by Sparks,Cat
Yet here were rows and rows of them, baking placidly in the heat. A hundred people could have fit inside the belly of each one. Maybe more. Some had metal surfaces intact, while others were nothing more than frames, years of rust and salt and sand gnawing at their bones.
The ones intact had writing on their sides, symbols or faded pictures. Flowers, women, animals with wings. Tribal totems. This must have been a holy place, or the meeting place of kings and queens. Not knowing filled her with a sense of loss.
Nene would have been excited. First she would have sketched the layout in her journal, then poked and prodded at the planes themselves, climbing inside if it were possible to do so.
“Look!”
Grellan’s voice. Star looked to where he pointed, and saw blue paint smeared across some weathered metal skin of one of the planes. It was a flower symbol, clearly added far more recently than any of the others.
Star could sense Bimini’s nervousness as they passed between the rows, giant nosecones towering above their heads. Some cracked open, spilling shadows across parched flats.
There were no obvious signs of current habitation, but that didn’t mean a thing. The unforgiving ground seemed to suck up the sound of their tread.
“Like we’re being watched,” Star said.
Bimini nodded quickly. “We should go back. Find some place to hide. We’ve come too far already.”
Too far, alright. Time passed at an altered pace out on the Black. It bothered her that she already couldn’t be certain how much long it had been since leaving Fallow Heel. A week, perhaps, or maybe even two?
“Hey—what’s that crazy Templar think he’s doing?”
Star looked to where Bimini pointed. At first she couldn’t see anything of interest. Just more rubble-strewn concrete, hard and flat, its surface cracked and crumbled in many places. Like plants had pushed their way up through, then dried up and vanished. She didn’t notice Quarrel until he moved from a crouching position to standing. He had apparently skirted around the planes and gone to investigate something the others couldn’t make out from this distance.
“Should we—”
“Smells like a trap,” said Bimini quietly.
Star nodded. She wanted to see what was going on, but she wasn’t going anywhere without Bimini.
The two of them watched as the others hurried over to see what Quarrel had found. Hackett coiled like a spring ready to pounce, knife already drawn, expecting trouble. Grellan got there first and kicked something lying on the ground. Whatever the something was, it didn’t move.
“Come on,” said Bimini.
Star pulled one of the small blades out of her boot and followed. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the still and silent planes. It felt like they were being watched, either by people hiding in the rusted bellies, or perhaps by the ghosts of the ones who had constructed them.
Star gripped her blade tightly as she and Bimini approached what she could now clearly see was a pile of corpses. All men, apparently, different ages and different hues of skin. Heavy chains around their limbs. Dried blood trails and drag marks. Bodies hastily dumped in disarray.
Bimini made the sign of a cross above her heart. She looked to Quarrel, waiting for instruction.
Grellan glanced back uncomfortably at the planes, perhaps also feeling that they were being watched. He turned his back on the corpses, both pistols raised and ready. Just in case. Hackett kept glancing back at the open sands, out past the Sentinel’s invisible influence. The angry cloud that had chased them was long gone, but a thick pall of green hung heavily over the landscape. They could well have been followed after the ship was rammed and wrecked. There was no taking anything for granted.
All of them waited for Quarrel to say something but the Templar’s attention had turned to scanning the horizon.
Star put her blade back in her boot. The dead men’s limbs were bound with heavy chains. Their dirty clothes were splattered with dried blood.
But as she leant in closer, a guttural sound came from a tangle of arms and legs. Star’s heart lurched. She jumped back instinctively. Bimini stepped forward, her knife raised, expecting trouble.
One of the corpses moaned and opened its eyes.
= Forty-three =
The dead man who was not dead had bright blue eyes, stark against his pale, sun ravaged skin. He was young, no more than twenty summers. He sat up as though he’d just been sleeping.
“What happened here?” said Quarrel, no longer scanning the horizon. Not trusting anything or anybody.
Blue Eyes stared up at the Templar, taking in the measure of him and trying not to cringe. He glanced furtively at the rest of them, then back to Quarrel, obviously their leader.
“Thought that witchwind storm was gonna catch you.” His voice was rough and scratchy. “Please—can you spare me any water?”
Star stepped forward with her waterskin. Bimini put out her hand to stop her. Star ignored her, pushed on past, knelt and held the skin up to his lips.
Blue Eyes gulped two long, grateful swallows. “Thought you’d all be cut up and spat out for sure.”
“You were watching?” said Star, stoppering the skin up tight. Not stopping Bimini when she pulled her back up to standing.
Blue Eyes tilted his face to her and smiled. “Nothing else to do round here—unfortunately.” He raised his hands to reveal wrists tightly bound. One of his legs was cuffed to a thick grey chain.
“What’s your name?” said Star.
He opened his mouth to answer but Quarrel cut him off. “Report what happened here.”
“Treachery is what happened here. A fight on ship. Rest of the crew abandoned us here to die. Some of us were dead before the ship took leave.”
“What ship?”
Blue Eyes smiled again. “The finest ship you ever did see, all tricked out in brass and polished wood.”
When he flicked his gaze in Star’s direction, she felt her own expression softening a little. The Razael—what else could he be referring to?
“What’s that ship doing so far out here?” said Quarrel.
Blue Eyes hesitated. “They’re chasing down some big old relic. Very valuable, apparently. They’ve got maps and charts and blueprints. Old world things with lines that move upon the page.” Chains clanked as he attempted hand motions to explain
Quarrel said nothing.
“Name’s Tully Grieve,” Blue Eyes announced suddenly, his attention on Star. “What’s yours?”
Quarrel turned his back on Grieve and the pile of bodies, threw back his sand cloak, and started tapping at his mesh. “Secure the perimeter,” he instructed both Grellan and another man, both of whom were squinting at the row of planes as if expecting trouble from them. “We rest up a couple hours, then set off at first light.”
Then the Templar strode away from the others, slapping his mesh and mumbling to himself as they had all seen him do so many times.
The big smile vanished from Grieve’s face. He shouted, “Hey, aren’t you going to cut me loose?”
Quarrel kept walking. He didn’t respond.
“Wait! You can’t leave me here to die!”
Quarrel ignored him. He called out to Grellan. “There’s water here somewhere, but it’s contaminated, and there’s not much of it. Better than nothing. Find it and boil it.”
Grellan nodded. He shouldered his weapon and moved off in the direction Quarrel indicated, towards a series of squat cement bunkers in a row, the nearest two sporting sunken roofs.
“Wait! Come back. You could use my help!”
Quarrel lowered his mesh and turned to Grieve with deliberate slowness before shouting back at him, “You’re a criminal. Your crew left you to die here for a reason.”
“No,
no—Not my crew. No reason whatsoever—you’ve got it all wrong! A misunderstanding. All a terrible mistake. There was a mutiny—you’re right about that—but I had nothing to do with it. I was just a galley monkey. Peeling spuds and swabbing decks. Fetching and carrying for the finer folk—honest!”
The corner of Quarrel’s lip curled. He didn’t say anything.
“Mutiny?” asked Star. She stepped closer. Bimini didn’t try to stop her this time. “Tell me about the ship.”
Grieve raised his bound hands, pulled at them in frustration. “Belongs to a rich man, name of Mohandas, held captive alongside his daughter, as was I. As were many, many others. I never wanted to come here. It’s all been a terrible mistake.”
Grieve talked quickly. He was smart. Having won some attention, he was desperate to milk it for all it was worth.
“A very pretty daughter. Somebody would pay big coin to get her back.”
“Allegra.”
“Yes yes—that’s her name! Allegra! Do you know her?”
“Is she alright? Did anybody hurt her?”
“No no, last I saw her she was fine.” He stared at her intently. “A friend of yours?”
She nodded.
Quarrel was now out of earshot. Bimini was still there, but remained expressionless.
Grieve continued. “All hell broke loose back on the Black. Smashed sandcraft on fire, pus oozing out of the ground. The old crew didn’t like where the new crew was taking us. Poisoned air—we barely made it this far!”
He glanced uncomfortably across the bodies of his fellow mutineers.
Star crouched over each one to check for life signs. “Two of these men still breathe,” she shouted loudly. “We can’t just leave them here.”
The others watched as she pressed two fingers against a slumped man’s neck.
“Death has put its mark on them,” Quarrel called out—she hadn’t realised he was close enough to still listen in. “Got no water to waste on dead men.”
His hearing was sharper than that of an ordinary man. He walked away, his sand cloak disturbing the stillness of the air. Bimini and another man followed, leaving Star alone with the mutineers, both the dead and the living.
Star stood up and shouted after them “Wait!”
Nobody was listening—other than Tully Grieve who was staring at her intently.
The slumped man was old, his breath slight and laboured. As gently as possible, she propped him up straight. He didn’t fight her. He didn’t even realise she was there.
“Somebody help us,” she shouted.
Nobody looked back—not even Bimini. They wanted no part in this.
The sound of Star’s voice triggered something in the old man. He began to shout and clutch at the air above his head. Gently, she laid him on his back and shielded his eyes from the sun. His lips were cracked and blistered, his eyes milky. Almost blind.
“Shhh,” she told him. “It’s alright.”
She removed the waterskin from her hip and dribbled liquid through his mouth. Just a sip. He smacked his lips in appreciation.
“You have to get up. Otherwise they’ll leave you here.”
“I can see his face!” The man’s eyes widened, his pupils no more than tiny specks.
“Whose face?”
“Hear his voice! Ah. So beautiful . . .”
“There’s no voice but mine,” she whispered.
“Such jewels! Ah. I thought I might die before he blessed me.”
Gently she shook his emaciated shoulder. “Come on—get up. You have to move!” she pleaded.
He couldn’t hear her. As she looked around for something soft to place under his head, the old man’s body wracked with spasms.
“Beautiful!”
He could not get up. He was almost gone. What would Nene do? Star knew full well the answer to that—and it sickened her to the stomach.
She laid his head down, pulled the longer knife from her boot. Placed his bony arms across his chest. Took a deep breath. “Goodnight, old man. Sleep sound.” She angled the blade and did what she had to, exactly how Nene had shown her, even though she had never had to do it before on her own. A short, sharp thrust through the armpit to the heart. A death as quick and clean as anyone could hope for.
The old man died without a sound. Star got up and checked the others. All dead. No need to use the knife again. She wiped the blade clean on the dead man’s trousers, then looked down into the eyes of Tully Grieve, the lucky man who had talked his way into a second chance.
“A friend of yours?”
Grieve shook his head. “Didn’t know him. Didn’t know any of them. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time, as usual.”
She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anybody except Lucius, but Lucius was gone. She felt a lump welling in her throat. She could not think about him, not now, maybe not ever. Star wiped the blade and slid the knife back into its sheath.
“I’ll fetch Grellan, he’ll know how to get that chain unlocked,” she said, then went to find a quiet place to sit.
= Forty-four =
Marianthe paced up and down the worn linoleum. In the cool recesses of her Sanctum, she’d had time to think, time she was not required to waste on the practical mechanics of day-to-day existence, the feeding of mouths and the fetching of water, the bartering and arguing necessary to keep a secret community whole, alive, and thriving.
She’d instructed her followers not to fret about the blister hanging in the sky, nor about the colour of the sky itself: a sick, disgusting daub. The sky is readjusting, she had offered as explanation. Not all of them believed her, but they kept up with their farming and other chores.
She wasn’t yet sure what she believed herself. Something had manufactured that anomaly. Something smart and ancient, the likes of which she’d hoped had been stricken from the world for good. A something that had also been forcing the tankers into peculiar behaviour, to run in grid formation like a regular assault battalion. She remembered with an involuntary shudder the cities they’d lain waste to.
Her drones confirmed it: across the sand, something was digging itself up out. Something with a brain, but not a heart. War machines were never built with hearts.
She stopped her pacing and sank into her chair. Everything was dangerous these days, that was why she had built this community so far off the beaten track, way on past the end of the earth. Because anything good gets eaten up alive, chewed and spat, then dug down deep and buried, like a bone—or maybe an insane general way past its expiry date.
She forced herself back up again, and hobbled over to the altar, lit one of her precious candles with a tinder box, and placed the crown of thorns upon her head. The name she’d given to the thing made her smile whenever she thought of it. Crown of thorns, and nobody left alive to get the reference.
No matter.
She punched in the requisite code that would connect her with the Warbird, her one true friend it seemed some days. This was one of them. She waited. The connection always took a while and sometimes it wasn’t possible at all.
First there was a hiss, then static, then the connecting tones. She dispensed with the customary formalities and launched right in. “So, my friend, what have you got to say for yourself this time?”
Warbird didn’t answer. It didn’t have a voice. Instead, one of the smaller screens flickered to life and “Nh3” appeared in large blocky font.
“Knight to h3. Good move.” She translated the play to the hand-made pieces on the board. She’d made the chess set herself from little salvaged items: the pawns were tap heads, uneven and mismatched, the king a plastic tube with a bright blue top, the queen a broken doll without any legs.
Now Warbird’s Knight can swing over to f2 and fork my King and
the Rook on d1. It looks like he has at least a perpetual check now. If I move the Rook to a1 to avoid the fork and protect my pawn on a6, he’s got Rook to g7 and I’m almost mated. There’s no way I can queen my a-pawn in time.
The Warbird almost always beat her. She thought about her options for a bit, and ultimately decided that given everything that was happening, she wasn’t in the mood for chess today. If she was forced to move the settlement, where would everybody go? She’d sent her drones out scouting many times in preparation for such an eventuality. JuJu had reported a few oases, all too small, not much potential, nowhere big enough to feed them all.
Marianthe wanted the settlement to stay together. She wanted to keep the dish, its comfort and its shadow. Some day she planned to get the array cleaned up and booted once again.
Some day.
She was musing on this possibility when the bank of screens lit up and spluttered to life—even the big one sitting high upon the wall, and she’d not seen a flicker of light on that screen for years.
Startled, she brushed her hand against the chessboard, knocking over the tube but not the doll.
This was not the Warbird’s doing. The screens showed a variety of images: moss covered rocks, a tangle of tree roots. Trunks tall and thick and cool. Shafts of sunlight striping a verdant lawn. Water falling from a high place, tumbling over rocks. Light bleeding through a jungle canopy, illuminating a tangle of creepers, fronds, and vines. Cows in a field. Blue sky. Thick white fluffy clouds. Rice paddies terraced up the curve of a hill. Water. So much water.
“What is it you want from me?” she said out loud, her voice ringing hollow in the cavernous, empty space surrounding her.
The screens—whatever was controlling them—didn’t answer.
“Who are you? Identify yourself.”
Something like this had happened once before. A week ago, or had it been longer? Screens blazing suddenly to life—though only the small ones then—but the intelligence who made it happen never spoke. She hadn’t been certain any of it was real.
