by Nate Crowley
“This is how we will tell them all,” said Dust, and night-black claws wrapped themselves around Mouana’s shoulder. “You and I.”
She wanted badly to tell the general that this wasn’t the way things had gone, but the shadows had enveloped her and her throat was closed.
“This is your duty,” said Dust, and drew her sabre from her belt with an oiled hiss. Mouana could do little more than gasp as it slid between her ribs, could choke out no more than a weak “but” as her intercostal muscles parted before the invading steel.
Her mouth flapped, her side clenched against the cold weapon, and the wounded beast screamed loud enough to shake the air in her pierced chest. And all she could make out was those yellow eyes.
“But...” she gulped, and the general drew her closer.
The ’drick stamped, the blade swelled in her, and the air sang with animal screams. The general’s eyes glowed, and the ground collapsed. “But...” gasped Mouana, and the sky throbbed white and angry.
“But this wasn’t...”
“Do me proud, Mouana,” whispered the general.
Then the blast came.
MOUANA LOST HER words to the scream of the shell, and half her right hand to shrapnel when it hit the deck.
“Fuck,” she spat, staring at the ragged mess of her hand against the sky. She had gotten caught in the dream, right when she most needed her wits.
Mouana swore again, using the word like a hammer to beat down the shock. This was no time to slip into the past—she was meant to be commanding the ship. Another shell came in, barely yards away, and shook her nearly off her feet. She had to focus.
Cursing herself again and again for falling away, Mouana looked around her. It was bad. The boy next to her—Simeon? Samuel?—had taken the worst of the shellburst, and was now little more than stew. Worse yet, the radio unit he had carried was gone, reduced to a mess of red-soaked splinters.
Nevertheless, she thought, as she bound the oozing wreckage of her hand with tape, it could have been worse. It could have been her in the crater. It was only a couple of fingers gone, after all.
Ripping the tape off the roll with her teeth, she hissed in frustration. Dream or no dream, the bombardment shouldn’t have started so soon. They shouldn’t have been in range yet. She was a fucking gunnery officer—she knew these things. Or she used to, at least.
Either way—the bombardment had started, and she’d dropped into some half-arsed memory right as it had. There was no point shaking what was left of her fist at her mistake. The body count was still low, and might stay low for a while if she could get from the front of the ship and pull things together before more shelling came.
Issuing half an order to retreat, then remembering the radio was destroyed, Mouana spat pettily at the remnant of her hand and turned for the bridge. She was going to have to do this the hard way.
“Get back, or behind something,” she roared, staggering as another shell hit the deck. “Cover!” she screamed, and choked as the hole in her lung cut her short. The wound was nothing new, but the dream—that bloody dream—had brought it close to mind.
But even with the slot in her ribs, her voice hadn’t left her. “Cover!” she cried, and the sailors scurried for the deck’s hard places, repeating her order.
Mouana staggered up the deck in a half-sprint, quaking as the shells hit, working at the slot in her ribs with her thumb. She was definitely going to have to have the damned thing plugged, she thought, if she was going to do much more old-fashioned commanding.
That was quite a big ‘if,’ mind. She looked behind her, past the ship’s bow and out to sea: just a few miles ahead, the black pillars of the Gate reared from the endless grey of Ocean. Between them, light burst as artillery fire streaked through. Once they were past the Gate, they’d be soaking up every shell the City had to offer, and there wasn’t much more of a plan than to ram the place at full speed and hope it did the trick.
Mouana laughed silently at the memory of her dream, even as the munitions pounded the deck and body parts pattered around her like fat rain. They were going to ram the city. She was going to breach Lipos-Tholos after all.
And then, as a one-armed sailor loped past her with a crate of ammunition belts in tow, her laugh became something loud and wild. She was going to breach Lipo-Tholos—and she was going to do it without loss of life.
The sailor turned in bafflement at her laughter, and she raised her fist in salute to him.
“Doesn’t it feel good to be alive?” howled Mouana with spring-morning exuberance, and the sailor creased his brow. It wasn’t as good as the jokes Wrack used to make, but it was good by her standards. After some initial confusion, the sailor’s face split with raucous laughter. After all, he was dead. She was too.
They all were.
The laughter spread amongst the sailors, and so did the salute. There were thousands of them, crouched like starved seabirds on every mount and rise of the ship’s town-sized foredeck. Withered, drawn, dead and salt-pickled, some whole and some ravaged—but all bound by a dreadful loss and a terrible purpose.
Their eyes glowed through the dullness of death. They grinned, and their fists shook in the salt wind, united in the grim joke. Mouana grinned back at them.
She’d spent twenty years with soldiers under fire, and never felt the sense of weird, black solace as she had after a week with this lot. Every soul on the ship had come here through death, and against their will.
Whether prisoners of war like her, or dissidents and criminals murdered by their own police, all had been brought back to work until they fell apart. To Tavuto, that evil old city-ship, anchored in Ocean’s monster-haunted waters, and tasked with harvesting sufficient meat to supply Lipos-Tholos against the endless siege.
Then everything had changed. The dead had remembered themselves, and surged against their overseers; in a few days of raw chaos, they had turned Tavuto from their prison into the instrument of their revenge, and pointed it like a two-thousand-yard dagger at the heart of the city it had once fed.
And Mouana, despite never having served on a ship in her life, had become its captain.
Given that few enough of her crew could even remember their names, let alone fathom the workings of the ancient vessel, she was well qualified for the task. In any case, the only command that mattered at this stage was “Forward!” and she had made it well understood.
Still, there was always room for reinforcement.
“Forward!” screamed Mouana, with enough force to make her execution-wound whistle, and every sailor on the foredeck repeated her with enough ferocity to drown out the shellfire.
“Forward!” they cried, and she ran up ramps and flights, buoyed on by their chant of rage. It carried on as she reached the meat-piles, the winching mechanisms, the weighing yards overlooked by the bridge where it all had started.
As Mouana reached the plateau before the tower’s doors, still littered with bodies from the uprising, the foghorn sounded. It was a voice beyond them, a sound far past the range of even Ocean’s grandest demons, and yet its pitch blended with that of the stricken sailors.
And as it faded, Tavuto’s ancient engines rose in ferocity to meet it, growing in pitch to match the cries of its former prisoners. Screaming as if the ship itself was possessed.
Which of course it was.
With a cheery beep, the display console strapped to Mouana’s left wrist sprang into light, and a new message arrived.
DID SOMEBODY SAY... FORWARD?
Mouana rolled her eye, and managed not to smile as she hurried up the stairs to the bridge. That was Wrack, and this had all been his fault. Either a librarian who had been framed for sedition, or a mastermind of the Lipos-Tholos resistance—even he wasn’t sure—Wrack had been sent here to fish like everybody else, but hadn’t quite managed to let go of himself.
In the shadow of a hillside carcass, as they had hauled blocks of fat to Tavuto’s rendering vats, Wrack had woken from his own dream, and had saved Mou
ana from a mauling at the jaws of one of the overseers’ attack creatures. They had fled into the night, come to terms with themselves among the ship’s sump of lost souls, and then gotten angry.
It had all started with Wrack, and at the height of the revolt he had died again, attaining the frankly unfathomable status he now held. Given the speed with which his waking had spread to the rest of the ship, she sometimes wondered if he really was the rebel he liked to joke he had been in life. Then again, when he sent messages like that, his life as a hapless book-stacker became much more believable.
Either way, he was something very different from her. But despite sharing so little in life, they had shared so much since dying that she saw him now as her only friend.
REPLYING SLW, tapped Mounana with her right index finger, plucking a shard of shrapnel from the knuckle. LESS FNGRS NOW. SHELLFIRE.
The ship’s foghorn gave a contemplative groan, and more text appeared on the screen.
ONCE AGAIN, I’M TALKING RINGS ROUND YOU. I TAKE IT WE’RE STILL DOING THIS, THEN?
Mouana nodded, then cursed in irritation and stabbed the “Y” key.
THAT’S JUST AS WELL; TURNING THIS THING IS A NIGHTMARE. FORWARD IT IS. AND I’M PUSHING THE REACTORS VERY HARD. MIGHT BE WORTH CHECKING ON OUR FRIEND DOWN IN THE ENGINES?
She grimaced at Wrack’s attempt at humour, but he had a point. Though he had attained some measure of control over the ship, it seemed the previous owners had been careful not to give the vessel too much autonomy—a fair precaution, given its previous occupant. There still needed to be living hands—or at least human ones—on the controls to make things work.
“Eunice, give me the engines,” snapped Mouana, stalking across the bridge to the bank of screens.
“Mmmmh,” grumbled Eunice, frowning blindly as she bent low over the comms control panel. She was one of the ship’s few remaining warbuilt—those criminals the City had deemed too vile to waste on sleep, and had wired into monstrous exoskeletons—and though she had proved invaluable in combat, she was hardly a natural at ops. Plus her eyes were boiled, and she had to rely on crack-lensed cameras to see what she was doing.
Regardless, she had the link up in seconds, and when she did, Mouana found herself looking into the face of the Bruiser. The way he was staring into the camera when the feed came on, she could have sworn he had been squinting angrily at it in anticipation, possibly for minutes.
“Fack off?” snarled the Bruiser, and bared grey teeth at the camera. It was his way of saluting. Many of the zombies (Mouana winced at the word, but she had long decided there was no better option) aboard Tavuto had come back to wakefulness with a loose grasp on language, and the Bruiser—as they had come to know him—was one of the most limited. But what he lacked in articulacy, he made up for in determination, and in muscle.
As far as Mouana had been able to work out, Bruiser had spent most of his life threatening people with violence in pubs. Presumably a threat had come good, and landed him with his current sentence.
At least, she thought, as her de facto chief engineer swaggered away from the camera to batter a bulkhead with an iron bar, he’d found a transferable skill.
As sparks rang from the strike, a chorus of fack offs sounded from the gloom, and a thousand faces turned from their labour to scowl at their taskmaster. Tavuto’s engines, it turned out, had not been as sophisticated as one might have expected from a ship with a central reactor so ancient and exotic.
Whether through ineptitude in design, or calculation of the value of flesh over tech, the ancient vessel still relied on a swarm of stokers to shovel fuel into its burning heart. Even Wrack, whose mind was wired into the bloody thing, couldn’t work out how the engines worked. But he was adamant that fuel had to keep coming in, and there didn’t seem to be any kind of conveyor belt to do it in place of bodies.
So zombies it was. They teemed in the gloom behind the Bruiser, blistered about the shoulders with radiation no living stoker could withstand. Many of them were manacled to the engine blocks they fed; more with fresher bodies had attached themselves through solidarity since the takeover.
“Fack off?” offered Mouana, trying to convey the sense that she was checking on the wellbeing of her crew, or at least their ability to stay intact long enough to get the job done.
“Fack off,” replied the Bruiser, lowering his iron bar and narrowing his eyes as if to suggest she was wasting her time by asking. The heavyset corpse stooped to examine the soot-caked rack of dials and readouts arrayed before him, then growled in frustration as he realised he had nothing like the vocabulary necessary to report on their situation.
“Fack off,” he grunted, twisting a dial from its mounting with a resounding crack, and shoving it up against the lens. It appeared to be a speed indicator—or so Mouana hoped, as its needle was jammed all the way into the red.
She was struggling for a follow-up question that might be rewarded with anything more like a status report, when the deck of the bridge began trembling. Her wrist panel pinged, and she half-read a message from Wrack about a lot of energy being drawn by the forward turret, before realising what was happening and lurching to the bridge windows in horror.
Right at Tavuto’s foremost extremity, the ship’s main turret—a monster of a thing designed to ruin cities from behind the horizon—was screaming with power and about to fire. Enraged by the rain of shells through the Gate, the turret crew, previously content just to spin the thing round in jubilation, had clearly made the decision to fight back. By firing with both barrels. While the ship was moving at full speed.
The bollocking they were due had barely even begun to distill in Mouana’s head when the thing fired and knocked her off her feet. The lights in the bridge went red and Eunice cursed, clutching her eye-cameras. The Bruiser’s screen flashed orange as something far back in the engine hall exploded, and a juddering moan—the kind you never, ever want to hear aboard a ship—coursed deep beneath the floor.
Worse yet, the shot had done nothing; the turret, aimed by the punchdrunk reckoning of a bunch of corpses, had unloaded into the stone of the Gate—possibly the only thing she could imagine which it couldn’t harm. The structure was looming right ahead of them now, one pillar glowing near-white with the impact, billowing with salt steam as waves crashed against it.
Anticipating Mouana’s reaction, Eunice had already patched her through to the turret interior on another screen.
“Readying for another big boom!” yelled Kaba from the gunner’s throne, right as Mouana barked at her to stand down. Given the merry uproar from the turret’s armoured heart, she doubt her order had even been heard. That was the problem with this ship—the command hierarchy was fresher than most people’s wounds, and hadn’t so much been laid down as it had oozed out of complete chaos.
Kaba was just some boat-loader with a broken jaw from a jungle backwater, and had no business running a weapon the size of a city block. But she had been instrumental in the ship’s takeover, and had become so through seizing control of said weapon, pointing it backwards, and wiping out the overseers’ biggest pocket of resistance in an instant of glorious recklessness.
Mouana had spent her life running gun crews, and wasn’t used to having to explain her orders, let alone repeat them. But from Kaba’s point of view, she was an ally and an equal—why would she wait for someone else’s decision on when to fire?
Mouana drew her breath to shout some sense into the gunner, but was interrupted yet again by action unfolding elsewhere. With a pop of snapping cables, one of the foredeck’s winch cranes, usually locked in place and used for moving whaleboats to their launch cradles, swung drunkenly out over the side of the ship. Its upper surface was crusted with a mass of dead sailors.
“Crane six is on the move, sir!” reported one of the bridge crew—another former prisoner from Mouana’s regiment, they were at least trying to make the situation seem under some sort of control. The dead soldier leaned in to a speaker, and furrowed their salt-eaten featu
res.
“They say they’re... making ready for boarding actions, sir.”
Mouna sighed and let her head slump, breath hissing from the gap in her ribs. The situation wasn’t beyond her control, she told herself. She would have Kaba agree to hold fire until her order, rein in the madness on crane six, then check the Bruiser had everything under control. Then she could start marshalling the forces on deck for the transition, and...
Her wrist panel pinged cheerfully.
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, WE’RE GOING TO BE HEADING THROUGH IN ABOUT A MINUTE. MIGHT WANT TO HOLD ONTO SOMETHING.
“Thank you, Wrack,” whispered Mouana through gritted teeth, and clenched her fists hard enough to force an unpleasant grey jelly from between the bandages on her smashed hand. The panel chirped again.
THERE’S JUST ONE MORE THING.
WHT NOW? typed Mouana, stabbing at the touchscreen as she did her best to ignore the hooting and hollering from the forward turret.
THE GATE. SHOULDN’T YOU GET EVERYONE BELOW DECK?
With a stab of panic, she remembered the container vessels the company would always load into before a Gate transit. The rude blatting of sirens as their great jaws closed. The nervous, blue-lit dark as the tracks ground into motion. The rattling of the lightning on the hull as they went through.
THE GATES. THEY KILL ANYTHING ON THE OUTSIDE. STOPS THE MONSTERS ETC GETTING THROUGH.
Mouana was about to call for a ship-wide retreat to covered space, when the thought occurred to her. Even amidst the shouting radios, the madness of her disintegrating command, it was a shot of bliss, akin to waking free from the sordid rules of a nightmare. The Gate would indeed wipe clean any life clinging to the ship; the barnacles and crab-stamens clustered beneath the keel were doomed. But they were not.
