Crystal Rain

by Tobias S. Buckell

  The silent face-off continued until John fired a shot between the three men. Snow spray kicked up into the air.

  “Now.”

  They complied. John sat upright, shotgun cradled under his good arm, watching them with a strength none had suspected he still had.

  Oaxyctl began thinking about the sign of Ocelotl again.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Pepper trudged his way through snow. To any other eye, the constant white sleet would have rendered them lost. Even as Pepper moved forward, his footprints disappeared.

  But he kept tracking John, as he had promised.

  The cold numbed him. Pepper increased his body temperature. He’d lose some body mass. It would impede his ability to survive more than a week out here, but that didn’t matter. If he didn’t survive the week and find the Ma Wi Jung, he was dead anyway. Why prolong it?

  A faint change in the wind.

  He sniffed the cold, barren air and paused.

  Snow crunched far to the left, and Pepper realized he wasn’t the only one out among the featureless hills and sudden crevasses tracking prey.

  The nearest snowy hillock exploded. Pepper planted his feet and turned to face the Teotl.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  John’s leg stopped throbbing. Chill crept throughout his whole body. He wasn’t too sure if his left hand was a hook. He remembered both that it was a hook, and that he had once had a hand and that was new. He hadn’t remembered what it was like to have a hand for a long, long time.

  And Starport: he saw a map of where they sat in his head. He spun it around a bit, rotated it, then pushed it away.

  He had a kid. Jerome. He remembered a wife. Shanta.

  Interesting. When had that happened?

  “Johnny, Johnny, what the fuck is going on?” he chattered.

  He’d fucked up something serious. Left himself bits and pieces.

  Gonna have to amputate this soon or die. Only an ax around, strapped to a bundle of canvas. Ax wouldn’t do the job. Kill him quicker. And the three men standing at the edge of the rope looking back at him might do the job even sooner.

  John didn’t trust them. Couldn’t trust the motivations. Several things were in the air.

  Emergency, man. Focus on the necessary. Discard excess.

  You’re dying, he told himself. By the way, if you amputate, you’re going to have to cut through some stuff in your leg tougher than bone. Don’t forget that you’re not all natural.

  What?

  He tried to make sense of the new memories bubbling out from behind the brick wall of his mind. The memories weren’t specific images, or anything swirling out like a dream. They were just things that happened to be there when he turned his thoughts different ways.

  For example, the name Starport felt familiar. He remembered being there before.

  One of the men walked back toward John. He held the rifle up. Focus on the moment. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t get back out on the rope,” John growled. It was in his eyes. This one was bad news. Oaxyctl, it was familiar to roll that name around in the back of his mind.

  The fever, the shock, must be shaking old memories loose, he thought. I finally remember myself. And all it took was getting shot, gangrenous, and half frozen to death.

  He laughed, and they looked back at him.

  John gestured with the rifle. “I’m fucking serious.”

  Of course, he thought, he needed them to pull him, so he couldn’t shoot them in the legs. If they rushed, he’d wait until he could hit an arm. They could still pull him there with a shot arm.

  Some of them wanted him dead. Or needed something from him.

  They were so close to the dockyards, he thought, leaning back and drowsing off. He could feel the Ma Wi Jung calling him.

  The man called Lionel stood overhead, blocking out the sun.

  John placed the end of the barrel against Lionel’s chin. “I’m napping.”

  Lionel scrunched back to the end of the rope and joined the two waiting men.

  How long would this last? Wasting away, almost at the end. The memories he’d grabbed during the last wave of semiconsciousness fled again.

  Where the hell was Pepper? He’d have to get the man’s attention.

  John fired the shotgun into the air three times, fumbling to reload, then leaned back. Let them think he was mad. That would keep them back for a while longer.

  He was kidding himself. He was too tired. Whom could he trust out of the three men? Oaxyctl had saved his life before. John relaxed, called him back.

  “I can’t do it any longer.” He handed Oaxyctl the shotgun. “I’m too tired. You protect me. Keep us moving.”

  Avasa walked up behind Oaxyctl and whispered. Oaxyctl nodded.

  “John.” Avasa leaned down next to John. “John. Your leg is gangrenous, and you’re hallucinating. We need to cut it off now. We’re trying to save your life.” Avasa cut and pulled away John’s trousers. John protested weakly. The numbing wind crept through the rest of his clothing from the inside out.

  “Here.” Avasa held a bottle of rum to John’s lips and grabbed his good hand as warmth spread. “I’m sorry, John, but I have to cut.”

  “Please don’t,” John whimpered as Avasa unwrapped one of the packages lashed to the sled and unwrapped a saw. “Too dangerous.”

  Avasa picked up the long saw and positioned it above John’s knee, his back turned to Oaxyctl. Oaxyctl raised the shotgun, aimed it at them, and fired. The back of Avasa’s head exploded over the snow in front of the crude sled and John’s bare leg.

  “I don’t understand.” John blinked.

  “He was trying to kill you.” Oaxyctl walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, shaking his head. Lionel sat next to John. The sled creaked down into the snow.

  “We need the code,” Lionel said.

  “What code?” John stared at the pieces of gleaming skull fragments on his boots.

  “The Ma Wi Jung.” Lionel dribbled more rum down John’s throat, then leaned down and pulled a long knife out from his left boot. “The Ma Wi Jung,” he repeated. The rum’s warm calm fled. Lionel was the fucker trying to get something from him. “Ma. Wi. Jung.”

  Lionel slammed the knife into John’s kneecap. On the good leg.

  John screamed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Dihana ran along the great wall of Capitol City toward the gates. Gordon saw her and waved her over to a small wooden platform.

  “Why isn’t Haidan here?”

  Gordon handed her a spyglass. “He hurt. Airship drop a bomb near him.”

  “Oh, no.” Dihana’s stomach clenched. Not Haidan. That meant Gordon was the new mongoose-general in practice, and the only friend she felt she had lay hurt somewhere. Dihana closed her eyes a moment, clutching the spyglass.

  “They already drown a few thousand marching to take the flood area,” Gordon said. “Been watching them all morning. But they keep coming.”

  Dihana raised the long brass tube up. Mud, twisted wire, and bodies leapt into focus. “So many.” The Azteca seemed to be everywhere she looked, as far as she could see. “What does Haidan think? Will I be able to go see him?”

  Gordon looked down. “He still out, asleep, or unconscious, something. He ain’t responding.”

  “But he’s alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  They watched the mud and trenches for the next hour. Watched more Azteca struggle through the flooded area between the tracks, then begin to use the drier ground north of that, pushing up against their fellow warriors already coming up along the northern tracks.

  The front of the line faltered as mongoose-men opened fire from the trenches farthest out from the city. Then Azteca cannon fire blew gouts of earth into the air among the mongoose-men trenches. Dihana winced.

  “We have Haidan’s plans, we know what happens next,” Dihana told Gordon.

  The mongoose-man nodded. “I know.” He turned and gave orders. Mongoose-men scurried off to small stutter stati
ons along the wall, and minutes later Dihana saw one of Haidan’s surprises lumber down the northern tracks. He’d left a one-mile stretch still down. An armored engine chuffed along it, gaining speed. Two mongoose-men jumped out of it, and others pulled gates and wire out of the way to let it pass through the zones.

  It picked up speed, barreling toward Azteca who jumped off the track to get out of its way.

  Gordon leaned forward. “Right now.”

  The train exploded, metal and fire ripping out into the Azteca warriors nearby. They were blown away from the explosion like so many colored feathers, Dihana thought.

  “And again,” Gordon said, as a second train gained speed and headed toward the Azteca. It was the first of many surprises for the Azteca.

  “We might break them here,” Dihana whispered. Who could lose thousands a day and recover?

  By midday the Azteca advance faltered. Hemmed in by the coast on their left, the flooded areas on their right, and the press of their own advance behind them, they chose to pause and began digging in.

  Heartened, Dihana left the walls to return to her office but was intercepted by a breathless ragamuffin.

  “Minister,” he gasped. “We have a problem.” He took a deep breath. “Tolteca-town in revolt. Three hundred Tolteca take over a barrack. They have rifles now.”

  Gordon swung around. “There mongoose in the barrack?”

  “No, no, they just holing up. Maybe sending out the word to other Tolteca. They already kill anyone they pass up in the street.”

  “How’d this happen?” Dihana fought not to yell. “I thought we had enough mongoose-men keeping Tolteca-town hemmed in?”

  “Haidan and I move a bunch of them out past the walls. Bad thinking.” He looked out over the city. “The Azteca ain’t pressing the south rail. Take five hundred mongoose-men from there, go back, and take care of this, Dihana.” Gordon whistled a mongoose-man over and repeated his orders. “You know,” Gordon said, “this probably wouldn’t have happen if you hadn’t work so hard to keep the Azteca in the city.”

  Dihana said nothing in return. She took the three mongoose-men with her and ran with them along the wall toward the south rail gate. It beat arguing over something that couldn’t be changed. And it was doing something.

  A trio of commanding mongoose-men met them above the south rail gate. Someone grabbed her arm. “We lost contact with the southern towns.”

  “What?” Dihana pulled away. “Are you sure?”

  “We just send an armor train down to see about it, they still gone. We think the Azteca either split they forces, or an Azteca scout party cut the wire.”

  They couldn’t withdraw so many mongoose-men from the southern line if Azteca were coming up it now. And—Dihana felt despair—that would mean they’d lost their ability to get resupplied by the southern towns.

  “Somebody send an airship along to confirm this, and see if we can spot Azteca.” This was out of the plan. She missed Haidan.

  “What do we do about them men from Tolteca-town?” they asked her.

  Dihana stood there. “We need to get back to Gordon.” She couldn’t make a decision like this on her own, but she knew they were going to have to withdraw the men along the southern rail. They’d lose their ability to compress the Azteca into their killing field.

  By sunset mongoose-men trooped back away from the southern rails, and the first of a second wing of Azteca arrived on the southern edge of the peninsula.

  The Azteca attack began again in twilight, this time from two sides, as mongoose-men inside the city hunted down the Tolteca traitors and killed them to regain the barracks.

  When Dihana saw Gordon again, he pursed his lips. “They force us,” he said. “We could have hold the southern track or take care of the Tolteca in the city.”

  The boom of Azteca cannon fire threatened to drown their conversation out. A line of airships in the distance drew closer.

  “We still hold the outer trench line,” Dihana said. “We’re killing so many of them.”

  “Not much longer,” Gordon said. “I giving the order to fall back so that the attacking Azteca within range of the wall guns. We killing them, but for every one we kill, two more standing behind the one that fall.”

  Later that night the mongoose-men fell back and long trenches of fuel burned in the night to make a barrier between the Azteca and the mongoose-men. It added to the Azteca casualties, they saw, but it didn’t stop them. Out of the smoky veil over the land when the flames dwindled, the Azteca came onward. Dying, but inching ever closer to the walls.

  They didn’t have a chance of breaking the Azteca tide. They could only slow it.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Lionel repeated the same words over and over. Codes. Ma. Wi. Jung. Each punctuated by the impact of the blade. Foot: through the boot and into the cartilage and flesh, twisted to emphasize Jung. Calf: through the legs of the trousers that soaked the blood up. Arms: slicing John’s forearms. Chest, stomach, Lionel remained patient. “Give me the codes, John, or it will get worse, you’ll die slowly, so slowly, in so much more pain. I’m just getting started.”

  Then Lionel stabbed John’s left thigh and the blade tip snapped off just under the skin. Lionel tried again, and again, and then John sat up, covered in his own blood, and grabbed Lionel by the throat to pull him close. He remembered he once had the strength to snap Lionel’s neck with just that same amount of effort. “Look, fucker,” he growled. “None of you get it. Pepper was right. There are no codes. Just me.”

  Lionel responded by slamming the knife through John’s shoulder and he dropped back down to the sled. A shotgun fired. Lionel fell to the snow in a gout of his own blood.

  “Gods!” Oaxyctl yelled. It sounded as if he was talking to someone John couldn’t see. “This man was torturing John while I was away. I don’t know why.”

  John’s vision stopped working, but he felt large hands yank the knife free and pick him up. Pepper. Too late, too late.

  Time passed. He wasn’t sure how much, and then Pepper’s familiar voice punctured his trance. “John?”

  “Torture,” John whispered. Everything hurt so much that nothing hurt in comparison, and everything felt sticky or crusty or still bloody. He couldn’t hold out much longer. Not in this cold, not with these wounds. He would die. And soon.

  John fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed of flying.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Pepper used a spare ax to chip out the blocks to make an igloo, while Oaxyctl watched, not sure what Pepper was doing. His muscles ached from the last day of wading through snow and the encounter with the Teotl that still hunted them. Pepper threw Oaxyctl the other ax.

  “Get to work. Make ice bricks. You can see what I’m doing.”

  Hacking the ice into bricks, chipping them into the shape. The first few rings grew up out of the ground, rising and falling in on themselves to begin the dome. Pepper sensed the pressure dropping, the wind increasing. He chipped the bricks into accurate shapes as Oaxyctl handed them to him. When Oaxyctl fell behind, Pepper made his own.

  The upcoming storm he sensed might last only the night, or a few days. They had supplies, but every day they dallied increased the chances of failure with John’s death. And damn it, Pepper hadn’t gotten there in time to save John from being tortured. The whole damn situation balanced on a knife’s edge.

  He wasn’t even sure what role Oaxyctl had played in the torture, as Oaxyctl claimed that he had left to look for a sheltered area and come back to find Lionel torturing John.

  Pepper didn’t believe him.

  These ignorant idiots didn’t even realize that there was no code to be dragged out of John deBrun. Even the Teotl chasing them, old enough now to have hazy memories of those times, thought the same.

  This wasn’t, Pepper thought, like the cave in A Thousaid and One Nights. Nothing like the Ma Wi Jung just opened for the right words. The ship had to know for sure whomever it let aboard was legitimate.

  Since th
e day the Teotl had captured the wormholes and trapped everyone in-system, Starport, with the help of the Loa, had thrown its men into building a long-range ship that could launch from the ground and travel the distances between the stars. It could repair itself after great amounts of damage and help keep the humans in it alive for insane lengths of time thanks to the Loa’s contributions.

  It would eventually have brought them help.

  The Teotl had almost won, so there was one last assault on the holes to destroy them and cut the Teotl off from their endless stream of reinforcements, as well as cutting Nanagada off from all the other worlds. The backlash of the weapons used to collapse the wormhole destroyed the ships in that attack, most satellites in orbit, and many orbital habitats. Almost anything with a chip in it died.

  Survivors of the destruction unleashed their worst remaining weapons on each other, and Pepper had listened to the survivors destroy each other with nuclear and antimatter weapons in a matter of days. Some in hardened life pods survived thanks to the combination of organic Loa technology and protected circuitry. That left a small constellation of floating, powerless survivors in space waiting and listening for rescuers who never came. Most suicided after the first hundred years.

  The Ma Wi Jung was designed to take that kind of abuse in her long trek across the stars, just as the pods. Pepper knew the initial burst would have quieted the ship. But it could recuperate.

  A combination of hardening, shielding, and recuperative organic technology the alien Loa had given them meant that the Ma Wi Jung would be the best candidate for a surviving ship.

  Not just any surviving ship, but one giving him a chance to finally go home.

  He’d been trapped in this system for 350 years. With most of those centuries spent inside a damned escape pod. Pepper would do anything, let nothing stand in his way, to end that sentence.