The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  As he relaxed, the rebels clustered round him relaxed too—they lowered their tools, and those who still had the facial architecture to do so were smiling, even Conwen as she wound a rag round her thumb.

  “Where is Mouana, anyway?” said Wrack, glad of his flat, toneless new voice, and childishly satisfied with the way it bungled the vowels of her name.

  “Over on Gunakadeit, the boat we took from Tavuto,” said the moustache man, gesturing through the cabin window at one of the old hulk’s jagged grey whaleboats. “You’re in its hold, but since you seemed attached to this body, we took it over here as we’ve got better workshops.”

  “And because she wanted me out of the way, no doubt,” muttered Wrack. At least, he meant to mutter: his voice announced it like the arrival of the 12:30 to Ploverholm.

  “She’s got a lot to do, Wrack. We’re headed to Grand Amazon, and half our boats are barely afloat. Plus there’s likely to be an army coming after us.”

  “I know,” said Wrack, and zoomed in on the whaleboat’s deck, where his former comrade was overseeing the welding of a new gun onto its increasingly fortified forecastle. Watching her stride around with her permanent scowl, he felt himself draining of the fuzzy sentiment that had come over him a few moments ago.

  Wrack had had many eyes in the City as it fell; he had seen the body of the Chancellor, had seen the cuts she had made. His supposed friend had tortured a man to death and back to get what she wanted. The great soldier, soldiering on, doing the vile things soldiers did in the name of soldiering. To her there was no fear, or sadness, or horror at what was going on—just obstacles, and guns to blow them away with. Wrack himself was not a friend to her; he was just another gun, to be welded in place and used when something stood in the way of the mission.

  Wrack didn’t know whether he loathed her for her callousness, or because he envied her. Certainly he loathed himself for going along with it all, for jumping at the fairytale hope that she wanted her friend alongside her for the journey. Looking at Mouana’s face, like a spiteful ghost-train puppet, and down at his own reeking claws, he wondered what in the world was left that was worth hoping for.

  That was the worst thing. The despair of Tavuto had at least had a coda; all along had been the promise that it would soon all be over. But now there was the hope—however ludicrous—of something after, and the hope fucking ached.

  “Let me get back to my book,” said Wrack, and tried to find his place among the bloodstained pages. The gathered rebels said nothing, just quietly put down their tools and left.

  “STRIP THE HARPOONS off,” barked Mouana, holding off the terror as it tried to force its way into her voice like the head of a carrion bird. “And secure the guns from the Bargain in their place. They need to be up and ready within the hour.”

  At least her voice was holding. She had finally patched the hole in her chest with a square of stapled tarp, meaning she could pack a few more syllables into each lifeless breath, but she wished she could do the same for her growing fear.

  Bertilak’s Bargain, the most heavily armed of the four ships sailing with Gunakadeit, had a dying engine and was falling behind the flotilla. Every hour they kept pace with it cost them miles, and with the Gate to Grand Amazon only hours away, they needed every mile of sea they could squeeze between them and their pursuit.

  And there was no question of their being pursued. It had been two days since they had cast off from Lipos-Tholos, two days of exploding boilers, welding sparks and frantic engineering, where even the living had barely slept. Yet even with that head start, she knew they could not stay ahead for long. Dust would do anything to get what she wanted, and to be the only thing standing in between her and her goal was chilling beyond the cold of death.

  When Mouana thought of her dreams, those claustrophobic half-memories of the command tent, her fears only grew. What Dust was truly after, her own role in that scheme, and the terrible logic that proceeded from its unravelling, was something she was avoiding thinking about at all costs. When Kaba interrupted her with a poke in the ribs, she could not have been more glad of the insubordination.

  “Channels are narrow off the Sinfondo, boss,” crowed her de facto first officer. “Narrow and not deep, you know. This is an Ocean-boat, deep keel and sharp besides. Keep loading all this heavy gear, you’ll scrape bottom and rupture soon enough.”

  “So have the crew empty the holds,” snapped Mouana. “Bodies, fuel and ammo is all we need besides the weapons, and we’ll run low on all three soon enough.”

  “Even the food?”

  “Even the food. We’re going to a fucking jungle, it’s full of the stuff.” Though they were perpetually hungry, Mouana wasn’t even sure if the dead really needed to eat, and the living would need bullets more than bully beef when Dust came.

  “You don’t know the jungle, miss,” said Kaba with a laugh that pulled her smashed mouth into a half-grin, then shrugged. “But we’ll ditch if you give the say-so. Bad news is, there’s not much else to dump. Take a look what we hauled out so far—besides, there’s something big-dangerous in there you’ll be happy to see.”

  Mouana followed Kaba down the ship’s main deck, ducking as another net of guns swung aboard from the ailing Bargain, to where a chain of sailors was hauling gear out of the hold. There were indeed tins of meat—stacks of them, along with the bottles of foul preservative Tavuto’s overseers had used to wash down their grim rations. There were nets and harpoons and barrels, and piles of iron sheets for hull repairs. But there was something else, which despite everything weighing on her, raised a tight smile, as Kaba had predicted.

  “It’s a Mark V warbody,” announced a rebel technician, patting the immense thing on the flank as she saw Mouana staring. “Military issue, but this is the ‘Ahab’ pattern, modded for Ocean deployment. Ministry built a load a year back, from a fresh blueprint won off Sedogua. We know because we tried to jack them from the forge. Quite a bod, eh?”

  “Yeah,” said Mouana to Kaba as she looked the Mark V up and down. “Don’t throw that overboard.”

  It was easily nine feet at its headless shoulders and almost as wide, a rust-red block of aggression bristling with harpoons, slug-throwers and rivets. Its limbs were caked in inch-thick iron, its joints swarmed with armoured cables, its feet were like upturned foundry crucibles.

  Eunice’s own sheet-metal physique looked fragile beside the newer model. Preferring not to risk its own people in close combat with Ocean’s fauna, Lipos-Tholos had wired its most bloody-minded criminals into these suits after death, safe in the knowledge their minds were too broken to consider rebellion. Eunice was horrific proof of what a stupid decision that had been. Even so, she looked jealous beyond measure as she eyed up the empty suit.

  Mouana couldn’t help it. She’d spent her life with heavy weapons, oiling their innards and frying eggs on their engine casings, and the sight of a new-forged war machine lifted her up, kept the fear at bay.

  “Damned heavy, though,” cautioned Kaba. “Must be a ton at least.”

  “So dump everything else,” said Mouana, before nodding to the technician and carrying on up the stairs to the quarterdeck at Gunakadeit’s rear. From here she could see down the whaleboat’s length, from the frenzy of activity at the hold amidships, to the forecastle with its growing tangle of weaponry. It was coming together, and the sight of the welding, the sound of the hammers, was as soothing as rain on glass to her. Mouana took a deep, futile breath, and turned to let the madness govern itself for a moment.

  She walked to the back rail and looked out at the ship’s wake, as it churned under the afternoon sun. The last time she had stood like this had been on Tavuto, when she and Wrack had reached the stern of the ship and realised they could run no further. They had watched scavengers swarm at a whale’s carcass under a grey dawn, and despaired.

  But Ocean was long behind her now. This, by contrast, was a beautiful day. This far from the stained sky over Lipo-Tholos, there was just blue water and pale c
loud. Standing at the rail and watching gulls swoop in their passage, Mouana dared to wonder if things might work out after all.

  Bertilak’s Bargain wallowed beside their port side, smoke belching weakly from its stacks as the last of its supplies were pilfered. The Asinine Bastard, the largest and the most intact of their flotilla, rode to starboard. Behind them were the other ships, the Chekhov’s Gun and the Pentangle, each barely larger than Gunakadeit, and a swarm of smaller launches, ferrying people and hardware between the fighting craft. Much further out, plumes of smoke marked the positions of civilian boats, fleeing the chaos of Lipos-Tholos to take their chances in the colonies or beyond.

  Soon they would have the sailors and materiel off the Bargain, and could really put on speed. With luck, they’d be making transit to Grand Amazon some time after dusk. They had maybe five hundred bodies between the ships, half of them living. As for the dead, they were the wily ones, and the most mobile. The zombies—as she had come to think of those wretches too broken by death to regain even a semblance of humanity—had almost all been left behind. As far as she knew, they were still milling on the decks of Tavuto, or wandering the City’s streets in search of their vanished lives. She hoped, if nothing else, that Dust would give them the rest they deserved.

  Something grey surged out of the ship’s wake, and Mouana reached for her pistol, then swore softly as she saw it was only a porpoise. The animals were playing in the engine wash, spinning in the air as they arced through the crashing foam. They were not albino, nor rotten, nor tentacled—just porpoises. The sight of the things brought hope back again; whatever mess they were in, at least they weren’t in Ocean.

  Still, thought Mouana, as she glanced at the sun beginning to sink below the water, it wouldn’t be long before they reached a place with no less dark a reputation. While Ocean was feared across the Lemniscatus as one of the most horrible worlds, a place best forgotten and left to devils, Grand Amazon was one of the weirdest. Lost and recolonised enough times to make a mystery of its founding, the place had a habit of eating history: its sweltering forests swallowed human work just as completely as Ocean’s endless grey, and concealed stranger ruins. People, ships, expeditions and cities all had a habit of disappearing there, vanishing into the jungle night.

  “What do we expect when we get there?” Mouana asked Kaba, who had appeared by her side at the railing.

  “Insects, boss,” replied the woman with a leer, brandishing a jug of the overseers’ preservative grog from the hold. “S’why I’m soaking myself in this stuff every chance I get.”

  “And I suppose it’s all just been dumped in the sea on my orders?” sighed Mouana.

  “Nah, boss, told them not to do that,” said Kaba, cackling. “You’d have fierce regretted it when you hatched your first boil-wasp.”

  “And besides insects?” asked Mouana drily, snatching the jug and pouring a puddle of the piss-coloured stuff on her bad hand.

  “Who knows, you know? Jungle changes all the time. I can take you up the Sinfondo, where the long-lasting towns are, and to Rummage on the Esqueleto, where squid-boy says we need to go based on his fancy book. Done that run a few times; Rummage won’t have gone anywhere. Beyond that? Can’t fathom. Don’t know what’s still there, what’s new.”

  “You think it’s changed that much since you left?”

  “Probably,” shrugged Kaba. “The colonies, they’re not what they were. Lot of the old machines are breaking now. And trouble elsewhere, the wars—they always spill over. Take people, take resources, start fires. And the jungle, she never misses a chance to fill in any holes. She’s been winning for the longest time.”

  “And what about High Sarawak?”

  “Don’t know boss. My head’s broke like yours, so maybe I knew and I’ve forgot. But I don’t think I ever did. Prospectors’ stories and wurmjäger whiskey-tales, maybe, bullshit over cards by lamplight, but no maps nor signposts. You want to find that place?” said Kaba, as she walked away to deal with the preservative stores. “You want to be talking to all the mad folk you can find.”

  “Maybe I do,” muttered Mouana, turning to look back over the boat. She looked over to where Eunice was still prodding and poking at the Ahab suit, and past her to the maw of the hold, where the rough curve of Wrack’s casket brooded in the dark. Feeling she was being watched, she shot a glance at the deck of the Bastard; sure enough, there was Wrack, squatting at a cabin window, staring at her with pebble-black lenses over the edge of his damned book.

  Wrack had not spoken with her since they had left his home town. More than once, Mouana had wondered if he had figured out she had lied to him, but she thought it more likely—or at least preferred to think—he had simply cracked. Wrack had been unstable since taking on the burden of his new mind; seeing his childhood disappear under a blanket of war-smoke might have sent him over the edge.

  That, and the sheer amount of death and damage they themselves had inflicted, in the name of the uprising he had started. Death and damage she herself had delivered, dragging its wailing progenitor with her. If that was it, then she would not apologise. There was no point in being sorry for anything she had done—it had been the ugly, necessary consummation of the justice they had conceived together in Ocean. If he was too weak to see through what he started, that was not her problem to solve.

  But one way or another, she would need him back if she was to continue to see things through. It wasn’t as if she could coerce him through torture, she thought; and cringed at even allowing herself to have the thought.

  So far, her best plan had been to set Fingal to the task of bringing Wrack back to the fold. She figured that, given their connection through Wrack’s father, the fact they had presumably known each other at some point in their lives, there might be some bond there. But from the rebel boss’s reports so far, it seemed it was tough going.

  Either way, Wrack needed to play on her team. Whatever lay at High Sarawak, whatever ancient weirdness had spawned the technology they were trying to eradicate, she had the strangest notion that her acquaintance was something to do with it. The more she thought about the visions she had been having, the more it made sense. Dust had never been after the City’s weird, filigreed necrods—she had been after Teuthis, the alien flesh that had lain at the heart of Tavuto, and which she thought had power far beyond mere scraps of old machinery. The flesh which Wrack now inhabited.

  He was inextricably linked with what they were pursuing, and he was the reason for their being pursued. Just thinking about it seemed to darken the sky, to grey out the sea. There were conclusions here she couldn’t face, memories that would not surface. Implications birthed by her visions of Dust, like the eggs of a parasite beneath her skin.

  But they were not to worry about now, she told herself, gritting her teeth as she clenched the rail in her good hand and stared at the porpoises. Those happy fucking porpoises.

  Mouana didn’t remember much of her life besides the big fights, but she knew she had spent most of it postponing happiness, thinking that things would get better after the next obstacle, after the next bout of pain and fear. It had been what had kept her on campaign so long.

  Perhaps the attitude had persisted after death. It had been what got her through Tavuto, and what had kept her going after victory had evaporated at the Ministry. It would get her through until her body finally fell apart. Maybe she would run into a dead end at High Sarawak—if they even got there—and maybe they would have to carry on fighting. Maybe things would get very, very dark with Wrack. It didn’t matter. Those were problems for later. Solve one thing at a time, Aroha had always said.

  The ships were full of sailors, and full of guns. Grand Amazon lay ahead, and Dust some way behind. For now, she was holding all the cards, and if she could at least convince herself that everything would be alright after the next hurdle, she could keep going.

  This is how a siege engineer experiences hope, she thought to herself with a laugh, and blacked out at the rail.


  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  NINE

  “ARE YOU SURE this isn’t turned?” retched Aroha, as he set his spoon back in his bowl.

  “Yep,” said Mouana, as she rolled the map out on the main desk of the dugout and weighted it with a wrench. “It just tastes of ’drick, is all. That smell they have, it gets in the meat, and there’s no salting it out. You get used to it.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll have to, won’t we?” grumbled the old captain, curling his lip. “There’s twenty tons of the stuff to get through.”

  Mouana shrugged, and scooped the last spoonful from her own tin. It was grey, fibrous like rotten wood, and soaked through with salt, but still tasted like Tassie. After acting as the battery’s mascot in the last days on the plateau, the old beast had taken on a second life as rations for the deployment outside Lipos-Tholos. Having been the one to pull the trigger on Tassie, Mouana made a point of finishing each tin of meat before any of her troops.

  “I don’t know, Mouana,” said Aroha, sounding suddenly very old. “I could be eating home-cooked stew soon.”

  “Your boy, is he much of a cook then?” she asked, as she began unpacking the battery’s analytic console, cursing under her breath as one screen came out of the crate shattered.

  “He cooks shit, same as his old man, far as I remember. But at least it’s home-cooked shit, eh?”

  Aroha had been maudlin since they had arrived. When the first mail had reached them, somewhere between Gate transits on the way here, it had brought news that the mother of his boy—the woman he had ostensibly stayed a mercenary to avoid—had died, and left him a lengthy deathbed letter. After years of joking about how good it would be to only have to send half the money back home, he had become a very sentimental man. Mouana could tell he was making ready for one of his reflections, and looked as busy as she could dressing the dugout so as to dissuade him. It didn’t work.