Down another corridor and up to the door. Ayaan rolled her shoulders and tried not to think about the pain in her arms. Almost done. She hit an automatic hatch release with her hip and stepped into the Officer’s Mess, a low room lined with clean windows, the walls and floor draped with Persian rugs. On couches before her the liches and their favorites waited. One of them—she didn’t know his name but he was covered everywhere in thick fur like an ape—came up and politely offered to take the buckets from her but she politely declined. Another squatted down on the floor and showed her a wide, lipless smile. The Green Phantom scowled at her, while Cicatrix smiled disinterestedly and reburied herself in an issue of French Vogue so old the lamination had worn off the cover. The living woman had a bright new scar on her cheek. It was healing well.
With a grunt Ayaan emptied her buckets into a tub full of ice. She tried not to look at the hands as they slithered out, the fingers lacing together, the dry blood running out in a fine sift. She tried not to let the powder get into her mouth or nose.
When the buckets were empty she turned to go. She knew it was futile but she moved steadily, purposely toward the door.
“There’s one more thing,” the green phantom said. She felt her body surge as he toyed with her metabolism. Would he wear her out, make her exhausted even though her shift was half over? Would he give her a goose, make her hyper until her jaw ached from grinding? His possibilities for amusement at her expense seemed endless.
“Yes, sir,” she said, wondering what demeaning errand he would have this time, and turned around. Had she been anyone else she might have screamed at what she saw.
14
A human brain. In a jar.
Cyrillic characters ran around the top and bottom of the glass jar, etched in a flowing cursive hand. Inside the jar the brain floated in yellowish liquid, dangling from a web of silver chains. It was a human brain, most definitely, and most certainly it was dead. Ayaan lacked the sensory sensitivity of a lich but even she could tell that something had taken up residence in the disembodied organ. It didn’t pulse or glow but it wasn’t quite dead, either, and somehow Ayaan knew exactly who was inside.
A mummy carried the jar. Not just any mummy. The fiftieth mummy, the former high priestess of Sobk who had crocodiles painted like a print on her ragged linen. The last mummy, the one Ayaan had been about to slaughter when the ghost had appeared.
It had only been a week ago. Ayaan remembered it well.
The stink of cordite and bitumen had filled the concrete bunker. The smoke was so think she’d had trouble seeing what she was doing. She had not hesitated—one after the other she had shot each of the fifty mummies in the head. Just as she’d been told.
When she reached the last of them, she had paused to wipe sweat from her brow. She had caught movement in the bunker’s doorway and she turned, her weapon coming up, to cover the entrance.
“Enough, enough, enough,” the ghost had chanted, rushing into the room. It had not looked like a ghost, of course. It looked like one of the dead. It had possessed the crumbling flesh of a Cypriot ghoul in order to steal its voice. True intelligence had shown in its borrowed eyes and Ayaan remembered the story Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had told her, of a creature that could inscribe its personality over the blank slates of the dead. A creature that had helped him in the final mad rush of corpses in Central Park. A creature that had a special affinity for mummies.
It had to be the same intelligence, the same spirit. The ghost which the Tsarevich so desperately wanted to contact had to be the thing that saved New York City from Gary’s final, horrible revenge. When it arrived Ayaan had looked around the bunker and seen for the first time just what they had made her do and it gave her gooseflesh.
“Enough. Spare her and I’ll do as the lad wants,” the ghost had said. Its face fell—not with the torpor of the undead but with genuine sadness. “Tell him he has me, you lot. Go and tell him now!” With its temporary hands the ghost had thrown over the bunker’s table, smashed to kindling one of the chairs. Ayaan had been afraid, truly afraid that it would seek vengeance on her for what she had done.
If it was planning revenge it was taking its time.
“This is our beloved leader’s friend. The ghost,” the green phantom told her, a week later in the officer’s mess of the nuclear waste freighter Pinega. She looked up at him and the memory evaporated from her mind. He waved a few bony fingers at the thing in the jar. “We stripped him of his borrowed body and let him inhabit this vessel because it’s easier to watch. We had to take steps to make sure he didn’t run out on us again. He’s shown himself a very slippery fish. Supposedly he has something he wants to tell you.”
“Me,” Ayaan said, rubbing her suddenly moist palms on her pants. “Well, I suppose that makes sense. Um. Hello,” she tried.
Neither the brain nor the mummy so much as twitched. Across the room Cicatrix put down her magazine to watch. The green phantom rose and went to the icy trough where Ayaan had unloaded her grisly haul. He made no attempt at nicety, digging in to the bony meat in the trough like a starving animal. Between bites he managed to choke out, “He says he wants you to know there are no hard feelings. He would have done the same in your position.”
“That’s… I mean, tell him I’m grateful for his… his…”
“’Magnanimity’ is the word that leaps to mind.” The phantom wiped blood from his cheeks and lips with a silk napkin. “He can hear you, you know. I don’t have to translate for him.”
Ayaan nodded. “So, well, thank you. And I am sorry. So truly, truly sorry.”
“He had something else for you—a message. I don’t claim to understand it. He says she’s just fine, and closer to your heart than ever.”
“She?” Ayaan asked.
“That’s what he said. Listen, I can barely understand him myself. I won’t be arsed to play twenty questions with him just to appease your curiosity. If I had to guess I would say it was talking about its mummy friend. Get back to work.”
Ayaan nodded agreeably and backed out of the room. With a moment’s thought she had answered her own question and she didn’t feel like sharing. The “She” of the message was not the mummy, she had grasped that much at once. It had to be Sarah. The brain’s other statement wasn’t so easy to decipher. Had it claimed that Ayaan was closer to Sarah’s heart than ever it would have made perfect sense. It was possible the ghost lacked a grasp of the finer nuances of English idiom.
She didn’t think so, though. She thought the ghost knew exactly what it was saying. Sarah was closer to Ayaan’s heart—did it mean—could it mean that Sarah was nearby? Physically close to Ayaan’s heart? But how, and more importantly, why?
Could she trust the brain? Could it be lying to her? In the end she supposed it didn’t matter. She had a mutiny to pull off, after all, and there were going to be casualties. If the brain or its attending mummy got in the way it wouldn’t hold her back.
Her job took her back to the stern surgeries. On the way she passed around a side of the rear superstructure, a four-story structure that tapered to a spacious suite of officers’ quarters with a magnificent view of the surrounding ocean. Only the radar tower stood higher. There was a reason for putting the officers’ quarters up so high—it kept the ship’s most important personnel as far as possible from the depleted fuel rods in the forward compartments. The liches were hardly bothered by the ship’s radioactivity—it probably did them good, actually, because it would sterilize their putrid flesh of microbes and slow down their decay. They had taken the tower for themselves simply because it afforded the best view, as far as she knew.
On the lowest level of the tower Ayaan passed the zealots she’d seen earlier laying down a second coat of marine paint on the deck plates. They didn’t so much as glance up at her.
They didn’t have to. One of them, an old man with a Russian accent but the Asian features of a Siberian, stood up with one hand holding his back and stepped into the shadow
s of the tower entrance. Ayaan passed the hatchway by, then doubled back once she was out of sight of the cultists and stepped in through an emergency exit. The Siberian was busy in the darkness inside, shoving bits of torn-up, paint-stained rag into a hatch near the floor. Ayaan bent down to help him. “You know the sign we’re looking for,” she said to him.
He didn’t nod. He didn’t stop what he was doing. He had been a librarian in another universe, a better one, and a closeted homosexual. His partner, a colonel in the Russian air force, had convinced him to join up with the Tsarevich. He had in fact been one of the most fervent recruits when the call first came. He swore up and down that they would not be persecuted in the new life, and to be fair, they hadn’t been. When the liches carried the colonel off to satisfy their appetites they hadn’t even considered his sexual orientation. They were equal opportunity devourers.
“When all of them are inside, that’s when you set the fire,” Ayaan repeated, just in case. Perfect timing would be the only way to carry this off. Even then she would need a great deal of luck.
It would be impossible to foment a revolution on the Pinega, she knew. There were too many true believers on the ship and far too many animated corpses. With the help of her friend in the navigation room however she had learned of a way to cut those odds in half. When the Soviets fabricated the nuclear waste hauler they had built a special feature into the holds. By throwing certain switches on the flying bridge anyone could open hatches on the bottom of the ship, hatches meant to dump the enclosed wastes into the ocean at large. It had been the ship’s standard practice to take the fuel rods and radiothermic generators and depleted uranium cargo out into international waters and just let them go. According to Ayaan’s informant, there never had been a containment facility near the North Pole—it would have been prohibitively expensive to build such a thing, at least compared to the cost of open-sea dumping. The bankrupt bureaucrats at the end of the Soviet empire had little concern for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and even less for Greenpeace.
Now, if Ayaan could get those hatches open, the undead stored in the compartments would be flushed away like so much toxic waste. The tepid waters of the Mediterranean might not kill them but she really didn’t care. They could wander around the bottom of the sea forever, spearing whatever fish were stupid enough to wander by with their sharpened forearms. She would have bigger problems to deal with—namely the liches. As soon as they realized something was up they would retreat to their tower. The green phantom could kill from a distance. Other liches could turn their own powers against Ayaan and her tiny cadre of rebels.
If the tower was set on fire once they were inside, however, she imagined they would be too distracted to put up much resistance. The doctor, who had access to bonesaws, fire axes and hammers (his surgery was neither precise nor delicate) would stop anyone from trying to get out of the tower—or anyone living from trying to rescue the liches trapped within. It would take some time for the tower to burn down but the Siberian’s hard work secreting inflammables in its various nooks and crannies meant the blaze would get off to a good start.
The Tsarevich lived in the penthouse on the fourth floor. He would be the last to be incinerated, which was a bit of a risk. It would give him time to realize what was happening and maybe do something else about it.
Another risk was that she had no way to put out the fire once it started. The Pinega had a steel hull but much of its interior fittings were made of wood. Years ago it had possessed a system of internal sprinklers and plenty of fire extinguishers but none of that equipment could be expected to work after so long.
Then there was the question of what the living faithful, the zealots who worshipped the Tsarevich, would do once they saw what was happening. Ayaan hoped they would listen to reason. With the Tsarevich dead they would be leaderless and their power would be cut down to a fraction. If they strung her up from the yardarm, well, at least she would have spared the rest of the world from whatever it was the Tsarevich had planned for his ship of fools.
She had only one certainty—that this was the best chance she would ever get. The Tsarevich was bent on some unknown scheme. Capturing the ghost had set his entire operation into motion. By the time they reached dry land it would be too late to stop him. She had to act with real haste or lose this opportunity forever.
“Get back to your station or someone will see,” the Siberian told her. He never looked at her eyes. He had lived as a gay man under Soviet rule long enough to know how these things were done. He’d been trained by the best—the KGB. Under their ever-present gaze, to have a love life he had become a master conspirator.
Ayaan had little experience at plots and schemes. She’d always believed that the Avtomat Kalashnikov Model 1947 was the answer to every question life posed. She was learning so much. The girl navigator, the Siberian, the doctor cutting hands on the stern—they had been secret agents from the beginning. They needed her, too, though. None of them would ever have acted on their own. The Tsarevich’s power felt too great, too pervasive. They needed Ayaan’s leadership.
She headed out of the tower and back toward the stern, back toward her official duties. When the time came she knew she would be ready. She had no choice.
15
Sarah swabbed out the inside of one of the buckets they used to catch rain. As usual a seagull had shit in it—the birds mistook the white canisters for public toilets. Sarah had never thought she could learn to hate living animals so much.
The tug rolled and she smacked her hip against the gunwale. It happened enough she was starting to get calluses. She had learned not to use her hands to try to steady herself when she had tried—once—to catch a line on the side of the wheelhouse and felt the skin burn right off her palms. The tug had not been meant for the kind of swells the Mediterranean offered. Sarah had no idea how they could stay upright on the open ocean. She supposed she could chalk it up to Osman’s expert piloting, and the fact that they had yet to see a real storm.
At least she was getting over her seasickness. As long as she didn’t go aft and have to smell the diesel fuel (or worse, its hot hydrocarbon exhaust), she only felt partially nauseous. Bilious, perhaps. Like something liquid and extremely foul was wallowing around in her empty stomach but at least it didn’t try to come up too often.
She cleaned out the last bucket with a dirty rag and headed forward, toward the bow where Ptolemy sat in a perfect lotus position, evidently enjoying the salt spray. She touched the soapstone. Even though he was facing away from her that simple contact was enough to get his attention. “Were you a sailor in a past life?” she asked.
everyone was sailor in that dream time canopus they sea say canopus time was desert a sailor they time say that desert all who canopus live in the desert sailor dream of the sea
As usual she understood maybe ten per cent of what he had to say. “Canopus, that’s part of your name. Ptolemaeus—that’s the Roman form of Ptolemy.” Jack had explained it to her. “Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great’s generals and he took over Egypt from the pharaohs. You were a descendant of his.” Ptolemy nodded. “And then Canopus... like the star?” she asked. “And those... what do you call them? Canoptic jars. The jars they put your internal organs in.”
He nodded.
both
Well, at least that made some sense. Then he had to ruin it by going on.
he drowned was troy menelaus’ helmsman, a city sailor beyond drowned compare they say named a drowned city for him a city that helmsman drowned menelaus he beheld helen city of troy a sailor they say
In her bleary condition it was too much. Sarah let go of the soapstone. “Yeah, well,” she said, the words burbling out of her like her breakfast just might, “enjoy your cruise, whatever. Don’t get up and do any work or anything.”
That was hardly fair. Ptolemy did much of the truly physical labor, almost all of the heavy lifting, and he kept the tug going at night while she and Osman slept.
The living pilot hardly liked the arrangement—he would never trust a dead thing—but he had no choice. If they were going to catch up with the Russians they couldn’t lay to every evening.
“Sarah,” Osman called, sounding a little excited, maybe, “you should see this.”
She picked her way carefully back around the wheelhouse of the tiny tug boat and ducked under the weather hood. Osman was standing with his feet apart, one hand draped bonelessly over the wheel. He didn’t look down at the radar screen so much as point at it with his chin. His eyes were busy scanning the horizon.
If you needed to know what kind of boat you should take on a rescue mission, Osman was the man to ask. He had passed by most of the surviving water craft they found in the harbors and marinas of Cyprus—one had a bad engine efficiency, the sails on another were merely for show. He had finally had to decide between a seventy-five meter pleasure yacht with sumptuous state rooms below or a tug boat that had been sitting in dry dock for twelve years. He picked the tug.
It had a monstrously large fuel supply, for one. It was meant for hauling supertankers down through the Suez Canal. With nothing in tow it could sail forever (or close enough) on a single tank. Secondly it had a radar tower much, much taller than the boat was long. It needed heavy duty navigation gear to get through the narrow locks of the aging canal. Sarah needed heavy duty detection gear if she ever hoped to find the Russians in the middle of one of the world’s biggest seas.
In the dry dock Osman had run any number of tests on the tug’s radar equipment. Miracle of miracles it still worked. Now Sarah looked down and saw the blip that had caught Osman’s attention. It looked like a splotch of glowing bird shit to her. “How do we know it’s not an island, or a drifting log?”
“Because, little girl, I know the difference between a radar and a tin can on a string. A bogey that size was rare enough back in the golden age. Now it means only one thing—a sea-going vessel at least a hundred meters long.”
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