by Nate Crowley
The shiver turned cold very quickly, and the anger coagulated into thick disgust. He wanted to believe the black euphoria had come from the same place as the hunger for fish, because if it had come from him, it raised the possibility that he had been every bit as unpleasant as the mind into which he had been transplanted.
Wrack had been angry when he had woken up after his execution; in fact, it was fair to say that was an understatement. That anger, and the chaos it had sparked, had forced him to actions he could never have imagined in life. Driven by the horror of surviving his death, and the burning need to stop it happening to anyone else, he had done insane things. He had ridden a dead whale into battle, swum across open Ocean, beaten a cyborg murderer with a length of pipe. He had bitten a man’s throat out as he pleaded for mercy, and the memory still made him shiver.
Taking Tavuto had been necessary, and becoming Tavuto after that. And even from those earliest moments of despair with Mouana, when they were just two shivering corpses on the decks of grey hell, the plan had always been to take that hell back to the City that had inflicted it.
But now the City was in his sights, now he could almost taste its fear on the wind, it all felt... well, a bit much. The people he had grown up with were still in that city; his friends were there, and his father, who had wept at his trial. And he was racing towards them, laden with angry carcasses that wanted nothing more than to bite and claw and destroy.
But he was committed now. Even if he was able to wrench Tavuto’s monstrous engines into reverse—and he wasn’t sure he knew how—it would do nothing to stall the tectonic momentum the ship had built up over miles of open Ocean. Accepting that his only option now was to surge forward into the fire, Wrack prised his thoughts from the city of his youth and made himself see it as an irritation to be swatted.
Turning his attention back to the fight, it seemed things were becoming a little less one-sided: the twin colossi at the harbour gates—the Wave-Roamers—had broken their vigil and begun striding out to sea to meet him.
Wrack floundered in confusion, fairly sure that he had slipped into yet another strange dream. But the stone giants were utterly real, and so was the glow of barely-restrained plasma along the street-long blades of their swords.
As the titans waded out to hip-depth, Wrack couldn’t help but feel a surge of satisfaction. Despite College Hill’s endless insistence that the Roamers had been nothing more than statuary for centuries, there had always been a pub-chat undercurrent that insisted that someone’s uncle had been contracted to scour their joints, that someone’s kid had climbed up one night and seen figures moving within their crowns.
Wrack almost felt disappointed when Tavuto’s forward turret, now severely pitted from shellfire, swivelled to the left and blasted one into gravel. The shot jarred Wrack like a swan-dive into concrete, and knocked the gun sixty feet off its bearings, but he couldn’t deny it had been well-aimed. Wrack heard Kaba’s crew whooping and shrieking as they abandoned the gun they had just wrecked, pumping their fists as the Roamer’s bodiless legs pitched into the bay.
There was little time to reflect, however; the other giant was closing rapidly on Wrack’s starboard flank, and the ships ranked in front of the harbour were shuffling apart to let something through. Switching his view to a camera on one of his highest masts, Wrack saw what was coming—the Eschatologist.
The dreadnought slank between the ships of the blockade like a pike through minnow. This was no bath toy.
The Eschatologist was perhaps the sole reason that, in the generations-long history of the siege, Lipos-Tholos had never been threatened by sea. Wrack remembered being part of a choir of fifty thousand schoolchildren, arrayed along the harbour wall to sing it off to some meaningless colony war. The City had never minded it being away from port; the mere possibility of its return was enough to dissuade any possibility of an attack by sea.
Sailors who had served aboard said its corridors had not been made for human beings, that in its deep decks it held the preserved exoskeletons of its first captains. It was a thing of black iron, so old that even its engineers often had to shrug and mutter about magic when tasked with trying to maintain it. It had nothing so crude as guns: it was said that the will of its captain alone was enough to turn even a Gate to sand. For the first time since becoming an enormous ship, Wrack felt true fear.
Then Mouana offered her take on the subject.
RAM IT, she sent, and Wrack checked the bridge camera to confirm the grin he already knew was stretched across her face.
Good idea, he thought at her, and began the chest-crushing work of nudging the ship’s course. He didn’t need asking twice: with the main turret shot and most of his artillery spent, Wrack didn’t have much choice but to barrel straight for the dreaded vessel and hope for the best.
As he centred the shell-chewed apex of his prow on the black ship, however, the whole battle shrank down to him and the dreadnought. His attention was consumed by its baleful lights, like a wolf’s gaze caught at the edge of firelight, and he began to feel strange energies churning deep in his belly. Whether the terror he felt under that glare was just fear of the ship’s secret weapon or part of the weapon itself, he could not say. But he could concentrate on nothing else. Dread consumed him.
When the surviving Wave-Roamer moved alongside and was swept onto its back by a crane swarming with zombies before it could strike a blow (Crane Six, had it been?), it was little more than a footnote on the edge of perspective. The Eschatologist was everything, cruising silently toward him, darkness on a white bow-wave. The feeling of strangeness inside him built until he felt his guts were on the edge of bursting. The black ship’s lights swelled, reaching furnace intensity, and Wrack’s engines began to quake.
And then, the unthinkable. Sirens wailed across the waves between Wrack and his adversary, and explosions consumed the Eschatologist’s port side. Stricken, the black ship began to yaw to face the unseen threat. The red lights swung away, the transfixion broke, and Wrack was able to focus on the other ships in the fleet. The battle line was wildly out of formation; its ships were jostling madly in a swamp of white water, and at least half had turned their guns on the Eschatologist, were pounding away with suicidal focus.
The traitor craft moved free of the blockade and advanced in a knot on the Eschatologist, which seemed vastly less imposing as it swung desperately to face them. The renegades steamed forward and bright white banners, emblazoned with a crude image of a tobacco-pipe, unfurled from their topmasts.
On Tavuto’s war-torn deck, the horde of dead reacted before Wrack could, erupting in a frenzy of cheering. They in turn were answered by the City, where volleys of flares began streaking into the evening sky. The sound of distant gunfire followed close behind.
IS THAT YOUR OLD LOT DOING THAT? messaged Mouana, as Wrack stared in disbelief.
He wasn’t sure how to answer. The traitors’ banners bore the symbol of the Pipers—the City’s insurrectionist faction, named for the semi-mythical rebel Old King Pipe—but whether they were “his old lot” was a very different question.
All he knew was that his Dad had almost certainly been one of them—and that when he himself had been arrested for distributing seditious material through the library (his own memories were unclear on whether he was guilty), he had been a good son and hadn’t told the constables his father was a rebel. Beyond these threadbare facts, his connection with the Pipers had remained maddeningly unclear in his memories.
Either way, he was glad of them now. The Eschatologist seemed a lot less terrifying as it foundered under the rebel guns, which fired relentlessly even as the Piper ships were chewed to pieces by the rest of the fleet.
Free of the flagship’s stare, not to mention the ire of the City’s blockade, the massed dead on Wrack’s deck broke into ceaseless wild shouting, waving rifles, falchions and their own shattered arms in the direction of the City. Even as they watched, two of the Piper ships disappeared before the Eschatologist in columns of f
lame, but by the time the black hulk began turning back to face them, it was too late.
You might want to have everyone brace for impact, Wrack warned Mouana, although Tavuto’s vast bow was already towering above the Eschatologist’s like the threat of a mountain storm.
Whatever the dark ship was made of, it was hard. As he smashed into its flank, Wrack felt a livid, cracking pain, as if he’d taken a bite out of a pint glass. The dreadnought stove in at the beam, but the impact sent a jolt through Wrack that made the Gate transition seem gentle.
Maddened by it, he flailed to hold on to consciousness, leaving his sense of self behind. As the force of the crash screamed through him, he let the formaldehyde-quenched recesses of his new brain come to the fore, and flexed boneless, barbed arms in the dark of his mind. He was a devil cruising under mile-thick ice, ripping lesser monsters from their crevices and grinding them in spiral jaws.
The prey-ship was driven beneath the waves in two splintered halves, ripping vast strips from his body as it went down. He was breached; water was pouring into him, tens of thousands of gallons per second, but he didn’t care. There was more prey ahead.
Shaking aside the chewed carcass of the dreadnought, he swam on. There was no turning back now, and no point trying to think like a timid little creature. Not now the City’s last defence had fallen to his beak; not now that final, delicious impact was so close.
Wrack was so, so hungry, and his quarry sprawled before him; he was within the harbour now, heartbeats from the dock wall. The tiny prey-ape was talking to him, bleating to him through her little letter-pad, but it made no difference now. He was closing on the carcass, foregut flushing hot with acid at the thought of so much meat, and nothing could stop him. The dockside rushed at him, stone and steel and wood and flesh, and Wrack spread his hooked arms in rapture.
WHEN AT LAST the shaking stopped, Mouana uncurled and rose unsteadily to her feet. Dust billowed through the shattered windows of the bridge, obscuring everything outside. Never had she been so glad not to breathe. The world was silent, save the deep moan of settling steel. After the last, ear-splitting crack, when Tavuto’s ageless spine had finally snapped, it was as if all other sound had been shamed into hush.
Mouana looked out at the smothering clouds, and then back at the bridge, where a crowd of wide-eyed cadavers stood, stunned and looking to her for guidance. The emergency lights were dead and the daylight wholly extinguished; their ragged faces were lit only by the flickering of fires deep in the murk.
The evening winds tugged at the shroud of stone fog, and shapes began to loom at the edges of the deck: they were buildings, fallen against the side of the ship and spilled over it in fans of rubble. The bridge crew stared in disbelief.
From an engineer’s point of view, it made sense. As part of her siegework, Mouana had studied the geology of Lipos-Tholos intimately; had worked on endless abortive plans to dig mines and invade it from below. Especially on its seaward side, the place was mostly hollow, honeycombed with storehouses, tidal generators, and ancient districts that had simply been bricked over. Tavuto’s six million tons had ploughed through all of that like a truck into glasswork, only stopping when it ground against bedrock.
Still, to see the mammoth vessel sprawled in the midst of the place like a beached monster defied comprehension. They had rammed the City, and the City had come off worse.
The clouds begin to thin, and so did the silence. The thin wail of sirens began to rise from the streets around them, and tentative gunfire began to sound in the distance. With a rattling hum, the ship’s auxiliary power came on, and Mouana’s radio began squawking as the torn cobweb that passed for her command network began reporting in. The spell was broken.
Raising a radio set to her withered lips, Mouana stared ahead through the vanishing fog, where a sullen shape loomed. College Hill, the seat of Lipos-Tholos’ government, and there at its crest, the crooked immensity of the Ministry of Fisheries and Justice. The place that had made them, through which every soul on the ship had passed on their way to Ocean and to death. Now they had come home, and stood within sight of its vile machines. There was only one thing left to do.
“All crew, this is your captain,” croaked Mouana into the radio, hearing her voice echoing from loudhailers across the ship. She loathed speeches, but she owed them this much before the madness started.
“Ahead of you is College Hill, and on top of it is the place where you became what you are now. You are angry, and you know what to do. If we’re not destroyed on the way there, we probably will be afterwards. But let’s have our revenge first. Let’s give them some of our own fucking justice. Storm the Ministry.”
As the inevitable cheering began, and the bridge crew scurried to be first on deck and join the rush into the City, Mouana dropped the radio and looked upwards. The power was back on, but Wrack’s casket in the ceiling was still dark. The panel of lights beside it, which usually displayed a rank of hard green bars, flickered weakly.
The shadowy mass of the brain barely stirred behind the glass, shreds of white matter drifting like meat in a thin soup. Wrack had stopped responding to her after they had rammed the black ship, and now she wondered if he had made it through the crash at all. She told herself that it didn’t matter; that he had done his part, and that there was nothing more to be settled between them.
Still, as she caught sight of his body, now shaken from its trolley and lying broken in a corner, she couldn’t help but wish he had been there with her to give the speech. Certainly, she had made a good job of whipping up the crew, but somehow, she knew if Wrack had been there, he would have made them smile as he did it.
But he wasn’t there, she thought, shoving a pistol in her belt, and that was that.
CHAPTER THREE
PLS HELP TYPED Mouana with shaking fingers, as a grenade reduced yet another wave of sailors to jagged mush. WRACK. PLS.
Beside her Eunice let loose another volley of fire, hydraulics whining as she pushed against the corpses piled up in front of them. Screams echoed from the militia lines as bullets tore into uniformed bodies. Grenades rained on the rebels.
When the charge started they had been unstoppable, swarming over knots of panicking riflemen like ants over nest-bound chicks. On Physeter, the broad avenue leading up College Hill, the City had found time to gather a sturdier barricade, but even that had been swallowed under their numbers. Over and over, the line had broken and reformed further back on the long road, but each time it came back it had taken longer to overcome.
Then at Exhibition Plaza, where Physeter narrowed to pass through the Scholar’s Gate and into the citadel that crowned the hill, their crawl had slowed to a halt. For every nine dead cut down at the bottleneck, ten would come forward, but the savage mathematics of the battle conspired against them.
Already, the drift of bodies before the gate was big enough to shelter behind. Worse yet, Mouana could now see the ragged tail of her forces on Physeter’s lower slope, and could no longer convince herself they were limitless.
Here and there, the river of once-human bodies was punctuated by the slick, surging shapes of the ship’s beasts. Wolf-eels, stingrays, sharks and black lobsters had all been goaded from Tavuto as they had rushed to the streets, but the stinking things had been made to keep cowed corpses in line, not assault the guns of the living.
Next into the breach was a Greater White, wobbling on brass struts, designed to clean up deck accidents and only half-finished when the Tavuto had been seized. The vast shark opened its jaws and lunged through the gate, drawing a hurricane of rifle fire as it stooped.
“Get that damned thing back!” yelled Mouana through the loudhailer, as she understood what was happening. “It’s going to block the gate! GET IT BACK!”
The leviathan’s supposed handlers yanked on the ropes riveted to the shark’s jaws, but they had no chance of even turning its head. The beast’s mouth collapsed as Mouana watched, cartilage twisting under gunfire and leaving tooth-rows sagging.
Then, thrashing in rage, the thing caught one of its spindly legs in its own mouth, and went down in a mass of torn anatomy.
Its ten ton bulk neatly blocked the entry to the citadel, and almost immediately the defenders had scrambled up onto the wreckage of its underbelly to fire over the top.
Mouana slumped back behind the barricade and stared at the dead screen of her wrist panel. They were past the point where teeth, claws, and the few guns they had could do them any good, and the only heavy ordnance was back on the sundered Tavuto, locked into the mind of her absent friend. For an artillery officer, she thought, this was about as bad as it got. She tapped out PLS again, with a growing sense of futility, and cursed in bitter frustration when no reply came.
Arms reached out from the pile, from those dead too bullet-ruined to walk; they pawed at her shoulders with mangled fingers and protruding bones, while buried mouths murmured husky consolations. Now that, she thought, laughing darkly, was camaraderie.
The absurdity of the moment didn’t amuse her for long. Never had Mouana felt so lost. There were no orders, no intel, and no reserves to call in. Even when she had woken on Tavuto, there had been Wrack to carry her, and to plot with. Now there was nothing but her, sitting alone at the ugly, unravelling end of a plan.
Not that the plan had amounted to much to begin with: ‘walk forward and tear apart anything in their path’ had been the beginning and the end of it. She should have given it more thought. Even with the siege on, even with those ships turning traitor, even with the damage caused by Tavuto, Lipos-Tholos was a nation. How had she expected a mob of poorly-armed corpses, half of whom were rotted through in mind and body, to just walk in and turn the place over?