"Listen!" he said.
Across the wastes of moonlit metal came a low rumbling noise, rising and falling, then cutting out altogether. White light flashed and flickered out of the openings in the hulk.
"Sprite?" asked Wren.
Wolf shook his head. "Machinery of some sort. The same sound I heard two years ago."
"Engineers come up here at night," she whispered. Wolf just nodded. "I've seen them too. And I've seen
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people bringing crates up here; crates filled with salvage from the debris fields. And Engineers poring over plans. Why? What are they building in there, Wren?"
Wren felt a little annoyed that he had found out more than her. Milly Crisp never had this sort of competition. She tried to look as if his findings came as no surprise to her.
"Let's find out, shall we?"
Side by side they hurried on, and soon reached the Gut segment. It really was immense; a sea cliff pitted with countless caves where ducts and corridors had once linked it to the rest of London. Wolf clambered in through one of them, and reached back to haul Wren up behind him. "It looks like some kind of factory from London's Deep Gut," he whispered. "It seems to have survived almost intact."
They moved deeper. The floors were tilted at a slight angle, making walking tricky. Metallic noises echoed along the drippy corridors. They reached a bolted door, retraced their steps, climbed a flight of sloping metal stairs. They passed a wall stenciled with the symbol of a red wheel and the words LONDON GUILD OF ENGINEERS: EXPERIMENTAL HANGAR 14. The higher corridors were lit by shafts of stuttering white and orange light that grew brighter as Wren and Wolf crept on into the heart of the building. The steady, reassuring glow of argon lamps shone through hanging curtains of transparent plastic.
Wren felt more excited than afraid now. She let her hand brush against Wolf's, and he gripped it and squeezed it reassuringly as he pushed the curtains aside.
Together, hand in hand, they looked down into an immense open space at the center of the hangar.
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"Great Gods!" Wren whispered. "So that's it!" said Wolf.
"Put your hands up, Mr. Kobold," said another voice, quite close behind them. "You too, Miss Natsworthy. Both of you, put your hands up and turn around very slowly."
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23 The Childermass Experiment
***
Hester?" mumbled Tom, waking slowly. He had been dreaming of the old London Museum again, but this time it had been Hester who was leading him through the dusty galleries. In his dream, he had been happy to see her.
Now someone was crouching beside his bed, shaking him. He remembered that it could not be Hester and sat up. A lantern dazzled him. He turned his head away and saw a couple of Garamond's boys in the doorway. The person who had woken him was Clytie Potts.
"There's a problem, Tom. It's Kobold and your daughter. Oh, they're quite all right, but--I think you'd better come."
Out across the ruins. Moonlight and scrap metal. Clytie walked with Tom, the two of them surrounded by silent Londoners, some carrying guns.
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"What has Wren been doing?" he asked as they hurried him along.
"Spying," said Clytie. "She and Kobold were found ... where they should not be."
"Wren's just a girl!" Tom protested. "She may be inquisitive and foolish, but she's not a spy! What was she spying on, anyway? What is this place you found her in?"
"Easier to show you than explain," said Clytie.
Tom pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn't just the cold that made him shiver. He had a feeling that he was close to learning the secret of his city. Had Wren discovered it already for herself? Was that was this was all about? He felt proud of her bravery, but worried too, in case she was in danger.
In an open doorway at the foot of a wall of wreckage Dr. Childermass and five of her fellow Engineers stood waiting; six bald heads like a clutch of eggs. "Mr. Natsworthy," said the Engineer with a faint, weary smile, "you may as well see the project. No doubt your daughter and her friend will tell you about it anyway. As long as we can dissuade our more excitable colleagues from shooting them, that is."
Up a stairway, through a plastic curtain, and out onto a narrow metal viewing platform where Garamond and a gaggle of his people stood around Wren and Wolf Kobold. They had both been made to kneel, and their hands were tied. Dr. Childermass said, "Oh, don't be such a twerp, Mr. Garamond!"
"They were in a restricted area! Spying!" Garamond complained.
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"Only because you let them come here," retorted the Engineer. "Really, Garamond, your people are appallingly slack. Now let them go."
Garamond and his young followers reluctantly freed their prisoners and let them stand. Tom ran to hug Wren, intending to tell her how foolish she'd been, but just as he reached her, he noticed what lay below, filling the hangar, and surprise drove all the words out of his head.
It was a town. Not a large town, nor a very elegant one (most of the buildings on its upper deck were missing, and there were no wheels or tracks) but a town nonetheless. It had no jaws, but in most other ways it seemed to Tom to match the basic blueprint of a London suburb: those small places like Tunbridge Wheels and Crawley that London had built to carry her excess population during the golden age of Municipal Darwinism.
"Pretty, isn't it?" asked Clytie, gazing down with a look of awe and affection at the unfinished town.
Dr. Childermass said, "The fruit of many, many years of hard work, now nearing completion."
A big saw was at work somewhere beneath the town, which was resting on a cradle of rusty stanchions. A spray of sparks scattered across the hangar floor like boisterous glowworms.
"You built this?" asked Tom, letting go of Wren and moving over to stand at the edge of the platform, gripping the pitted metal of the handrail to convince himself that it was not all a dream.
"Not quite," said the Engineer. "The chassis and most of the upperworks were here already. My division began working on
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this project long before MEDUSA. Luckily this experimental hangar was deep enough in the Gut to survive without too much damage."
"But why didn't I know about it?" Tom wondered. "I mean, if London was building a whole new suburb, surely it would have been news?"
Dr. Childermass shrugged. "It was a secret. My Guild was very keen on secrecy. Anyway, this little place was only intended as a prototype. Experimental Suburb M/Ll is its official designation. We designed it as an answer to London's problems, but Magnus Crome was never keen on it. He thought that MEDUSA was a better solution, and gradually he withdrew more and more funding from my Mag-Lev Research Division and diverted it to MEDUSA. Now those of us who survived MEDUSA's failure have been able to pick up the work. It is not just the Engineers' project anymore, Tom. Everyone in London has worked together on it."
"And please don't think of it as a suburb," said Clytie. "It may be small, but to everyone in London it is a city; our new city. Soon we shall climb aboard it and leave these debris fields behind forever."
Tom gazed down at the tiny forms of Londoners clambering over the new city, laying cables, welding girders, marking out the shapes of streets and buildings on the bare deck plates.
"But it's got no wheels," Wren pointed out.
"I can see you don't know what Mag-Lev stands for, my dear," said Dr. Childermass.
"It's a code name, isn't it?" asked Tom, who didn't know either.
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"Oh no," Dr. Childermass said. "Mag-Lev is just a shorter way of saying Magnetic Levitation."
"It floats!" said Wolf, gazing down at the new city entranced. "Like a gigantic hovercraft...."
Dr. Childermass gave him a graceful nod, pleased that at least one of her listeners was keeping up. "Rather quieter than a hovercraft, Herr Kobold, and not nearly so hungry for fuel. More like a very large, low-flying airship. You see those silvery disks along the flanks and underbelly?"
Tom, Wren
, and Wolf nodded in unison. There was no missing the disks, dirty metal mirrors fifty feet across, swivel-mounted like an airship's engine pods.
"Those are what I call Magnetic Repellers. Once they are powered, the whole city will be able to swim in the currents of the earth's magnetic field. It will hang a few feet above the ground--or above the water; indeed, it makes no difference. The small prototypes we made worked splendidly. All we need do now is to complete the electromagnetic engine that powers the repellers--"
"The Kliest Coils!" cried Wren, like a plucky schoolgirl detective making a brilliant deduction.
"Yes," admitted Dr. Childermass. "We were having trouble generating enough power until Mr. Pomeroy told me about Dr. Kliest's work on the Electric Empire machines. I guessed at once that something like that was what we needed. Clytie has managed to acquire several dozen, along with the materials we need to fabricate new ones."
Wren glanced at Wolf and saw him gripping the handrail and staring at the little city with the wide, shining eyes of someone who has been granted a vision of the future.
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"So you see why we're nervous about spies,"' said Clytie Potts. "It's taken us nearly twenty years to put New London together. We'd hate a scavenger to get wind of it now that we're so nearly finished."
"New London!" said Tom softly. "Of course...." You could not go on calling a place "Experimental Suburb M/L1" forever, not if you meant to live aboard it, and carry the culture and memories of your city away on it to new lands. New London.
"I'll help!" he said. "I mean, if you can use me. I can't stay here, eating your food, getting in your way, doing nothing, while you all do so much. I'm a Londoner. I want to see London move again as much as any of you. I'm no Engineer, but I kept the Jenny Haniver ticking over all right, and at Anchorage I helped Mr. Scabious build the hydroelectric system. I'll stay, and help ... that is, if Wren doesn't mind...."
"Of course I don't," said Wren, and Tom could see that she was just as impressed as him by New London. "And I expect Mr. Kobold will want to help too," she said, turning to draw their companion into the conversation.
But Wolf Kobold was gone. While everyone had been listening and looking down at New London, he had slipped silently away.
Garamond turned white and started shouting things about securing the perimeter and organizing searches. Dr. Childermass stared hard at him. "See?" she said. "Slack."
News of Wolf's escape went ahead of Tom and Wren. By the time they reached Crouch End, they found search parties
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being organized, armed with crowbars, crossbows, and even lightning guns. "We'll catch 'im!" Angie Peabody vowed, buckling on a quiverful of crossbow bolts. "He ain't going to sell New London out to no dirty pirate suburb."
"Oh, be careful," Wren warned. "He's dangerous!"
"There are dozens of us and only one of your friend, Miss Natsworthy," snapped Mr. Garamond. "And we know these debris fields a lot better than him. It's Kobold who's in danger, not us. Come along, everyone! Move out!"
"We'll come with you," said Tom.
"I think not, Mr. Natsworthy. As far as I'm concerned, you and your daughter are Kobold's accomplices. You're staying here."
"Nonsense, Garamond," snapped Chudleigh Pomeroy, emerging from his hut in dressing gown and nightcap. "Tom and Wren have as much to lose as any of us. Kobold is probably planning to make off aboard that airship of theirs."
Wren hugged her father. "You stay here, Daddy," she said and, snatching a lantern, ran off with Angie and her brother, Saab. Tom watched them go, the bobbing lamps disappearing into the hillocks of scrap, Mr. Garamond yelling orders that were meant to be military but made him sound like a panicky teacher in charge of a school outing. "At the double! Work in pairs! Watch where you're pointing that lightning gun, Spandex Thrale!"
Fanning out across the rubble, the searchers moved away from Crouch End, combing every path and cranny of the rust hills for traces of Wolf. "He can't have got far," Wren heard people whispering. But he could, she thought. He's a soldier; he's already made his way back to Harrowbarrow once before,
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hundreds of miles through Green Storm territory. Hiding from us in a maze the size of London won't be hard.
At least he had not made it to the airship hangar yet. The Jenny and the Archaeopteryx sat where they had been left, untouched. Garamond loudly detailed Saab and a few others to reinforce the guard on them, and the search parties moved on.
"It's useless," said Wren miserably, as she and Angie tramped away from the hangar, along that narrow path she had come in by on the first day. "He could be anywhere. He's skilled at hiding. His whole suburb hides."
"Oof!" said Angie.
It seemed a funny sort of reply. Wren turned to look at her friend and found herself, for the second time that night, unexpectedly face-to-face with Wolf Kobold.
"You've found me, Wren!" he said brightly. "Now it's your turn to hide...."
He stooped over Angie, who had crumpled at his feet, knocked down by a blow from behind with some heavy object--there was no shortage of blunt instruments in the debris fields. Wren opened her mouth to scream for help, but before she could force a sound out, Wolf straightened up again, pointing Angie's crossbow at her.
Wren wasn't sure if she was supposed to raise her hands or not. She flapped her arms uncertainly, wondering if Angie was alive or dead. "You'll never get away!" she said. "There are guards in the airship hangar, with lightning guns--"
"I don't need an airship, Wren," said Wolf, laughing. "I thought once that the Engineers' secret might be something I could carry away aboard your Jenny Haniver, but now I've
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seen how wrong I was. I shall have to bring Harrowbarrow east...." Keeping the crossbow pointed at her, he started pulling off Angie's belt, with its quiver of bolts and canteen of water. "Look, I have all I need for a trek across the Out-Country. I'll ride on one of the Storm's convenient Stalker trains. Hausdorfer will have Harrowbarrow waiting for me just across the line." He grinned at Wren and held out one hand. "Why not come with me?"
"What?"
"You're wasted in the life you lead, Wren. Trailing about after your dad. How long is he going to keep you trapped here, skivvying for these mudlarks? Come home to Harrowbarrow with me."
"And watch it eat New London?" asked Wren. "I don't think so."
"Then think harder. This new technology the lady Engineer has developed is wasted on the Londoners. Well-meaning fools! They haven't even put jaws on their new city. I'm going to take it for myself, and use it to make Harrowbarrow the most powerful predator on earth. A flying predator, armed with electric weapons! Think of it!"
Wren did. She didn't like it.
Wolf laughed again, then blew her a kiss as he turned away. "There'll always be a place for you in my town hall, Wren," he said.
Wren bent over Angie. The girl groaned as Wren touched her face, which she hoped was a good sign. "Help!" she screamed, as loudly as she could. "Help! Help! He's here! Over here!"
They came running: Saab, Garamond, Cat Luperini.
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Someone with more medical know-how than Wren bent over Angie and said, "She'll be fine, she'll be fine." But of Wolf there was no sign, and although the others kept hunting him until the sky above the wreck turned gray with morning, he was not sighted again; he had faded away, as if he had been just another of London's ghosts.
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PART TWO
***
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24 Manchester
***
THE CLANG AND TREMOR of docking clamps engaging shook Oenone from her dreams. She struggled to stay asleep, but the dull, hungry ache in her belly kept nagging at her, and she came awake groggily. She had been dreaming of home, the islands of Aleutia; gray stone and gray sky and gray winter sea, she and her brother Eno haring downhill in the sharp cold. The images faded quickly in the stuffy heat of the Humbug's hold.
&
nbsp; It was morning. The new-risen sun was poking in through rents in the Humbug's envelope. Oenone lay curled on the floor of a wire-mesh pen, surrounded by crates and boxes full of dodgy gadgets and unsold trade goods that Napster Varley must once have hoped would make his fortune. There was no mattress in the pen, and Oenone was so stiff from sleeping on the hard deck that she could barely move. She lay there
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for a while, wondering what it was about her prison that seemed different this morning. Then she realized. The rattling engines that had been drilling their noise into her ears all the way from Cutler's Gulp had stopped.
She could hear voices down below her in the gondola. Varley was shouting at his wife, as usual. As usual, the baby was crying. Oenone had never known a baby who cried as much as Napster Junior.
She drank water from the tin jug Varley had left her, peed in her cracked enamel chamber pot, and said her morning prayers. By the time she had finished, all was quiet below. She waited fearfully to see what would happen next.
To her relief it was not Varley who came up through the hatch, but Varley's wife. Mrs. Varley was not exactly friendly toward the prisoner in the hold, but she was friendlier than her husband. She was a freckled, doughy girl with unruly red hair and frightened eyes, one of which was currently swollen shut and surrounded by yellowish bruises. Varley had bought her somewhere, and she had not made as good a wife as he had hoped. He beat her, and Oenone had often heard her screams and sobs echoing through the airship. She had come to feel a sort of comradeship with this exhausted young woman, as if they were both prisoners together.