Infernal Devices (12 page)

and flat-chested as a boy of fourteen. She waited patiently while the subofficer checked her pass, and saw his face change when he realized who she was. "Let her through! Let her through!" he shouted, lashing at his men with the flat of his sword, punishing them in the hope that Dr. Zero would not punish him. "Let her through at once! This is Dr. Zero, the leader's new surgeon-mechanic!"

Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues' Roost, was just a face in a photograph on the family shrine.

Oenone grew up shy and clever on an air base in remote Aleutia, where her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs like "The East Is Green" and "We Thank the Stalker Fang for Our Happy Childhoods." At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother, Eno, told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken Stalkers shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them better, not understanding then that they were dead already and would best be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armor, the braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations for her mother and herself that way until she was sixteen, when the Green Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility,

then to a front-line Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.

In that underground world of trenches and dugouts she toiled through the long, murderous winter of '22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them marching back into the line.

She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity. She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way they weren't people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the Resurrection room that Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked and teased one another as they worked, but because Oenone was so young, they called her "little sister" and took care of her. They were impressed by how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her, using words like "genius."

Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units

crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.

At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming snout-gun rounds and the whistle of snipers' bullets slicing the cold air above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months, and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in the Resurrection room: You learned to stop feeling things. She didn't even feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother's air base had been eaten by amphibious suburbs.

And then, during the spring offensive of '23, she recognized one of the bodies that the salvage teams dumped in front of her. There was a pattern of moles on his chest that she knew as well as the constellations he had taught her when she was little. Even before she peeled aside the bloody rag that someone had draped over his face, she knew that he was her brother, Eno. Because their letters to each other had been censored, she hadn't even known that he was in her sector.

She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets. She did not want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps taking the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced them as Crypto-Tractionists, and they were shot

and Resurrected with their friends. Oenone did not want to be shot. At the sight of Eno, all her feelings had returned, and her fear of death came back so suddenly and so powerfully that she could barely breathe. She did not ever want to be like Eno, cold and helpless on a slab.

"Surgeon-Mechanic?" asked one of her assistants. "Are you unwell?"

Oenone wanted to be sick. She waved him away and tried to control herself. It was wrong to even think of not Resurrecting Eno. She told herself that she should be happy for her brother, because thanks to her, his body would be able to go on fighting the barbarians even after death. But she was not happy.

Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, "Scalpel. Bone saw. Rib spreaders," and set to work. She opened Eno's body and took out his internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery housings, and preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She took off his skin and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibers of his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and to the other machines she had installed.

"This isn't really you," she told him, whispering to him constantly as she worked. "You are in the Sunless Country, and this is just a thing you've left behind that we can use, like recycling a bottle or a crate. Doesn't the Green Storm tell us to recycle everything for the sake of the Good Earth?"

When she had finished, she handed him over to a junior surgeon-mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives. Then she went outside and smoked a cigarette, and watched airships on fire above no-man's-land.

It was after that that the dead started talking to her. It seemed strange that they should be so chatty when her own brother had said nothing at all, but when she looked into their faces, which she always made a point of doing after Eno, she could hear them whispering in her mind.

They all asked her same thing:
Who will end this? Who will put an end to this endless war?

"I'll do it," Oenone Zero promised, her small voice drowning in the thunder of the guns. "At least I'll try."

"Treacle!" cried Popjoy cheerfully, when she finally arrived at his offices, high in the pagoda. He was packing. In the big trunk that sat open on his desk, Oenone could see books, files, papers, a framed portrait of the Stalker Fang, and an enamel mug with the logo of the Resurrection Corps and the slogan YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A MAD SCIENTIST TO WORK HERE--BUT IT HELPS! Popjoy was standing on a chair to unhook a picture of the Rogues' Roost air base, which he dusted with his cuff before stowing in the trunk. Then he blew Dr. Zero a kiss.

"Congratulations! I've just been to see Fang, and it's official! She's so impressed with your work on old Grikey that she's decided to let me retire at last! I'm off to my weekend place at Batmunkh Gompa for a well-earned rest. A spot of fishing; tinkering with a few pet projects; I might even write my memoirs. And you, Treacle--you're to be my replacement."

How strange,
thought Oenone. This was what she had been working for ever since her epiphany in the trenches: to be the Stalker Fang's personal surgeon-mechanic. For this she had overcome her natural shyness and fought for a transfer to the central Stalker Works. For this she had put up with Dr. Popjoy's unpleasant sense of humor and wandering hands. For this she had spent years tracking down the grave of the notorious Stalker Grike, and months repairing him, proving to everyone that she was at least Popjoy's equal. Yet now that the moment had arrived, she could not even find a smile. Her knees felt weak. She gripped the doorframe to stop herself from falling.

"Cheer up, Treacle!" Popjoy leered. "It's good news! Power! Money! And all you have to do in return is check Her Excellency's oil levels from time to time, buff up her bodywork, keep a weather eye open for rust. She's basically indestructible, so you shouldn't have too many problems. If you have any worries, send word to me. Otherwise ..."

Otherwise I'm on my own,
thought Oenone Zero, climbing the stairs to the highest level of the pagoda, the Stalker Fang's own quarters. It was all wrong, of course; if there were justice in the world, a man like Popjoy, who had unleashed so much suffering and evil, would suffer himself. Instead, he was going to end his days in luxury, doing a spot of fishing, tinkering with a few pet projects. But at least by retiring he would allow Oenone Zero a chance to fulfill her promise to the dead.

Sentries clattered to attention as she passed. Flunkies bowed low before her and swung open the doors that led into the Stalker Fang's conference chamber. Clerks and staff

officers looked up from a big map of the Rustwater and did not bother to return Oenone's low bow. Fang looked up too, her green eyes flaring. She had returned from the front line only a few hours before, and her armor was crusted with dried mud and the blood of townie soldiers. "My new surgeon-mechanic," she whispered.

"At your service, Excellency," murmured Oenone Zero, and dropped to her knees before the Stalker. When she found the courage to lift her head, everyone had gone back to their war maps, and the only eyes that lingered on her were those of Mr. Grike.

So everything was in place. She was on the inside, a member of the central staff. Soon she would put in motion the plan she'd thought of in her louse-infested bunk on the Altai front. She would assassinate the Stalker Fang.

***

Later, Wren would sometimes tell people that she knew what it was like to be a slave, but she didn't, not really. The old trade was thriving in those years. Prisoners taken by both sides in the long war were sold wholesale to men like Shkin, who packed them into leaky, underheated airfreighters and shipped them off along the bird roads to work on giant industrial platforms or the endless entrenchments and city-traps of the Storm. Slavery for them meant grinding labor, the ripping apart of families, random cruelty, and an early death. The worst Wren had to put up with was Nimrod Pennyroyal's writing.

They had moved her, after that first interview with Shkin, into a comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Pepperpot. She had a soft bed, a basin to wash in, three meals a day, and a new linen dress that rather suited her. And she

had a copy of
Predator's Gold,
delivered by Miss Weems "with Mr. Shkin's compliments."

For a few hours each day, a reflector outside the barred window caught a beam of sunshine falling through a skylight in the deck plates above and filled Wren's cell with light. As she curled up on her bunk and opened the lurid covers of Pennyroyal's book, she could almost imagine herself back in her own bedroom in Dog Star Court, where she had often sat beside the window, reading. But she had never read anything like
Predator's Gold.
How strange it was to find the places and people and stories she had known all her life so changed and twisted!

She had been afraid that reading about Mum and Dad would make her homesickness worse, but she need not have worried. Dad did not feature at all in Pennyroyal's book. As for Hester Shaw, "a titian-haired Amazon of the air whose divine face was marred only by a livid scar where some brigand had drawn his stiletto across the damask flesh of her cheek," she was barely recognizable as Mum.

And one night, as Wren lay sleepless, thinking indignantly about all that she had read, it struck her that she had made another terrible mistake. She'd thought herself so clever for persuading Shkin to take her to the mayor, but she'd been assuming that
Predator's Gold
would be mostly true. She had not imagined just how much Pennyroyal had lied about his time in Anchorage. By telling the real story, Wren could destroy his reputation and his career. Pennyroyal might well want to buy her, but not so that he could write books about her. He would want to silence her, quickly and permanently.

Alone in her cell, Wren hid her face in the pillow and

whined with fear. What had she done? And how could she undo it? She jumped from her bunk and started toward the door, meaning to shout for a guard. She would tell Shkin that she had lied about Anchorage; she was just a Lost Girl after all, and of no interest to Professor Pennyroyal. But then she would be back where she had started, or worse--Shkin would say she had been wasting his time. She imagined that a man like Shkin would have unpleasant ways of getting even with people who wasted his time.

"Think, Wren,
think!"
she whispered.

And all the while, beneath her feet, Brighton's powerful Mitchell & Nixon engines boomed and pounded, pushing the city steadily northward.

After his interview with Wren, Shkin had questioned Fishcake. The newbie had proved highly cooperative. He was tired out and terrified, and eager for some new master who would look after him and tell him what to do. After a few kind-sounding words from Nabisco Shkin, he confirmed Wren's story about Anchorage. After a few more, he told the slave dealer where Grimsby lay.

Shkin's people relayed the information to the mayor and the Council. Brighton adjusted its course, and soon the Old Tech instruments on the bridge detected the spires of a sunken city in the depths below. Brighton circled for a while, broadcasting its treacherous message, and succeeded in winkling out a last few limpets. When no more appeared, Pennyroyal decided that the expedition was at an end.