by Nate Crowley
She tried to put it down to the chaos at sea, to the haste with which she had been forced to turn an upturned graveyard into an army, but there was no avoiding the truth. As a tactician, she had been pathetic. All she had really done was point the dead in the right direction, and even that was now ending in disaster. They’d be ground to paste at the citadel gates; the City would send new ships and new bodies back to Ocean, and inflict who knew what cruelties on them to stop this happening again.
Nearby, a man was screaming. Mouana had been too focused on the carnage at the gate to notice him before, but there he lay, a yard from where she sat slumped against the corpse-drift. He was young, perhaps her side of twenty, and well-fed, as far as she could tell. After getting so used to faces where the cheekbones broke the skin, living faces seemed desperately unusual. He lay on a stretcher, clearly abandoned by his squadmates in their haste to secure the gate.
The man screamed again as he saw Mouana turn to regard him, loud enough to carry over another blast from Eunice’s gun. She wondered what he made of her, a one-eyed corpse morosely tapping on a keyboard, but by the looks of things, he was beyond reason. Sweat streamed from his brow, his pupils had hardened to points of animal fear, and his scream was the sort that echoed in the dreams of army surgeons.
As Mouana looked down the man’s body, she saw why. He was being eaten from the feet up. The grasping hands of the fallen dead had found him and drawn him in, and now he was up to the knees in the hungry mound. A thicket of brine-withered claws groped at him, pulling him in inch by inch, and he stared at Mouana with gritted teeth.
Served him right, thought Mouana. The fucker had eaten well off their labour, had grown fat on meat they had hauled from hell. Served him right to end as meat himself. She scraped the puckered recesses of her mouth for the black fluid that pooled there, and spat on the ground beside the man’s head.
Then she thought what Wrack would have thought of her, and her sneer collapsed. Anger was one thing, but this was another. Taking satisfaction from the man’s agony wouldn’t bring the gate down, and it certainly wouldn’t make her failure any less profound. What had she expected the poor sod to do; starve and refuse the draft? He probably hadn’t even known what was going on in Ocean—or at least had convinced himself it was all nonsense. She could hardly say he deserved to be eaten alive.
Before she could think any further, she had drawn the pistol from her belt and put a hole through the boy’s temple. Telling herself that hate had pulled the trigger for her, Mouana rose to her feet, put the damned soldier out of her head, and climbed up on the mound of bodies.
“No point dragging this out any longer,” she muttered to herself, then picked up her loudhailer to order the charge. It was halfway to her lips when her wrist chimed.
THAT WAS GOOD OF YOU, said Wrack, and Mouana dropped the loudhailer in shock.
“Fucking hell, Wrack,” she said, gaping at her wrist panel in rage. Only when the second bullet smacked into her shoulder did she remember to slide down from the barricade.
“How in piss did you see that?” she shrieked, scanning the baffled faces of the piled bodies.
I’M THE CRAB, replied Wrack, adding a cheery V.v.V that would have made Mouana tear her hair out if she hadn’t been worried it might take her scalp with it.
Sure enough, there was one of the Tavuto’s cleanup crabs nearby, mouthparts whickering away absentmindedly at a fallen soldier. She could have sworn the camera bolted to its blanched carapace winked at her as it gave a cheery wave with a gore-streaked claw.
Muttering something she had once given a man a week’s latrine duty for calling her, she resisted the urge to shoot the thing, and stabbed at the keyboard.
WHR TH FK YOU BN???
WHAT ARE YOU ON ABOUT? replied Wrack, I’VE NOT BEEN ANYWHERE! I HAVE, HOWEVER, WORKED OUT HOW TO RECEIVE SOUND FROM THESE THINGS, MIND, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO TYPE ANYMORE.
“Don’t be bloody cute with me, Wrack,” Mouana hissed at the crab, her leg aching to kick the thing. “We’re getting annihilated here. And you just pissed off. What in the name of the Tin King have you been doing?”
The crab raised its claws in a conciliatory gesture, and the panel beeped again.
OK. I’M SORRY, I REALLY AM. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO EXPLAIN, OR AT LEAST EXPLAIN QUICKLY. I WAS THINKING ABOUT... OTHER STUFF, BASICALLY. BUT I’M HERE NOW. WHAT CAN I DO?
Squatting down to eye level with the camera, Mouana jabbed a finger at it and did her best to keep a level tone.
“Mortars, Wrack. Missiles. Anything. I need you to blow the Scholar’s Gate to pieces. And I need you to do it now, because we’re running out of ‘later.’ Shoot the gate, Wrack. Please.”
Too long passed, filled with the rattle of gunfire at the breach, and Mouana feared for a moment he was gone again. Then the words came up on the screen, and her jaw dropped.
I’M SORRY. I WON’T.
“What do you mean you won’t? There must be something!” panted Mouana, shaking the crustacean desperately. “There has to be something you can fire!”
NO, I DON’T MEAN ‘I CAN’T’, said Wrack, the words appearing slowly. I MEAN, ‘I WON’T’.
THE THING IS, THERE’S A REALLY LOVELY BAKERY THERE, BUILT INTO THE PASSAGE ON THE OTHER SIDE. I USED TO GO THERE ON TUESDAYS, ON THE WAY TO WORK. THEY DID THE MOST INCREDIBLE SAUSAGE ROLLS. OF COURSE, IT WASN’T REAL PORK, BUT THEY DISGUISED THE FISH REALLY WELL, AND...
“Wrack,” whispered Mouana, swallowing rage.
YES? said Wrack, as the crab tipped its body quizzically to one side.
“I can’t imagine what you’ve been through in that thing. I honestly wonder how you’ve kept your mind this long. But please. Please, Wrack. Don’t go mad now. I need this. We all need this. Fire the mortars. And then we can get this over with and rest.”
Mouana closed her eye and clenched her teeth, tried to drown out the sound of the massacre as she waited for the chime of a new message. When it came, she dreaded it almost too much to open her eye.
GOOD GRIEF, typed Wrack. YOU’VE LOST YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR, HAVEN’T YOU? OF COURSE I FIRED THE BLOODY MORTARS. THEY JUST TAKE A WHILE TO COME DOWN AGAI—
The ground flashed bright white, then slammed into her face as her body was smacked sideways by the blast. Impacts shook the cobbles beneath her, one after another, coming faster and faster until they blurred into a continuous roar of thunder. Masonry rained down around her, and heat rose at her back until she felt her clothes would surely catch fire.
Something in Mouana’s head ticked and sent her back to bombardment drill, forcing away all sensation except the movement of her lips as she slowly recited the alphabet. By the time she reached O, the explosions had given way to a profound silence, and she cautiously raised her head.
The barricade was blasted into disarray and littered with chunks of stone; beyond it was only dust and smoke. Besides the soft clink of stone chips pattering on the rubble, there was no sound. Mouana rose to her feet, and checked her body for missing parts: she was alabaster from head to toe, but everything was there. And beside her was the crab, staring at the destruction with a scavenger’s disregard.
YOU’RE WELCOME, said Wrack and, without hesitation, she kicked him down the hill.
MOUANA WAS FIRST into the breach, screaming as she fired her pistol into the smoke. Behind her came the last of Tavuto’s workforce, hundreds strong still, loping and hopping and hobbling across broken stone.
Clouds of murk rolled through the cratered waste, occasionally revealing a blackened body, or a leg protruding from the collapsed stonework. But nothing fired back at them. They were alone in the desolation, greeted only by their own battle-cry as it echoed through a tomb of smoke.
As they passed through the gate’s ruins and into the street beyond, the clouds began to thin, but still there was no new line of guns to overcome. Mouana jabbed her pistol at shadows in the gathering night, expecting an ambush at any second, but they remained unchallenged.
At th
e gate, it had seemed as if the entirety of the City militia had been backed up behind that passage—she had imagined them packing the streets all the way to the Ministry. Surely that couldn’t have been the citadel’s last line of defence?
Yellow light blossomed above them, followed by a distant, deep cracking, and Mouana wondered if maybe it had been after all. The smoke lit up again, and she looked up; the distant glow told her the City was falling—she just couldn’t put her finger on why. Death had done maddening things to her memory.
Then the clouds parted, and she saw the light’s source—a mile up, fire was splashing across the sky in rippling circles, boiling away like water flicked on hot steel. As each bloom faded it birthed an arc of lightning, which crept across an unseen dome until it twined with another discharge. Her old guns, hammering the City’s shield.
There was the patter of the howitzers; three, then five, then three, just as she had drilled them. There were the twin blasts of Theia and Rhea, creating a violet surge where they overlapped, and then—Mouana counted to three, then nodded as the sky flashed green, right on cue—there was old Kronos, with its belly-grown warheads that outweighed a man.
Mouana cracked into a wolfish grin; she drew in a huge, useless breath through her nose and imagined she could smell the ozone of their discharge, hear the sizzle of coolant dripping from the casings. Another flurry of howitzer shots peppered the bruise Kronos had left on the shield, and sparks burst from its underside as if from forge-struck iron.
As the wound left by the barrage faded, however, so did her smile. She knew those weapons like family, and recognised this particular firing pattern. It was an all-out bombardment of the shield’s strongest point—phenomenally costly, and designed not to break it, but to draw all its power to one spot. With the shield sucking up everything that came out of the reactors, the point defence systems on the wall would have sputtered out, and the division’s rail pieces would be briefly free to batter the city wall.
As if on cue, a monstrous cracking rolled in from far inland, followed by a rumble through the ground. Another few volleys like that, and a breach was inevitable. The Blades of Titan, the mercenary company Mouana had served her career in, was finally making its play to take the City. And to have ground down its defences to a point where such an assault was even feasible, Lipos-Tholos must have been on its last legs even before they had arrived.
With the threat of full assault on its landward side looming, the City would have had to keep its troops out in the suburbs, massed anxiously behind the walls. When the Tavuto came through the Gate, what choice had they but to pray the naval blockade held, and that the citadel’s standing garrison would be enough to mop up anything that made it through?
And to give credit to whoever had arranged the defence, thought Mouana, it nearly had been enough. She doubted she still had seven hundred sailors standing, and wouldn’t have had that if Tavuto hadn’t been able to bombard the city from under its shield.
But it had, so there they were. And there was the Ministry, just half a mile ahead up an empty street.
Mouana wondered why nobody was running for it, then realised they had all stopped to wait for her as she stared at the sky. Looking behind her, she saw the street filled with dead faces, patient yet alert, waiting for her to signal the advance. The mindless and the muddled were gone now; they had either wandered off into the streets in search of meat and old memories, or had long since found a gun to run at. These were the ones who had made it through Tavuto with a semblance of self, and there was something like hope in their clouded eyes, now the end was in sight.
There was Kaba, Tavuto’s former turret commander, and there was Eunice, towering two feet above the rest of the crowd. Two of the other warbuilt had made it through the assault, though one was missing an arm, and all through the crowd were women and men in the same rags as her, the remnants of the company uniform. They were mixed in with thieves and brawlers, pamphleteers and preachers; a raft of dread flotsam drifted back to the city that had cast them overboard.
The Blades’ attack on the walls no longer mattered to Mouana; they were not her army. This was, and their work was almost done. She had no idea what they would find ahead in the place of their monstrous birth; all she knew was that they had to break it so it would never work again.
Another barrage raked its claws across the night and Mouana started up the hill, with death at her back.
CHAPTER FOUR
WRACK FOUND HIMSELF somewhere on Scullery Street, eating a dead hound.
Wrinkling his snout in distaste, he coughed out the rancid mouthful and scissored his jaws in a nearby puddle to rinse them. These things were necessary, sure, but he didn’t really fancy experiencing it if he could avoid it.
As the puddle’s surface flattened out, he turned his wedge of a head and eyeballed the reflection: he was a Mako this time. Or was it a Grey Gorger? Either way, some sort of shark, fitted with the usual hydraulic cradle and crown of steel legs that most of Tavuto’s beasts had been built into.
They hissed and clattered as they carried him along the street’s cobbles, through a scene of howling chaos. This close to Tavuto (its flank loomed just a few blocks ahead, like a crude new street) the roads were swarming with zombies; those either too degraded or confused to have followed the logic of the invasion, and who had wandered down the chains and boat-chutes to see what they could find.
For much of the citizenry, already terrified by the interposition of a town-sized ship in their postcode, this had proved too much. Families were fleeing their tenements wholesale, clutching their children as they sprinted up the street in bug-eyed terror, while militiamen fleeing from the fighting on College Hill accelerated past them.
For the most part, the wandering dead were harmless—Wrack witnessed one woman with a sagging vest and exposed vertebrae, leaning down to a letterbox and repeatedly bellowing to ask if Lottie was home. Others, however, had come to the streets with more than just fog in their heads. For some of the dead, any revenge would do.
A piercing scream caused Wrack to turn; a child had tripped, been sent sprawling in the debris of a toppled poem cart. His mother had noticed, but so had a huge old bastard with a crushed face and a metal spar in his hand—and the dead man was a lot closer.
Wrack sprinted for the corpse, raising sparks as his claws crashed across the cobbles. The sight of a quarter-ton shark racing towards her son did nothing to allay the mother’s screaming, but it managed to distract the crushed man.
Spar still raised in readiness to spear the boy, the corpse swung round and threw the thing at Wrack instead. It was a classic harpooner’s throw, sending the pole smoothly through Wrack’s mouth and skewering virtually everything vital on the way back.
Still, Wrack didn’t mind that much; since he’d worked out how to get telemetry from the ship’s beasts (after Tavuto’s impact, he’d needed something to distract him from the pain), he had no shortage of bodies to resort to.
The shark’s vision drained like a drunk’s bladder, greying out even before he collided jaws-first with the corpse, but lasted long enough for him to catch the mother scooping up her son in the corner of his vision. As it faded entirely, he found his relief turning swiftly to cold slush. How many dead men, on how many streets, had he not managed to stop? Seeing it at street level, hearing the horror in that woman’s voice as she wondered how this could possibly be happening to her... it had made it all a bit too real.
Maybe the shark had been a bad idea, thought Wrack. So he looked somewhere else.
“TWO... THREE!” ROARED Mouana, pushing forward with all the strength her salt-cured calves could muster. The makeshift battering ram surged forward on the shoulders of the mob, and the Ministry’s mahogany gates bounced in her vision as they broke into a run.
She did not expect them to be flung open, nor for a pair of burly women to step forward from a cheering crowd inside and hurl a man’s body into their path.
From the looks on their faces they were
just as shocked to see a gang of corpses rushing at them, brandishing a piece of public statuary as a ram.
There was a lot of shouting, a lot of falling over, and then a gruesome, clanging crunch as the ram—a bronze casting of the City’s Chancellor—pitched forward right on top of the body on the floor.
The echoes of the crash were still ringing as the crowd inside exploded into motion, drawing weapons and diving behind whatever cover the Ministry’s lobby offered. Despite their decay-numbed reflexes, Mouana’s crew nearly matched their speed, drawing their weapons and aiming at the doorway with teeth bared. Eunice’s gun was already whining when Mouana gave the order to hold fire and—to her immense relief—the same order echoed from inside the building.
The silence that followed was dense and dangerous; a soft chorus of clicks, coughs and shuffles, each of which threatened a hail of bullets if it tempted a finger to slip. Then came the deliberately heavy slap of soles on marble, as a rangy figure strode out of the Ministry to stand on its threshold.
Initially, Mouana took him for a dead man. His face was tight as sheet rubber across a skull like a fist, and riven down one side by a scar that left one eye a milky wart. His arms were twisted bunches of tattoos and veins, and his waistcoat hung from his ribs across a painfully empty abdomen. But his good eye was sharp as sea ice, and the way he sucked at his tobacco-pipe betrayed an uniquely living thirst.
Mouana let go of the fallen ram, and walked towards him without breaking eye contact. Her wrist panel beeped, but she ignored it. Standing just six feet apart, they nodded at each other. He took in the remains of her uniform, the regimental tattoo of the ringed world on her forearm; she flicked a glance at the blue-inked pipe-smoke wreathing his own. They had an understanding.
“Wrack?” said the man through his thick black moustache, emitting a cloud of blue smoke.
“Yeah,” answered Mouana. “Wrack.”
Both mobs erupted in rhythmic chanting of the name as the two of them shook hands and broke into the strangest of smiles.