Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  Which of course it was.

  With a cheery beep, the display console strapped to Mouana’s left wrist sprang into light, and a new message arrived.

  DID SOMEBODY SAY... FORWARD?

  Mouana rolled her eye, and managed not to smile as she hurried up the stairs to the bridge. That was Wrack, and this had all been his fault. Either a librarian who had been framed for sedition, or a mastermind of the Lipos-Tholos resistance—even he wasn’t sure—Wrack had been sent here to fish like everybody else, but hadn’t quite managed to let go of himself.

  In the shadow of a hillside carcass, as they had hauled blocks of fat to Tavuto’s rendering vats, Wrack had woken from his own dream, and had saved Mouana from a mauling at the jaws of one of the overseers’ attack creatures. They had fled into the night, come to terms with themselves among the ship’s sump of lost souls, and then gotten angry.

  It had all started with Wrack, and at the height of the revolt he had died again, attaining the frankly unfathomable status he now held. Given the speed with which his waking had spread to the rest of the ship, she sometimes wondered if he really was the rebel he liked to joke he had been in life. Then again, when he sent messages like that, his life as a hapless book-stacker became much more believable.

  Either way, he was something very different from her. But despite sharing so little in life, they had shared so much since dying that she saw him now as her only friend.

  REPLYING SLW, tapped Mounana with her right index finger, plucking a shard of shrapnel from the knuckle. LESS FNGRS NOW. SHELLFIRE.

  The ship’s foghorn gave a contemplative groan, and more text appeared on the screen.

  ONCE AGAIN, I’M TALKING RINGS ROUND YOU. I TAKE IT WE’RE STILL DOING THIS, THEN?

  Mouana nodded, then cursed in irritation and stabbed the “Y” key.

  THAT’S JUST AS WELL; TURNING THIS THING IS A NIGHTMARE. FORWARD IT IS. AND I’M PUSHING THE REACTORS VERY HARD. MIGHT BE WORTH CHECKING ON OUR FRIEND DOWN IN THE ENGINES?

  She grimaced at Wrack’s attempt at humour, but he had a point. Though he had attained some measure of control over the ship, it seemed the previous owners had been careful not to give the vessel too much autonomy—a fair precaution, given its previous occupant. There still needed to be living hands—or at least human ones—on the controls to make things work.

  “Eunice, give me the engines,” snapped Mouana, stalking across the bridge to the bank of screens.

  “Mmmmh,” grumbled Eunice, frowning blindly as she bent low over the comms control panel. She was one of the ship’s few remaining warbuilt—those criminals the City had deemed too vile to waste on sleep, and had wired into monstrous exoskeletons—and though she had proved invaluable in combat, she was hardly a natural at ops. Plus her eyes were boiled, and she had to rely on crack-lensed cameras to see what she was doing.

  Regardless, she had the link up in seconds, and when she did, Mouana found herself looking into the face of the Bruiser. The way he was staring into the camera when the feed came on, she could have sworn he had been squinting angrily at it in anticipation, possibly for minutes.

  “Fack off?” snarled the Bruiser, and bared grey teeth at the camera. It was his way of saluting. Many of the zombies (Mouana winced at the word, but she had long decided there was no better option) aboard Tavuto had come back to wakefulness with a loose grasp on language, and the Bruiser—as they had come to know him—was one of the most limited. But what he lacked in articulacy, he made up for in determination, and in muscle.

  As far as Mouana had been able to work out, Bruiser had spent most of his life threatening people with violence in pubs. Presumably a threat had come good, and landed him with his current sentence.

  At least, she thought, as her de facto chief engineer swaggered away from the camera to batter a bulkhead with an iron bar, he’d found a transferable skill.

  As sparks rang from the strike, a chorus of fack offs sounded from the gloom, and a thousand faces turned from their labour to scowl at their taskmaster. Tavuto’s engines, it turned out, had not been as sophisticated as one might have expected from a ship with a central reactor so ancient and exotic.

  Whether through ineptitude in design, or calculation of the value of flesh over tech, the ancient vessel still relied on a swarm of stokers to shovel fuel into its burning heart. Even Wrack, whose mind was wired into the bloody thing, couldn’t work out how the engines worked. But he was adamant that fuel had to keep coming in, and there didn’t seem to be any kind of conveyor belt to do it in place of bodies.

  So zombies it was. They teemed in the gloom behind the Bruiser, blistered about the shoulders with radiation no living stoker could withstand. Many of them were manacled to the engine blocks they fed; more with fresher bodies had attached themselves through solidarity since the takeover.

  “Fack off?” offered Mouana, trying to convey the sense that she was checking on the wellbeing of her crew, or at least their ability to stay intact long enough to get the job done.

  “Fack off,” replied the Bruiser, lowering his iron bar and narrowing his eyes as if to suggest she was wasting her time by asking. The heavyset corpse stooped to examine the soot-caked rack of dials and readouts arrayed before him, then growled in frustration as he realised he had nothing like the vocabulary necessary to report on their situation.

  “Fack off,” he grunted, twisting a dial from its mounting with a resounding crack, and shoving it up against the lens. It appeared to be a speed indicator—or so Mouana hoped, as its needle was jammed all the way into the red.

  She was struggling for a follow-up question that might be rewarded with anything more like a status report, when the deck of the bridge began trembling. Her wrist panel pinged, and she half-read a message from Wrack about a lot of energy being drawn by the forward turret, before realising what was happening and lurching to the bridge windows in horror.

  Right at Tavuto’s foremost extremity, the ship’s main turret—a monster of a thing designed to ruin cities from behind the horizon—was screaming with power and about to fire. Enraged by the rain of shells through the Gate, the turret crew, previously content just to spin the thing round in jubilation, had clearly made the decision to fight back. By firing with both barrels. While the ship was moving at full speed.

  The bollocking they were due had barely even begun to distill in Mouana’s head when the thing fired and knocked her off her feet. The lights in the bridge went red and Eunice cursed, clutching her eye-cameras. The Bruiser’s screen flashed orange as something far back in the engine hall exploded, and a juddering moan—the kind you never, ever want to hear aboard a ship—coursed deep beneath the floor.

  Worse yet, the shot had done nothing; the turret, aimed by the punchdrunk reckoning of a bunch of corpses, had unloaded into the stone of the Gate—possibly the only thing she could imagine which it couldn’t harm. The structure was looming right ahead of them now, one pillar glowing near-white with the impact, billowing with salt steam as waves crashed against it.

  Anticipating Mouana’s reaction, Eunice had already patched her through to the turret interior on another screen.

  “Readying for another big boom!” yelled Kaba from the gunner’s throne, right as Mouana barked at her to stand down. Given the merry uproar from the turret’s armoured heart, she doubt her order had even been heard. That was the problem with this ship—the command hierarchy was fresher than most people’s wounds, and hadn’t so much been laid down as it had oozed out of complete chaos.

  Kaba was just some boat-loader with a broken jaw from a jungle backwater, and had no business running a weapon the size of a city block. But she had been instrumental in the ship’s takeover, and had become so through seizing control of said weapon, pointing it backwards, and wiping out the overseers’ biggest pocket of resistance in an instant of glorious recklessness.

  Mouana had spent her life running gun crews, and wasn’t used to having to explain her orders, let alone repeat them. But from Kaba’s point of vie
w, she was an ally and an equal—why would she wait for someone else’s decision on when to fire?

  Mouana drew her breath to shout some sense into the gunner, but was interrupted yet again by action unfolding elsewhere. With a pop of snapping cables, one of the foredeck’s winch cranes, usually locked in place and used for moving whaleboats to their launch cradles, swung drunkenly out over the side of the ship. Its upper surface was crusted with a mass of dead sailors.

  “Crane six is on the move, sir!” reported one of the bridge crew—another former prisoner from Mouana’s regiment, they were at least trying to make the situation seem under some sort of control. The dead soldier leaned in to a speaker, and furrowed their salt-eaten features.

  “They say they’re... making ready for boarding actions, sir.”

  Mouna sighed and let her head slump, breath hissing from the gap in her ribs. The situation wasn’t beyond her control, she told herself. She would have Kaba agree to hold fire until her order, rein in the madness on crane six, then check the Bruiser had everything under control. Then she could start marshalling the forces on deck for the transition, and...

  Her wrist panel pinged cheerfully.

  JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, WE’RE GOING TO BE HEADING THROUGH IN ABOUT A MINUTE. MIGHT WANT TO HOLD ONTO SOMETHING.

  “Thank you, Wrack,” whispered Mouana through gritted teeth, and clenched her fists hard enough to force an unpleasant grey jelly from between the bandages on her smashed hand. The panel chirped again.

  THERE’S JUST ONE MORE THING.

  WHT NOW? typed Mouana, stabbing at the touchscreen as she did her best to ignore the hooting and hollering from the forward turret.

  THE GATE. SHOULDN’T YOU GET EVERYONE BELOW DECK?

  With a stab of panic, she remembered the container vessels the company would always load into before a Gate transit. The rude blatting of sirens as their great jaws closed. The nervous, blue-lit dark as the tracks ground into motion. The rattling of the lightning on the hull as they went through.

  THE GATES, said Wrack. THEY KILL ANYTHING ON THE OUTSIDE. STOPS THE MONSTERS ETC GETTING THROUGH.

  Mouana was about to call for a ship-wide retreat to covered space, when the thought occurred to her. Even amidst the shouting radios, the madness of her disintegrating command, it was a shot of bliss, akin to waking free from the sordid rules of a nightmare. The Gate would indeed wipe clean any life clinging to the ship; the barnacles and crab-stamens clustered beneath the keel were doomed. But they were not.

  WRACK, She typed, taking the time to type whole words. WE’RE ALL DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. WE’RE FINE.

  The panel’s screen remained empty for a long moment, longer than usual, and then three words appeared.

  NO I’M NOT.

  Wrack’s status was, admittedly, hard to pin down. On the one hand, his corpse was lying just a few feet away on a trolley, where it had lain as little more than meat since the bloody conclusion of the rebellion. Then again, he no longer resided in it.

  Refusing to shudder as she craned her neck, Mouana looked up at Wrack’s current resting place. She tried to ignore the slow, fat swirl of creamy matter in the armourglass tube, tried to put aside what it was and see her friend, but there was no dodging the truth. He had become something very, very weird.

  In place of a hardwired AI or a brainbank, Tavuto had, for who knew how long, been controlled via the extracted nerve stem of... something. Teuthis, the overseers had called it. In the blur of activity since the uprising, there had been no time to work out precisely what it was—Wrack figured it for something like a squid. In any case it was ancient, and malevolent, and horribly powerful.

  When the revolt had been about to fail, with City triremes full of destriers and kentigerns closing in, Wrack had made some sort of dark bargain with whatever had inhabited the old flesh, and had swapped places with it. The thing had been awarded oblivion, and Wrack had been given a city-ship in place of his body.

  Whether Wrack was any more or less dead than he had been as the mess of split sinew on the trolley, Mouana had no idea. But he sure as fuck wasn’t alive. Taking a deep breath, despite having no use for oxygen, she set her fingers to the panel.

  YES YOU ARE MATE, she typed, wishing she could make it look at least slightly compassionate.

  No reply came. The Gate loomed, its pillars now framing Tavuto’s bow. Shells whizzed through in a flurry, eroding the vast prow like snow before piss. The zombies on crane six howled for revenge, and the barrels of Kaba’s turret began to glow with a fresh charge.

  On the Bruiser’s screen a new glow, deep carnelian, blossomed in the ship’s heart. The big bastard’s eyes widened, and the screen shook, as the ship somehow found more power. “Fack off!” he breathed, awed, as a terrible shudder rose from the keel.

  Text faded onto Mouana’s screen without a chime. I SUPPOSE YOU’RE RIGHT, it said.

  Purple lightning surged across the deck like grasping fingers, drawing them into the space between the pillars. They were going through.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WRACK’S BONES HURT, but they were not his bones. His eyes were seared by light, but they were not his eyes. Thousands upon thousands of muscles-that-were-not clenched in spasm, and fire screamed across skin that was not there.

  Worst of all, though, even above the agony of his body’s passage through the Gate, rising from the vast depths of his new mind was a relentless craving for fish.

  Don’t listen to any of it, he told himself, over and over. He was not a ship, he thought, as his bow lurched into the raging gap. And he certainly, without question, was not a bloody squid. He was Schneider Wrack, formerly of No. 32 Clerk Street. He had been in charge of categorising the College Library’s collection of allegories, and he had been very good at it.

  This, he insisted, as his heart shunted nuclear fire through his leviathan keel, was just a phase he was going through.

  Wrack laughed, and mournful horns blasted from a dozen masts, barely murmurs above the noise of the Gate-storm. And what a storm. He understood next to nothing about the Lemniscatic Gates—not that many people understood much about them any more—but he knew that the energy transfer involved in moving something as massive as Tavuto was staggering.

  It certainly made for an astonishing show. Squinting down his foredeck from the first cameras through the Gate, he saw the ship’s hatchet prow surge into the world between wings of steam, wreathed in actinic filigree. Crowding its edges were dead women and men, too excited to care for the shells that still rained around them, lightning dancing across their skins.

  Anyone watching them would be properly shitting themselves by now, he thought, and boomed another terrible laugh.

  Then the laugh wrenched into a cry of pain, as more of his body ploughed through the Gate. A good third of him was now in an entirely different world from his two-million-ton arse, and had subtly more mass than it had possessed five minutes ago. As his bones flexed and glowed with the stress of staying together, the change felt anything but subtle.

  Wrack had no doubt he could take it: the really ancient ships—and Tavuto was as old as they came—had been built to take worse than this as a matter of course. But either its designers had not taken into account what it felt like to be the ship, or they had no sense of pity.

  As his waist slid through the gap, he felt sure his back would break. Every vertebra felt as if it was being prised from its neighbour with a heated blade; tendons drew tight as rods and snapped under the strain. Wrack screamed, and his tentacles, his cranes—no—his hands arched into claws. Whiteness overtook him, and washed away sensation.

  Allegories. He would list allegories. First came the allegories for Nation, carefully alphabetised, on circular shelves around the lily pond where the placoderms wallowed. Nation as Zoo took a slice of the bottom shelf, Nation as Saints’ Lives sat midway along the third, and there was Nation as Machine, a long section starting neatly at the beginning of the fifth. He ran his finger upwards, past Nation as Karst, Nation as Go
ldmine, Nation as Euphemism, to the top shelf. There was Nation as Body, but it had been put back in the wrong place, before Nation as Battleship and Nation as Beast. Wrack clucked in disapproval, and poked his tongue out as he began to rearrange them. He was just wondering how they had gotten so out of sequence when he was smacked across the brain by a string of angry block capitals.

  WRCK?/? WHRE THE FCK ARE YOU>?

  Hold on, he thought, irritated, and focused again on the books. How odd; while he had been distracted, all three volumes had merged into one.

  WRACK. MATE. NEED YOU.

  Oh, thought Wrack, looking up from the impossible book as the edge of perception began to pound with light. What a clever dream.

  CLVR DREAM? THE HELL DO YOU MEAN? shouted Mouana into his head, as he chucked the book into the pond.

  Sorry—nodded off for a second; I’m on it now, thought Wrack, and blinked.

  Wrack had seen paintings of some enormous naval battles, but this made most look like a baby’s bathtime. A crescent of warships, each the size of a skyscraper, bristled before the harbour of Lipos-Tholos like bison circling a sick calf. Explosions rippled across their decks as their guns sounded, and triremes scudded through the air like fat arrows.

  Wrack was thundering towards them, cloaked in spirals of gunsmoke as his own turrets barked in answer. As he cleared his head of the strange fugue, more came online, while those piloted by the enthusiastic dead came under the subtle guidance of his aim. Wrack clenched his diaphragm, and rockets slid from his sides spurting flame; he gritted his teeth, and tungsten flechettes erupted from his spine with a wet, springy hiss. Missiles and flak found their marks, and aircraft spiralled smoking from the sky.

  Railfire punched through his hull, and mortars knocked chunks from his superstructure, but it was like the scrape of pumice on dead skin; if anything, it felt refreshing after the searing misery of the transition. There was just so bloody much of him, and it was bearing down on the City’s navy far quicker than it could be broken by their guns. Elation bellowed through him, and his skin shivered with the bliss of rage. He was death now, and the City was powerless before him.