“Morning.” John nodded as they approached one another. With barely room for each to pass, John turned aside to let the man through.
The man, a true Azteca, drew a knife and struck John’s shoulder. It hit bone, and the pain drifted down John’s arm. “Your time is over,” the man hissed, pushing the knife farther in. Waves of dizziness grabbed John. “You now pay for defying the gods.”
John dropped to his knees. A second man grabbed him from behind. John twisted just far enough so that the knife bit into his left lung instead of a kidney.
He tried to scream, despite one punctured lung, and despite the fingers jammed down his mouth as they pushed him down to the ground. The first man yanked the knife free from his shoulder, slick with blood, and John grabbed the next stab with his left hand. The knife impaled the meat of his hand.
All three of them struggled on the dirty, wet alleyway ground.
Deep inside, old technology struggled to maintain his consciousness, suppress pain, and keep him standing. John hadn’t been in combat shape in a long while, though, and only his body’s natural shock prevented him from passing out.
More footsteps. John kicked a kneecap in and struggled to get free, but he just couldn’t draw a breath.
“Hey!” Someone yelled into the alley. “Somebody get help, is a mugging going on!”
John pulled the knife out of his left hand as his attackers looked up. He stabbed it deep into the belly of the man who sat on his chest. The man screamed and stumbled back.
The remaining assassin spun and took off running. John pushed himself onto his hands and knees and looked over at the corner of the alleyway. Something glinted back at him.
A homemade bomb.
John struggled forward out of the alley.
The world roared, shifted, and John flew forward. His back exploded in pain from shards of rock and metal embedded in it.
Face, shoulders, and back streaming blood, nose broken, eyes too bloodshot to see, his head ringing, John crawled out. He felt the larger cobblestones of the road under his hands.
He collapsed into the dirty water of a gutter. Strong arms grabbed him to pull him up. “We need get you to a hospital.” The faces of several Ragamuffins, the city’s policemen, looked down at him.
“No,” John croaked. “Boat.” The men who’d tried to kill him, Azteca spies posing as Tolteca, had done a good job. He was as good as dead unless he got back to the ship.
He pushed them away and dropped to his knees.
“He hit he head too hard,” someone offered.
John turned toward the sound of the voice. He focused down into himself to try to manage the pain. “I’m perfectly clear of mind. If I don’t get out to where I need to go, I’ll die, there’s nothing any doctor here can do for me.”
“But . . .”
He coughed blood. “Do not argue with me.”
They argued about it, each taking a minute too long, but someone had recognized him and commandeered a small boat with a steam engine still hot. John could smell fish everywhere as they gently moved him into a hammock.
“This ain’t no good,” the captain of the small vessel protested. “You go die if you don’t get help.”
“Will you just trust that I know what I’m doing?” John asked him.
With his eyes closed he could see exactly where they had moved. Each step remained in his mind since they had left the edge of the alley to walk down the docks.
Now at sea he gave them orders, moving them out toward the Ma Wi Jung.
His heart rate dropped, close to failure. “Hurry,” John told them. “Hurry.” The small boiler next to the hammock radiated heat, which made him drowsy. The door clanged as someone fed it wood.
By steamboat it took only a couple hours, though by then John’s eyes started to glaze.
“Stop!” John whispered, and the captain coasted to a stop.
The waves tossed them back and forth, rocking steadily.
John fumbled out of the hammock and felt his way to the rail. His legs protested, but he used every last ounce of strength to walk over and grab hold.
“What you doing?”
Before they could stop him John pitched forward into the cold water. The world fell silent, the distant crash of waves against the hull of the boat nearby becoming the entire world.
He sank, expelling air to speed up.
Ma Wi Jung?
The ship lay hundreds of feet below him. It had the medicinal technology to heal him.
The ship responded as John queried it, asking it to rise and meet him. He swallowed hard as the reply came to him. The ship did not have the ability to rise from the seabed. The water had grown cold.
Far beneath John an air lock slide open and belched massive bubbles.
Already he had fallen a hundred feet, his ears popping as he equalized them. If he could see, the ocean would be inky blackness.
He hadn’t taken in enough air with a collapsed lung to do this.
The pockets of air released from the air lock buffeted him.
He fell faster now, arrowing down, long seconds passing, the water getting even colder. John started shivering as his body’s core temperature dropped.
Behind his eyelids he could see the last fifty feet through the ship’s datasphere. The ship had spotted him. It lit the area up, and what it saw, John also saw. He could see himself, trailing blood, shivering, falling down toward the ship.
Just a little left, and John struck the hull headfirst. He dragged himself the last few feet into the air lock.
The lock shut. It slowly drained away the water until John floated faceup in air he could breathe. The pumps failed at that point, unused to the strain of pumping in enough air to force the water out.
John burst inside the ship along with hundreds of gallons of water as the inner lock opened.
He lay on the floor as it absorbed the water.
The medical pod lay inside a room ten feet away, and for John, gasping like a fish, it may have been twenty miles away.
He closed his eyes and curled up in a ball of pain on the floor, then straightened out. Foot by foot he crawled until he could pull himself into the medical pod and close it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
John woke up with a pounding headache, aches, and scars all over. A meal sounded good, but there was nothing on the ship but the nutrient drip the medical pod had retracted from his arm several hours ago. He checked the time. Three days. Three days ensconced in here. The boat above had left, no doubt assuming he was dead.
The inside of the ship looked a lot better since the last time he’d visited, when it still bore smoke and fire damage.
An alert pinged patiently from the cockpit, as well as in the back of his head. The Ma Wi Jung needed him to take care of something.
John sat down and tapped a panel, looked down at the series of readouts that appeared in the air.
Radio signals.
They’d started while he was in the medical pod, coming from the vicinity of the Spindle, and moving their way from the geosynchronous orbit of that wormhole into a low orbit.
John felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The wormhole had reopened. Which meant that the energies pouring through what had once been a tiny hole in the sky to create the always visible Spindle and force the hole back open would soon fade away, and the whole world would know it.
Teotl would be coming through. Tenochtitlanome was going to become the most dangerous place to be on the whole planet.
John checked the ship’s inventory, looking for an escape raft. None, and it would take too long for the ship to create one for him. But it did have an inflatable vest and a flare gun.
That would have to do.
That evening, as the fishing steamers were returning toward Capitol City, John burst out of the air lock toward the surface.
After his first deep breath of salty, cold air, he fired a flare. Three flares later a bewildered fishing crew hauled John up onto their deck.
&nbs
p; “You dead,” they said.
John ignored them as they wrapped him up with blankets and took him into the engine room near the giant boiler to keep him warm. He lay in the warmth thinking of his son in the heart of Azteca land unaware that everything was on the cusp of changing for the worse.
Before he left the fishing boat, he borrowed some heavy-weather gear, flipping the hood up to obscure his face.
He fought his way back through the crowds of Capitol City. Everything seemed normal in the fading light and inside the great walls of the city. Crowds of people, from dark to light brown and even a few white, filled the streets. All manner of accents filled the air. It was a bit packed for this late. Although the city’s electric lights would be on, most people in the city had candles. They left for home at sunset. But now vendors shouted at each other as John got on one of the street buses running down the center of the city. Several people stood over large bundles.
The whip antenna sparked and slapped the metal grid overhead. The bus accelerated toward the next stop.
John had been happy to move out from Brungstun, the town he’d lived in almost thirty years and raised his son in. Too many memories there, most of them of Shanta, his wife.
Capitol City felt safer than the small town right beside the Wicked High Mountains, the first place overrun during the Great War. He still had nightmares about waking up to find Azteca rooting through his house, binding his wrists, and dragging him off to be a sacrifice.
Better to remain in Capitol City, behind the solid walls, with hundreds of miles between the mountains and him.
The bus stopped near the red-painted stone building John lived in. He got out and jogged up the outer steps to his apartment, almost knocking himself out on a clothesline as he couldn’t see much above eye level with the hood up.
The door was unlocked. It swung open and a pair of mongoose-men stepped out from the shadows to grab him and pull him in.
“Who you is?” they demanded. One yanked the hood down, and they both froze. “John deBrun?”
John nodded.
“Yes. What are you doing in here?” he demanded.
The two soldiers looked abashed. “We was sent to guard the place, see if anyone showed up. General Haidan hear you was dead.”
“He angry,” the other mongoose-man said.
“After all the years we’ve known each other, I’m glad to hear that.” John walked over to a chest under the small table in his cramped kitchen. “Someone did try to kill me. Azteca spies here in the city.”
He pulled out a handful of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a pistol.
“You in a hurry to leave, Mr. deBrun, but where you going, sir, Haidan go want to know.”
“Tenochtitlanome.”
“Is dangerous for you. The Azteca go want catch you and torture you, they want to know where to find you ship, how to get into it.”
“I know, it doesn’t matter now. Now look, time is short.” John stood up and looked at the two mongoose-men in their beige uniforms. “You need to tell Haidan the Teotl have come from the Spindle, and that the wormhole is open again. He needs to make preparations. Tell him as soon as possible.”
The two men glanced at each other. “We already know.”
John stopped. “How?”
They threw open the wooden shutters on the north side of his apartment. “Look up, above the jungle.”
John walked over. Above the clotheslines outside, the alleyway and bubble of conversation and street noise, above the great wall of Capitol City, was a band that stood over it all. And a large black dot hovered in place in the distance, visible just over the lip of the wall. Hood up, lost in his own worries, he hadn’t looked up to see what everyone else in the city had already seen.
That was why so many people were out this late.
“A ship?” John asked.
“Just hanging there,” they confirmed. “Although rumors is that one of them drop off Azteca near the center of the city, near the gardens. We ain’t see it, but things getting crazy already.”
There would be no outgoing airships, or probably even trains. John grabbed the peeling windowsill with both hands and hung his head.
In the distance a siren sounded. The city’s air shelters would be filling up, civil defense officials moving out onto the street, and the whole population getting ready for a new war.
Only this one would feature attackers from above.
They could not win it, John knew.
Outside the door, when John walked out with the two mongoose-men, an old lady with her hair in a bun held up a hand.
They all paused. “Mother Elene?”
“No, I am Sister Agathy,” the lady whispered. “But Mother Elene sent me. John deBrun, the Loa need to see you.”
Capitol City’s so-called gods were worried. The Teotl had struggled to wipe them out as well, now their more powerful brothers from space had arrived. The Loa had every reason to fear what would come next.
Their human delegates would be moving all throughout the city to prepare for this. And they’d sent a Vodun acolyte to get John.
“There is little time,” Sister Agathy said, looking at John.
The prospect of speaking to the alien creatures in their dens made John sick to his stomach. Hundreds of years of death and manipulation lay at the feet of the Teotl and Loa. It never went away, except for the few brief decades when John had lived in Brungstun as a fisherman, his memories erased.
That felt like a second childhood.
He really missed fishing.
Sister Agathy took John’s hand, and he sighed and followed her away from his apartment and deeper into the panicking city.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jerome deBrun watched as the Azteca priest prepared his squealing sacrifice. The priest stank, his hair matted into long clumps of black, foul-smelling snarls due to the blood that remained on him. Two younger acolytes held the sacrifice down, its limbs tied with rope.
“Thank God it a pig,” Thomas, from Grammalton, whispered to Jerome. Jerome nodded back.
The pig squealed loudly, the priest held up his stone knife, and Jerome looked down at the muddy floor. This would have been how they killed his mother ten years ago. He bit his lip until he tasted his own salty blood.
When he looked back up, the priest held a beating heart up toward the sun, blood streaming down his hands into his face.
“We give this gift,” said the priest haltingly, unused to translating the words for his audience. “To the sun.”
To make sure it came up again. Right. Jerome sighed.
Behind the priest a large pen with barbed wire held eighteen more pigs, rooting in the dirt, scuffling around. Jerome wondered if they heard their companion’s squeals and could understand their fate.
“They going kill all eighteen?” Thomas asked.
“Yes.” Thomas needed to quit asking questions he should already know the answer to.
The pen’s wall stretched too high to hold in just pigs. Jerome’s mother, as well as other people from Brungstun, must have been locked in a pen like that once.
But that was past. Jerome let out a deep breath.
“They having a reception for all the delegate them after all this.” Thomas leaned in. “You go come, or lock youself in you room early again?”
Jerome took a deep breath and almost gagged on the scent of blood. “Maybe.”
“They say we go meet the pipiltin there,” Thomas said. “You know what they is?”
“Noblemen, businessmen, the people that run the place other than the priests.”
Jerome stared past the priest at the city of Tenochtitlanome and the tips of all its buildings. The delegation, all twenty in stiff-starched black suits soaking up the heat, stood on the flattened-out apex of a pyramid five stories tall at the center of a plaza.
The city ran outward from the pyramid, city streets like spokes from a hub, layers of Tenochtitlanome radiating outward from the core. Thousands of Azteca milled about aro
und the pyramid, staring up at the apex.
Smoke curled up from several marketplaces out near the rim, and from house yards. And people packed the streets everywhere, moving quickly about their business.
“Remind me of Capitol City,” David said from Jerome’s left. He hailed from a small settlement near Batalun.
Jerome shook his head. “Only pigs for eating get killed in Capitol City.”
David shook his head. “At least it ain’t us.”
People kept repeating that. “As if that cancel out all that had go on before,” Jerome spat. Probably a bit too loud; an acolyte looked at him.
“You know Tolteca good people,” David said. “Lot of them never believe in human sacrifice, all this time. Lot of them had to get over the mountains to come to Capitol City to escape all that, and others could never escape, had to stay here. Now they in charge. Now they rule. It all good.”
“Sure,” Jerome said. “Sure.”
He spat on the ground. The mongoose-men who had traveled with the delegates from Capitol City stood at rigid attention, their faces glistening with sweat and khaki uniforms sopping with it. Nanagada’s best bush warriors, wasting their time in the heat.
A local chief of the new pipiltin held the reception in a tented platform on the edge of Tenochtitlanome. Here the roads petered out into jungle, and lower-class Azteca followed donkey carts into the city or carried large bales of wheat on their backs.
Newly acquired electric lamps swung from poles, lighting the interior now that the sunlight faded.
Chiefs stood around in traditional padded-cotton armor, their hair carefully combed forward and fringed, with feathers twined throughout.
“Hi-lo.” An Azteca woman with lightly tanned skin and bangs over her eyes smiled at Jerome. He held a glass of fermented something, too strong for him, and considered her plain white cotton dress. She chewed something rubbery in her mouth. A prostitute for the delegates’ pleasure.
Jerome looked down at the drink and walked back over to the bar. “You have any beer?”
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