“I’m glad you could come down! How’s Herr Natsworthy?”
“All right,” Wren replied. “He’s having an after-dinner nap, I hope…” (Dad had not felt well since they’d come aboard the burrowing suburb, and he was looking pale and weak. She had left him with strict instructions to get some sleep, but, knowing him, he was probably in Wolf’s library, studying charts of the land ahead.)
Wolf took her arm. “You worry about him.”
“I think Harrowbarrow is too hot and stuffy for him,” said Wren. She didn’t want to explain about Dad’s heart trouble. Dad put so much effort into trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he was all right, it would have felt like a betrayal to tell Wolf how ill he really was. “He’ll be fine,” she promised, smiling as brightly as she could.
“Good,” said Wolf, as if they had settled something. He guided Wren to a place near his chair where a big brass thing covered in knobs and levers poked down through the ceiling. There were two eyepieces at the bottom of it. Wolf pulled it down until they were at the right level for Wren to look through. “I thought you’d like a look at the view.”
Wren had almost forgotten that there were such things as views. The hours passed so slowly aboard Harrowbarrow that it already seemed like days since she had seen the sky, or the earth. Yet when she looked into the eyepieces of the periscope, she saw them both; the sky deep blue and almost cloudless, a crescent moon hanging bright above the weed-grown walls of the track mark that the suburb was running through.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Close to the Storm’s country,” Wolf replied.
“Then why are there no fortresses? No settlements?”
Wolf chuckled. “The Storm haven’t enough troops left to garrison all the new territories they captured. Out here they just have armored watchtowers every few miles. Air patrols too, sometimes.”
“Then it’ll be easy to get the Jenny across?”
“Easy enough. I have prepared a little diversion that will keep the Storm’s lookouts busy.”
Wren frowned. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a diversion when they’d planned this trip, in Murnau. But before she could ask him what he meant, Hausdorfer approached them, and Wolf turned to speak in German with him. After a few words he grinned, and slapped the older man on the shoulder, and Hausdorfer started bellowing orders down the speaking tubes in a language Wren didn’t even recognize—Slavic? Roma? The suburb shuddered and canted, changing course.
“When we’re moving slow like this, I send scouting parties out ahead of us on foot. Some of them have just come in to report. We’re almost at the Storm’s front line.” Wolf slapped her on the shoulder and grinned; he was having fun. “You should fetch your father. We’ll be going through within the hour.”
Where the deep, twenty-year-old track marks of London cut through the Green Storm’s border, they had been filled with banks of earth, topped by stone-filled wicker gabions, iron huts, and rocket batteries. Ten years earlier a pack of harvester suburbs had tried to break through there, and their ruins had been added to the fortifications; upended sections of chassis and track, pierced with gun slits and painted with the angry slogans of the Storm: STOP THE CITIES! THE WORLD MADE GREEN AGAIN! WE SHALL WASH THE GOOD EARTH CLEAN IN THE BLOOD OF TRACTIONIST BARBARIANS!
In the rocket battery at Track Mark 16a sentry thought she heard the growl of land engines and went out onto the parapet to look, but all she could see was the mist. That morning’s patrols had reported all the barbarians sitting safe and snug and stationary on their own lines, almost like real people. The engines probably belonged to a Green Storm half-track taking soldiers out to some advance listening post in no-man’s-land. Poor devils. Sentry duty stank, and Track Mark 16 was a worthless sewer. The soldier went back inside, where there were hot noodles and a stove to sit beside, and letters from her family in Zhanskar.
Tom was dreaming of London when Wren came to wake him. In his dream, he had already reached the wreck site, and to his delight the old city was not nearly as badly damaged as he had feared. In fact, all that had changed was that Tier Two was open to the sky, and the sun shone brightly down into the streets of Bloomsbury, where Clytie Potts was waiting for him on the steps of the museum. “Why did you wait so long to come home?” she asked, taking his hand. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“Well, you’re here now,” she told him, leading him in through the familiar portico. The dinosaur skeletons in the main hall all turned their bony heads to look at him, and mooed their greetings. “Now you can get on with the rest of your life,” said Clytie. He looked past her and saw his own reflection in a sheet of ancient tinfoil that hung in one of the cabinets, and he was not old and ill-looking but well again, and young.
“Dad?” asked Clytie, turning into Wren, and he woke reluctantly to the stuffy dark of Harrowbarrow, groping for his green pills.
“Are you all right?” Wren asked him. “We’re nearly at the line. Wolf says to make ready…”
The thought that they would soon be leaving made Tom feel a little better; so did the pleasant memory of his dream. He dressed and followed Wren aft to the hangar near the suburb’s stern, where the Jenny Haniver sat waiting to resume her journey. Wolf met them there. “Get your stuff aboard,” he ordered. “Be ready to move out as soon as I come back.”
“Where are you going?” asked Tom, surprised that they were not to take off at once.
“To the bridge. We are not across the line yet, Herr Natsworthy. I am arranging for a little distraction so that the Mossies don’t spot us crossing.”
He left, hurrying forward along one of Harrowbarrow’s tubular streets. Tom and Wren stowed their bags in the Jenny’s gondola, then waited outside, standing close together in the noisy turmoil of the hangar. The note of the idling engines changed suddenly, rising from a murmur to a scream, and Wren grabbed at Tom for support as the suburb surged forward.
“What’s happening?”
Tom was not sure, but even in the windowless hangar there was an immense feeling of speed. With all its auxiliary engines churning, Harrowbarrow raced along the track mark, throwing up a thick bow wave of soil and vegetation as it rose to the surface. The startled Green Storm soldiers had time to fire off a few salvos of rockets, which burst harmlessly against the suburb’s armor. Then the barriers, the fortresses, and the rocket projectors were slammed aside as Harrowbarrow tore through the front line into Storm territory. Sally ports popped open in her flanks, and squads of fierce scavengers swarmed out with guns and knives and maces to attack the survivors scrambling from their dugouts. With a steep skirl of engines Harrowbarrow swung itself sideways, smashing the walls of the track mark down, toppling a watchtower.
A moment later Wolf ran into the hangar, shouting, “Go! Go!” and yelling orders in Roma and German to the men waiting by the hangar door controls. Heaving on brass handles, they started to haul the doors open. As smells of damp earth and cordite swilled into the hangar, Tom and Wren caught their first glimpse of what was happening outside. In the red glow of countless fires a battle was raging across the steep, mashed sides of the track mark. Harrowbarrow was still turning, so the scene slid past quickly, but there was time to see the flattened barracks blocks, the spiky tangles of barbed wire showing spidery against the flames, and the figures struggling and slithering and scrambling in the mud; the flash of gunfire; the glint of blades, the sliding, tumbling dead.