Traction City (2 page)

Sergeant Anders has a key to the fence around Mortlake, though it takes him a while to find it. The Base Tier police don't have the manpower to patrol the empty districts. The council claim they can't afford it, although they always seem to find the funds to pay for policemen on the higher tiers to guard the elevator stops and stairways and make sure no ne'er-do-wells from down below come up to make High London look untidy. Districts like Mortlake are left to police themselves, and so, despite Anders's best efforts, they have fallen into the power of men like Costa Mulligan.

“It'll be no loss if
he's
dead,” says Nutter, as Anders pushes the wire gate open and the two of them advance into the Mortlake gloom. Their torch beams skid across the rusted deck. “
If
he's dead. . .”

“Young Smiff was not lying,” says Anders. He knows that boys like Smiff have no love for the police. Whatever happened here this evening must have been bad indeed to send him running to Airdock Green for help.

It doesn't take them long to find the bodies. They are lying just where Smiff said; Big Norm Trendlebeare and Spicy Rick, two of Mulligan's mates. Blood has spread in lakes upon the rust around them. Both are missing their right hands. Anders goes to the nearby hole in the deck and shines his torch down. Snow eddies in the beam, dancing in the complicated breeze between the city's wheels. Costa Mulligan hangs in the nets where Smiff left him, a fat fly in a rusty spider web.

“There must have been more than one killer,” Nutter says. “These were big lads. To take all three down. . . Must have been a bunch of them.”

“But the hands,” says Anders, feeling queasy and trying not to let it show. All these years a policeman and the sight of blood can still do that to him. “Why take their hands?”

“As a warning,” says Nutter. “To rival gangs.”

“There are no rival gangs.” Anders stoops to study a scrape mark on the deck. “Anyway, who'd see this warning? If Smiff hadn't chanced to be here it might have been weeks before we found these fellows.”

Nutter says nothing. He's sulking.

“The boy said there was just one attacker,” Anders reminds him.

“The boy was jumping down a hole at the time,” says Nutter. “You can't take his word on any of it. For all we know he helped do in Mulligan and his cronies and then came scampering to us to get himself an alibi.”

“He was frightened.”

“He was actin'.”

“Nobody is that good an actor.”

Anders torch lights up bright scratches in the rust. He follows them into the mouth of an alley where shadows sleep among the hulks of huge, abandoned machines. Beside them, flower-shaped stains where blood has dripped. The sort of stains that Anders would expect to see if, say, someone carrying three freshly severed hands had run into that alleyway. But what about the scratches? Are they the marks of hobnailed shoes? Metal boots?

“You're too soft on these scavenger kids, Sarge,” Nutter is saying, back at the alley's mouth. “Same with that girl I nabbed. Foreign mossie scum, and you talk to her like she's your long lost. . .”

“Quiet!” says Anders.

A few yards ahead, in the shadows beneath a huge old crane, he has spied the glint of moving metal.

Up, up the city climbs. Through gaps in the clouds the people on the higher tiers can see the lakes and rivers of the lowlands glinting in moonlit far behind. London has never climbed so high. There are parties to celebrate; the music of string quartets mingles with the steady howling of the wind. If London can conquer the Shatterlands, it can do anything.

 

At Airdock Green, Smiff sits sipping at the tea which Constable Pym has given him. He's calmer now, but not yet calm enough to face a night alone in his nest behind the starboard back-up heat exchangers on Tertiary Street. He sits and watches Pym, who is crouched in front of the station's big wooden filing cabinet, flicking through the papers inside. Through the spy-hole on the cell door the prisoner watches too, with her unreadable eyes.

“Here we go!” says Pym. He stands up with a sheaf of papers in his hands. Each week Airdock Green is sent a copy of all the police reports from other stations on Base Tier, badly typed on grey recycled paper. Constable Pym is the only one who bothers reading them. “I knew it reminded me of something,” he says, waving the reports cheerfully at Smiff. “Listen. ‘
Friday 10th May. Body identified as Sid Simmonds, Track-Plate Cleaner 3rd Class, recovered from no.14 axle housing. Badly mangled; right hand missing
.' They'd put it down as accidental. Thought he'd got caught in the machinery. And here's another, back in Sternstacks; right hand missing. And. . .” He sets the papers on the desk and leafs swiftly through them. “Disappearances. Eight . . . nine . . . ten of 'em this fortnight past. Ten men gone overboard, it seems. But did they fall, or were they pushed? And were they missing their right hands when they fell?”

“When I was a child,” says a voice behind him, in surprisingly clear Anglish with a northern lilt, “I worked in the base tier of the city of Arkangel. One time we ate a little scavenger town. A nasty little place, but it didn't even bother to flee when Arkangel came swooping down on it, so it got eaten. Just thirty men aboard. All dead. All with their right hands missing. We found the hands heaped up in an old warehouse near the bows, like a nest of big white spiders.”

“Blimey!” says Smiff, all saucer-eyed.

“D-don't listen to her, Smiff,” warns Pym. “She's just tryin' to frighten us. Spreadin' panic and discontent, that's what they do, these Anti-Tractionists. I went on a course about them.”

“You should be frightened, policeman,” says the girl. “Your sergeant and the other one aren't coming back. I know what it is, that thing out there. It will kill them too, and take their hands.”

“Who's there?” says Karl Anders, into the dark under the old crane. He hears Nutter's regulation-issue boots on the deck behind him and says without turning, “I don't know why they don't just clear this district. The council's always nagging us to recycle everything. Why not recycle these old machines?”

“'Cos the Engineers are always talking about getting the Wombs working again,” says Nutter wearily. “Good thing if they did, too. Trouble with this city is, we don't make anything any more. . .”

“Wait here,” says Anders, before the constable gets started on some recycling of his own, rehashing some tirade from the news-sheets about how foreign imports are crippling London's industry. With his torch in one hand and his service revolver in the other he goes cautiously into the rattling, rust-scented dark.

“You'd best come quietly,” he says to the shadows. “I'm armed.”

Above his head big chains swing clanking, stirred by the city's movement. Nothing else moves. Nobody answers. His torch beam lights up strewn ducts and old papers under the rusting crane. It lights up a square pit in the deck where some other hunk of machinery was once attached.

The pit is full of hands.

“Great Goddess!” Anders starts to say, but before he can get the words out a shadow moves. He starts to turn. Sees dark, oily robes, a hood with more shadows inside it and two . . . those can't really be green glowing eyes, can they? They must be goggles, reflecting a green light from somewhere. . .

A raised hands sprouts knives; not one, but four. Anders fumbles with the safety catch of his revolver. He hears himself say, “No!” Then the crash of Nutter's pistol deafens him. The robed attacker stumbles but does not fall. Nutter comes running and the pistol goes off again. The robed shape goes backwards and then up, bounding like an ape up the side of the crane, dropping into the darkness beyond.

“After him!” Anders yells.

They go round the crane. The robes flap under an arch ahead. They follow. Round a corner, through stacks of old crates. Each time they think they've lost the fugitive he's there again, a footfall ahead, robe tails vanishing around a corner.

Above the ceaseless voices of the wheels and engines comes a new sound; the snare-drum rattle of the little railway that runs through Mortlake, carrying solid fuel from the Gut to the old auxiliary Godshawk Engines near Sternstacks. The line has been enclosed in a wire cage to stop men like Mulligan jumping aboard the unmanned trains and helping themselves to the fuel.

“He's trapped!” shouts Nutter.

The fugitive is running down a street which both men know is a dead end. The walls of the shuttered construction hangars tower up on either side, and the railway in its cage cuts across the end. Beyond the railway line lie brighter districts: Engine 12 and Ditch Street. The glow from their street lamps flickers through gaps between the trucks of the passing train. The fugitive is silhouetted against it, slowing as he reaches the fence and realizes the policemen have him trapped.

“He's tall. . .” says Anders.

The fugitive looks back at him, and again he catches that glint of green eyes. Then the fugitive goes through the fence. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the heavy mesh of the cage apart, tearing a hole that's big enough for even him to climb through.

“No!” says Nutter scornfully, as if his eyes expect him to believe something impossible.

Anders keeps running. The fugitive leaps aboard the last of the trucks as it trundles past. Anders runs right to the fence and stops to take careful aim. In all his years as a policeman he's never yet shot anyone, but this seems like a good time to start. In another second the train will vanish through a tunnel beneath a big old metal building. He pulls the trigger and the gun jumps in his hand and he knows he's hit the figure squatting on the last truck because he sees a puff of smoke or dust or something spurt from its chest. But it doesn't fall; just turns and looks at him as the train carries it out of sight.

As the clatter of the wheels fades he hears footsteps behind him. Spins with the gun ready, but it's just Nutter, winded, running up behind. They stand there together, bracing themselves against the train cage as the city lurches under them, scrambling over some granite reef.

“It wasn't human,” says Anders. “Bullets don't hurt it.”

“Not human?” Nutter starts to chuckle, then realizes his chief's not joking. “What, then? A werewolf? A nightwight? Maybe we should be using silver bullets! We missed him, that's all.”

“My shot hit all right. So did at least one of yours.” Anders shakes his head, staring at the curve and gleam of the narrow tracks where they plunge into that tunnel, trying to remember where they go. “It was a Stalker,” he says.

“They're just in stories, aren't they?”

“Oh, they were real enough.” The ghosts of long-ago history lessons stir in Anders's memory. There was this rusty head he liked to go and look at, in the Hammershoi Museum, when he was a lad. He says, “There was a culture once that knew how to resurrect the dead. Not their minds, just their bodies. Armoured them and sent them into battle, in the wars they used to have back in the days before Traction, when rival cities worked out their differences by fighting instead of just eating one another. The last of the Stalkers were supposed to have perished at the Battle of Three Dry Ships, but there's always been rumours of one or two survivors. Old things. Insane and dangerous.”

“But how's one come to London?” asks Nutter, still not sure if he should take this seriously or not.

Anders shrugs. “Up from below, I suppose. London's been moving slow these past few weeks. A thing like that, if it was lurking in the high places, could have climbed aboard. Unless. . .” He turns suddenly, looking at Nutter. “It's no coincidence. This thing appears, and that girl you arrested, on the same night. There's a connection.”

“What?”

“I don't know. Let's get back to Airdock Green and ask her.”