Operation Arcana

by John Joseph Adams

  “The oxcarts are dangerous?”

  “Not really. But they’re valuable to the sraa.”

  “We think,” Revya said.

  “Why else come all the way out here to load them up?” Sark said. She shrugged. “Anyway, we try to destroy them when we can. Anything that slows them down can’t hurt.”

  Revya muttered something under her breath, then froze. With one finger, she snapped a new lens into place on her scope.

  “Find the captain,” she said. “Tell him to reverse course now.”

  “Why?” Sark said.

  “This is a trap.”

  The lieutenant smiled. “The sraa don’t set traps. They just come after you like hungry animals.”

  “You don’t—” Revya began.

  Something shifted, stones falling away with a clatter. A mound of rubble, one of a thousand innocuous hillocks created by the sraa in their endless search for salvage, shifted slightly. Dull metal gleamed underneath.

  “Gunspider!” Sark shouted. A brilliant flash obscured the mound of debris, hidden quickly by a plume of evil black smoke. A moment later, the boom reached their ears, and Wrath jerked underneath them. Soldiers grabbed the nearest rail as the ship slewed sideways, and Pahlu could hear the boiling-kettle whistle of escaping steam.

  As if the shot had been a signal, the whole city came to life. Sraa rose up from the rubble in a clatter of stone and dust, gangly metal legs clicking into motion as far as the eye could see. The ground seemed to writhe with them.

  Wrath rumbled under Pahlu’s feet, turning her nose away from the ruined city and putting her stern to the sraa. A bell sounded with a single long buzz, and the engine sound rose to a new pitch. The landship leapt forward, jolting Pahlu’s grip on the rail. At the same time, though, the whistle of steam rose to an unearthly shriek, and after a minute or so the hum of the engine fell away.

  “Not good,” Revya muttered. She leaned out over the rail, and Sark took hold of the back of her coat to keep her balanced as she peered down the side of the hull. “Leaking from the starboard strut!”

  Sark looked at the pillar of steam that stretched behind the stricken ship. “They can’t have lost all the pipes, or we’d be going in circles.”

  At that moment, the unearthly keening stopped. Pahlu could see the gushing plume of steam cut off, leaving a long, thin cloud dissolving slowly over the landscape.

  “Did they fix it?” he said.

  “They figured out which pipes were busted and closed the valves,” Sark said. Her voice was grim. “But since they’ll have to cut power to the port-side pod to compensate—”

  “We’ll be slow.” Revya ran along the rail until she could get a look astern. “Too slow.”

  The leading edge of the sraa swarm looked like a wave, lapping gently over the land in a carpet of steel and brass. Thousands of scuttlers, skating smoothly over the broken ground on their multiply jointed legs, merged at a distance into a monstrous, unbroken mass of metal. Behind them were larger forms, spider-like shapes that hulked above the smaller sraa like horses in a pack of dogs. The time it had taken the sraa to dig themselves out and the brief, chaotic sprint had given the Wrath a lead, but only a small one, and it was diminishing fast.

  “Eupater protect us,” one of the soldiers at the rail muttered. A couple of others nearby touched two fingers to their eyes, a traditional Kotzi gesture of supplication and prayer. Pahlu looked between them and Revya, still pressed against the rail. A worm of fear had burrowed into his stomach, and he swallowed and fought it down.

  Wrath surged forward at the best speed she could manage, massive caterpillar treads spitting out chunks of crushed earth and stone, accompanied by the distant keening of her steam tubes under tremendous pressure. The massive springs that supported the ship on its struts were unable to absorb every bounce and jolt of the terrain, and the deck began to shudder as though it were being shaken by playful giants.

  The ship’s bells blared another command, three short and one long buzz. Prepare for action astern. The soldiers, who had been lining both rails, converged on the rear of the ship. Revya went to follow.

  “You should get below,” Sark said in the tone of someone expecting to lose the argument.

  “No,” the professor said, pushing back from the rail and flipping her scope out of the way. “I have to see.”

  “Of course,” Sark said under her breath. She grabbed Pahlu by the arm and hissed into his ear. “Remember, our job is to keep an eye on her, you understand? Don’t get distracted.”

  He nodded and checked his rifle again. It was still loaded, but it suddenly seemed pitiful protection indeed against the mass of metal bearing down on them. What could a few bullets do against that?

  Revya was headed to the raised firing platform that jutted off the after edge of the bridge tower, its rail already lined with riflemen. Just beyond them was the after six-inch gun, now turning frantically to bear on the swarm, and beyond that the stern rail and another line of armed soldiers.

  “Coming into range, sir!” a rating said, clinging to a handle on the gun mount.

  The officer in charge, a young woman with her hair in a long, frizzy braid, peered through a pair of binoculars and then gave a decisive nod.

  “Load high explosive,” she said, prompting the gun crew to begin a frenzy of action. A few seconds later, the gun’s breech slammed closed and they all stepped away. The officer took hold of a railing and slashed her hand in the direction of the enemy. “Fire!”

  The sound of the gun seemed to fill the world, even over the roar of the engine and the scream of the steam pipes. Pahlu could see the shell as it arced out, crossing more than a mile of broken ground in a perfect parabola to fall, brutally fast, among the scuttlers at the front of the swarm. A flower of smoke and dust bloomed, and pieces of metal scrap pinwheeled away. The sound reached them a few moments later, a distant, hollow boom.

  By the time the dust cleared, the carpet of scuttlers had closed up again, scurrying over the broken bodies of the fallen. It reminded Pahlu of tossing a stone into a lake as a boy, watching the splash and the ripples slowly settle back into a placid surface.

  Domus protect me, he thought. Oddly, the instinctive, vestigial prayer sent a flare of anger through him that pushed back the terror. He’d turned his back on his father and his father’s god. I’m not going to give that up now. If I die, it will be as the man I want to be.

  Wrath’s forward gun fired, and another fiery flower bloomed among the scuttlers. The after gun fired again, and again, an endless, hammering rhythm. Sraa bodies were thrown into the air by the force of the explosions, limbs flailing madly as they fell back to the earth. But the swarm came on. The guns had as little prospect of stopping it as Pahlu’s boyhood stones had of emptying the lake.

  Then there was a bright white flash from the swarm, smothered instantly by a plume of black smoke. A new flower of flame and flying dirt bloomed, two hundred yards short of Wrath. More flashes followed, and in between the cacophonous boom of guns Pahlu could hear the whistle of incoming shells. The explosions that marked their fall were always short of the ship, but marching closer, yard by yard, as the swarm advanced.

  “Switch to armor piercing,” the officer yelled. “Target the lead gunspider!”

  Sailors raced to open another set of ammo chests, while two men cranked frantically on a large metal wheel to match the bearing a third was calling out to them. The gunspiders were the size of carriages, bulky creatures bearing a cannon that ran the whole length of their body, its bore like a single baleful eye. There were a dozen of them behind the mass of scuttlers and other sraa, walking in line abreast.

  “Coming into range,” Revya muttered.

  “Scuttlers are getting close,” Sark said. “We can’t outrun them like this—”

  Another round of flashes from the gunspiders, and another volley screamed down around the ship. This time the explosions bracketed Wrath, some falling ahead and some behind. One round went off practically
in their path. The concussion rocked the landship on its springs, and Pahlu got one hot breath full of the smell of cordite.

  The bell buzzed another signal. The soldiers at the rail raised their rifles, and Sark thumped Pahlu on the shoulder.

  “That’s our cue.” She braced herself against the rail and raised her own rifle. Pahlu followed suit, aiming down the iron sights at the leading edge of the swarm.

  Three more long buzzes. Fire at will. Every rifle cracked at once, like an old-fashioned musket volley.

  Pahlu had picked out one scuttler on the edge of the swarm as his target, and he saw it crumple and fall, but he had no way of knowing if it was his bullet or another’s that had put it down. It didn’t matter—behind it was another, and another. He lined them up and pulled the trigger, again and again, feeling the nerve-deadening thump of the rifle kicking against his shoulder and working the bolt back and forth to eject the spent shells. When his clip ran out, he turned and grabbed another from a box someone had strapped to a handle behind the line.

  It wasn’t going to be enough. The scuttlers were too fast, and there were far too many of them. He could hear a high-pitched whine as the engineers pushed the remaining steam tubes to the edge of their rated pressures and beyond, but the little sraa were still catching up. They were within a hundred yards now, spreading out, limbs a blur as they drove themselves forward at fantastic speeds. It made them easier targets, since they didn’t take time to dodge and weave, but in spite of the efforts of the riflemen the gap slowly closed.

  Pahlu sighted on a scuttler, only to see it vanish in a blast of fire and smoke. The sraa’s shots were falling among their own now. Pahlu smiled, adjusted his aim, then was driven off his feet by a thunderous roar.

  Two shells had landed on Wrath nearly simultaneously. One impacted just past the after gun, punching through the deck and exploding underneath. The force of the blast ripped a hole in the deck plating and twisted the gun and its mounting into scrap metal. The second shell hit the stern, just below the deck line. It failed to penetrate the armored hull, but the explosion sent a shockwave and shards of red-hot steel zipping through the riflemen gathered there.

  When Pahlu raised his head, the deck was awash in blood. The man beside him had been chopped practically in half by a flying fragment, releasing a sea of bile and gore. Beyond him, a woman was curled up around an invisible wound, screaming wordlessly, while another sailor hung limply on the rail.

  Sark grabbed Pahlu’s shoulder and spun him round. It took him a moment to understand her through ears still ringing from the blast.

  “. . . you all right?”

  “I . . .” Pahlu looked down at his uniform, which was spattered with blood. He didn’t feel any pain. “I think so.”

  “Come on!” She pushed past him, leaping over the disemboweled body, her boots squelching in the pool of blood. Pahlu wanted to vomit, but he didn’t have the time; he was already following, keeping his eyes glued to her broad back so that he didn’t have to look down.

  The deck shook with a metallic clang. He thought it was another hit, but there was no explosion, and the sound came again, and again. The sraa were jumping onto the deck, gathering down below the stern of the ship and hurling themselves into the air, limbs snapping closed like steel-jawed traps. For every three that tried it, two fell short or missed the mark and tumbled beneath Wrath’s treads, but a half-dozen had already made it and more were coming.

  Pahlu skidded to a halt on the corrugated metal deck, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder. The soldiers who’d survived the shell blast were starting to pick themselves up, but the sraa were already on top of them. He picked out a scuttler closing in on a dazed young woman, one of its limbs already drawing back to deliver the killing blow. It was barely ten yards away—

  —and Pahlu’s shot caught it between two of its glass lenses, the bullet punching a neat hole in its carapace and emerging from the other side of its body in a spray of fine machine parts.

  The soldier he’d saved rolled away, groping for her own weapon, as another sraa pulled itself over the rail and landed on the deck. Other rifles sounded, and scuttlers collapsed, but more of them were landing all the time. At the rail, Pahlu saw a young man grappling hand-to-limb with one of the things, the scuttler pushing one bladed claw into his stomach with piston-driven strength. A large woman with a deck sergeant’s insignia delivered a two-handed blow with her rifle butt that shattered a scuttler’s eye, sending it reeling across the deck, before another machine jumped on her shoulders and speared her neatly through the throat.

  Sark, ahead of him, had discarded her rifle and drawn a large-barreled pistol of unfamiliar design. When she fired it at a scuttler, the weapon nearly kicked itself out of her grip, and the machine slumped to the deck with an inch-thick hole in its oval body.

  She was running toward Revya, Pahlu realized. The professor had gotten down from the firing platform, apparently uninjured, but the lurching of the ship had tossed her against the rail near the hole in the deck. Sark reached her side, blasting another scuttler that had gotten tangled up on the rail and sending it tumbling out into the Waste. She grabbed Revya and pulled her to her feet just as another wave of sraa landed.

  Two of the machines hopped down through the hole in the deck into Wrath’s innards, and Pahlu heard shots and screams. Two more headed for Sark. Pahlu raised his rifle, sighted, and fired, and one of them went down, but when he yanked back on the bolt, it gave the clunk that meant an empty clip. Sark had her big pistol broken open, pulling a pair of fat bullets from her pouch and struggling to fit them into the breech.

  She’s not going to make it. Pahlu was moving forward before he realized what he was doing, reversing his rifle like a club, the barrel hot in his hands. The second scuttler leapt for Sark, bladed forelimbs extended, and Pahlu caught it in mid-air with an overhand swing. Glass shattered, and the thing’s carapace dented, but it was still squirming, forelimbs slicing at his shins. Pahlu danced backward. One of the blades scored, opening a long slice through his leather boot and leaving a shallow gash in his leg.

  As the scuttler regained its footing, Sark grabbed his shoulder and pushed him aside. Her heavy pistol spoke again, blasting a hole in the little machine and putting it down for good. Rifles were barking all around them, catching the scuttlers as they landed and strewing the deck with mechanical corpses.

  “Thanks,” Sark said, pulling Revya to her feet. The professor’s eyes were wide and unfocused.

  “Is she okay?” Pahlu said.

  “Just stunned, I think.” Sark looked out over the stern, where the gunspider’s heavy ordnance was still flashing. “I think we may be pulling away from them. May get out of this yet—”

  The ship shuddered, armor plating ringing like a bell. Pahlu stumbled and grabbed the rail, while Sark held on to Revya. He braced himself for the shell’s explosion, but it didn’t come. Instead, two long, multi-jointed limbs reached over the stern rail. They were tipped with crescent-shaped blades, and the sraa punched the points into the deck, cutting easily through the steel. With this leverage, it hauled itself up and onto the Wrath.

  This was no dog-sized scuttler. It was fully as tall as Pahlu, limbs stretching six feet or more, a hulking monstrosity of iron and brass. The lenses that ringed its body were the size of dinner plates. A dozen rifles fired at once, and the air was full of the ping and whine of ricochets as the bullets bounced off its armor like hailstones off a tin roof. It ignored them, picking its way through the bodies of its comrades with mechanical grace, and began to slaughter everything within reach.

  The soldiers stood their ground, firing as it bore down on them. It opened the first man from throat to groin with a single, casual swing, the spray of blood coating its metallic hide in gore. The young woman Pahlu had saved fired her rifle from only a few inches away, with no more effect than the others. The sraa caught her with the point of its blade on the backswing, punching it into her chest. The momentum of the strike hurled her off the deck
entirely, her body pinwheeling over the rail to fall to the broken ground below.

  “Butcher,” Sark growled, identifying the thing. She sighted carefully and fired, hitting it square in one of its lenses, but the heavy round from her pistol only cracked the thick glass. Tossing the weapon aside, she yanked something from her belt. A grenade, Pahlu realized as time seemed to slow to a crawl. Sark was running, pulling Revya behind her, and her free hand caught Pahlu and dragged him along as well.

  The explosion shook the ship, as though the gunspiders had scored another hit. Sark threw herself flat, and Pahlu needed no urging to follow her. The concussion passed over them, a wave of hot wind and smoke. He twisted around to see the effects. The deck was blackened in a wide circle around the butcher, but the sraa was still there, burn marks searing its iron hide. At least one of its legs was damaged, dragging uselessly behind it, but that didn’t seem to impede its mobility much. The surviving soldiers scrambled away as it came forward.

  “Shit,” Sark said, under her breath. “Shit, shit, shit. Rev, now would be the time for a good idea or two.” But Revya, eyes still wide, was breathing fast and shallow and didn’t seem to hear.

  The butcher turned, and Pahlu saw the lens Sark’s shot had cracked. The way was suddenly clear to him, as obvious as if Domus himself had dropped the knowledge ready-made into his brain. At the thought, his lip curled. The hell with Domus. This is my decision.

  There was another grenade on Sark’s belt. He pulled it free and rolled to his feet, ignoring her shout of warning. Hand grenades were a rarity, but they’d practiced a few times at the Academy, and the theory was simple. Yank on the pin to start the fuse, and get rid of it before it went off.

  Pahlu got to his feet and aimed himself at the butcher. He pulled the pin.

  The deck was treacherous underfoot, slick with blood and littered with scraps of scuttler. He ran flat out, leaping human and sraa bodies. As he came up to the butcher, it swung a forelimb in his direction, a lazy cut that would have decapitated him if he hadn’t ducked. Popping up inside its reach, he pressed himself against the underside of its body, one arm extended. His right hand, holding the grenade, stretched up along the butcher’s carapace until it found the cracked lens. He slammed the grenade against it, feeling the glass give slightly, and held it there with all the strength he could muster.