by Nate Crowley
“Mouana, look. On the deck.” Beyond the choppy drone of the engine, everything had gone very quiet. Mouna turned around.
There, outside the rain-smeared window, her crew had gathered in a wide semicircle around the cabin. And in its centre, rain sleeting from his outstretched arm, stood the Bruiser. He was pointing directly at her.
“We need to ’ave...” he said, brow clenched for a long moment as he wrestled for speech. “We need... to ’ave... some fackin’ words.”
Despite the fact she stood in nine feet of hydraulic armour, Mouana had to force herself not to show fear as she stepped out of the cabin, not to let her huge hands shake as she closed the door behind her. Eunice lurched to her feet as she left, sending spanners and clamps clattering to the floor, but Mouana waved her down—this was something she had to face alone.
The boat, already crowded when they arrived at Rummage, was packed to the gunwales now it had taken on the slaves from the town. The crew, both living and dead, covered the deck in a mass, shivering as they watched to see what would happen. The sky above was a black vault, the river a churning, ripple-crazed darkness around them.
Mouana entered the space that had formed around the Bruiser, and the big man paced sideways, keeping opposite her without breaking his reptilian gaze.
“I’ve... I’ve seen you,” he gargled, finger stabbing out again in accusation. “I... know you.”
“I know you too, sailor,” said Mouana, as calmly as she could. “What’s your issue, man?” Choked sounds spluttered from the Bruiser’s throat as he struggled to speak, and his arm trembled with the effort. When the words emerged, they came through his rotten teeth with the heat and pressure of engine steam.
“I... know. I know... what... you was gurner do. In the taahn. And it ain’t right.” The last word was a roar, fury mixed with triumph, and his pointing hand coiled into a fist as it came.
“You’re as bad as... as... as...” stuttered the pub hulk, gesturing back through the storm, “as bad as fackin’ Dust.”
Fear ran cold down Mouana’s spine, and rage flooded after it. In all her worrying about what Wrack had learned, she hadn’t thought for a moment that the festering, near-mute old brawler could ever have been a threat. But somehow, he had figured things out, and had regained his tongue at the worst possible time. Her eyes flicked to the crowd on the deck, to the faces furrowed as they worked through the Bruiser’s words. This had to end now. It had to be silenced, before chaos overtook them and damned their chances of making it any further.
“Is this a mutiny?” boomed Mouana, loud enough for the whole boat to hear, and throwing out her arms in challenge.
“Nah,” spat the bruiser, as he cracked his knuckles. “It’s a fackin’ FIGHT.”
And with that he charged, arms spread as he pounded across the rain-slick deck. He slammed into her, and despite outweighing him five times over, she still rocked with the impact. She couldn’t believe his strength; if she hadn’t been wired into the warbody, she would have been sent flying.
But unfortunately for the Bruiser, she was built for this. Clamping a hand around his shoulder and sweeping her right arm between his legs, Mouana heaved the man over her shoulder and into the air, to land on the deck with a wet crack. She turned to face his crumpled body, hoping that was the end of it, but the Bruiser clearly felt differently.
Rising to his feet as if he had tripped on a shoelace, the glowering giant grabbed his head in his hands and set his neck with a sickening crunch. Then he charged again. Mouana twisted her whole body from the hips, throwing herself into a haymaker aimed at the brute’s chest, but he simply ducked under it, bringing himself to a stop by snatching a fistful of her underarm cables.
Swinging round behind her, the Bruiser growled and leapt onto her back; his half-brick of a hand gripped her shoulder, and his legs wrapped round her waist. She flailed behind her with her right arm, trying to swipe him away, but the warbody was too inflexible to score a hit. Then metal flashed in the corner of her vision, and her arm began sagging; the Bruiser had pulled out a blade and was stabbing away like a jackhammer at the cables nested in the crook of her arm.
Realising he was only a thought away from scrambling up and doing the same to her neck, Mouana threw her leg out and fell backwards, hoping to crush him beneath her weight. But again the Bruiser was too quick; with a speed that should have been impossible for a corpse, he leapt aside and left her to hit the deck with a bone-shaking crash.
As she struggled to right herself, her weak arm scrabbling for purchase on steel, he came on her again, throwing himself onto her chest and smashing her in the face with his forearm. Next was his fist, and Mouana felt her cheekbone crumple under the impact, her vision flaring white. The third blow would have crushed her good eye socket, but her left hand shot up to block it and grabbed his fist in mid-flight. She squeezed, and heard the pop of his hand turning to liquid in hers.
But the Bruiser was undeterred; already he had the blade out again, and would have sunk it into her face if she hadn’t jerked him sideways by his pulped wrist. Feeling strength coming back into her right arm as its hydraulics self-sealed, she put a palm to the deck and shoved herself up, keeping the bruiser pinned to the deck by his wrist as she rose. But as she got to her knees, the man threw himself backwards, tearing his arm free of his hand and leaving the sodden thing in her fist.
Mouana rose to her feet, the Bruiser to his, and they circled each other in the rain. His right forearm ended in a mess of crushed bone, but he held it in front of his face like a shield while his left waited bunched, blade in hand.
“COME ON, THEN,” bellowed the Bruiser, beating his chest with his stump, and Mouana lunged. He leaned back under her first wild swing, then ducked in close with a flurry of stabs between the plates on her side. But the swing had been a feint to get him low, and when Mouana came back round, her left fist hit him in the side like an artillery shell.
The Bruiser skidded five yards across the deck, coming to a crunching halt against a stanchion, but still tried to haul himself up despite half his chest being a mire of caved-in bone. Mouana strode slowly to where he lay, giving him time to surrender, but he only hissed at her as he flailed. She knelt over him, rain washing scraps of his flesh from her armour, and put a hand on his chest.
“Stay down,” she said quietly, so only he could hear.
“Fack off!” he screamed in her face.
Mouana had done her best. She had given him a chance. But she could see in his eyes that he, like she, understood how this had to end. They had fought together to liberate Tavuto, and had laughed together as they burned the factory that had made them. But now he held knowledge that could turn her crew against her, and they both knew he couldn’t keep it to himself.
She raised her arm before she could think about it any further, before she could talk herself out of it. Her fist slammed down, and cracked the Bruiser’s skull like rotten fruit. It took three more blows before his arms sank to the deck, knife rolling from his fingers to come to rest in a puddle.
Mouana stood, gore sleeting from her fingers in the rain, and looked around the circle of staring faces. She looked down on them, silently challenging them to come forward and face her, but nobody would raise their eyes to hers. Where once had been loyalty, now there was abject fear. No matter, thought Mouana, as she turned her back on the crowd and plodded back to the cabin. It would do just as well.
The crowd melted away and went silently back below decks, or to the tarpaulin shelters that had been strung across the foredeck. As she returned to the maps, Mouana tried to tell herself she had done the only sensible thing. That the Bruiser had been dead in any case, and that they all faced annihilation once they had done their work at High Sarawak. But as Fingal gave her a stern nod of approval, and Kaba slunk past her with a mutter about having to watch for fallen trees, the Bruiser’s words echoed in her head: as bad as fackin’ Dust.
THE STORM FINALLY broke at dawn. The air turned gold as the last dro
ps fell, and mist shrouded the river, broken only by the splash of breaching fish and the flapping passage of river birds.
Nobody in the cabin had spoken to Mouana for the rest of the night, and she hadn’t wanted them to. Gunakadeit had steamed on, the river black in front as it was behind, and taken the turn up the Extrañeza with its crew huddled sullenly under canvas. They had stayed there as morning approached, bodies piled together in a fitful approximation of sleep.
Only a few souls, the most bewildered of the rescued miners, wandered the deck as the sun rose. Fingal had gone with Pearl during the night, to go and see to the living rebels who had made their shelter under the boat’s forecastle. Eunice was largely repaired, and lay slumped in whatever passed for rest, motes dancing in sunlight above her vast shoulders.
Mouana stood where she had spent most of the night, silent at the tarnished dials of the captain’s station. She had not wanted to rest; wakefulness had been haunting enough, and she dreaded what visions might come to her if she let vigilance slip.
Again and again during the night, she had told herself she had done the right thing; that a mutiny would have cost them their chance to get to High Sarawak, and to finish the journey. That even once they had reached their destination, there would be no getting back past Dust’s army. That there were no lives to go back to. That for the Bruiser, she had only advanced an inevitable end.
But no matter how much she tried, she would not be convinced. Even when she came near to forgiving herself for the Bruiser, the memory of the refugee boats came back to her, and the sight of the Chancellor on College Hill. After a life spent killing, she finally felt like a murderer.
Murderer... The word echoed in her head, as dawn crept over the map in front of her. It repeated over and over, losing all meaning and chiming like an alarm, until she thought she had finally lost her mind. She shook her head, but the noise kept coming, until she realised it really was an alarm.
Mouana focused on the dashboard in front of her, and the red light flashing above the radar screen. There was something approaching Gunakadeit, on the river’s surface, coming from behind at an incredible pace. She frowned in incomprehension—if anything, they should have increased their lead on the Blades during the night. And the object on the screen was tiny, certainly far too small to be an invasion force.
Panic flared at the thought of a torpedo, then became something colder as Mouana realised what was coming. Wearily, but knowing there was no way to avoid what lay ahead, she left the cabin and made her way to the stern rail to watch the mist.
The fog stirred on the black water. In perfect silence, a boat appeared. Mouana hoped it was a vision, at first, and felt a moment’s relief at the possibility this was all in her head. But it was all too real, and so was the figure that sat in its bows: Dust.
There was the general, eyes yellow and unblinking, staring directly at her as she glided forward. She seemed at once too big and too small; spindled and brittle, but folded, as if she could reach out across the water for her at any moment. Mouana found herself clutching at the armour that concealed her execution wound, and watched Dust’s eyes swivel to follow the gesture.
The boat moved to within a stone’s throw of the stern and held there, silently matching speed with Gunakadeit without making so much as a ripple on the water. Mouana knew she should have powered up her weapons, that it was not too late to shout and alert the crew. But she was frozen to the spot, caught in the gaze of the apparition.
“Only you can see me, and only you may hear me,” said Dust, in a murmur that brushed her left earlobe across thirty yards of water. “I have come to speak with you. We may fight if you like, but it will be quick if we do.” Mouana gawped and searched for words, but Dust spoke again.
“I see you have become strong, my champion. It’s pleasing to see, despite all the difficulties you have caused. Soon, when this is resolved, you must tell me of death.”
The general’s words rang out over the water, yet felt as if they came straight into her head, to be heard by her alone. Still she could find no answer.
“I wonder, do you remember when you came to me, in the fourth year of the siege?” asked Dust. “It was the day you were told of your brother’s death, and you asked to be relieved of your duties.”
Mouana did remember, for the first time, as Dust said the words. Her brother... She had just received the letter while Aroha was sleeping off another night at the flasks, and had looked at him after she had read it, a living example of the mistakes she didn’t want to make. She had already missed the chance to make things right with her brother, but she still had a family, waiting every day for the news she was coming home at last.
There and then, despite the drunken warning Aroha had given her about what to expect of the general’s sympathy, she had resolved to leave the Blades and go home. She had crammed her field pack with whatever necessities she could grab before her mind threatened to change, and headed for the command trench.
“Take a moment to remember that day, commander,” purred Dust from the boat. “Indeed, since your memory in death has not proved as strong as either of us had once hoped, I shall assist you in remembering. Remember, and begin by remembering Mīhini.”
Mouana stared into Dust’s eyes, as golden and chilly as the dawn, and her life before the Blades came back to her at last.
Mīhini, her home. Proud and filthy and ancient; the black jewel of the Diaspora Chain, and its toiling industrial heart. Fed from the valleys of sister-world Kotinga, and watered by ice from far Kōpaka, it was a world of smoke and iron and work. An ugly world, but it made her ache to remember it now.
“An irony,” mused Dust, as the memories pooled. “Your very own Tavuto, long before it made its way to Ocean—back when it was still a warship—was birthed in the Mīhini yards.” Dust sighed. “It’s not just you, Mouana. There is so much we have all forgotten. Now remember your brother.”
Henare’s face, and his name, returned to her with a pang of loss. He had loomed so large in her life; how could she have forgotten? But thinking of him now, she had the queer sensation he had never truly left her thoughts. Henare: the ore-man, the hero-miner, stronger than his father before his fifteenth year, but always smiling, and making others smile.
His life seemed effortless despite his endless thirst for work, and he had become emblematic to the home-block. Even as the machines died and Mīhini slid gradually into decline, people like Henare offered hope that muscle and laughter alone could ward off entropy.
“He was why you wanted to leave me,” said Dust, “but he was also the reason you came to me. A glutton for love, you called him. Always the first to be served when the block gathered to eat, always at the centre of the family portrait. And you? You, so bright and so talented, who kept the ancient pumps alive and the mines open even as the world collapsed? You could only ever be his support.”
Dust’s boat drifted closer, but Moana was powerless to react. All of this, now, was too much for her to bear.
“And so you fled to me, my prize-winner. Onboard a shipment of fresh-forged howitzers I found you, covered in coal dust and determined to make a name for yourself. You were barely more than a child, but I kept you on. I would not have done, but you saw to the workings of old Kronos when he fell sick that winter, and you earned your place.
“But you always meant to go home, didn’t you? You never loved the wars, not like I do. You feared them. You hated the life, but you wouldn’t stop living it until you knew for sure you had eclipsed your brother. I admired you for that, Mouana; for what you would do to prove a point.”
Mouana couldn’t stand to hear the words, but they were true. She had never felt at home as a soldier, had always longed to be away from all the hardness and the aggression. But she could not leave. At the end of each campaign, it became traditional for her to write to say she was coming home, then burn the letter.
Time and again she had gone through that bitter ritual, all the way to Lipos-Tholos, the Queen of Siege
s. And then, a year in, the word came; Henare had developed the greasy lung, the miner’s plague. He was still walking, but his best hope was to die sooner rather than later, and still Mouana had elected to stay. Her brother was strong, and she knew he might hold out for years. Years in which, if the Blades lived up to their reputation, they might finally take that bloody city. Each day, she had prayed her brother would last longer than Lipos-Tholos, so she could return to him as an equal.
The City outlasted him. Henare had died in a mine collapse, working despite his illness, as the siege entered its fourth year under the Blades. The whole block had turned out for his funeral, and a statue was forged in his honour to stand at its heart. That was the day Mouana had decided to give up trying to outdo her brother, and admitted it was time to go home and make the most of things as they were.
“When he died, you came to me,” said Dust. “On a morning like this, after a storm, you told me at last that you had to leave. You told me my own story, as Aroha had told it to you, in the hope it would sway me.”
Mouana had remembered Aroha’s warning not to expect sympathy from Dust, and never to mention her past on pain of death. But that morning she had been in the mood to say whatever she felt like.
Dust remembered for her. “You told me I knew how it was to lose a brother, that surely—forced into loss by circumstance as I had been—I would not begrudge you your redemption. That was when we hatched our plan, my prize-winner.”
To Mouana’s surprise, Dust had not been bothered by anything she said, despite all Aroha’s warnings. But she hadn’t for a moment entertained her request to leave. The general had shamed her for wanting to give up. When Mouana had said there was no way she could compete with the memory of a man who had died a hero, she had told her she was wrong.
That was when Dust had revealed the truth about Tavuto, and she had volunteered to die in order to capture it. The long months of training had followed, ending with the vast, staged assault where she, Aroha and five hundred others had been captured. Then had come the mass execution, the blade through the chest that had so haunted her, and then...
