by Nate Crowley
Mouana screwed shut her eye, spat, and cursed Wrack’s name. The craven bloody librarian wouldn’t lift a finger to help, and now he was going to suffer for it. She had no idea what Dust had planned for his mind once she got hold of the vessel that contained it, but she knew for sure she would be delighted to find it held a human consciousness.
Wrack was going to suffer in a way that made what he’d been through so far seem like a laugh, unless she did something insane. Mouana cursed him again, but before she could work out whether he deserved saving or not, her sabre was drawn.
Smacking Eunice on the shoulder with the pommel to get her attention, Mouana gave the warbuilt a grim nod and pointed at the mob of irregulars on the hatch. Eunice nodded back, then turned to the sailors and gave a booming roar as she swept her huge fist forwards. When the charge started, Mouana was already ten feet ahead of it, weapon raised and howling. As she lurched headlong into three crack-toothed axemen, she tried to ignore the fact her sailors were chanting Wrack’s name.
THESE, AND MANY other strange wonders—the parasitic eel-nymphs that wind around trunks and branches, the germ-lights that glow in the litter and the pungent fruits that lie rotting among them—experienced altogether defy words, and solicit a sensation of awe and—
Shrapnel lanced through the cabin wall and embedded itself in his carapace, making Wrack flinch. Couldn’t they keep it down out there, he thought, mouthparts ticking with irritation? He was trying to read.
These, and many other strange wonders, he began again, before one of the bloody triremes swooped past outside and rattled a window from its frame. He must have started this paragraph over a dozen times, but the damned battle kept taking his attention. What with that and the phantom sensation that someone was hammering on the roof above his head, it seemed the world was out to break his concentration. This was a terrible library.
This time, Wrack made it as far as parasitic eel-nymphs, before the book was snatched from his claws. He gurgled in fury and lashed out with a pincer, but not in time to stop Fingal hurling the tome across the room.
“Mo’dred’s grudge, man, this is no time for fucking books,” seethed the rebel, as he glanced out of the window and reloaded his weapon. “Are you fully out of your mind?”
“Yes,” said Wrack, in the measured tone of his new voice.
“Well, get back into it,” growled Fingal between clenched teeth, as he took a volley of shots at a passing gunship. Somewhere in the mist, the silhouette of a trireme flared as a shell burst against it, then broke apart and tumbled into the sea in a shower of fire. “I’ve done my best to humour you, Wrack—grief knows I have—but I can’t abide a bloody coward. Your father’d be ashamed to call you ‘son,’ acting like this.”
“Don’t you say a damned thing—” started Wrack, but Fingal had grabbed his body from the table and thrust it at the broken window, shaking him as he pointed him at the deck of Gunakadeit.
“Your friends are getting cut to pieces,” gnashed Fingal, barely holding his rage. “The people you freed: the people you lost your body for, and my people besides, who’re willing to die for the same. They’re getting butchered, because you’ve had enough. Let me tell you this,” said the man, holding Wrack’s camera within an inch of his own dead eye, “you don’t get bored of a revolution. You’re in it ’til you die, and if you get the chance then you carry the hell on afterwards. So get your head together and fight.”
MOUANA GROWLED AS the blade bit into her thigh, using the second it took her opponent to dislodge it to ram her sabre through the warrior’s neck. She was still freeing her own weapon, sawing against vertebrae, when another attacker bore down on her with a mace clenched in a blood-caked fist.
As the weapon swung, a ceramic fist swept in over her head, and Eunice sent the man spinning back over the hold. The warbuilt was leaking fluids from a dozen hydraulic punctures, but only seemed to grow more savage as the fight drew on. Dipping to avoid a shotgun blast, she lowered her head and ploughed into a ragged line of irregulars, bowling them onto their backs. The deck shook as she trampled their bodies to bone-flecked paste.
To her left, a group of living sailors were firing into the melee from behind the carcass of a Kuiper Ochsemann, while the Bruiser appeared to be genuinely boxing with a scaly-armed aug woman at the edge of the fray. They were slowly pushing the irregulars back along the deck, but the fanatics still had control of the hold, and had all but cut through the locks holding it shut.
Mouana was turning to assess the fighting on her right, when a hammer smashed into her chest, flattening half her ribcage and sending her sprawling to the deck. A monstrous figure towered above her, already winding up for a second blow. She jerked her shattered body to avoid the impact, but the hammer came down like a steam press, flattening her left arm below the elbow.
She scrabbled for a blade with the remnants of her right hand as the hammerman limbered up for another swing, and then, abruptly, he was staggering back with a harpoon in his chest. Bawling Mouana’s name, Eunice leapt over her body and knocked the man to the ground. Hands dragged Mouana back towards the huddled knot of defenders, and she didn’t so much hear as feel the impact of the warbuilt’s fist as Eunice finished the man.
WRACK SIGHED TO himself as he looked out over the carnage on the old whaleboat. Once again, it had become clear that he only held any interest to these people as a weapon. So be it, he thought, as he let his consciousness sink down into the gloom below the hold doors. He would be a weapon. He was in a vile mood anyway.
The casket was stale and stifling. His head throbbed with the clanging of the preymeat on the doors above, and the darkness itched with limbs he did not have. With a shiver, he let his phantom tentacles uncoil into the hold, filling the dank space and making the dark itself writhe.
He yearned to rip and slash, to constrict and chew, and his many bodies felt it now. They came slinking from the bilges and scuttling from the hull’s dead spaces, scaled and rotting on filth-crusted cradles of spidery limbs. Sharks and eels and rays, wolf-serpents and sprödewurm, abyssal things with faces full of slivered knives. They circled his coffin and coiled round its supports, clustered on its top to stare up at the clanging hatch.
The doors flew open, and a ring of faces peered down into the gloom. He grinned up at them, and fire twinkled on the black glass of his teeth. They shrieked, then, but it was too late.
Let’s go hunting, thought Wrack, and let rage take him.
AT FIRST, MOUANA thought a trireme had crashed into the ship. There was a deafening boom, and a deep vibration passed through the hull. But it was blackness instead of light that blossomed, and the rumbling seemed to build in her own bones. All around her, sailors with catastrophic injuries leapt to their feet with wild eyes and snapping jaws, and she herself felt the urge to sprint and slaughter, despite being shattered beyond crawling. The air stank with fury, and the terror of her enemies lingered like meat-scent.
It was Wrack, she realised, as a wail of fear rose from the invaders around the hold. It was the black pulse. Wrack had tapped into whatever vile power festered inside the Teuthis device, and let it free from its chains.
The terrible anger raced through her and she thrashed on the floor, desperate to kill even as she tried to reason out what was happening. Then hell came from the hold. She watched from the ground as the Tavuto’s beasts—more than she had any idea had slunk aboard—burst from the hatchway in a tsunami of slime and bone and fins to set upon the attackers.
Even the irregulars, blood-deep in war drugs and madness, could do little more than shit themselves as the monsters came on. Mouana, whose hip still bore the wound of one of Tavuto’s spider-sharks, could even have felt pity for them, if she hadn’t been slavering with hunger for their meat.
As the invaders on the quarterdeck saw the slaughter at the hold, they began backing away to the ship’s edge. But there was nowhere to retreat to, and despite her every effort not to, Mouana savoured their screams as her sailors tore them a
part.
CHAPTER NINE
WRACK CROUCHED AT the edge of the Asinine Bastard’s deck, tearing crumbs from a loaf of bread with his claws. Grand Amazon lay next to him; scuffed and dogeared and stained with blood and brine, but still holding together, still readable.
In front of him and around him, vast and hot and dense, was the real thing. The river churned at the warship’s hull just as it lapped at the distant red bank, warm and silty and scouring. Pristine in its filth, calming in its restlessness, an ocean in perpetual transit.
The jungle crawled by in the distance, all its grandeur reduced to a stippling of green against the clouds. Every hour or so the trees gave way to towers and docks, but from this far away, ruins were indistinguishable from ports. Other than the occasional white streak of a refugee boat, the wildness of the place was loud as thunder.
And this was just the Rio Entrada, the entry-river, so named for the Gate cut into its banks by the ancient architects of the Lemniscatus. It was a tributary of the mighty Sinfondo, one of a thousand throats that fed into that continental intestine. Why those titans of parahistory had chosen to anchor the Gate here, nobody would ever know, but the stretch of river they now sailed—named the Waldemar Transfer after Wrack’s hero—remained largely unsettled. In all but the most crowded worlds, it was deemed unwise to build much within range of an active Gate.
And so they had steamed up the river under the swollen sun for two days, passing the place where Waldemar’s searchlights had swept the bank for the ruins of Torsville, and retracing the course of the great explorer. Ahead lay the Sinfondo confluence where, Wrack seemed to recall overhearing, they had plans to dock and resupply at Wormtown, the name Lipos-Tholon colonists had given to the old city of Mwydyn-Dinas.
After that it would be on to the Esqueleto, and then... well, Wrack didn’t really know. In theory, it depended on what Kaba could glean from the locals, and whatever he could work out from Waldemar’s book. In practice, however, he suspect things would get weirder. The truth was—and it sounded so ridiculous he could barely admit it to himself—he could feel where they needed to go. But he was resolved to pretending he was working from Waldemar’s clues until such a time as he had to admit quite how mad he seemed to have become.
For now, he would let Mouana’s cabal argue it out among themselves. He wanted little to do with it, if it could be avoided. In truth, thought Wrack, as he piled the chunks of the dismantled loaf on the ship’s edge, he had not been paying a lot of attention to the talk on deck since the night with the triremes. After the bit he really didn’t like thinking about, there had been an awful lot of shouting of his name, and a lot of being carried around above the heads of an excitable crowd. But when the shouting had finished and the crew had busied themselves with dealing with the aftermath, he had felt very sick and very frightened. There had been chewed bodies everywhere, and a phantom taste of blood that still lingered.
The river, with its sheer indifferent tonnage, had been a good place to come back to himself. For all Waldemar’s talk of richness and decay, of a world full of savage energy, it seemed extraordinarily calm. If he could forget for a moment that he was a crab, a murderer, a man twice-dead and fully mad, it was like a wonderful kind of holiday. Nobody he knew in Lipos-Tholos had ever gone on holiday, but he had read about the idea in books and had always loved the thought. Indeed, he remembered, in those long evenings in the library belfry, this was often the place he had dreamed of going.
If anything, he was amazed how ordinary it felt. The Waldermar Transfer, though largely unsettled, was as tamed as any part of this overgrown world could be. The banks had been cleared for crops and left fallow in endless cycles, while the waters had been well-combed by the paddleboats of the wurmjägers.
Even so, the mystery of the jungle was forever lurking on the horizon. On the first morning he had seen the huge green hands of a gobbler, stripping branches on the distant shore before pulling back into the canopy—it had been a reminder of how deep this world ran if you looked past its surface.
With a satisfied flourish, Wrack swept his little pyramid of bread over the edge, and watched the pieces tumble towards the river below. The moment they hit the surface, the river boiled in rapture. Fish of three or four kinds, stripe-sided and sail-finned, rolled and dove in their frenzy. They flipped and thrashed in splashing arcs, and the milky shapes of predators rose to snap up the stragglers.
The feeding was over in moments; as shed scales eddied away, an elongate carrion turtle rose to catch the last bodies in its craggy jaws, then sank away in a stream of bubbles. Wrack had never anything like it, even in pictures; by the time he had registered the serpentine articulation of its shell, it was gone back into the silt. Waldemar’s words came to mind, memorised almost by heart now, though he reached for the book out of a sense of comfort.
As with all the supposed former gartenwelten, Grand Amazon has a dizzyingly broad array of fauna, beyond any hope of categorisation for generations to come. It seems each new day—each hour—brings some new form as yet undocumented; every third sample net opens up a new field of study. As well as home-kinds both adapted and artificed, the Sinfondo and its schwesterflüsse bear host to countless exotaxa—beyond the spheres of colonial influence established in the last connected era, whole transplanted biospheres are said to thrive in the distant basins. Their intermingling with the home stock and with each other have given rise to a fierce and beautiful competition; the resultant biotic schema seem at times more rich than anything naturally evolved. To witness a phosphorescent worm slinking beneath a field of Nymphaeaceaelilies, among catfish and tambaqui, is to see a whole new nature, and—
An unnatural cough came from the deck, splitting into Wrack’s recital like a blunted axe. Fingal was there, leaning on a railing and looking awkward. Wrack snapped the book shut, and scuttled round awkwardly to face him.
“Not going to beat me up for reading, then?”
“I’m sorry for the way things were during the attack,” said Fingal, with the tone of a man for whom apology was a currency not to be devalued through overuse. Despite his resentment, Wrack had the distinct impression he had already been allowed his one chance to take the piss, and held his tongue before answering.
“I know the violence is tough on you, mate. You always were a sensitive lad.”
Wrack rankled at being called ‘mate,’ for a start. Yes, the violence was tough on him. But Wrack knew full well Fingal couldn’t know how that felt at all—the man was a thug. Violence to him was a job. He doubted Fingal had much respect for him either, but could certainly see why he’d lie about it. To the old rebel, he was still old Wrack’s weakling boy: needy and spineless, eager for praise.
“I remember your pa always used to wait ’til you were well in bed by the time we’d talk about the messy stuff, even when you were well into your teens.”
Fingal had always refused to talk until the little sap was out of the way, more like. Wrack remembered now: the long evenings of muttered fireside plotting, that would become heated when he had disappeared. He remembered overhearing snatches from the top of the stairs. Fingal asking his father when he was going to get ‘that boy’ involved in some proper work, get some calluses on his hands. No doubt Fingal still thought of him as an innocent. But then, he hadn’t been a fucking battleship for a week, had he?
Wrack wanted to tell Fingal to shut up about his childhood, and ask what the hell he wanted, but to his disgust found himself playing to the man’s tune.
“Thanks for understanding,” said Wrack, hating himself for wanting the knife-happy bastard’s approval.
“I wish it could be the way it used to be,” sighed Fingal, “when we’d keep the real business of what we did away from you. But we’re in a whole new world now, mate. You’ve been as brave as any Piper in making it through this far, and you’ve just got to stick it out a bit more. That’s all I was trying to say the other night, and I’m sorry the tension of it all got to my words.”
Wrac
k seethed inside, knowing exactly how much praise and gentleness he’d be getting if acquiring his trust wasn’t Fingal’s only way to control a terrifying weapon. But again, he simpered.
“It’s good of you, Fingal. I’m sorry I’ve been such a flake so far.” This earned him a pat on the carapace.
“You’ve been a hero, mate, and the whole crew thinks so too.”
They thought of him as an extremely lethal mascot and little else, but Wrack now felt too embarrassed by the flattery to do anything but nod his way to whatever end Fingal had planned for the conversation.
“And the most heroic thing you can do now is just hold back the fear, stay with us, and help us find that damned High Sarawak.”
Well that’s bloody convenient, isn’t it, thought Wrack.
“Whatever it takes,” said Wrack in entirely fraudulent earnesty.
Fingal nodded.
“Right then, that’s the spirit. Now, speaking of bodies...”
Wrack became aware of the Bruiser looming a few feet away. His face was badly dented and his hands were bandaged messes, but he’d been patched up well since the fight. Kaba was there too, wearing her own gruesome attempt at a smile. Wrack could see another round of cajoling coming his way, and pre-empted it with a hint of annoyance in his mechanical voice.
“This is about Mouana, isn’t it?” he said.
“That it is,” admitted Fingal. “She’s nearly done being pared down and wired into the Ahab, but Pearl’s never worked with the new model and she’s having a tough time of it. We reckon she could use a friend around.”