Traction City (3 page)

“Sarge!” says Constable Pym excitedly, when the two of them get back to Airdock Green. But Anders goes straight past him to the cell, leaving Nutter to pour two mugs of tea, fortified with a good dash of something stronger from the bottle they keep for emergencies in the top drawer of the filing cabinet. Smiff, who seems to have appointed himself a sort of deputy constable for the night, fetches the official biscuit tin.

The girl stands up as Anders opens the cell door.

“She speaks Anglish, Sarge!” says Pym.

“Of course she does,” says Anders. “
Everybody
speaks Anglish in the air-trade. And if she really doesn't we can get a translator in. But by the time I can get one here, her creature may have killed again.”

Something changes behind the girl's eyes. She says, “It is not
my
creature.”

“It arrived the same time you did. I think Corporal Nutter's right; you're some kind of saboteur and you've brought that thing aboard.”

“No,” says the girl.

“No,” says Pym, behind him in the doorway. “That's what I was trying to tell you, Sarge. It's been here for days and days. A fortnight maybe. There's been deaths and disappearances.”

Anders looks at him, then back at the girl.

“He's right,” she says. “I tracked it here. It is very old and it has been wandering the world for a long time. I followed the stories, from city to city, settlement to settlement; stories of murders and missing right hands. In most of the places it's been, people don't even know what it is; they think it's a bogeyman, a hungry ghost. Aboard Murnau they called it Struwelpeter; on Manchester it's the Fingersmith. Most places, people just call it the Collector. It takes the right hand of everyone it kills.”

Some of the anger goes out of Anders. He sits down on the cell's hard bench. “Why?”

“Maybe it's planning to open a second-hand shop.”

“Very funny, miss. But I meant, why did you trail it here?”

“Because I want it. You're right. I'm an Anti-Tractionist. I hate all mobile cities. But I'm not so stupid that I think I could blow them up with little fireworks like the one your man found on me.” She shoots a look of scorn at Nutter. “If I had a Stalker to do my bidding, he could tear your city apart with his iron hands. He could kill you all one by one.”

“But why would it do your bidding?” Anders asks. “Why wouldn't it just cut your throat for you, and take your pretty hand for a souvenir?”

The girl shrugs. “Nothing, maybe. But I've heard about this other Stalker, a bounty killer up in the northlands. Mister Shrike, he's called. Kills men and women without pity, for anyone who'll pay. But he won't harm children; the young, he takes pity on. I thought maybe the Collector would be the same. Maybe he'll listen to me. Maybe I can make him turn his talents to a good cause, and help me rid the world of these juggernauts of yours.”

Anders ignores the notion that destroying whole cities full of people is a good cause. “It spared Smiff,” he admits. “But you're older than Smiff. What, fifteen? Sixteen? Not a child. Maybe he won't take pity on you. . .” He laughs. “But you've already thought that through, haven't you! That's why you had the demolition charge with you!”

The girl tilts her sharp little chin at him, sensing mockery. “If I clamp it to his armour and let it off, not even a Stalker could withstand that.”

Anders shakes his head. “What's your name, girl?”

“Fang.” She spits it at him.

“That's not a name,” says Smiff.

“It might pass for a name among heathen Anti-Tractionist easterlings,” Nutter admits grudgingly.

“Well, believe me, Miss Fang,” says Anders, “I've met this Collector. If you were close enough to clamp things to its armour, you'd be dead.”
Yet
I'm
not dead
, he thinks.
Why did it run when me and Nutter found it? A Stalker must know mere bullets couldn't pierce its hide. Unless
. . . “It doesn't know that it's a Stalker,” he mutters. “Old and insane. . . And the hands. What's
that
about?”

“Why are we stood here listening to this mossie minx?” asks Nutter. “We need to be calling for support. This Stalker thing could be halfway to Sternstacks by now, murderin' as it goes. Send word up top, sarge. Get some of them lads from the Gut who think policing means posing about in plastic armour; let them help us deal with this thing.”

“No,” says Anders. “If we call for help the Guild of Engineers will hear of it.”

“Good!” says Nutter. “They got death rays and electric guns and all sorts stashed away in the Engineerium, I've heard.”

“Exactly. So you can imagine how they'd love to get their hands on a working Stalker. Not to mention young Miss Fang here. I want to deal with this thing myself, if I can.”

He leaves the cell door open as he goes back out into the office. Fang's demolition charge lies on his desk, neatly labelled as EVIDENCE in Constable Pym's boyish handwriting. He picks it up, weighing it in his hand and trying to imagine the blast it would create. Powerful enough to tear apart a town's deck plates, but focused. It seems to him that the girl has provided him with the perfect anti-Stalker weapon. If only he can get close enough to use it?

“Did you hear all that, Smiff?” he asks, meeting the wide eyes of the boy who sits beside the stove.

“Get him out of here, sarge,” says Nutter. “He scoffed all our best biscuits.”

“But we need him,” says Anders. “You heard what Miss Fang said. These creatures are kindly to the young. That's me and you ruled out, and even Pym. Smiff here is the one we need to talk to it for us; lure it close, so I can pin this pretty medal on it.” He holds up the demolition charge.

Smiff shakes his head. He keeps on shaking it while he slides down off his chair and backs away. He keeps backing away until the wall stops him. “I ain't going to go looking for that thing again, mister. I 'scaped it once, I might not get so lucky next time.”

“But it won't harm a child. That's why it spared you last time. You'll be perfectly safe. Well, safe. Safeish.”

Smiff just shakes his head some more. “You don't know that. You don't know nuffink. You just got
her
word on that, and she's not even a Londoner.”

He points, which makes them all turn to look at Fang. She has emerged from the cell and stands behind them, listening. Nutter, when he sees her standing there, grabs her by her arm and says, “Get back in there, you—”

“Leave her,” says Anders sternly. “We need her. The boy's right. We can't ask him to face this danger for us. Miss Fang can do it.”

“What, you mean take
her
off to Sternstacks with us?” Nutter can't begin to mask his contempt. “Let her talk to this creature, and turn it against us? Or run off into the dark first chance she gets?”

By way of answer to the last point, Anders brings the handcuffs from his pocket and locks Fang's thin wrists together again. “If she runs, Nutter, you can shoot her. And if she says more than ten words to this Collector before I attach the charge to him, my name's not Karl Anders.”

It's a funny thing, but now he knows what it is, Smiff can't get the Stalker out of his head. It's the biggest thing that's ever happened in his small life, that robed giant barging past him, pruning Costa's boys like weeds. It seems a pity not to get another look at it; a
proper
look like, before Sergeant Anders blows its mean old machine soul to the Sunless Country.

When they've gone, Anders and Nutter with the girl between them, leaving Constable Pym to mind the shop, he sits a while longer by the station stove. Eyes the biscuit tin, but knows the nice ones are all gone. He sits and thinks about his Stalker, and wonders what it's doing now.

Constable Pym has his long nose in those filing drawers again. As soon as that girl said her name he knew he'd seen it somewhere. He flicks through the file marked S and soon finds what he's looking for. An alert issued nearly a year back, brought to London a month or so ago by some wandering aeronaut.
Anna Fang. Escaped
Slave: Wanted for Theft of Money and Airship Parts by
the Direktorate of Arkangel.
There's a grainy photograph of the girl, younger and acne-speckled, but that stripe of white hair is unmistakable.

Eager to share this latest breakthrough (his second in one night!) Pym turns to show the sheet to Smiff. “Hey, look at this! No wonder she hates Traction Cities!”

But Smiff is gone. The biscuit tin's gone with him.

It's a long way to Sternstacks, downhill along the dingy, steeply tilted streets that skirt the central Engine District, leading past the Engineers' great experimental prison at Piranesi Plaza. “That's where you're headed for,” Nutter tells the girl with a leer. “All sorts of toys they've got in there for loosening Anti-Tractionist tongues. Literally, sometimes.”

Luckily the streets are almost deserted. The only people they pass are harried engine-minders hurrying from one emergency to another, with no time to wonder where two policemen are
going, or why the girl they have with them is
handcuffed. They pass down Shallow Street, which isn't shallow at all tonight but canted at an angle that makes them shuffle and stagger like comedy drunks. At the street's end, litter that has slid down from higher districts near the city's prow has collected in drifts against the plinth of
the statue of Charles Shallow himself, one of
London's first and least-favourite Lord Mayors.

At Sternstacks they step out of the iron shadow of the tiers above into air that's cold and almost fresh. Fang tilts her face up hoping to see stars, but she's out of luck. All around her the huge exhaust stacks of the city rise, taller than any tower she's ever seen, some striped like garter snakes, some so fat that lesser stacks and flues twine round them like ivy round a giant tree. From their high snouts the smoke and smuts and filthy gas of all the city's engines fume, forming a cloud that blots out the sky.

“I found a whole parasite town up there in that lot once,” says Nutter. “A little flying place called Kipperhawk. They'd anchored it to London's stern with hawsers and it was hanging in the smokestream, sieving out minerals and such. Cheeky cloots.”

“It's a town-eat-town world,” says Anders.

They walk past darkened offices and workshops to the place where the little railway track emerges from Mortlake. A line of trucks is being unloaded there by men in the orange jackets of the fuel corps, the fuel emptied into hoppers which will feed the ancient Godshawk engines which still stand here, too old and feeble to power London's usual travels, but still useful when there's a big push on. Anders goes over to the foreman. “Seen anyone come out of Mortlake tonight?”

“Mortlake?” The man looks at him like he's crazy. “What's up? Costa's boys causing trouble?” He peers past Anders, trying to ogle Fang through the ripple of hot air escaping from his engines. “Who's the girl?”

“Police business,” says Anders.

“Suit yourself. But if you see my 'prentice on your travels, send him to me, would you? I haven't seen him since last tea break.”

“It's here,” says Anders, when he gets back to where Nutter and the girl are waiting. “An apprentice from that fuel gang has vanished. The Collector has collected himself another hand.”

Even Fang has the decency to look a little
nervous as they head sternwards. There is no one
about. Walkways lead aft between huge horizontal ducts. The ducts steam, filling the air with mist. Smuts drifting down from above swirl in the mist like snow gone bad. Sometimes there's actual snow as well. By the time they get near to the high barriers at the stern, visibility is down to a few yards. Anders stumbles over the body of the fuel-team apprentice before he sees it. It lies where the collector left it, in a sticky dark puddle in the middle of the street.

“So much for your theory,” Anders tells the girl. He takes out his handkerchief and spreads it over the dead boy's face. “He's younger than you, and your Stalker didn't show
him
any pity.”

“What now then?” asks Nutter.

Men appear silently and all around; their rubber-soled shoes make no sound on the deck plates and their long, white rubber coats blend perfectly with the drifting steam. Four Engineers with pale bald scalps and the red cogwheel symbol of their Guild tattooed on their foreheads. Two carry sleek guns; a third is weighed down by something vaguely gunlike but so huge, and so encrusted with wires and coils and dials, that it's hard to tell.

“Is there a problem, sergeant?” asks the leader, a senior Guildsman, his eyes invisible behind faceted goggles.

Anders steps forward, half hoping that in the Sternstacks murk these newcomers won't notice Fang. But they
have
noticed her, of course; the eyes of the three gunmen are creeping all over her. He chooses his reply with care. The Guild of Engineers started out as London's mechanics and technicians, but on a mobile city mechanics and technicians are men of great importance, and over the centuries the Engineers have come to wield huge power. Upsetting them could end a man's career.

“Murder, sir,” he says. “Three scavengers dead.”

“And the girl?” asks the Engineer, goggles glittering like flies' eyes as he swings them towards Fang.

“A witness, sir, assisting us with our enquiries.”

The goggles swing back to Anders. “These Scavengers. Were they mutilated?”

“Their right hands had been taken off, sir.”

“Mmm,” says the Engineer. Behind him the man with the big gun-thing shifts position, adjusting its weight. The others stand still as statues (which isn't very still on London's shuddery decks). Black smuts settle on their white coats; they are speckled like Dalmatians.

“You may return to your station,” the Engineer says. “We have this situation under control. Your witness will remain with us.”

From the corner of his eye Anders see Fang turn her face to look at him. She's wondering what he'll do. He's wondering the same thing himself. It's a surprise when he hears himself say, “No.”

The Engineer raises one well-pruned eyebrow.

“She's in my custody.” says Anders. “For her own protection.”

“You have questioned her?” asks the Engineer.

“Oh, we know about the Stalker, sir.”

The Engineer doesn't so much as twitch a nostril. They must be great poker players, Anders thinks, if games of poker are permitted in that cheerless Engineerium of theirs. But his men start at that word, “Stalker”.

“I didn't realize the Engineers knew about it, sir.”

“The Guild of Engineers know everything,” the Engineer snaps. “One of our survey teams encountered the creature known as the Collector three weeks ago, when London first entered these hills. We subdued it and brought it aboard. We were keeping it under observation in one of the old Wombs.”

“Not keeping it under very
good
observation, were you?” splutters Nutter. “It's killed a dozen men on Base Tier. . .”

“That was part of the experiment,” says the Engineer. “We wished to see how it behaved in the mobile-urban environment. London is no longer the largest or fastest city in the Great Hunting Ground. If we are to compete with the new megalopolises we may need to adjust our hunting strategies. If we could reproduce these Stalkers and insert them into the engine districts of prey cities they could prove useful. However, this Stalker has proved less controllable than we had hoped. We have lost contact with the Engineers who we put into Mortlake to study it. It has been decided to shut down the experiment.”

“That contraption will kill it?” asks Anders, pointing at the big gun-thing.

“It is already dead.” The Engineer permits himself a cold smile. “As are you, sergeant. We cannot have mere policemen prying into the business of our Guild.”

He steps aside. The two gunmen behind him raise their weapons. Anders tries to think of something to say and finds that he is empty of words. But before the Engineers can shoot, something comes trundling at them down the slope of the deck, a small thing, cylindrical, rattling and clanking as it rolls into the open space between Engineers and policemen.

“Bomb!” shouts a voice, out of the vapours and the swirling snow.

The Engineers stare at the thing just long enough for Anders to butt their chief aside and swing a punch at the nearest gunman. He grunts and goes backwards, crashing into the one with the giant Stalker-gun, which goes off, arcing blue lightning everywhere. In the jagged light of it Anders sees the girl Fang swing a high kick into the face of the second gunman, who drops his weapon as he falls. She doesn't see the leading Engineer stepping towards her from behind, drawing a shiny silver pistol. But Nutter does, and throws himself between girl and gun as it goes off. Then Anders has the Engineer by his rubber collar. He wrenches the gun out of the man's hand. The fly's-eye goggles shatter as he drives his head against the nearest duct.

Something bumps against the toes of Anders's boot and he looks down and sees that it's the bomb. Only it isn't a bomb; it's the biscuit tin from Airdock Green police station. Smiff stands in the swirling steam, staring at the felled Engineers.

“I followed after you, Sarge,” he says.

Anders finds that he's too shocked to say anything. The dazed Engineers are grovelling on the deck. He kicks their guns away and goes to Nutter, who's crouched by a duct, hand pressed to the wound in his shoulder. Fang stands watching him. “He saved me,” she says. “Why'd he do that?”

Nutter groans, looking like he wonders the same thing.

“Because you're a human being and so's he,” says Anders, moving Nutter's hand and studying the wound. “Also, it's his job.”

“Blimey,” says Nutter, his face pale grey, tears running down it.

“You'll be all right,” Anders promises him, although he's not sure how, because even if he can get Nutter patched up there's going to be trouble coming down on them for assaulting an Engineer Security Team. “Come on. . .”