Traction City (4 page)

He heaves Nutter up, yells for Fang and Smiff to follow and sets off up the deck's steep slope, all thought of hunting the Collector gone, starting the long walk back to Airdock Green. They've gone ten paces when he hears a voice behind shout, “After them!”, and a bullet flicks past him and spangs off a stanchion. He wishes he'd hidden those men's guns better, or brought them with him, or thought to hit them harder. It occurs to him, as he pulls Nutter into the feeble shelter of an alleyway, that he should perhaps have killed them.

Nutter has fainted. Anders lays him down, says to Fang, “Take care of him,” and quickly undoes her handcuffs. Then he creeps back to the alley's end. There's an old shrine there to Sooty Piet, the god of the Engine District. Ander's crouches behind it and peers out between the beer bottles and sheafs of lucky money that have been propped against the plinth as offerings.

The Engineers are making their way towards him, leaning forward like mountaineers as London heaves itself up a steep ridge and the slope of the street grows more extreme. There are five of them, and for a moment Anders wonders where the fifth one came from, before he realizes that the one at the back is far too tall to be an Engineer, and that his eyes are stabbing rods of green light through the mist.

“Watch out!” he shouts. He can't help himself. He'd leap out into his hunters' path to warn them of the threat, but Smiff has crept behind the shrine with him, and holds him back.

“No, sarge!”

One of the Engineers shrieks as the Stalker scythes him down. The others turn. The giant gun-thing goes off again, scrawling its blue lightning all over the Stalker, but it seems the Engineers have miscalculated; the current doesn't seem to bother him. The electricity wraps around him like tinsel round a Quirkemas Tree as he cuts down two other Engineers and then finally turns his attention to the one who's shooting him, reaching through the lightning to wrench the big gun apart, and its operator too.

Smiff tries to pull Anders away, but the policeman can't help himself. He keeps watching as the Stalker sets about its work, quickly and carefully removing the right hand of each dead Engineer. Silhouetted in the backlit steam, its spiky outline and jerky movements make it look like a shadow puppet. It pulls back the sleeves of its robe, and Anders sees that while its left hand is a nightmare gauntlet of iron and blades, the right is missing; its arm ends at the wrist in a jutting metal prong and a tangle of rusty wires.

Carefully the Stalker takes one of the freshly severed hands and shoves it on to the stump. The fingers jerk. Anders imagines electricity flowing into the hand, filling it like a glove. The Stalker raises it up in front of its face, into the light of those witch-green headlamp eyes. It turns the new hand this way and that, considering. Then it tears it off, throws it aside, and reaches for another.

“Is
that
what this is about?” whispers Anders. He's talking to himself. He doesn't even realize that he's spoken aloud until the thing turns its huge head towards him and the beams of its eyes come groping for him through the vapours.

How could it have heard him, over all the noise of London? But it has.

It puts down the hand it's holding and comes towards the shrine. Anders knows there's no escape for him. The best he can hope for is to buy some time so that the others can escape. “Run!” he tells Smiff, and stands to meet the Collector.

As he steps out in front of it, Fang's knapsack nudges his hip like a reminder.

“Is that what this is all about?” he asks.

The Stalker is very close. It moves slowly, as if perhaps the Engineers' lightning did it some damage after all. Its head is half helmet, half skull. From the helmet part long tubes and cables trail, plugged into ports on the armour which Anders sees gleaming under its torn and ragged robes. The skull parts are thinly papered with old skin. The lamps that are its eyes flare slightly as he asks his question. It stops and stands there in front of him, braced against the rolling of the deck, bladed hand half raised. Maybe it isn't used to being talked to. In all its years of hunting and killing probably nobody's said anything to it more interesting than “Aaaargh!”

“So you lost a hand, and so now you're looking for another?” says Anders. “Trying and trying to find a replacement. But you never can, can you? They're always too big or too small or too hairy or the wrong colour. So you keep on searching. . .”

The Stalker twitches its head and the eyes flicker. “
Must
. . .
repair
. . .” it says. Its teeth are metal. Its voice rasps through them like a rusty file.

“Repair?” Anders fights the urge to look to his
right, down the alley, to see if his companions have escaped.
How many years?
he thinks.
How
many hands?
His own right hand is busy in Fang's
knapsack, fingering the smooth curve of the demolition charge. He keeps talking. “You need to adapt, my friend. People lose hands and arms and legs and all sorts of things, but they learn to live without them. I lost my whole family; my wife and daughter, killed when London ate our town. That was worse than losing a hand. But I adapted, see?”

The Stalker has lost interest. “
Repair
,” it says, and its head tilts downwards, looking to size up
Anders's hand. Feeling
in the knapsack, he turns the switches on the demolition charge; safety off, then the detonator. He remembers, as he draws the charge out, that he has no idea how long the fuse is set for.

“Here,” he says.

The Stalker doesn't seem to know what the charge is. It doesn't seem to care. It watches Anders's hand as he reaches out and lets the charge's magnets clamp it to its armour, through its robes. Anders can guess what it's thinking.
Is this the right one at last? Is this finally the new hand I need?
And he surprises himself with a thought
of his own:
Poor old thing
.

But he's not hanging about to let it try his mitt for size. As soon as its clawed gauntlet starts to reach for him he turns and runs, glancing back just once. The Collector is lumbering after him, the demolition charge pinned to its robes like a tacky brooch with one red light on it, red as a ruby.

He doesn't hear the explosion. There is only his sudden running shadow, flung on the deck plates in front of him. Then something hits him in the back like Sooty Piet's shovel. He feels the sorts of sensations that fools pay good money for in fairgrounds. Time gets stretched out, and when it finally gets a grip on itself Anders learns that the demolition charge has not just destroyed the Collector, it has blown a big, roughly circular hole in the deck plate. Through this hole gravity and the steep slope of the deck are dragging him. He claws for a grip at its raggedy edge. He hangs there by his slowly slipping fingertips, grunting as they strain with the effort of supporting his whole heavy policeman's body.

He looks down. In the light that spills past him through the hole he can see bits of the Collector strewn in the net beneath the city. A hand; a blank-eyed head. The body, or whatever was left of it, is gone. Presumably that's what tore the immense hole in the net, right under Anders's dangling size nines.

His fingertips slip another eighth of an inch closer to the edge of the hole. He says a quick prayer to Peripatetia, the goddess of mobile cities, in whom he does not really believe.

Like an answer, a small voice from above says, “Sarge?”

Smiff is looking down at him over the edges of the hole. His small hands sieze Anders's right wrist and tug, trying uselessly to haul him up. Anders is afraid that if the boy doesn't let go, they'll fall together. “Go!” he says. “Fetch help!” Knowing that he'll be long gone before Smiff can bring any help to this remote portion of the deck.
Unless Fang or Nutter are still around. But Nutter's too badly hurt to help, and Fang will be far away by now if she has any sense
. . .

Then, just as the hand Smiff's clinging to loses its grip entirely, strong fingers grip his other wrist,
and there she is, her pretty face quite ugly with the
effort as she strains to heave him up. And
somehow, between them, her and Smiff, they do
it; like snow-mad fishermen landing a walrus through a hole in the ice, they drag him up and lie there beside him, gasping, panting, laughing with relief on the hot deck, listening to the shouts and footsteps of the approaching emergency crews.

Afterwards, when Nutter has been taken off to the infirmary and they are all back at Airdock Green, she tells him, “I heard what you said to the Collector. About your wife and daughter.”

Anders is studying the list Pym made of her airship's cargo, and the “wanted” note from Arkangel which he has paperclipped to it.

Fang says, “My father once docked our airship on a little ice-town, to wait out a storm. But in the storm's heart great Arkangel came and ate the town, and we were caught, and set to work as slaves aboard Arkangel. They treat slaves hard there. My parents. . . All that kept me alive was knowing that one day I would escape, and I would destroy Traction Cities.”

Anders says, “With me, it was a silly accident. The town I lived on, it was pretty, but it wasn't well-built. Some of the tier supports gave way when London ate it, and Lise and Minna were caught in the collapse.” He looks up from the grainy photo on the “wanted” note to her real face, across his desk. “You can't fight cities on your own, you know. If that's your ambition, you should go to Shan Guo, Kerala, Zagwa. The lands of the Anti-Traction League. They have armies and air-fleets to keep cities at bay. At least you wouldn't be on your own.”

Fang says, “I thought I was your prisoner, policeman.”

Anders carefully tears the papers in half, and then in half again, and again. He drops the pieces into the red recycling bin under his desk. “It's been a busy night,” he says with a yawn, “and I still haven't got round to filing a report on you.”

Fang watches him with those dark, dark eyes of hers. After a while she says, “You can come with me if you like. You can join the Anti-Traction League too.”

“Me?” Anders chuckles. “Why would I do that? I'm a townie through and through.”

“But London killed your family!”

“It was an accident.”

“An accident caused by this stupid system, this insane, evil system, this Municipal Darwinism that makes city chase city. . .”

Her voice grows shrill and scratchy. How wonderful it must feel, thinks Anders, to be so young, so angry and so certain that you're right.

“I have work to do here,” he says gently. “I don't know if it was a good idea of Quirke's to start cities moving all those years ago, but I do know there are plenty of good people aboard London, and somebody has to protect them from the bad ones. This is my city.”

“But. . .”

Anders yawns and swings his chair around to face away from her. “Goddess, but I'm tired! Do you know, if a prisoner chose to make a break for freedom now, I don't think I could do a thing about it.”

There is a long silence behind him. Then he hears her footsteps cross the room, and the sound of the door opening. He feels the breath of engine-scented air as it swings slowly shut. He is alone.

He gives her ten minutes, then goes outside. The motion of the city has changed; it's no longer climbing. Smiff and Constable Pym are walking towards him from the direction of the hospital on Crumb Street. He greets them.

“Corporal Nutter is going to be all right,” says Smiff.

“And what about the girl?” asks Pym.

“Girl?” Anders looks blankly at him. “I'll teach you something about good police work, Constable: don't let yourself get distracted by unimportant details. Concentrate on the big picture. Which at this present moment means going inside and starting to work out how we can report last night's events to the Council of Guilds without mentioning mysterious girls or disagreements with Engineers.”

“Yes, sarge,” says Pym, saluting smartly.

“What about me, sarge?” asks Smiff, lifting his grubby face.

“You can go with him,” Anders says. “I'm sure Pym can find some work for you. We'll be short-handed around Airdock Green till Corporal Nutter's fit for duty again. Who knows, there might even be enough money in the petty-cash tin to pay you, once we've bought a new biscuit tin.”

They leave him. He walks on alone to the air dock and out along one of the quays into the grey, cool, early morning air at the edge of the city. The little red airship has gone from her berth. He looks up to see if he can catch a glimpse of her flying away, but cloud wraps the Shatterhorns. He'll not see Anna Fang again. He grabs hold of the handrail at the quay's end to steady himself and stands there in the cold, clean wind. London is tilting forward now, starting down the southern slopes. All the things which had slid to the back of the city on its way up will now be sliding forward again. The girl was right, thinks Anders; it is a strange way to live. But he knows no other.

The clouds ahead of London thin and part. The sun is coming up over the plains of Italia. The daylight gleams on lakes and rivers and slow, fat, unsuspecting towns.