Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  She padded barefoot down the corridor to the next room.

  Hesitated a hundred times about knocking, then knocked.

  Then that door vanished too, and there stood Reston, in just his underpants. A well muscled torso, with just the right amount of chest hair nestled between his pectorals.

  Dammit.

  “Can’t sleep,” she said.

  “Me either. Should. Can’t.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Shouldn’t. Can.”

  She did.

  They stood apart but facing, within reach of each other.

  She put a hand on his forearm.

  He moved the arm so that her hand fell into his.

  “Ought we?” she said.

  He nodded. “Ought. Will.”

  She took a step towards him. “You’re still a smug dickhead, Reston. Know that.”

  “Stuart,” he said.

  “Mal.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  4 Flower 1 Movement 1 House

  (Friday 21st December 2012)

  STUART LAY STROKING the hair of the maddening, mesmerising woman who lay snuggled against him. Her cheek was against his chest and she was snoring ever so slightly.

  He cast his mind back to the previous night and smiled. Vaughn – Mal – had proved to be an energetic, enthusiastic lover. No surprises there. What had taken him aback was her overwhelming need, like the hunger of the starving. He had responded in kind, and there had been that sort of tough tenderness, that gentle greed, which typified the best lovemaking. The two of them had slotted together, fitted together, in a way Stuart had never experienced before. Not even with Sofia had he known the same mutual rightness or the same instinctive synchronisation. Barely speaking, communicating almost entirely through their bodies, he and Mal had brought each other to a climax that was gloriously gratifying. Mind-blowing, in fact. A moment of ecstasy that had erased all thought and ego, leaving no room inside him for anything other than itself. After that, sleep had come crashing over them both like a tidal wave.

  If last night was a one-off, if it never happened again, Stuart could live with that. And if it wasn’t, if it was the start of something more substantial, he could live with that too.

  He was, he realised, content. For the first time since Sofia and Jake died, he was at peace.

  Mal’s serene sleeping face told him she was too.

  Pity that today was scheduled to be –

  A tremor shook the room.

  Not just the room.

  Stuart could feel it – the entire underground edifice shuddering around him.

  “Huh, whuzzat?” said Mal foggily.

  “Don’t know.” He leapt out of bed. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not good.”

  The tremor subsided.

  Then came another, fiercer, more violent.

  “Earthquake?” said Mal, swinging off the bed and pulling a sheet around her.

  “I don’t think we’re in a seismic activity zone.” Stuart danced into a pair of underpants. “And even if we are, earthquakes feel like waves on a rough sea. This is more like –”

  A third tremor overwrote the second. Everything in the room vibrated and shook.

  Stuart disappeared the door. Distant shouts of alarm echoed along the corridor. He dashed out, Mal following. The first of the pantheon they encountered was Azcatl, who was scurrying along like one of his beloved arthropods.

  Stuart grabbed him. “What’s going on? What is this?”

  “Unhand me!” snapped the Red Ant. “We’re under attack is what’s going on. Tezcatlipoca’s forces. They’ve found us somehow. I must marshal my best shocktroops.”

  He hurried onward. Stuart looked at Mal. “Armour time.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Toci’s lab. Which is... this way, I think.”

  In truth, he had no idea. But as they ran, he hoped they would bump into another of the gods who would give them directions.

  In the event, they bumped into Itzpapalotl. Stuart didn’t know it was her, having never seen her sans armour. All he saw was a tall and impossibly athletic female, almost as dark-skinned as Mictlantecuhtli, moving with obvious urgency but not in a blind panic. He made a deduction and called out her name.

  “We need our armour, too,” he said. “Where do we find it?”

  Without breaking stride, the Obsidian Butterfly made a gesture: follow me.

  Two levels down, near the bottom of the inverted ziggurat, lay a chamber that was part armoury, part laboratory. The equipment that filled it was mostly unrecognisable to Stuart and Mal, a plethora of sleek machines and subtle instruments whose nature and purpose they could only guess at. What was familiar was the jumble of it all. Offcuts and oddments littered workbenches. There were disorganised shelf-loads of tools and spare parts. Everywhere, a sprawl of unfinished projects and experiments-in-progress. Scientific chaos was scientific chaos, no matter if the scientist who generated it was also a goddess.

  Itzpapalotl went straight to her suit of midnight-black armour and began clamping it on. Huitzilopochtli was already here, doing the same. A woman with a thatch of blonde hair and keen, beady eyes – Toci, it must be – was busy loading flame spears into the rack the Hummingbird God toted on his back.

  “Toci, please, our armour...?” said Stuart.

  Toci wagged a finger distractedly towards a corner of the room. The Serpent Warrior suits were set out on armatures, no longer as snake-featured as before. The helmets had been reshaped, their fronts flattened and the eye lenses joined up into a single bulbous visor. All of the sections had been recoloured, not mamba green now but a silvery blue that would afford some camouflage in the daytime sky. There were other modifications, such as l-gun attachments on both arms and the tips of blades projecting from the wrists.

  “Been busy on those all night,” Toci said. “You’ll find them very much improved, although there’s a limit to what I could do, given the crudeness of what I had to work with. Tezcatlipoca was never much of an engineer, and I discern human touches everywhere – shortcuts, quick fixes, general bodging, no finesse. The lightning guns are activated by studs on the palms of the gauntlets. They recharge more rapidly than you’ll be used to, and last longer too. The blades extend to full length with a flick of either arm and retract the same way. Both of you, I understand, are proficient with swords. Of necessity, these ones are short, but they’ll cut through anything short of a forcefield.”

  “Forcefields,” said Stuart. “Any chance we have those?”

  “Exclusive to Quetzalcoatl. Mictlantecuhtli has his gauntlets, Xipe Totec his knives, Huitzilopochtli his flame spears... Each a particular suite of capabilities, to fit each’s individual style and temperament. There is no sharing or crossover. That is not our way. Be grateful for what you’ve got.”

  Another tremor rocked the gods’ lair. It felt less potent than previous ones, but Stuart assumed that that was because they were deeper underground.

  “Hurry,” said Itzpapalotl. It was the first word Stuart had heard her utter, and he wasn’t sure if the remark was directed at him and Mal or not.

  The two humans helped each other into the customised Serpent suits, fast as they could manage. When only the helmets remained to be put on, Mal said, “Here we go. Can’t say I’m not dreading this.”

  “You’d be crazy if you weren’t.”

  “So much at stake.”

  “We’ll just do what we can, leave the heavy lifting to the big boys like Huitzilopochtli.”

  “Stuart...”

  He shook his head. “Last night was last night. I get that.”

  “No, what it is, is, I don’t understand how I can have spent so many weeks wanting to see your heart cooking on a brazier, and now, suddenly, all that’s gone. Now I’m actually worried about you.”

  “Maybe Ometeotl was right. We’re meant to be together but until now the circumstances were against us. I mean radically against us.”

  “It’s almost like some kind of joke, isn
’t it? Like the world was doing its very hardest to keep us apart.”

  “If ‘apart’ is another way of saying ‘at each other’s throats,’ then yes, I’d agree.”

  “If I don’t make it through this...” Mal began.

  “In that case,” Stuart said, securing his helmet on, “it’s unlikely either of us will make it. The point is moot.”

  Mal had her helmet on too, so they were now talking via the strange intimacy of the comms link. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I do,” Stuart replied. “And I will. But afterwards, all right?”

  Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli were leaving.

  “Right now,” he went on, “we’ve business to attend to. The world’s not just going to save itself, you know. It’s time for the new, improved Conquistador to go out there and shine. Oh, and his sidekick Jaguar Girl too.”

  “Call me your sidekick again, and I’ll kick you in the side,” Mal growled. “Fucker.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Fucker, fucker, fucker.”

  “Eloquent as always. Let’s go.”

  TAKING FLIGHT, THEY followed in the wake of Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli, up through the centre of the ziggurat to the hatch. When they emerged onto the surface, it was like entering some fiery, howling maelstrom. There were Serpent Warriors everywhere, swooping, swarming, shooting. The rainforest around the hatch was ablaze. Flames crackled. Smoke churned. The air was thick with falling ash and embers. L-gun fire streaked between the burning tree trunks, and now and then huge, not-so-far-off explosions erupted, seeming to shake whole acres of landscape.

  Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli wasted no time in engaging the enemy. Within seconds, Serpents were being blasted out of the air or sliced to ribbons.

  It took Stuart and Mal slightly longer to gather their wits. A pair of Serpents came zooming at them on an attack run. Stuart targeted one, Mal the other. Plasma bolts zigzagged from their forearms and struck the Serpents with staggering force. One hurtled backwards into a cedar, crashing against the trunk and flopping down to its base, broken inside his armour. The other was sent sailing sideways and collided with a third airborne Serpent. They fell together in a tangle, and Mal was on them before they could extricate themselves from each other. She flicked her arm as Toci had instructed and the blade in her gauntlet snicked out to its full extension. One of the Serpents raised his l-gun and Mal slashed at it unthinkingly, slicing the barrel in two. The Serpent was almost as startled as she was, and his eyes widened further as she plunged the blade through his breastplate, deep into him.

  The other Serpent made a bid to retrieve his own l-gun, which had been knocked from his grasp and landed a few yards away. He scrambled desperately on all fours, but was beaten to it by Stuart, who flew over him and alighted in his path, sword out. The next instant, a Serpent Warrior helmet went bouncing across the forest floor, with a Serpent Warrior’s severed head inside.

  Itzpapalotl and Huitzilopochtli had disappeared somewhere into the smoke haze, but more gods were emerging from below. Tzitzimitl and Azcatl took up positions on either side of the hatch, each accompanied by a retinue of monsters. Tzitzimitl had her leaping, yowling pack of Tzitzimime, while Azcatl was haloed by a dense, buzzing cloud of insects the likes of which neither Stuart nor Mal had ever seen. They were large, the size of a clenched fist, and appeared to be a hybrid of wasp, scorpion and stag beetle, with a stinger-tipped tail at the back, pincer-like horns at the front, and a yellow-striped abdomen.

  Joining Tzitzimitl and Azcatl was a third god: the disfigured, hunchbacked entity whom Stuart remembered from his first ever visit to the refectory down below. Nanhuatzin, the Deformed One, limped up out from the hatch and stood, swaying somewhat. His arthritically clawed hands were outstretched, and a look of grim delight was discernible on his twisted face.

  “Go!” Azcatl ordered Stuart and Mal. “Get out there. The main battle is that way” – he waved in a westward direction – “and that is where you can be the most help, if you can be any help at all.”

  “We can defend this spot,” Tzitzimitl added. “No one will get past us.”

  “Are you sure?” Stuart said.

  The crone’s eyes flashed. “Watch.”

  A squadron of Serpents came gliding in through the pall of smoke. Tzitzimitl, with a loud whistle, despatched her Tzitzimime at them. The dark demon dogs sprang up and brought down one of the Serpents in midair. They dragged him to the ground and set about him in a snarling, slavering pack, going for the joints, the vulnerable chinks between sections of his armour. His screams, relayed by the comms, were shrill in Stuart’s and Mal’s ears. As the Tzitzimime tore him apart and ate him alive, he was begging for his mother to save him.

  Meanwhile Azcatl unleashed his scorpion-wasp monstrosities, which whizzed towards the Serpents like rocks from a catapult. They butted through faceplates and set about stinging straight away, clinging on with their pincer horns while their sinuous tails jabbed and jabbed repeatedly into cheek and nose and eyeball. The venom worked almost instantaneously; their Serpent victims went rigid with paralysis and became floating corpses, hovering stiff and lifeless in the air, supported only by their suits.

  As for Nanahuatzin, he waited until one of the Serpents strayed close to the hatch, and then he simply reached out and brushed the man with his fingertips. Something glistened briefly between him and the Serpent. Something was transferred. The Serpent turned and trained his l-gun on Nanahuatzin, but all at once his limbs went weak and wouldn’t function properly. Over the comms link Stuart heard him say something about being unable to breathe. The man dropped the weapon and fumbled to get his helmet off. His face had gone a vivid, liverish puce. Sores were breaking out all over his skin, all manner of blisters, buboes and pustules. The whites of his eyes went scarlet. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out, only a vomitous gush of blood. He fell, wracked with agony, as what seemed to be every communicable disease that had ever existed infested his body, proliferating at an obscene rate. By the time he stopped writhing and lay still, fluids were seeping out through all the seals in his armour and his face was so distended by swellings and lesions that it no longer resembled anything human.

  “Fair enough,” Stuart said to the three gods. “Mal? This way.”

  They flew through the burning forest. They drew their heading by the rising number of Serpent corpses that littered the ground, a trail of the dead left by the other gods. The comms chatter they were picking up over their helmet radios grew as they approached. It wasn’t long before they arrived at the epicentre of the battle.

  There were several hundred Serpents in flight, orbiting an enormous humanoid machine, which advanced slowly, step by thunderous step. It was near enough the size of a house, with arms that ended in multiple lightning gun arrays and legs that balanced on jointed, talon-like feet. The l-guns cleaved trees in two and the feet crushed their toppled trunks to splinters as the giant thing waded purposefully through the forest.

  Five of the gods were attempting to get near this mechanical behemoth, but the Serpents kept thwarting them, attacking in such numbers that the gods were too busy coping with them to achieve anything else.

  On the ground, Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli were close to being overwhelmed by the sheer number of opponents they faced. The Flayed One’s knives flashed relentlessly, the Dark One’s gauntlets crushed and bludgeoned, and still the Serpents kept on coming, crowding in on them from all quarters.

  In the air, Itzpapalotl was unable to dart through the droves of Serpents. Whichever way she turned, she was intercepted and driven back by l-gun fire. Likewise Huitzilopochtli. His flame spears took out a half-dozen Serpents at a time, but every time he created a gap it was plugged by a half-dozen more.

  Only Quetzalcoatl was making any headway, and then not much. He was barely visible through the crackling storm of plasma bolts that pounded against his forcefield. He flew like someone swimming against a powerful current, fi
ghting for every inch of progress.

  And still the massive manlike machine moved inexorably forwards.

  “Tezcatlipoca,” Mal said.

  The Smoking Mirror could be seen through a screen of glass set in the thing’s torso. He was enclosed in a kind of cat’s cradle of light beams which synched his movements to those of the machine. He raised an arm, so did the giant. He shifted his legs, the giant strode.

  “It’s... a bigger suit of armour,” Stuart said. “The biggest ever.” He sounded, in spite of himself, impressed.

  “Size isn’t everything,” Mal said curtly.

  “Now you tell me. So what should we do?”

  “Take him down if we can. He clearly wants to get to the gods’ headquarters and destroy it, and all their backup and resources with it. Destroy them, too. We do our bit to stop him. Or rather, you do.”

  “Huh?” Stuart was startled by the sudden change in her tone of voice. It had dropped to an icy hush. She was staring hard at the forwardmost grouping of Serpent Warriors, the vanguard of the attack force. One of them stood out from the rest, distinguished by the gold patterning on his armour.

  “There you are, you bastard,” Mal said. She was aloft before Stuart could stop her.

  “Mal!” he remonstrated. “No. He’s a sideshow. He’s not important.”

  “Maybe to you he’s not,” came the reply. “Colonel Tlanextic!” She had switched to Nahuatl. “Can you hear me? I’m here. Over here. Come and get what’s coming to you.”

  “The Vaughn bitch.” Tlanextic’s caustic voice cut through the babel of comms chatter, loud and clear. “How interesting. That’s you in that silver suit?”

  Stuart saw the gold-patterned figure break away from the main pack and head for Mal.

  “I could have sworn you were dead,” Tlanextic said.

  “Should have checked more thoroughly, shouldn’t you?”

  “An oversight I shall remedy now.”

  “Remedy this, motherfucker,” said Mal, and she let him have it with both her l-guns.