Lotus Blue

by Sparks,Cat

  She grew bolder, stepping forward to assist a large man with shrapnel lodged in his shoulder where he couldn’t reach. She held the pliers close to his face until he nodded and let her tend to his wounds.

  He didn’t flinch or make a sound until the last of the shrapnel had been pulled, and the last ragged edges of his wounds were stitched and bound and packed with salt. These people were used to pain and suffering. Qualities the Black required of its sailors. Qualities Star did not possess.

  When she was done, the big man smiled at her and said his name was Hackett. All further attempts at conversation were drowned out by hammering. How long had that been going on? She looked over, and saw that the busted side where the other ship had rammed was being repaired with pieces salvaged from its wreck.

  Exhausted, Star got up to stretch her legs, and stared over the side of the Dogwatch, her arms red up to her elbows.

  Hackett handed her the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette. She took it, even though she never smoked. Out here, everything was precious, every small gift to be treasured, from a kind word to a friendly glance or gesture.

  “Good job,” he said.

  She couldn’t even bring herself to look at his bandaged shoulder. It was not a good job. The odds were even that the wound would become infected. The smoke made her want to cough but she suppressed it, not wanting to show weakness. Not even in front of a man with such kind eyes.

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing to one of the tiny islands peppering this section of the Black.

  She could make out the silhouette of a structure on one, smoke rising up in a long, thin ribbon. “People live there?”

  “Reckon they might do,” he said, dragging deeply on his own cigarette, the scent of seaweed-baccy pungent. “Reckon they might be hankering for our leavings.”

  What they were leaving was bloody wreckage and a pile of corpses, Star thought.

  “They’re welcome to them.” She rubbed her arms, even though it wasn’t cold. The left one was throbbing more painfully than ever. She’d been able to ignore it once the battle started. Now she felt like she needed to check her own skin for injury, though not while anyone else was standing near. “Why don’t they attack us? Why do they just wait?”

  “Who’s to say they didn’t?” He flicked the butt over the side. “Sooner we pull out of here, the better,” he added.

  When the last of the crew’s wounds had been attended to—or at least inspected—she fetched herself a little of the salty water. Not much, as there wasn’t much to spare. She found a quiet corner and a scrap of rag. Inch by inch she cleaned strangers’ blood from her own skin, relieved to find no deep scratches or open wounds, until she noticed something that would have made such ordinary things welcome by comparison.

  Her left arm had been throbbing for a reason. The long sliver of metal under her skin, the one that had been embedded there since childhood, had changed. Impossibly, it had thickened. Nubs of metal had begun to grow from it like twigs on a branch. Metal tightly fused to her own skin. She stared at it in disbelief. Her own flesh, a splint embedded since she was ten years old. She’d been told there was nothing anyone could do about it—the metal could not be safely removed, so Nene had said. And so she had believed it, of course she had, because she’d never had a reason to doubt Nene—no one ever had. No reason at all until the day she learned her sister wasn’t her sister.

  The metal in her arm was growing. Pushing slowly through her flesh, reaching down to her bones was what it felt like. Picking at it caused spikes of searing pain.

  With trembling hands, she took the last of Bimini’s ripped shirt bandages and wrapped them around her metal-embedded skin before anyone could see that it wasn’t right. That she wasn’t right. Thoughts began to flood her mind but she pushed them quickly from her head.

  She jumped up, startled, when Lucius called her name, letting her dirty shirt sleeve cover her terrible secret.

  “You hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He frowned. “Something wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong,” she said bitterly. “But I’m okay. Did we lose many?”

  “A few.”

  “You crewed with some of these folks before?”

  He nodded, staring out across the Black at the solitary island Star had been checking out earlier. “Swore I’d never come back to this place. Swore it on the bones of many taken before their time.”

  The smoke snaked, coiled, and dissipated, snatched away by the wind. “People live on those islands,” said Star, hoping to change the subject.

  “People die on them, too,” Lucius replied. “Good people gone to face their gods too young.”

  = Thirty-one =

  Templar.

  The curse that followed Quarrel wherever he went, a name striking fear into the hearts of all who heard it. Backed up by ignorance, superstition, and loathing. How quickly the world had forgotten the bravery and endurance of his kind. How quickly they discarded the truth: that their kind manufactured his kind as protectors. Creatures to do their dirty work, to fight wars they regretted starting and couldn’t finish on their own. To rebuild infrastructures they’d reduced to rubble with their blanket bombing and invasion tactics.

  That the crew now knew Quarrel’s true identity was unfortunate, but it had its advantages. It served as a distraction from other truths, kept them worrying about the safety of their own miserable skins. Catering to their own concerns was something humankind did better than anything else. So few of them had the fortitude for serving the greater good, for caring about the centuries to come.

  Quarrel shifted his weight from foot to foot. The others had cold-shouldered him since the fighting, leaving him with nothing but the poisoned sky for company—which suited him fine. He needed time to process the latest broadcast message from Nisn. Not the regular itching nag: he’d received fresh specs and new directions. Loud and clear, the truth at last. He’d known it was coming, suspected all along. So this was what they’d awoken him for, this was what it had come to. The creature fouling up the sky, shitting out polyp storms—he should have known this wasn’t no Angel joyride.

  He should have stayed in Temple Nisn where it was nice and cool. Where children brought him offerings on small ceramic dishes. Where mothers knelt and shared with him their deepest, darkest secrets. Where fathers bowed and presented him with locks of their children’s hair for blessing.

  But instead those priests had cast him out upon the Black off to perform one more dangerous act, one more sacrifice in the service of their cowardly underworld.

  His suspicions had been correct: the Lotus Blue was awake and scheming. There was talk of poison codes and strategic bombs, with Quarrel as the delivery boy, of course. Last of the Templar warriors, last man standing, last real man on Earth.

  The ship sailed on. Islands, wrecks, and dog packs were thinning out. Not many had ever made it this far from shore. Quarrel stared, brooding across the Black, his mind an endless feedback loop of memories. Snippets from another life. Sometimes the barrier holding them at bay disintegrated:

  He is perched in an artillery observation post high in an old office tower, as they used to call them, watching an attack through a salvaged spotting scope, seeing the line of mecha-spiders advancing, scaffold skeleton silhouettes picking their way along Puckers Ridge.

  Meanwhile, beyond the minefields, trip flares, and outposts, a wall of Templars marches in lantern light. Moving too swift, which is a problem. Don’t wanna go swinging that muzzle round too fast—slow short bursts is best. Don’t leave a damn one of them mobile, that’s the key.

  But then spiders step out of the trees like living nightmares, erect, careful where they placed their legs, a long wavering line glowing in a halo of chips and muzzle flash. Shell bursts make flaming clusters twenty feet in th
e air, swift blooms over the vertical stems of mortar explosions. Flashes followed by abrupt silence.

  He sees the squad rushing, forty yards up and then to earth. Rising sunlight cuts the rim of the hill when the last of the spiders come at them, stepping around and over their dead with their elongated legs, a cloud of livestock fleeing down the hill.

  Then the whole platoon lets rip together; three of the four cut down in showers, hissing and spitting, electric death saturating the air. Tracers slamming like horizontal sleet. Keep your sights on where they fall. Like shooting drones. They gotta get up sometime and when they do, you’ll be ready. Shooting from a strongpoint a hundred feet away, yelling over the roar of their gunfire, howling and whooping and chanting wards and prayers. Keep your heads down, boys, and don’t waste ammo! The edge of frenzy accelerates over the stammering roar. The last one hits in a pillar of flames and smoke, and then burns and burns and burns.

  The picture froze, then disintegrated as Quarrel returned to the present. It was too much, too strong for his butchered memory to hold on to.

  He licked his blistered lips. To feign disorder and crush the enemy, that was what they taught you. Valley of shadows, shadows of death, bucking up and shipping out, picking up the pieces and moving on.

  He needed a drink, a fresh infusion of cool, pure energy. Quarrel needed a lot of things, but he wasn’t going to get them. Chew you up and spit you out, that’s a soldier’s lot. The whistle blows and its all over rover, and you’re left there standing around in piles of dead bodies with shit and blood all over you, fierce life hovering on the edge of rage.

  He thought the desert was all there was. There seemed to be no end to it. He wondered what kind of kill triggers the priests of Nisn had wired into his meat and frame, how far he’d get if he tried to abort or make a run for it. Would they go ahead and detonate him remotely, out of spite?

  He wondered about the geographical limitations of their influence, about what would happen if his mesh was smashed and broken beyond repair.

  Templar warriors used to fight because that’s what they were made for, for corp and country, because of the rush. Because fighting was all they knew and fighting meant exhilaration, ecstasy, and freedom. But now, what was there left to be ecstatic about? Sand and rocks and sky and sun and red.

  Screw that and screw the whole damn lot of them.

  Quarrel fantasized about clean peaks and dirty buzz. Of abandoned sands dotted with still-functioning Sentinels—and who knew how many other things besides. He was gonna risk it. Take a detour, go out on his own. See how far he got before they shut him down.

  In his mind he drooled over bright blue light. Somewhere out there lay the perfect high. He would walk the sands until he found it and drank deep of light, power and dreams.

  After all, what loyalty did he owe the ones who’d made him after the sorry ways in which they’d used him? He was looking for the ultimate high. Out with a bang, not a whimper—he can’t recall which general taught him that one.

  = Thirty-two =

  The Dogwatch continued its precarious passage through a landscape fallen dark and still. There was scant activity from competing ships and karts, and no lights or smoke visible on the occasional islands they passed.

  “Mind you stay where I can see you,” said Lucius, puffing on a pipe with a narrow stem. Star had never seen him smoke a pipe before. She didn’t question it—perhaps the Black drove everyone to smoke. There wasn’t much else to do in the gaps between fighting and chasing tankers. Out here, the old tankerjack was in his element whereas she knew nothing. Not how to brace herself properly against errant gusts of wind, nor avoid the boom when it swung in her direction. Not who to trust or how to trust them. She’d managed to glean a handful of their names. That was something. A start.

  “Catch some kip. I’ll watch over you,” Lucius said.

  She nodded, grateful for his kindness, then wedged herself into a nest of sacks, tightly resecured after the bloody on-deck melee. Nothing he could say would convince her to brave belowdecks, with its greasy stench and clanking reliquary. She would rather have foregone sleep altogether than enter that dark, cramped, and stinking space.

  But she couldn’t sleep, afraid that if she nodded off, she’d awaken to find her entire arm encased in metal. Part of her wanted to check her flesh at the sound of every bell. The rest of her wanted to bandage that arm up tight. Out of sight and out of mind, one of Yeshie’s familiar sayings, that one. Yeshie’s bag of amulets formed a comforting lump at the bottom of Star’s pocket. She used to make fun of the old woman’s faith, but right now merely touching that bag made her feel better.

  Eventually exhaustion had its way, and she managed her first true slumber in the days since leaving Fallow Heel.

  She awoke abruptly to the harsh clang of bells and jarring cry of “All hands about ship!,” extracting herself from a nightmare in which the bleak and barren landscape had come alive. Rocks had been rolling over to reveal themselves as tankers, crushing everybody in their path. Black birds had been circling overhead. White heat and endless sky. Star flexed her arm as the dream slowly faded away, feeling tentatively through the cloth. Mostly flesh, although she was far too frightened to strip away the bandage to inspect further. Her arm still ached, but so did everything else from sleeping in such uncomfortable conditions.

  The sky remained a bilious green. The air reverberated with sickening sound, so strong it turned her stomach. She bent over the railing and threw up the salted roo jerky she’d shared with Lucius previously—what little there had been of it.

  When the sound struck again, her stomach spasmed again, but this time she managed to keep herself from retching. She looked to the rest of the crew for clues. They’d heard it too, whatever it was. Those with free hands moved to port side, staring out across the Black-and-Red; the name Lucius had told her was given to the edge where obsidian met sand. One man high up in the rigging shouted and swore—words that made the others cheer and pump their fists.

  The Obsidian Sea did not stretch forever, as she’d once presumed. She hung Allegra’s spyglass around her neck, and aimed, adjusting the focus, to the place where the rest of them were pointing. Their ship veered close to that torn and jagged edge, where it seemed some mighty creature had been gnawing across centuries. Beyond it, red sand as far as the eye could see, quivering in the heat. And something else. Something moving.

  Suddenly rogue tanker swerved into clear view, running along the Red, sand streaming off its encrusted bulk like water. Then, close on its heels, a sandship somewhat similar to the Dogwatch; only a little longer, and definitely sleeker, a craft that had been built rather than knocked together, hotly in pursuit.

  That sound again, like nails raking through her own bones’ marrow. Star clamped her hands across her ears, expecting others to do the same. She was surprised when they merely shrugged it off.

  Dogs exploded over the horizon. Two packs merged, tearing in from opposite directions, rivals under ordinary circumstances, snapping and biting at each other’s heels, but in the moment focused ahead of them on the tanker, not each other.

  A hideous sound filled the heat-thick air, accompanied by the long, low drawls coming out of an instrument propped on the deck of the approaching vessel. It was some kind of horn made of battered brass, its farthest end a hollow, gaping maw. Their ship’s crew were beginning to prime their harpoon.

  Star placed her palms against her ears again. Lucius slapped them down.

  “It’s tankersong—get used to it,” he said.

  “But it hurts!”

  “The pain will pass.”

  The high-pitched tankersong was driving the dogs into a frenzy. They leapt and bowed and flipped summersaults in the air. Running out across the open Black, Star could finally get a good look at them. No two were alike. Some were snake-thin with elongated jaws
, others squat and muscular. Some were running on six legs. Others . . . she looked away, back up to the action on the churned up sand.

  “They’re bracing to throw,” shouted Grellan, a harpoon slinger himself according to the thatch of tattoos staggered down his arm. Star had been learning to read the marks.

  The harpoon on that other ship fired, so quickly that Star never even saw it strike its mark, just a flash of light and a puff of belching smoke and it had dug deep into the tanker.

  “Their towline’s secure!” reported Grellan, climbing higher on the rail, watching with his naked eyes despite the spyglass slung around his neck.

  All hands but the skeleton crew were now clustered along the port side rail. And Quarrel. Star couldn’t see where he’d gone. He must have been below, although how he would fit his massive bulk down there, she couldn’t imagine. He’d be furious when he got back on deck. All eyes were on the tanker chase. None were on the Black and its obstacles and ever-looming dangers.

  The tanker lurched, pulling the harpoon tether taut. A cry went up, audible despite the combined cacophony of tankersong and hunting ship’s horn.

  “Stand by and lower!”

  Six figures leapt down from the attacking vessel, running out onto the open sand with lances raised.

  The tanker itself did not look dangerous. Not yet. Just an exposed mass of barnacle-stone on wheels blasted by the sun and wind. But Star knew better. She’d seen the one that had taken Remy, up close and personal. Close enough to smell its stink.

  Six running figures reminded Star of rats scuttling up to a carcass. As the wail of the horn faded, she used the glass to bring the action close enough to make out fine detail. The figures were garbed similarly to the Dogwatch crewmen and women. Star held her breath as a couple swung grappling hooks and shimmied up the side of the great stone-encrusted metal beast. Another fired a crossbow bolt with a line attached. The tanker was holding steady but it wouldn’t do so for long. She held her breath as one of the climbing figures swung a pickaxe in a wide arc.