The Apocalypse Ocean (19 page)

Tiago remained on top of the
Saguenay
’s superstructure, looking at the ice ships surrounding them. The inflated airship bags had all grown over the last few hours, bobbing and weaving in the air overhead, tethered down to the planked decks of the ungainly fleet that Thinkerer had assembled.

Workers shot cables over to the
Saguenay
and swarmed aboard via dinghies, with some winching themselves across on the cables. They began bolting the airship bags to the spaceship, starting at the rear latticework.

In the distance, a steady booming started.

Tiago frowned and ducked under extrusions in the hull until he stood facing out to sea. It was mid-day, the sun bright overhead. But the horizon flashed and fluoresced. The clouds in the distance glowed amber, and red. War had broken out over the horizon.

The workers were getting closer. They were moving damn quickly. Only two of the airship bags hung overhead, but they’d gotten cables attached to the spaceship all over the place. Tiago hurried to duck off into the airlock before he was noticed up on top.

He navigated his way through the still dimly lit corridors, moving slowly as his eyes adjusted. His stomach grumbled. He was going to have to scrounge for some food.

The ship shuddered a bit as he thought that, surely the men who’d been on board had eaten. They’d have to. The ones who’d survived the fight had jettisoned themselves out from the ship by pods and shuttles. It hadn’t always been a ghost ship like this. But they would have eaten. And had sleeping bunks.

He needed to find a galley. Or raid the sleeping quarters.

He turned a corner and ran right into Nashara.

She grabbed his shoulder. “I thought I heard footsteps down here. Thinkerer and Pepper have left with Kay already, and I don’t care where you choose to sulk. So quit wandering around in the dark. This ship isn’t built for combat, and you’ll be safer in the cockpit.”

“I’m not leaving the ship!” Tiago shouted over all that, then felt embarrassed as her words sunk in.

“I know. It’s too late for you to leave, Thinkerer’s crew are coming inside for safety. We’re already starting to lift off,” Nashara said. “So I want you in the cockpit.”

“What?” Tiago shook his head. “I was just up there. Only a couple of the bags floated over us.”

“All the cables you would have seen led back to everything else. The bigger bags were tied down to the ice ships still. You saw the fighting over the horizon?”

Tiago nodded.

“Well, they’re coming for the harbor. The League is making a push to take the island. We figure they’ll want to use it as a base to make sure the Xenowealth doesn’t make any moves toward Trumball as they try to get the
Saguenay
back. They encountered Xenowealth ships as they hooked around and now, even though they’re all in the dead zone, anything they can get working they’re using to fight with.”

“So why are we taking off?”

“The League will be here soon, the ice flotilla will move to engage, but they probably won’t hold them. It’s best we get in the air. So I gave the order.”

Inside the cockpit, the screens that Thinkerer had fixed showed that they were airborne. Floating over the ice fleet. They could see over the tops of buildings in the harbor near the sea wall. Matty Mallete was in the cockpit with them, checking over data and acting as Nashara’s second in command.

For the first time in his life, Tiago looked out over what had been his entire world.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “I can help pilot. I know most of the island.”

“I don’t know yet,” Nashara said. “Kay hasn’t been able to send us a message.”

“She won’t come through,” Tiago said. He had a bad feeling about it all. “You can’t build a plan around her. Or even with her. She’ll try to rip it up to make it her own.”

They were, he decided, probably bait for the Doaq.

Nashara snorted. “Of course she’s up to something. That’s her nature. She’s said as much.”

Tiago stared at her.

“Look,” Nashara continued. “At some point, you will have to trust someone. And you will have to make agreements with shaky allies. Even ones that will keep trying to stab you in the back. At some point in your life, you’re going to have to be prepared to get fucked over while you’re trying to achieve a goal of your own. And you’re also going to have to let it go.”

“Let it go?” Was she insane?

“What’s more important, the goal, or who hurts you getting there? Don’t take your eyes off the finish line, Tiago. There are lots of diversions along the way.”

“What’s my finish line, Nashara?” he asked her. “Survival?”

She looked coolly at him, as if somehow disappointed. “If it’s only survival, Tiago, then you’re living a very limited life. You’d better find one, and quick, if you want to make it through the universe sane.”

Tiago opened his mouth, thinking about the people he’d left behind on that roof on the island. People who didn’t deserve having the might of the Xenowealth and the League drop on them for no reason.

“Sir!” One of Thinkerer’s ice-ship crewmen entered the cockpit. “One of the last crew in said the klaxons are going off around the city. Everyone’s off the top of the ship.”

Nashara and Tiago looked at the screens.

Mist roiled down from the top of the mountain toward the harbor.

“Is that going to burn through the airship bags?” Tiago asked, his voice cracking slightly.

“No, it’s teflon, and the gas inside is helium,” the crew man said. “But it’s gonna be hell outside.”

Nashara looked out at the city. “We don’t have shielded radios, Pepper was going to be using a laser to communicate us coordinates. Get out on deck, increase our lift, we need to get just above the rooftops so we circle around downtown and be in line of sight. Light up every emergency blinker you can find and glue it to the wires so they won’t miss us down there.”

“Gonna be a hell of a target floating around that close to ground,” Matty said.

“If I were you,” Nashara said to the crewman that had just come in, “I would get out there before that cloud of napalm mist hits us, don’t you think?”

The man bit his lip, swore, and then ran out.

Nashara watched him go, then glanced at Tiago. “I don’t suppose you know, or have heard Kay mention, how high the Doaq might be able to jump?”

He had no idea.

The sound of a distant, steady thunder reached the two figures unsteadily scrambling over loose shale. Kay ignored it and pulled out the map the Runner had given her back in town. It was hard to squint in the jellied rain through the faceplate, but the kevlar firesuit she wore kept her safe.

She hunched over the map, keeping it away from the flammable splotches.

For almost two months she’d spent an alarming amount of money building a network of passive observers watching the Doaq. They each submitted their results via a stiff punch card to morning newspaper boys, who passed them along to a dead drop.

From there the raw data was delivered in anonymous hand-built statues of mermaids via a fisherman who took them to someone willing to act as an agent for data analysis in one of the floating cities.

That man used non-dead-zone machines to analyze the data on the punch cards and thus reveal the Doaq’s movements.

Of course, he had explained to Kay, the men who analyzed the data thought it was for a game of some kind. She didn’t understand the details, but she was reassured that no one would know what was being studied. Her data was safe.

The agent, who had moved from Placa del Fuego just six months previously, understood Kay’s proposal; she knew where his old mother lived, and provided an aide to help her shop and fix up the house. A very large Ox-man who would follow any order Kay gave.

Every week an updated printout of a map would arrive. It was shaded. Wherever the Doaq had been was darker. Trajectories and times became lines.

A complex map emerged, and over that, extrapolative lines stretched from the city map back out into the mountains. Small percentage points sat in various points, indicating machines’ best guesses as to where the Doaq originated.

Every week the data filled in the lines further. The map’s best guess as to where the Doaq came from got firmer and firmer: a valley cut into the east side of the mountain. Eighty percent, claimed a small number. Extrapolated lines converged on the point, like lines of metal shavings near a magnet.

Over the crest of the hill and they would be close. After that, the lines faded away. Somewhere in the valley on the other side, they would probably find the Doaq.

The roll of thunder continued. It took a moment to penetrate Kay’s concentration. When she looked up, Thinkerer stood near a large boulder, ear tilted in a pose of rapt thoughtfulness. He held a kevlar umbrella up, as if he were taking a stroll on a sunny day. When rain hit him he didn’t flinch as it sizzled on his skin.

“What is it?” Kay shouted.

“Someone’s into the harbor.” Thinkerer was just barely audible through her protective gear. “Those are the ice ships’ forward batteries.”

“Who’s attacking?” she asked.

Thinkerer shrugged.

Pepper leaned over the top of the boulder Thinkerer stood beside, startling Kay. His trench coat seemed to ward off the rain, and he had on a wide-brimmed hat as well. She hadn’t known where he was, he kept roving on up ahead, scouting the best path up through the thick, horribly thorny brush and slippery rock. It was a miserable fucking hike, Kay thought. Searing rain, horrible landscape. “League ships. They also scrambled anything they could from Trumball. How long can your ships hold them off?”

Again, Thinkerer shrugged. Now that she’d been around Thinkerer long enough, Kay noticed something. The shrug was the same exact motion. To the micro movement. And every expression he used was repeated.

Artificial.

“The problem,” Thinkerer said, “is the crew. They are paid mercenaries, not volunteers who believe their land, or nation, is at risk of falling to an enemy. It is hard to predict how long they will retain their vigor. The ships themselves are designed to take a beating, mainly. They need to be invaded and captured, not sunk.”

Pepper nodded. “There will probably be landing parties on the other side of the mountain, the straightest route to Trumball, but the coast is rocky there. We won’t worry about them. I saw some activity in some of the docks; I’d bet League agents and some League special teams made it onto shore – scouting the situation and looking to secure points of interest quietly.”

“Any points of interest we need to worry about?” Kay asked him.

“I doubt they’re coming here – for now,” he said. “But once they get around Thinkerer’s armed icebergs, it’ll get harder to wander around. Although that could work to our benefit.”

“How is that?” Thinkerer adopted his curiosity face.

“I imagine the Doaq will be very interested in them. We can’t convince the League soldiers down there to help us, they’re still thinking we’re Xenowealth and up to something no good, so they’re mostly looking to get
Saguenay
back. And they’re thinking that taking over the island would be a strategic bonus. But if the Doaq starts eating them en masse, I have to imagine that commanders on the ground will react and we might be able to make some common cause.”

“That is interesting.” Thinkerer paused a moment. “I have the capacity to send very small, distinct commands to the ice fleet via a communications device I built for dead zone combat situations. Attack, flee, focus on a compass point, pick me up at these coordinates, and surrender?”

“The Doaq doesn’t come out during the mid-morning,” Kay said, looking up at the hot sun that added to the misery of the long climb.

“That’ll probably change today,” Pepper said.

Kay took a long drink of cool water from a canteen, screwed the lid back on, and then rolled the map back up. She’d just been checking it to reassure herself. Pepper had glanced at it and then, presumably, committed it to memory. He had led them rapidly to the right spot. “Well, are you ready? Anything up ahead?”

“I don’t see the Doaq, but it is interesting over there,” he said.

“Interesting?” Kay asked.

“You’ll see.”

#

At the crest, Kay looked over the rocky valley. Sickly gray-green tree trunks filled the valley’s slope. They looked like coconut trees without palm leaves, she thought, but fatter and shinier.

Phallic was the word that jumped into her head.

Every other “tree” bulged at the base, and as she watched, the pressure bulge moved through the trunk up through the trunk until it burst through a membrane at the top. A large, milky bubble rose into the air. It travelled several hundred feet over the valley then burst into familiar droplets of spitting mist.

“Fire Valley,” Kay said. “No one comes here.”

Pepper moved to the nearest gray-green tree and looked down at the muscled roots. “They get burned if they try to cut them down.”

“The trees explode if you try to cut them down,” Kay said. “And few, if any, come back.”

“So you tolerate getting napalmed every couple months or so, to live here,” he said.

“Back then the only place the dead zone hung over was this area. They tried bombing it, but it was hard and they regrew. They only grow in the valley, so everyone leaves the place alone. We’ve lost enough lives trying to tame the trees. They were cut down everywhere else.”

They watched the fire trees vomit their destructive belches into the air for a while, then Thinkerer shook his umbrella and walked between the nearest trees. They towered overhead, some a couple hundred feet tall.

Threading through them, Kay couldn’t help jumping every time one of them belched its toxic load. Now deep into the fire forest, they couldn’t hear the distant battle, if it was even still continuing, over the sound of the trees vomiting their fiery spoor into the air via their own biological artillery barrage.

At least she was walking downhill now, she thought.

The valley’s slopes met on a dried-out streambed. Pepper had run forward again and then come back. He held his finger up to his lips and pointed down the streambed. He leaned over and picked up a rock.

He unzipped the duffel back slung over his left shoulder, revealing the dull matte of metal. Weapons. And that was all beyond the armament strapped to his thighs, inside of his trench coat, on his back, and anywhere it seemed he could find a place.

The three of them snuck their way along the streambed until Pepper held up a hand.

Kay couldn’t see what they were sneaking up on. There was no hole into the ground for the Doaq to slip off down. There was no secret base here in the heart of fire valley. Just the remains of what looked like a medium-sized pond.

Although, she noticed, no fire trees grew anywhere near it, which was a bit odd.

Pepper threw the rock in his hand gently into the air in a long arc at the bare dust bed of the old pond.

Instead of hitting the dusty dirt, it disappeared.

Kay stared at the dirt.

It was fake. An image. Like those moving pictures hitting the blank glass at the Holly Oak Theatre.

Kay realized that this was where the invasion would come through. Alien hordes, pouring out to wreak havoc on her world.

A fat yellow orb rose out of the dirt, humming and spitting its way into the air, then yanking itself through the air at them.

“Drone.” Thinkerer collapsed his umbrella and threw it in the air between. It popped open and wobbled back down toward the ground.

The drone swung to investigate and Pepper whipped a flat disc through the air at it. They met halfway. The disc exploded a foot away and jets of hot fire ripped through the drone. 

As debris rained down Thinkerer grabbed Kay and shielded her.

Pepper grabbed them both. “Defenses. Go.”

Insect-like machines were crawling out of the rock around the pond. More orbs rolled out from underground and shook the rock under Kay’s feet as engines flared and they took to the air.

“I’ll engage,” Thinkerer said. “You call Nashara in.”

Pepper let go of Thinkerer and picked Kay up under an arm, just like he had the duffel bag tucked under his other. For a second she fought to stand up again, then stopped. “It’ll be quicker,” he said.

And they were off into the bloated trees.

Three large explosions forced Pepper to his knees, stumbling, but he picked back up, dragging her along up the slope and zigzagging through trees.

Something whined along behind them. Pepper swore.

“What is it?”

“Another drone.” Pepper didn’t drop her or the duffel, just kept pumping uphill.

Kay strained to look behind, but didn’t see it. A metal fragment flashed through the corner of her left eye and zoomed ahead, obscured at first by the hood and visor that kept her safe.

Pepper shoved her against a tree, reaching into his jacket and pulled out a shotgun as he stepped away from her.

A beam of energy spat and sizzled as it stabbed at him. The rock bubbled in his footsteps as he calmly stood in place to aim, then shoot the drone. As it dodged he threw another disc.

The drone exploded.

“Come on!” he yelled.

They ran through the debris, Kay swearing and hopping around to avoid sharp metal fragments on the ground. They crawled up to the valley’s crest on their hands and knees.

Pepper pulled out a bright orange gun, loaded a flare, and shot it into the air. He reloaded and fired again, and then a third time, and again and again until seven flares hung high over the valley, sharp and bright over the worst of the exploding bubbles of flammable rain.

“The
Saguenay
should spot that,” Pepper said.

Kay watched one of the lower flares slowly drift into the mist. The air around it flared and caught fire, spreading in a large ball of gas and fire until it petered out.

A tap on the shoulder turned her around. “Wha—”

She froze. Coming up the hill, slow and deliberate, a shiny, furred wolfish creature adjusted its course to speed up at them as it sniffed their trail. It stopped and looked up, blue eyes bright in the fire mist. It smiled, but there was no tongue.

The jaw dropped lower, ringed with razor-sharp teeth, too large.

And then larger still as it dropped low to the ground.

There was nothing deep in its maw. Just blackness.

“Run,” said Pepper, dropping to a knee and reaching into his bag. He pulled out a shoulder-launched rocket and set it comfortably on his shoulder and sighted. “Now.”

He fired. The projectile cracked and hissed its way downhill. The wolf ran toward it, slowed, then leapt up, jaw wide, and swallowed the RPG round whole.

And then kept coming.

Kay ran.