The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  Mouana looked out at the smothering clouds, and then back at the bridge, where a crowd of wide-eyed cadavers stood, stunned and looking to her for guidance. The emergency lights were dead and the daylight wholly extinguished; their ragged faces were lit only by the flickering of fires deep in the murk.

  The evening winds tugged at the shroud of stone fog, and shapes began to loom at the edges of the deck: they were buildings, fallen against the side of the ship and spilled over it in fans of rubble. The bridge crew stared in disbelief.

  From an engineer’s point of view, it made sense. As part of her siegework, Mouana had studied the geology of Lipos-Tholos intimately; had worked on endless abortive plans to dig mines and invade it from below. Especially on its seaward side, the place was mostly hollow, honeycombed with storehouses, tidal generators, and ancient districts that had simply been bricked over. Tavuto’s six million tons had ploughed through all of that like a truck into glasswork, only stopping when it ground against bedrock.

  Still, to see the mammoth vessel sprawled in the midst of the place like a beached monster defied comprehension. They had rammed the City, and the City had come off worse.

  The clouds begin to thin, and so did the silence. The thin wail of sirens began to rise from the streets around them, and tentative gunfire began to sound in the distance. With a rattling hum, the ship’s auxiliary power came on, and Mouana’s radio began squawking as the torn cobweb that passed for her command network began reporting in. The spell was broken.

  Raising a radio set to her withered lips, Mouana stared ahead through the vanishing fog, where a sullen shape loomed. College Hill, the seat of Lipos-Tholos’ government, and there at its crest, the crooked immensity of the Ministry of Fisheries and Justice. The place that had made them, through which every soul on the ship had passed on their way to Ocean and to death. Now they had come home, and stood within sight of its vile machines. There was only one thing left to do.

  “All crew, this is your captain,” croaked Mouana into the radio, hearing her voice echoing from loudhailers across the ship. She loathed speeches, but she owed them this much before the madness started.

  “Ahead of you is College Hill, and on top of it is the place where you became what you are now. You are angry, and you know what to do. If we’re not destroyed on the way there, we probably will be afterwards. But let’s have our revenge first. Let’s give them some of our own fucking justice. Storm the Ministry.”

  As the inevitable cheering began, and the bridge crew scurried to be first on deck and join the rush into the City, Mouana dropped the radio and looked upwards. The power was back on, but Wrack’s casket in the ceiling was still dark. The panel of lights beside it, which usually displayed a rank of hard green bars, flickered weakly.

  The shadowy mass of the brain barely stirred behind the glass, shreds of white matter drifting like meat in a thin soup. Wrack had stopped responding to her after they had rammed the black ship, and now she wondered if he had made it through the crash at all. She told herself that it didn’t matter; that he had done his part, and that there was nothing more to be settled between them.

  Still, as she caught sight of his body, now shaken from its trolley and lying broken in a corner, she couldn’t help but wish he had been there with her to give the speech. Certainly, she had made a good job of whipping up the crew, but somehow, she knew if Wrack had been there, he would have made them smile as he did it.

  But he wasn’t there, she thought, shoving a pistol in her belt, and that was that.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  FOUR

  PLS HELP TYPED Mouana with shaking fingers, as a grenade reduced yet another wave of sailors to jagged mush. WRACK. PLS.

  Beside her Eunice let loose another volley of fire, hydraulics whining as she pushed against the corpses piled up in front of them. Screams echoed from the militia lines as bullets tore into uniformed bodies. Grenades rained on the rebels.

  When the charge started they had been unstoppable, swarming over knots of panicking riflemen like ants over nest-bound chicks. On Physeter, the broad avenue leading up College Hill, the City had found time to gather a sturdier barricade, but even that had been swallowed under their numbers. Over and over, the line had broken and reformed further back on the long road, but each time it came back it had taken longer to overcome.

  Then at Exhibition Plaza, where Physeter narrowed to pass through the Scholar’s Gate and into the citadel that crowned the hill, their crawl had slowed to a halt. For every nine dead cut down at the bottleneck, ten would come forward, but the savage mathematics of the battle conspired against them.

  Already, the drift of bodies before the gate was big enough to shelter behind. Worse yet, Mouana could now see the ragged tail of her forces on Physeter’s lower slope, and could no longer convince herself they were limitless.

  Here and there, the river of once-human bodies was punctuated by the slick, surging shapes of the ship’s beasts. Wolf-eels, stingrays, sharks and black lobsters had all been goaded from Tavuto as they had rushed to the streets, but the stinking things had been made to keep cowed corpses in line, not assault the guns of the living.

  Next into the breach was a Greater White, wobbling on brass struts, designed to clean up deck accidents and only half-finished when the Tavuto had been seized. The vast shark opened its jaws and lunged through the gate, drawing a hurricane of rifle fire as it stooped.

  “Get that damned thing back!” yelled Mouana through the loudhailer, as she understood what was happening. “It’s going to block the gate! GET IT BACK!”

  The leviathan’s supposed handlers yanked on the ropes riveted to the shark’s jaws, but they had no chance of even turning its head. The beast’s mouth collapsed as Mouana watched, cartilage twisting under gunfire and leaving tooth-rows sagging. Then, thrashing in rage, the thing caught one of its spindly legs in its own mouth, and went down in a mass of torn anatomy.

  Its ten ton bulk neatly blocked the entry to the citadel, and almost immediately the defenders had scrambled up onto the wreckage of its underbelly to fire over the top.

  Mouana slumped back behind the barricade and stared at the dead screen of her wrist panel. They were past the point where teeth, claws, and the few guns they had could do them any good, and the only heavy ordnance was back on the sundered Tavuto, locked into the mind of her absent friend. For an artillery officer, she thought, this was about as bad as it got. She tapped out PLS again, with a growing sense of futility, and cursed in bitter frustration when no reply came.

  Arms reached out from the pile, from those dead too bullet-ruined to walk; they pawed at her shoulders with mangled fingers and protruding bones, while buried mouths murmured husky consolations. Now that, she thought, laughing darkly, was camaraderie.

  The absurdity of the moment didn’t amuse her for long. Never had Mouana felt so lost. There were no orders, no intel, and no reserves to call in. Even when she had woken on Tavuto, there had been Wrack to carry her, and to plot with. Now there was nothing but her, sitting alone at the ugly, unravelling end of a plan.

  Not that the plan had amounted to much to begin with: ‘walk forward and tear apart anything in their path’ had been the beginning and the end of it. She should have given it more thought. Even with the siege on, even with those ships turning traitor, even with the damage caused by Tavuto, Lipos-Tholos was a nation. How had she expected a mob of poorly-armed corpses, half of whom were rotted through in mind and body, to just walk in and turn the place over?

  She tried to put it down to the chaos at sea, to the haste with which she had been forced to turn an upturned graveyard into an army, but there was no avoiding the truth. As a tactician, she had been pathetic. All she had really done was point the dead in the right direction, and even that was now ending in disaster. They’d be ground to paste at the citadel gates; the City would send new ships and new bodies back to Ocean, and inflict who knew what cruelties on them to stop this happening again.

  Nearb
y, a man was screaming. Mouana had been too focused on the carnage at the gate to notice him before, but there he lay, a yard from where she sat slumped against the corpse-drift. He was young, perhaps her side of twenty, and well-fed, as far as she could tell. After getting so used to faces where the cheekbones broke the skin, living faces seemed desperately unusual. He lay on a stretcher, clearly abandoned by his squadmates in their haste to secure the gate.

  The man screamed again as he saw Mouana turn to regard him, loud enough to carry over another blast from Eunice’s gun. She wondered what he made of her, a one-eyed corpse morosely tapping on a keyboard, but by the looks of things, he was beyond reason. Sweat streamed from his brow, his pupils had hardened to points of animal fear, and his scream was the sort that echoed in the dreams of army surgeons.

  As Mouana looked down the man’s body, she saw why. He was being eaten from the feet up. The grasping hands of the fallen dead had found him and drawn him in, and now he was up to the knees in the hungry mound. A thicket of brine-withered claws groped at him, pulling him in inch by inch, and he stared at Mouana with gritted teeth.

  Served him right, thought Mouana. The fucker had eaten well off their labour, had grown fat on meat they had hauled from hell. Served him right to end as meat himself. She scraped the puckered recesses of her mouth for the black fluid that pooled there, and spat on the ground beside the man’s head.

  Then she thought what Wrack would have thought of her, and her sneer collapsed. Anger was one thing, but this was another. Taking satisfaction from the man’s agony wouldn’t bring the gate down, and it certainly wouldn’t make her failure any less profound. What had she expected the poor sod to do; starve and refuse the draft? He probably hadn’t even known what was going on in Ocean—or at least had convinced himself it was all nonsense. She could hardly say he deserved to be eaten alive.

  Before she could think any further, she had drawn the pistol from her belt and put a hole through the boy’s temple. Telling herself that hate had pulled the trigger for her, Mouana rose to her feet, put the damned soldier out of her head, and climbed up on the mound of bodies.

  “No point dragging this out any longer,” she muttered to herself, then picked up her loudhailer to order the charge. It was halfway to her lips when her wrist chimed.

  THAT WAS GOOD OF YOU, said Wrack, and Mouana dropped the loudhailer in shock.

  “Fucking hell, Wrack,” she said, gaping at her wrist panel in rage. Only when the second bullet smacked into her shoulder did she remember to slide down from the barricade.

  “How in piss did you see that?” she shrieked, scanning the baffled faces of the piled bodies.

  I’M THE CRAB, replied Wrack, adding a cheery V.v.V that would have made Mouana tear her hair out if she hadn’t been worried it might take her scalp with it.

  Sure enough, there was one of the Tavuto’s cleanup crabs nearby, mouthparts whickering away absentmindedly at a fallen soldier. She could have sworn the camera bolted to its blanched carapace winked at her as it gave a cheery wave with a gore-streaked claw.

  Muttering something she had once given a man a week’s latrine duty for calling her, she resisted the urge to shoot the thing, and stabbed at the keyboard.

  WHR TH FK YOU BN???

  WHAT ARE YOU ON ABOUT? I’VE NOT BEEN ANYWHERE! I HAVE, HOWEVER, WORKED OUT HOW TO RECEIVE SOUND FROM THESE THINGS, MIND, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO TYPE ANYMORE.

  “Don’t be bloody cute with me, Wrack,” Mouana hissed at the crab, her leg aching to kick the thing. “We’re getting annihilated here. And you just pissed off. What in the name of the Tin King have you been doing?”

  The crab raised its claws in a conciliatory gesture, and the panel beeped again.

  OK. I’M SORRY, I REALLY AM. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN, OR AT LEAST EXPLAIN QUICKLY. I WAS THINKING ABOUT... OTHER STUFF, BASICALLY. BUT I’M HERE NOW. WHAT CAN I DO?

  Squatting down to eye level with the camera, Mouana jabbed a finger at it and did her best to keep a level tone.

  “Mortars, Wrack. Missiles. Anything. I need you to blow the Scholar’s Gate to pieces. And I need you to do it now, because we’re running out of ‘later.’ Shoot the gate, Wrack. Please.”

  Too long passed, filled with the rattle of gunfire at the breach, and Mouana feared for a moment he was gone again. Then the words came up on the screen, and her jaw dropped.

  I’M SORRY. I WON’T.

  “What do you mean you won’t? There must be something!” panted Mouana, shaking the crustacean desperately. “There has to be something you can fire!”

  NO, I DON’T MEAN ‘I CAN’T’, said Wrack, the words appearing slowly. I MEAN, ‘I WON’T’.

  THE THING IS, THERE’S A REALLY LOVELY BAKERY THERE, BUILT INTO THE PASSAGE ON THE OTHER SIDE. I USED TO GO THERE ON TUESDAYS, ON THE WAY TO WORK. THEY DID THE MOST INCREDIBLE SAUSAGE ROLLS. OF COURSE, IT WASN’T REAL PORK, BUT THEY DISGUISED THE FISH REALLY WELL, AND...

  “Wrack,” whispered Mouana, swallowing rage.

  YES? said Wrack, as the crab tipped its body quizzically to one side.

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through in that thing. I honestly wonder how you’ve kept your mind this long. But please. Please, Wrack. Don’t go mad now. I need this. We all need this. Fire the mortars. And then we can get this over with and rest.”

  Mouana closed her eye and clenched her teeth, tried to drown out the sound of the massacre as she waited for the chime of a new message. When it came, she dreaded it almost too much to open her eye.

  GOOD GRIEF, YOU’VE LOST YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR, HAVEN’T YOU? OF COURSE I FIRED THE BLOODY MORTARS. THEY JUST TAKE A WHILE TO COME DOWN AGAI—

  The ground flashed bright white, then slammed into her face as her body was smacked sideways by the blast. Impacts shook the cobbles beneath her, one after another, coming faster and faster until they blurred into a continuous roar of thunder. Masonry rained down around her, and heat rose at her back until she felt her clothes would surely catch fire.

  Something in Mouana’s head ticked and sent her back to bombardment drill, forcing away all sensation except the movement of her lips as she slowly recited the alphabet. By the time she reached O, the explosions had given way to a profound silence, and she cautiously raised her head.

  The barricade was blasted into disarray and littered with chunks of stone; beyond it was only dust and smoke. Besides the soft clink of stone chips pattering on the rubble, there was no sound. Mouana rose to her feet, and checked her body for missing parts: she was alabaster from head to toe, but everything was there. And beside her was the crab, staring at the destruction with a scavenger’s disregard.

  YOU’RE WELCOME, said Wrack and, without hesitation, she kicked him down the hill.

  MOUANA WAS FIRST into the breach, screaming as she fired her pistol into the smoke. Behind her came the last of Tavuto’s workforce, hundreds strong still, loping and hopping and hobbling across broken stone.

  Clouds of murk rolled through the cratered waste, occasionally revealing a blackened body, or a leg protruding from the collapsed stonework. But nothing fired back at them. They were alone in the desolation, greeted only by their own battle-cry as it echoed through a tomb of smoke.

  As they passed through the gate’s ruins and into the street beyond, the clouds began to thin, but still there was no new line of guns to overcome. Mouana jabbed her pistol at shadows in the gathering night, expecting an ambush at any second, but they remained unchallenged.

  At the gate, it had seemed as if the entirety of the City militia had been backed up behind that passage—she had imagined them packing the streets all the way to the Ministry. Surely that couldn’t have been the citadel’s last line of defence?

  Yellow light blossomed above them, followed by a distant, deep cracking, and Mouana wondered if maybe it had been after all. The smoke lit up again, and she looked up; the distant glow told her the City was falling—she just couldn’t put her finger on why. Death had done maddening things to her memory.


  Then the clouds parted, and she saw the light’s source—a mile up, fire was splashing across the sky in rippling circles, boiling away like water flicked on hot steel. As each bloom faded it birthed an arc of lightning, which crept across an unseen dome until it twined with another discharge. Her old guns, hammering the City’s shield.

  There was the patter of the howitzers; three, then five, then three, just as she had drilled them. There were the twin blasts of Theia and Rhea, creating a violet surge where they overlapped, and then—Mouana counted to three, then nodded as the sky flashed green, right on cue—there was old Kronos, with its belly-grown warheads that outweighed a man.

  Mouana cracked into a wolfish grin; she drew in a huge, useless breath through her nose and imagined she could smell the ozone of their discharge, hear the sizzle of coolant dripping from the casings. Another flurry of howitzer shots peppered the bruise Kronos had left on the shield, and sparks burst from its underside as if from forge-struck iron.

  As the wound left by the barrage faded, however, so did her smile. She knew those weapons like family, and recognised this particular firing pattern. It was an all-out bombardment of the shield’s strongest point—phenomenally costly, and designed not to break it, but to draw all its power to one spot. With the shield sucking up everything that came out of the reactors, the point defence systems on the wall would have sputtered out, and the division’s rail pieces would be briefly free to batter the city wall.