Crystal Rain (33 page)
Authors: Tobias S. Buckell
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 stations 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 the 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.
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.
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.
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.
Lionel’s almost headless body had frozen solid. Pepper hefted it like a massive log and walked over to a pit in the snow he’d dug.
He dropped the man in and pushed snow over.
Oaxyctl had done him a favor. But Pepper would have
prefered taking care of Lionel so that he could get some more information.
prefered taking care of Lionel so that he could get some more information.
And he wondered where the Teotl was. He’d have expected another attack, but the alien seemed reluctant to leave the perimeter of
La Revanche
. Was it waiting for something?
La Revanche
. Was it waiting for something?
Maybe it hadn’t realized that its prey was not on the boat.
“Come on,” Pepper said, returning to the igloo. “Get inside.”
Oaxyctl obeyed.
Inside, Pepper started a fire. The warmth creeped over him, welcome. Pepper removed his clothes, and Oaxyctl gasped.
“What happened?”
The claw marks across Pepper’s chest were deep, and still oozing.
“I met one of your gods,” Pepper grunted.
“Is it … did you … ?”
“A draw. We both live.” Pepper grimaced as he pulled out spare clothes from the tightly packed sled. They’d built the igloo around it rather than leave it outside. “Shame.”
Oaxyctl swallowed. “Are you a … Loa?”
Pepper laughed. “I might seem inhuman.” He grinned. “But Loa, no.” He spat the words. “Nor Teotl. None of those bastards.” He turned to Oaxyctl. “Strip.”
“What?”
“Take your clothes off and give them to me.” Oaxyctl hesitated, and Pepper grabbed the shotgun leaning against the wall behind him.
Oaxyctl stripped. His ribs showed against gray skin, abused from the cold. Inside the igloo a half-blue light dappled around them, reflecting the fire. Smoke swirled up toward the small exhaust hole. Pepper doubted that it was visible in the storm, but just in case …
He picked up Oaxyctl’s clothes, glanced at the tips of Oaxyctl’s frostbitten toes. “Get in with John. You’ll keep him warm.” Oaxyctl obeyed. Pepper tossed the man’s clothes behind him, with the shotgun. He continued to dress himself with the new set of clothes.
He’d lost fat, he noted, and some muscle. Body cannibalizing itself for fuel.
“Will you sleep?” Oaxyctl asked.
Pepper smiled, rooted through their supplies for jerky, or anything to fill up on, then stamped out the fire over Oaxyctl’s objection.
“No more fire, we don’t want to get spotted.” Once Pepper had enough to eat, he warmed up with a simple stretch. Reached his toes. Touched the ceiling. All night long he moved, keeping limber and warm.
The movements calmed him.
Eventually Pepper slipped down into sleep and left only the right half of his brain awake to perform the movements. After several hours, he switched, and by morning, before Oaxyctl stirred awake, and John began coughing and hacking blood, Pepper was rested, awake, and ready.
The storm, thankfully, had subsided in the early-morning hours.
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