by Nate Crowley
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
[email protected]
First published in 2015 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Oz Osborne
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Publishing Manager: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-025-4
Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
This one’s for my dad.
This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, you search in vain for traces of man; you feel you are carried into a different world from the one you were born into.
Alexander von Humboldt,
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the
Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot,
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
CHAPTER ONE
MOUANA GROUND HER teeth as the nib trembled on the empty page. She strained for words, but they wouldn’t come. She couldn’t think past the shrieking of the ’drick.
The thing had cracked a hip decoupling Themis after the siege broke, and nobody had yet admitted it wasn’t the kind of wound that got better. If the beast had been on her gun, she would have put a bolt through it. But Themis’ sergeant had taken to calling it Tassie during the campaign, and it had become a mascot to the troops.
Mouana never named her tools.
Tassie had whined and snorted as they had finished dismantling the burner stacks; the engineers had given it sugar rations from their palms and patted its flanks. But the air was bad here. Infection had set in quick, and so had the noise. Now, five days on, the screaming was relentless.
The rest were sleeping through it; Captain Aroha was doing his best to match it with his snoring, but she was used to the old man’s night racket. Mouana focussed on the noise, and tried again with the letter.
The campaign went well, she wrote with her eyes, but the pen would not follow. The siege is over, she tried, yet still her hand refused to move. The ’drick wailed softly, drawing moans from its grazing-mates down the line.
Mouana scratched I am into the page, splaying the pen’s tip and leaving an angry splot, then scowled as her thoughts scattered like fish before a net:
—coming home.
—staying on.
—satisfied.
—thinking of you every day.
—hoping for promotion soon.
Then the ’drick screamed again, louder than ever, and she snatched up the letter with a snarl. She didn’t register the word scared scrawled on the page before balling it and throwing it in the brazier.
Mouana pounced to the door of the tent, snatched up her rifle, and loaded it with shaking hands. If no one else was prepared to end the wretched thing, she would do it herself.
Outside, the wind that had been thumping dully on the canvas became something intimate and vicious, smacking at the side of her head and forcing fuel-smells into her nostrils. The sky pulsed and flared with eddies of the solar wind, blooming false dawn across the endless twilight.
Down in the hollow, the city’s shell glowed with the weird lights of reclamation, the strange industry of her company’s silent employers. Further along the valley, the ground smouldered in hot streaks, days after the defenders had called in ancient kinetics to forestall the inevitable. That awful bloody valley; Mouana was sick of the sight of the place.
Turning her back on the site of the battle, she leaned into the wind and stalked round the tent, to face the plateau that had housed her battery for the last six months. Far past the tent-city’s outskirts, the horizon was limned sapphire with a sunrise that would never come. Against it towered the silhouettes of the container carriers, half-loaded, that would carry them back through the Gate.
Closer, its black bulk resolving into a cowering animal shape as her eyes adjusted to the perpetual gloom, was Tassie. The old indricothere’s eyes gleamed wet in the darkness, its armoured sides heaved, as it stared at her. Beside its pen a brazier burned low, gusts scooping clouds of sparks from the embers.
Mouana moved closer, boots scraping on the plateau’s rough earth, and cursed the animal for falling silent.
“Make it easy, you stupid lump,” she growled, striding forward against the gaze of its cow eyes and daring it to scream again, to seem less vulnerable.
She drew closer and the ’drick half-stood, raising a cloud of dust as it propped its twenty-ton bulk up on its forelimbs. It stamped, and the ground shook. Suddenly, Mouana felt enormously under-armed. The thing’s skull was as long as she was, a handspan thick in places, and she had an infantry rifle. What if she only drove it into a rage? She was acting completely outside of her authority as it was—a maddened ’drick loose in the camp would be a hanging offence.
Reason, or more honestly impatience, wrestled down fear. The beast was hobbled, and had a festering pelvis anyway. It wasn’t going anywhere. And she could always fetch a gauss if things got ugly. The ’drick whimpered at her, and Mouana found she had raised her weapon. It needed to die.
The wind and the fumes stung her eyes, but she blinked away the moisture and squinted through the sight, at the folds of Tassie’s—the beast’s—throat, where the skin was thin. She would wait for the ’drick to raise its head, then squeeze the trigger.
“I would save my ammunition if I were you, sergeant.”
Mouana stiffened. The voice was unmistakeable; dry and sharp as the wind, and close as a knifepoint threat.
“You will need it, for the next campaign,” said the voice, and Mouana turned, her rifle falling to her side.
The general was crouched by the brazier with a broad black bowl, yellow eyes peering through the steam as she sipped. Her form was indistinct, her limbs folded like a patient spider in the dark.
Dust, they called her. Dust, for the world of her birth, which had not always been called Dust. Dust, which had become her name, for now, no other living people came out of that place.
Mouana had been across a tent from her countless times, but always as part of a shoal of officers; here, there was nowhere to hide from those eyes.
“You were the one who turned the leveller, on day one-fifty.”
Mouana froze. The leveller had been a mad, old piece of tech, sent out by the defenders after five months of attack. A paralithode war platform, long considered obsolete, but stacked with munitions. Its code had been in the old style, easy to overcome, but the time taken to turn it had cost them dearly. Once it had floated back to the valley and started shelling the enemy, she had thought the issue forgiven. Nevertheless, she had feared her decision would come up for review every day since.
“Yes.”
> Dust sipped at her bowl. Even with the plateau’s winds, the acrid scent of the herbs made it across to her.
“What do you know about Lipos-Tholos, Sergeant?” said Dust.
The relief that filled Mouana’s skull at the change of subject froze solid at the mention of the name.
Lipos-Tholos. The most notorious stalemate in all the worlds of the Lemniscatus. One of the great cities, long-settled and fat with tech, synonymous with its fleets and its link with Ocean. Shorthand for the siege that never broke. The thought made her shiver even more than it should, though she couldn’t figure why.
“City of ten million, sir. Under contract for siege by the Principals. Naval power, supplied by sea via the Ocean gate, and heavily teched.”
The wind whistled across the plateau. Tassie whimpered and shifted her bulk.
“Tough job, sir,” added Mouana.
Dust took a long draught from her bowl and unfolded, standing bowed despite the empty space around her, and spoke.
“We are to break the siege at Lipos-Tholos, sergeant. The Cauldron Company is leaving in disgrace, and the contract has been offered to me. I have accepted.”
It had been the question haunting the Blades: what next? Lipos-Tholos had been mentioned as a campfire joke, but few had taken it seriously. With the swamp wars raging and the canyon cities still changing hands on a near-yearly basis, anyone with an ear to company scuttlebutt had seen them as the next venues for deployment.
“So the rumours were true?”
“Not until now,” said Dust, stalking across the rubble towards her. “I came out here to think. Now I have decided. We will be the ones to take Lipos-Tholos. You’ll tell the rest.”
As the general advanced, the ’drick screamed, and the other animals began lowing in sympathy further down the line. The rifle’s grip itched in her hand.
Yes, sir hung on Mouana’s bottom lip, but her lungs would not force it out. The general, moving towards her, was nothing more than yellow points in the swirling dark, and something felt wrong.
Of course, there was nothing to worry about. Mouana had been here before. She knew how things played out from here. She would snap, turn, put three rounds through the base of Tassie’s skull, and Dust would promote her to battery commander.
But as the general approached, still just amber pricks in blackness, she had the sick feeling it was not going to go that way.
Tassie shrieked, the sky flaring bile-green as she threw her head back. She stamped, and the plateau quaked. Mouana moved to raise her rifle, but her arms would not move. Instead, the weapon dropped from her hands, and Dust came closer.
“This is how we will tell them all,” said Dust, and night-black claws wrapped themselves around Mouana’s shoulder. “You and I.”
She wanted badly to tell the general that this wasn’t the way things had gone, but the shadows had enveloped her and her throat was closed.
“This is your duty,” said Dust, and drew her sabre from her belt with an oiled hiss. Mouana could do little more than gasp as it slid between her ribs, could choke out no more than a weak “but” as her intercostal muscles parted before the invading steel.
Her mouth flapped, her side clenched against the cold weapon, and the wounded beast screamed loud enough to shake the air in her pierced chest. And all she could make out was those yellow eyes.
“But...” she gulped, and the general drew her closer.
The ’drick stamped, the blade swelled in her, and the air sang with animal screams. The general’s eyes glowed, and the ground collapsed. “But...” gasped Mouana, and the sky throbbed white and angry.
“But this wasn’t...”
“Do me proud, Mouana,” whispered the general.
Then the blast came.
MOUANA LOST HER words to the scream of the shell, and half her right hand to shrapnel when it hit the deck.
“Fuck,” she spat, staring at the ragged mess of her hand against the sky. She had gotten caught in the dream, right when she most needed her wits.
Mouana swore again, using the word like a hammer to beat down the shock. This was no time to slip into the past—she was meant to be commanding the ship. Another shell came in, barely yards away, and shook her nearly off her feet. She had to focus.
Cursing herself again and again for falling away, Mouana looked around her. It was bad. The boy next to her—Simeon? Samuel?—had taken the worst of the shellburst, and was now little more than stew. Worse yet, the radio unit he had carried was gone, reduced to a mess of red-soaked splinters.
Nevertheless, she thought, as she bound the oozing wreckage of her hand with tape, it could have been worse. It could have been her in the crater. It was only a couple of fingers gone, after all.
Ripping the tape off the roll with her teeth, she hissed in frustration. Dream or no dream, the bombardment shouldn’t have started so soon. They shouldn’t have been in range yet. She was a fucking gunnery officer—she knew these things. Or she used to, at least.
Either way—the bombardment had started, and she’d dropped into some half-arsed memory right as it had. There was no point shaking what was left of her fist at her mistake. The body count was still low, and might stay low for a while if she could get from the front of the ship and pull things together before more shelling came.
Issuing half an order to retreat, then remembering the radio was destroyed, Mouana spat pettily at the remnant of her hand and turned for the bridge. She was going to have to do this the hard way.
“Get back, or behind something,” she roared, staggering as another shell hit the deck. “Cover!” she screamed, and choked as the hole in her lung cut her short. The wound was nothing new, but the dream—that bloody dream—had brought it close to mind.
But even with the slot in her ribs, her voice hadn’t left her. “Cover!” she cried, and the sailors scurried for the deck’s hard places, repeating her order.
Mouana staggered up the deck in a half-sprint, quaking as the shells hit, working at the slot in her ribs with her thumb. She was definitely going to have to have the damned thing plugged, she thought, if she was going to do much more old-fashioned commanding.
That was quite a big ‘if,’ mind. She looked behind her, past the ship’s bow and out to sea: just a few miles ahead, the black pillars of the Gate reared from the endless grey of Ocean. Between them, light burst as artillery fire streaked through. Once they were past the Gate, they’d be soaking up every shell the City had to offer, and there wasn’t much more of a plan than to ram the place at full speed and hope it did the trick.
Mouana laughed silently at the memory of her dream, even as the munitions pounded the deck and body parts pattered around her like fat rain. They were going to ram the city. She was going to breach Lipos-Tholos after all.
And then, as a one-armed sailor loped past her with a crate of ammunition belts in tow, her laugh became something loud and wild. She was going to breach Lipo-Tholos—and she was going to do it without loss of life.
The sailor turned in bafflement at her laughter, and she raised her fist in salute to him.
“Doesn’t it feel good to be alive?” howled Mouana with spring-morning exuberance, and the sailor creased his brow. It wasn’t as good as the jokes Wrack used to make, but it was good by her standards. After some initial confusion, the sailor’s face split with raucous laughter. After all, he was dead. She was too.
They all were.
The laughter spread amongst the sailors, and so did the salute. There were thousands of them, crouched like starved seabirds on every mount and rise of the ship’s town-sized foredeck. Withered, drawn, dead and salt-pickled, some whole and some ravaged—but all bound by a dreadful loss and a terrible purpose.
Their eyes glowed through the dullness of death. They grinned, and their fists shook in the salt wind, united in the grim joke. Mouana grinned back at them.
She’d spent twenty years with soldiers under fire, and never felt the sense of weird, black solace as she had after a week wit
h this lot. Every soul on the ship had come here through death, and against their will.
Whether prisoners of war like her, or dissidents and criminals murdered by their own police, all had been brought back to work until they fell apart. To Tavuto, that evil old city-ship, anchored in Ocean’s monster-haunted waters, and tasked with harvesting sufficient meat to supply Lipos-Tholos against the endless siege.
Then everything had changed. The dead had remembered themselves, and surged against their overseers; in a few days of raw chaos, they had turned Tavuto from their prison into the instrument of their revenge, and pointed it like a two-thousand-yard dagger at the heart of the city it had once fed.
And Mouana, despite never having served on a ship in her life, had become its captain.
Given that few enough of her crew could even remember their names, let alone fathom the workings of the ancient vessel, she was well qualified for the task. In any case, the only command that mattered at this stage was “Forward!” and she had made it well understood.
Still, there was always room for reinforcement.
“Forward!” screamed Mouana, with enough force to make her execution-wound whistle, and every sailor on the foredeck repeated her with enough ferocity to drown out the shellfire.
“Forward!” they cried, and she ran up ramps and flights, buoyed on by their chant of rage. It carried on as she reached the meat-piles, the winching mechanisms, the weighing yards overlooked by the bridge where it all had started.
As Mouana reached the plateau before the tower’s doors, still littered with bodies from the uprising, the foghorn sounded. It was a voice beyond them, a sound far past the range of even Ocean’s grandest demons, and yet its pitch blended with that of the stricken sailors.
And as it faded, Tavuto’s ancient engines rose in ferocity to meet it, growing in pitch to match the cries of its former prisoners. Screaming as if the ship itself was possessed.
