of the Jenny’s best coffee in his hand.

“The professor’s been telling me about some of his expeditions,” Tom said eagerly, standing up to let Hester take the controls. “You wouldn’t believe the adventures he’s had!”

“Probably not,” agreed Hester. “But the only thing I want to hear about at the moment is why there’s a flight of gunships closing in on us.” Pennyroyal squawked with fear, then quickly clamped a hand over his mouth. Tom went to the larboard window and looked where Hester pointed. The specks were closer now, and clearly airships; three of them, in line abreast.

“They might be traders, heading up to Airhaven,” he said hopefully.

“That’s not a convoy,” Hester said. “It’s an attack formation.” Tom took the field-glasses from their hook under the main controls. The airships were about ten miles off, but he could see that they were fast and well-armed. They had some sort of green insignia painted on their envelopes, but otherwise they were completely white. It made them look absurdly sinister: the ghosts of airships, racing through the daybreak.

“They’re League fighters,” said Hester flatly. “I recognize those flared engine-pod cowlings. Murasaki Fox Spirits.”

She sounded scared, and with good reason. She and Tom had been careful to avoid the Anti-Traction League these past two years, for the Jenny Haniver had once belonged to a League agent, poor dead Anna Fang, and while they had not exactly stolen her, they knew the League might not see it that way. They had expected to be safe in the north, where League forces were spread thinly since the fall of the Spitzbergen Static the year before.

“Better go about,” said Hester. “Get the wind on our tail and try to outrun them, or lose them in the mountains.”

Tom hesitated. The Jenny was much faster than her wooden gondola and scrapyard engine pods made her look, but he doubted she could outrun Fox Spirits. “Running would just make us look guilty,” he said. “We’ve done nothing wrong. I’l talk to them, see what they want…”

He reached for the radio set, but Pennyroyal grabbed his hand. “Tom, no! I’ve heard about these white ships. They aren’t regular Anti-Traction League at all! They belong to the Green Storm, a fanatical new splinter-group who operate out of secret airbases here in the north. Extremists, sworn to destroy all cities – and al city people! Great gods, if you let them catch us we’ll all be murdered in our gondola!” The explorer’s face had turned the colour of expensive cheese, and pinheads of sweat gleamed on his forehead and his nose. The hand that gripped Tom’s wrist was shaking. Tom couldn’t imagine at first what was wrong. Surely a man who’d survived as many adventures as Professor Pennyroyal could not be scared?

Hester turned back to the window in time to see one of the approaching ships fire a rocket to windward, signalling the Jenny Haniver to heave to and allow herself to be boarded. She wasn’t sure she believed Pennyroyal, but there was something threatening about those ships. She was certain they hadn’t just encountered the Jenny by chance. They’d been sent to find her.

She touched Tom’s arm. “Go.”

Tom heaved on the rudder controls, swinging the Jenny about until she was steering north with the gale behind her. He pushed a sequence of brass levers forward and the rumble of the engines rose to a higher pitch. Another lever, and small air-sails unfolded, semi-circles of silicon-silk stretched between the pods and the flanks of the gasbag, adding a little extra thrust to help shove the Jenny through the sky.

“We’re gaining!” he shouted, peeking into the periscope at the grainy, upside-down image of the view astern. But the Fox Spirits were persistent. They altered course to match the Jenny’s, and coaxed more power out of their own engines. Within an hour they were close enough for Tom and Hester to make out the symbol painted on their flanks – not the broken wheel of the Anti-Traction League, but a jagged green lightning bolt.

Tom scanned the greyish landscape below, hoping for a town or city where he might seek sanctuary. There were none, except for a couple of slow-moving Lapp farming towns leading their herds of reindeer across the tundra far to the east, and he could not reach them without the Fox Spirits cutting him off. The Tannhäuser Mountains barred the horizon ahead, their canyons and pumice-clouds offering the only hope of shelter.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

“Keep going,” said Hester. “Maybe we can lose them in the mountains.”

“What if they rocket us?” whimpered Pennyroyal. “They’re getting terribly close!

What if they start shooting at us?”

“They want the Jenny in one piece,” Hester told him. “They won’t risk using rockets.”

“Want the Jenny? Why would anyone want this old wreck?” The tension was making Pennyroyal tetchy. When Hester explained he shouted, “This was Anna Fang’s ship? Great Clio! Almighty Poskitt! But the Green Storm worship Anna Fang!

Their movement was founded amid the ashes of the Northern Air Fleet, sworn to avenge the people killed by London’s agents at Batmunkh Gompa! Of course they’d want her ship back! Merciful gods, why didn’t you tell me this ship was stolen? I demand a full refund!”

Hester shoved him aside and went to the chart table. “Tom?” she said, studying their maps of the Tannhäusers. “There’s a gap in the volcano-chain west of here: the Drachen Pass. Maybe there’ll be a city there we can put down on.” They flew on, climbing into thin air above the snowy peaks and once skirting dangerously close to a plume of smoke that belched thickly from the throat of a young volcano. No pass, no city did they see, and after another hour, during which the three Fox Spirits steadily narrowed their lead, a flight of rockets came flashing past the windows and exploded just off the starboard bow.

“Oh, Quirke!” cried Tom – but Quirke had been London’s god, and if he couldn’t be bothered to save his own city, why would he come to the aid of a battered little airship, lost in the sulphurous updrafts of the Tannhäusers?

Pennyroyal tried to hide under the chart table. “They are firing rockets!”

“Oh, thanks, we wondered what those big explodey things were,” said Hester, angry that her prediction had proved wrong.

“But you said they wouldn’t!”

“They’re aiming for the engine pods,” said Tom. “If they disable them we’ll be dead in the sky and they’ll grapple alongside and send a boarding party across…”

“Well, can’t you do something?” demanded Pennyroyal. “Can’t you fight back?”

“We don’t have any rockets,” said Tom miserably. After that last terrible air battle over London, when he had shot down the 13th Floor Elevator and watched her crew burn inside their burning gondola, he had vowed that the Jenny would be a peaceful ship. Her rocket projectors had been empty ever since. Now he regretted his scruples. Thanks to him, Hester and Professor Pennyroyal would soon be in the hands of the Green Storm.

Another rocket slammed past. It was time to do something desperate. He called again on Quirke, then swung the Jenny hard over to larboard and took her powering down into the maze of the mountains, flashing through the shadows of wind-carved basalt crags and out again into sunlight.

And below him, far below him and ahead, he saw another chase in progress. A tiny scavenger town was scurrying southwards through a cleft in the mountains and behind it, jaws agape, rolled a big, rusty, three-tiered Traction City.

Tom steered the Jenny towards it, glancing from time to time into his periscope, where the three Fox Spirits still hung doggedly on his tail. Pennyroyal gnawed at his fingernails and gibbered the names of obscure gods: “Oh, great Poskitt! Oh, Deeble, preserve us!” Hester turned the radio on again and hailed the fast-approaching city, demanding permission to dock.

A pause. A rocket struck steam and splinters from a mountainside thirty yards astern. Then a woman’s voice crackled out of the radio, speaking Airsperanto with a heavy Slavic accent. “This is Novaya-Nizhni Harbour Board. Your request is denied.”

“What?” screamed Pennyroyal.

“But that’s not—” said Tom.

“This is an emergency!” Hester told the radio. “We’re being chased!”