Free Traction City by Philip Reeve Page B

Costa Mulligan, or was till recently. Where his throat was there is now only red. And as Smiff drops his precious torch and goes scrambling for his life towards safer districts of the city he has time to notice one more nasty detail. The man’s right hand is missing; severed at the wrist.



2
    London climbs higher and higher as the night draws on. The last steep ridge of the Shatterlands looms ahead, swaddled in cloud. Even the auxiliary engines have come on stream now, bellowing with the effort as they help to heave the city up this final slope.
    On the edge of Base Tier, snow blows in between the tier supports, melting as it settles on the warm iron pavements. Airdock Green Police Station is quiet tonight, but then most nights are quiet at Airdock Green. Sometimes there’s a drunk from the pubs on Crumb Street to deal with, sometimes a pickpocket works the crowds of engine labourers around the elevator station on payday, but by and large there’s not much crime down here on Base Tier. It was different in the days when the Airdocks were busy, but there’s a smart new air-harbour on Tier Four now where most of the traffic pulls in. The coppers up there must see some cases, Sergeant Anders thinks wistfully as he strolls towards Airdock Green to start his shift. Stolen airships, smugglers, brawls. . . The quays behind his little station are half abandoned, except for some Goshawk 51s which the Guild of Engineers keeps moored there, their plump white envelopes like the speech bubbles of cartoon characters with nothing left to say. Tonight a little shabby red job has joined them; probably some country ship out of the Shatterlands come to shelter from the gale. It’s so small that there can barely be room for a single aviator in its gondola. No hope there of a gang of liquored-up sky-boys to add some interest to a policeman’s life.
    Karl Anders has been thirty years a policeman, but only three of them aboard London. Before that he was chief of police on a little town called Hammershoi, just three tiers tall, that roved around the north country, right up into the Frost Barrens in the arctic summertime, stopping to trade with other towns it met. A happy place, till one bleak February Thursday it met London, hunting in the north. Anders still misses his quaint old police station; the parks on Obertier, the wooden cupolas of the Temple of Peripatetia – but Hammershoi’s engines were just cheap gimcrack copies of the great inventions which drove London. The chase lasted fifteen minutes before London’s jaws closed on Hammershoi’s chassis and the town was hoiked into London’s gut, looted and broken up to feed the hungry city.
    There are worse cities to be eaten by. At least London doesn’t enslave the people of the towns it eats. They are free to leave if they can think of anywhere to go, or welcome to stay aboard if they wish, and become Londoners as so many have before. So Anders stayed, using his long experience as chief of police to get a job with the London force, the “Coppertops”, or “Coppers”, as they’re called. But they didn’t need a chief of police, and refugees from eaten towns aren’t welcome on the higher tiers or in high-ranking jobs. So Karl Anders had to start at the bottom again; Base Tier, at the bottom of London, a lowly sergeant, running the quietest cop shop in the city.
    He buttons the collar of his blue uniform and pushes open the door, stepping into the hard, flickery light from the electric bulbs in their big tin shades that swing from the ceiling as the city moves. Constable Pym has his feet on the office desk and his nose in a book, but he pulls himself smartly to attention and salutes when Anders enters. A keen lad, just three weeks out of school. In twenty years or so, thinks Anders, he might make a decent policeman.
    â€œGood evening, Pym,” he says, in his careful Anglish. “Anything to report, or shall I