“So much at stake.”
“We’ll just do what we can, leave the heavy lifting to the big boys like Huitzilopochtli.”
“Stuart…”
He shook his head. “Last night was last night. I get that.”
“No, what it is, is, I don’t understand how I can have spent so many weeks wanting to see your heart cooking on a brazier, and now, suddenly, all that’s gone. Now I’m actually worried about you.”
“Maybe Ometeotl was right. We’re meant to be together but until now the circumstances were against us. I mean radically against us.”
“It’s almost like some kind of joke, isn’t it? Like the world was doing its very hardest to keep us apart.”
“If ‘apart’ is another way of saying ‘at each other’s throats,’ then yes, I’d agree.”
“If I don’t make it through this…” Mal began.
“In that case,” Stuart said, securing his helmet on, “it’s unlikely either of us will make it. The point is moot.”
Mal had her helmet on too, so they were now talking via the strange intimacy of the comms link. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”
“I do,” Stuart replied. “And I will. But afterwards, all right?”
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli were leaving.
“Right now,” he went on, “we’ve business to attend to. The world’s not just going to save itself, you know. It’s time for the new, improved Conquistador to go out there and shine. Oh, and his sidekick Jaguar Girl too.”
“Call me your sidekick again, and I’ll kick you in the side,” Mal growled. “Fucker.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Fucker, fucker, fucker.”
“Eloquent as always. Let’s go.”
Taking flight, they followed in the wake of Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli, up through the centre of the ziggurat to the hatch. When they emerged onto the surface, it was like entering some fiery, howling maelstrom. There were Serpent Warriors everywhere, swooping, swarming, shooting. The rainforest around the hatch was ablaze. Flames crackled. Smoke churned. The air was thick with falling ash and embers. L-gun fire streaked between the burning tree trunks, and now and then huge, not-so-far-off explosions erupted, seeming to shake whole acres of landscape.
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli wasted no time in engaging the enemy. Within seconds, Serpents were being blasted out of the air or sliced to ribbons.
It took Stuart and Mal slightly longer to gather their wits. A pair of Serpents came zooming at them on an attack run. Stuart targeted one, Mal the other. Plasma bolts zigzagged from their forearms and struck the Serpents with staggering force. One hurtled backwards into a cedar, crashing against the trunk and flopping down to its base, broken inside his armour. The other was sent sailing sideways and collided with a third airborne Serpent. They fell together in a tangle, and Mal was on them before they could extricate themselves from each other. She flicked her arm as Toci had instructed and the blade in her gauntlet snicked out to its full extension. One of the Serpents raised his l-gun and Mal slashed at it unthinkingly, slicing the barrel in two. The Serpent was almost as startled as she was, and his eyes widened further as she plunged the blade through his breastplate, deep into him.
The other Serpent made a bid to retrieve his own l-gun, which had been knocked from his grasp and landed a few yards away. He scrambled desperately on all fours, but was beaten to it by Stuart, who flew over him and alighted in his path, sword out. The next instant, a Serpent Warrior helmet went bouncing across the forest floor, with a Serpent Warrior’s severed head inside.
Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli had disappeared somewhere into the smoke haze, but more gods were emerging from below. Tzitzimitl and Azcatl took up positions on either side of the hatch, each accompanied by a retinue of monsters. Tzitzimitl had her leaping, yowling pack of Tzitzimime, while Azcatl was haloed by a dense, buzzing cloud of insects the likes of which neither Stuart nor Mal had ever seen. They were large, the size of a clenched fist, and appeared to be a hybrid of wasp, scorpion and stag beetle, with a stinger-tipped tail at the back, pincer-like horns at the front, and a yellow-striped abdomen.
Joining Tzitzimitl and Azcatl was a third god: the disfigured, hunchbacked entity whom Stuart remembered from his first ever visit to the refectory down below. Nanhuatzin, the Deformed One, limped up out from the hatch and stood, swaying somewhat. His arthritically clawed hands were outstretched, and a look of grim delight was discernible on his twisted face.
“Go!” Azcatl ordered Stuart and Mal. “Get out there. The main battle is that way” — he waved in a westward direction — “and that is where you can be the most help, if you can be any help at all.”
“We can defend this spot,” Tzitzimitl added. “No one will get past us.”
“Are you sure?” Stuart said.
The crone’s eyes flashed. “Watch.”
A squadron of Serpents came gliding in through the pall of smoke. Tzitzimitl, with a loud whistle, despatched her Tzitzimime at them. The dark demon dogs sprang up and brought down one of the Serpents in midair. They dragged him to the ground and set about him in a snarling, slavering pack, going for the joints, the vulnerable chinks between sections of his armour. His screams, relayed by the comms, were shrill in Stuart’s and Mal’s ears. As the Tzitzimime tore him apart and ate him alive, he was begging for his mother to save him.
Meanwhile Azcatl unleashed his scorpion-wasp monstrosities, which whizzed towards the Serpents like rocks from a catapult. They butted through faceplates and set about stinging straight away, clinging on with their pincer horns while their sinuous tails jabbed and jabbed repeatedly into cheek and nose and eyeball. The venom worked almost instantaneously; their Serpent victims went rigid with paralysis and became floating corpses, hovering stiff and lifeless in the air, supported only by their suits.
As for Nanahuatzin, he waited until one of the Serpents strayed close to the hatch, and then he simply reached out and brushed the man with his fingertips. Something glistened briefly between him and the Serpent. Something was transferred. The Serpent turned and trained his l-gun on Nanahuatzin, but all at once his limbs went weak and wouldn’t function properly. Over the comms link Stuart heard him say something about being unable to breathe. The man dropped the weapon and fumbled to get his helmet off. His face had gone a vivid, liverish puce. Sores were breaking out all over his skin, all manner of blisters, buboes and pustules. The whites of his eyes went scarlet. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out, only a vomitous gush of blood. He fell, wracked with agony, as what seemed to be every communicable disease that had ever existed infested his body, proliferating at an obscene rate. By the time he stopped writhing and lay still, fluids were seeping out through all the seals in his armour and his face was so distended by swellings and lesions that it no longer resembled anything human.
“Fair enough,” Stuart said to the three gods. “Mal? This way.”
They flew through the burning forest. They drew their heading by the rising number of Serpent corpses that littered the ground, a trail of the dead left by the other gods. The comms chatter they were picking up over their helmet radios grew as they approached. It wasn’t long before they arrived at the epicentre of the battle.
There were several hundred Serpents in flight, orbiting an enormous humanoid machine, which advanced slowly, step by thunderous step. It was near enough the size of a house, with arms that ended in multiple lightning gun arrays and legs that balanced on jointed, talon-like feet. The l-guns cleaved trees in two and the feet crushed their toppled trunks to splinters as the giant thing waded purposefully through the forest.
Five of the gods were attempting to get near this mechanical behemoth, but the Serpents kept thwarting them, attacking in such numbers that the gods were too busy coping with them to achieve anything else.
On the ground, Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli were close to being overwhelmed by the sheer number of opponents they faced. The Flayed One’s kn
ives flashed relentlessly, the Dark One’s gauntlets crushed and bludgeoned, and still the Serpents kept on coming, crowding in on them from all quarters.
In the air, Itzpapalotl was unable to dart through the droves of Serpents. Whichever way she turned, she was intercepted and driven back by l-gun fire. Likewise Huitzilopochtli. His flame spears took out a half-dozen Serpents at a time, but every time he created a gap it was plugged by a half-dozen more.
Only Quetzalcoatl was making any headway, and then not much. He was barely visible through the crackling storm of plasma bolts that pounded against his forcefield. He flew like someone swimming against a powerful current, fighting for every inch of progress.
And still the massive manlike machine moved inexorably forwards.
“Tezcatlipoca,” Mal said.
The Smoking Mirror could be seen through a screen of glass set in the thing’s torso. He was enclosed in a kind of cat’s cradle of light beams which synched his movements to those of the machine. He raised an arm, so did the giant. He shifted his legs, the giant strode.
“It’s… a bigger suit of armour,” Stuart said. “The biggest ever.” He sounded, in spite of himself, impressed.
“Size isn’t everything,” Mal said curtly.
“Now you tell me. So what should we do?”
“Take him down if we can. He clearly wants to get to the gods’ headquarters and destroy it, and all their backup and resources with it. Destroy them, too. We do our bit to stop him. Or rather, you do.”
“Huh?” Stuart was startled by the sudden change in her tone of voice. It had dropped to an icy hush. She was staring hard at the forwardmost grouping of Serpent Warriors, the vanguard of the attack force. One of them stood out from the rest, distinguished by the gold patterning on his armour.
“There you are, you bastard,” Mal said. She was aloft before Stuart could stop her.
“Mal!” he remonstrated. “No. He’s a sideshow. He’s not important.”
“Maybe to you he’s not,” came the reply. “Colonel Tlanextic!” She had switched to Nahuatl. “Can you hear me? I’m here. Over here. Come and get what’s coming to you.”
“The Vaughn bitch.” Tlanextic’s caustic voice cut through the babel of comms chatter, loud and clear. “How interesting. That’s you in that silver suit?”
Stuart saw the gold-patterned figure break away from the main pack and head for Mal.
“I could have sworn you were dead,” Tlanextic said.
“Should have checked more thoroughly, shouldn’t you?”
“An oversight I shall remedy now.”
“Remedy this, motherfucker,” said Mal, and she let him have it with both her l-guns.
Tlanextic returned fire, and there ensued a dogfight which Stuart would have followed more closely if he himself hadn’t come under assault from several quarters at once. The Serpents had finally latched on to him as an enemy combatant.
For minutes on end Stuart fended off a co-ordinated barrage of plasma bolts and delivered rapid-fire ripostes. Now and then he caught glimpses of Mal and Tlanextic weaving around and blasting away at each other above the tree canopy. He was also aware of Tezcatlipoca stalking ever onward in his ogre of a suit, forging a path through the rainforest.
At one point, amid all the bedlam, it seemed as though the gods had made a breakthrough. Xipe Totec had dispatched enough Serpents to give himself some breathing space and a clear run at Tezcatlipoca. Mictlantecuhtli urged him forward, promising to handle any interference that might come his way.
Huitzilopochtli had an opening too. He had at last punched a hole through the endless flocks of Serpents. Tezcatlipoca was in range and in his sights.
Xipe Totec sprinted towards the left leg of Tezcatlipoca’s suit, while Huitzilopochtli levelled his spear launcher at Tezcatlipoca’s head.
Stuart sensed that this was when everything could change, the fulcrum moment that would set the battle seesawing in the gods’ favour.
Then Xipe Totec stumbled. That was when Stuart realised the Flayed One had been injured. With his skin transparent, wounds were not immediately obvious. Spilled blood did not show up against the wet muscle tissue on display. Several Serpents must have got in lucky shots before Xipe Totec slew them. He was weak, failing. His charge towards Tezcatlipoca was a last-ditch suicide run.
And Tezcatlipoca knew it. As Xipe Totec lost his footing, the Smoking Mirror turned his ponderous armoured bulk towards him. One of the legs rose. Xipe Totec scrambled upright and continued his bid to reach Tezcatlipoca. But the vast foot overshadowed him. It descended like a five-ton piston. The Flayed One’s knives shot up. In defence? In defiance? It was hard to say.
Tezcatlipoca crushed Xipe Totec underfoot as a child might crush a snail on a garden path. The Flayed One became the Flattened One. He burst, and now all of his viscera were exposed. He was a lump of gristle and offal attached to the underside of Tezcatlipoca’s foot. The Smoking Mirror stamped down again and again, smashing and mashing Xipe Totec until there was even less of him left, just a gory smear.
Huitzilopochtli overcame his shock at seeing a fellow god annihilated and loosed off a flame spear at Tezcatlipoca. But the Smoking Mirror lashed out with one of his vast arms, batting the projectile aside so that it spun end over end and detonated amidst the foliage of a tree. As the Hummingbird God hurried to reload his launcher, Tezcatlipoca calmly lined up a shot with the same arm.
Huitzilopochtli looked up, flame spear in hand.
Looked down the hollowness of that l-gun barrel.
Knew he was out of time.
He hung in the air, resigned, and was enveloped in a tremendous torrent of plasma.
Little remained of Huitzilopochtli as he fell to earth, just a charred, spindly effigy, like a scarecrow that had been pulled off a bonfire.
Tezcatlipoca’s guffaws of joy came loud and clear over Stuart’s comms. His giant metal shell seemed to laugh too, rocking up and down in grotesque emulation of its driver.
Mictlantecuhtli lunged for Tezcatlipoca, emitting a roar, a primal wordless bellow of rage. He ploughed through the massed ranks of Serpents, scattering them to either side. Stuart followed in his slipstream. The Dark One took an l-gun salvo from Tezcatlipoca full-on, crossing his gauntlets above his head to shield himself, and plasma broke over him like rain on an umbrella. He lumbered on, skin smouldering, and began pounding away at Tezcatlipoca’s leg, the same leg that had squashed Xipe Totec. He managed to put a few dents in it before the Smoking Mirror used his other leg to kick him like a tlachtli ball. Mictlantecuhtli was propelled high into the air, disappearing into the depths of the forest.
Stuart stood alone and horribly exposed. Tezcatlipoca towered over him. He fired off a shot at the glass screen in the armour’s chest. The bolt didn’t leave so much as a scratch.
“Ah, the erstwhile Conquistador.” Tezcatlipoca was plugged into the Serpent Warrior radio frequency. “Still around to plague us. Well, not for much longer.”
Tezcatlipoca’s arm came down. A half-dozen lightning-gun barrels were pointed Stuart’s way.
“Incoming!”
That was Mal, and she streaked down from on high, locked in a frantic embrace with Tlanextic. Twisting and turning, the two of them rammed sideways into Tezcatlipoca’s arm. The plasma bolt meant for Stuart gouged a furrow in the ground inches to his right.
Stuart didn’t hesitate. He sprang at Tezcatlipoca’s foot, flicking out his swords. Toci had said they would cut through anything.
Let’s see, shall we?
He cross-cut into the metal of the foot with a simultaneous outward swing of both blades. Unbelievably, there was almost no resistance. Stuart found himself looking at a deep X-shaped slash in the armour’s skin. Hydraulics and cables were laid bare. Sparks spat.
He darted behind Tezcatlipoca and cut again. Surely he could stop the mechanical beast by hobbling it.
Next thing he knew, he was flat on his back. Tlanextic was on top of him. The Serpent colonel pummelled him hard, landi
ng armour-augmented blows which Stuart could feel even through his own armour.
“You don’t get it, do you, Englishman?” Tlanextic said. “The Empire is eternal. The Empire is unstoppable. Gods cannot stand in its way. Do you honestly think a turd-eating little maggot like you can?”
“Mal…” It was partly a question, partly a plea. Where was she? If Tlanextic was free of her, then what had become of her?
“I shook the bitch off. Our landing took more out of her than me. I’ll deal with her after you. Now, just fucking lie there while I beat you to death, eh?”
Stuart couldn’t bring the swords to bear. He was nailed to the earth by Tlanextic’s remorseless thumping.
“I know this armour’s limitations,” Tlanextic crowed. “I know what it can handle. I’ll open you up like a sardine can. I’ll shatter you. Pulverise you.”
The impacts were intensifying. Stuart could feel the armour losing integrity. Tlanextic’s blows were starting to hurt.
How much more could he withstand?
How much could the armour?
He put everything he had into an attempt to shove himself upwards, against the force of Tlanextic’s onslaught. He lodged an elbow in the soil, so that one sword was pointing upwards. Tlanextic grabbed his wrist and levered the arm away. Stuart fought to raise it again. Tlanextic continued to hammer him with his other hand.
The sword wavered between them, now vertical, now at an angle. The pain in Stuart’s chest was mounting. There was a sudden sharp spike of agony, accompanied by a crack that he felt as much as heard. A rib. He cried out involuntarily.
Tlanextic’s eyes held nothing but the grim resolution of a loyal solider keen to see his mission through.
Then, all at once, his gaze became vacant and the punching stopped. There was no longer any resistance against Stuart’s arm.
Without pausing to question what had happened, Stuart rammed the sword up into Tlanextic’s belly.
“Too late, slowcoach,” said Mal. “I got there first.”
Tlanextic was doubly impaled. Mal had skewered him from behind, Stuart from the front.
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