Crystal Rain (30 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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The Azteca armies arrived on the peninsula and the mongoose-men retreated before their numbers. Haidan’s men slowed the Azteca down by destroying train tracks and food warehouses as they retreated. Several large explosive traps closed off hill passes.
The brilliantly colored Azteca horde continued forward after clearing them and unknowingly followed the path Haidan hoped they would. Every hour the leaders of the mongoose-men sat with Dihana to update her on what was happening.
Until this morning. They told her there was no more information to give. The airships spied on the Azteca, and the city waited for the siege to begin.
Dihana left the Ministry building to find Haidan.
 
He stood on one of the walls, looking out over the empty villages and depots around the city’s walls. The fringe of jungle green lay beyond a wasteland of barbed wire, trenches, troops, and brown earth. Dihana imagined the shadows of Azteca creeping through it.
“What about their airships?” she asked.
“We can hold most of them with what we got. We got
explosive shell we can fire from these wall. And we own airship go battle them down if they come too near. But they can still fly in the distance, watch the battle, try to look inside the city.”
Dihana allowed him to take her in hand and tour the rest of the walls, where men grimly manned guns of all sizes, machetes strapped to their sides. Most of the defenses on the wall weren’t useful until the Azteca broke the outer rings of trenches and came much closer to the wall. “Haidan, what could we have done to prevent this?”
“I don’t know. More spy in Azteca land?” He’d been up for nights in a row, overseeing every possible detail, hounding his men. It showed in his puffy eyes and gravelly voice. He leaned against the wall and put his head in his hands. “If we still alive after this, we go have to change things. Bigger forces, more villages. More cities. This entire land go have to be powerful, dynamic. We can’t wait, can’t be laid-back. There a thousand things we need.”
Dihana nodded. “We will have to be the ones on the move, not them. No more defensive waiting.”
“That too.” Haidan stood up. “We still can’t find any Loa.”
“Where do you think they went?”
“Deep under the city?”
Dihana nodded. “They give you a gourd? One with a plague in it?”
“We could fire it into the Azteca when they attack our walls,” Haidan suggested. “And hunker down. Maybe we won’t catch it?”
“I think the Loa would have suggested that if it worked, don’t you?” She walked with Haidan back toward one of the heavy platforms on the edge that would lower them to the streets.
“I collected all the other ones, the ones the Loa left behind for the priestesses, the one they gave the Councilmen, and the one they gave me, in a locked vault. I want yours there as well.”
Haidan helped her onto the platform, the wood squeaking under her feet. “You think you go use them, if it get to that point?” Haidan asked, his teeth bared in what wasn’t a
smile, but not quite a grimace. “Destroy everything, so no one gets anything?”
“That would be like Hope’s Loss. For us to point our own weapon at ourselves, just like our ancestors destroyed all of each other’s machines so no one would have anything. So many died then, Haidan. How could I do that?”
The platform jerked. The steam motor powering it hissed as it let the brakes go, and she dropped down toward the ground. “You hope you die with it all,” Haidan said, “and never get held responsible for such a thing.”
“The Loa are hoping to hide this one out and come back up when either their disease has claimed everyone, or we survive by some miracle. Maybe that was what the old-father thought they could do. Wait it out. They could have just been trying to buy some time.”
Haidan chuckled. “All that had survive of the old-father were the Councilmen them. Not so good, eh?”
The platform slowed and stopped at ground level.
There were more meetings to be had with the people in the city. No one knew how long this would take. Food and water supplies were critical, and meting them out meant dangerous decisions. No one was sure how long they could hold off an Azteca attack, but with so many people behind the walls, Dihana didn’t think it was long. A couple months? Maybe more if the fishermen kept their larders full.
Dihana wondered how much longer she could hold up without sleep. As she stepped into a waiting vehicle, she mentally set aside time in the afternoon for a nap.
 
Later in the night she awoke to a series of deep thuds. When she walked over to her window, she heard people shouting in the street.
Up on the walls of Capitol City, flashes of gunfire lit the night sky with stabbing orange streaks. A cloud of eeriecolored backlit powder floated in the air. Below the clouds seed-shaped figures coasted over the city, dropping flares.
Dihana leaned against the windowsill and cried.
The Azteca were here.
 
 
La Revanche
landed three days into the third week. Pepper stood on deck along with the other crew, all shivering, frozen, but awed at the majestic mountains covered in snow. All around them the staccato snaps of breaking ice and swoosh of calving icebergs filled the air.
It took another day before they were stuck in ice. The crew grew nervous, but Pepper saw from John’s calm that this was something John expected.
The bottom of the steamship was shallow and curved, not the sharp cutting shape of the traditional sail-ship. John explained that he’d seen shallow skiffs survive the freezing ice in his previous trip with that design and seen deeperkeeled skiffs staved in. Pepper watched over the next night, his eyes piercing the dark, to see unstoppable sheets of ice push against the sides of
La Revanche,
then slip under the hull and lift the boat up onto the ice.
La Revanche
was shaped like the fishing skiffs that could be pulled up onto ground and float over shallow reef water easily. John was right. As a result, the ice could push up without damaging the hull.
Pepper smiled and explained it to several of the mongoose-men milling around, expecting the sides of the ship to be stove in, waiting for the announcement of their deaths.
The mood brightened somewhat. The land was alien, dark, like something out of a nightmare, but at least they still had the ship around them.
Preparations began in earnest. They pulled the ballast out of the bilges of the boat. No one found or said anything about the incubating Teotl, Pepper noticed. He helped with moving ballast and made his way through bilges, looking for it.
He only found a patch of clean hull in the grime. Presumably where the creature had attached itself to cocoon.
Pepper looked around. The Teotl would have left the ship in the night, crossing the ice.
It was out there somewhere, watching them.
Sailors yelled at him to get moving. Great lead weights and blocks of stone had to be lifted out by yardarms and lowered over the ship’s side onto bright red tarps so they could locate them when they returned and put the ship back into the water. It was hard work.
Several men spent full-time shifts boiling and making clean water to replace their stores. Food was inventoried and split: half on the tarps, half in the ship. All spare supplies were set in the snow with the ballast and marked with tall flags.
They were lightening the ship. The Teotl could poison or get rid of the stores they’d left behind if they got free, but it was a nonissue. All Pepper had to do was get to the
Ma Wi Jung
.
The next surprise for Pepper came when massive axles were pushed out of the sides of the front bow and rear stern. Then tiny additional axles where welded to the sides of the hull. Wheels were mounted, and then several hundred feet of tread threaded on by grunting mongoose-men, their sweat freezing to their eyebrows.
In just a little over a day, they had converted
La Revanche
to a giant snow-tank. The mongoose engineers spent another day in the boiler rooms redirecting the gears from the ship’s propeller to the axles. Their shouts drifted up from the ship’s hatches into the crystalline air as they worked at getting the ship converted.
 
Pepper walked along the length of the tread. He’d been somewhat dubious, but the more he examined it, the more it looked as if it would work. Several small, additional wheels had been mounted along the hull of the ship, on upper and lower tracks, to keep the tread taut and provide some suspension.
Stars filled the sky, and for a moment Pepper enjoyed the mass of constellations, many still unfamiliar to him.
Something ahead made his nostrils flare, and he crouched to the ground.
Blood.
He found several scarlet drops on the ground, pockmarking the snow with their warmth.
Several more feet ahead a whole pool of fresh blood lay around the ripped furs of a mongoose-man. Pepper bent over and looked at the wounds. A cut to the throat had cut the man’s vocal cords, and then numerous nasty jabs to the stomach, chest, and groin had caused the blood loss.
Teotl. It had escaped. This poor mongoose-man had spotted it and paid as a result.
A spotlight struck Pepper and he tensed. Men rushed to the side of the deck, murmuring spreading around, looking down at him.
“You have got to be kidding.” Pepper turned and looked into the light. His eyes adjusted, and he made a note of every face on the deck, every expression, to analyze later.
“Is he dead?” someone asked.
Pepper nodded.
“You killed him,” someone else said.
John’s haggard face appeared on deck. He looked over and frowned. With his Aztecan friend’s help he walked down the gangplank to the snowy ground and crunched over to the scene.
The two men stood looking at Pepper in the glare of the light.
Pepper looked at John. Come on, man, he thought, you can’t believe this shit. But Pepper could tell it was futile.
“I didn’t do this,” he said.
John didn’t answer, but looked down at the dead man. Oaxyctl, Pepper noticed, never bothered. Instead the Aztecan stared Pepper down. Something was going on, behind those brown eyes and the frozen fringe of jet-black hair.
“We can’t be sure if he did this,” Oaxyctl said. “But we saw him in action at the battle. He did fight for us. But we know he is very capable of this sort of butchery. And we still don’t know what he is doing here. We must lock him up. For our own safety.”
Now Pepper knew who at least one of the enemy was. Pepper focused on the sweat frozen to John’s forehead. John was not doing well.
Oaxyctl hovered by him like a buzzard. John nodded, almost absentmindedly, considering Oaxyctl’s words. “Yes, yes, I think that is best for right now.” He looked at Pepper, met his eyes. “Just a precaution.”
Again, Pepper saw a glint of the familiar John: calm, calculating, scheming. This was the easiest way to calm the crew. Have some faith in him, John’s eyes seemed to say. Even without his memories, John knew what he was doing. Pepper didn’t move as more men came down the planks and surrounded him. Several stayed far back, guns pointed at him. He could have killed them all. Instead he let them lead him back on board.
The sail locker they had locked him in the first time still had no doors, so they chained him between two sturdy posts.
Just temporary, he thought. John is taking the best gamble. And he couldn’t leave John here alone. John was Pepper’s only way into the
Ma Wi Jung.
Don’t hold it against him.
Arms draped at his side, rattling chain, he sat crosslegged, ears perked, flicking as sounds reached him from the gloom of belowdecks.
 
After a few hours, movement started up again. People thudded around on the decks. The boilers in the engine room hissed steam, and men shouted instructions back and forth, reading off dials.
The crunch of gears being engaged shuddered through the hull. Pepper shifted as the steamship lurched forward, almost stalling as even more screaming came from between the bulkheads, the three engineers demanding more fuel be fired.
Not far from the hull Pepper listened as the treads thumped and creaked past.
La Revanche
moved forward. Men shouted as they clambered up from the slow-moving treads back onto the ship.
There was more conversation. Ahead of him on the other side of a bulkhead, in the hammocks where the crew slept, Pepper listened to someone breathing heavily. Pepper focused
on the sounds, tuning his hearing up to unnatural levels.
Someone spoke.
“Can we trust him?” The voice sounded nervous, but a fake nervous.
The heavy breathing stopped. Someone dropped a spoon to the floor and fumbled about for it. “He the captain, he know what he doing.”
“He know where we even going?” The second person’s voice took on a tone of incredulity.
“Someone say he have map.” Defensive.
“You see it?”
“Uh-uh” The hammock creaked as someone got off it. “What you saying?”
“That we can’t self trust that.”
“Look, we can’t turn back. The mongoose-men ain’t go stand for that. This dangerous. But think back on what we done escape. Azteca.”
A long pause. Pepper tuned out the sound of treads to focus on the almost whisper that came next.
“What if I say some of the mongoose-men nervous as well? They think a run to Cowfoot Island would save all of we.”
The heavy breathing came back, along with footsteps that moved away. There was no answer, just the faint static of whispers that had moved out of his hearing range.
Mutiny, Pepper thought.

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