The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  “Go away,” said Mouana in a husk of a voice, not looking at him. Against the roar of the engines and the shouts of the boat people, her stillness was terrifying; she stood with her gun level, like a statue of someone too grim to be tidied away by history. Wrack ran at her, not sure what he intended to do, and found the world spinning as she sent him across the quarterdeck with a flick of her boot.

  As he struggled to right himself, the clang of a grapple sounded above the chaos of the chase, biting into the deck with a cargo of rope. Mouana slashed the tether with her arm blade, then barked a single word of warning in the local dialect, before firing a volley into the air. For a moment Wrack hoped this might all end sanely.

  But then another pair of grapples struck the deck, and Mouana’s gun levelled at their pursuers and fired.

  At first, Wrack was glad he couldn’t see what was happening to the boats off their stern. But in a way it was worse to watch Mouana, her face stretched into an unreadable grimace and lit from beneath as her gun belched death. She paused to reload, and a shaking hand reached up from one of the grapple-ropes to clasp the deck. Mouana stamped on it, and fired again.

  Then it was over. Mouana stalked back towards the cabin, her expression barely less grotesque than it had been as she was firing, and Wrack was left alone on the quarterdeck.

  He reached the stern rail just in time to see his first phosphorescent worm. Wrack spotted it maybe thirty yards from where the people flailed in the water; a patch of glowing water that snaked towards them, trailing occasional bumps of mottled purple as its flanks brushed the surface.

  The townspeople panicked as they saw the worm’s glow among them, moaned in terror as their feet brushed its bristled hide. They thrashed to get away from the bullet-struck, whose blood was now attracting the beasts, and surged to climb the sides of the boats that remained. With a creak and a splash, a dinghy capsized as more men than it would carry tried to scramble aboard.

  Then a second worm appeared, a woman was pulled down in a cloud of red, and the feeding began.

  Wrack turned away from the blood and stared at Mouana’s back as she retreated, wishing his gaze could carve molten troughs through her armour and blacken her bones. As she stepped over the hold doors, he shivered, trying not to visualise black arms jetting up and cracking her like a shrimp. This is what had become of the Tavuto revolt. This is what they did now, in the name of compassion and the ease of suffering. They filled boats full of children with lead, and left their parents for the jaws of river worms.

  As the massacre receded behind them, Wrack found a horrible solace in the sound of the worms’ feeding. Killing and eating. That was what was easiest to understand, what it was safest to expect, from the world. It was what they wanted from him, when it came down to it, and it was what they had made of this journey. Fingal could say all he wanted about heroics and team spirit, but he was nothing more than a thuggish murderer; the same was true of that miserable sadist, Mouana. Wrack wished he’d left her for the shark’s jaws back on Tavuto.

  And what neither of them realised—and perhaps he hadn’t until now—was that he hadn’t been reading the book all the time because he didn’t want to get involved in the fighting. It was because he was terrified of how much he might absolutely fucking love it if he stopped trying not to.

  Wrack screamed, but not with his voice. He held the image of the blood-clouded water in his mind, and clamped down on it ’til his nerves sang. He felt ichor stream from his teeth, ice water streaming as his tentacles flew open, cold dread bursting in the minds of his prey.

  Wrack screamed, and every soul on deck wailed in fear. The sun rose above the river, lacing its wavelets crimson, and something black and dreadful rose with it.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  ONE

  DUST WATCHED THE hilt of her sword fluoresce with strange, crackling odours as it cooled in the chest of the mayor. Or was it the mayor? Blinking past the wash of colours from the wound, she took in the man’s clothes, which clearly weren’t Lipos-Tholon. Perhaps this had been whoever had led the revolt. It didn’t matter, really. He had been the one cowering behind the greatest number of guards in the town’s capitol tower, and so the place was hers now.

  Not that that mattered much, either. Looking down from the windows of the stunted edifice, she saw a pathetic place: a few rows of weed-smeared tenements, muddled with reeking markets (their stench roared even from here) on a mile-long hump of river mud. It matched the meagre world it sat on, smelly and jumbled, and chaotic in the least interesting way. She did not plan to make much of it. With most of the fires put out, it would serve as a decent staging post for the Blades.

  It hadn’t been much of an invasion. Dust had always had a fondness for an amphibious assault, but compared with the taking of Steel Beach at the close of the Thaddean war, it had been an embarrassment. Whatever invasion or uprising they had interrupted had nearly spent itself on the town, leaving just a few dozen sweating gunmen to fend off the Blades. After mortaring a couple of half-hearted barricades from mid-channel, they had simply waded ashore and put metal through anything still breathing. It had barely been worth the drugs, thought Dust gloomily, veins trembling with wasted juice.

  Already, her vanguard were nearly done cutting down the remaining population; glancing down onto the town’s main thoroughfare, she saw them being lined up to be dispatched with a neat slot to the chest, then hauled off to the town’s meat store to take the miasma. Even as the last of the living were finished off, the first of the newly woken were being corralled into work gangs to speed the unloading. Of course, some of her infantry were refusing to run the execution lines, but that only meant more bodies for her new logistics corps.

  Turning to look back downriver, Dust knew the dead would be busy with unloading for some time. The lights of her army formed a stream of fire all the way to the horizon and the Entrada confluence beyond. From the cargo barges that had been refitted as floating stables, to the fishing boats wallowing under the weight of her infantry, they were carrying her whole company into the world. Even now at the shattered docks of Lipos-Tholos, her engineers were working around the clock to scavenge more hulls and carry the last of her army from the city.

  There would be no time to wait for those stragglers, however—even the brief pleasure of impaling the mayor had been a wasteful diversion. There was a hunt on.

  Dust clapped her hands once, and her intelligence officer shuffled forward. He had not taken kindly to death. The man’s scalp oozed where he had pulled his hair out in clumps; his permanently fearful face sagged around watery eyes. But he did his job, and so long as his memory held out, he would keep it.

  “What news from the interrogation?” asked Dust, enjoying the taste of the man’s voice as it churned in his throat.

  “The refugees... they say... two ships. Passed just before dawn, at high speed and armed. If we pursue straight away”—the officer gulped, and licked his lips with a dry tongue—“they’ve maybe got twenty-two hours on us.”

  “Did they stop here?” she asked.

  “They... avoided the colony, sir. Some of the other refugees... begged sanctuary with them, but they were... shot in the water. Only a few made it back.”

  Dust was impressed—she would have thought Mouana had been the type to slow and dither, if not actually stop to help. If she had, her cargo would already have been in her grasp. Maybe death had hardened her—if anything, it would make the chase more interesting. Her mood brightening, she clapped again and called Logistics to report.

  The tinworld crone was adapting much better. She had been dour and unimaginative to begin with, and was taking undeath like a bad bout of camp fever. If anything, her reports had more life in them now.

  “Barge Sections Alpha-Nine through Kappa unloading now,” she reported. “Engineering Section Three is now ashore and expanding the dock. We’ve assembled an embarkation pier upriver; the fastest boats are being routed there for reloading with troops as per my d
eployment plan submitted after transit. Current projections show that—”

  Dust stopped listening halfway through the report. She had not read the deployment plan when it arrived, either. So long as her forces were able to continue the pursuit as efficiently as possible—and the logistics officer had been tediously reliable in her efficiency for the last few decades—there was little more to learn. As Logistics droned on, she turned to Engineering. The young officer had a particular flavour of anxiety to her that fascinated Dust, and she wished to draw it out.

  “The triremes?” she asked her abruptly, drawing an indignant grunt from Logistics.

  “Still... still getting there, sir,” wheedled Engineering. “We’ve got them all through the gate and laid up on the beach after a controlled descent. Unexpected tidal action stalled work for two hours, but we’re making progress and I expect—”

  “They will fly today?” demanded Dust, barely inflecting the statement as a question.

  “Well, I think—”

  “Would you stake the use of your legs on them flying today?”

  “No, sir,” gulped Engineering, after a stutter that glowed a wonderful, wobbling indigo in Dust’s ears.

  Of course the triremes weren’t working yet, and they wouldn’t be for some time. It was no surprise—it took forever to calibrate floaters to new fields—but it was important to emphasise haste nonetheless. She demoted the girl to private on the spot, and sent her into the streets to help with the executions. She swore she had looked relieved.

  “Comms,” said Dust, and the bandy-legged lightworlder stepped forward, stooping to avoid cracking their skull on the ceiling.

  “Negotiations with the Principals have stalled, sir,” piped the officer through bloodless lips. “The troops from Orcus have joined their allies at the wall, and Kanélan floaters have been sighted in-world. We have insisted that you are still within the Ministry, but their patience appears to have run out. We expect an assault within hours.”

  Dust glanced out the window again, at the serpent of lights ferrying her entire army to this backwater mudpile. She had gambled everything on this expedition, had evacuated Lipos-Tholos as swiftly as it had been captured, with barely time for the troops to turn round a night’s sleep. The most notorious siege in the worlds was over, and she had not so much as stopped to piss on its embers.

  Of course, there had been mass desertions when the troops had been informed the campaign was to continue, and a decimation of the sixth regiment (chosen by a roll of the dice) to discourage further losses. Ancient siege pieces and irreplaceable engines had been left like stew-bones, simply too heavy to be carried away by boat.

  She was surprised it had taken the Principals this long to realise they had been duped; that they had gained nothing from the siege they had near-bankrupted themselves to prosecute. They could have that senile old city and the guns she had left in it—once she had Lipos-Tholos’ real prize in her hands, it would make all their toys meaningless.

  “Surrender the city to them,” she told Comms. “Tell them to enjoy their prize, and that we will forego our final payment as we enjoyed liberating it so much.”

  The birdlike officer nodded acknowledgement.

  “And lay the streets with plague-mines,” finished Dust, before turning back to Intelligence.

  “We’ll be on the river again within the hour. May I trust you know where our pursuit should lead us?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” blurted the pale man. “They’re headed to Rummage; one of their crew told the refugees, before the fighting broke out. But we... we know where they are anyway, sir.”

  “You know?” asked Dust, curiosity piqued.

  “Since you... since we... now we are dead, sir. We can, we can... feel the prize ahead. We all can. We can’t lose it.”

  Dust felt a moment of envy at the thought of something her new soldiers could feel, but which was denied to her. But she could consider that later; there were more pressing implications. If its presence was tugging on her dead then Teuthis, the prize, was alive. The intelligence officer spoke again.

  “Another detail, sir... they used the cargo... Teuthis... to... project something? We felt something at dawn, something faint, but the refugees were right there, and living. They report experiencing a ‘black feeling’ that matches what we understand of the thing’s capabilities, after the boats had passed. We don’t know... know why... the conflict had finished by then. Perhaps—”

  Dust contemplated that, as Intelligence waffled, trying to sound useful. The prize was not only alive, but awake and functional. Stripped from its cradle aboard the city-ship, it should have been reduced to catatonic dormancy. But it was conscious, and projecting its power. That was strange.

  Still, she had planned for the eventuality of the thing being active, and would never have staked so much on its capture without the means to control the thing she was hunting. She would just have to use it sooner, rather than later.

  Dust thought of the asset she had procured from one of the Kuiper states, back when her plan to take on the Lipos-Tholos commission had taken shape. The gelid museum-piece, which had spent centuries in the icy hollow of a store-stone, and which had been so eagerly traded for soil and germstock. She still wasn’t sure if it was alive, despite the titanic cost of maintaining its environment tent, but—and in this she was perhaps alone across all that was left of the Lemniscatus—she knew exactly what to do with it. The excitement was too much—she could not wait.

  “We leave immediately,” she announced, and even the logistics officer looked astonished.

  WHEN RUMMAGE’S SCOOPWHEEL finally loomed over the trees of the river-bend, Wrack stirred for the first time in hours—partially out of excitement, but mostly from relief. The convoy had been in desperate need of rest and resupply at Wormtown, and another three days’ travel had all but ruined them.

  The heat was the worst. It lay over the water like a second liquid, and throbbed in the metal of the deck. It cloaked them and dragged at them, basted them in the stench of their own decay. And though Tavuto’s former crew seemed to be degrading more slowly than inert corpseflesh might, there was no doubting it: they were rotting as they walked.

  The dwindling remains of their preservative supply had been gathered in a cask, to which the Bruiser had been appointed quartermaster. He stood at the tap, grudgingly apportioning the stuff to the sailors who queued with tin cups and shrunken hands. Rations were down to a half-cup each per day now, which the sweltering dead mixed with salt and smeared over their leathery skin with their fingers.

  The insects weren’t deterred. Now the Esqueleto had narrowed to a muddy ribbon maybe two hundred yards across, they were drawn from the mud of the banks in endless whining clouds, settling on everything that resembled flesh. The first parasites had made themselves known, too; already the crew were alert to the yellow pustules that marked a boil-wasp sting, and not a half-hour passed without the cursing of a sailor afflicted by a passenger-fly and its writhing cargo.

  With little to do but sit and wait to fall apart, the crew had taken to fishing—there was, after all, no shortage of maggots to be used as bait. One barely had to brush the river’s surface with a baited hook before it could be hauled back up with a flashing silver cargo. In many cases, the time it took to bring the catch to the surface was long enough for something larger to seize it and end up on the hook itself. The nicer fish were offered to the living, who grilled them on the braziers where they boiled their drinking water. The grimmer specimens, meanwhile—the sagging catfish whose bauchfett reeked of river mud—went to the less discerning palates of the dead.

  Wrack imagined the plentiful food was small consolation for the living. With the initial camaraderie of the journey fading now the dead were beginning to stink, the living sailors had taken to sticking aboard the Asinine Bastard, with Gunakadeit becoming the de facto Ship of the Dead. But when the Bastard had run aground on a sandbank near the Esqueleto’s mouth, and the Chekhov’s Gun had proved too heavy for
them to tow without losing half their speed, everyone had been forced aboard the former whaleboat.

  Their speed had picked up no end without their escort, but that was little relief for the living crews, now packed shoulder-to-shoulder with rotting corpses and vermin, with nowhere to sleep that wasn’t sticky with rot. Most of the Pipers who’d volunteered for the journey were just kids from the Lipos-Tholos slums, who wouldn’t have dreamed of turning down a boat trip to another world in search of forbidden technology to wreck. Now, after days among the dead and no end to the muddy river in sight, there was real horror on their faces.

  And Wrack had to admit he had not made things any better. After the incident at Wormtown, he had retreated to an overturned crate at the fore of the ship and lurked there, invisible and seething like the conscience he doubted Mouana still had.

  They had all felt his outburst after Mwydyn-Dinas, but nobody could bring it up. Fingal had approached him with another attempt at bonhomie, but he had been having none of it. Kaba and some of the familiar faces from Tavuto had come the following day to sit and talk with him about river lore, but it had seemed done more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Whether they feared him or were unsettled by him, the rest of the crew had left him be, and the boat had motored under a weird, muttering pall.

  But at the sight of Rummage’s wheel ahead—rust-red and proud against a blue sky—Wrack could feel his mood lifting. One way or another, this was civilisation, and it wasn’t on fire. The river was winding now, and distances were deceptive, but Kaba swore the town was round the next bend.

  Sure enough, as they moved round the swoop in the river, the settlement revealed itself, and Wrack marvelled at what he was prepared to accept as civilisation these days.

  Rummage was perhaps the most permanent settlement this far from the main channel of the Sinfondo, having persisted there since not long after Waldemar’s time. Indeed, it had been the explorer’s shipmates, bringing mineral samples back from the site, who had founded it. His enthusiasm for reading had waned considerably since Wormtown, but still Wrack couldn’t resist seeking out the passage.