Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  A sharp, loud whistle from Tzitzimitl had the Tzitzimime pricking their ears and raising their gore-streaked muzzles. A second whistle, and they abandoned their meals and hurried towards her, a great flowing carpet of low-slung bony beast. They assembled at the goddess’s ankles, clambering over one another and fawning for her attention. Tzitzimitl gave them all a gracious smile, patted a few heads, then set off with the Tzitzimime trotting behind her in a long obedient line, onwards to whatever atrocity she planned next.

  “She bred them, didn’t she?” Mal said. “Trained them. Made them.”

  “I’d guess so.”

  “They were little bits of this and that. A bunch of different animals put together.”

  “I think these gods can do things human scientists can only dream of. Manipulate genetics. Splice elements of one creature into another. You should see Xolotl. He’s half dog, half man, but it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”

  “So that’s another gift they didn’t give us: how to tamper with nature.”

  “Do you think it would have done us any good to have it? Or, no, put it this way — do you think we’d have done any good with it?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. On the plus side, Tzitzimitl has at least given you and me something.”

  Mal surveyed the concourse, now little more than an abattoir. “A clear run to that bunker.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” said Reston.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Same Day

  They picked their way across the concourse, around the heaps of slain Serpent Warriors. Here and there lay the charred body of a Tzitzimime. Mal found the creatures far harder to look at than the mutilated human remains; they were unnatural things, hideous and insidious. She steered clear of them as best she could. One, still just alive, snapped feebly at her ankle as she passed. She considered running it through with her macuahitl, but she liked the idea of the animal suffering a lingering death, and she didn’t want its blood besmirching her blade.

  The sky was alive with explosions. Again and again the darkness was lit up by a bright flash, followed by a long resonant boom. Tenochtitlan was taking a pounding, but it was also dishing one out in return. An aerodisc streaked overhead in pursuit of an armoured god, blazing away with its lightning guns. The sound of street skirmishes echoed between the buildings.

  The bunker entrance was sealed by a pair of broad, heavy doors, secured by a chunky combination lock.

  “Any guesses as to the code?” Reston said.

  “Search me.”

  “Then we’ll just have to use the universal lockpick — brute force.” He went and fetched two of the Serpents’ l-guns that still carried some juice. Handing one to Mal, he said, “Aim for the middle, the gap where the doors meet. Full charge.”

  Standing well back, they zapped the doors repeatedly until the guns ran dry. When the smoke and their vision cleared, they found that they had created a gap just large enough for a person to squeeze through. They waited a minute or so for the twisted edges of the hole to cool; when the metal was still hot to the touch but not burningly so, they slithered inside.

  A trapezoidal tunnel stretched ahead, illuminated at intervals by caged lightbulbs and descending at a shallow gradient. They proceeded down it, alert for danger. Every so often the walls around them shook as yet another building above them took a hit.

  The tunnel disgorged into a huge chamber. A dozen suits of Serpent armour stood in rows, mounted on purpose-built modules. There were scores of empty modules for all the suits currently in deployment in the field. Weaponry hung on racks. A small team of technicians were checking the equipment, running battery tests and diagnostic workups. They were obviously doing their best to ignore the noises coming from above, busying themselves with tasks so as not to have to think about the devastation being wrought on their city. Anxiety was etched on every face; shoulders were hunched, voices were strained.

  She and Reston were not spotted coming in. They ducked behind a workbench strewn with random pieces of armour. There, in whispers, they debated their next move. Reston proposed taking one of the technicians hostage and using him as a bargaining tool to force the rest of them to get two suits ready. “They can tell us how to activate them, how to fly them, everything.”

  “You think they’ll go for that?”

  “Look at them. They’re scared out of their wits. These are civilians, not soldiers. They don’t want to die.”

  “Okay. But this had better work.”

  Mal drew her macuahitl and stole across the floor to the nearest technician, a thin, bespectacled and extremely gawky young specimen. Coming up behind him, she put the blade to his neck and said quietly in his ear, “Do not scream. Do not panic. Just do as I say and I promise you won’t get hurt. Nod if you understand.”

  He did.

  “There are two of us,” she went on, “and we want two of those suits of armour. You and the other boffins set them up for us, get us into them, and instruct us on what to do with them. Help us out, and this can all be over with in no time. Yes?”

  Another nod, accompanied by a small, terrified whimper.

  “Great. Call everyone over, then, quick as you can. Any false moves, any funny business, and the last sound you’ll ever hear will be the hiss of your breath escaping through the hole in your windpipe.”

  “Ahem,” said the technician, trying to clear a very dry throat. “People? Little problem here. Can I have your attention?”

  It went surprisingly smoothly. The technicians were a biddable lot, as Reston had predicted. One of their own being held at swordpoint was a convincing argument for co-operation. Being smart men and women, they grasped that they were in the presence of two individuals who were not only capable of killing them all, but quite prepared to if the situation demanded it. They knuckled down, and within minutes two of the suits had been trundled out from the racks and Mal and Reston were being given a crash course in flying technique.

  “These things are actually beautifully straightforward,” said one of the technicians, the seniormost and by all appearances the man in charge. “A complex system with an uncomplicated interface. The flight dynamics — roll, pitch and yaw — are all conditional on your own movements. Basically, lean or bend in the direction you want to go and the armour will comply. The antigrav excitation selector is incorporated into the helmet, so as to keep both hands free. You lower your head to descend, raise it to ascend. That’s the only part that takes some mastering. The rest is no trouble.”

  The suits had to be put on in sections. Mal kept her macuahitl and the hostage technician in close contact while the pieces of armour were clamped onto her and linked together. He trembled like a leaf throughout the process, casting imploring looks at his colleagues as if to say, Please don’t do anything rash. They obliged, and Mal and Reston were soon fully suited.

  It felt weird being contained head to toe inside this hard, jointed casing. Mal experienced a stifling surge of claustrophobia. She wanted to rip the armour off, get out of it any way she could. Be calm, she told herself. It was only a few pieces of light metal. She moved a leg experimentally, then an arm. It barely felt any different from normal — a little more resistance, that was all. She flexed one gauntleted hand. The segmented fingers rippled like caterpillars.

  “Faceplate appears and disappears at the touch of this sensor,” said the head technician. He pressed a spot on the side of Mal’s helmet, and all at once everything went yellow and she realised she was staring out through the snakelike lenses. “The tinting on the eye screens filters out glare from l-gun bolts. That’s crucial after dark, so as not to compromise your night vision.”

  Reston tried his faceplate too. “Nice.”

  His voice came directly to Mal via her right ear.

  “All the suits are in constant comms-link contact,” the head technician explained. “There are two channels, proximity and general. Proximity, the default setting, works up to a range of three hundred
metres. General is a wide-spectrum band that picks up all Serpent Warrior chatter at all times. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “Is there anything else we need to know?” Reston replied.

  “I don’t think so. Now, will you kindly let poor Yolyamanitzin there go? The boy looks like he’s about to faint.”

  “Give us a couple of l-guns and we’re done,” said Mal.

  The guns were lodged into her and Reston’s hands. Mal laid her macuahitl aside and gave Yolyamanitzin a gentle shove. “Off you go.” The young technician almost collapsed to the floor in relief.

  “I would wish you godspeed, but I can’t bring myself to,” said the head technician, finding some courage now that none of his people was in direct danger any more. “Whoever you are, coming in here dressed in holy garb, you don’t deserve to get away with this. The Great Speaker knows all, sees all. Vengeance will be his.”

  “What you mean is you’re going to blab to him about us as soon as we’re gone,” said Reston.

  “That’s right.” The man blinked defiantly. “And to Colonel Tlanextic.”

  “How?”

  “Through the hotline link.”

  “What hotline link? That one over there?” Reston was looking at a console with a number of telephone receivers attached to it, each a different colour.

  “That very one.”

  Reston charged up his l-gun and blasted the console to pieces.

  “Not any more you’re not,” he said.

  Mal lifted her head… and flew.

  It was strangely exhilarating and exhilaratingly strange. Her feet were off the floor. She was floating. She had to resist the urge to waft her arms and legs as though treading water in a swimming pool.

  She lifted her head again and rose a little higher. She wobbled uncertainly in the air. She felt on the verge of overbalancing and inclined herself forwards ever so slightly to compensate. All at once she was in motion. The further over she leaned, the faster she went. Wishing to decelerate, she instinctively straightened up. The suit of armour halted, returning to hover mode.

  “This is…” She couldn’t think of a word for it.

  “I know!” Reston beamed, executing a tentative midair pirouette. “Where has this been all my life?”

  Mal tried for speed again, bending forward until she was near horizontal. The armour flung her towards the tunnel, far faster than she was expecting. She collided with the edge of the entrance and rebounded off. Picking herself up off the floor, she marvelled that she hadn’t felt a thing. It had been like sprinting headlong into a wall of cotton wool.

  What was it Tlanextic had called it? “Impact-dispersant.”

  Phenomenal.

  She resumed her progress through the tunnel, warier than before but only marginally. Reston caught up and flew alongside her. They exchanged looks through the snake-eye lenses. His eyes were boyishly wide. He was having fun. And so, she had to admit, was she.

  The bunker doors could be opened manually from the inside; Reston turned the wheel, and the doors ground grudgingly apart a few inches, then stopped, refusing to go any further. They’d warped them when they’d blasted their way in, and they no longer neatly followed their tracks.

  “Let’s see if we can get them to budge the old-fashioned way,” he said, and grabbed one and began to tug sideways.

  What happened next surprised them both. The door started to bend as Reston pulled on it. The more pressure he applied, the more it curved inwards. Solid metal buckled in his hands as though it were cardboard. Finally, with a cracking screech, both the top and bottom edges of the door jumped out of their tracks and the whole thing hung askew.

  “Well, either I don’t know my own strength,” Reston said, “or this suit enhances the wearer’s muscle power by a factor of ten. The head technician didn’t mention that.”

  “Maybe he just wanted us out of there as soon as possible,” Mal said.

  “Imagine if I’d had one of these instead of my Conquistador armour. Imagine what I’d have been able to accomplish then.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Too late. I already have.”

  “Let’s focus on the now. We still have to get off the island, and armour or not, I have a feeling it isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Why not? The only people who’d have any interest in stopping us are Serpents, and to them we look like, well, them. They won’t bother us.”

  “Yeah,” said Mal, “but to Quetzalcoatl and pals we look like Serpents too. And on recent evidence, gods don’t show their enemies much mercy.”

  Reston was sobered. “Ah. Good point. We’d better go carefully, bettern’t we?”

  “No shit, sunshine.”

  Outside, the concourse was as before, a field of corpses. Wounds and spilled blood glistened blackly in the lamplight.

  The worst of the fighting seemed to be taking place over on the west side of the city, so they elected to head east. As she took off into the open air, Mal was filled with a giddying sense of possibility. The exhilaration she’d felt down in the confines of the bunker was magnified a hundredfold. This suit of armour could transport her anywhere.

  She reminded herself not to get cocky. Just because they’d got themselves some paddles didn’t mean they weren’t still up shit creek.

  They rose into the night sky, Tenochtitlan dropping away beneath them. In mere moments they were level with the summits of the ziggurats, the tops of the towers. Shoreline lights twinkled in the distance — so far and yet, now, so near. Below her, Mal could see fires raging in at least three areas of the city. The eye screens on her faceplate reduced the brilliance of the fires to the muted throb of embers in a grate, but these were still clearly, from their size alone, serious infernos. One whole ziggurat was ablaze from lowest tier to highest, sending up dense clouds of smoke. An tanker aerodisc was scooping up water from the lake and dumping it onto the flames, but in vain. Elsewhere there were intermittent strobe flickers of l-gun fire. It was a garish, hellish scene. Mictlan itself surely had nothing that could compare.

  If there is a Mictlan, Mal thought. The gods were real, but somehow that made the myths attached to them seem less plausible, rather than more. It was like the first time she’d realised, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, that her parents weren’t the infallible, matchless beings she had believed them to be. They were just humans after all, with as many faults and failings as she had. It was that kind of loss of innocence. Nothing was safe any more, nothing sacred. Every measure she knew had had to be recalibrated.

  When she and Reston had gained sufficient altitude, they set a course for the shore.

  They had gone a mile — less — when trouble reared its head.

  “Airborne troopers, please identify yourselves.”

  Mal and Reston looked around. Looked at each other. Was someone talking to them?

  “I repeat, airborne troopers, currently eastbound out of Tenochtitlan. Who are you and where do you think you’re going?”

  The challenge had come over the comms link, but neither of them could see where it originated from.

  “You two,” said the voice testily. “The ones heading away from the combat zone. I’m talking to you. Please respond. Over.”

  “Er, yes,” said Reston. “We’re, er… This is us. Where are you?”

  “Right up your backside.”

  And there, behind them, out of nowhere, loomed a Serpent gunship. Mal and Reston slowed to a hover, and the aerodisc braked accordingly. A trio of pilots were visible in its cockpit. One of them spoke into a microphone handset, and the suspicion-filled voice resumed in Mal’s and Reston’s ears.

  “Sound off,” it said. “Name, rank, platoon.”

  “Uhmmm…” Mal was stumped. They hadn’t banked on something like this. “I’m Lieutenant…” She groped for a Nahuatl surname. “Yolyamanitzin.” It was the last one she’d heard, the first one that came to mind.

  Unfortunately, Reston had had the exact same idea
, and just as Mal was dubbing herself Yolyamanitzin, so was he. He even awarded himself the same rank as her.

  “Let me get this straight,” said the pilot. “You’re both lieutenants and you’re both called Yolyamanitzin?”

  “Yes,” said Reston. “Funny thing, eh? And we’re not even related.”

  The pilot wasn’t buying it. “And your platoons? Which? Viper? Boa? Cobra?”

  “Viper,” said Reston decisively. “Both of us. Another coincidence.”

  “Nice try, dickhead. Serpent platoons are known by numbers, not the names of snakes.”

  “Yeah, nice try, dickhead,” Mal muttered.

  “So, really, who the hell are you two? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow you out of the air.”

  “We’re on a special mission,” Reston said, stalling for time. Surreptitiously he flicked a switch and his l-gun started to power up. “Top secret. For the colonel.”

  “Yeah, pull the other one. What accent is that anyway?”

  “British,” said Reston, and in English he added, “Vaughn. Brace for evasive action.”

  “What was that?” said the pilot. “Didn’t catch that last bit.”

  “I said…”

  And Reston opened fire.

  Someone on board must have been anticipating this very move, because just as Reston unleashed the bolt the gunship flipped up onto its starboard side. His shot grazed the hull, leaving only a scorch. Then, still canted almost perpendicular, the aerodisc lunged forwards, its front-facing l-gun nacelles belching plasma.

  But Mal and Reston were already racing away, flat out, in reverse. The gunship gave chase. More plasma bolts blistered around them, and they both twisted and sidewinded. There was no skill to their manoeuvring, only desperation, but the suits of armour were superbly responsive, almost as if they wanted what their wearers wanted. One bolt struck Mal a glancing blow. She was barely aware of it. She felt like laughing. But the next instant another caught her full on, and although the armour took the brunt, it seemed there were limits to the levels of energy discharge it could absorb. Mal was sent spiralling through space. Flecks of brightness whirled against a dark background. She couldn’t tell what was up or down, what was firmament or lake surface. She struggled against the spin, and finally managed to correct it and right herself. Her head took a few seconds to catch up with the rest of her.