by Nate Crowley
“They will fly today?” demanded Dust, barely inflecting the statement as a question.
“Well, I think—”
“Would you stake the use of your legs on them flying today?”
“No, sir,” gulped Engineering, after a stutter that glowed a wonderful, wobbling indigo in Dust’s ears.
Of course the triremes weren’t working yet, and they wouldn’t be for some time. It was no surprise—it took forever to calibrate floaters to new fields—but it was important to emphasise haste nonetheless. She demoted the girl to private on the spot, and sent her into the streets to help with the executions. She swore she had looked relieved.
“Comms,” said Dust, and the bandy-legged lightworlder stepped forward, stooping to avoid cracking their skull on the ceiling.
“Negotiations with the Principals have stalled, sir,” piped the officer through bloodless lips. “The troops from Orcus have joined their allies at the wall, and Kanélan floaters have been sighted in-world. We have insisted that you are still within the Ministry, but their patience appears to have run out. We expect an assault within hours.”
Dust glanced out the window again, at the serpent of lights ferrying her entire army to this backwater mudpile. She had gambled everything on this expedition, had evacuated Lipos-Tholos as swiftly as it had been captured, with barely time for the troops to turn round a night’s sleep. The most notorious siege in the worlds was over, and she had not so much as stopped to piss on its embers.
Of course, there had been mass desertions when the troops had been informed the campaign was to continue, and a decimation of the sixth regiment (chosen by a roll of the dice) to discourage further losses. Ancient siege pieces and irreplaceable engines had been left like stew-bones, simply too heavy to be carried away by boat.
She was surprised it had taken the Principals this long to realise they had been duped; that they had gained nothing from the siege they had near-bankrupted themselves to prosecute. They could have that senile old city and the guns she had left in it—once she had Lipos-Tholos’ real prize in her hands, it would make all their toys meaningless.
“Surrender the city to them,” she told Comms. “Tell them to enjoy their prize, and that we will forego our final payment as we enjoyed liberating it so much.”
The birdlike officer nodded acknowledgement.
“And lay the streets with plague-mines,” finished Dust, before turning back to Intelligence.
“We’ll be on the river again within the hour. May I trust you know where our pursuit should lead us?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” blurted the pale man. “They’re headed to Rummage; one of their crew told the refugees, before the fighting broke out. But we... we know where they are anyway, sir.”
“You know?” asked Dust, curiosity piqued.
“Since you... since we... now we are dead, sir. We can, we can... feel the prize ahead. We all can. We can’t lose it.”
Dust felt a moment of envy at the thought of something her new soldiers could feel, but which was denied to her. But she could consider that later; there were more pressing implications. If its presence was tugging on her dead then Teuthis, the prize, was alive. The intelligence officer spoke again.
“Another detail, sir... they used the cargo... Teuthis... to... project something? We felt something at dawn, something faint, but the refugees were right there, and living. They report experiencing a ‘black feeling’ that matches what we understand of the thing’s capabilities, after the boats had passed. We don’t know... know why... the conflict had finished by then. Perhaps—”
Dust contemplated that, as Intelligence waffled, trying to sound useful. The prize was not only alive, but awake and functional. Stripped from its cradle aboard the city-ship, it should have been reduced to catatonic dormancy. But it was conscious, and projecting its power. That was strange.
Still, she had planned for the eventuality of the thing being active, and would never have staked so much on its capture without the means to control the thing she was hunting. She would just have to use it sooner, rather than later.
Dust thought of the asset she had procured from one of the Kuiper states, back when her plan to take on the Lipos-Tholos commission had taken shape. The gelid museum-piece, which had spent centuries in the icy hollow of a store-stone, and which had been so eagerly traded for soil and germstock. She still wasn’t sure if it was alive, despite the titanic cost of maintaining its environment tent, but—and in this she was perhaps alone across all that was left of the Lemniscatus—she knew exactly what to do with it. The excitement was too much—she could not wait.
“We leave immediately,” she announced, and even the logistics officer looked astonished.
WHEN RUMMAGE’S SCOOPWHEEL finally loomed over the trees of the river-bend, Wrack stirred for the first time in hours—partially out of excitement, but mostly from relief. The convoy had been in desperate need of rest and resupply at Wormtown, and another three days’ travel had all but ruined them.
The heat was the worst. It lay over the water like a second liquid, and throbbed in the metal of the deck. It cloaked them and dragged at them, basted them in the stench of their own decay. And though Tavuto’s former crew seemed to be degrading more slowly than inert corpseflesh might, there was no doubting it: they were rotting as they walked.
The dwindling remains of their preservative supply had been gathered in a cask, to which the Bruiser had been appointed quartermaster. He stood at the tap, grudgingly apportioning the stuff to the sailors who queued with tin cups and shrunken hands. Rations were down to a half-cup each per day now, which the sweltering dead mixed with salt and smeared over their leathery skin with their fingers.
The insects weren’t deterred. Now the Esqueleto had narrowed to a muddy ribbon maybe two hundred yards across, they were drawn from the mud of the banks in endless whining clouds, settling on everything that resembled flesh. The first parasites had made themselves known, too; already the crew were alert to the yellow pustules that marked a boil-wasp sting, and not a half-hour passed without the cursing of a sailor afflicted by a passenger-fly and its writhing cargo.
With little to do but sit and wait to fall apart, the crew had taken to fishing—there was, after all, no shortage of maggots to be used as bait. One barely had to brush the river’s surface with a baited hook before it could be hauled back up with a flashing silver cargo. In many cases, the time it took to bring the catch to the surface was long enough for something larger to seize it and end up on the hook itself. The nicer fish were offered to the living, who grilled them on the braziers where they boiled their drinking water. The grimmer specimens, meanwhile—the sagging catfish whose bauchfett reeked of river mud—went to the less discerning palates of the dead.
Wrack imagined the plentiful food was small consolation for the living. With the initial camaraderie of the journey fading now the dead were beginning to stink, the living sailors had taken to sticking aboard the Asinine Bastard, with Gunakadeit becoming the de facto Ship of the Dead. But when the Bastard had run aground on a sandbank near the Esqueleto’s mouth, and the Chekhov’s Gun had proved too heavy for them to tow without losing half their speed, everyone had been forced aboard the former whaleboat.
Their speed had picked up no end without their escort, but that was little relief for the living crews, now packed shoulder-to-shoulder with rotting corpses and vermin, with nowhere to sleep that wasn’t sticky with rot. Most of the Pipers who’d volunteered for the journey were just kids from the Lipos-Tholos slums, who wouldn’t have dreamed of turning down a boat trip to another world in search of forbidden technology to wreck. Now, after days among the dead and no end to the muddy river in sight, there was real horror on their faces.
And Wrack had to admit he had not made things any better. After the incident at Wormtown, he had retreated to an overturned crate at the fore of the ship and lurked there, invisible and seething like the conscience he doubted Mouana still had.
They had all felt his
outburst after Mwydyn-Dinas, but nobody could bring it up. Fingal had approached him with another attempt at bonhomie, but he had been having none of it. Kaba and some of the familiar faces from Tavuto had come the following day to sit and talk with him about river lore, but it had seemed done more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Whether they feared him or were unsettled by him, the rest of the crew had left him be, and the boat had motored under a weird, muttering pall.
But at the sight of Rummage’s wheel ahead—rust-red and proud against a blue sky—Wrack could feel his mood lifting. One way or another, this was civilisation, and it wasn’t on fire. The river was winding now, and distances were deceptive, but Kaba swore the town was round the next bend.
Sure enough, as they moved round the swoop in the river, the settlement revealed itself, and Wrack marvelled at what he was prepared to accept as civilisation these days.
Rummage was perhaps the most permanent settlement this far from the main channel of the Sinfondo, having persisted there since not long after Waldemar’s time. Indeed, it had been the explorer’s shipmates, bringing mineral samples back from the site, who had founded it. His enthusiasm for reading had waned considerably since Wormtown, but still Wrack couldn’t resist seeking out the passage.
On the third night of our excursion up the Esqueleto, we elected to make camp for a time beside a sizeable limestone outcrop, in order to dry meat and set up a preserving tent for the specimens collected so far. Ms Tansell, much to Hansen’s irritation, argued for two days to be added to our time on the tributary in lieu of the time spent in camp. This was fish a request to which I happily acquiesced, due in no small part to our capture of a nest of hatchling aquascolopendra, which I wished to properly preserve and dissect before the heat turned them.
Hardwick and Chase, our geologists, were elated to finally be set down on dry land in virgin forest, and immediately catch fish set about digging in the red soil and panning in the smaller creeks that flowed from hunting and killing the higher ground. Vegetation here was more limited and less diverse hungry, chew them than downriver, and the river bore fewer fish fish, catch fish and more fish in the immediate vicinity; Chase suspected this to suggest the presence of jet through water under ice and hunt and—
Wrack blinked the lens of his camera several times, and did his best to focus. This was why reading was rapidly losing its shine for him; when Waldemar’s prose turned dull—and it did, often—it was so easy for unwelcome thoughts to intrude. No matter, thought Wrack, he knew what happened next anyway. While Chase had died of a sudden fever on the way back downriver, Hardwick had written to his sponsors back in Lipos-Tholos, urging them to stake a claim on the Esqueleto’s astonishing mineral wealth.
They had done so, and Rummage was the result. There, on a long beach in the shadow of a river curve, beside the very promontory where Waldemar had made camp so many years ago, now sat a rusting god.
The mining company behind Hardwick, a shared venture that spanned the confederacy, had sunk unbelievable funds into sending it here—a self-propelled town capable of chewing mountains with its street-sized scoopwheels. But none of that money had ever made it back out of Grand Amazon. The colossus had failed in the sweat of the jungle just days after assembly, having not even struck rock. With no funds to repair it, and no salaries to draw from home, the miners had had no choice but to stay and seek their fortune by hand, on the bones of the great machine. After a week of life, Rummage had entered a long and profitable undeath.
The engine’s hull had been stripped and whittled into shacks and piers, its booms and digging arms grown into rickety airborne thoroughfares. The promontory had been riddled with caves and storehouses, while iron tanks had been floated on the river to support sprawling pontoon docks. For while the machine had failed, the soil had not, and the flow of prospectors seeking their fortunes in the green had never ebbed.
Kaba had told him all about it: the wealth of the place was not so much in the gold as came out of the ground, but as came back from the pockets of prospectors. Rummage sold them picks and shovels and waders on the way in, and vice on their long, slow way out.
Even as Gunakadeit made its way into the lee of the giant past the web of piers that made up its docks, the town was ready to sell to them. Weather-pickled merchants proffered bloody haunches and fruit-laden branches up at them, alongside tarnished ammunition belts—and if they registered that the folk on the deck were dead, it didn’t disquiet them. A deal, it seemed, was a deal.
Before long, Mouana had appeared on deck and was roaring for her crew to stay out of any trading, but they were no army, and soon trinkets and looted coins were being passed down, as the boat ground to a halt. Wrack watched with amusement as, resigned to the inevitable, Mouana threw down the gangplank and descended to the docks herself. Faced with her glowering immensity, even the keenest of Rummage’s salespeople backed away.
Up on the beach, shaded by one of the huge machine’s sunken tread assemblies, two figures stood in wait. The taller of them, a stocky woman with a swathe of black hair and dressed in work-worn leather, leaned on the old machine and raised a languid arm in greeting. The other, a man in the patched and sweat-stained remnants of a banqueting suit, fidgeted and wrung his hands in impatience.
Turning to Fingal and Eunice with a curt nod, Mouana led her lieutenants towards them, leaving the rest of the crew to spill out into the floating market. Although clearly not invited to the confabulation, Wrack advanced through the legs of the crew as they stumbled off the boat, and made his way up the beach to see what would happen.
The man in the appalling suit started forward to meet the party when they were still thirty yards away. He bowed deeply to Mouana, making sweat drip from his balding brow.
“I bid you welcome to our humble town,” he proclaimed with a flourish, offering a yellowy grin that collapsed on itself as Mouana walked straight past him towards the taller figure.
“I wonder if you would care to hear—” continued the man, scurrying to keep up with the dead woman’s strides, before giving up, shoulders slumping. The woman leaning against the treads took up where he left off.
“Alice Ivers,” she said, guardedly. “And I see you’ve already met Dolph, the mayor.”
Stubbing out a damp-looking cigarette in the sand, she stood upright and walked casually to where Mouana waited on the beach. She winced as she moved out into the daylight, but looked nothing less than amused as she swiped hair from her face and squinted up at the towering warbody.
“You in charge here, Ivers?” rumbled Mouana.
“No, that’d be the mayor,” she said, nodding at the man while she lit another cigarette. “I just run the saloon.”
“And the docks, I’m guessing?”
“Since there’s drinking goes on at the docks as well, I’ve always guessed so, too.”
“We need repair and resupply, in a hurry.”
“What’s the rush?” drawled Ivers, brushing a fly from the lapel of her shirt. “Couldn’t be you’re being followed, not out here in the middle of nowhere? Because if it’s asylum you’re after... well, that’d be politics, and you’d want to talk to Dolph, there.”
“I said we wanted supplies,” snapped Mouana. “Fuel, engine parts, ammunition and preservative. And as much as you can do to patch our boat up. We hit a log.”
“Sure, though I’d tell you for free that it’s best not to hit logs. Fuel, parts and ammo we’re overflowing with. As for preservative,” said Ivers, wrinkling her nose. “Well, I can’t imagine why you’d want that stuff.”
Mouana lunged down with a grimace, but Ivers didn’t so much as flinch.
“A joke. In poor taste, I can see,” she conceded, offering a conciliatory palm. “But I don’t have much call to stock preservative. I’ll sell you whiskey, but you’ll pay whiskey prices. And how quick do you mean by ‘in a hurry’?”
“Four hours.”
Ivers glanced at Gunakadeit, and rolled smoke in her mouth. “Sure,” she said, exh
aling. “Twenty-four, maybe.”
“How much extra to do it in four?”
“Easy, there,” protested the saloonkeeper. “We’ve not discussed what it’d take to do it in twenty-four, yet. With the whiskey and enough fuel and shells to get you upriver? Likely to cost you more than the boat’s worth—even before we narrow down to specifics. Best you just sell that old thing to me and take one of our fine craft in trade—do that and you’ll be out in four hours, plus I’ll throw in any supplies you want for free.”
Wrack looked at the selection of pitted hulks languishing nearby. It didn’t take a shipwright to see the deal was an insult. Mouana gave a low growl, and her chaingun started slowly spinning. The crew had begun to gather on the beach now, milling with weapons held not quite casually enough, as the tone of the conversation grew more tense.
“I’ll give you the gunship on the deck,” said Mouana, teeth set. “Lipos-Tholos air force, engines in good shape. You can check it over yourself—but that’s as far as I’ll offer.”
“Sounds good,” said Ivers, lightly. “I’ll have you fixed up and provisioned in a week.”
“Don’t play fucking games with me,” boomed Mouana, raising the whining barrels of her arm cannon to Ivers’ chest. Eunice was immediately at her side, and Fingal had a revolver pointed at the mayor’s sweating egg of a head, but Ivers looked as unconcerned as if Mouana had sneezed.
“I’d give you the same advice, friend,” said the saloon-keeper, her voice revealing a new edge. “We play this particular game all the damned time on this beach, and we’re pretty fucking accomplished.”
Ivers tilted her chin up at Rummage’s hulk, and Wrack cast his eye up the ancient machine. All along its cranes and galleries, sun flashed from the barrels of rifles. There must have been fifty gunmen above them, all behind cover, with clean shots on anyone who held a weapon. If Mouana lost her temper now, the journey was over. To her credit, she lowered her gun and took a step back.