The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  WRACK, She typed, taking the time to type whole words. WE’RE ALL DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. WE’RE FINE.

  The panel’s screen remained empty for a long moment, longer than usual, and then three words appeared.

  NO I’M NOT.

  Wrack’s status was, admittedly, hard to pin down. On the one hand, his corpse was lying just a few feet away on a trolley, where it had lain as little more than meat since the bloody conclusion of the rebellion. Then again, he no longer resided in it.

  Refusing to shudder as she craned her neck, Mouana looked up at Wrack’s current resting place. She tried to ignore the slow, fat swirl of creamy matter in the armourglass tube, tried to put aside what it was and see her friend, but there was no dodging the truth. He had become something very, very weird.

  In place of a hardwired AI or a brainbank, Tavuto had, for who knew how long, been controlled via the extracted nerve stem of... something. Teuthis, the overseers had called it. In the blur of activity since the uprising, there had been no time to work out precisely what it was—Wrack figured it for something like a squid. In any case it was ancient, and malevolent, and horribly powerful.

  When the revolt had been about to fail, with City triremes full of destriers and kentigerns closing in, Wrack had made some sort of dark bargain with whatever had inhabited the old flesh, and had swapped places with it. The thing had been awarded oblivion, and Wrack had been given a city-ship in place of his body.

  Whether Wrack was any more or less dead than he had been as the mess of split sinew on the trolley, Mouana had no idea. But he sure as fuck wasn’t alive. Taking a deep breath, despite having no use for oxygen, she set her fingers to the panel.

  YES YOU ARE MATE, she typed, wishing she could make it look at least slightly compassionate.

  No reply came. The Gate loomed, its pillars now framing Tavuto’s bow. Shells whizzed through in a flurry, eroding the vast prow like snow before piss. The zombies on crane six howled for revenge, and the barrels of Kaba’s turret began to glow with a fresh charge.

  On the Bruiser’s screen a new glow, deep carnelian, blossomed in the ship’s heart. The big bastard’s eyes widened, and the screen shook, as the ship somehow found more power. “Fack off!” he breathed, awed, as a terrible shudder rose from the keel.

  Text faded onto Mouana’s screen without a chime.

  I SUPPOSE YOU’RE RIGHT

  Purple lightning surged across the deck like grasping fingers, drawing them into the space between the pillars. They were going through.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  THREE

  WRACK’S BONES HURT, but they were not his bones. His eyes were seared by light, but they were not his eyes. Thousands upon thousands of muscles-that-were-not clenched in spasm, and fire screamed across skin that was not there.

  Worst of all, though, even above the agony of his body’s passage through the Gate, rising from the vast depths of his new mind was a relentless craving for fish.

  Don’t listen to any of it, he told himself, over and over. He was not a ship, he thought, as his bow lurched into the raging gap. And he certainly, without question, was not a bloody squid. He was Schneider Wrack, formerly of No. 32 Clerk Street. He had been in charge of categorising the College Library’s collection of allegories, and he had been very good at it.

  This, he insisted, as his heart shunted nuclear fire through his leviathan keel, was just a phase he was going through.

  Wrack laughed, and mournful horns blasted from a dozen masts, barely murmurs above the noise of the Gate-storm. And what a storm. He understood next to nothing about the Lemniscatic Gates—not that many people understood much about them any more—but he knew that the energy transfer involved in moving something as massive as Tavuto was staggering.

  It certainly made for an astonishing show. Squinting down his foredeck from the first cameras through the Gate, he saw the ship’s hatchet prow surge into the world between wings of steam, wreathed in actinic filigree. Crowding its edges were dead women and men, too excited to care for the shells that still rained around them, lightning dancing across their skins.

  Anyone watching them would be properly shitting themselves by now, he thought, and boomed another terrible laugh.

  Then the laugh wrenched into a cry of pain, as more of his body ploughed through the Gate. A good third of him was now in an entirely different world from his two-million-ton arse, and had subtly more mass than it had possessed five minutes ago. As his bones flexed and glowed with the stress of staying together, the change felt anything but subtle.

  Wrack had no doubt he could take it: the really ancient ships—and Tavuto was as old as they came—had been built to take worse than this as a matter of course. But either its designers had not taken into account what it felt like to be the ship, or they had no sense of pity.

  As his waist slid through the gap, he felt sure his back would break. Every vertebra felt as if it was being prised from its neighbour with a heated blade; tendons drew tight as rods and snapped under the strain. Wrack screamed, and his tentacles, his cranes—no—his hands arched into claws. Whiteness overtook him, and washed away sensation.

  Allegories. He would list allegories. First came the allegories for Nation, carefully alphabetised, on circular shelves around the lily pond where the placoderms wallowed. Nation as Zoo took a slice of the bottom shelf, Nation as Saints’ Lives sat midway along the third, and there was Nation as Machine, a long section starting neatly at the beginning of the fifth. He ran his finger upwards, past Nation as Karst, Nation as Goldmine, Nation as Euphemism, to the top shelf. There was Nation as Body, but it had been put back in the wrong place, before Nation as Battleship and Nation as Beast. Wrack clucked in disapproval, and poked his tongue out as he began to rearrange them. He was just wondering how they had gotten so out of sequence when he was smacked across the brain by a string of angry block capitals.

  WRCK?/? WHRE THE FCK ARE YOU>?

  Hold on, he thought, irritated, and focused again on the books. How odd; while he had been distracted, all three volumes had merged into one.

  WRACK. MATE. NEED YOU.

  Oh, thought Wrack, looking up from the impossible book as the edge of perception began to pound with light. What a clever dream.

  CLVR DREAM? THE HELL DO YOU MEAN? shouted Mouana into his head, as he chucked the book into the pond.

  Sorry—nodded off for a second; I’m on it now, thought Wrack, and blinked.

  Wrack had seen paintings of some enormous naval battles, but this made most look like a baby’s bathtime. A crescent of warships, each the size of a skyscraper, bristled before the harbour of Lipos-Tholos like bison circling a sick calf. Explosions rippled across their decks as their guns sounded, and triremes scudded through the air like fat arrows.

  Wrack was thundering towards them, cloaked in spirals of gunsmoke as his own turrets barked in answer. As he cleared his head of the strange fugue, more came online, while those piloted by the enthusiastic dead came under the subtle guidance of his aim. Wrack clenched his diaphragm, and rockets slid from his sides spurting flame; he gritted his teeth, and tungsten flechettes erupted from his spine with a wet, springy hiss. Missiles and flak found their marks, and aircraft spiralled smoking from the sky.

  Railfire punched through his hull, and mortars knocked chunks from his superstructure, but it was like the scrape of pumice on dead skin; if anything, it felt refreshing after the searing misery of the transition. There was just so bloody much of him, and it was bearing down on the City’s navy far quicker than it could be broken by their guns. Elation bellowed through him, and his skin shivered with the bliss of rage. He was death now, and the City was powerless before him.

  The shiver turned cold very quickly, and the anger coagulated into thick disgust. He wanted to believe the black euphoria had come from the same place as the hunger for fish, because if it had come from him, it raised the possibility that he had been every bit as unpleasant as the mind into which he had been transplanted. />
  Wrack had been angry when he had woken up after his execution; in fact, it was fair to say that was an understatement. That anger, and the chaos it had sparked, had forced him to actions he could never have imagined in life. Driven by the horror of surviving his death, and the burning need to stop it happening to anyone else, he had done insane things. He had ridden a dead whale into battle, swum across open Ocean, beaten a cyborg murderer with a length of pipe. He had bitten a man’s throat out as he pleaded for mercy, and the memory still made him shiver.

  Taking Tavuto had been necessary, and becoming Tavuto after that. And even from those earliest moments of despair with Mouana, when they were just two shivering corpses on the decks of grey hell, the plan had always been to take that hell back to the City that had inflicted it.

  But now the City was in his sights, now he could almost taste its fear on the wind, it all felt... well, a bit much. The people he had grown up with were still in that city; his friends were there, and his father, who had wept at his trial. And he was racing towards them, laden with angry carcasses that wanted nothing more than to bite and claw and destroy.

  But he was committed now. Even if he was able to wrench Tavuto’s monstrous engines into reverse—and he wasn’t sure he knew how—it would do nothing to stall the tectonic momentum the ship had built up over miles of open Ocean. Accepting that his only option now was to surge forward into the fire, Wrack prised his thoughts from the city of his youth and made himself see it as an irritation to be swatted.

  Turning his attention back to the fight, it seemed things were becoming a little less one-sided: the twin colossi at the harbour gates—the Wave-Roamers—had broken their vigil and begun striding out to sea to meet him.

  Wrack floundered in confusion, fairly sure that he had slipped into yet another strange dream. But the stone giants were utterly real, and so was the glow of barely-restrained plasma along the street-long blades of their swords.

  As the titans waded out to hip-depth, Wrack couldn’t help but feel a surge of satisfaction. Despite College Hill’s endless insistence that the Roamers had been nothing more than statuary for centuries, there had always been a pub-chat undercurrent that insisted that someone’s uncle had been contracted to scour their joints, that someone’s kid had climbed up one night and seen figures moving within their crowns.

  Wrack almost felt disappointed when Tavuto’s forward turret, now severely pitted from shellfire, swivelled to the left and blasted one into gravel. The shot jarred Wrack like a swan-dive into concrete, and knocked the gun sixty feet off its bearings, but he couldn’t deny it had been well-aimed. Wrack heard Kaba’s crew whooping and shrieking as they abandoned the gun they had just wrecked, pumping their fists as the Roamer’s bodiless legs pitched into the bay.

  There was little time to reflect, however; the other giant was closing rapidly on Wrack’s starboard flank, and the ships ranked in front of the harbour were shuffling apart to let something through. Switching his view to a camera on one of his highest masts, Wrack saw what was coming—the Eschatologist.

  The dreadnought slank between the ships of the blockade like a pike through minnow. This was no bath toy.

  The Eschatologist was perhaps the sole reason that, in the generations-long history of the siege, Lipos-Tholos had never been threatened by sea. Wrack remembered being part of a choir of fifty thousand schoolchildren, arrayed along the harbour wall to sing it off to some meaningless colony war. The City had never minded it being away from port; the mere possibility of its return was enough to dissuade any possibility of an attack by sea.

  Sailors who had served aboard said its corridors had not been made for human beings, that in its deep decks it held the preserved exoskeletons of its first captains. It was a thing of black iron, so old that even its engineers often had to shrug and mutter about magic when tasked with trying to maintain it. It had nothing so crude as guns: it was said that the will of its captain alone was enough to turn even a Gate to sand. For the first time since becoming an enormous ship, Wrack felt true fear.

  Then Mouana offered her take on the subject.

  RAM IT, she sent, and Wrack checked the bridge camera to confirm the grin he already knew was stretched across her face.

  Good idea, he thought at her, and began the chest-crushing work of nudging the ship’s course. He didn’t need asking twice: with the main turret shot and most of his artillery spent, Wrack didn’t have much choice but to barrel straight for the dreaded vessel and hope for the best.

  As he centred the shell-chewed apex of his prow on the black ship, however, the whole battle shrank down to him and the dreadnought. His attention was consumed by its baleful lights, like a wolf’s gaze caught at the edge of firelight, and he began to feel strange energies churning deep in his belly. Whether the terror he felt under that glare was just fear of the ship’s secret weapon or part of the weapon itself, he could not say. But he could concentrate on nothing else. Dread consumed him.

  When the surviving Wave-Roamer moved alongside and was swept onto its back by a crane swarming with zombies before it could strike a blow (Crane Six, had it been?), it was little more than a footnote on the edge of perspective. The Eschatologist was everything, cruising silently toward him, darkness on a white bow-wave. The feeling of strangeness inside him built until he felt his guts were on the edge of bursting. The black ship’s lights swelled, reaching furnace intensity, and Wrack’s engines began to quake.

  And then, the unthinkable. Sirens wailed across the waves between Wrack and his adversary, and explosions consumed the Eschatologist’s port side. Stricken, the black ship began to yaw to face the unseen threat. The red lights swung away, the transfixion broke, and Wrack was able to focus on the other ships in the fleet. The battle line was wildly out of formation; its ships were jostling madly in a swamp of white water, and at least half had turned their guns on the Eschatologist, were pounding away with suicidal focus.

  The traitor craft moved free of the blockade and advanced in a knot on the Eschatologist, which seemed vastly less imposing as it swung desperately to face them. The renegades steamed forward and bright white banners, emblazoned with a crude image of a tobacco-pipe, unfurled from their topmasts.

  On Tavuto’s war-torn deck, the horde of dead reacted before Wrack could, erupting in a frenzy of cheering. They in turn were answered by the City, where volleys of flares began streaking into the evening sky. The sound of distant gunfire followed close behind.

  IS THAT YOUR OLD LOT DOING THAT? messaged Mouana, as Wrack stared in disbelief.

  He wasn’t sure how to answer. The traitors’ banners bore the symbol of the Pipers—the City’s insurrectionist faction, named for the semi-mythical rebel Old King Pipe—but whether they were “his old lot” was a very different question.

  All he knew was that his Dad had almost certainly been one of them—and that when he himself had been arrested for distributing seditious material through the library (his own memories were unclear on whether he was guilty), he had been a good son and hadn’t told the constables his father was a rebel. Beyond these threadbare facts, his connection with the Pipers had remained maddeningly unclear in his memories.

  Either way, he was glad of them now. The Eschatologist seemed a lot less terrifying as it foundered under the rebel guns, which fired relentlessly even as the Piper ships were chewed to pieces by the rest of the fleet.

  Free of the flagship’s stare, not to mention the ire of the City’s blockade, the massed dead on Wrack’s deck broke into ceaseless wild shouting, waving rifles, falchions and their own shattered arms in the direction of the City. Even as they watched, two of the Piper ships disappeared before the Eschatologist in columns of flame, but by the time the black hulk began turning back to face them, it was too late.

  You might want to have everyone brace for impact, Wrack warned Mouana, although Tavuto’s vast bow was already towering above the Eschatologist’s like the threat of a mountain storm.

  Whatever the dark ship was made of,
it was hard. As he smashed into its flank, Wrack felt a livid, cracking pain, as if he’d taken a bite out of a pint glass. The dreadnought stove in at the beam, but the impact sent a jolt through Wrack that made the Gate transition seem gentle.

  Maddened by it, he flailed to hold on to consciousness, leaving his sense of self behind. As the force of the crash screamed through him, he let the formaldehyde-quenched recesses of his new brain come to the fore, and flexed boneless, barbed arms in the dark of his mind. He was a devil cruising under mile-thick ice, ripping lesser monsters from their crevices and grinding them in spiral jaws.

  The prey-ship was driven beneath the waves in two splintered halves, ripping vast strips from his body as it went down. He was breached; water was pouring into him, tens of thousands of gallons per second, but he didn’t care. There was more prey ahead.

  Shaking aside the chewed carcass of the dreadnought, he swam on. There was no turning back now, and no point trying to think like a timid little creature. Not now the City’s last defence had fallen to his beak; not now that final, delicious impact was so close.

  Wrack was so, so hungry, and his quarry sprawled before him; he was within the harbour now, heartbeats from the dock wall. The tiny prey-ape was talking to him, bleating to him through her little letter-pad, but it made no difference now. He was closing on the carcass, foregut flushing hot with acid at the thought of so much meat, and nothing could stop him. The dockside rushed at him, stone and steel and wood and flesh, and Wrack spread his hooked arms in rapture.

  WHEN AT LAST the shaking stopped, Mouana uncurled and rose unsteadily to her feet. Dust billowed through the shattered windows of the bridge, obscuring everything outside. Never had she been so glad not to breathe. The world was silent, save the deep moan of settling steel. After the last, ear-splitting crack, when Tavuto’s ageless spine had finally snapped, it was as if all other sound had been shamed into hush.