by Nate Crowley
The novelty was quite delicious, but Dust knew bland rage would soon overwhelm the flavour if she didn’t find something creative to do with it. Calmly, as if all was proceeding as expected, she ushered her officers in from their fearful knot beyond the bridge doors, and told them to find her the answer to what had happened here.
As the officers scurried, she stroked the canister of miasma at her belt. It was one of the store they had recovered from the remnants of the Ministry, four thousand silver cases, stockpiled in a cellar and safe from the fire. After a moment’s hesitation, she cranked her synaesthetics up a notch. Really, she knew she should be letting her system cool, but what was coming next would be too beautiful to enjoy without augmentation.
Twenty-three minutes later, two uniforms approached her with a corpse supported between them. They looked at each other with sweat-bleached faces. One tried to tell her they had managed to get the wretch to talk, but was interrupted by the thing itself, suggesting they had not had to conduct much of an interrogation.
The carcass looked her straight in the eye, grinned, and told her all she needed to know. It was lengthy, aggressive and largely indecipherable. But it gave her the answer she had already reached.
“Mouana,” said the corpse.
The word was hot and rancid as it leaked into Dust’s skull, drowning out the flavour of the others. She let the synaesthetics drench her; there was no point postponing the anger any longer, though she did pause to thank the corpse before she clapped its head flat between her gauntlets. After all, it had displayed more character than most of her command staff.
They would, in fact, be much more interesting dead, she mused to herself. After all, they had all just been outperformed by a colleague long-deceased. Really, she was offering them a second chance.
Slowly unscrewing the nozzle of the miasma, Dust told her officers to form a parade line, and to put on their gas hoods. To their credit, only two tried to break for the bridge door when they realised what was about to happen. They were stopped by the pair of piston-limbed Augs she had stationed there during the search, and brought back to the line as the doors were bolted.
The rest didn’t say a word after that. Maybe, she thought, as fear blossomed from the soldiers in gorgeous amber spheres, there was hope for them yet.
Moving to the first man in line, she let loose a blast from the cylinder into the inlet of his mask, and savoured the terror in his eyes as he held the breath, waiting for her blade to come. Eventually, when no violence came, he exhaled in tentative relief.
“Good,” said Dust, and screwed shut the man’s air intake.
Some time later, when the last of the officers had stopped convulsing, she took a seat on an overturned terminal and waited for them to come back. It was beautifully quiet, and Dust sighed to herself as she tasted the moment. Maybe this setback had been for the best. She was tired of the clumsy, protracted business of sieges, and missed the hunger and the fury and the pain that came with a real challenge.
Now, not only did she have a task ahead of her, but a decent opponent standing in her way. And as the very first of her new soldiers began to thrash on the floor, she smiled. It was a beautiful day, and the hunt was about to begin.
THE WATER THRONGED with bright fish, jinking and dashing among the lily stems. Flag-tailed eft cruised between them, feather-gills pulsing, while hornplate catfish jostled one another in the sun patches dappling the pool floor. Leaf scraps whirled in the wash of their heavy tails, rich as tea-leaves in the great warm brew.
Wrack felt the sunlight sink into his back, felt silt trickle through his fingers as he pulled himself along through the shallows. A flight of mottled stingray flapped away in startlement, leaving a plume of disturbed sand behind them. He pushed through and kicked free of the bottom, rolling lazily in the water as weeds brushed his sides.
Swimming through an arch of moss-crusted wood, he watched as jewelled shrimp fussed and picked through their tangled garden, waving glass-clear claws when grazing fish nudged too close. Everywhere he looked there was life, teeming and vibrant.
Then he was out into the river channel, where redtail cats and hump-backed nutcrackers meandered in the slow current. Eels flittered in the distance, while here and there the water surged with the white bubbles of a diving bird. Pink shapes loomed in the soupy distance, and the fish scattered in all directions. Creaking clicks and squeaks filled the water, and bulbous heads pushed out of the gloom—a pod of river orcas, their eyes little more than specks in salmon-coloured skin. They swung their heads at him as they passed, sonar clicking deep against his diaphragm, but were gone as soon as they arrived, in search of the huge worms they were famed for hunting.
As their tails vanished, Wrack found himself alone in the water; he looked around for more fish, but every movement resolved into dead vegetation, or a trick of the light. He saw something creeping along the sediment, but when he swam to investigate, it was nothing but a half-eaten redtail, rolling along the bottom with mouth gaping.
The river’s bottom fell away, and the water grew colder, and darker. The light from above grew more and more distant, and lost its amber glow. The current picked up like the stirrings of a winter gale, and Wrack felt it pulling him along, faster than he could kick against it. It was as if something was breathing him in, something that grew closer and closer, yet remained out of sight as the water darkened.
Wrack flailed in the icy water, tumbled in search of the surface, but it was nowhere to be seen—the water stretched fathomless in every direction, grey and terrible. He was pulled further and further by the current, despite all his thrashing, and he knew he was being dragged down, down to somewhere good fishes did not go.
Blackness rose, and within it loomed two great orbs—eyes, scratched and sightless and deathly pale. Beneath them sprawled a tangle of black glass, a forest of needles sprung from ragged flesh. A predatory yawn, that gaped in measureless hunger and despair. The jaws creaked silently apart to accept him, and Wrack resigned himself to their embrace.
Then a deep, wet crack echoed from the abyss, and the monstrous face jerked sideways. Another, and it convulsed again. It was tugged back violently, and a jet of cloudy filth rose from its maw. Unseen teeth ground in the blackness, and a shiver of awe crept across the crown of Wrack’s head. There was something beyond, something so large and fierce it made prey of the devil-fish.
A deep green light rose from the depths, and Wrack caught sight of it then; a titanic crown of limbs, rolling dark as onyx serpents, their lengths stippled with scars and savage hooks. At their centre, a churning spiral of tooth-rows and horny plates, which dragged in the head of the fish as he watched, snapped shut, and belched a few strands of slimy flesh.
Wrack licked his lips as he hung before the monster, and stretched his arms in satisfaction. That was delicious.
“Saints and knights!” yelled a man, over someone’s screaming.
“Easy, Wrack!” barked another, as metal clattered and more shouting started. Wrack focused, and found he had a hand in his mouth, clamped in his right claw as his mouthparts chewed at the thumb. Below the hand was Waldemar’s book, its text spotted with fresh blood. He was in a ship’s cabin, crowded with people, and it took him a second to realise it wasn’t yet another vision. As soon as he did, he spat the hand out in self-disgust.
Fucking visions, he thought, and started into a rambling apology. To his puzzlement, his words came back at him, read aloud by a synthesised voice with slightly mangled inflection.
All around him were a circle of faces, some living, some dead, all wide-eyed and agitated as a woman retreated, clutching her sliced thumb. One of the dead men, with a bad eye and a big moustache, looked really familiar, but Wrack was pretty sure he hadn’t been on Tavuto. He was talking, and Wrack supposed he really should be listening.
“—mate, we thought you were just concentrating on your book. Didn’t mean to startle you. Look, we’ve been souping you up some!” The man gestured at a living woman, who h
eld up a mirror with a conciliatory, if slightly forced, grin. In the mirror was a crab, and Wrack cringed—that was never going to feel natural—but he had to admit it was in better shape. His smashed legs had been replaced with wooden prosthetics, while the whole rack had been fixed with steel supports and servos, wired to a cluster of machinery bolted to his shell. The camera he was peering through was now flanked by speakers, which broadcast a thoughtful “huh” as he examined himself.
“I can talk now?” said Wrack, as he tested his legs. He had to admit, being a speaking, mostly-mechanical crab controlled by a brain in a tank was—somehow—more satisfying than just being a crab controlled by a brain in a tank.
“Yes, you can,” said the moustachioed cadaver, nodding at the woman with the bitten thumb. He was achingly familiar. “And you’ve Conwen to thank for that. Used the voice from the Lipos-Tholos trams, which we always used for our radio stuff. We figured you and Mouana could use a break from writing to each other, and you might want a bit more company. Thought it might cheer you up.”
“Thanks,” said Wrack, feeling more human than he had done in a long while. The idea that someone had thought of him in a context outside of mortar fire, naval hyperwar and desperate crusades in search of nightmare technology made him want to well up, though he doubted his renovators had thought to install tear ducts. “And Conwen, I’m really so sorry for trying to eat your thumb. I didn’t know I was doing it. I’m... well, I’ve gone a bit mad, if I’m honest. This is all just a bit much. Thanks for what you’ve done.”
As he relaxed, the rebels clustered round him relaxed too—they lowered their tools, and those who still had the facial architecture to do so were smiling, even Conwen as she wound a rag round her thumb.
“Where is Mouana, anyway?” said Wrack, glad of his flat, toneless new voice, and childishly satisfied with the way it bungled the vowels of her name.
“Over on Gunakadeit, the boat we took from Tavuto,” said the moustache man, gesturing through the cabin window at one of the old hulk’s jagged grey whaleboats. “You’re in its hold, but since you seemed attached to this body, we took it over here as we’ve got better workshops.”
“And because she wanted me out of the way, no doubt,” muttered Wrack. At least, he meant to mutter: his voice announced it like the arrival of the 12:30 to Ploverholm.
“She’s got a lot to do, Wrack. We’re headed to Grand Amazon, and half our boats are barely afloat. Plus there’s likely to be an army coming after us.”
“I know,” said Wrack, and zoomed in on the whaleboat’s deck, where his former comrade was overseeing the welding of a new gun onto its increasingly fortified forecastle. Watching her stride around with her permanent scowl, he felt himself draining of the fuzzy sentiment that had come over him a few moments ago.
Wrack had had many eyes in the City as it fell; he had seen the body of the Chancellor, had seen the cuts she had made. His supposed friend had tortured a man to death and back to get what she wanted. The great soldier, soldiering on, doing the vile things soldiers did in the name of soldiering. To her there was no fear, or sadness, or horror at what was going on—just obstacles, and guns to blow them away with. Wrack himself was not a friend to her; he was just another gun, to be welded in place and used when something stood in the way of the mission.
Wrack didn’t know whether he loathed her for her callousness, or because he envied her. Certainly he loathed himself for going along with it all, for jumping at the fairytale hope that she wanted her friend alongside her for the journey. Looking at Mouana’s face, like a spiteful ghost-train puppet, and down at his own reeking claws, he wondered what in the world was left that was worth hoping for.
That was the worst thing. The despair of Tavuto had at least had a coda; all along had been the promise that it would soon all be over. But now there was the hope—however ludicrous—of something after, and the hope fucking ached.
“Let me get back to my book,” said Wrack, and tried to find his place among the bloodstained pages. The gathered rebels said nothing, just quietly put down their tools and left.
“STRIP THE HARPOONS off,” barked Mouana, holding off the terror as it tried to force its way into her voice like the head of a carrion bird. “And secure the guns from the Bargain in their place. They need to be up and ready within the hour.”
At least her voice was holding. She had finally patched the hole in her chest with a square of stapled tarp, meaning she could pack a few more syllables into each lifeless breath, but she wished she could do the same for her growing fear.
Bertilak’s Bargain, the most heavily armed of the four ships sailing with Gunakadeit, had a dying engine and was falling behind the flotilla. Every hour they kept pace with it cost them miles, and with the Gate to Grand Amazon only hours away, they needed every mile of sea they could squeeze between them and their pursuit.
And there was no question of their being pursued. It had been two days since they had cast off from Lipos-Tholos, two days of exploding boilers, welding sparks and frantic engineering, where even the living had barely slept. Yet even with that head start, she knew they could not stay ahead for long. Dust would do anything to get what she wanted, and to be the only thing standing in between her and her goal was chilling beyond the cold of death.
When Mouana thought of her dreams, those claustrophobic half-memories of the command tent, her fears only grew. What Dust was truly after, her own role in that scheme, and the terrible logic that proceeded from its unravelling, was something she was avoiding thinking about at all costs. When Kaba interrupted her with a poke in the ribs, she could not have been more glad of the insubordination.
“Channels are narrow off the Sinfondo, boss,” crowed her de facto first officer. “Narrow and not deep, you know. This is an Ocean-boat, deep keel and sharp besides. Keep loading all this heavy gear, you’ll scrape bottom and rupture soon enough.”
“So have the crew empty the holds,” snapped Mouana. “Bodies, fuel and ammo is all we need besides the weapons, and we’ll run low on all three soon enough.”
“Even the food?”
“Even the food. We’re going to a fucking jungle, it’s full of the stuff.” Though they were perpetually hungry, Mouana wasn’t even sure if the dead really needed to eat, and the living would need bullets more than bully beef when Dust came.
“You don’t know the jungle, miss,” said Kaba with a laugh that pulled her smashed mouth into a half-grin, then shrugged. “But we’ll ditch if you give the say-so. Bad news is, there’s not much else to dump. Take a look what we hauled out so far—besides, there’s something big-dangerous in there you’ll be happy to see.”
Mouana followed Kaba down the ship’s main deck, ducking as another net of guns swung aboard from the ailing Bargain, to where a chain of sailors was hauling gear out of the hold. There were indeed tins of meat—stacks of them, along with the bottles of foul preservative Tavuto’s overseers had used to wash down their grim rations. There were nets and harpoons and barrels, and piles of iron sheets for hull repairs. But there was something else, which despite everything weighing on her, raised a tight smile, as Kaba had predicted.
“It’s a Mark V warbody,” announced a rebel technician, patting the immense thing on the flank as she saw Mouana staring. “Military issue, but this is the ‘Ahab’ pattern, modded for Ocean deployment. Ministry built a load a year back, from a fresh blueprint won off Sedogua. We know because we tried to jack them from the forge. Quite a bod, eh?”
“Yeah,” said Mouana to Kaba as she looked the Mark V up and down. “Don’t throw that overboard.”
It was easily nine feet at its headless shoulders and almost as wide, a rust-red block of aggression bristling with harpoons, slug-throwers and rivets. Its limbs were caked in inch-thick iron, its joints swarmed with armoured cables, its feet were like upturned foundry crucibles.
Eunice’s own sheet-metal physique looked fragile beside the newer model. Preferring not to risk its own people in close combat with Oce
an’s fauna, Lipos-Tholos had wired its most bloody-minded criminals into these suits after death, safe in the knowledge their minds were too broken to consider rebellion. Eunice was horrific proof of what a stupid decision that had been. Even so, she looked jealous beyond measure as she eyed up the empty suit.
Mouana couldn’t help it. She’d spent her life with heavy weapons, oiling their innards and frying eggs on their engine casings, and the sight of a new-forged war machine lifted her up, kept the fear at bay.
“Damned heavy, though,” cautioned Kaba. “Must be a ton at least.”
“So dump everything else,” said Mouana, before nodding to the technician and carrying on up the stairs to the quarterdeck at Gunakadeit’s rear. From here she could see down the whaleboat’s length, from the frenzy of activity at the hold amidships, to the forecastle with its growing tangle of weaponry. It was coming together, and the sight of the welding, the sound of the hammers, was as soothing as rain on glass to her. Mouana took a deep, futile breath, and turned to let the madness govern itself for a moment.
She walked to the back rail and looked out at the ship’s wake, as it churned under the afternoon sun. The last time she had stood like this had been on Tavuto, when she and Wrack had reached the stern of the ship and realised they could run no further. They had watched scavengers swarm at a whale’s carcass under a grey dawn, and despaired.
But Ocean was long behind her now. This, by contrast, was a beautiful day. This far from the stained sky over Lipo-Tholos, there was just blue water and pale cloud. Standing at the rail and watching gulls swoop in their passage, Mouana dared to wonder if things might work out after all.
Bertilak’s Bargain wallowed beside their port side, smoke belching weakly from its stacks as the last of its supplies were pilfered. The Asinine Bastard, the largest and the most intact of their flotilla, rode to starboard. Behind them were the other ships, the Chekhov’s Gun and the Pentangle, each barely larger than Gunakadeit, and a swarm of smaller launches, ferrying people and hardware between the fighting craft. Much further out, plumes of smoke marked the positions of civilian boats, fleeing the chaos of Lipos-Tholos to take their chances in the colonies or beyond.
