Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  “And what?”

  “Simple geometry. As we hit the apex of the turn, the angle will bring us closer to them.”

  “Fuck my luck.”

  “Succinctly put. Hang on. This is going to get bumpy.”

  It did indeed get bumpy, so much so that Mal had to cling onto the headrest of the driving seat in order to keep her balance. The screeching was deafening. Several times it seemed as though the train was going to tear free of the track. She could feel it twisting against itself, inner torque juddering mightily through it.

  And then, halfway through the turn, as Reston had predicted, the Serpents opened fire. Their train was just hitting the bend. They had a chance and they didn’t squander it.

  Bolts arced across from their train to the one Mal and Reston were in. The Serpents had time to loose off only one shot apiece, four shots in all.

  All four came close, strafing, blitzing, simultaneously, blindingly.

  One made contact.

  Fortunately, the bolt struck the end of the train, nowhere near the drive mechanism – the power cells and neg-mass exciter – which was located in the middle, beneath the passengers’ feet. Damage was done, but not instantaneously catastrophic damage. The train’s tail end exploded outwards, shards of metal caroming and ricocheting back along the track. Mal was thrown to the floor. She got up to find the train didn’t have a back any more, just a jagged gap that looked as though a shark had chewed a whole section of bodywork off. The rearmost bank of seats was bent up at a crazy angle. Smoke trailed behind them.

  But they were still going. The train was making terrible noises, a ragged-edged keen of protest, but it was still moving forwards and didn’t appear to have lost much in the way of momentum. Coming out of the curve, Reston nudged the throttle back up to 7, and the train jerkily responded. He tried 8, and the noises worsened but there was a further hike in speed nonetheless.

  They entered another straight section.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Mal said, shouting to make herself heard above the train’s caterwauling.

  “Does it matter, as long as it’s away from Tlanextic?”

  “I mean, do you have a plan? Or are we just going to tour round Tenochtitlan for the rest of the day until we get bored?”

  “South,” said Reston. “We head south. The harbour end of the island. Steal a boat there and make for shore.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m open to other suggestions, inspector.”

  She had none.

  They hurtled on, the ruined, screeching train drawing curious looks from everyone it passed by. A junction loomed, and a light on the control console flashed and a buzzer beeped.

  “It’s asking if we want to switch direction,” Mal said.

  “The points are set for straight ahead, but left looks southbound to me. Let’s take it.” Reston jabbed the button beside the light. A segment of the track slid ponderously leftward, and the train, complaining, transferred onto the new course. “Hope that was right decision.”

  Tlanextic’s train also made the interchange, much more smoothly, and Mal could see that it was gaining on theirs, incrementally but remorselessly. She could see on the Serpent Warriors’ faces – Tlanextic’s in particular – a growing sense of triumph. They were holding fire with their l-guns, but only because they were waiting for the moment when her and Reston’s train became an unmissable, point-blank target. It wouldn’t be long now.

  She had to slow the Serpents down somehow, if possible stop them altogether.

  The displaced bank of seats gave her an idea. She made her way along the train to them.

  “What are you doing?” Reston wanted to know.

  “Trying to help. Just keep driving.”

  The seats had been wrenched almost completely free from their mounting. Only a couple of screws still moored them in place. One of the screws was sheared nearly all the way through and Mal was able to snap it with a good, hard kick. The other, however, was more or less intact. She didn’t have a screwdriver on her but she did have her trusty macuahitl. She inserted the edge of the blade under the screw’s head and began levering. She squatted down and gave it all she’d got, heaving on the sword handle, using every ounce of strength in her shoulders and thighs. It seemed that the screw would never budge. Her muscles would give, or her macuahitl would, before it did.

  Then there was an abrupt sharp creak of progress. The screw squeezed up a few millimetres from its socket, and the seats jiggled that little bit more freely. Encouraged, Mal redoubled her efforts.

  “Get a move on, Vaughn,” Reston said. He could see what she was up to but also how close the Serpents were getting. “Put your back into it.”

  “Could you...” Mal gasped through clenched teeth, “kindly... just do your thing... and leave me... the fuck alone... to do mine?”

  At last, with a sudden grinding surrender, the screw came out. The bank of seats stood rattling loose on the floor of the train.

  Mal had been intending to pick up the seats and lob them at the train behind with as much accuracy as she could manage. At the very least the sight of a bank of seats hurtling towards him would cause the driver to apply the brakes, and if she got lucky the thing might get jammed between train and rail, forcing the Serpents to halt, maybe even causing a crash.

  Just then, however, one of the Serpents chose to fire an exploratory shot, to see if the fugitives’ train was near enough yet. It wasn’t. The bolt fell short. But only by a foot or so. A few more seconds and even that slender margin of safety would be eroded.

  There wasn’t time for anything elegant. Mal settled for booting the seats off the back of the train.

  They cartwheeled down the track towards the oncoming Serpents. Tlanextic yelled out a warning and everybody ducked. The seats failed to become wedged beneath the train; instead, they collided with the windshield, which shattered in a sparkling shower of glass shards that sprayed over the five Serpents and the driver. The seats then spun on past the train, landing behind and careering off, a mangle of tubular steel and plastic padding, through the windows of an adjacent tower.

  “Nice try,” Reston commented.

  “Worth a shot,” Mal said, as the driver of the other train popped his head up again and so did the Serpent Warriors, all of them shaking glass fragments out of their clothes.

  “Uh-oh,” Reston then said.

  “Oh, what now?”

  “Look.”

  “Bugger.”

  Dead ahead, there was a third train. It was trundling along at a leisurely pace, empty apart from a driver who seemed in no hurry to get anywhere and was blissfully unaware of the two trains barrelling up from behind. He was just idling along from platform to platform like a cabbie cruising for his next fare.

  “Does this thing have a horn?” Reston said.

  “Racket we’re making, it’s a wonder he hasn’t heard us already,” said Mal. “Oi!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Dickhead! Shift yourself! Unless you want to get rammed.”

  The driver in front turned and his eyes went saucer wide. He scrabbled to push the throttle forward, and his train started to speed up.

  Their train was still zeroing in on his, though, and fast. Reston didn’t dare ease off, not with the Serpents breathing down their necks. A shunt was unavoidable.

  “Brace yourself,” he told Mal.

  Their train rear-ended the one in front. At that point, Newtonian physics took over. The front train, boosted from behind, jetted forward at even greater speed. The driver let out a squawk of terror, clinging to his control console for dear life.

  Mal and Reston’s train, meanwhile, its nose now a crumpled mess, was brought almost to a standstill by the impact. The Serpent train continued rocketing towards it as rapidly as ever. The driver of the latter hit the brakes, but there wasn’t enough time.

  “Jump for it,” said Reston.

  Mal was already jumping for it.

  Both she and Reston threw themsel
ves clear of the train a heartbeat before the Serpent train ploughed into it. The Serpent train rose off the track and mounted theirs, with a godawful cacophony of metal crunching and men screaming in panic. The two vehicles, conjoined, went scraping on down the track, parts flying off, sparks shooting everywhere like a firework display. One of the Serpent Warriors was jettisoned from his seat and flung like a ragdoll headfirst to the track bed, breaking his neck. The others, and the driver, just hung on helplessly as the violent, slewing ride ran its course. Friction and inertia eventually brought the locked-together trains to a halt some five hundred yards further down the line. They settled at an ungainly angle on the rail, silent and spent, like a pair of old drunkards after an uproarious bender. Everyone still aboard was too shaken up to do much but groan and give thanks that they were alive. The antigrav-particle exciters on these trains were well-reinforced, but even so it was a small miracle that neither one of them had been breached.

  By the time Colonel Tlanextic got himself together to clamber out and head back along the track to look for the two English fugitives, they were long gone.

  His wrath was terrible to behold. And exceptionally loud. Proceeding on the assumption that Mal and Reston were still within earshot, which they were, he informed them that this was his island, his domain. It was swarming with Serpent Warriors. They could run but they wouldn’t get far.

  “You’re mine,” he roared. “I’ll find you. I’ll find you and fucking slaughter you. It’s only a matter of time.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Same Day

  STUART WAS FEELING more like his old self than he had in weeks. Since leaving England, in fact. He was in desperate trouble, he knew. He and Vaughn were on the run in Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan! They were fugitives marked for death in the Great Speaker’s own redoubt, a city teeming with highly trained, dedicated and ruthless soldiers. Colonel Tlanextic’s next move would surely be to put out an all-points bulletin with their descriptions. Every Serpent Warrior under his command would be on the lookout for a white male and white female, both in their early to mid-thirties, one armed with a macuahitl. As things stood, their chances of reaching the harbour without being spotted, challenged, shot at and captured were next to nil. And in the unlikely event that they did make it, it was far from guaranteed that they’d be able to get themselves a ride on a boat. All in all, their prospects were bleak.

  But even as he and Vaughn raced to put distance between them and the monorail track, Stuart felt positive. Alive. Hopeful, even. The more so as Tlanextic’s bellowed threats reached his ears.

  This, it seemed, was who he was meant to be: a man facing insuperable odds, beset by enemies, with nothing to fall back on but his wits and skills. He was a born desperado, a natural underdog. The Stuart Reston he had been for most of his life – rich kid, socialite, plutocrat, top of the heap – was a guise he’d worn so long that he’d ceased to realise it wasn’t really him. Only after he’d lost everything was he able to break free from the shell he’d built around himself and become something truer to himself.

  It helped, too, that the indomitable Malinalli Vaughn was running with him now. It made a very pleasant change from having her running after him.

  They crossed concourses and traversed raised walkways. Stuart kept the trend of their progress as southward as he could, but it wasn’t easy. Tenochtitlan was a maze. There hadn’t been any overarching design behind its layout. The ziggurats and towers had simply accumulated over time, one rising up in the space beside another until the entire island was covered. The train network made sense of the muddle and was obviously the most practical and straightforward way of getting around, but the monorail was no longer safe for him and Vaughn to use. On foot, sticking close to walls, skulking, steering clear of passersby, they could maintain a lower profile and, hopefully, evade detection.

  He explained his choice of tactic to Vaughn.

  “If you say so,” was her reply. “You’ve done more fleeing from the authorities than I have.”

  “Yes, and I’m alive to tell the tale. So I must know a thing or two about it.”

  “That or you’ve been phenomenally lucky.”

  “Comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it? Who cares how I get there, as long as the end-result’s in my favour?”

  “I liked you more when you weren’t so smug,” Vaughn said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “No, you’re right. I’ve never liked you.”

  They came to a blind alley, and Stuart proposed a pause to rest and take stock. Vaughn, short of breath, agreed it was a good idea.

  In the alley, they hunkered downwind from a set of bins. Tenochtitlan, for all its majesty, had its grubby areas, as any city did. You couldn’t have thousands of humans crammed together in a confined space, with their effluent and their detritus, and expect absolute cleanliness everywhere. Waste water trickled down the alley’s central gutter. A rat poked its head out from a downpipe, didn’t like the look of the two humans, and withdrew. The contents of the bins, as garbage was wont to in this climate, reeked.

  “Aaronson,” murmured Vaughn. She was staring broodingly at her palms, which were badly grazed from when she’d leapt clear of the train. “That poor bastard. Why? It’s not fair. He didn’t have to die.”

  “The Great Speaker thought he did. And Tlanextic.”

  “But Aaronson never did anything wrong. He was a cheeky sod, and sometimes his tongue was a bit too sharp for his own good, but...” Her eyes were red-rimmed. “Those fuckers. Those pieces of dogshit.”

  “These are the people you’ve been working for all this time, Vaughn.”

  “Don’t you start.”

  “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t be surprised how the powers-that-be have turned on you. They can do that. It doesn’t bother them. We’re all of us expendable, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “I’m not in the mood for a lecture. Stop it or I’ll use this fucking sword on you.”

  “Okay.” Stuart relented. Right now Vaughn was his only ally, and it wouldn’t do him any good to make her more upset than she already was.

  A few moments later she said, “Were those really...?”

  “The Four? Not so long ago I’d have said no, don’t be so daft. Now? I’m pretty sure they are. I don’t see what else they can be.”

  “Fuck. And the Speaker is Tezcatlipoca. I never saw that coming. If there’d been a choice of which of the gods, out of all of them, had to be left in sole charge of earth, he’s the one I’d least want it to be. Even Xipe Totec would have been preferable. Even Mictlantecuhtli.”

  “Mictlantecuhtli? I wouldn’t go that far. Xipe Totec, although he’s not a pretty sight when his skin’s transparent, you still sort of know where you are with. Mictlantecuhtli, on the other hand...” He mimed a shudder.

  “How come you met them?” Vaughn asked. “Why did they reveal themselves to you, of all people?”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t my doing. I’d give anything not to have been the one. They may be gods, but they’re far from benevolent. Even Quetzalcoatl’s got a mean streak. Azcatl’s pretty hardcore, too. You should see him in action.”

  “Azcatl? The Red Ant?” Vaughn almost laughed.

  “I know. The myths don’t make much of him. All I know is the one about Quetzalcoatl bullying him to reveal where his grain store is. In real life, though, Azcatl’s not someone you want to mess with. All of them are like that. You just feel so inferior when they’re around. Particularly when it’s someone like Tzitzimitl, who couldn’t disguise her scorn for me.”

  “You don’t think that’s just you? Your sparkling personality?”

  “Could be,” said Stuart. “And in answer to your earlier question, they revealed themselves to me because I happened to be there and it was convenient. No other reason. I wasn’t specially selected or anything like that. Quetzalcoatl injured me and had a fit of guilt about that, and then saw a way I could be useful to him. I’m not useful to him any more, apparently, judgin
g by the way he almost completely blanked me when we were up on the Great Speaker’s palace.”

  “He had other things on his mind.”

  “Maybe. I think...” Stuart hesitated. “I think, to them, humans are playthings, not much more. ‘As flies to wanton boys,’ et cetera.”

  “Don’t recognise the quotation, but then I didn’t have a posh education like you.”

  “Shakespeare. And we didn’t study him at ‘posh’ school, either. Too Christian. I sought out his work for myself when I was older. Complete, unexpurgated editions of the plays are hard to track down. I found one of the last ever Victorian ones, got it from a black-market dealer in Hull. Set me back a pretty penny, I can tell you.”

  “We’re the gods’ pets, then, is that what you’re saying?”

  “At best. We intrigue them, the way a strange species of animal – I don’t know, the duck-billed platypus for instance – intrigues zoologists. All said and done, it turns out we’re nothing more than a worthy project to them, a charity case. That’s how this whole Empire nonsense got started. The gods saw us, thought we were cute, adopted us and tried to make us better, more like them. And then it all went belly up, and this is the mess we’re left with, the aftermath of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca’s big spat.”

  “I don’t understand. So are the myths true or aren’t they?”

  “I think they are, sort of, and also not. I think they’re versions of the truth which explain the gods’ behaviour, and the Great Speaker – Tezcatlipoca – has allowed them to become religious currency because it suits his ends. The creation story, for instance. It’s a way of telling us, reinforcing to us, that the gods made everything. They’re the ones responsible for the world and we owe them an unrepayable debt of gratitude for that. Of course, what they actually did was take a race at a pre-existing level of civilisation and develop it, mould it in their own image. They didn’t make the world, they remade it. And us with it.”