Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘Its blood is rancid,’ said the guard, grabbing hold of a stiff leg. ‘The Mass must feed.’

‘Indeed we will, but not on this debased flesh,’ hissed Cloake. ‘How many do you need? Animals overrun this filthy city. Breeding in their slums, lying hop-addled in the gutters outside their taverns. You can’t cross the street without tripping over sustenance.’

Sadly helped the guards drag the corpse away, while in front of Corporal Cloake, the deposed head of the State Protection Board was vibrating and shuddering, adding its mad ramblings to the insane sing-song whine from the dirty cattle clustering at the rear of the pen.

‘Treasonists, treasonists, everywhere. Vampires, vampires, on the stairs.’

‘So, your mind’s finally become as broken as your body, you primitive bucket of bolts?’ Cloake drew out his pistol. He was eager to pay back this half-witted calculating device for the ignominy of far too many years having to pretend to take orders from a mere nanomechnical, of having to subjugate the superior intellect of the Mass to this ridiculous half-sentient machine-born monstrosity. ‘Don’t you have any orders for me? Speak, tell me how you are the head of the board and I must rush to do your bidding… order me to let you live!’

Dragging Dick Tull’s corpse out of the cell, the sea-bishop wearing Barnabas Sadly’s form turned and took in the vista of the Algo Monoshaft’s violently shuddering body, Corporal Cloake standing in front of it and about to pump a bullet though its useless, shaking skull.

‘Don’t!’ shouted Sadly. ‘That’s-’

Cloake ignored his brethren. ‘We can’t take an imprint of this thing’s memories. I want to see what it looks like in pieces.’

‘-how their race use their body as a-’

With stacks sealed for hours, its boiler-heart circulating and building pressure, the pressure inside Algo Monoshaft’s frame became too much for its ageing hull-plates to hold.

‘-suicide bomb!’ The steamman transformed into a grenade, shrapnel and fire scything out, instantly killing all the cattle and cutting Corporal Cloake in two, both halves of his body collapsing across the filthy pen floor. Cloake’s mesmeric field collapsed along with the shredding of his crystal. The sea-bishop’s distended head had enough life left to watch the other guard caught in the blast. Writhing across the floor, the sea-bishop’s field flickered on and off as he lost control — switching between his human and natural form — then, judging its host life lost, the evidence removal function of the crystal activated and the guard flared into ashes. Cloake reached for his own crystal, but it had been blown to pieces, his fingers only coming away with splinters. He wasn’t going to experience the sudden clean death of the crystal’s mercy.

Sadly and the remaining guard were peering around the doorway at the silent shrapnel-embedded walls of the pen, peering horrified through the smoke at the ruins of their brethren’s body.

Corporal Cloake moaned. The last thought that flickered across his dying mind was how damned hungry he was.

Crowds snaked up on the slopes of the volcano, the hangar doors of the island’s destroyed airship squadron held open while thousands of Nuyokians abandoned their city, ordinary citizens deserting their porcelain towers and hexagonal streets for the safety of the Court of the Air’s underground chambers. Daunt considered it something of an irony they would be packing in around the house-sized transaction-engines of the Court, the steam-driven thinking machines maintaining the model of Jackelian society and the supposedly safe course the Court was charting for it. There was nothing safe on the Isla Furia anymore. The city wall overlooking the lake was holding, but only just. Mainly thanks to the fact that the parapet on the city’s jungle side had been breached in so many places that it now made sense for the gill-neck invasion force to concentrate their forces on the breaks to the north-east. Leaking invaders into Nuyok, storming the rubble of fallen battlements. It wouldn’t take long before the Advocacy commanders realized that only token militia volunteers manned the city towers in front of them. Daunt was introducing a new thing to the city today — a terrible lesson for any pacifist to pass on. Guerrilla warfare. Hit and run. It was the only way to slow down such a vastly superior force. Give the Advocacy the impression that every hexagonal tower they faced was a fortress needing to be reduced to rubble, every savage inch bled for, while small mobile companies charged across the streets, harrying the gill-neck invaders. Hope what was left of their defences held until the populace was evacuated.

It was a risky plan, but the only one Daunt had. Every minute he slowed their advance was another minute for citizens to seek out the safety of the Court’s deep vaults. Poor devils. The Nuyokians were like refugees everywhere, all the worse for being dispossessed inside their own city, the city monitors shouting at the crowds to toss aside any possessions slowing the lines down. Wrestling carts of goods away from some and pushing them off to the side of the lawns. They took it in better humour than a similar mob of Jackelians would have — no doubt a side effect of their communal society and particular ideas about ownership.

Morris counted explosions flowering around the collapsing defences on the far side of Nuyok, then looked at the mob herding up the slopes. ‘I don’t like it. That place up there might be laid out like a fortress, but the Court was never built to house so many civilians. The gill-necks will be able to wait us out for as long as it takes for us to starve. Once the hares are inside the warren, there’s no way out that won’t be weasels all the way.’

‘I’ll settle for as long as it takes,’ said Daunt. ‘Time is what we need.’

‘Time for what?’ asked Morris, wiping the sweat off his brow. He had pushed his gas mask back up his helm. ‘You don’t really think Dick Tull and Sadly are returning to the island with a flight of Royal Aerostatical Navy squadrons in tow, do you? And I don’t particularly rate your girl and u-boat skipper’s chance of rousing the nomads of the sea up against the gill-necks, either.’

‘I fear we must have faith, Mister Morris.’

‘When a Circlist parson starts talking of having that, I know we’re in bloody trouble.’ He spat onto the ground. ‘Well, at least the poor gits will be better shielded in the gas mine’s tunnels than inside the city. Porcelain walls might keep you cool from the heat, but they’re bloody shrapnel coffins in a fight, see.’ His last few words were mangled by the detonations of the two giant cannons, their artillery relocated in front of the cable car station and landing shells within the city boundary. It was a hard thing to do, to order gunners to land shells on their own people. But the forces along the jungle-flanked wall had become so intermingled that the impact of the barrage was killing as many Advocacy soldiers as locals. Out beyond the thermal barrier surrounding the island, the invasion fleet was now bridging the killing zone unopposed. More soldiers to pour across the island, more predators to prowl the set Daunt was trapping the citizens inside.

Eventually the sea-bishops hidden among the invaders would track down and eliminate the faked signals emulating King Jude’s sceptre and then there would be only one hiding place left. The volcano. They would throw the entire gill-neck military machine against the slopes, with not a care for the natives sheltering inside. It all came down to time, if only he could buy enough time. Buy it with bodies. What a bitter currency to fund my strategy. A line of detonations stitched their way across the cable car concourse, the distant whoop of gill-neck mortars falling across their position.