Sly Mongoose

by Tobias S. Buckell

  By the end of the first hour the first wave of scouts had been destroyed, and the second as well.

  Now the entire city watched the full invasion fleet grow, details emerging as the midges turned into larger and larger cigar-shaped airships.

  Timas wished they’d had more nuclear weapons as he looked back out up toward the approaching cloud of airships. The sun behind them glowed strong yellow, the rays twinkling and flashing throughout the fleet.

  “Here comes the real battle.” As if on Pepper’s cue, the Aeolian fleet moved forward.

  The entire air filled with explosions, smoke, tracer fire, and flashes as the hundreds of airships intermingled, creating random paths around each other, swarming through the air.

  Wreckage dropped, spars, flaming stretches of cloth, and occasionally flailing bodies as airships scored precise hits. Anti-pirate fire constantly shook the ground on the top layer of Yatapek. The large ones mounted inside the city remained quiet, reminding Timas that the battle still had a long way to go. They would need those before the fight wrapped up.

  The chaotic mass continued moving closer. A mile, a quarter of a mile, and then one lone Swarm airship burst through. All the defending airships had targets of their own. And this one flew too close to the city now to get targeted by antiship fire.

  “Gods have mercy on us,” Timas whispered.

  The tip of the airship grew, bearing down on the city, but off to their right. Spars and rigging became discernible. The reinforced nose cone had been sheathed with metal, and a long spike on the end had been added by the Swarm. The spike ripped through the city’s shell just above the rows of corn.

  More airships broke through, smacking into the city. Each one pierced its way in. Different ships into different levels. Yatapek must look like a pincushion from a distance, Timas thought.

  Air slowly leaked from the edges of the tears. Katerina glanced over at Timas, who reassured her. “We’re high enough, the outside air pressure’s the same. It’ll leak, but slowly.”

  “And your bulkheads?”

  “They’ll be shutting them. Just like during any emergency holing.” Although who could hear the breach klaxons over all this?

  “Are you going to help them now?” Katerina asked Pepper.

  He shook his head. The guns mounted on top of the buildings near the atrium started firing at the Swarm ships. These didn’t thud, but chattered and howled as tracer fire lit up the inside of Yatapek.

  From each ship ropes dropped, and figures crawled clumsily down, many slipping and falling to the ground.

  Beside Timas Pepper now stepped forward, his whole suit whining and thudding forward with a snap-quick jerky motion as heavy gunfire hit the nose cones of the zombie airships.

  “Do you see that?” Pepper asked, pointing down at the clouds.

  The interior of Yatapek strobed with green and white tracers from the interior guns. The red flames of burning airships stuck to its hull reflected off polished surfaces and windows all around.

  Pepper pointed down again. Something glinted in the clouds beneath Yatapek. A large shadow moved underneath them.

  Timas’s mouth dried as an Aeolian city laced with metal spars slowly burst from beneath the clouds, its entire skin scoured shining and bright.

  “A whole city?”

  Rockets glared as the entire structure adjusted course.

  “There’ll be millions of infected in there,” Katerina whispered. They’d be simply overrun.

  “Run.” Pepper grunted at them as the last wisps of cloud fell away from the approaching city. “It’s going to ram us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  The Aeolian city struck as Pepper ripped straight through the corn-fields, leaving a swathe behind him that Heutzin, Katerina, and Timas followed through.

  He could feel the shuddering underfoot, and the thuds, cracks from overhead. And a horrible, long, screeching and shrieking of superstructure: the impact twisted and broke the shell around Yatapek where the two cities collided.

  When Pepper finally slowed and looked behind him the edges of the two cities were still combining in a mix of tangled girders, shattered outer layer, and interleaved decks.

  Brown, noxious Chilo air ever so slowly seeped in between the two cities. The city wouldn’t lose buoyancy right away, but the striking city had crippled them. Yatapek’s layers and bulkheads could only hold so much air against a crushing blow like this, Pepper thought. They were going to have to cut loose the docks, or find some other way to radically lighten the city. While fighting back the Swarm.

  Pepper didn’t see Yatapek winning here.

  “You okay?” He looked at his small group. They were shaken, but unharmed. They stood well clear of the impact zone, deep into the ranks of defenders getting ready to repel the Swarm. People had died from falling debris near the impact point, but since most had hung back behind the fire zone, away from the lip, Yatapek still stood ready to fight.

  A runner sped toward them with a note in his hand. He gave it to Pepper and then wobbled in place, hands on his knees, hyperventilating.

  From the pipiltin. Amminapses had, before collapsing when the nuke went off, gotten quite agitated. Apparently during their check of the getaway wormhole, before setting off the nuclear charge to unbury the wormhole from the depths of its asteroid, they’d detected League ships.

  A lot of League ships.

  Pepper started laughing. Everyone stared at him, and he crumpled the note up. “Good news. Amminapses is just as screwed as we are. The League set a trap on the other side of the wormhole for the Satrap, no one in Hulbach is going anywhere, they’re not setting off the charge, they’re leaving the wormhole buried in the center of their asteroid.”

  They didn’t have much time to celebrate, though. Already the older defenders at the far edge of the corn, armed with their billhooks, had engaged the Swarm dropping down out of the airships.

  Now gangplanks and rope ladders were tossed out of the adjoining city into Yatapek. Hundreds of infected swarmed between the wreckage, and hundreds more lurked behind them. The river of stumbling bodies just didn’t stop pouring in.

  “Okay, Heutzin, let’s roll.”

  Timas stepped forward with them, but Pepper shook his head. “You stay here. Katerina, too.” He pointed out several warriors with rifles, waved them to him, and then checked the weapon the Aeolians had given him.

  Sharkov 9. Nothing truly unique about it. Standard fare. He had extra rounds on his waist, the sword, and the suit still worked.

  Pepper thumbed the safety, and the gun streamed information to him via the direct skin contact. He ignored the information laid over his vision and willed it to go away.

  “Heutzin, it’s been an honor.” He shook the man’s hand. Then louder. “Let’s haul ass!”

  The five men ran with him. Their heads down, whipping through the corn, they passed the fire line quickly enough, leaving the houses and barricades behind them.

  And then it was into the men trying to hold the line with billhooks. The first line held up shields and wore thick, makeshift padding so that the infected couldn’t bite through to their skin. Behind them, three rows deep, the long billhooks lashed out, trying to decapitate the infected before they even got close enough to hit the shields.

  Looming over them all was the ruined mess of the contact point, girders tortured into strange and surreal shapes, layers visible with their edges cracked, warped, and sagging.

  And the Swarm stretched out before them, a crowd of corrupted humanity acting as one.

  “Coming in!” Pepper yelled. Shooting the approaching Swarm to give them space, they slipped in right behind the shields, as if part of the defensive structure.

  The Aeolians had to have guns, but so far the Swarm didn’t seem armed. It might be holding those back, or saving them for the attack on Hulbach, not thinking that this city would be such a tough nut to crack.

  Pepper reached under his chest plate and pulled out the vial. He flicked the
tab off the top and jabbed Heutzin. “We fight. In a few minutes, you will start feeling it. You don’t run out there, you let me handle our fallback.”

  Heutzin nodded, eyes wide.

  Pepper tapped the soldiers to the right after four minutes. “I need you to fall back, as if tired and wanting to exchange places with others, fumble about. We’re going to lull them in.”

  He didn’t tell them what was about to happen to Heutzin, he wanted their surprise, their natural reactions.

  They did exactly what he asked, and as they fumbled, the wall broke, Swarm dashed forward. Heutzin moved to stop them, getting out in front of the shields.

  For a moment the gunfire Pepper laid down, along with the other warriors, kept the bodies dropping.

  But then the first one got Heutzin, biting his arm.

  A second piled on, and then Heutzin was dragged into the crowd. After knocking him out they left him alone.

  Pepper moved back, trying to find a higher spot of ground for a better vantage point, but several of the Swarm paused, looking at him together. They stood at attention, and started shouting.

  “You!”

  “You are the one.”

  “The one known as Pepper.”

  “We wish to speak to you.”

  “We will keep a zone free, we will cease our attack here.”

  “For now.”

  And just like that, the line in front of him froze. The empty eyes all locked on Pepper. Like sand, behind that front line, the others started moving sideways, heading off toward other areas to attack as they streamed in.

  “What do you want?” Pepper asked over the sound of steady marching.

  “An offer.”

  “This city is well prepared, and will cost us.”

  “Not too much that we cannot reach the aliens below.”

  “But enough that we make an offer.”

  “It is only certain aspects of your consciousness that are dangerous.”

  “We can offer you an infection that does not degrade your individuality.”

  “We will only blunt your baser instincts for progress and expansion, and you will be allowed to keep your individuality.”

  “Imagine, how fulfilling it will be to maintain your sense of self, but not feel compelled to consistently war, struggle against new environments, and dash yourselves against the universe.”

  “We offer you true and total peace. Many of the remaining people aboard these cities in the middle layers have taken this option.”

  Pepper saw Heutzin stirring, slowly sitting up, a vacant look in his eyes. “I have a philosophical offer of similar import for you,” Pepper shouted back.

  They waited expectantly.

  Pepper, with a straight face, looked out at the entire crowd of the Swarm and said, “Bite me.”

  The crowd surged forward, but he could see Heutzin muscle over to one of them and bite it right in the neck, then turn for another. Bits of the Swarm noticed that something was wrong, but Heutzin attacked them as well.

  “Take their heads off,” Pepper yelled. “Press them.” Add some confusion to the mix.

  As he walked away, Heutzin ran off, biting everything he could. Already fifteen Swarm were counter-infected, but still standing up, so they turned back to their duties.

  By the time Pepper passed the fire line at a slow amble, the fifteen Heutzin infected had turned and started biting other Swarm nearby.

  Consciousness might be a liability, but right now it was coming in handy, Pepper thought.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  From their vantage point Timas and Katerina could see Pepper coming back through the corn, leaving a long trail of broken stalks behind him. The first line of billhook fighters slowly retreated back as well, and then as they hit the fire line they ran.

  The Swarm didn’t take the bait; the crowd paused at the edge of the soaked corn and slushy mud. Behind them, where the two cities remained locked together, more Swarm slowly laid down more gangplanks and ropes. A road of makeshift bridges zigzagged its way through the debris from city to city. Swarm marched along it toward Yatapek’s fields.

  “Damn,” someone by Timas muttered.

  Katerina had been listening to a small handset, hardened against electromagnetic pulses. It was what was left of Aeolian communication. She grabbed Timas by the shoulder. “Timas, Yatapek is losing altitude.”

  They both glanced back to the crushed mess where the two cities remained joined. “Too much Chilo air getting in.”

  She nodded. “It’s going to slowly get worse.”

  Pepper broke out of the corn and walked past the defenses onto the street below, then hopped one story up to land on the edge of the wall near them, crouching on the edge. “Trouble?”

  “Yatapek is losing buoyancy,” Katerina told him.

  “Shit. I’ll be back.” Pepper dropped off the edge and took off at a run.

  Timas looked out over to the city that had hit them. They hadn’t been thinking on the same scale as the enemy, where a city could be a weapon. What other mistakes where they going to make?

  He squinted. There seemed to be more chaos in the Swarm’s ranks. Zombies bit other zombies. The counter-infection slowly spread.

  But still, there were tens of thousands darkening the better part of the rim that Timas could see.

  Katerina tapped his arm. “Strandbeests!”

  Five of the massive creatures, or constructions, had moved swiftly in on one of the Swarm’s ships attached to the hull of Yatapek. One of the Strandbeest’s spiked tips pierced the airship’s gasbag. As it deflated other Strandbeests swept in, pulling lose rope, rigging, fabric, and anything else they could tear free of the dying airship.

  “Van said he hated aliens,” Timas said. “He’s helping us.”

  “Or they’re scavenging.” Katerina pointed out a pair of strandbeests swerving at a damaged Aeolian airship dead in the air.

  “Who cares? They’re helping pick at the Swarm airships that made it through to the hull.” They’d take any help they could get at this point.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Pepper found the pipiltin gathered with engineers, looking at old, yellowed copies of the city’s blueprints. Someone used an orange to hold an edge of the paper down. “You heard?”

  “We’re falling.”

  They were trying to figure out the best way of sealing off the upper level. But it wasn’t going to help, other levels struggled with airships penetrating the shell, and the upper layer was a very buoyant section. “We’re going to have to seal it, or start throwing whole buildings off the side somehow,” Necalli said.

  “Another problem.” Ohtli stood behind Pepper, who turned to see that the pipiltin, sweaty and breathing heavily, had pulled a stretcher along with him. “Look at this.”

  He ripped the sheet off the corpse to reveal one of the Swarm’s victims, but it hardly looked human. The face looked stony, and the skin abnormally thick.

  Pepper rapped the thick skin. It was skeletal. “Serious gene tweaking going on there. The Swarm’s adapting them for high-pressure environments, they’re going to be dropped to the surface.”

  The new type had a secondary eyelid grown into a thick, glasslike enclosure over the eye. The shoulder structures Pepper had seen in orbit had grown into heat-dissipating fans.

  “We can’t lose to this,” Necalli said.

  “We’ve started to order dockworkers to ferry out on Aeolian airships docked at the city.” Tenoch now stepped forward from his fellow pipiltin. “We can ferry them to other ships, but we can’t evacuate Yatapek, there’s nowhere for us to go. And the farther we drop, the more Chilo’s air will be forced in and replace ours. We’ll fall faster and faster.”

  Between facing the hundreds of gangplanks between the two cities and Swarm boiling into the upper layer through that gap, as well as the impending fall, the pipiltin realized that they faced the death of everyone in the city.

  The orange rolled slightly, and Necalli grabbed it absentminde
dly.

  Pepper frowned and took the orange from Necalli, and set it back on the center of the table. He let go of it. It rolled, very slowly across the table until Necalli caught it again.

  “I think I have a solution,” Pepper said. “What’s holding that side of Yatapek up?”

  They didn’t get it at first, and then Ohtli did. “The city that hit us.”

  “Aegae, I’m told, is its name,” Pepper said. “Obviously it isn’t as damaged: better bulkheads, design, whatever. It’s pulling that side of Yatapek up. We know if you hole a city it doesn’t lose too much air to Chilo at this height, the air pressure is similar enough inside and outside, so that city is just in better shape than ours. We storm it, we take it.”

  “The Swarm must have millions aboard,” Necalli protested.

  “Maybe,” Pepper said. “Or maybe not. The Swarm tried to offer me a truce again. It offered us the opportunity to be cattle. We could feed a fraction of our population to it, in exchange for living. It said Aegae had people in the middle layers who took that deal.

  “There might be millions. Or we might be already facing most of the Swarm. Look, we can face them right here in a while, when we could be well choking on Chilo’s air all around us. But I’d prefer to fight them with good air, buoyancy, and a city under my feet.”

  The pipiltin started to argue with Pepper, much to his annoyance. They yelled at him for turning down the truce without consulting them, but then agreed that they wouldn’t want to live as brain-dead pawns to the Swarm.

  “This is our home,” Ohtli finally said, stating the biggest objection.

  “Not anymore.” Pepper tapped the table and the blueprints. “It’s a failed battleground. We need to, quite literally, take the high ground.”

  They stared at him. Pepper realized that they agreed, and were looking for him to lead.

  “And the sooner the better.” He clapped his hands.

  “What about the elderly . . . .”

  “Get them down to the docks as best we can, give them the choice to stay with guns and snipe at the Swarm or take a final shot. Get as many children into the center of the attacking force or down here to get aboard fleeing ships as you can. Everyone else, spread the word. Use loudspeakers in the lower layers, word of mouth in the upper so that the Swarm doesn’t get wind of this. You have an emergency system, klaxons of some sort? Good, tell everyone when they sound off, they rush for the other city.”