"P-please!" bubbled Reine, wringing its claws in supplication. "It's eating me alive, Ashishi! My Lord - my Lord has forsaken me!"
There was no remorse in Abdulafia's eyes as he jammed the trigger down, pulling the last filament fatally tight. He watched with clinical detachment as the Exalted's face became a gridwork of seeping lines, as its whole body began to leak putrid yellow fluid from ten thousand razor cuts. Inside its skin the wire sliced through organs and bones, reducing its innards to shuddering jelly. And Reine was right - the blessing of the Worm had left him, allowing the acidic slime of the Saprophytes to eat away at his transformed flesh. For a second his human face melted out of the oily blackness, a man with blind and milky eyes...
"Mine too, Reine." whispered the Ashishi as the Exalted fell to its knees. "We're two of kind, you and I. But my Lord - he's going to have to answer to me."
'Afia jerked the Eversio up and away with a final tearing sound, and the poor doomed thing slithered into pieces, a sad little pile of steaming chunks.
It was done.
At the bottom of a crater of smoking rubble a dirty little stick-man stands, the barrel of a huge silver cannon leaned across his shoulder. Around him the plasticrete and steel run black with blood, dripping with saprophytic gore. From above he's nothing, just another insect crawling over the broken remains of its hive.
Zoom out.
For a mile on every side the ruins sprawl, and other tiny figures pick through the wreckage, scrabbling and crying and looting. The habs and 'facs which loom on every side are locked down, barricaded up tight while ancient war-machines and crawling horrors stalk the streets.
There's no Vision to guide him home, nothing but screams and static on the R.T. radio band. Not even Kaito and Hassan, or Deut' Jones and his so-called Heretics.
Abdulafia checks his load - five more shots. He scrambles up the crater wall and looks out over a battlefield.
It's going to be a very long walk.
Jaq Hassan stared with undisclosed hostility at the plate in front of him. Right in the middle of that brightly-colored disc of plastic squatted the ripest, reddest tomato he'd ever seen. It was clearly unnatural.
Next to him Kaito prodded a cob of steaming corn tentatively with his fork, as if expecting it to explode on contact. The other Pentecostal sailors were tearing into their meal with gleeful abandon, while at the head of the table Deuteronomy Jones perched like an avuncular buzzard, watching the two Elysians squirm.
"What's the matter, boys? Lost your appetite? I hear those old MRE rations can do that to a body..."
Jaq, at least, had seen pictures of things like this. Vegetables, they were called. Not like the balls and tubes of colored synthesoy which passed for food in the Subcity. He'd been raised on tales of what the Hand of Fatima's hydroponic gardens had once grown, back in the old country. Some of the old folks even had photographs.
"Mister Jones - I mean, it's just... where did you get this stuff, anyway?”
The old preacher smiled, revealing a mouthful of ivory pegs interlaced with gold fillings.
"The Amish. We've got a whole community of those Mennonite boys down on the abyssal plain, domed up under a couple miles o' water. Grow the best damn crops I've ever tasted."
"Amish?" asked the Kayzi, dropping his fork "Aren't they an anti-tech cult? That's what we used to call anyone in my hab who wasn't headwired."
Jaq took a bite out of his tomato, and a look of transcendent bliss spread across his face.
"Mhhy hvvh t' hhhry thsss! Sss fuh'nn essskwsnst!" Runnels of juice ran down his chops, dripping onto the checkered tablecloth.
"Yeah, that's them." said 'Deut, stooping to carve a slice of pumpkin with his own bone-handled cutlery. "They don't want to touch the air-scrubbers and valency generators that keep 'em alive, so my kids do it for 'em. See, it wasn't only the Church of the Pentecost what got wiped out in the Vatican Purge. There's Baptists, Bahai, Mormons, heck, even Unitarians still out there in the rad-lands. They never got all of us, even when Pope Innocent the Destroyer was in charge."
Kaito finally trusted his meal enough to pop a forkful of kernels into his mouth, and soon his idiot grin was as wide as Hassan's.
"Man, you had us worried for a second!" sighed Jaq, wiping the pips out of his beard with one immense hand. "Your boat's not the most subtle thing in water, you know that?"
Deuteronomy laughed as he tipped his chair back, his hands behind his head.
"Well, we've got quite a crew on board. Three hundred of us, last count, plus the pickups, the stowaways and the kids. Why you think we needed the pile out of that machine of yours?"
Kaito remembered the huge pincer-claws of the Archangel coming down on them, part of a floating dry-dock apparatus remade as a ship-catcher. It wasn't as if they had any choice. Not for the first time the Kayzi wondered what Abdulafia had gotten them into.
"Rig like that can keep us fueled for another century, boys. But if what you tellin' me is true, the judgment of the Vatican might just be at hand tonight."
Jones unfolded himself from his chair, stretching out to his full height with a click and pop of ancient joints. In his prime the man must have been huge - big enough to challenge Hassan himself in sheer bulk. But years of living in a submarine had stooped him over, while sheer old age had whittled him away to a sinewy shadow of his former self. He wore an old-fashioned preacher's outfit - stovepipe trousers, black shirt and white starched collar, and a pair of worn-down alligator boots with silver tips. His face was as creased and wrinkled as that scaly old leather, a rich mahogany hue which shone blue-black under the fluorescent lights.
"The question is, am I gonna help Mister Three-Thirty and his friends? Or am I just gonna sit here and laugh while the Holy See gets burned down to dust...."
Kaito fixed him with a shrewd stare as Jones stalked down the table toward him, his boots clicking against the metal floor. The Kayzi gestured around him with a forkful of corn, unflinching as the Pentecostal preacher leaned down over him.
"The way I see it, captain, this all looks like it uses a lot of power. I'd say it's a fair trade - our micropile for the lives of as many Ashishim can fit inside this tub."
Jaq made to stand up as Deut' eyeballed Kaito from an inch away, his face grim. But the Electromagus held him back with one hand, taking a juicy bite out of his cob. Butter dripped as he grinned and swallowed.
"You think this is some kind of deal, Elysian? I got your little toy wrapped up tight, and you're sittin' at my table with a hundred Pent' sailors at either side. What's my incentive?"
Kaito dabbed his lip with a cotton napkin and met Deuteronomy's gaze, unblinking. "Your incentive is, you're only playing at being crazy. And if you touch that thing without the codes in my head, we're all going for one last swim."
His fingers mimed a little explosion in the air.
There was a second's silence as cold as the water slipping past the Uriel's hull. Jaq was horribly aware of the hard-faced Pentecostal mariners all around them, waiting for their captain's order.
Then the preacher began to laugh, a deep belly rumble which shook his entire lanky frame.
"Oh yeah, you is 'Afia's boys allright. That's just what he'd have said, right there!" Deut' sat himself down on the edge of the table, wiping away a tear from his eye. "Can't be too careful, even tonight. See, the truth is... well, I don't suppose words'll do it justice. What say we go for a walk together?"
He didn't wait for an answer - just turned away with his hands clasped behind his back, moving with a long, hunched-over stride which was all the low ceiling allowed.
Kaito tipped his chair back and followed, grinning at the crew of sailors who'd never before seen their captain outstared. Jaq was after him in another second, stuffing his pockets with Amish-grown salad greens.
The Archangel Uriel was huge.
That much had been apparent when the hulking great vessel had blotted out the light above the fleeing Kraken, drawing them into its craw with giant hydraulic
pincers. With their claw-tipped tentacles severed all they could do was sit tight until the Pent' marines cracked the hatch, leading them out at gunpoint. The trip up to the mess hall had been a dizzying maze of mesh tunnels, catwalks over thumping engines, galleries of
oxygenating 'ponics and worn-down ladders.
It turned out to be only the tip of one mother of a pressurized steel iceberg.
The Archangel had been constructed during the Christian Internecium, a last escape for the doomed 'Heretics' who defied the reunification of the church. Orthodox monks out of Kamchakta had commandeered one of the vessel's hulls, an ex-Russian missile sub. The other was jacked out of Alaska by Baptists, and when the two factions met among the Aleutians to take stock of their situation the plan had come together...
Centuries later their work was still in progress. The Uriel was essentially a twin-hulled submarine, but it would be far more accurate to call it a mobile undersea town. Modules were welded and bolted on seemingly at random - everything from ancient rocket boosters to great spherical fuel tanks. This mess of watertight steel filled in the space between the two ancient nuke boats, a dewy warren packed with life.
Literally hundreds of Pentecostal sailors popped hatches and swung down from hammocks to goggle at their alien guests - the only people on board not dressed in immaculately starched whites.
"See, by the end of the Purge those Vatican boys thought they had us beat. Cast out of all the habitable zones in the rad-lands, literally pushed into the ocean. But there
were pockets here and there where us Heretics held on. The Archangel was what held us together - Heaven knows that our faith wasn't gonna do it alone."
Deut' stopped at the foot of yet another ladder and turned to smile ruefully at Kaito.
"Take my advice, son. Never join a revolution based on dissent. We wanted the right to argue with the Pope, and what we got was the right to argue among ourselves. For about two hundred years..."
This ladder led them to a dead end - but what a dead end it was.
This must have been the highest point of the whole great vessel's superstructure, a transparent plastic dome forty feet wide. An array of periscopes and screens depended from a set of coiled insectoid arms in the centre of the room, and dark water swirled by all around, the lights of the Uriel filtering up dimly from below.
Jones grabbed a swinging microphone and brought it up to his lips, muttering a few snatches of code into its rusted grille. At once the deck canted, and the two Elysians staggered, grabbing for the handrail which ran around the edge of the dome.
"Don't be alarmed, gentlemen." said the preacher, holding himself steady on the chrome shaft of the main 'scope. "We're coming to the surface so I can assess the tactical situation - as your Ashishi friend would put it."
The screens descended at the ends of a clutch of insect arms, screening hundreds of live feeds from all over the Uriel's hull. Both the Russian and American subs had been immense on their own, but with a small city piggybacking between them the ship was vast beyond imagining, a whole island of corroded steel and battleship-grey paint. Ornate crucifixes were etched and airbrushed onto every panel and tube, the blessings of generations of Pent' maintainence grunts. Even more of them were welded up out of scrap steel, salvaged from ruined churches and woven out of chrome wire. These broke the surface all around them as the Archangel breached, and for a second the black surface of the ocean looked like an ancient graveyard.
The crew of the sunken cathedral were nothing if not pragmatic, however - the next things to rise dripping from the swells were guns. Hundreds and hundreds of guns. More than a floating basilica, it seemed that the Uriel was a ziggurat of firepower, scavenged from the rusted hulks of the world's battleships. All of them were pointed at the horizon, toward the dirty orange glow of Elysium.
"It's burning. It's all burning..." Hassan's voice was barely a whisper as he watched the flames, hypnotized. Inside his head he was watching his old Hab-Block disintegrate, hearing the screams of his family behind the roar of the flames.
Kaito swallowed hard, his head spinning with similar visions. Up until now, he'd tried to forget the terrible things Abdulafia had revealed to them. The truth about Kronos and its harvest of souls. About something even worse which could rip open human minds and feed on their pain...
He prayed that the warmekan he'd sent had found the Ashishi warrior. He didn't want to think about a thing like him being turned, sequestrated like Magus Verlaine.
"Looks like they caught it bad, whatever it is." said Deuteronomy Jones, his face set in a grim scowl. "And if 'Afia wants his people saved, it's gonna be tough. Look..."
One of the screens zoomed, showing something hazy and indistinct bobbing on the black ocean. The lenses shifted, and suddenly it became clear. A whole armada of boats was heading out from the city under a pall of smoke, everything from inflatable dinghys to a Celestial fish-processing plant piggybacking on a mobile oil-rig. Some of the
desperate refugees were even clinging to makeshift rafts - oildrums and polystyrene chunks netted together, pallets and boards and household furniture. As they watched one of those topheavy little craft faltered and ripped in two, spilling its screaming cargo into the icy water.
"What - what the hells is that thing?" gasped Kaito, recoiling from another hanging screen. "There - zoom in on it! It's some kind of..."
But the Kayzi knew all too well what it was. He'd felt its touch before, if only for a second. The image split and doubled, spilling across the banks of monitors until it was the only one left. If this didn't convince Deuteronomy Jones that the situation was serious, then nothing would.
Once the ship had been a pleasure-cruiser, but now its white hull was streaked with rust and algal filth, its lines hacked and mangled by ten centuries of constant modification. The vivid red chop of the Celestial Kingdom was spraypainted across its bows to declare its allegiance, while a trio of makeshift machinegun turrets bulged from its superstructure. The crew had decided that they'd rather run than fight tonight, and many of them had decided to take their families with them. The camera eyes of the Uriel picked out the broken shapes of them scattered across the decks. Who could guess what kind of hell existed below?
"Sweet Lord... it's eating them alive!" breathed Jones, pressing one palm up against the screen as if he could reach out to those doomed souls. "Is - is this the thing that Abdulafia wants us to fight?"
It was no regular Saprophyte which had slipped aboard the Celestial gunboat. One of the refugees who'd paid his way down into its hold had welcomed the coming of the Worm. He'd carried the virus with him until they were too far from land to escape. And then...
The shuddering black mass of it hung over the transom of the gunboat, thick ropy tentacles churning the water to froth. As Kaito watched, horrified, a spiked tongue of gelid ooze slithered across the deck, snaring a body by the ankle. It was a young girl - perhaps the daughter of a crewman, perhaps even of the Exalted One itself... She kicked and twitched weakly as she was drawn in, mummified in coiling pseudopods, clawing trails across the bloody hardwood...
It was too much for Jaqub Hassan, and he turned on the captain, knotting his huge fists in the Pentecostal's shirt and lifting him from his feet.
"Dammit, are we just gonna sit here and watch! The Ashishi said the whole city's full of those things!"
He slammed Jones up against the curving wall, making the whole dome shudder. "And what if this is how it's meant to end, Jaq?" whispered the preacher. "Those are killer's hands, boy, so don't try to tell me you're innocent."
For a second Hassan clenched even tighter, his teeth clenched together in a grimace of fury. But then he sagged back, letting Deut' slide back down the wall until his silver-tipped boots touched the floor.
"I killed them clean, man. Only them that deserved it, one way or another. Neat and clean."
Kaito rushed forward, pulling his friend away before things could get any worse. There were hundreds of Pentecostals just a few floors bel
ow them, and they couldn't get out of here alone.
Ha! Get out of here to where, exactly?
"What did he do for you?" asked the Kayzi, holding Jaq at arm's length. "Abdulafia. He seemed pretty damned sure that you'd come when he called you."
Deuteronomy Jones smiled, smoothing down the black fabric of his preacher's costume.
"Code, son. Code. You should know that his people are the best, and we needed them for two reasons. First, so I could reach out to the faithful who still live in Elysium. So I could cut through the threedeeo networks' encryption." Now his eyes twinkled, and his mouth twisted into a sardonic half-smile.
"That, and some other codes too. These two boats here..." he gestured at the twin hulls of the Uriel, ploughing through the waves toward the burning city "They came complete with about six hundred megatons of nuclear weaponry. Not a piece of it was any use without those numbers - but once the Vatican knew we had 'em... well, they kind of gave up trying to finish the Internecium."
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