Grand Amazon

by Nate Crowley

  Wrack snorted at the word, but passed no further comment. He was quietly sceptical that Mouana would be remotely interested in his company if he wasn’t annihilating soldiers, but they clearly weren’t going to leave him in peace until he came with them to Gunakadeit. So he let Fingal continue.

  “I know she’s a hard case, Wrack, and she’s been rough on you this far. But she’s taken a hell of a pasting, and she needs to get back on her feet before we get to Wormtown. She’s not forgotten it was you saved her, you know, way back on that awful ship. And whether she knows it or not, you could probably do her a lot of good right now.”

  Wrack felt a flash of acid towards Fingal; despite knowing he was being manipulated, he found himself wanting to look after the distraught corpse he’d pulled away from the rain-slicked flensing yards of Tavuto. He imagined her in pain, and he wanted to go and make her feel better.

  “Can I at least take my book?” he asked, with an air of resignation that his tram-announcer’s voice didn’t carry.

  “Sure, why not—you can read to her!” said Fingal, and the Bruiser gave a chillingly muscular thumbs-up. Wrack sighed, and scuttled onto the deck. At least they didn’t want him to have a fight.

  “ONCE INTEGRATION OF spinal trunk three is complete, refer back to section nineteen for instructions on ulnar nerve calibration across dorsal conduits F through J.”

  “Done that already!” said Pearl, revving the drill behind Mouana’s back. The bench in front of her was littered with grey-smeared bone chips and the trimmed heads of nerve bundles, the exhausted debris of a body forced through two lives.

  “Well you bloody shouldn’t have done it already,” answered Wrack, pointing at the mess of charts taped to the cabin window and continuing from the manual again. “If the ulnar nerve has already been calibrated, please refer to appendix nine for instructions on resetting tolerances across the brachial plexus. In addition, you may need to reset flexor drivers for the digitorum and ulnaris nodes in accordance with the new calibration.”

  “No need,” said Pearl, the drill plunging into Mouana’s spine. “That stuff’s written for journeymen. I’ve done this before, it’s basic to any body hookup. Doesn’t matter what you’ve already done by the time you wire up the dorsal nodes, if you run a decent spine flush it’ll find its own tolerances. And anyway—”

  “Look, don’t ask me. I’m just a crab. Just a crab, telling you what’s written here in the manual.”

  Mouana snarled above the wet grinding of the drill. It had been better when he’d been reading out the jungle stuff. At least that had kept everyone else quiet. Now he’d gotten onto the manual for the Mark V, it had become a shared performance with Pearl. If she didn’t know better, she would have said they were flirting.

  “Just get the fucking arm switched on,” growled Mouana, then grunted as an electric tremor passed through her right shoulder. Much as she loathed the former Ministry necrotechnician, she was prepared to accept Pearl was the only person on board capable of giving her a new body. It didn’t mean she wanted to make a comedy of it.

  “She’s doing it,” protested Wrack. “Anyway, I thought you wanted me to read something else.”

  “I did, but I didn’t want a damned music hall show made of it. If she knows so well what she’s doing playing around with dead bodies, then let her get on with it.”

  “I will. But I swear she’s missed some stuff from section eight.”

  “Shut up, you!” cried Pearl in mock outrage. “What have I missed?”

  Wrack peered at the manual with a theatrical gesture.

  “First of all, ensure sterility at all times during the procedure,” he recited, before sweeping out a claw to encompass the cabin. The place was caked in filth; where it wasn’t black from the battle’s spilt blood, it was tacky with engine oil and craggy with rust. Flies eddied in droning clouds, and every surface around Mouana’s makeshift operating table was heaped with slippery bodymess.

  The Bruiser was first to crack, giving a wuffling laugh from the corner of the cabin where he lurked, sipping from a can of oil. Then he punched Eunice, who seemed to have become his drinking companion during her own lengthy bout of repairs, and she started laughing too, a horrible sound like a ruptured gas pipe.

  Mouana was about to cut them all down with a vile threat, but checked herself. This had to be better than the silent anxiety that had clamped over the convoy since it had made transfer. The jubilation of routing the irregulars had faded fast; once through the Gate and under an empty sky, they had realised just how far they had left to travel, and how scarce their resources were.

  She looked out of the cabin window, her head still the only thing that could move in the new body. There was the Asinine Bastard, limping slightly but intact for the most part, and Chekhov’s Gun, which had been holed in the battle, and was only still with them thanks to a towrope and constant bailing. On their own deck was the grounded Alaunt, but there was no way of getting it aloft in Grand Amazon’s shifted gravity, so it was only good for spare parts.

  They would need every scrap. Their ammunition stores had been rinsed in the fight, and the heat and the insects had ensured they were already well into their preservative store. Their human resources were drained too—they had maybe three hundred sailors left, a third of them living. After the trireme fight, some of the dying Pipers had elected to take Fingal’s route through death, and had taken miasma; the others had been dumped overboard in sacks.

  Of the dead that remained, most boasted a few bullet holes or a severed limb. Wounds had become a matter of cheerful competition between the sailors, and they had become creative—decorative, even—in patching each other up. One man as she watched was pacing the deck with an irregular’s shotgun in place of his lower leg, lashed in place with pink cable. But for all their bravado, if they got into another fight now, they would be lucky to escape.

  And there was no doubt: pursuit was coming. The thick gravity would keep triremes back as they were recalibrated, but Dust would find other ways to stay close behind them. They had to repair and resupply at Wormtown, as quickly as they could, and keep moving.

  Mouana’s attention was yanked back to the filthy cabin as Pearl cursed, and something gave way in her back. One of her bone-chisels—her persuaders, she called them—had gone clean through a rotten rib, slipped from her hand, and clattered down inside Mouana’s body.

  “Fucking amateur,” grumbled Mouana between her teeth, as Wrack made another one of his bloody quips from the manual, and everyone had another good laugh. She let them. It was odd to think about morale on a mission where almost everyone was dead, and certainly Mouana had little talent maintaining it among the living, but it had to be attempted.

  Besides, the whole point of getting Fingal to coax Wrack here was to humanise him a little, get him attached to the rest of the crew again. The next time they ran into trouble, the last thing she needed was him stuck in another bout of selfish catatonia. Of course, she wasn’t much more keen on having the arsehole in the room with her, guffawing about her reassembly, but it was for the best in the long run.

  “Remind me—how long do I have to suffer you reading to me?” she asked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

  “Until you’re in one piece and moving that body again,” said Wrack. Mouana flexed her hip and gave a stiff kick of her leg, and everyone laughed. There, she thought. I can do morale.

  IT WAS DUSK by the time Mouana was wired in; she dismissed Pearl just as the sun began its plunge past the far bank. There were still superficial touches to be finished, bolts to be tightened and actuators to be fine-tuned, but she could walk and—more importantly—fire her weapons. It took longer to get rid of Wrack, but a sighting of something big rolling in the channel past the bow soon had him out of the cabin. Now it was just her, the Bruiser and Eunice.

  They were almost at the confluence, and the Entrada had widened to the point where the channel’s banks were reduced to a green trace on the horizon. The sun’s light had
dimmed to a ruddy wash, the water was a rippled red sheet, and even this far from the banks the insects teemed. Jittering clouds of midges and moths bounced on the cabin lights, while every so often the armoured smack of a fist-sized beetle made everyone jerk.

  Watching Wrack potter towards the prow, stopping to inspect a flying lizard that had perched on a rail, she wondered how wise it had been to bring him back across to her ship. Certainly he seemed more in tune with the crew now—the circle of sailors around him, sharing jokes and stories, attested to that.

  But the same sight made her feel strangely bitter; it was him the crew saw as the heart of the voyage, him that they warmed to, even though it was her who had brought them here, who had led a tooth-and-nail defence while he had cowered behind his bloody history book. But that would change, she thought, as the forest swallowed the sun and darkness swept across the river. Now it was time to show them what real leadership was, beyond cracking jokes.

  “Bring him up,” said Mouana to the Bruiser, as she tested the flex on her boulder of a fist. A minute later the dead man returned, dragging with him a wretched sight.

  They had kept the prisoner in the bilges since the fight, roped to a stanchion. It had cursed and bitten everyone who had come near it, and near chewed through one of its wrists in an attempt to get free. Swathed in stinking pingvin hide, black-toothed and stippled all over with bone-tapped tattoos of the Blades’ ringed-world emblem, it was typical of the most wretched of Dust’s irregulars.

  But it was also a zombie. The inch-wide hole through the thing’s throat left no doubt, and even as the Bruiser hauled it up the stairs, it ranted about the dust of war, the breath of life, the cold chance. They had found plenty like it in the aftermath of the fight; perhaps a third of the bodies cut down in the assault had gotten back to their feet with a blade during the cleanup, or had gone into the river hissing. But this one had talked, and so she had kept it aboard. Ostensibly it had been retained for intelligence on their pursuit, but Mouana had a more personal curiosity.

  She stopped the creature’s feral chants with a steamhammer slap that crunched its neck and left its head at an angle, then grabbed it by the collar of its rags.

  “What do I mean to you?” she snarled.

  “Aaah!” gurgled the zombie, lifeless breath slurping through stump teeth. “Traitor-gunner and runaway! Failed war-child! The thief! Maow-aaah-nerrr!” The wretch broke into a sucking parody of a laugh, and she knocked him to the floor of the cabin, but it didn’t stop the noise.

  “War-mother sent us, breathed into us the breath of life, the cold chance! Sent us to make good!”

  “Make good on what?” said Mouana coolly, planting her boot on his squirming body.

  “Make good the theft, the failed task, the dereliction! Return the thief, return the treasure!” The ghoul hacked a glop of black fluid as her boot pressed down on its sternum, but carried on in a crushed whisper. “The traitor, the failure, the company’s shame! A place in the war tent for them that brings it back on a rope, a spike on the war-mother’s tank for the traitor’s unliving head!”

  “Get some fresh air,” said Mouana, looking up at Eunice and the Bruiser, and they wandered off onto deck. Mouana looked past them at Wrack, but the fool hadn’t even noticed what was going on in the cabin. He was sat on the hatch of the hold, playing cards with a circle of grinning sailors. Their bottled miracle, sauntering along as they blew their bodies apart to protect him. Her supposed friend, who had rescued her from slavery, and pulled her back from the hopeless fugue of death. Subduing a spike of rage, Mouana planted her foot-wide toeplate delicately on the wretch’s forehead, and steadied her voice.

  “What failed task are you talking about?” she asked, keeping a feather’s pressure on the zombie’s skull.

  “The ship-taking, the great trick! The journey through death and the seizing of the treasure! The special mission!” Mouana began to press down, feeling the skull flex under her boot, but still the thing continued its demented rant. “You, Maow-aaah-nerrr! You, you are the failu—”

  Mouana stamped down hard, and bone-flecks bounced in the corners of the room.

  She closed her eye, and tried to drown out the sound of the card game with the thunder building in her head. She had feared the truth for some time, if she was honest with herself, had suspected it ever since her visions during the escape from the Ministry. This time, she needed no visions to understand.

  Her being on Tavuto had been no misfortune, no accident of war. She had been there on a mission, and she had failed.

  Her ‘necronaut,’ Dust had called her, as they had spent long nights practising the hypnotic and mnemonic exercises that would allow her to wake from death. Her voyager, she had named her, as she had emerged from a coffin after four weeks buried alive. Her prizewinner; her protégée, who would take command of her new army on recovering the tool of its creation. The tool which now lay in the hold of her ship, possessed by the mind of a fool.

  That ancient brain, which the Lipos-Tholons and their enemies had mistaken for a simple control device, when all along it had dwarfed the power of their coveted relics. Her task had been to seize the ship that held it and bring it back in triumph, shattering the siege and gifting its terrible power to her mistress. In taking on death, she had been assured never-ending glory.

  Only she had never woken up. She had not been up to the task. She had wandered, wretched and hopeless, just another slave in that vast grey factory. But for sheer chance, she would have ended up fodder for the teeth of a watchbeast, as she dragged blocks of fat to the try-pots.

  But for Wrack. But for that happy-go-lucky, whimsical cretin, who had come to his senses through some disastrous act of chance, and seized her from the jaws of failure. For all her training, she had been bested by a librarian. And no wonder, once she had joined him in consciousness, she had been so keen to help him take the ship and sail it back to port with guns blazing. She had been carrying out her task, with no idea who she had been doing it for.

  Opening her eye again, she stared straight at that stupid little crab, and felt her steel-bolstered nerves sing with violence. She leaned against the cabin wall, and fought every urge to pound through it with her iron fists. If she had only woken up of her own accord, if she had only had the strength, she could have taken the prize. She could have been seated at Dust’s right hand side, rather than being hunted as a traitor.

  But she hadn’t. She had joined Wrack’s silly revolution, and sworn herself to the destruction of all that had made it necessary. Mouana had known, had felt, that everything that had happened on Tavuto was evil, that it had to be stopped. Glaring at her fist, looking at the power of those hard fingers, she wondered how much conviction she still had in those feelings, when they were all that stood in the way of redemption. With the simplest command, backed up by those fists, she could turn the convoy around, and be welcomed back with open arms. She could finish the mission.

  But she couldn’t. No matter the lure, she would not swim towards it. Because for all the hate she felt—and it was hate; what was left of her brain was sure of it—Wrack’s silly revolution was right. So long as anyone had the means to force the dead to work on their behalf, there was something that needed to be stopped. Now that she was dead, she couldn’t see it any other way.

  So there was no way she could turn the ship around; the only end to this was to lead these leaking boats all the way to High Sarawak, and destroy whatever it was that waited there. And she had to do it with Wrack, the constant reminder of her failed mission, inhabiting the very fucking thing she had been sent to seize.

  He was such a pain in the arse.

  And worse yet, she considered, as her gaze drifted from the crab to the doors of the hold, he was now part of the very problem they were sworn to solve. If Dust had been right; if the brain at the heart of Tavuto really had been a resource to make the rods from the Ministry look pitiful, then Wrack himself represented at least as much threat as whatever waited for them in the jung
le.

  What’s more, she had the means to snuff it out, and end her pursuit in the process, all in a matter of minutes. All she had to do was walk down to the hold, where Wrack’s monstrous form lay in its tank of preservative, and let loose those fists.

  But she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t turn Wrack over to Dust, nor should she destroy what he had become. Because no matter how much she hated him right now, he was her only friend in the world. He was the only one, even among the dead, who might truly understand, and—

  A shout came up on the deck. A cry of surprise, followed by a rustling against the hull, and then a solid bang that nearly shook her off her feet.

  A fight. Mouana abandoned her self-indulgent reverie, and cranked her guns to full power as the deck shook. There was a terrible creak, and more deep, slithery rustling; Mouana snapped her head around, waiting for the next impact, but the night air was silent but for the flutter of bats as they swooped for moths in the lights.

  “Blastwood,” came a cry from down the deck; Kaba’s voice. The ship’s searchlight came on, illuminating a colossal shape in the water.

  The tree had ploughed right into them; if their prow hadn’t been designed to ram leviathans, they would have crumpled against its mass. It must have been a hundred yards long, with bark like rock and branches that jutted into the air like sails. It was swamped in vines all over, and had tangled a dozen smaller trees into a raft, their canopies half-submerged like the heads of drowned men.

  As their searchlight swept across the vegetable platform, hoots and shrieks and skitters rose. A pack of things like insects hammered into the shape of monkeys bounded in terror from the beam, and a wildcat hissed from a tangle of branches, its eyes glowing like mirrors. Something big and green and doleful was nursing a wound on the edge of the dark; Mouana thought it was vegetation ’til its eyes shone. They were all castaways, trapped on the tree as it fell and now separated from the jungle by a mile of water.