by Nate Crowley
“We’ve won!” hissed Mouana, and Wrack winced. That was dangerous talk.
As if to underline his fears, the monitors flicked off again, switching to static for a long moment, before a coldwater-sharp image snapped onto the screens, dominating the entire bank. The transmission was of a woman’s face, leonine, sneering down at the camera from above the collar of a grey uniform. Headphones clamped the sides of her face below a pepper-grey crewcut, her eyes flicked to the side as her hands tapped at controls offscreen. Behind her, men and women in similar dress sat in crash-couches, fingers flicking over maps and machinery, silenced by the thudding drone of rotors.
Wrack started, blinking, as he processed the fact he was looking at a healthy human face. Too healthy: her skin was entirely ungrey, her nose sharp and whole. Veins traced ordinary patterns around her temples. Before she spoke, he knew they were fucked; after, he was certain.
“Tavuto, this is squadron Kentigern-Chi out of Lipos-tholos, responding to your distress call. Please answer our hails. We are registering railgun fire from your location, and presuming a serious national incursion on fishing grounds.”
The soldier thumbed a switch on her headset, spoke briefly on another channel with her eyes focused on something just out of shot, then returned to the transmission.
“I repeat, this is Kentigern-Chi: respond immediately. We are through the gate and closing in six, with or without confirmation status. We’ve five triremes and attendant carriers on a pattern four loadout; assault troops and destriers deploying as per threat condition Rho. Answer now or we will assume a boarding and configure for Sigma. Out.”
From the port windows of the bridge, purple lightning flashed, far away. Storms at the gate, massive discharges flaring as a huge mass passed through the gap between worlds. Wrack looked at Mouana and Mouana looked at Wrack, their faces lit in amethyst flashes, two children caught breaking into a boarded-up shop.
They had six minutes. Six minutes, and then the triremes of the city, the black oaken warships and their holds full of armoured killers, would be on them. Their only advantage was that the overseers, in their cowardice, had been too ashamed to mention they had been overcome by their workforce when they squirted their cry for help through the gate.
Wrack was just opening his mouth to tell Mouana how fucked they were when she twisted aside, grabbing for a radio and snarling for Kaba to respond from the bow turret. Once she had barked her instructions, she turned on her milling bridge crew, began ordering them onto their own radios, calling for readiness in every part of the war-quaked Tavuto.
He could do nothing but admire her pragmatism, her refusal to accept defeat, but the situation was ridiculous. Swinging his one remaining leg from the trolley with all the force he could muster, Wrack kicked his friend hard in the side and shouted for her to listen to him.
“Not now, Wrack,” she muttered, before turning to the map of the ship.
“No,” said Wrack, kicking her again. “I know—this is sherious. But you really need to lishen.” He nudged his sagging jaw with his good hand, trying to stop it ruining his consonants. The attention she gave Wrack then, undivided even as her crew bellowed for instructions, was as sincere a gesture of affection as she could have given him.
“I need you to raizhe Oshedax, in the crane,” he implored. “And I know you want to join your matesh,” he added, nodding to the crowd of Blades forming on the foredeck, “but I need you here. Pleazhe. Trushte me.”
“Fine,” said Mouana, with an expression that suggested he was testing the very limits her of trust, and set at the comms panel even as her radio crew called for her. Then there was a crackle of static, and Dakuvanga answered.
“Osedax,” came the voice from the other end, without a hint of congratulation. Clearly, there was no time for chat.
“Lishen,” said Wrack, then added, “well done and all,” as it was only fair. “Schity’s been alerted. Triremezh coming in. Five of them, and carrierzh.”
“Yep,” replied the gravelly voice, as if waiting to hear something that would surprise it.
“Kill ’em,” said Wrack, grinning. “Buy me as much time azh you can.”
Before Mouana cut the link, Osedax’s laughter swirled in the bridge like bonfire sparks. Then she frowned and leaned in to Wrack.
“Time for what?” she asked, seeming genuinely intrigued despite her ludicrously high threshold for curiosity.
Wrack tilted his head over to the mess of cables still clustered around Teuthis’ pilot chair and smiled lightly.
“Time for me to have a chat with the squid, I suppose,” offered Wrack, shrugging, then froze halfway to a smirk as the ceiling blazed green.
Yes, let’s talk.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WRACK WAS SINKING in endless salt water.
He panicked, mouth sucking in air to scream, but only cold water filled his ruined chest. He sculled upwards with his one good arm, trying to draw the surface back, but he was sucked down ever further, the current drawing him down to empty depth.
Had he fallen in? Had the ship sunk? He looked around, but there was nothing in the void—just a halo of light, incredibly faint above, and blue fading to black in every other direction.
The sea dragged him down, and he felt pressure crush the spaces of air still inside him, wringing bubbles from dead muscle and squeezing his tired fibres together.
Down and further down, and there were no sounds beyond a far rumbling, directionless, as of icebergs shifting in the polar night. After a time, all light went from the world. He floated, unable to tell up from down, a katabatic speck.
And then stars glittered green in the dark, still at first, then swaying in sinuous chains. Points of luminescence unfurled, charting a florescence of arms into the abyss, mapping a black presence in the water ahead of him. Teuthis.
Thinking of what he was confronting, it was all too clear to Wrack that, by rights, he should be paralysed with fear. But he couldn’t really see the point—he had a favour to ask, after all, and very little to lose by doing so.
“Did they plug me in, then?” he said. His mouth did not move as he spoke, nor did he break the tomb-hush of the deep.
There was no need for plugs. You wanted to talk, and so I will talk with you. Now I have no little preymeat squatting on my mind, no leashes on my thinking, I am able to speak as I wish.
Teuthis paused, green constellations wavering in the currents, the distant grinding of ice like the movement of its thoughts.
Of course, silly preymeat could have found methods of control that did not involve drilling holes into their own heads, but I enjoyed watching them suffer. This will amuse you, too: the belief that I could only be spoken to by those near death? A convenient fiction for the masters of your masters, one I admired too much to contradict.
“So how are you doing this?” demanded Wrack. “Am I in your head or mine? Or is it...”
No, little morsel, it is not ‘tiny machines.’ I suspect you will not want to waste further time asking me to explain, as your friends are about to be annihilated.
“I wasn’t going to. I was going to ask you to help.”
The arms coiled, coaxing a sourceless glow from the water. In the darkness thrown into relief by the sick witchlight, a maw churned with spirals of hook teeth.
I am laughing now, as you would understand it, little fleshpiece.
“Laugh away, I’m a funny man,” snorted Wrack. “But the request stands. It’s obvious I want your help, and why bother talking to me if it’s out of the question?”
Maybe I am just curious. It has never reached this stage before, you understand. Once your little biting thing took their shackles from me, I decided to watch and see what you did.
Wrack stared into the maw, fighting the urge to kick against the current he could have sworn was dragging him closer. “What do you mean by ‘it?’ This happens often, then?”
Every once in a while, I give a little preymind a nudge. It is entertainment, for the most part.
They never manage to make it past the stage of standing on the deck and shouting, usually. They have certainly never managed to free me. Clever, vile little carrion.
“So you’ve been watching since the start?”
Oh, yes, all the time. I always watch. I like to see the preymeat fight and kill.
“Why don’t you ever help?”
I could not help. While I could watch, the sickly ones sat on my glands and my synapses, had my hunting pulses wired to controls.
Wrack sculled backward, face twisted into an involuntary grimace, as the huge shape loomed at him. The passage of a limb sent him spinning in the water, and he found himself being regarded by a vast eye, featureless as black glass, with liquid shapes churning beneath its chipped shell.
But understand, carcass-scrap: even though that has changed now, I have no desire to help you, no pleasure in the thought of your victory. Why would it matter to me if one set of preymeat wrests control from another? I hate you all equally.
“But you’re a prisoner like we are!” shouted Wrack, glaring into the onyx cupola of the thing’s eye. “Hate us or not, don’t you at least want revenge on those who imprisoned you?”
I was imprisoned long before I was cut up and sewn into this metal toy, morsel. If anything, I consider this an improvement on my previous sentence, as I can see little monkeys hurting each other all day and all night. When the walking-fish tear them apart, I feel it in the ghosts of my teeth.
“You sound just like Osedax,” muttered Wrack, but Teuthis either did not understand, or chose not to respond. “Go on, then, apex predator,” he said, as the tapering, armoured body cruised past him in the gloaming. “I heard you were the last of a bad bunch. What’s your story?”
The others left, all at once. They left when the masters of your masters came and began to melt the sky ice. I was left alone to watch. Without my pack, alone like prey, I was left to live while they departed.
“What did you do wrong?”
You will like this. I claimed we should speak with the new prey, that we could negotiate, and profit from the arrangement. I suggested what none of the others could admit: that we were no longer—as you put it—‘apex predators.’
“So you wanted to talk with the overseers?”
Stupid nauplius, how little you know. This was before your ‘overseers.’ This was so long ago as to make the age of your little boat seem a joke. This was when the first of the monkey-prey arrived; came to melt the ice and breed their fish here. They said they would share with us. But we do not split our food with prey. “As you want to share,” my pack said to me before they left, “you may stay to share with them.”
Teuthis rumbled, and snatched something alien out of the water with the lash of an arm, then passed it into the maw to be ground into murky clouds.
Your people, your impoverished fish-catchers, came in leaky metal sea-boats, an age later. They made no effort to speak.
“And they made prey of you,” said Wrack.
Teuthis hung in the green dark, lights blazing, and said nothing. Wrack had very little basis on which to recognise shame in alien gigapredators, but he had definite suspicions.
“I can see why you hate us,” he conceded, and then decided to move on. Simulation or not, there was a point beyond which it was unwise to push things. “I have to ask again though, why are you talking to me?”
Old habits die hard, it would appear. And you’re a strange morsel, little fish. Do not misunderstand—I despise you and I wish you nothing but suffering. But I feel you might choose to accept... a bargain.
“Ah, I see,” said Wrack. “And assuming your end of it inflicts something horrendous on me, what do I get out of it?”
Have a look outside, little boneworm, and tell me what you want.
Wrack’s perspective shifted violently; his mind’s eye was shunted through one of the telescope lenses mounted—he assumed—on Dakuvanga’s highest masts. Ships were sweeping towards Tavuto, a line of black shapes scudding low over the water. The sleek, barbed outlines of triremes bristled with forests of guns, while the coleopteran bulk of three troop transports loomed in the shimmering wash of their engines.
They would be here in minutes, with enough firepower to capture a city. He had to help. Imagining everything Teuthis could control—the guns, the monsters, the despair pulses—he knew their only hope was for him to take the bargain.
“Go on, then,” said Wrack. “You know very well what I want. Deal. Just tell me what I have to do.”
Not much, really. I can offer all of the things you were thinking of just now. All you have to do is kill me.
There was no time to work out the monster’s thinking. “I’d love to,” said Wrack. “How do I do that?”
There’s a large button underneath a box in the centre of the captain’s wheel. They put it there as a safeguard, in case I ever found away to slip their leash.
“Of course there’s a big button at the centre of the captain’s wheel,” said Wrack, with a wry smile. “But if you’re all-powerful now the drugs and the pilot have been disconnected, can’t you do it yourself? Find a sleeping zombie somewhere you can puppet, or find a way to threaten us into doing it?”
I had intended the latter. But it seems the time of opportunity is closing. Without the ship fighting on your side, your little rebellion is going to be over very quickly. And while it will be pleasurable to watch, it will mean this toy boat will soon be full of hungry little meatscraps again, and I’ll be wired back into a revolting ape, with very little chance of this happening again.
Teuthis’ arms coiled into themselves, and the black mass of the creature seemed to shiver as if with utter revulsion.
Hence I’m asking you... nicely.
“Fine—so we have a mutual interest. We both need these people driven out—you, so you can finally piss off, us so we can stop this whole nightmare. So: help us drive off the city, and I’ll be glad to wipe you right out.”
Ah, but that would be bad bargaining, little morsel. I would be foolish to fulfil my end of the bargain before you fulfil yours. You could never make me trust you to keep your word: little monkeys like having their big monster to work for them, and you would keep me where I am. If you want my help, you will have to kill me now.
“But how can you keep up your side of the bargain, how can you help us, once you’re dead?” spluttered Wrack, as Teuthis began to drift slowly backwards into the dark.
I never said I would help. Just that I would give you control.
Wrack floated, and considered, as the squid receded. The ship had no mind of its own, no central computer—just Teuthis. But with it dead, there would be nothing to control the ship, nothing to defend against the triremes, nothing to get its engines moving and send them back to the city, even if they prevailed. Nothing, that is, unless someone else tagged in in place of Teuthis.
He was left with one option.
“Fine, then. I’ll kill you. But you know what I’m going to need you to do on the way out. I need you to let me take your place. How can I trust you to do that?”
It’s not a question of trust. If I were to break my promise and let you get cut up by your city, I would be offering a... kindness. Why wouldn’t I want to see you suffer, deathscrap, trapped as a mind in a bottle on a toy boat? I cannot think of a more pleasurable parting thought.
“Right, then. Give me a minute. And enjoy dying,” said Wrack, as the lights on the tips of Teuthis’ arms slid back into the depths.
“You lucky bastard,” he muttered, as the darkness became absolute again.
Wrack woke to his own scream, and thrashed like a beached fish on the trolley. Sunlight blasted into the bridge, light and wind and thunderous sound. Then the light was blocked by the giant form of a descending carrier, jets flaring as it came down on Tavuto’s foredeck. Soldiers were already pouring from its sides, sleeting down black lines with carbines in their hands into the massacre below.
“Wrack,” called Mouana from the captain’s wh
eel, the rags of her uniform fluttering in the dropship’s hellish downwash. Her hand clutched a radio, frantic with the reports of desperate voices. Behind her on the monitors, Wrack could see one of the carriers was already on deck: an arc of fallen corpses was spreading from its aft ramp as armoured figures waded from within.
“Mouana... I can shtop them, but you’re going to have to trusht me.” Then he gasped, as he saw her hand had already opened the armoured box at the heart of the wheel, was hovering over a red switch within.
“You heard all that?” balked Wrack, as a trireme scudded past the port windows and made every bolt in the bridge rattle. Bullets pecked holes in the floor, one passing through Wrack’s chest on the way there.
“Only your side of things,” answered Mouana, like someone who had not just been strafed by a fifty-yard helicopter gunship. “Or at least most of it; you were mumbling a lot. I think I get the gist, though. Want me to hit the button and get this over with?”
“Yes!” hollered Wrack. “I can’t believe you waited this long!”
Mouana looked taken aback. “I thought you’d want to say goodbye, is all. Are you scared?”
Wrack didn’t want to take the time to consider, so just made a derisive sound. “What’s there to be scared of? I’ve already died and been a zombie.”
“Alright, then,” nodded Mouana. “Let’s do it.”
“Wait,” cried Wrack, thrusting his arm out and forgetting it was the one with no end on. “What about goodbye?”
“So goodbye,” shrugged Mouana. “That’s all there is to it. Look—I know I’ve always been less of a talker than you. But come on—look outside.”
The second carrier had landed, and its side had been thrown open—from within came terrible things like giraffes in beige chitin, scissor-claws unfolding from fat thoracic pouches: destriers.
“You said it yourself,” reasoned Mouana, as Wrack stared slackly at the horde gushing onto the deck. “You’re already dead. We both are. We’d never have exchanged a word in life, and if we had, we’d only have found each other intolerable. This was a strange postscript. And it’s not all been completely terrible, so thanks. Now, goodbye, and let’s be done with this. I think I’ll like you better as a factory ship, anyway.”