The lads on watch beside the Archaeopteryx had heard the muffled engines in the west by the time Theo arrived. They were standing on a high promontory of wreckage outside the hangar, squinting into the murk. As he scrambled toward them, he heard one say, “I can’t see anything. It’s the volcano,” and the other reply, “Or maybe it’s an airship engine. Maybe there’s an airship circling above all this smog—”
“It’s not an airship!” Theo shouted, and ducked as they turned toward him, afraid that they would fire their crossbows at him. But they only stared. The same boys he’d talked to yesterday. He tried to remember their names; Will Hallsworth and Jake Henson.
“Will,” he said, walking toward them with his hands outstretched to show he was not armed. “Jake, there’s a suburb coming. Harrowbarrow. You’ve got to warn the others. Your new city has to move out now.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Jake warned his companion. “He’s a Mossie! Mr. Garamond said—”
“Mr. Garamond is wrong,” Theo insisted. “If I were a Mossie, what would I be doing coming to warn you about Harrowbarrow?”
“Maybe there is no Harrowbarrow,” said Will, thinking hard. “Maybe it’s a Mossie trick.”
A snarl of engines drowned out his voice, coming from somewhere to the southwest. A crash and clang of falling debris too. The Londoners stared. Smoke and clouds of dust and rust flakes drifted across the southern sky.
“It’s surfacing!” shouted Theo. “It’s reached the edge of the wreck! Come on!”
“What about the Archy?” asked Jake. “We can’t just leave her here!”
“We’ll have to fetch Lurpak or Clytie…”
“There’s no time!” shouted Theo, as the rusty deck plate beneath them shook and shifted, dislodged by the vibrations from the hungry suburb that was shouldering its way through the wreck a mile to the south.
“Well, we can’t fly her!” wailed Will.
“I can.”
“Yes, home to your stinking Mossie friends; we’re not falling for that one!”
“Will,” shouted Theo, “I’m not with the Green Storm! Trust me!” He scrambled into the hangar, staring at the Archaeopteryx. “Is she fueled?”
“I think so. Lurpak Flint was down here yesterday working on her.”
Theo rattled the gondola door. It was locked, and when he asked for the keys, Will and Jake looked blank. He picked up a hunk of metal and smashed the door in, then grabbed a knife from Will’s belt and started to hack at the ropes that anchored the airship. “Her controls will probably be locked,” he shouted as he worked. “But that doesn’t matter. The wind’s with us; even if I can’t get the engines on, it’ll still be quicker than running to Crouch End.”
Will and Jake started to object, then gave up and joined him. The airship shivered as the ropes fell away. Theo noticed two rockets resting in racks beneath the forward engine pods. If he could get to Crouch End and persuade the Archaeopteryx’s crew to return with him, there was a chance they could slow or stop Harrowbarrow; he’d heard stories of how a well-aimed rocket, shot down an exhaust stack or into a track support, could bring a whole city to a halt. Then New London would have time to escape, and perhaps Theo could find his way aboard the crippled harvester and reach Wren.
The three boys scrambled into the gondola as the un-tethered airship began to rise. On the flight deck, Theo found that he could work the elevator and rudder wheels, although he had no way to turn on the engines. Sunlight poked in through the gondola windows as the Archaeopteryx rose out of the top of the hangar, trailing camouflage netting and uprooted trees. The brisk wind boomed against the envelope, already pushing her westward, and Theo spun the rudder wheel so that her nose began to swing toward Crouch End.
The first rocket punched through the prow of the envelope and tore the whole length of the ship, exploding in the central gas cell and sending a spume of fire out through her stern. Theo heard Jake and Will scream as the gondola lurched sideways. Struggling with the useless controls; he saw another ship go sliding past behind the sheets of smoke billowing from the Archaeopteryx’s envelope: a small armed freighter in the white livery and green lightning-bolt insignia of the Storm. Machine guns opened up from a nest on her tail fins as she sped by, and bullets came slamming into the Archaeopteryx’s listing gondola, and into Will, smashing him backward through a shattering window. “Will!” screamed Jake, as Theo dragged him to the deck.
Peering through the smoke, he had a brief, dizzy view of the debris field. Above it, low and menacing, a school of white ships circled. The Green Storm had arrived.
Chapter 46
The Shortcut
The warships circled low over Crouch End, low enough for everyone to see the rockets glinting in their racks and the Divine Wind machine cannon twitching in the swiveling turrets. A few of the braver Londoners ran for crossbows and lightning guns, but Mr. Garamond shouted at them not to be so daft. He hated the Storm, but he knew that trying to fight them would be madness.
Someone tied a white bedsheet to an old broomhandle, and Len Peabody waved it frantically as the leading ship came down. She was the Fury, the only real warship in the fleet, but none of the Londoners noticed how tatty the other ships looked; they were too busy staring at the soldiers and battle-Stalkers who spilled from the Fury’s hatches as she descended.
General Naga was the first to jump down, relying on his armor to absorb the shock of landing. Straightening up, sword in hand, he breathed in the rusty, earthy air of the debris field and heard his troops disembarking behind him. He glanced to his right. Two of his ships had landed on top of the big wedge of wreckage there, and others were circling it. A party of his men was herding more Londoners down the track that led from it.
“The site is secure, Excellency,” announced his second-in-command, Subgeneral Thien, running to his side and dropping on one knee to salute.
“Resistance?”
“One of our armed freighters shot down a ship that rose from the western edge of the ruins. And the gunship Avenge the Wind-Flower was struck by some sort of electrical discharge and destroyed with all hands. She reported movements in the western part of the wreck before she was hit. I’ve sent the Hungry Ghost to investigate.”
Naga strode toward the waiting Londoners. His feet sank into the deep drifts of rust flakes with crunching sounds, each footstep unpleasantly like the noise Oenone’s nose had made when his fist struck it. He tried again to stop thinking of her. She was a traitor, he told himself sternly. Half the men in this fleet would have mutinied if he had not dealt firmly with her. He had to be strong if he was to save the good Earth from these barbarians and their new weapon.
But the barbarians were something of a disappointment. Ragged, unkempt, unarmed except for a few homemade guns and bows, which they had dropped when they saw Naga’s force landing. They had vegetable gardens, for the gods’ sake, just like real people! Their leader was a frightened little man with a scrap-metal chain of office around his neck. “Chesney Garamond,” he said, in Anglish. “Lord mayor of London. I’m here to negotiate on behalf of my people.”
“Where is the transmitter?” barked Naga.
“The what?” Garamond gaped fearfully at him.
Naga raised his sword, but the man’s bruised face and swollen nose reminded him suddenly of Oenone, and he lowered it again. His armor grated and hummed as it tried to compensate for the quick shivering of his sword arm. “Where are you hiding it?” he demanded. “We know the ground station is in London. Why else have you lurked here all these years? Why else did you destroy one of our ships just now with your electric gun?”