by Sparks,Cat
The tankers are messy and individual. He has to convince them, one by one. Not like those nice and clean cut, brainless Angels. The General suffers from regret. He wishes he hadn’t dropped so many of them down out of the sky. He might have made better use of those Angels if he’d been thinking straighter. From now on, he resolves he will be more sparing with his limited resources.
The excavation of the bunker complex is going better than the General might have hoped. Slow at first, with only a handful of willing Templars to use as implements. All crazy, every one of them, so many broken down to the point of uselessness. But they’ve managed to dig down into the compound, burrowing like rats into a cache of equipment intended for construction of other bunkers and other compounds in other centuries. Earth moving equipment. Getting it out has not been easy, getting it fixed and started even harder. He’s lost many Templars, clumsy oafs ground to paste between slipped cogs, but more have come, answering his call, walking in across the desert from who knows where they’ve been hiding out all these years. Some half dead like animated corpses. Some no longer resembling men at all. But they come to the bunker, get down, and start digging. Moving sand and shifting beams. Babbling on about the glory days, believing all the lies the General feeds them.
His Templars have cleared a big rectangular grid: A forty-eight-element high frequency antenna array, preserved in still, hot sand. Beyond it stands a power generation building, imaging riometer, and a flat roofed operations centre built of cinder blocks. The General is planning to investigate reinvigorating ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. Bring the cluster of ELF wave transmitters back online, slamming their 3.6 million watts up at the ionosphere.
In time, he’ll have the whole thing patched up and running.
After a week of clearing the array they dig out the dishes and the towers. By use of satellite, the General can now see much farther than before, can listen to the faintest signs of far off lands and places. A crypto-anarchic chittering and murmuring via strained quadruple diversity propagation paths. They are out there, others like himself. He has no confirmation yet, but is sure of it.
Others of his kin and kith. Clever mecha, not the big dumb brawn barrelling across the flats but a chain of super capacitors, each with a Lotus General at the helm. There would be evidence of high level dynamic reconfigurability—evidence of his own kind. That is what the General listens for.
= Forty-one =
Tully Grieve tugged hard upon his chains. The half-dead man beside him moaned. The man chained to his other side had ceased his moaning hours ago, and now he slumped forward, urine pooling beneath him. Grieve had not yet been desperate enough to attempt to drink it.
Spread out before him and his companions—a handful of luckless would-be mutineers—stood a row of giant metal birds. Not birds, exactly. Things like birds, set neatly side by side on the cracked and weatherworn concrete. Reliquaries of old-world metal, with wings as though they had been made to fly, even though they were mostly wrecked and torn now, dangling like broken limbs. Some still had their silver skins, others corroded bellies betraying innards long ago picked clean by Dead Red scavengers.
He’d never seen anything like those birds—and Tully Grieve had seen a lot of things. The Dead Red Heart left its mark upon a soul. The things you saw could never be unseen.
But a graveyard full of metal birds? Back home they’d never believe a word of it.
This was all the fault of the pretty girl aboard the Razael.
Allegra—she had asked him for a favour, just a small thing, nothing much. Pretty girls were always trouble. He should have known better, never should have taken those keys from her. But he never learnt, no matter how many times they bit the hand that fed them. A strange old saying—one he’d picked up from his uncle, a man he apparently took after much more than ever had been good for him.
The breeze was gentle, tempered, presumably by the ministrations of the battered Sentinel. Still standing tall against the elements. Without it, the metal birds would long have disintegrated and there’d be nothing here for him to stare at while he waited to die of dehydration and exposure.
The ridiculous thing was, Grieve had gotten away with so much up until that girl had charmed him. He’d been stealing food and water right from under the noses of the galley crew, growing bolder, taking it out on plates and a tray, claiming everything was on Master Kian’s orders. It had been easy enough once he had learned the name of the foreigner with dark curls and golden earring. “Master Kian wants this, Master Kian wants that.” Master Kian got anything he wanted, so Grieve had taken charge of it, blustering about with his nose in the air, like the Razael was his very own ship and he some kind of right hand man to the foreigners.
And why not? It had worked before, that kind of bold and brazen trick—and it would have kept on working, he was certain, even with the ship under constant alert, with the deck continuously hammered by wind-slammed rubble and even with three foreigners lurking below behind closed doors, leaving the heavy duty sailing to the drunken pigs they’d hired back in Heel, pissing off the artisans who loved the ship and thought of it as their own. That some form of rebellion would eventuate was inevitable.
All that talk of maps and documents of a very mysterious kind. Fancier than maps of the Vergelands, from Summersalt through Grimpiper—anyone could get hold of maps like those. That anyone had bothered to chart the wasted stretch along the Sand Road fringe was the only wonder of such maps.
But the kind of maps the rich old man had stashed behind the painting—now there were curiosities worth taking risks for. Of course he had wanted a closer look, just like he’d longed to get closer to the girl. Close enough to smell her sweat, close enough to confirm that she really was scared, no matter all her bluff and bluster.
But it wasn’t all her fault. Not really. He’d found the door with the birds carved into the wood—and the pretty girl’s father. Cut his bonds and given him the knife, done everything she’d asked. Her father had been half crazed from rage and dehydration, had grabbed that knife and gone tearing up along the companionway, screaming loud and blue bloody murder, believing his daughter to be somewhere up above amongst the danger.
Grieve sniffed. Yeah, in hindsight that was the moment he should have left well enough alone—as his cousin Selene would have said. Only he didn’t, because he never did. He had to go on charging up the stairs after the mad old man, had to end up right in the thick of the fight. Not his fight even—somebody else’s. A handful of half-drunk sand sailors who had presumed Mohandas to be spearheading a rebellion. Who’d taken up arms and started attacking the ones the foreigners had put in charge of the ship.
But that sad old man had not been leading anything. He’d seemed to be half mad with terror, certain that something frightening and indestructible was waiting for the ship beyond the Black. Swinging punches until somebody knocked him cold.
Grieve was the one who had been clapped up in irons and thrown off the ship alongside a handful of opportunistic mutineers. Men who’d seen their chance and taken it—and failed. Brave men—stupid but brave, he’d give them that. But not as stupid as Tully Grieve, who once more had gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Possibly, this time, the last and final effort.
Tepid breaths of wind blew ineffectually in his face. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. A couple more hours and the sun would have its way. The moaning man beside him slumped further forward. There’d not been time to learn his name, or any of their names. The other two beyond him were already dead.
Grieve sniffed. The scent of something strange hung in the air. Something he couldn’t see. He pictured wild dogs creeping up behind him. The wind in his face grew stronger, obliterating all smells and clues. Without the strength to fight off dogs, it was better not to know. Only it wasn’t. Not knowing was never better than anything.
&n
bsp; He used the chains—and the dead men’s weight—to heave himself to standing. Dizziness swam and nausea punched but he fought them back. He was not dead yet. He could stand and he could turn.
What he saw stopped his breath cold in his throat. A great storm raced across the flats towards him, thunderheads encased in boiling bloom. Forks of lightning stabbing from its centre. A storm that looked like a living, breathing creature. But the storm was not what held his full attention. At its base, seven people were running for their lives, tiny forms against the monstrous clouds.
“Come on!” he screamed—or tried to. Not much sound escaped his parched throat but that didn’t stop him from trying. “Come on! Run faster!”
A storm like that was not of natural making. It was a witch wind, an old-world weapon, either something long forgotten and triggered randomly, or else cast by weathermancy. Forbidden knowledge that should have died along with the wars that had spawned it, along with so many other abominations. He would have crossed himself but his hands were bound.
Distracted by the spectacle, he tripped and fell on top of his fallen comrades. He wanted to get up, truly he did, but his legs were tangled in chains and dead men’s arms. His head hurt from where it had cracked against broken concrete.
The sky directly above turned black. Minutes before it had been pale blue as ibis eggs, the ones he and his cousins used to steal from dune top nests, never taking them all because that would mean next season there’d be no birds.
= Forty-two =
Star ran. There was nothing to hear but her own ragged breath and the palpitations of her heart. Nothing to see but thick green fog, thinning in patches through which she glimpsed dark, indeterminate shapes and moving forms: human, spider, or something else.
She ran. Fear had the better of her, drove her forward, kept her going, wouldn’t let her stop or let her think. Lucius was dead and she was on her own.
Then there were cries audible in the distance. Bimini’s voice, male voices calling in response. Gradually she became aware of the repetitive patter of her own footfall, boots slapping sharp against the ground, tripping up on rocks and cracks but never falling. She knew she couldn’t afford to fall again.
Star slammed into something warm. It was Bimini, arms out and ready to catch her around the waist. Star wanted to speak but her words were all jammed up, all jumbled and trapped inside her throat.
In the end, words were not required. The two women headed off together. Bimini seemed to know where she was going. They ran until Quarrel was within their sights. The Templar seemed unharmed. He marched like a machine, pacing far ahead with broad strides, leading them towards a rocky island, visible in glimpses through the fog, the only form of shelter close enough to reach on foot. It might be shelter, but Star doubted it would be safe—there were no safe havens out upon the Black.
“Keep up,” said Bimini, hurrying to catch him, crossbow at the ready, checking all around for signs of danger.
As the fog cleared, Star could see both Hackett and Grellan lagging far behind, mesmerised by the remains of the rapidly disintegrating ship. Eventually one nudged the other. They ran to catch up with the others, seven Dogwatch survivors in total, following Quarrel through no man’s land toward an ominous island of rocks that, up close, did not look hardy enough to protect anything. A half-filled waterskin slapped uncomfortably against Star’s side. A stitch soon began twisting in her gut, slowing her down as Bimini raced ahead..
Beyond the miserable rocky outcrop, more rocks and a tangled mess that looked like thick, dark weed. Hard to tell through the bilious green. Not weed, she realized on closer inspection, but matted strands of sand-scored plastic, like lantana raze, but still and harmless—hopefully.
Wind snatched at Star’s hair as she moved. The temperature was dropping, cooling the sweat that dribbled down her spine.
Beyond the thatch of plastic strands, more rocks. Too green to make out detail. Running, running, the others in her sights. So long as she could see them, she could make it.
A blast of lightning lit the sand ahead of her, sand churned by the boot prints of the others. Star saw Bimini’s silhouette ahead, the tall, muscular woman having leapt up to stand atop an outcropping.
Star reached her as the stitch cramped up her side. She bent forward, gasping for breath, desperately glad of the pause. When she looked up, Bimini was examining markings on rocks.
“What is it?”
No need to ask—she could see it for herself. A pattern cut deep, some kind of boundary marker, like the ones that dotted the Sand Road’s Verge.
Another blast of lightning close by and they were off and running again. Star struggled to keep pace with her with pain lancing down her side.
Grellan and Hackett eventually caught up with them. Four was safer than two. Nobody spoke, all focus was on keeping moving, until Hackett cried out and pointed up.
Visibility was low, but they didn’t need much light. A net like the kinds used for snaring tankers, only ten times bigger, was strung between two jutting spars of rock. Something stuck at its centre like a fly in a spider’s web.
Bimini made a ward sign and whispered a muted prayer.
At first Star thought it the skeleton of a bird—only no bird had ever been the size of a wagon. Two solid, tangled, silvery wings were entwined in weathered plastic weed. The thing’s belly was slashed open, and remains of long rotted metal and plastic entrails spilled out.
Bimini glanced upwards and froze, her face illuminated by a storm hovering directly above them, pulsing with bright flares of light, expanding and contracting like it was breathing.
“Move!”
They took off, ducking beneath the web and its mysterious, rotting captive. Star dodged quickly, half expecting the shiny metal bird to come crashing down upon them. But it held fast.
They emerged onto open sand to find Quarrel slapping at his mesh, shouting at it, not liking whatever it was telling him.
“The storm has seen us,” shrieked Bimini over the howling of the wind.
Star looked up. There was no sky. In its place was a glowing cavernous maw, bearing down to suck them into its gullet.
Quarrel shouted orders, but the wind snatched his words away. It didn’t matter—they really had no choice but to follow him until they died—or made it.
The safety of the rocks was soon far behind them, and they were heading as fast as they could towards something ahead still half shrouded in stinking green. A flat expanse, human made, not Black. The structures upon it were still intact, which meant there had to be a Sentinel. They ran, hoping Quarrel’s mesh read true. Hoping they weren’t running at a mirage.
The blackened, roiling, breathing storm chased them. As they neared their destination, Star felt a strange sensation; a tingling brush against her skin. It was the protective umbra of a Sentinel tower, recognised by her still-forming Templar mesh, somehow she knew it was, a Sentinel still functioning all alone in the middle of this strange and deadly nowhere.
“Thought that thing was going to swallow us,” said Star, leaning over to take deep breaths, holding her position until the cramps in her side finally gave up and let her be.
“Same.” Bimini smiled. It was the first time Star had ever seen her do that. She had nice teeth. White and mostly straight. “Not a mouth,” she added. “An eye. Eye of the storm.”
“It chased us like an animal,” said Star.
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
“It’s alive?”
“Not the natural kind of life. The other kind. One of those things they built to do their fighting for them.”
Bimini did not need to explain who they were. Them. The ones who caused the Dead Red Ruin. The ones who made the world the way it was.
“Get any of that green poison on your skin?” Bim
ini spun Star about to check before she had a chance to answer, then checked herself, her arms and legs.
Seven were all that remained of Quarrel’s crew, two of them men whose names Star had never learned. Between them, they had a little water and some well wrapped chunks of salted roo. Not enough to get them far—assuming there was anywhere to go.
Once they’d made the safety of the Sentinel’s outer reach, all but Quarrel collapsed, panting to the sand. The Templar stood much like a Sentinel himself, surveying the small pocket of civilisation the mesh had guided them to.
“Planes,” he said. “Used to call them planes. Jumped out of my fair share of em.”
He pointed. Star pushed herself to her feet, the others not far behind.
“Birds of metal,” said Bimini. “A good omen. Must be a safe place.”
Safe from storms, if nothing else.
“Safe for some, not so safe for others,” said Grellan.
Hackett nodded, checking his weapons before heading out to investigate.
“You watch yourself,” shouted Bimini.
He raised his hand in acknowledgement.
The others followed cautiously, all but Quarrel. He kept his eye on the strange cloud creature, hovering just beyond the Sentinel’s range. He kept consulting his mesh. Arguing with it, clearly not comfortable with the turn of events.
Neither was Star. The loss of Lucius had left her stunned. He’d sworn he’d never return to the Black, had sensed all along his was to be a suicide mission. There was no satisfaction in being proven right.
She turned her back on Quarrel, and made the effort to catch up with the others; to keep moving, the only thing to do. There was nothing safe here, nothing familiar. She was on her own. From now on, she’d have to look out for herself.
The others had reached the planes already. Star knew of such things—one of Nene’s books had pictures, but she’d never had any concept of the scale. Shiny metal casings, supposedly light enough to float on air. Ridiculous, like so many old world stories.