The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  12. TRIDENT

  I find Keeshom and Arnst in one of the staterooms on the way back up. I must have seen them earlier without realizing it, but then there's a lot I haven't realized lately. The bandage of Drake has blinded me for weeks, keeping the true extent of what I've done a secret while the wound beneath festered and spread. You can't kill yourself inside and just be fine.

  I'm not fine.

  I stand in the doorway and Keeshom looks up at me with a crumpled kind of hatred, like his body is a wrecked car and his face the shattered grille. Once this kind of look would have had me bent double in discomfort, struggling to understand.

  Now I welcome it.

  Their room smells of alcohol disinfectant and ammonia. Arnst looks like shit, lank and pale lying on his front with his scarred back open to the air. His eyes are open and he's watching me too, but who knows if that's fear or not. His back is healing over, the lash marks and welts slowly shedding their carbuncles of scabs, while the dark continent of bruising from his neck to his hips has faded to a jaundiced yellow.

  "Get ready," I say.

  Arnst rolls off his belly, pulling winces from Keeshom, and slides up into a tilted sitting position. He probably can't sit properly without substantial pain. Keeshom knows it, and feels the weight. I hammered that guilt in deep.

  "We're closing on Europe," I say. "I'm going to need you both above decks, helping Feargal with whatever shit he's doing. Arnst, I need you on your feet."

  His eyes are heavily lidded.

  "What's your plan?" he asks.

  He's not afraid of me. Good for him.

  I tell them the plan. It's loosely connected to the nonsense I was filling sheets of paper with above, though all those sketches served a double purpose, honing a skill I didn't even know I had; a way to manipulate the hydrogen line.

  Drake taught me, I suppose. Experience made it plain, and I know I'm not the first to attempt it. I've seen the video of Cerulean's transformation in Julio's pit, and I'm sure he did it too. During his final moments as his body swelled into a demon, he exercised control just long enough to save Peters and the rest. He had seconds only to master it, but still he gave us all a chance.

  I've had nearly three weeks.

  Standing in the doorway, I work these new pathways Drake and I built in my mind, carved out of my own art. It does seem fitting, that the same creative outlet that once brought on the twinges has now made me master of them. I sketch the outcome I want to see in my head, and the black light swells out of me like a fog, thickening the air.

  Keeshom is the first to respond; just like Feargal in the madhouse, his eyes go black and his skin tinges gray. Arnst follows. I don't understand it, but then I didn't understand the blast that began this apocalypse, I don't understand Lara's vision on the stage, and both of those still happened, so who cares? It's real, and it works.

  I push harder, vomiting paralysis into them even as I tell them their roles. When Keeshom starts to tremble and his breath wheezes in and out in synchrony with Arnst, I let my grip go. The sketches in my head fall flat, breaking into doodles that evaporate easily; a very temporary cairn. The effect won't last long, barely more than a few minutes with this kind of dose, but for that time they won't be in control of themselves. They'll listen to me and follow my law.

  "On deck," I tell them. "We've work to do."

  I find the women in the 'radar' room, set up and tuned by Hatya with equipment stolen from one of LaGuardia airport's control towers. On a plain green screen a green line circles, beeping repeatedly as it finds no high-altitude drones within range, again and again.

  Hatya shrinks as I come in, as she always does. Lydia stares at me with hate. As usual, I just look at her until she looks away. It's not that I enjoy this, because I don't. It's that she really is only a tool to be wielded, and the best tools don't squeak when they're used.

  So I apply a little oil. I sketch my way deeper into the future, mapping onto her the plan. I dive like Cerulean and grapple with the threads of that slippery feeling, honing it into a weapon.

  Into a shield.

  Into a war.

  I keep on until both their eyes go woozy and black. It feels like tensing a muscle, and the level of control I have over it is sharpening with each exposure.

  "You're needed on deck," I say in a flat monotone. "We're nearing Europe."

  They follow me out.

  On the deck I stand under the hot evening sun and look at Feargal. He nods. His drone armada is ready. Around us the eight speedboats are prepared, having been towed across the ocean for three thousand miles. Under Hatya's careful hand the radar array is beeping to mark the French coastline, but it's not the only radar I have now. Like Peters or Crow or even Anna, I can feel each person nearby as hot red blips on my skin.

  I never used to have that, though I'd heard them talk of it often. Now I do.

  I feel the six red dots of us, and a faint sense of warmth from far back west, while ahead there is nothing at all.

  Standing at the prow I imagine the shark-eyed man out there blocking my path, a black slash of ink on the beach, waiting for the long siege of Europe. He's already tried to kill me and all my people several times, and he'll try again today, so I will too. There is no limit to the atrocities I will commit.

  "Prepare the boats," I order.

  Feargal begins. We rig a pulley from the yacht to the speedboats and transfer the equipment, then rig heavy-duty cabling to connect them together in three chains. Each chain has three speedboats in it, except for the master chain which includes the yacht. Each boat has a pair of mannequin figures settled in front of the wheel, fitted with a heating array so that from above, in infrared, they'll look passably like people.

  It doesn't take long. When it's done my team stand before me as the sun comes down, casting purple shadows across the yacht's deck like bruised fruit. This is the time for an inspirational speech, but I don't give speeches now. Instead I flex the black light, twingeing them all, reminding them where they've come from and what they've become.

  Then I get into my speedboat, the second in the central chain, and Feargal follows. Keeshom and Arnst get in the rear boat in the left chain, while the girls go to the yacht's wheelhouse, leading the chain on the right. We all fire up our engines, running the front ones with a remote control system Feargal and Lydia designed together.

  The gentle lap of the sea is torn by the three engines chewing up the water. It's getting dark now, which is as good a time as any. I give the signal, and Feargal and I start due east. Keeshom and Arnst angle northeast, the girls head southeast, and our devil's trident assault of the Bordeaux coast begins.

  * * *

  Three miles out, traveling over choppy and dark waters, we get our first pings on the radar. There are vehicles up ahead, and Predator-class drones high above, flying fast.

  "Ready for impact," I call over the radio.

  At the same time Feargal launches his first rotor drone. It is caught by the wind at once and batted hard toward the coast, where in seconds its light is extinguished in the ocean.

  "Rolled," he says calmly. "I can adjust for that. I'll take it higher."

  The second he sends shooting hard up, so that even when the wind snatches it and sends it tumbling east, it has time to catch the angle and ride it. Feargal works the controls with calm concentration, while I sit and wait, watching the radar blip noisily for the two enemy drones far above.

  The dark line of the coast is in sight now, a cut black line where the burgeoning stars begin. Their drones likely have bellies full of missiles, possibly six each. Enough to take out all our boats, both decoys and real, but it should be near impossible for them to distinguish which is which. I have to believe that with the dark, and our camouflage and this fast forward charge, we will make it through.

  The first blast comes two miles out from shore.

  FRUMSHH

  In the dark I don't see it, but I'd guess it strikes the ocean a few hundred yards in back of us, sen
ding a wave to rock the rear boat in our chain.

  FRUMSSH comes another, then another, as the drone's first scattered volley from far above strikes, and then-

  BANG

  Something is hit. A fireball erupts in the dark from what looks to be a speedboat off to the left, one of Feargal and Arnst's chain, though there's no way visually to detect which boat it is. We declared radio silence to better protect our locations, so I can't check if they're dead, atomized on the water, or even now unhooking from the broken ship and driving on.

  I propel us forward, as more loud splashes kick up with expended missiles, one digging out a cavity in the water right ahead of us that sends spray across our faces and drops us briefly into its trough. The engine splutters as it loses its grip, but catches hold again just in time for-

  BOOOM

  The boat behind us blows in a firestorm of orange and yellow light that sears across my retinas. Feargal is busy hunched over his tablet, organizing his drone assault in return along with Keeshom and Hatya on their respective boats, so it falls to me to run back and pull the emergency halter to disengage the chain.

  The line slips just before the sinking boat tugs us down after it. In the conflagration I see the mannequins at the wheel, burning hot, then we're pulling away and-

  FRUMSHH

  Another missile hits right next to us, almost tipping the boat, then BANG, another strikes the boat ahead of us, and I'm running again to the front where I disconnect us. The waves toss us but I manage to drop in beside Feargal, take the wheel and pedal the accelerator hard forward. The boat responds at once, chopping violently over the waves and past the burning, broken hull of the lead decoy.

  A mile out, and hopefully they're out of missiles.

  "Nothing yet," Feargal reports, focused intently on his tablet display. The sound of his drone's rotors is long gone now, lost in the melee and hovering somewhere over the beach. I lean to look at his tablet display, where the infrared camera mounted on the drone's belly gives a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the surrounding coast.

  "That's us," says Feargal, pointing at a cluster of tiny red punctuation marks at the left of the screen, amidst a minefield of hot red blasts. It's hard to make out anything on the beach in the cold blue dark, though there is the ghost of a road there, retaining more of the sun's heat than the undergrowth or the sand. It leads inward, to a circular road that bypasses Bordeaux to the north.

  I'm expecting them to be well dug-in here. With the drones overhead, it makes sense that they've prepared this as their first line of defense. Our course for the last two weeks has been clearly aimed at this for just that reason; to force them to gather in one spot, where we can see them coming. Perhaps they didn't expect our group to fragment into three chains though, offering three attack vectors with few clear targets. I try to imagine the man with the shark eyes now, making rapid calculations about how best to head us off.

  How many men has he got? How many suits do they have? Are there more drones waiting to launch?

  "Drop the flare," I say, and Feargal pushes a button on the control tablet. Like a Yangtze book delivery, the drone drops the flare, which triggers on impact and shoots up, bursting red and smoky across the starry sky three seconds later.

  It's a tiny echo of the bloody white eye over New LA.

  His drone turns its lights to full and races along the beach, switching from infrared to regular video. I watch on the screen with my heart in my mouth as our hull beats forward over the waves. Feargal scrolls the drone up and over the dunes to the road, where something gray and tall extends out of a squat concrete block, and-

  RATATATATATATAT

  Bullets spray from the gun turret, audible even this far away, and Feargal lofts the drone upward. My heart runs a double beat, because this even more than the drones confirms they're nearby, in waiting. We scan the tablet screen as the beach slaps closer; the sand and road and nearby buildings look bloody in the red glow, but there is no sign of Shark-eye's people. They must have a signal on us now, so another missile or artillery blast is surely incoming, but the radar only bleeps for the circling drones and now the gun turret.

  "Take it out," I hiss at Feargal, and he navigates the drone through the RATATATATATAT air, easily coasting above the furious hail of bullets. Four metal hoods shield the machine gun barrels like silver petals, spitting out fiery pollen, and the drone comes to roost atop them like a cuckoo in a foreign nest. We both study its visual on the world below, hunting for any signs of movement before this camera is lost, but still there is nothing.

  Feargal taps the button for detonate, and over a mile away the explosives taped to the drone's underbelly blow. The sound of the blast carries cleanly across the water, and we watch as the puff of flame ignites like a tiny lighthouse, then is gone. The drone's feed cuts out and the RATATATATATAT halts, just as the red flare falls to earth and we are blind again.

  Feargal goes to ready another, but I hold out a hand. I feel something changing on the wind, something on my skin. I didn't feel it earlier, but there's something out there that reminds me of Salle Coram in her suit, standing over the Maine bunker and explaining the responsibility she was leaving to me.

  It's a hollow shape on the line, like noise-canceling headphones, like white noise pouring out into the radio spectrum, but it's there and I feel it.

  It has to be helmets. The boat THOCKs closer over the waves and the signals resolve more clearly, a string of empty pockets in the air, like the strange tingle of passing down into the bubble of the Maine shield. The harder I focus the more clearly I can feel them, shifting across my skull in shades of white static.

  There are ten, and one of them is the man with the shark eyes. I feel him as surely as I felt him in every drawing I made in my furious nest. He is quieter than the rest, motionless in motion and spewing out his own bubble of silent control that helps shield his men from me.

  "They're coming," I say, then-

  There's a singing WHEEEE whine for half second, a slim line splash like a diver perfectly entering the water, then the ocean bursts nearby with an angry wet FRUMSSH bark that tosses us sideways. The boat slams down hard on its side and almost capsizes, but we both hold tight and lean hard against the roll, which sends us slapping back to level with a soaking splash. The shock wave subsides and the ripples fade and I listen. Now it's artillery, and they'll be range-finding for the next few shots, and then there'll be-

  WHEEEE splash FRUMSSH

  It comes on the other side this time, harder and closer and so bright that the glow of it shines up through the water like a star being born, then we're storming forward again, the boat's hull beating THOCK THOCK THOCK over the waves on a direct line for the beach. Feargal fires a second flare by hand, shedding a fresh rain of red light over the dark beach head, and now we can see figures moving, and behind them rises the ghostly specter of something massive, which can only be a helicopter.

  I laugh madly.

  The THUMP THUMP of its blades carries out to us, then there are more WHEEEs of falling artillery that splash and make water-cratering FRUMSSH blasts in our wake, and I zigzag us on. Feargal tosses a second drone up into the wind and sends it high as I pull us away at a sharp angle, now veering hard north away from the helicopter. We can't bull through that. It gives chase, shooting out a bright white beam that spotlights the bloody red water, followed by a thunderous roll of automatic gunfire.

  RATATATATATATAT

  THUMP THUMP

  It picks up our trail with its two massive rotors churning the air, and I race us away, spinning the boat while Feargal works his controls. Freezing spume sprays across our faces and I feel wild, like the whole world is coming down around us. I holler out my madness at the helicopter as it strafes after us, ripping the ocean with its sewing-machine fusillade.

  RATATATATATATAT

  I feel them on the line as they come into range, and that revelation tips the world again. For three thousand miles across the Atlantic it was a theory. Drake trained me
on Feargal and the others, honing the art of my control, but there was no way to know if it would work on soldiers in helmets until we faced them, until we leaped into the lion's mouth.

  But I feel them. Even through the helmets, I feel the faint heat of their signatures on the line, leaking through the imperfect seal of their shields as they peel away from the steel of the shark-eyed man, just as I'd hoped. A little something of who they are creeps out and carries to me like blood in the water.

  They may control the air, but I'm the shark on the line. This is my world and they're just tourists in it.

  I yank the speedboat round to face them as they pull in, stoking my madness like a furnace, fuelled by the light of the white eye in my memory, and dig deep and work my mental brushes and roar the black light out at them.

  It soars like a rocket and bursts in a cloud around them, smothering them in black. We race on and the RATATATATATAT cuts out as they freeze, and the helicopter's ripping THUMP THUMP advance halts.

  "Now," I shout, as our boat tears through their helicopter's search beam and beyond, and at my side Feargal steers a final course on his tablet, and as we strafe by I turn back to see-

  BANG

  His drone crumples in a brief bite atop the huge helicopter's rear rotors, sucked in by the downdraft. The orange flame is gone in a second, and for a second seems to have no effect, until the helicopter begins to twist. I let go of my grip on the four minds in the air and sink panting onto the speedboat's deck, as the fist of my own rage rushes back to hammer into my skull: one, two, three, four huge blows that leave me reeling and twingeing so bad I want to cry.

  But I can't cry, and lift my leaden head to watch as the rear rotor barks roughly, sparking like an angle-grinder cutting steel, then ruptures. There is the smallest of secondary explosions as the rotors' great arms jam and tear from their reinforced hub, then the rear end drops.

  It hits the water hard and sinks harder, taking on water through the open gun bays. Gunfire rips out again desperately, as if that could keep it afloat now, a RATATATATAT stream that skims across the waves and dives into the ocean. Then the back end is under and the body angles up sharply like a diver making a smooth entrance, yanking the search light on the front to paint the sky like the bat signal. The front blades lash furiously at the ocean, spinning the dying craft in tight circles, and I catch the muffled sound of men yelling as they seek to abandon ship.