Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (14 page)

“We don’t have to do a thing. There’s something about the suspensors the flora doesn’t like. It won’t grow on them.”

“The metal, perhaps?”

Mercer shook his head. “The surveillance towers on top are made of the same thing, and they’re covered. It could be anything—chemicals, perhaps, or something to do with radiant particles. We’re simple engineers and chemists here. We need an expert—and I understand you know more than most about the physical sciences.”

Valerie stared at the man. “Are you suggesting—?”

“We could use someone like you. If we could find the answer, we might make this city habitable in a fraction of the time.”

Valerie’s heartbeat quickened, and she felt a little breathless. These people were doing something important here, something that would benefit millions, and offering to make her a part of it. But they were the enemy. Weren’t they?

“I have to help my city. I can’t stay.”

“I’m not suggesting that you should. But you could come back.”

Mercer took her to a building in the cleared zone where she could stay until the morning. “My people are working on your ship—clearing dragonfly smut from the engine, and patching the skin where your behemoth tore it open. They tell me you did the right thing, by the way—clearing the engine before you tried to land. If you’d landed first, the behemoth would have shredded you before you could have done anything.”

“It wasn’t planned. I was in a panic.”

Mercer shrugged, and smiled. “They’ll run a spore sweep and replace all your filters. It’ll be ready by dawn.”

Valerie thanked him, and he left. She tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Thoughts of helping to create a restored, living city filled her mind. Then came sleep, and with it dreams of walking without fear through the gardens of Syberia.

Castrovalva hovered above the February Desert. Mercer had explained that in the event of a catastrophe, the desert region was the best place for the city to fall. The contaminants that the city guarded wouldn’t get into ground water or the oceans. If the worst happened, it could be cleaned up.

Valerie began to understand what the Free Cities cared about. They were trying to protect the surface life. Every organism down there was vicious, venomous, and extremely tough. Nature had made them that way. They did what they did to survive—not out of hate, or spite, or greed, or cruelty. The Free Citizens saw themselves as part of the world, not its enemy.

They cared about each other, too. They didn’t watch each other constantly, suspicious of everything.

Valerie had known one way of life—the Royal Cities’ way. And now she’d been shown another way, and she’d obstinately denied that it was better. But no longer. She was a scientist, and good scientists didn’t ignore facts that didn’t fit a pet theory. But that was what she’d done since the minute she’d landed on Belvedere.

Her feelings were a twisted knot in her belly. Shame at her own stubbornness mixed with the sense of betrayal at the lies she’d grown up believing, and anger that millions of people were still kept subdued by those same lies.

Now she knew the truth, and with that came a bright spark—a feeling of liberation and hope. The Rogues were a myth, invented by her own leaders to validate an oppressive system of rule. If she returned to City Twenty-seven, she’d die. They’d execute her, and her body would be dropped in a sewer to end up as food for the surface life. Her name would be just another given out over the loudspeakers as a Rogue spy.

The truth about the Free Cities implied something else, too. Danforth was no government agent. He couldn’t be, or he would have known that same truth. He wouldn’t have sent her to Belvedere unprepared. So what was he up to?

It took three days for the dock workers on Castrovalva to line the flyer’s cargo hold with shielding. That done, automatons carried in the twenty boxes and stacked them according to Valerie’s instructions before sealing the hold.

Her plan required one more piece of equipment: a shielded suit. The one the dock people let her take was old, and had obviously seen a lot of use. The brass helmet was marked with gouges, the lead glass of the faceplate scratched, and the canvas of the suit itself had more patches than she could count—but they assured her the lead lining was intact. All was ready.

“City Twenty-seven has drifted west of where it was when you left,” said Carter, the dock navigation expert. “Belvedere has moved some way to the north, too. So you won’t be using the same refuelling stops. I’ve set your clockworks for an optimal route to get you back to your home as quickly as possible.”

Valerie’s mind balked at Carter’s use of the word ‘home,’ but she pushed the feeling aside. “How long to get there, then?”

“Thirty-three days, assuming no delays.”

Valerie had been travelling for forty-six days. She’d get back with just one day to spare. It was going to be a close thing. “I’d better get going.”

Carter nodded. “Indeed. Safe travels, Miss McGrath.”

The flyer docked with Lilyrock seven days later. The city was aptly named; underneath, most of its structure had been built from sparkling blocks of bubble-granite carved from the mountains in the southern polar region, and the city buildings above were festooned with lilies—a mutated variant of the carnivorous form found on the shores of the April Sea.

The city was all white and green above and all rainbow colours below, where the crystal rock splintered the sunlight into its components. Valerie caught her breath at its beauty and toyed with the idea of staying to explore, but questions were a weight on her mind. Who was Danforth working for? Was the city in danger? She wanted the answers, and time was short. She had to move on.

Five days later, as she passed over the May Woods, she noticed a streak of yellow and brown cutting through the green of the trees below. She considered flying lower to see what it was, but then she saw the cause—off to the north, faded by haze, was a city. It trailed smoke, and Valerie knew that it could only be one of the Royal Cities.

She squinted at the tainted woods as the flyer passed over the stain, and her eyes followed the trail of damage along the ground in the direction of the city. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily, as if she could smell the odour of sewage.

The Free City of Xochil floated over the July Wetlands, bathed in sunlight. Valerie wandered over the pale, polished wood bridges, taking the air while the flyer was being readied. It would be her last stop before City Twenty-seven.

Seventy-two days had passed since she’d left. According to Carter’s figures, it was seven days from Xochil to her starting point. Carter had called it ‘home.’ Valerie no longer felt any such connection to the place.

She’d arrive with not one day to spare, but two. As Carter had pointed out, she’d flown around the globe, always travelling eastward. When she returned to City Twenty-seven, she would have experienced seventy-nine days—but in the city, only seventy-eight days would have passed.

She was tempted to spend an extra day aboard Xochil—the Flower City, as they called it, because of the petal-shaped layout of its roads and the bright painted colours of the curving buildings and walkways. But the weight of the eighty-day deadline pressed on her soul.

Danforth hadn’t told her the whole truth; of that much she was certain. She didn’t believe him, but she couldn’t risk being wrong, with eight million lives at stake. And she needed to know. The only way to be sure was to return, before her time ran out.

As she flew on toward City Twenty-seven, she stood at the rear port and watched Xochil floating like a rose blossom against cream-white clouds until it faded into the distance and the dusk.

Valerie relaxed in the pilot’s chair, occasionally looking up from her book spool to scan the horizon and the low, rolling hills idly. She was four days out from Xochil and two days from City Twenty-seven, and wondering what would happen when she arrived there. Would Danforth be surprised? She’d been away a lot longer than either of them had expected. He might have given up on her. Perhaps he’d even sent someone else, following her trail, to locate the protonium.

She didn’t really care if he had. The far more important question was whether there any truth at all in what he—

The bang from the rear of the aircraft shook the deck and she dropped the book spool, startled. She jumped for the passageway and ran back to the engine room, the source of the sound.

A grating noise came from the engine. Something inside it was broken, but she couldn’t fix it without stopping it, and that meant landing—and that was out of the question. Those low, rolling hills were covered in deadly greenery. Touching down meant death.

She scurried back to the controls. She resisted the temptation to take over; the clockworks were doing their best to keep the motor running, and there was no way she could do the job any better. She glanced at the moving chart. There were no cities closer than Twenty-seven.

She scanned the ground ahead, looking for any place that might be safe long enough to make repairs, but she knew it was futile. Nowhere on the surface was safe.

The grating got louder, and then came a screech of complaining metal. The engine seized, and the only sound was the rushing of air against the hull. Valerie forced down the panic and grabbed the wheel, doing her best to keep the aircraft in a shallow glide. She looked for a place that was flat and clear of rocks and trees.