The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  The Alaunts opened the throats of their guns, and bullets slammed against Gunakadeit’s stern, whipping over their heads and burying themselves in the hull patches the crew had set up as barricades. Gritting her teeth at the thought of a shell to the face, Mouana squinted over the rim of her cover, and was rewarded by the sight of the lead Alaunt rupturing under the Bastard’s hail of fire. Its engines screeched, then erupted in a crown of white fire, sending the wedge-prowed gunship plunging into the sea as it lost its fight with gravity.

  The elation was brief: even as one escort foundered, the other thundered over them, letting rip with its ventral guns in the process. The Alaunt passed close enough to make the deck shake with its field-effect, and a scream rose from across the quarterdeck as bullets streaked into bodies from above.

  “Hold fire,” repeated Mouana over the bark of the guns, keeping her eyes on the lumbering shape of the Mastiff. It was a slower beast, but had sunk down to deck-level and was closing on them fast. The Bastard had brought some of its heavier guns to bear on the craft, but still they did little more than rock the assault ship as the shells burst against its shields. The Mastiff was built to deliver infantry under withering fire, and soaked up the punishment like spring rain.

  Mouana stared it down, fixing her eyes on the massive armoured drawbridge at its prow, and waited for it to surge forward. Gunfire erupted behind her as either the Pentangle or the Chekov’s Gun engaged with the other escort craft, but there was no point paying attention—if they didn’t unload everything they had when the carrier’s jaw hit the deck, they were fucked whatever happened.

  “Wait... wait!” urged Mouana above the howls of the wounded, and levelled her rifle at the Mastiff’s jaws as they loomed. Beside her, Eunice began to spin up the barrels of her weapon, and rumbled what sounded a lot like a cheerful song. “Faaaaack OFF!” hollered the Bruiser, waving his shotgun like a club, and the crew took up the cry.

  As if rising to the challenge, the mammoth assault craft gunned its engines and surged forward, its jaw falling open and a chorus of yells and war-screams blasting from its throat.

  “Fire!” screamed Mouana, as the iron jaw clanged down on the deck’s lip, and the air filled with hot steel.

  First out of the Mastiff were two enormous brutes in rough-forged armour; iceball cultists with bearded helms and rotten fur totems spilling from their shoulders. They advanced behind man-high shields, singing a death hymn as they waded into the steel blizzard.

  Their armour sang with countless impacts, and they staggered as if against a wind; in the strobing glare of the muzzle flashes she could see the iron dissolving under the onslaught. But they made it far enough to slam their shields into the deck, forming a barricade of their own before they collapsed, their song drowned by the blood in their lungs.

  Even as they fell, their fellows were streaming from the trireme’s throat, vaulting over their carcasses in a torrent of mad snarls and roaring shotguns. These were not the disciplined ranks of the Blades, but madmen drawn from the desperadoes and transients who followed the company across the worlds, hoping to earn a uniform. The irregulars.

  Mouana, like the rest of the company, had always treated them with fear and disdain, those lunatics who lived in sprawling, filthy tent cities behind the lines. They were men and women with nothing to lose, who volunteered for the truly hellish assaults in the belief that if they survived enough charges, they would earn a commission in the company. Few ever did, but the hope was enough to make them almost god-touched in their fervour.

  “DUST!” howled an emaciated woman as she leapt onto the defenders’ barricades, face set in a snarl of an ecstasy beneath bandaged eyes. She raised a monstrous axe assembled from engine parts, but crumpled sideways as a shotgun blast took out her leg. Before she hit the deck, a pack of loping swamp-men had clambered up and over the line; they dived at Mouana’s crew with flintlocks and bone knives, slashing and thrusting even as bullets punched holes in their bodies.

  The mass of defenders pushed forward, sailors with billhooks and flensing poles craning over the front line to thrust at the onrushing savages. In front of Mouana, the Bruiser’s broad back dipped and his arm came surging up with a lit bottle of preservative, in an arc so practised it was almost elegant. The firebomb burst in the Mastiff’s throat and shrieks rang from its interior, but still more bodies came, swinging weapons even as fire danced on their limbs.

  Eunice was a wall of rage next to Mouana, her face a rictus as the chaingun carved apart the stream of attackers. But for all that fury, they were losing ground. For every attacker that joined the heap around the cultists’ shields, three more swarmed over the pile, with only a few yards of deck to vault before they reached the sailors’ lines. And their defence was weakening; ammo clips were emptying, dead hands were fumbling as they struggled to fit new ones.

  Mouana cried for her troops to pull back, hoping a little more space would give them a better killzone, but there was no chance of being heard over the thunderous whine of the chaingun beside her. Then she glanced back to make sure their path was clear, and realised they had bigger problems.

  The Pentangle was dying, its ammunition store belching a column of flame as it cooked off. The fire-plume lit the bellies of the three surviving Alaunts as they circled in the fog above, dark shapes like scavengers round a dying whale. Already one was descending to their now-undefended starboard flank, while the others roared high over the deck to duel Chekhov’s Gun.

  Figures were leaping down from the settling trireme already, and as many broke their legs as found their feet. But even the maimed were undeterred, and those that made it down intact whooped and cackled as they spread out over uncontested deck. Gunfire came from the ship’s prow as the sailors Mouana had stationed there moved amidships to tackle the boarders, but she knew the bulk of her force was here, locked in a desperate struggle against the Mastiff. With the Pentangle sunk and the Gun engaged, they risked being surrounded and overwhelmed if they couldn’t link up and hold the ship’s centre.

  Eunice’s gun fell silent for a moment as the giant reloaded, and Mouana gave the call to pull back, the tape on her chest wound pulsing as she strained for volume. After a brief look behind her, Eunice caught on, and began dragging the sailors in front of her backwards. Some, too addled by death to notice the retreat, stayed at their positions to be swallowed by the flood of irregulars, but their demise bought time for the rest to begin struggling down the quarterdeck ladders, firing all the way.

  As Mouana took the first shaking step back down the stairs, the world turned white and there was a terrible crack of thunder. The deck rumbled: through the wall of fog, a prow loomed—the Bastard. With the Mastiff hovering stationary off their stern, the Bastard had closed the gap and brought its main cannon to bear, putting a shell right through the thing’s shields.

  For a second the carrier just shuddered in the air, sheet lightning crackling across the hull as its shield struggled to reform. Then flames gushed from its mouth as its engine caught, and the craft tilted backwards into the sea. Its hooked jaw held its grip on their deck for a long moment, and Mouana could have sworn the whole deck tilted as it pulled them down, but then the hinges ripped and the Mastiff fell away.

  If the crowd of irregulars on the deck cared that their ship had exploded behind them, they didn’t show it. Singed bodies, thrown from the mouth of the carrier as it died, simply staggered to their feet and screamed their general’s name, as if the Mastiff had been sacrificed in her honour. In moments they had their vigour back, and were charging across the quarterdeck at the sailors still holding the stairs.

  The situation was no less grim on the main deck. The Alaunt was level with their deck now, and dozens of irregulars were spilling from its side hatches. They teemed over the sealed hold, kicking over the smouldering remnants of the roasting fire, and swarmed up the nest of cranes and antennae at the ship’s centre.

  Before she knew it, Mouana’s force was pinned between the quarterdeck and t
he hold, hemmed in and fired on from both sides. A flaring shape arced into the press from the top of the stairs and only the desperate dive of a sailor, their torso already riven nearly in two by a blade, stopped the bomb from carving a ten foot crater in her force. If the irregulars were reckless enough to use grenades on a ship they were trying to capture, the fight was all but over.

  By way of emphasis, the mist overhead parted to reveal the open belly of the Aquila as it descended, lift cables already dangling. Below it, madmen were savaging the hold’s doors with axes and welding torches—given another minute, she thought, they’d have the top off and be able to winkle Wrack’s casket out like meat from a shell.

  Mouana screwed shut her eye, spat, and cursed Wrack’s name. The craven bloody librarian wouldn’t lift a finger to help, and now he was going to suffer for it. She had no idea what Dust had planned for his mind once she got hold of the vessel that contained it, but she knew for sure she would be delighted to find it held a human consciousness.

  Wrack was going to suffer in a way that made what he’d been through so far seem like a laugh, unless she did something insane. Mouana cursed him again, but before she could work out whether he deserved saving or not, her sabre was drawn.

  Smacking Eunice on the shoulder with the pommel to get her attention, Mouana gave the warbuilt a grim nod and pointed at the mob of irregulars on the hatch. Eunice nodded back, then turned to the sailors and gave a booming roar as she swept her huge fist forwards. When the charge started, Mouana was already ten feet ahead of it, weapon raised and howling. As she lurched headlong into three crack-toothed axemen, she tried to ignore the fact her sailors were chanting Wrack’s name.

  THESE, AND MANY other strange wonders—the parasitic eel-nymphs that wind around trunks and branches, the germ-lights that glow in the litter and the pungent fruits that lie rotting among them—experienced altogether defy words, and solicit a sensation of awe and—

  Shrapnel lanced through the cabin wall and embedded itself in his carapace, making Wrack flinch. Couldn’t they keep it down out there, he thought, mouthparts ticking with irritation? He was trying to read.

  These, and many other strange wonders, he began again, before one of the bloody triremes swooped past outside and rattled a window from its frame. He must have started this paragraph over a dozen times, but the damned battle kept taking his attention. What with that and the phantom sensation that someone was hammering on the roof above his head, it seemed the world was out to break his concentration. This was a terrible library.

  This time, Wrack made it as far as parasitic eel-nymphs, before the book was snatched from his claws. He gurgled in fury and lashed out with a pincer, but not in time to stop Fingal hurling the tome across the room.

  “Mo’dred’s grudge, man, this is no time for fucking books,” seethed the rebel, as he glanced out of the window and reloaded his weapon. “Are you fully out of your mind?”

  “Yes,” said Wrack, in the measured tone of his new voice.

  “Well, get back into it,” growled Fingal between clenched teeth, as he took a volley of shots at a passing gunship. Somewhere in the mist, the silhouette of a trireme flared as a shell burst against it, then broke apart and tumbled into the sea in a shower of fire. “I’ve done my best to humour you, Wrack—grief knows I have—but I can’t abide a bloody coward. Your father’d be ashamed to call you ‘son,’ acting like this.”

  “Don’t you say a damned thing—” started Wrack, but Fingal had grabbed his body from the table and thrust it at the broken window, shaking him as he pointed him at the deck of Gunakadeit.

  “Your friends are getting cut to pieces,” gnashed Fingal, barely holding his rage. “The people you freed: the people you lost your body for, and my people besides, who’re willing to die for the same. They’re getting butchered, because you’ve had enough. Let me tell you this,” said the man, holding Wrack’s camera within an inch of his own dead eye, “you don’t get bored of a revolution. You’re in it ’til you die, and if you get the chance then you carry the hell on afterwards. So get your head together and fight.”

  MOUANA GROWLED AS the blade bit into her thigh, using the second it took her opponent to dislodge it to ram her sabre through the warrior’s neck. She was still freeing her own weapon, sawing against vertebrae, when another attacker bore down on her with a mace clenched in a blood-caked fist.

  As the weapon swung, a ceramic fist swept in over her head, and Eunice sent the man spinning back over the hold. The warbuilt was leaking fluids from a dozen hydraulic punctures, but only seemed to grow more savage as the fight drew on. Dipping to avoid a shotgun blast, she lowered her head and ploughed into a ragged line of irregulars, bowling them onto their backs. The deck shook as she trampled their bodies to bone-flecked paste.

  To her left, a group of living sailors were firing into the melee from behind the carcass of a Kuiper Ochsemann, while the Bruiser appeared to be genuinely boxing with a scaly-armed aug woman at the edge of the fray. They were slowly pushing the irregulars back along the deck, but the fanatics still had control of the hold, and had all but cut through the locks holding it shut.

  Mouana was turning to assess the fighting on her right, when a hammer smashed into her chest, flattening half her ribcage and sending her sprawling to the deck. A monstrous figure towered above her, already winding up for a second blow. She jerked her shattered body to avoid the impact, but the hammer came down like a steam press, flattening her left arm below the elbow.

  She scrabbled for a blade with the remnants of her right hand as the hammerman limbered up for another swing, and then, abruptly, he was staggering back with a harpoon in his chest. Bawling Mouana’s name, Eunice leapt over her body and knocked the man to the ground. Hands dragged Mouana back towards the huddled knot of defenders, and she didn’t so much hear as feel the impact of the warbuilt’s fist as Eunice finished the man.

  WRACK SIGHED TO himself as he looked out over the carnage on the old whaleboat. Once again, it had become clear that he only held any interest to these people as a weapon. So be it, he thought, as he let his consciousness sink down into the gloom below the hold doors. He would be a weapon. He was in a vile mood anyway.

  The casket was stale and stifling. His head throbbed with the clanging of the preymeat on the doors above, and the darkness itched with limbs he did not have. With a shiver, he let his phantom tentacles uncoil into the hold, filling the dank space and making the dark itself writhe.

  He yearned to rip and slash, to constrict and chew, and his many bodies felt it now. They came slinking from the bilges and scuttling from the hull’s dead spaces, scaled and rotting on filth-crusted cradles of spidery limbs. Sharks and eels and rays, wolf-serpents and sprödewurm, abyssal things with faces full of slivered knives. They circled his coffin and coiled round its supports, clustered on its top to stare up at the clanging hatch.

  The doors flew open, and a ring of faces peered down into the gloom. He grinned up at them, and fire twinkled on the black glass of his teeth. They shrieked, then, but it was too late.

  Let’s go hunting, thought Wrack, and let rage take him.

  AT FIRST, MOUANA thought a trireme had crashed into the ship. There was a deafening boom, and a deep vibration passed through the hull. But it was blackness instead of light that blossomed, and the rumbling seemed to build in her own bones. All around her, sailors with catastrophic injuries leapt to their feet with wild eyes and snapping jaws, and she herself felt the urge to sprint and slaughter, despite being shattered beyond crawling. The air stank with fury, and the terror of her enemies lingered like meat-scent.

  It was Wrack, she realised, as a wail of fear rose from the invaders around the hold. It was the black pulse. Wrack had tapped into whatever vile power festered inside the Teuthis device, and let it free from its chains.

  The terrible anger raced through her and she thrashed on the floor, desperate to kill even as she tried to reason out what was happening. Then hell came from the hold. She watched from t
he ground as the Tavuto’s beasts—more than she had any idea had slunk aboard—burst from the hatchway in a tsunami of slime and bone and fins to set upon the attackers.

  Even the irregulars, blood-deep in war drugs and madness, could do little more than shit themselves as the monsters came on. Mouana, whose hip still bore the wound of one of Tavuto’s spider-sharks, could even have felt pity for them, if she hadn’t been slavering with hunger for their meat.

  As the invaders on the quarterdeck saw the slaughter at the hold, they began backing away to the ship’s edge. But there was nowhere to retreat to, and despite her every effort not to, Mouana savoured their screams as her sailors tore them apart.

  This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, you search in vain for traces of man; you feel you are carried into a different world from the one you were born into.

  Alexander von Humboldt,

  Personal Narrative of a Journey to the

  Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  WRACK CROUCHED AT the edge of the Asinine Bastard’s deck, tearing crumbs from a loaf of bread with his claws. Grand Amazon lay next to him; scuffed and dogeared and stained with blood and brine, but still holding together, still readable.

  In front of him and around him, vast and hot and dense, was the real thing. The river churned at the warship’s hull just as it lapped at the distant red bank, warm and silty and scouring. Pristine in its filth, calming in its restlessness, an ocean in perpetual transit.

  The jungle crawled by in the distance, all its grandeur reduced to a stippling of green against the clouds. Every hour or so the trees gave way to towers and docks, but from this far away, ruins were indistinguishable from ports. Other than the occasional white streak of a refugee boat, the wildness of the place was loud as thunder.