Infernal Devices

“You might as well. There’s not much else to do.”

Theo flinched at the distant sounds of another Tumbler salvo exploding on the skirts of Kom Ombo. Then, in a soft voice that she could barely hear over all the noise, he told her of his brief career as a flying bomb.

“It was back at the start of the Battle of the Rustwater,” he said. “Enemy suburbs had broken through all along the line, and the fleet was falling back toward the western borders of Shan Guo. None of us were expecting to go into action. Then the order came in; this place called the Black Island had to be held for a few hours more, because some surgeon-mechanic from the Resurrection Corps was digging up a valuable artifact that mustn’t be allowed to fall into townie hands…”

Theo could still feel in his belly the sudden, sickening motion of the carrier going about, and the panic in the companionways as Tumbler pilots scrambled for their ships.

“The waiting was worst,” he said. “Strapped into our ships, hanging there in the racks in the Tumbler bay with the doors open under us. You could see the guns going off below. Then the order—’Tumblers away!’—and we went for it.”

They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn’t zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?

“The target was a city called Jagdstadt Magdeburg,” he told Wren. “I hit somewhere on the middle tiers; I thought I was heading for an armored fort, but it turned out to be just a thin plastic roof over some sort of farming district. I landed in a great deep pile of silage bales. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t killed, just knocked out for a minute or two. I suppose that’s why the Tumbler didn’t blow. They’re supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there’s a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t bring myself to…”

“Of course not,” said Wren softly. “You’d missed your target. You couldn’t blow up workers. Civilians. It would have been murder.”

“It would,” said Theo. “But that’s not what stopped me. I just didn’t want to die.”

“Bit late to decide that, wasn’t it?”

Theo shrugged. “I just sat there and cried. And after a while, they came and defused my Tumbler and dragged me out and took me away. I thought they were going to kill me. I wouldn’t have blamed them. But they didn’t.

“All my life I’d been hearing stories about the cruelty of the barbarians, the way they tortured prisoners, and maybe some are like that, but these ones tended me like I was one of their own sons. They fed me, and explained how sorry they were that they’d have to sell me as a slave. They couldn’t afford to keep Green Storm prisoners aboard, you see, for fear we’d band together and revolt. But I wouldn’t have revolted. They’d made me realize how wrong the Storm are. How stupid it all is, this fighting.”

He looked up at Wren. “That’s why I gave up on the Storm. And now, when they catch me and they find out what I am and what I did, they’re going to kill me.”

“They won’t!” promised Wren. “Because we won’t let them catch you! We’ll get away somehow…”

A growl of engines drowned her out. She stood up cautiously and looked out across the gardens. A huge, battle-scarred white airship was shoving her way in through Cloud 9’s rigging.

“Great gods!” said Theo, looking over Wren’s shoulder. “That’s the Requiem Vortex] That’s her ship!”

Snub-nosed projectors mounted on the airship’s engine pods swiveled this way and that, effortlessly blasting any Flying Ferret that came within range. The Visible Parity Line and the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Machiney were smashed apart by rockets, showering shreds of balsa wood and singed canvas over the crowds who cowered on the Pavilion lawns. An ornithopter called Is That All There Is? fluttered around the airship like a gnat pestering a dinosaur, but it could not pierce the reinforced envelope, and after a few seconds a flight of Stalker birds found it and ripped it into kindling. Damn You, Gravity! plunged toward the airship’s gondola in a desperate attempt to ram it, but more rockets battered it aside, and it went plowing through the flank of one of Cloud 9’s outer gasbags. The Pavilion shuddered, the screaming guests on the lawn began to scream still louder, and the whole deck plate tilted steeply as some of the gas that had been supporting it went spewing into the night.

Orla Twombley and the other surviving Ferrets, realizing that they could do no more, turned tail and sped away.

Wren shielded her face against the dust and smoke as the Requiem Vortex swung her engine pods into landing position and touched down on the lawns of Cloud 9. Party guests who had fled the Pavilion earlier now came fleeing back past Wren and Theo’s hiding place, or stood their ground and fashioned flags of surrender out of shirtfronts and napkins. Redcoats hared through the shrubbery flinging down their weapons and trying to rid themselves of their fancy uniforms. Machine guns nattered among the ornamental palms. From the open hatches of the warship’s gondolas spilled spiky armored shapes.

“Stalkers!” yelped Wren. She’d never seen a Stalker, had never really quite believed in Stalkers, but something about the way those armored figures moved was enough to convince her that they were not human and that she very much wanted to be far away from them. She started to run, calling out to Theo to follow her. “Come on! We’ll cut back through the Pavilion to the boathouse!”

The stairways of the Pavilion were deserted now. Wren and Theo climbed them quickly, stumbling over abandoned party hats and trampled bodies. On the sundeck where Shkin had sold her to Pennyroyal, Wren slipped and went crashing down. The Tin Book, jammed in her waistband, grazed her spine and dug painfully into her bottom. She thought she could feel blood running down inside her trousers as Theo helped her up. She wondered if she should try to get rid of the book, or surrender it to the Storm and beg for mercy. But the Storm had no mercy, did they? She’d seen pamphlets and posters since she’d been in Brighton, headlines in the foreign-affairs pages of the Palimpsest about MORE MOSSIE ATROCITIES and FURTHER BEASTLINESS BY THE GREEN STORM. If they found that Wren had the Tin Book…

From the entrance to the ballroom, they looked back across the lawns. The battle was over, and Stalkers were moving about down there, herding crowds of captive guests ahead of them. “I wonder if Shkin’s down there,” said Wren.

“And what about Boo-Boo?” said Theo as they pressed on, crossing the ballroom, where the lights on the walls and ceiling had failed and broken glass crunched underfoot. “What about Pennyroyal?”

“Oh, he’ll be all right.” said Wren. “I bet it was him who brought them here. Shkin said he was looking for a buyer for the Tin Book. That’s just the sort of thing Pennyroyal would do, sell his own city for a profit…”

They passed the film room, where the projector was still rattling away. By its light Wren glimpsed a movement on the spiral staircase. “Cynthia!” shouted Theo.

Their fellow slave came running down the stairs, her party costume flickering softly with the reflected colors of the film loop. What she had been doing up there Wren could not imagine. Perhaps she had got flustered and run the wrong way when everybody was fleeing from the ballroom. Or maybe Mrs. Pennyroyal had sent her back to fetch something; she was carrying something shiny in one hand.

“Cynthia,” said Wren, “don’t be frightened. We’re leaving. We’ll take you with us. Won’t we, Theo?”

“Where is it, Wren?” snapped Cynthia.

“Where’s what?” asked Wren.

“The Tin Book, of course.” Cynthia’s expression was one that Wren didn’t recognize: cold and hard and intelligent, as if her face were under new management. “I’ve already checked Pennyroyal’s safe,” she said. “I know it was you who took it. I’ve known you were up to something ever since you came aboard. Who are you working for? The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft? The Africans?”

“I’m not working for anybody” said Wren.

“But you are, Cynthia Twite,” said Theo. “You’re with the Green Storm, aren’t you? You killed Plovery and the others. It was you who cut Cloud 9 adrift!”

Cynthia laughed. “Ooh, you catch on fast, African!” She made a polite curtsy. “Agent 28, of the Stalker Fang’s private intelligence group. I was rather good, wasn’t I? Poor, silly Cynthia. How you all laughed at me, you and Boo-Boo and the rest. And all along I have been working for a different mistress, for one who will Make the World Green Again.” She held her arm out stiffly toward Wren. The shiny thing in her hand was a gun.