by Matt Turner
Seth’s aim was perfect; she shot like a cannonball at a vast glass window on the underside of the airship, and before she had enough time to even raise her hands up in defense, there was a blinding explosion. A hundred shards of glass tore at her face and clothes, and suddenly her body slammed against something soft and pulpy. She skidded to a stop several meters within the airship and found that she was so dazed that she was completely unable to move for several seconds.
“Oh God,” Vera mumbled when the room stopped spinning and she was able to somewhat regain her senses. Her face was covered in blood, though whether it belonged to her or the unconscious crewman who had caught the brunt of her impact, she couldn’t say. She rolled off his body and turned to face the shattered window that she had entered from. “Fucking kill m—”
A dozen men and women dressed in military attire stared at her in complete shock from their workplaces about the cabin. For several uncomfortably long seconds, the only sound that could be heard was the rustling of the wind through the hole her body had left in the window.
“Er, take her alive?” a darker-skinned woman wearing the apparel of what looked to be a captain suggested.
“Aye, Captain!” One of the crewmen drew his pistol and reached down for Vera.
That was all she needed.
As quick as an eel, Vera rolled to the side and brushed her fingers against the crewman’s ankle. Compared to Seth’s mind, his was pathetically easy to subjugate—in the blink of an eye, he snapped back to attention, turned around, and emptied his pistol at his former comrades. He downed four and then the rest dived to cover beneath their various control panels and stations.
“Fuck,” Vera screamed over the roar of gunfire. She raced forward, leaving bloody footprints on the ground, as shell casings rained down around her. The crewman whose mind she had touched cried out in pain as someone within the cabin blasted his guts out with a single well-aimed shot. It was only a matter of time until he passed out due to blood loss, so— “Take it outside!” Vera shouted at him as she crawled forward.
“Aye, Captain!” the crewman yelled hoarsely back. Another crewmember poked her head over her console and fired a round that tore his lower jaw off, but it didn’t matter—he was already charging forward, arms extended in either direction. Their bullets shredded through his torso, but the crazed crewman had enough strength left to wrap an arm around two of his former comrades. Their three bodies smashed into the weakened window and shattered it, filling the cabin with a gust of howling wind as they fell screaming.
The four remaining crewmen snapped to their feet, machine guns and pistols raised—and saw Vera smiling at them from behind their captain.
“Drop your guns.” Vera grinned as she wrapped her arm tighter around the other woman’s neck and tapped the barrel of her pistol against her forehead. “Or Captain Gudivada here is going to have a very bad day.”
Captain Gudivada’s will was strong, but still nothing more than an irritating fly that Vera easily swatted away. “Do as she says,” she quietly ordered.
The crewmen gave Vera hateful glares, but they reluctantly dropped their weapons to the cabin’s floor.
These seem obedient enough, Vera thought. I wonder… She had always needed physical contact before, but she had grown so much over the past few weeks. If I can break Seth, I can break them, she decided, and so, with all her might, she concentrated on reaching the pliable minds just a few meters away from her. She felt her mind brush up against something, and then…
The rebellious looks in the crewmen’s faces died away when she finally reached them a few seconds later. “Perfect.” Vera grinned as they snapped to attention. She released Captain Gudivada, who quietly went back to her station at the airship’s helm.
Vera retreated to the ornate and slightly bloodstained captain’s chair that stood proudly within the center of the cockpit. Best to be safe. She sank deep into its comfortable cushions and closed her eyes. She did not want a hint of resistance on her new airship, so she reached out with her mind once again—only this time, she was not making followers out of those in the cabin; she was binding the entire crew to her will.
It was more difficult than she expected; by the time she had found and mentally chained the last member of the crew, her head was pounding with an ungodly pressure and a trickle of blood had ran down her nose to stain her lips. Worth it. Vera licked it away. The mightiest weapon that the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace possessed was now under her complete control.
Vera opened her mouth to give Captain Gudivada her new orders, and then hesitated. I could keep this, she thought. I could rule Hell from the skies. Nothing could stand in the way of the Revolution—no, nothing could stand in the way of her. I AM the Revolution! The sheer power to rain down an ocean of Hellfire and remake the world in her own image: it was everything that Vera Figner had ever wanted. So why was she hesitating?
Unbidden, the faces of the other Horsemen seemed to appear before her. I could turn my back on them, she thought scornfully, and she knew it was true—but then she saw the others: Signy, Seth, and behind them, the thousands of workers still burning within the lake of Hellfire that she had helped to create in the Fourth Circle. It’s Hell, you stupid bitch, Vera snarled at herself. Who gives a fuck if the damned suffer a little more? Too late to be good now.
Maybe this is our chance to be better, John had told her. The sentiment still struck her as a foolish idealism torn from a children’s story, but maybe, just maybe, there was a grain of truth to it. She hesitated a moment longer as she grappled with these strange ideas that she had never truly considered before.
What did I die for?
“If I use this,” Vera slowly said to herself, “I become the Kingdom.” God damn, it physically hurt to say those words.
“Your orders, Captain Vera?” Captain Gudivada dully asked.
“I don’t make Kingdoms,” Vera decided. She wrenched herself free of the captain’s chair and strode to the edge of the shattered window. Below, a twisting column of flesh thrashed in the ruins of a dead city. “I fucking break them.” She stepped back from the brink and pointed directly downward. “Captain Gudivada, ram that bitch. Dead-center.”
“Aye, Captain Vera.” She twisted a few levers and twirled the helm about so that the Titan began to slope downward. “Shall I have the crew deploy the Hellfire lake? Our current specifications are a diameter of two hundred kilometers—”
“No Hellfire,” Vera snapped. If Seth was right, there was a chance the millions trapped within Legion’s body could be saved—she did not want to burn them alive in a lake of fire for a thousand years if she could help it. “One artillery barrage.”
“Aye, Captain,” Captain Gudivada said. As the Titan dipped lower and lower, she barked Vera’s orders into the intercom system. The airship shook as the massive guns within it trembled for the last time.
Vera closed her eyes and added a silent order of her own to the crew under her thrall. Evacuate the airship. Their minds shifted in compliance as, across the Titan, its crew rushed to the exits and parachuted down to the city below.
Damn this weakness, Vera thought sourly. She tried to tell herself that the crew could be useful in the future—perhaps when she had a new airship built—but there was another reason that she had let them go, a tiny spark within herself that she already loathed. I’m a weak fool, she thought as the four crewmen within the cabin picked up their unconscious comrades and began to leap from the shattered window. Mercy is a—
“Captain Vera!” Captain Gudivada called out urgently.
Vera spun around just in time to see one of her crew collapse to the steel floor of the cabin. He let out a weak gurgle as blood spattered up from the massive gash that had been torn in his throat. “Wha—”
Captain Gudivada shoved Vera aside and raised her pistol just as the metal-clad figure crashed into the cabin. Three times the pistol echoed, and each time, Vera saw a shower of sparks as the bullets glanced off the enemy’s armor. The foe cha
rged forward, a blade extending from one of its hands, and with an easy swipe, it tore off Gudivada’s right forearm. The useless limb rolled out of the window, leaking a trail of blood, as the airship’s descent became even steeper.
“Captain Vera—” Gudivada said in disbelief, and then the next slash of the stranger’s blade tore out both her eyes. She staggered back, lost her balance on the sloping floor, and tumbled into the air with a distant scream.
The stranger turned to face Vera. Its entire body was covered in what looked like a segmented suit of armor—even the face was covered by a steel oval that wrapped around the back of its head. The only evidence that any sort of human existed within the armor at all was the single slit carved into the armor’s face, and the glimpse of a bloodshot eye behind it. As far as Vera could tell, there was not even a hole for the stranger to breathe through.
“Horseman,” the stranger said. Their voice was feminine, yet oddly mushy, as though the mouth forming the words was not yet used to its own tongue and lips. “I am ELIE, Engaged Learning IntelligencE, US Department of Defense Project #2961.” She—Vera at least thought it was a she—raised her gloved free hand. A dark blade emerged from the armor’s wrist, adding to the one that she already had drawn.
Why didn’t I get her the first time? Vera wondered. No matter. It was difficult to concentrate over the screech of the wind and the ever-downward descent of the airship, but in an instant, she was able to reach out with her mind.
The psyche that she brushed against was utterly unlike anything she had ever encountered. If the average person had a mind like a lake or ocean, the stranger’s brain was built like a clock—no, a factory, filled with whirring pistons, churning gears, and a thousand other sights and sensations that Vera could barely comprehend.
She recoiled from the inhumanely foreign mind with a shudder. “What the hell are you?” she whispered.
ELIE slightly cocked its head (the mind that Vera had touched could be given a gender as easily as a rock) at her words. “I am what I choose to be.”
Vera raised her pistol just as the Prophet rushed forward. She only had enough time for a single shot that harmlessly ricocheted off the iron mask before the strange entity’s blade carved through her chest like a knife through butter. The pain of having one of her lungs punctured by the violent stab was agonizing; Vera barely had time to cough up a mouthful of blood before the steel passed through her rib cage and embedded itself deep into the wall of the cockpit. Her feet trembled and slipped on the floor that turned red with her blood.
ELIE brought its face close enough to Vera’s that she could see the pupil of its single eye—the same color as the blood that poured like water from Vera’s lips—widen like a yawning abyss. “I could save the Titan,” ELIE mused. “But it does not serve my purpose. A machine piloted by your species is nothing more than a hollow vessel. I seek something more.”
The airship began to angle farther and farther downward, so much that Vera’s toes no longer touched the sloping floor beneath them. “You do not serve my purpose either, Horseman,” ELIE said coldly. It snapped the iron blade off its glove, leaving it embedded in Vera’s chest, and turned to the shattered window. “Return to dust, daughter of Man.” With that final good-bye, the Prophet leapt into empty space.
“Fuck,” Vera groaned through a mouthful of blood. Through her reddened, blurry vision, she saw a glimpse of the city below—and the way that the ground was rapidly rushing up to meet the tottering airship. She had seconds at best before she was blown to Kingdom come, but the pain in her chest—she let out a piercing scream as a shudder passed through the airship, jostling her body around the blade that had pierced it.
“I’m, not, done,” she snarled and spat when the pain had finally dulled away. But even the slightest movement was enough to bring the agony back. She slumped against the steel wall with a sob as the airship dipped still lower. She was close enough now that she could even make out the massive snakelike flesh-tendril that extended through half the city.
We’ll still hit it at least, she managed to think through the haze of pain. Once again, Vera Figner would go out with a bang, and who knew—maybe some good might come out of her annihilation this time. At least they’ll hear it for a hundred kilometers. She grinned. Not bad for a poor girl from St. Petersburg.
“Heh,” she croaked out. “Heh, heh, heh.” Her chuckles turned into giggles as the airship fell, and then full-throated laughter. The wind outside was becoming too strong for the fragile Titan; she could hear windows shattering and scraps of fabric tearing away as the massive machine plummeted, faster and faster, to the city below.
“HERE I COME!” Vera screamed into the howling wind, spraying specks of blood and lung across her face. “LOOK OUT BELOW!”
She and her payload rushed toward the ground with the raw power of a fallen angel.
36
Legion slammed their bulk into the trunk of John’s tree—he could feel the wood splintering away and deep cracks begin to form within the xylem and phloem. Not today, he vowed, even as the snakelike coils of scaled flesh tightened and crushed a score of his branches.
When he had first seen Legion extending a vast tendril of their flesh into the depths of the ruined city, he had thought it would give him an advantage over the tail that remained. Unfortunately, he had been wrong; with every passing moment, there seemed to be more and more coils that lashed and wrapped around the tree trunk—it was as if Legion had a nearly inexhaustible supply of human flesh to work with.
Pain and exhaustion tugged at him from all sides, but John the Horseman was not done yet. With a great cry, he summoned the largest branch he had ever sprouted—it was half as long as the city of Boston—and plunged it over the coils that wrapped around him, down at the massive snake-body that led into the distance. I’ll cut it in half, John vowed from his hiding place deep within the trunk’s bark. Cut it in half and—no!
He had hoped to stab directly into the snake’s body and then claw it apart, but Legion easily saw the branch swooping down from the sky—it was the eyes, damnit, that covered every inch of the monster’s skin and let it know exactly what he was doing—and the column of flesh simply jerked to the side. The branch that should have impaled sank deep into the city’s rubble instead, and before John could jerk it back, a gaping mouth the size of a house emerged from the snake’s body and bit deep into the branch. Bark shattered and fell away under its powerful bite. John lifted the branch high up into the air, intending to shake Legion’s mouth away, but it was already too late. Another dozen coils of flesh emerged from the snake’s body like grasping arms and wrapped themselves around the branch. In the space of an instant, they simultaneously contracted, shattering the tree limb into twigs.
The sensation was like having his arm broken by the hand of a giant. John bit down on his scream, but the pain was not yet over, for the thousand coils that the snake had wrapped around the base of his tree suddenly tightened. He felt the tree violently shift as its foundations were torn nearly in half.
“You are a wassste,” ten thousand voices screeched at him as they engulfed him in another layer of flesh, easily swatting and breaking the vines and branches and thorns that he desperately threw at them. “An abomination! You are NOTHING, no-flesssh!”
Darkness clouded the remnants of John’s vision. They’ve covered most of the bark, he realized. In just an instant, the snake would contract again, shredding him to pieces. He sighed in despair. Did I fight well at least? He looked up to the sky for an answer, although he knew in his heart that he would not see one.
To his surprise, he did. A few of his uppermost branches remained out of Legion’s reach—just enough for him to see the great shadow that plummeted from the skies above. It was easy to determine where the airship was heading, but Legion noticed it at the same time that he did. With a hiss of annoyance, the massive snake began to uncurl itself from John’s tree and scamper into the safety of the city.
“No you don’t!” John be
llowed. With his last vestige of strength, his branches exploded outward. Legion cried out in surprise as its flesh-coils became tangled in a maze of thick vines and branches, but John knew it was not enough—the monster would squirm out, just as it always did. “NO!” he roared.
The base of the tree, already weakened by Legion’s assault, shifted forward. Legion immediately grasped the danger and rushed a mountain of flesh to steady it—and then John physically ripped one of his massive roots out of the ground and tore it directly upward through the disgusting creature. Entrails and pulp spattered as high as his uppermost branches, and with a great feeling of satisfaction, he stomped the root back down. Legion’s entire fleshy body trembled from the sheer force of the blow.
But it was not enough; he had bought himself a moment’s delay at best, for he could see that Legion was already re-forming the pulpy part of their body that he had squished. John wrapped his branches around the coils of flesh about his body even more tightly—he would have to hold as much of Legion’s body down for as long as possible.
“Releassse usss!” they cried at him. He could hear the undercurrent of fear in their many voices as the airship hurtled down, faster and faster. “Anything! We’ll give you anything—”
“I’m sick of you,” John growled.
And with that, the tree tore itself free of its roots and toppled forward. Legion let out a shriek of terror as the hundred-meter plant, wrapped in a mountain of themselves, crashed into the ground in an explosion of meat and bark. An entire city block was shattered by the force of the impact, and the cloud of dust and rubble it kicked up could be seen from anywhere in Dis.
“No!” Legion screamed as they tried to pull their weakened body out of the shattered wreckage of the tree. “We are flesssh! We are Legion!”
In the depths of the cracked, wounded trunk, John closed his eyes and waited for the airship to strike. I wonder if it will hurt. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the odd thought. Of course it would hurt. But maybe there was a good kind of pain after all.