Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  The dust was in his eyes too. He blinked hard to part his eyelids. It was like cracking eggshells.

  Vaughn’s face was coated with grey. Her hair was bedraggled and hoary.

  “You look a sight,” he croaked.

  “So do you. There’s blood all down the side of your face. Gash in your head, but I don’t think it’s too deep. Here we go. Up you come.”

  Stuart clambered shakily to his feet, Vaughn helping.

  “You said...”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. It was abundantly clear what had started.

  There were figures in the air. Glittering armoured creatures. They flashed to and fro like dragonflies.

  Battle stations. Tenochtitlan was under siege.

  As he watched, a familiar iridescent shape soared overhead, brandishing an equally familiar spear-launcher. Braking to a hover, Huitzilopochtli targeted the apex of a nearby ziggurat. A spear streaked down. The building’s top storey erupted in flames. Stuart felt the rumble of the blast through his soles.

  Armour-clad Serpent Warriors swarmed up to engage with the god, but he was already jetting off at speed, disappearing over the rooftops.

  In his wake came a dark figure, almost a silhouette. Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly. The Serpents turned their attention on her. Plasma bolts came her way thick and fast, but Itzpapalotl evaded them with ease, jinking and barrel-rolling. She flew right into the midst of the Serpents, where they were clustered together the most tightly. She shot through them like a black dart, emerging the other side unscathed.

  Serpents fell from the sky, parts of them missing. Severed arms, legs, heads tumbled with them.

  “Can’t stay here gawping,” Vaughn said. “Look, we’ve got a way out.”

  Stuart turned. The section of outer wall they’d been put up against for execution was no more. A hole had been blown in the upper part of it, and the landslide of rubble made a kind of steep ramp leading to the gap.

  “What about Tlanextic? Where –?”

  “He’s fucked off to repel the attack. Must’ve assumed we were dead but didn’t have time to check. More pressing matters to attend to.”

  “Dead?”

  “There was a whole bunch of debris on top of us. We were buried, you more than me. I’ve been digging you out from under it for the past ten minutes while all hell’s been breaking loose.”

  “You saved me? When you could have got away on your own?”

  “Don’t make a big thing out of it. Call me sentimental, but I reckon I owe you one.”

  “Actually I think you owe me two at least.”

  “And the Reston arrogance ruins the moment yet again. Come on.”

  Vaughn set off up the escarpment of rubble. It was loose and treacherous, and she was obliged to scramble on all fours like a lizard to reach the summit. Stuart made even heavier weather of it. Pain was setting in. He felt bruised all over, his body battered as it had never been before. Nothing worked quite the way it should. His head throbbed. Nevertheless he made it to the top, where Vaughn was flapping a hand frantically at him.

  “Almost all the boats have gone. There’s only one left. I think they’re having engine trouble or something. Crew are running around like blue-arsed flies trying to fix the problem.”

  She slithered down the other side of the wall onto the narrow strip of cliff edge below. Stuart could see the boat bobbing in the harbour. It was a garbage scow; bags of refuse that its crew had decided not to load sat heaped on the quay alongside it. He could faintly hear a sailor on deck yelling down through a hatch to someone in the hold. A moment later a head popped up from the hatchway and a hand holding an adjustable wrench gesticulated to the wheelhouse. The sailor relayed a message to whoever was in the scow’s wheelhouse – the captain, presumably – and then there was a mechanical coughing and a blurt of diesel smoke. A cheer went up from the other crewmembers.

  “Hurry the fuck up!” Vaughn shouted at Stuart. “They’ve got it started.”

  Stuart lowered himself stiffly to the clifftop while Vaughn sprinted for the zigzagging leading down to the harbour. She yelled and waved as she ran, hoping to catch the scow’s attention.

  Meanwhile, the siege continued. Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl were, as far as Stuart could tell, the sole attackers, but the two of them were causing enough devastation and destruction for a strike force a hundred times as large. They operated according to a pattern. Huitzilopochtli inflicted property damage while Itzpapalotl ran interference for him, keeping the Serpent Warriors off his back. He was the heavyweight bomber, she the smaller, nippier fighter craft giving him clear passage to his targets.

  Softening up, Stuart thought. A first phase of attack to weaken defences and sow disarray. A teaser for the main event.

  Vaughn tackled the harbour road vertically. Rather than follow its back-and-forth course she vaulted the guardrails and slid down the embankments between one incline and the next. All the way she kept calling to the scow, begging it to wait. Just half a minute! Civilians wanting safe passage off the island!

  Perhaps none of the crew heard her above the noise of the scow’s engine and the booming detonations rolling across the city. Perhaps some of them did, but refused to listen, too concerned for their own lives. Perhaps the sight of a female acolyte was just too bizarre to make sense of. Whatever the reason, the boat didn’t stop. It chugged out onto the lake at flank speed and was a hundred metres from its berth at the quay by the time Vaughn got there. She jumped up and down on the spot and implored the crew to turn back, to no avail. Stuart saw one of the men on deck give her what seemed like a shrug of apology. The others pretended not to notice her.

  A volley of foul language echoed across the water from Vaughn, and then she slumped to the quay with a grunt of frustration.

  Stuart put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry.”

  She rounded on him. “Don’t worry? Don’t worry!? We’re trapped on this fucking island, there’s a major-league conflict starting up around us, and we just lost our only way off.”

  “Who says? What about the Serpent aerodiscs?”

  “Do you know how you fly one?

  “Well, no, but maybe we can find someone who does and coerce them into being our pilot.”

  “Sounds pretty thin to me.”

  “Me too,” Stuart admitted. “It’s not our only option.”

  “Go on. I’m all ears.”

  He looked up. A squadron of armoured Serpents were flying above in echelon formation, on course to intercept yet another raid by Huitzilopochtli. Itzpapalotl came at them like a bowling ball hitting the pins, scattering them in all directions.

  “If we could get our hands on a couple of those suits...”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, but I am. We wouldn’t need anyone else to fly us out of here. We could do it ourselves.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Same Day

  THE LAST THING Mal wanted to do was head back into the beleaguered city. It was counterintuitive. Worse than that – it was downright crazy.

  But Reston, damn him, was right. The Serpents’ suits of armour were their one real shot at escaping. She didn’t know how difficult the suits were to fly. Probably quite difficult. But simpler, surely, than a disc.

  As she and Reston made their way back up the harbour road, they met a crowd of people heading in the other direction. It seemed the idea of hitching a lift on a boat had occurred to several of Tenochtitlan’s ancillary and domestic staff. They’d crawled out through the shattered part of the wall, only to discover that the harbour was now empty, but they were continuing anyway, because conditions had to be less hazardous to health outside the city precincts than within. Mal and Reston butted past them, against the tide of exodus, and climbed the wall and over the breach. A look back showed Mal that several of the workers were so desperate to leave that they had dived into the lake and begun to swim. It was a good five or six miles to shore, a distance even a strong swimmer would strugg
le to cover. She wished them luck.

  Just as she and Reston re-entered the city, there was a lull in the onslaught from above. Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had fulfilled their mission remit and returned to base. Serpent Warriors patrolled the skies, scanning the horizon. Gunships were now airborne, too. They soared out to form a defensive perimeter a mile around the island, their double-barrelled weapons nacelles swivelling.

  On the ground, non-armoured Serpents were regrouping and entrenching. Blockades were set up at strategic points throughout the city: on plazas where there were clear lines of sight and enfilading crossfire was possible, and at street chokepoints where any invaders coming in on foot could be pinned down and pincered. Heaps of rubble from ruined buildings were put to use as shooting cover. Holes in façades became sniper nests. Places of refuge were established too, for the injured and for noncombatants who’d been caught out in the open.

  All of this impacted Mal and Reston, hampering their progress through the city. Their aim was to infiltrate one of the underground bunkers. That was where the suits were stashed, Reston reckoned, recalling Colonel Tlanextic’s instruction to Ueman and his men to “go to the bunkers and get armoured up.” But the bunker entrances were now the city’s most heavily fortified spots, which seemed to confirm his theory but at the same time made it almost impossible to take practical advantage of. It was tricky even getting near them, and they had several too-close-for-comfort encounters with Serpents. They couldn’t risk being spotted by the soldiers; Tenochtitlan might be on a war footing, but the two of them were still officially wanted. Colonel Tlanextic was under the impression they were dead, but that false report couldn’t yet have filtered out among the main body of his troops. All in all, although they had a clear objective, the obstacles to attaining it were well nigh insurmountable.

  Reston remained upbeat.

  “What we have to do,” he said, after they had once again been stymied by the concentrated Serpent presence at a bunker entrance, “is lie low and wait. As Quetzalcoatl’s lot step up their attack, order will break down. Chaos will be our best ally. Maybe by nightfall we’ll be looking at a whole different set of circumstances. And then, of course, we’ll have the cover of darkness on our side as well.”

  “You just don’t give in, do you?”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Would you rather I turned into a quivering jelly?”

  “No, it’s simply, I find it really annoying, and I shouldn’t. Not now. Not any longer.”

  “Not when it might work in your favour.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  They found themselves a bolthole on the third floor of a ziggurat that turned out to be the administrative hub of Tenochtitlan, a warren of offices where smartly dressed workers cowered under their desks or congregated in frightened huddles, unsure what to do with themselves. The borrowed hieratic vestments, though tattered and torn now, were still in good enough condition and still carried enough inbuilt authority to allow Mal and Reston to walk the corridors unopposed and unquestioned, especially since everyone else was so preoccupied with other matters. They searched for a room that was unoccupied and would provide a good vantage point. One door they tried opened onto a supply closet where a pair of respectable-looking middle-aged bureaucrats were in the throes of strenuous upright sex, she braced against the shelves with her skirt hitched up, he taking her weight and pumping hard with his pants round his ankles. Both were so engrossed in their business that they didn’t notice the intrusion.

  “Get it while you can,” Mal observed, quietly closing the door.

  “An office romance blossoms under adversity,” said Reston.

  “Now or never.”

  “Could be dead within the hour.”

  The room they ended up taking over as their own was a corner office whose two converging walls of plate-glass window afforded a clear, uninterrupted view outside. There was a crossroads below, a cocourse with a monorail platform and a bunker entrance. Diagonally opposite the office building lay a block which Mal quickly deduced must be a Serpent Warrior barracks – rows of small rooms, each with a single narrow bed and little in the way of interior decor. Adjacent stood a water tower and, behind that, the functional concrete bulk of a fusion plant, the city’s source of power.

  She used the desk to barricade the door, and for the next few hours she and Reston crouched by the windows and watched.

  It was a hell of a show, and they had the best seats in the house.

  ABOUT AN HOUR after Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl called off their initial assault, they returned for more. This time they brought along Quetzalcoatl himself.

  Quetzalcoatl was as adept at aerial combat as the other two gods. He was also invulnerable, thanks to the spherical forcefield which enclosed him like an oily bubble and absorbed direct hits from the Serpents’ l-guns.

  The Serpents, however, had upped their game since the previous attack. Not only were gunships in play now, but the sentinels on the outer walls were contributing intense surface-to-air barrages. The gods found making their approach runs to the city much harder. Beeline flying was impossible: Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had to dodge and swerve, and even Quetzalcoatl was knocked off-course by the pulses of heavy plasma fire. His forcefield repeatedly took a pounding and he was batted this way and that like a tlachtli ball.

  Tenochtitlan did suffer during the second wave, but not as badly as before. When the three gods relented and pulled back, it seemed more like a retreat than a tactical withdrawal.

  In the hiatus that followed, many of the armoured Serpents returned to the ground and trooped off down into the bunkers.

  “Bingo,” said Reston. “Bet you anything they’re going to recharge their suits’ power packs.”

  “Probably to have a pee, too. I would if I’d been stuck inside one of those things for so long.”

  “Only you would think of a practicality like that.”

  “Hello? Woman.”

  “Yes, and therefore incapable of bladder control.”

  She punched him on the arm, hard enough to leave a mark. “I bet you’d just piss inside it if you had to.”

  “Actually, I would.”

  “You’re even fouler than I thought.”

  “You’re talking to a man who lay in a pile of fresh corpses for two hours, pretending to be one of them. I know foulness.”

  “Yeah,” Mal said. “D’you know, when I realised that’s how the Conquistador must have got away from the City of London ziggurat, all I could think was how fucking batshit crazy this guy must be, whoever he was.”

  “And now?”

  “I still think you’re batshit crazy, but I sort of understand why. The Empire took everything from you.”

  “It took something from you too.”

  “My brother, you mean? Yeah, maybe, but the difference is, I gave Ix up. I’m the one who threw him to the wolves when I could have saved him. Because he compromised me. He was like a stain. Being related to a petty crim could have nobbled my career. So I scrubbed him off me, publicly, thoroughly.” She gave a bitter chuckle. “I told myself it was for his own good but really it was for mine. All said and done, he was still my big bro, wasn’t he? And I should have protected him.”

  “You did what you felt was right at the time. You can’t condemn yourself for it.”

  “Oh, yes I bloody can.”

  “Well then, you mustn’t. Or else you’ll end up like me.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “I mean it. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could have helped Sofia, done more for her.”

  “What, though? It wasn’t your fault at all, as I understand it.”

  “Wasn’t it? I married her.”

  “You didn’t make her how she was. You didn’t drive her to do what she did.”

  “I knew, going in, that she was a bit flaky. But she seemed so right for me. For the man I used to be,” he amended. “Want to know why I first asked her out?”

  �
��Because she was a catch, the trophy wife every bloke with a fat wallet was trying to bag?”

  “No. Well, yes. But it was also because... I already knew about her, but when I actually laid eyes on her for the first time, at some drinks party or other, she was picking a piece of hors d’oeuvre out of her teeth.”

  “Really?” Mal said. “That was it, the big attraction? She was picking her teeth?”

  “She thought nobody was looking and she was digging at something stuck between two molars. Levering it out with one manicured, lacquered fingernail. This great swanlike society beauty. This ethereal, worshipped creature. Doing something so mundane and ordinary, her mouth wide open, hand rummaging away. That was when I knew I was in with a chance. That was also when I knew I could love her. She was human, after all.”

  He looked wistfully out of the window.

  “You like a bit of grit in the works, don’t you?” Mal said.

  “If life’s too easy, what’s the point?”

  “And yet the rest of us – the ‘other half’ – we’re all trying to fight our way up out of the muck, into the so-called good life, a life like you had.”

  “Who’s content with their lot?” Reston said. “No one. Except maybe the Great Speaker.”

  “Not even him, judging by how he whinged to Quetzalcoatl.”

  “True. Then again, he seemed enthused by the prospect of this war. Like it was something he was looking forward to, after so long. Speaking of which...”

  There was the distant sound of l-guns discharging on the outer walls.

  “Looks like things are hotting up again.”

  THE GODS’ THIRD strike was broad-based and comprehensive. They didn’t confine themselves solely to the air. Ground forces were also deployed.

  The first sign was a terrific commotion originating from over in the direction of the main gate. There was shouting and a mass of concentrated gunfire. Shortly afterwards, non-armoured Serpent Warriors came hurrying into the concourse below the administrative ziggurat. They were on the run, pulling back, harried by an enemy.