by Nate Crowley
“Right, then. Give me a minute. And enjoy dying,” said Wrack, as the lights on the tips of Teuthis’ arms slid back into the depths.
“You lucky bastard,” he muttered, as the darkness became absolute again.
Wrack woke to his own scream, and thrashed like a beached fish on the trolley. Sunlight blasted into the bridge, light and wind and thunderous sound. Then the light was blocked by the giant form of a descending carrier, jets flaring as it came down on Tavuto’s foredeck. Soldiers were already pouring from its sides, sleeting down black lines with carbines in their hands into the massacre below.
“Wrack,” called Mouana from the captain’s wheel, the rags of her uniform fluttering in the dropship’s hellish downwash. Her hand clutched a radio, frantic with the reports of desperate voices. Behind her on the monitors, Wrack could see one of the carriers was already on deck: an arc of fallen corpses was spreading from its aft ramp as armoured figures waded from within.
“Mouana... I can shtop them, but you’re going to have to trusht me.” Then he gasped, as he saw her hand had already opened the armoured box at the heart of the wheel, was hovering over a red switch within.
“You heard all that?” balked Wrack, as a trireme scudded past the port windows and made every bolt in the bridge rattle. Bullets pecked holes in the floor, one passing through Wrack’s chest on the way there.
“Only your side of things,” answered Mouana, like someone who had not just been strafed by a fifty-yard helicopter gunship. “Or at least most of it; you were mumbling a lot. I think I get the gist, though. Want me to hit the button and get this over with?”
“Yes!” hollered Wrack. “I can’t believe you waited this long!”
Mouana looked taken aback. “I thought you’d want to say goodbye, is all. Are you scared?”
Wrack didn’t want to take the time to consider, so just made a derisive sound. “What’s there to be scared of? I’ve already died and been a zombie.”
“Alright, then,” nodded Mouana. “Let’s do it.”
“Wait,” cried Wrack, thrusting his arm out and forgetting it was the one with no end on. “What about goodbye?”
“So goodbye,” shrugged Mouana. “That’s all there is to it. Look—I know I’ve always been less of a talker than you. But come on—look outside.”
The second carrier had landed, and its side had been thrown open—from within came terrible things like giraffes in beige chitin, scissor-claws unfolding from fat thoracic pouches: destriers.
“You said it yourself,” reasoned Mouana, as Wrack stared slackly at the horde gushing onto the deck. “You’re already dead. We both are. We’d never have exchanged a word in life, and if we had, we’d only have found each other intolerable. This was a strange postscript. And it’s not all been completely terrible, so thanks. Now, goodbye, and let’s be done with this. I think I’ll like you better as a factory ship, anyway.”
Wrack smiled, and nodded. “You say the sweetest things. Bye, mate.”
Mouana hit the switch. Light fizzed, death actinic in the ceiling, and Wrack was annihilated.
ALONG A MILE of metal crenellations, flak turrets rise, turning. Rain in reverse; tungsten flechettes sleeting through wood, iron, gears and flesh. A speeding aircraft, one motor seized in flight, yaws wildly and carves into the side of the leviathan ship, raising a bloom of sparks. The carcass skids, splintering at last into the side of a crane with a jolt that snaps necks.
Its partner fares better, staying aloft and returning fire, but something in it is broken: as it soars past the stern of the ship it cannot turn, and heads out over empty sea. It will never return.
A third trireme, weaving hungry circles around the ship’s central crane-mast, shudders as a battery of missiles streak from nowhere into its ventral armour. Still firing, it begins to lose altitude, black smoke gouting from its stacks like blood from the spout of a stricken whale.
As it reaches the level of the crane’s largest boom, a vast figure matches pace, piston legs thundering as it races alongside the sinking warcraft. Shells rattle on red iron, thump into flesh, but the figure reaches the end of the boom and leaps out into space, a sharpened pole raised as a harpoon above its head. The pole strikes and sticks, and its bearer swings itself onto the back of the craft.
Below on the deck, steel grates rise in shudders, emptying the salt-stinking tunnels of the vivisection labs. Steel chitters on steel, a thicket of teeth shiver, a glistening torrent of hunger breaks into the light. Sharks, squid, rays and wolf eels, lampreys, hatchets and sprödewurm, skidding and gnashing in their haste for meat. The dead, limping and pressed to the fringes of the deck, step aside to let them pass.
Soldiers backpedal before the tsunami of needle teeth, their destriers skitter, guns rattle in disarray. But before they can be marshalled, something black and vast and unseen sweeps down over them, bringing a terrible anger with it. The dead cheer at its passing. Then it crashes over the soldiers, doubling them over with clawed hands and sobbing hearts. Their regrets swarm to them, and their wailing has barely begun when they start to be eaten.
Overhead, the giant has forced his way into the dying trireme. He is in the cockpit, and it cannot contain his rage. As the ship tilts out of control, a hatch spins off from its side like a tossed coin, and the body of its captain is hurled out in two pieces. The battered titan leans from the ragged hole and pumps his fist at his comrades as they flash by below; the roaring salute they offer in return ends only when the trireme smashes into the sea.
A little later, and the last of the soldiers are rallying around the downed hulk of the last trireme, right on the lip of the deck. They are those too composed to have gone down to the black pulse, along with the last few destriers, but they have nowhere to retreat to but the sea. They reload the last of their guns and cry out the name of their regiment, but a wall of meat is closing on them.
Dead women, dead men, stride, lurch and drag themselves with fingertips across the red deck, voices joined in a boisterous song of joy. Dead-eyed fishes caper through their ranks; some way to the rear, towering crustaceans raised from cold storage plod along with murder in their stonelike eyes. At the front of the mass and breaking into a charge now, an orca, riddled with holes, thunders towards the soldiers with a dozen merry dead on its back.
After the last shot is fired, when the last soldier is driven over the side of the ship, a click reverberates from loudspeakers across the ship, and a voice speaks from the bridge. It says one word, and is echoed by an army, chanting it again and again until the noise of it rolls like thunder across a silent world.
“Wrack! Wrack! Wrack! Wrack! WRACK!”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
ONE
UNDER AN EMBER-RED dawn, the reactors of the Tavuto growled into life. The chains of her sea anchors had taken all the long night to cut through, and figuring out how to marshall the dead to man the engine halls had been even more of a challenge.
But the ship had known when things were ready, and had started the beat of its nuclear heart as the sun shivered into being above the horizon.
Mouana leaned on the wheel as the city-ship rumbled into motion, looking out over the deck where zombies swarmed to cut weapons from the downed triremes. Crabs plodded across the steel plain, dragging artillery to be mounted on the prow, while sharks bent crouched over the battle’s debris, clearing the deck with their wet chomping.
The ship was turning slower than the hands of a clock, but turning it was: inch by inch, the purple stain on the edge of the world where the gate stood was creeping towards the prow, and soon they would be steaming straight for it.
The first scout vessels had returned before dawn, had reported warships mustered on its far side: cruisers, carriers and gun platforms drawn from siege defence.
But she had six million tons of steel on her side, accelerating by the minute, and crewed by an uncountable number of angry dead. Let them bring as many ships as they like, thought Mouana, and reached for the ship’s
foghorn.
The sound blasted from Dakuvanga’s highest castle, flew over the waves like the song of a war god. She imagined the people of the city, waking to the remnants of that shout, and quaking in their beds for fear of what was coming. She hissed in anticipation, and narrowed her eye in hunger at the storm above the gate.
A chime from her dashboard told her that one of the crew stations was reporting in, and she looked over to see where the message was coming in from. But on the screen which would usually display the location of the caller, a line of text was flickering.
EASY ON THE FOGHORN MATE, IT’S BEEN A LONG NIGHT.
OH, AND LOOK WHAT I’VE WORKED OUT HOW TO DO.
DID YOU MISS ME?
Mouana rolled her eye, broke out in a smile unlike anything that belonged on the face of a corpse, and sounded the horn again.
A mile ahead of her, lashed to the point of Tavuto’s prow like an animate figurehead, a one-armed corpse cackled for joy.
“We’ll find out!” it shrieked, as devilworms arced in the bow wave a hundred yards below.
“We’ll find out, won’t we!”
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
CHAPTER
TWENTY
TWO
MOUANA GROUND HER teeth as the nib trembled on the empty page. She strained for words, but they wouldn’t come. She couldn’t think past the shrieking of the ’drick.
The thing had cracked a hip decoupling Themis after the siege broke, and nobody had yet admitted it wasn’t the kind of wound that got better. If the beast had been on her gun, she would have put a bolt through it. But Themis’ sergeant had taken to calling it Tassie during the campaign, and it had become a mascot to the troops.
Mouana never named her tools.
Tassie had whined and snorted as they had finished dismantling the burner stacks; the engineers had given it sugar rations from their palms and patted its flanks. But the air was bad here. Infection had set in quick, and so had the noise. Now, five days on, the screaming was relentless.
The rest were sleeping through it; Captain Aroha was doing his best to match it with his snoring, but she was used to the old man’s night racket. Mouana focussed on the noise, and tried again with the letter.
The campaign went well, she wrote with her eyes, but the pen would not follow. The siege is over, she tried, yet still her hand refused to move. The ’drick wailed softly, drawing moans from its grazing-mates down the line.
Mouana scratched I am into the page, splaying the pen’s tip and leaving an angry splot, then scowled as her thoughts scattered like fish before a net:
—coming home.
—staying on.
—satisfied.
—thinking of you every day.
—hoping for promotion soon.
Then the ’drick screamed again, louder than ever, and she snatched up the letter with a snarl. She didn’t register the word scared scrawled on the page before balling it and throwing it in the brazier.
Mouana pounced to the door of the tent, snatched up her rifle, and loaded it with shaking hands. If no one else was prepared to end the wretched thing, she would do it herself.
Outside, the wind that had been thumping dully on the canvas became something intimate and vicious, smacking at the side of her head and forcing fuel-smells into her nostrils. The sky pulsed and flared with eddies of the solar wind, blooming false dawn across the endless twilight.
Down in the hollow, the city’s shell glowed with the weird lights of reclamation, the strange industry of her company’s silent employers. Further along the valley, the ground smouldered in hot streaks, days after the defenders had called in ancient kinetics to forestall the inevitable. That awful bloody valley; Mouana was sick of the sight of the place.
Turning her back on the site of the battle, she leaned into the wind and stalked round the tent, to face the plateau that had housed her battery for the last six months. Far past the tent-city’s outskirts, the horizon was limned sapphire with a sunrise that would never come. Against it towered the silhouettes of the container carriers, half-loaded, that would carry them back through the Gate.
Closer, its black bulk resolving into a cowering animal shape as her eyes adjusted to the perpetual gloom, was Tassie. The old indricothere’s eyes gleamed wet in the darkness, its armoured sides heaved, as it stared at her. Beside its pen a brazier burned low, gusts scooping clouds of sparks from the embers.
Mouana moved closer, boots scraping on the plateau’s rough earth, and cursed the animal for falling silent.
“Make it easy, you stupid lump,” she growled, striding forward against the gaze of its cow eyes and daring it to scream again, to seem less vulnerable.
She drew closer and the ’drick half-stood, raising a cloud of dust as it propped its twenty-ton bulk up on its forelimbs. It stamped, and the ground shook. Suddenly, Mouana felt enormously under-armed. The thing’s skull was as long as she was, a handspan thick in places, and she had an infantry rifle. What if she only drove it into a rage? She was acting completely outside of her authority as it was—a maddened ’drick loose in the camp would be a hanging offence.
Reason, or more honestly impatience, wrestled down fear. The beast was hobbled, and had a festering pelvis anyway. It wasn’t going anywhere. And she could always fetch a gauss if things got ugly. The ’drick whimpered at her, and Mouana found she had raised her weapon. It needed to die.
The wind and the fumes stung her eyes, but she blinked away the moisture and squinted through the sight, at the folds of Tassie’s—the beast’s—throat, where the skin was thin. She would wait for the ’drick to raise its head, then squeeze the trigger.
“I would save my ammunition if I were you, sergeant.”
Mouana stiffened. The voice was unmistakeable; dry and sharp as the wind, and close as a knifepoint threat.
“You will need it, for the next campaign,” said the voice, and Mouana turned, her rifle falling to her side.
The general was crouched by the brazier with a broad black bowl, yellow eyes peering through the steam as she sipped. Her form was indistinct, her limbs folded like a patient spider in the dark.
Dust, they called her. Dust, for the world of her birth, which had not always been called Dust. Dust, which had become her name, for now, no other living people came out of that place.
Mouana had been across a tent from her countless times, but always as part of a shoal of officers; here, there was nowhere to hide from those eyes.
“You were the one who turned the leveller, on day one-fifty.”
Mouana froze. The leveller had been a mad, old piece of tech, sent out by the defenders after five months of attack. A paralithode war platform, long considered obsolete, but stacked with munitions. Its code had been in the old style, easy to overcome, but the time taken to turn it had cost them dearly. Once it had floated back to the valley and started shelling the enemy, she had thought the issue forgiven. Nevertheless, she had feared her decision would come up for review every day since.
“Yes.”
Dust sipped at her bowl. Even with the plateau’s winds, the acrid scent of the herbs made it across to her.
“What do you know about Lipos-Tholos, Sergeant?” said Dust.
The relief that filled Mouana’s skull at the change of subject froze solid at the mention of the name.
Lipos-Tholos. The most notorious stalemate in all the worlds of the Lemniscatus. One of the great cities, long-settled and fat with tech, synonymous with its fleets and its link with Ocean. Shorthand for the siege that never broke. The thought made her shiver even more than it should, though she couldn’t figure why.
“City of ten million, sir. Under contract for siege by the Principals. Naval power, supplied by sea via the Ocean gate, and heavily teched.”
The wind whistled across the plateau. Tassie whimpered and shifted her b
ulk.
“Tough job, sir,” added Mouana.
Dust took a long draught from her bowl and unfolded, standing bowed despite the empty space around her, and spoke.
“We are to break the siege at Lipos-Tholos, sergeant. The Cauldron Company is leaving in disgrace, and the contract has been offered to me. I have accepted.”
It had been the question haunting the Blades: what next? Lipos-Tholos had been mentioned as a campfire joke, but few had taken it seriously. With the swamp wars raging and the canyon cities still changing hands on a near-yearly basis, anyone with an ear to company scuttlebutt had seen them as the next venues for deployment.
“So the rumours were true?”
“Not until now,” said Dust, stalking across the rubble towards her. “I came out here to think. Now I have decided. We will be the ones to take Lipos-Tholos. You’ll tell the rest.”
As the general advanced, the ’drick screamed, and the other animals began lowing in sympathy further down the line. The rifle’s grip itched in her hand.
Yes, sir hung on Mouana’s bottom lip, but her lungs would not force it out. The general, moving towards her, was nothing more than yellow points in the swirling dark, and something felt wrong.
Of course, there was nothing to worry about. Mouana had been here before. She knew how things played out from here. She would snap, turn, put three rounds through the base of Tassie’s skull, and Dust would promote her to battery commander.
But as the general approached, still just amber pricks in blackness, she had the sick feeling it was not going to go that way.
Tassie shrieked, the sky flaring bile-green as she threw her head back. She stamped, and the plateau quaked. Mouana moved to raise her rifle, but her arms would not move. Instead, the weapon dropped from her hands, and Dust came closer.
