Anamneschaton

chapter forty-six

Quince found his shoes, shoved them on, and started to run.

In the hall, a guard was just swinging his rifle onto his shoulder, getting ready to head out as well. A silent alarm must have been sent out, but the man still wasn’t prepared for the sight of Quince hurtling down the gallery, shirt untucked and eyes wide with worry. When he got close, the guard made a halfhearted attempt to grab him, but Quince did a quick dance, side to side, and then swung himself abrupty over the rail.

Luckily, a thickly padded carpet caught most of him, and though one shoe flew off, causing him to stumble, he turned it into a doorward roll. On the way out, he passed another guard, who he slapped on the back of the neck with the wayward shoe, dashing to the street while the poor man recoiled.

Right, down the Saebraut, and then right again onto the Snorrabraut, until he reached the, uh, the Hverf … the other street, the one that cut through the warehouses, follow that for, well, long enough to find Claudia.

His gait was uneven, worrisomely slow, and he was definitely being chased by one of the guards. Quince started running zigzag for a moment, just in case he was being shot at, until he could dash through a gap in the median, where he could …

“Ow, fuck!” Quince yelled, as he slammed into a knee-high bench, catapulting into a sickly tree and nearly bending it horizontal.

“Just … please … stop!” shouted the guard, from nearby.

Quince rolled over and fingered the tear in his pants; blood was on his fingers when he removed it. He levered himself onto the bench, wincing as his shoulder and stomach experienced the uneven pain of still existing after a fall like that, and then moved to the wall of the median, trying to stand as straight as possible.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” the guard continued, rounding the corner. The fellow was almost entirely winded.

“Good,” Quince replied, and swung his arm straight into the man’s throat.

The resulting tussle was not one of Quince’s proudest moments, but it served. The guard took a fist to the chin, having hunched as Quince swung, and then a heavy stomp to the instep, which set him back a bit; Quince’s whole sleeve got torn off, and he responded with a few seconds of trying to tear the rifle off the man.

The strap of the rifle was a lot tougher than it looked, and it wasn’t until he got two fingers into the guy’s eye and a knee into his chest that he could tear the heavy weapon away. Then he was running again, this time with both his shoes gone, slipping on the dewy finished-granite walkway, but still making a damn sight better time than before.

Before he reached the Hverfis … that one street, he started taking side alleys, dodging between apartment blocks shoulder-to-shoulder, seven or eight stories tall, maintaining the deadly quiet of a shitty part of town. Nobody much spent time out at this hour in Reykjavik, and the few people he saw he pointed his new rifle at. They didn’t protest, just turned silently around and ambled off, displaying a truly nordic regard for the threat of death.

When somebody tapped him on the shoulder, his body nearly discombobulated entirely, and the resultant swing of the rifle’s butt he managed was inept and wildly fast.

Isabelle dodged easily, though. “Quince, every alarm that Syntactic owns on this island is going off! What is happening?”

The look he gave her must have looked insane. “Isabelle? How did you get here?”

“Quince, what did you do? What action did you take?” She grabbed him by his elbows, and he realized he was gaping. “Where is Claudia?”

“Uh … Okay. Alright. Claudia is this way, in the warehouse! I’m heading to help her now. Somebody has to, right? Let’s move, let’s run, let’s go!”

“Why is she in trouble?” Isabelle asked as they trotted forward. Quince wished he could go faster, but he’d picked up a stitch in his side.

“Some of Syntactic’s guards are moving towards her. They probably have her now, you know?” He picked up the pace a little, and suffered for it. “She grabbed, uh, Poeiater Lore, and they were going to ask him …”

Isabelle stopped dead. “They took Blackhat Lore? Just grabbed him and started asking him questions, just thought they’d get him to spill the beans, just without a care in the world? Just … wow. God dammit.” She looked truly struck.

“Is that …”

“That’s fucking bad, Quince. The Blackhat’s not some fucking stooge, he’s not replaceable, and … this is a direct act against Syntactic. He’ll notice. I shouldn’t’ve …” She shook her head, started jogging again. 

Quince had a dead space in his stomach. Isabelle being shocked was not something he’d thought he’d see. Isabelle here, at this moment, he hadn’t expected that either. She was never around for clear skies, it seemed, but when things became grim … he ran forward to catch up, the rifle’s stock slamming painfully into his shoulder blades. “We … Claudia didn’t know, right? She thought they could use replaceable faces to interrogate him, people they could sneak out into the wilderness or something.”

They were only a few hundred feet away from the warehouse when Isabelle slowed down. From what he remembered, this was a pretty perfect distance to stay out of security images, but it was nowhere close enough to help Claudia.

Another good reason for stopping was the hundreds of guards now clustered around it. 

Quince did his best to look nondescript, and ambled backwards into a sheltered doorway. Isabelle was already in there, somehow, pulled into a deeper shadow.

“How do we get in?” he asked, while tring to look around the edge. There had to be upwards of two hundred men and women in Syntactic’s uniform, and that was on this side of the building alone.

Isabelle didn’t answer immediately, and when he looked back to her, she was sitting balanced on her toes, her fingers to her forehead. Every so often she shook her head, muttered something, and then went back to a gargoyle-like state of perfect stillness.

“They need us in there, Isabelle. We have to go …”

Before he could finish, there was movement in the guards clustered around the warehouse, a miniature diaspora as they all jogged at least thirty feet from the building, and then spread out, dashing into nearby streets. A few passed them, but paid no mind to the dark doorway. 

“Where are they going?”

One of the men leaving had a black hat, rushing away from them, to the west. “Nowhere in particular, from the looks of …”

Quince was cut off by a shockingly loud noise that managed to knock him straight off his feet. Behind him, the glass panes torqued and shattered; by the time he rolled himself upright, somebody was shoving the door open, forcing Isabelle to move. The man’s mouth was moving, but Quince couldn’t hear it.

Up and down the street, the same scene; men and women rushing to doors, glass littering the road. Aimless screaming, disturbed citizens, a few hardy winter dogs voicing their displeasure. 

He rolled some more, making it to his feet, and looked to the warehouse.

There, the windows hadn’t merely shattered; whole sheets of metal roofing had been thrown across the way, and flames billowed from uneven holes in the thick stone walls. Quince staggered forward, then started running, before he even had a chance to think about it, until Isabelle grabbed him by the arm and swung him around.

“Quince! What are the key points?”

It took a few moments before that sentence even made it through his head. While he waited, he just repeated, “What?” over and over. 

“Syntactic is liquidating this whole operation! He knows we’re in, and he’s dropping it all! Where is he headed next?”

“Uh, I don’t … Claudia? We should go in and help her, we need to go help! She could be in there!”

Isabelle left fingerprints on his face; he was just happy she didn’t wear rings.

“The warehouse, that was one,” Quince said, trying to gather himself. “Uh, the lines, the data and power lines across the bay … Radsinshusid, that’s one focus. The living quarters, and the moderation hall over them, and the, uh, the power station to the south, the Boreas … Lore was headed to the Boreas. I know that.”

“Boreas it is, then.”

She stood, carefully wiped the edge of her knife … one of the knives that she was suddenly carrying, wiped it on her pants, and then started to jog west. 

chapter forty-five

Elaine now felt comfortable in stereotyping: Americans could not be trusted.

At about three in the morning, they’d found the American fishers deep in the weapons hold, trying to find gunpowder that wasn’t waterlogged. The mayor of the town, Jordan, had disavowed all knowledge of what they were up to, and did a pretty credible impression of a confused person.

Elaine and the Duke had shared a look, she in her nightclothes, he bootless and tired, both knee deep in cold water. There was a lot in that look, a lot that Elaine assumed and a lot that she felt she didn’t even have to. The Duke had spent a week just prior with some sort of fever, his eyes dilating wildly; she’d discovered the American penchant for extremely sugary alcohol, her evenings a wasteland of doughy headaches and her mornings a puking travesty.

For an anthropologist, some sort of doddering old historian, a reeking alchemist, America might have held some interest. Their manners, showcased by the mayoral Jordan, would be of much interest to a sociologist or an ettiquettiste. Their cities, crumbling, whitewashed, collapsed and re-whitewashed, might engender epiphanies in architects and students of civil engineering, while their wildlife and diseases, the neglect of European influence in paths of inherited traits, might bring a weak biologist to tears. 

Their history would probably be something else entirely, a revelation that would even excite herself; why their civilization was falling apart, the ceaseless flow of free grain from the interior, the depredations of their electric kinesturges, but a line had to be drawn.

Her tongue was fucking purple, after the Americans’ most recent open bar, and now these podgy old fishwives were poking around near Elaine’s nuclear weapon.

The look had said it clearly enough. 

She’d had them all those barbarians thrown overboard, except the mayor, whom she’d chained to a piston. There was a brig on the Intercessor, but she’d be damned if she was going to waste the time to take him over there.

After a good night of sleep, Elaine had been woken by a few of the sailors, headed up by a large longshoreman named Wax. They wanted to talk about what to do next. Apparently the lack of safe harbor was making them skittish; it should, given that the weapons hold was now filled with two solid feet of water. 

“We send the Intercessor back, the way I figure it. Pick up some mechanically minded fellows in Morocco, tie them up, bring ‘em back. Only a short time, and we’d have both ships back to the mainland, safe and sound.”

“Except that Prelate Morocco recognizes English maritime law. We’d be in gaol before we could say otherwise,” said Sven, ever the death of a good time.

Elaine rubbed sleep from her eyes while Wax replied.

“So then we go further south. Nigerian Pan-empire, maybe. They’ve got to have metallurgists, right?”

“And worse case scenario,” Barlow added, “We trade the long guns, the whole Intercessor, for an old cargo hulk, something steam driven.”

By the time Elaine made it to the porthole, the sangria had made the back of her throat, and it stung as she released it into the ocean fair. Bile, probably. 

When she turned around, the sailors were looking at her, in a worried way. Wax asked, “Countess, are you … would you like some water?”

“Whisky, if you have it. I’ve seen enough of water for a lifetime.”

“You look pale, though.”

“Ah, Wax. We’re built differently. You need red meat, and heavy corn bread, and pure water to fit it all down your throat.” She drank some proffered water; obviously, some hydration wasn’t going to be the end of her. “You plan the same way you eat, too. Not stupidly, but … I can do better.”

“So, not Nigeria, then?”

“No. Follow me, and find a map. And the Duke. And a wrench.”

Down in the hold, Elaine was glad for her boots, the only thing between her and purple toes. The Godqueen was rocking back and forth, a bit of wind tousling the waves; down here, it felt like trying to stand on a rocking chair, and water hopped through bulkheads. This ship wasn’t going to last long.

Somebody had found a large table, and they’d put the map on it. It showed as much of the American coastline as they could fit, from Newfoundland down to the Floridian Peninsula, and back even to western edge of the Mexican Gulf; on the right side, the Empire of Mali, the Iberian Peninsula. In the middle, the Atlantic Ocean, as impassable as a mountain range for a ship in this condition.

The Mayor of New Temperanceville, America, Jordan Iveduar, was sitting on a barrel. Somebody had taken his boots, and he’d drawn his wet socks up beside himself, probably hoping to avoid grisly loss of extremities from the cold. 

He looked miserable, but when Elaine caught sight of his eyes, lucid enough. His pathetic demeanor could be a ruse. Probably was a ruse. Americans and their ruses. Disgusting.

“Thanks for coming down,” Elaine said, in a general way. To the onlookers, sailors etc., it was polite. To the mayor, it hopefully stung a bit. “As you know, we’re floating without much of a plan. We’re mutineers, mostly, and America is a shithole. The only boat we have large enough to cross the ocean isn’t seaworthy. We’ve got food for now …”

“Actually, not especially,” pitched in Henry. “A week and a half.”

“Well, that’s, uh, that fits in well with what I’m saying.” She kicked the water a bit. “We’re sinking, in ways both physical and metaphorical.”

She paused, for effect; the polyglots translated for the rest, and Jordan looked miserable.

“We need a plan. Not just that, but we need everybody to be in on it; I’m sick of being sent off, like a doll packed in straw, and I imagine the rest of you feel the same. This expedition stank from the moment we set sail.”

“How so?” shouted somebody from the back. “I had a pretty good feeling about.”

“There’s a bomb in the hold, you know,” Elaine replied. “Big enough to wipe out the whole fleet.”

“Hmm,” the woman in back managed to shout. “Why haven’t we got rid of it?”

“That brings me to my next point, thank you. These Americans, they’ve got a whole history we don’t know about. A thousand years of decline, interaction with our colonists, the whole Vespucci incident … no, I’m not going to explain that one, ask the Duke later. They don’t necessarily hate us, but they do fear us.”

“Seems a bit tangential, really. What do you mean?”

“So, we take advantage of that. The Duke and I spoke about this, so, uh, I think it’s a good plan. To get back to England, to live without being hanged by a court martial, we need three things.”

The Duke nodded, thank god. She hadn’t said a word to him about this, not a syllable, but he seemed to recognize the fine art of flying by the seat of one’s pants, and didn’t feel the need to stand in her way just yet.

“Firstly, we need somewhere to go. The Western coasts of Europe and Africa are a death sentence, and staying around here … I don’t even want to think about it. Secondly, we need a boat or two to take us there; I’m sure you sailors understand the finer points of oceans, and agree with me there.” 

That got some nods, mostly from Lily and Lucas, who were watching raptly.

“Finally, we need something to balance out our crimes. Something nice, a gift to King England, or … something else. I think we have all of those things.”

“We actually have none of those things,” Wax replied. He’d been counting them out on his fingers; luckily, he had more than three on his hand.

“What if we bought land, on this continent, from the natives?” Sven pitched in. “We could settle here.”

“Or just go back to Renshaw, ask his men to fix the ship. We could trade the nobles for repairs, or something.”

“And can we talk about the bomb more? How can such a thing even exist?”

Before the hold could be swallowed by shouts, Elaine swung the wrench into a metal stanchion, the ringing report slicing through the clamor.

“I don’t care about why that bomb exists, or how. I don’t care about this stupid continent, or anybody that lives on it. I especially don’t care about Renshaw. I want to go home, and I know you do too.” Elaine tapped her hand with the wrench a few times, then swung around to the bound Jordan. “The Lord Mayor here, he said something about owning a boat like ours.”

The man managed a nod and a shiver.

“Untie him. He’s going to show us where they own other boats like that, where they have shipyards that can work metal. Somewhere that they’ve heard of steam.”

Jordan coughed and looked up weakly, but Elaine caught the glint of calculation in his eyes. “They will … never agree to help you. Europeans … never, in our history, has a meeting across the ocean brought anything but death. You will be turned back at the harbors.”

“I’m not going to ask them, Lord Mayor. They’ll fix the Godqueen, or they’ll taste lead.”

The man had the temerity to look shocked at that. “You’d declare war, attack the unified …”

“No,” Elaine interrupted. “Nothing so symbolic. I don’t care for America, or for your Americans. We’re leaving the moment our ship is fixed, and how many holes we leave in buildings, how many sunk ships, is entirely up to you. You’ll take word ahead, as soon as you explain to me exactly where I can find a shipyard worthy to refurbish our engines.”

“You think I’ll just tell you these things, betray my countrymen?”

“You think this wrench is for show?”

Sven had been seething to speak, and as she turned from the mayor, he grabbed her arm. “Elaine, do you not think … this is too much! He is right, this would be war, and we have no idea what lies to the south and west!”

Elaine whispered, to match his tone, but from a quick glance she could tell that everyone near could hear, and would pass it on. “Sven, if you can imagine another way, let me know. If it doesn’t end with our ropes in hemp, of course, or a keelhauling, or a quick shot to the heart at Renshaw’s hands, or years in a pressurized chamber, being sampled for King England’s curiosity. Let me know.”

He dropped his hand from her arm, stepped back.

“I … excuse me, Sven. I just feel very strongly about this.” She shook herself, looked to Duke Patrick, and then back to the rest of the men. “I want to get us home, and safely. If it was just me, sure, I’d steal the Intercessor and ride straight up the Thames.”

“Fuck King England!” somebody shouted. Somebody French, from the sound of it.

“Exactly,” she replied. “He thinks he’s safe, but … well, there’s a canal, right here, and from there we can head to the empires. Landfall, in the civilized world. Landfall with a land-breaking weapon, with every man of us ‘infected’ with the American disease, with every gun of the Intercessor loaded.”

“Negotiating from a place of power,” interjected the Duke.

“And if the canal is collapsed?” asked Wax.

“I’ll carry us across myself.”

chapter forty-four

Quince was up to his knees in black silt when Claudia pointed towards Poeiater Lore making his way into the city. The docks were livid with summer business, but the man stood out anyway, his black hat a meandering dot in the distance; behind him loomed the Imperator Boreas, in all its absurd metal glory. 

The sensation of dredging through silt was not a new one for Quince, not recently. In Reykjavik, they were pulling thick optic cables out of the absurdly heavy overflow tailings from Lake Ellithavatn, holding the mottled black worms a couple feet up, and splicing twenty-pound repeaters in. It was backbreaking work, but not nearly so much as the work he’d done in the listings of the difference engines they shipped into port.

Claudia hadn’t been able to force him out of the work against Syntactic, not a bit. She hadn’t talked to him for days after her attacks on his character, but when she did, she’d handed him an IB, replete with captured pieces of probable sabotage, and put him to work.

It had been work that he’d been forced to undertake at night. He hadn’t been forced to do it secretly; the work he’d been doing looked so boring that nobody would dare interrupt him. 

Getting at the sabotage proved difficult, if the word ‘difficult’ was understood to imply the sort of trepidation a bird felt at being ordered to file a boulder into nonexistence using only its beak. 

He’d used checksums to compare the sublistings on the shipment bound for Iceland with a set of generic difference engines headed for the continent, hoping to narrow the problem. After that, he’d grouped the results into new listings, those with file names that didn’t exist in the generic, and modified listings, breaking the latter down line by line until he was left with only the novel portions of machine code. With an effort like that, he’d expected quick results.

What he hadn’t expected was the breadth of the listings. The native system of an IB, unmodified, was composed of somewhere around thirty billion words, or one trillion bits. A large portion of these were used to construct images, static and moving, as well as audible waves. What remained, though, was still brutally long, and almost impossible to sort through.

After a week, one of his most promising leads had turned out to be localization data, completely benign, that related to the expected magnetic fields for Iceland. Another lead turned out to be the times of sunrises and sunsets for the next thirty-eight thousand years.

Quince eventually had to smarten his search; simply looking for bits that seemed out of place was a fool’s game. He spent another two days looking for pieces of listing that determined process priority in the operating system of the Difference Engine; another two weeks, writing code that could search out generalized forms of these.

By the time he’d finished that, he’d been forced to drop the IB in a niche, hop on a boat (slouch, really, considering the amount of sleep he’d been getting) and then it’d been Iceland for him. 

From what Claudia said, nobody had made it further than him.

That’s why they were looking for Lore, the head officer of Syntactic’s naturalization team. Word from the Precisive Manufactory had him in the know, as far as sabotage went. He would be the weak point they could exploit, to head off any disaster before it could happen.

This was because, while difference engines had methods to be essentially uncrackable, people … if you had a wrench and access to a man’s fingernails, there was no information beyond your reach.

When they made it back to the boathouse, Quince asked Claudia what the next step was, while they were stripping off their long boots.

“Restructuring the geothermal, if I’m any judge,” she replied, giving the others in the room a careful look. They were talking loudly to themselves, bemoaning the labor and the stench of sulfur, but Claudia was frequently overcautious. “After dinner.”

“Oh, of course, those tricky turbines,” Quince replied. Lowering his voice, he continued. “But about Lore, I mean. When do we go after him?”

Claudia shook her head and dumped about a quart of black silt out of her boot.

“Because I have a few ideas about where they might have broken something, things we should ask about.”

She stared at him wordlessly, her mouth twisted.

“The, uh, power station is an obvious place, but I feel like there’s something fishy near the Boreas …”

This woman was going to be the death of him. Instead of answering, she took off her other boot, shook it out onto the floor. 

“Claudia, come on! You can’t … you can’t just shut me out, not now. This, taking Lore, that’s the most overt move anybody’s made against Syntactic. You can’t just let me go on without knowing when it will happen! I could be in real danger.”

“You won’t be, Quincy. We’ll keep him quiet for long enough, and, well, by the time we’re done nobody will care about you.”

“They won’t stop with you, Claudia, not that easily. You know that.” He tried to look as though he were genuinely worried for his safety. “Please. Let me help.”

She shook her head. “No, Quincy. I’m sorry.” It looked like it burned her to say that, and she continued quickly. “We’re going tonight, and you’re not coming.”

Quince didn’t bother trying further. Claudia looked as though she had more to say, but instead she walked to the other side of the room, continued to pull off her thick leather outergarments. 

He moved his toes around a bit in his now black socks. This silt was murder on the nose, and horribly cold as well, but for a few moments he was incapable of doing much besides watching as his feet made patterns on the smooth marble floor. In a few hours, a team would come in with a pressurized water hose, spray this entire room down. 

Dammit, he deserved to go with them. Even though he hadn’t found much in the modified listing, he was smart enough to know what the danger points would be. 

Reykjavik wasn’t too hard to figure out.

From the sea, it was an imposing mass of beautiful sharp-angled buildings, white marble edged in gold leaf, a relic of extreme prosperity that must have happened more than a thousand years ago, when America was still open to trade. The whole city relied on geothermal power plants, built in that last swell of affluence; it was enough to keep more than a million and a half people warm, with good running water, and pretty much the only electric grid outside of Europe.

That was the real point of it. It was the only electric grid that wasn’t hooked directly to Syntactic’s power plants in northern England. It was small, sure, but it was incredibly reliable, situated on top of some incredibly benign vents. They didn’t do much manufacturing here, and nothing of the sort that would draw Syntactic’s ire, but … his father had chosen here for his work.

Word had made it back to England, and now Quince was here, an instrument in the sabotage of his father’s work. Also an instrument in the sabotage of the … well, the point was that he could figure this out. The turbine stacks in southwestern Reykjavik, they had more than enough kinetic energy for a small destabilization to wreak substantial havoc.

Later that night, Quince snuck out of his room. 

He was lucky, as the guards had become lax. This far north, everybody’s sleep schedules were ruined, and darkness was hard to come by. The sun had set after midnight a few weeks ago, for god’s sake. It also didn’t hurt that they were hundreds of leagues from any other land mass, in the only city on a rock made of ice and magma.

The difference engine terminal they’d set up in their impromptu mess hall was a flat panel perched on top of a wash of thin black wires. It took only a short time for him to get into the security feeds, as they were completely unsecured. People just didn’t understand how careless they were being.

First, a list of buildings, red tags indicating recent movement. Quince checked through a few of them: grids of squares, dark gray on the edge, light gray in the general shape of the building’s floor plan, red where people were setting off sensors; a few footsteps triggered image captures, which arrayed themselves for his viewing.

Thank god, most people in Reykjavik observed pretty strict sleeping hours. Apparently, if they didn’t, the suicide rate jumped. More luck.

He finally found them in the warehouse a few hundred feet east of the sleeping quarters. The guards on rounds were going extremely slowly, and Quince caught Claudia in two different pictures, thirty seconds apart, dragging somebody into the warehouse.

Without his hat, it was hard to pick out Lore’s features, but Quince was capable of guessing.

Twenty seconds after that, sensors registered movement a few hundred feet out from the warehouse.

Ten seconds later, Quince saw the first image of Claudia’s pursuers, guns at the ready.

Oh, man.

chapter forty-three

Colin didn’t wake up very often, but when he did he hated it.

Insofar as he could place events in a reasonable chronological order, the earlier periods of wakefulness had been the worst. Little patches of memory, suspended in a depthless cardinal haze: trying to flail around on cots that creaked like sinking ships, weakly puking, gasping when his airways were clear and crying when they weren’t; the ceiling of the tent, the malformed stitches shuddering across writhing gaps; burning that gripped his stomach like a blacksmith’s tongs. Other painful things.

Later, he was still so far out of sorts that he could hardly think. Somebody fed him food, or liquid, or something that fit into his mouth, as far as he could tell. Thick, bitter drips of medicine, perhaps, or the sticking remnants of bread. Rice? He couldn’t say.

How did people stand this? Why didn’t they just die outright, leave a cracking furnace for something nicer? Did they stick around because they desperately wanted to live, because their bodies forced them to, because of hope instilled by some father god, smiling and pure white beyond throbbing clouds, alabaster and broken? Why claw this fervently, their fingers raw with it?

He gasped, twitching and choking. Why couldn’t he die?

Some relief from the pain stole through his eyes, picking the physical world apart, and he dropped into delirium and shocking cold.

In vast stretches of vengeful nostalgia, Colin wandered for a while. Of course his family was there, little simulacra of memories and impressions heaving themselves to life, using the short reprieve from his senses to construct gardens of interaction. Abir was there, stitching himself back together with a chuckle, and Colin woke shrieking from that, but it only until they forced more viscous sleep down his throat.

The kids from that Swiss Casemate, perched on mountains that shook boulders loose with the tremors of waking, and the servants from home, silent as empty graves. Colin grew tired of replaying his life. Every spare hour seemed to demand another brutal remembrance, ceaseless and strange; he grew tired of seeing loved ones dead, acquaintances shambling with missing limbs, his mother eyeless.

He pushed at the arms that restrained him, ignoring the seizing pain in his chest, but they always dropped him further down the hole. Some mercy, this. When he clamped his mouth shut, they pulled it open; whenever he spoke, they stuck fingers in, forced his jaw wide. He succumbed every time, reluctantly.

Gwynedd showed up. That hurt.

When he finally managed to break his cot, slapping hands away as he struggled against further tranquillizers, they let him up.

The edge of the tent was about as far as he could make it, his pants having taken most of the fight out of him. Bandages restrained his arm’s movement, and grinding sensations made him cautious of quick movement, but he persevered. Inside, all was muffled, smelling of impossible combinations of fluids, and the floor hopped in slow time, irregular hearts magnified through stone. 

Outside, things were on fire.

To the west, the walls stood, only a single breach in their long expanse. The cannons on top were firing further to the west, thank god, and though fires were clearly doing their best inside, they hadn’t spread. No flames visible, just black smoke that made it all the way to the sky. Spires were in good repair; buildings had solid walls, instead of crumbled brickwork. 

Ankara, yet. The city held.

Wait, but how?

Not knowing the language of the land he was in had its benefits; for the last few minutes, some old lady had been trying to talk to him, but ignoring her was easy. Finally, though, she started yanking on his arm, trying to pull him somewhere. Away from the tent, oddly.

“Hello, Colin!” came a cheery yell from behind.

“That’s me,” Colin replied, turning to find … “Giusever? Uh, what are you … hmm. How’s it going?”

“Oh, things are all right,” the large, flat-faced man replied, his words a row of careful syllables. “I see you have been shot. And now you are well?”

The old woman began to chatter away, and Giusever listened closely, nodding thoughtfully. He had a serious expression on, but it was stretched thinly over a broad happiness. Colin stuck a finger in his bandages and scratched while he waited. 

“And now you are well,” Giusever said, in a real language. “Come! Follow me! Do you wish to be carried? Here is a shirt! All right then, let us go.”

As they walked, Giusever talked, and Colin listened. Though they made slow progress, and the summer sun, compounded by sooty wind, was an unholy trial, Colin found himself enjoying the man’s company, absurd as it was.

“Harold brought your body back. That is to say, with you in it. You were not dead, though close. Your friend, Baran, not so lucky, and Ammanuel as well.” Giusever shook his head, and was silent a moment. “It is a terrible thing. Here, down this street. Once Harold told the story, it was a very impressive thing. The people here were ready to run, of course, and they might still, but … well, they sent men to destroy the long guns, in stealth.”

“That’s,” Colin coughed; he literally could not remember the last time he drank. “That’s good, I guess.”

“You showed them that the guns were vulnerable, that the army is vulnerable. It is an important idea, to recognize the enemy as mortal.”

Colin nodded as they walked into a huge building. The floors and ceiling were carefully tiled, examples of incredibly robust calligraphy lining the walls thickly, but simple wooden tables now filled the halls, covered with maps and papers inches thick.

“So they make a stand here. The long guns have not been replaced; they were not expecting this. The walls cannot be breached by the powder cannon. I am sorry; would you mind speaking more? I have not attempted English recently, the diction evades.” Another huge notepad had appeared from somewhere about the man, and a lead pencil stood posed.

Instead of responding, Colin pushed some papers around. Nobody slapped his hands away, and gradually he realized that they’d gained a bit of an audience. Uniforms, on all sides, most of them black with ash and more than a few torn; nobody had stopped talking, but they all had at least one eye on him.

“Uh … So what’s happening here? We just sit around until the monarchies smash us to bits, and then whine as we die?”

There was movement in the hall, and Colin was finally aware that he had been brought. Eleven years of life, and somebody had brought him somewhere, for a reason beyond punishment.

“I do not think so,” Giusever said, peering down the hall. “Here, the Tuggeneral approaches.”

Indeed, some sort of thick-shirted military fellow was rounding the table, his moustaches fearsome, his chest huge. He was tall, and tiredness was peeking around every corner of his face, but his back was straight as an arrow. 

Colin stood up as tall as he could, pushed his hair back, and looked the man in the eye.

“What?”

Giusever said something in foreign, and the Tuggeneral responded. Conversation dipped.

“He says, ‘Look, it’s that child. You can not keep an ant in a burrow.’ Something close to that, I believe. Colloquialisms, you understand.”

“We seem to be pretty well kept in this burrow,” Colin replied, slapping the map. “Are we waiting for rain? Say that, and explain that I’m continuing the metaphor.”

The Tuggeneral smiled for a moment, and then swept himself into a bit of a fervor. Whatever statement he made ended with a shout, and a responding shout from the men and women all around.

“‘No, we are going to break free, and soon! This child, he struck the first blow, and we have men and supplies arriving every day. For the first time, we are not overtaking refugees; we are providing safety, and soon we will retake what was ours! The world is large, and our enemies are small.’ The rest is a bit of chant, harder to translate, but, uh …”

“That’s alright, Giusever, I get it. Ask them what their plan is.” Colin thought about that for a moment. It lacked the tone he wanted to strike. “Say, ‘Words mean little.’ Maybe swear a bit.”

The response was wordy and useless. Giusever only translated about half of it, skipping sentences that were obviously just self-aggrandizement, and what remained was promises, odd declarations about little towns, and nationalist rhetoric. 

These people, they didn’t honestly think they could hold Ankara. The Tuggeneral’s job was to get as much fight as he could out of his army, and then to relinquish the city, fall back further, hope for the best. He could see it in every face, the way they responded so eagerly to shouts and the worry in their dim faces. The idiots could be frightened into a corner, chased by shadows, and they’d still talk big.

Colin didn’t honestly know too much about the empires, about the way they were structured or the degree to which they coordinated, but he could guess quite a bit from what he saw. The Byzantine Empire was stumbling, pushed off balance by a technologically superior force, and they imagined their enemy to be too great; their other borders must be problems as well, ready to grab at weaknesses.

Information was what they needed, the poor fools. They’d ignored the peaceful bulk of the monarchies until too late, and now their only chance was Colin. 

Perfect.

“So you’ve no plan, then?” Colin shouted, twice, to get their attention back. 

The Tuggeneral frowned, shook his head a bit, and replied. Giusever was doing some talking of his own now; single words were rebuffed, further questions asked. The general’s response was to point to the map, draw his finger in arcs, and slap his hand down.

“His plan is to wait for reinforcements, from Jerusalem, from Rhages, further. Then, they commit to general battle, breaking the siege with sorties and other things like that.”

“Ha,” Colin replied. “Push? Against entrenched long guns? You’ll be grinding yourself into … uh, ground meat.”

A laugh, and most of the soldiers had stopped paying attention. They were returning to tasks that they thought were more important than an eleven-year-old child’s ideas, and for that they could go to hell.

The only person that mattered, though, the general, he was paying attention. He looked worried, and a little bit sad, as he responded to Giusever.

“Meat here or meat there, young goat. Kid.”

“No, meat nowhere. Fall back. If you haven’t wasted however long I was out for, you’ve got most of the citizens to safety; drop Ankara, and pull back your regulars. That’s what the monarchies want, and they’ll follow you.” Colin drew his finger to the east.

“And eventually they will die of old age, I suppose. Not the worst plan.”

“Your opportunity is in their movement. They rely on the long guns constantly, right? Have you even met them in open battle?” A shake of the head answered that. “That’s because they’re terrified of it. You outnumber them hugely. Their only advantage are devices, weapons, and the constant choice of the battlefield. Move around them,” he traced the arc, “Small groups, to disable the weapons. Larger groups, to disable supplies, catch regiments out of place.”

“They will reinforce their lines, ruthlessly push, and in the end we will lose.”

“Sure, if they had infinite supplies.” Colin smiled; it was an odd life, always being the smartest person in any room. “But they don’t. All manufacturing, they’ve moved it to one place. If you want to balance the battle field … you have to remove the imbalance.”

He moved his finger to the west, and north, until it left the map. 

“Giusever, tell the man that my finger is now pointing at North England.”

chapter forty-two

The American was gone by the next morning.

Elaine had him shut in a fully iron cell, strapped down with chains and his clothes stapled to the bed, after he’d tried to murder everyone. When she’d pushed the door open, bleary eyed and with multiple sailors talking over each other into her ears, she’d found plenty evidence of his night. Two little pieces of bed, a few scraps of the sheet. Five links of chain, each snapped and buried in a wall. A hole in the hull.

Good riddance. He’d left his ship, presumably swimming the three miles to shore, so the incident hadn’t been a total loss. She sent Sven out on the ship, to see what he could find, and took a break from being in charge.

It was lucky that she did. 

The Intercessor towed the Godqueen south, aided intermittently by a lucky sputter of the larger ship’s engine, and they made absurdly slow time. It was warm, though, and the breeze wasn’t terrible; some of the more excitable sailors had jerry-rigged masts, hanging over the edge of the Godqueen and tethered tightly to her tower, and put out all the sheets they could find. 

Elaine spent days sitting on the deck, surrounded entirely by flapping white cloth, drinking slowly as the shore wandered aft.

Everybody else worried constantly, stormed from map to map, thought up new things to worry about. When they rounded into Delaware Bay, Sven was waiting for them, his little craft edging through the strait and tugging a roughly made rowboat. Apparently he’d found some more Americans, more reasonable folk than the first, and they’d traded him several crates of various fruits for some salted pork. Nice enough people, it seemed, just lacking in pigs. They’d had guns aplenty, and Sven had done his trading over the course of hours and the length of a field.

She ate an orange, squeezed a section between her fingers until it burst. Then she washed her fingers.

Meanwhile, the Duke was fighting with Alzabeth. She wanted to fire a few warning shots from the Intercessor’s long guns if they ever ran across any settlements, while he favored a more cautious approach. Alzabeth insisted her way was the soul of caution; he called her bloodthirsty. The sailors readied a few rounds, just in case, and they traveled onwards. The wind had been strong since the storm blew itself out, and all the sheets tied to the Godqueen actually seemed to help.

By the time they’d reached Chesapeake, there were real signs of civilization. For a long time, there’d been nothing but trees, wide sandy beaches, flat reaches of shattered synthetic stone and crumbled concrete. The first real ruin they’d sighted had been surrounded by tidal pools, on a long stretch of sand, white buildings bleached by the sun. Empty for a hundred years or more.

Lily and Elaine spent some time mucking around in the ruins. Oddly wide glassless windows, long, low hallways, broad boulevards, and a bunch of broken shit. All the metal was rusting, and a lot of the other stuff was just caving in; rotting leaves were piled in corners, still wet from spring rains. It was comforting to know that every part of the world was capable of being a massive disappointment.

During the day, she played poker with anyone she could round up.

“Before he left, Sven said he expected to find more people. A lot more. He said,” Lily absentmindedly fished a chip out of her large pile, “the further you get from New Amsterdam, the more recent the ruins are.”

“I bet,” Lucas replied.

“Because of the, uh, radioactive all over the place there.” Barlow was down to a couple chips, and ministering to them like sick children. “I check.”

Elaine flipped her cards against each other; they were from multiple decks, since every deck had seen losses during the flooding, and to fix their different back patterns Voy had painted them with sticky black tar. Shuffling was a nightmare.

“Then I raise,” Lily said. “Do you think Sven will make it back?”

“When I try to imagine something stopping Sven, it takes work. On the other hand …” Alzabeth’s mouth twisted.

Elaine pushed a few chips forwards, to match Lily, and then leaned her head back. The sky was full of huge, absurdly fluffy clouds; behind them, a perfect sun burned, and for a moment her chest ached with a blind need for home.

With a grim laugh, Barlow continued the thought for her. “On the other hand, I bet this continent finds some impressive way to murder him.”

“Barlow, hush!” Lily said, pushing him lightly on the arm. “Sven has weapons, and a … well, a mighty arm, I’d have to say.”

“And I’m sure that’d help against a bunch of electric bastards like these Americans, right? We should’ve sent him with a coffin, of course, but … well, I guess not, since we need all we have …”

“Hey!” Lucas interrupted. “Are you matching or out, Barlow?”

The sailor gave him a frown, catching the tone, and then flicked his cards onto the table. “Out, I guess.” He looked around, but nobody really bothered to catch his eye, and he snorted. “I suppose I’m done here regardless. I’ll see you gents around,” he said, pushing his chair out and standing abruptly.

Nobody replied as he left, heading for one of the hatches. 

“What a fucking bummer that guy is,” Lily said, when he was out of earshot.

“No kidding.” Alzabeth tossed her own cards onto the table.

“Not too long from now, we’ll be laughing at his paranoia.”

“Well …”

“Standing on the banks of the Thames, waving away this ship for the last time.”

Alzabeth was restraining herself from responding; her face was a rictus, looking like somebody really reassuring had died. Sometimes, that’s how conversations with Lily went. Elaine could tell what the other woman was thinking, though.

Back in England, the only thing that was waiting for them was arrest, and perhaps an execution. It really depended on exactly how the story got out, and how King England was feeling that day. Maybe how much rope was available, and other things like that.

The thing that Lily failed to grasp was that mutiny was a crime, and that treason against their King was a crime, and that stealing the flagship and lead gunship of a Consensus-ordered expedition halfway around the world, while not explicitly listed as a crime in any lawbook, was tantamount to spitting in every aristocratic face in Europe. Oh, and theft of a nuclear weapon would probably be frowned on as well.

So maybe they could spend some time in the Orient. Maybe the rest of their lives. Maybe they could live here, let the sailors take the Godqueen back to Europe, start some bullshit little life in the rot-choked inlets of the American seaboard. At least nobody would be able to tell her what to do. 

Yellow Fever, Malaria, they’d have a say, but King England sure as shit wouldn’t.

A few hours later, when Elaine was thinking of ways to kill herself using bark and vines, one of the lookouts saw something. They were always seeing things, of course, since that was there job and everybody on board was bored out of their minds, but this particular yell was laced with something novel.

She levered herself out of her seat and walked to the fore rail. The sheets were all around, still obscuring her vision as the wind whipped through them, but when the water ahead of them was briefly visible she caught sight of a little gaff-rigged sloop wallowing along towards them.

As they pulled alongside, a couple of net-wielding women started waving to them, their bright white smiles visible against some brutal tans. 

Elaine waved back.

Whoever was in the bridge apparently didn’t feel much like stopping, but a few of the longshoremen tossed lines to the little lobster sloop, and they dragged the women on board when they were close enough. Lucas tried talking to them, but had no luck; Voy managed better, eventually settling on a mixture of Spanish and what Elaine guessed to be nautical gibberish. Alzabeth could be heard from somewhere, but Elaine ignored her. Fisherwomen didn’t seem to constitute much of a threat.

It was times like this when Elaine was most glad that she’d abdicated every responsibility, every expectation that her well-meaning acquaintances had tried to weld to her. The Duke was trying to get some words in with these new Americans, but so was everyone else.

Elaine stayed up front, where she couldn’t hear anything, and kept her eye on the shoreline. She thought about what Barlow had said. He was probably right, but they hadn’t packed any coffins, so his point was probably moot.

After only about half an hour, they rounded a finger of land to find themselves only a few miles away from a town. Around them, various fishing craft nosed through the water; on the shoreline, wooden houses stood, docks and other fishing-people nonsense dripped into the bay. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in England, were it not for the white stone foundations most of the place stood on; well, that and the alabaster clock tower in the middle of town.

Maybe the huge metal cranes, hung with wooden fetishes and looking more defunct than museum pieces, that might have been a little out of place. 

Somebody in a canoe shouted at Elaine, trying to sell her a fish, and she stared blankly down at them.

A warning shot from the Intercessor nearly scared her overboard, nearly popped her ear drum, and entirely got rid of the aspiring merchant. She watched him go, pulling the oars for all he was worth, until he was lost amidst his fellows; then she pushed herself up and wandered over to the rest of the crew.

One of the bigger craft had tied itself to the lobster sloop, and a well dressed man was clambering across to talk to the Duke. Voy did some polyglottal negotiation, and a variant of English emerged from the man; it was throatier than the first American had used, but understandable.

“Nice boat.”

Duke Patrick’s face was a study in polite incomprehension.

“Thanks, jackass,” replied Alzabeth, while the Duke caught up.

“Shame about the hole in the side.”

“You know what put that hole there?” Alzabeth shouted, before anyone could stop her. “The guns on our other ship! And we’ll scatter your whole town to the four winds if you don’t watch it, you ignorant savages!”

“We had a boat like that,” the man replied. “It sank, though. Gotta be, oh, three hundred fifty years ago.”

Even though the guy was talking as calmly as possible, like he’d had the same conversation a hundred times before, Elaine could see the tension in his shoulders, in the way he angled his body. He didn’t want to be out here, not a bit, but only his boat had come this close. The poor guy was probably their lord, and he didn’t even have the luxury of being stupid. He could see the guns on the Intercessor. He’d heard that shot.

He hadn’t said a word about it, though. Couldn’t, really. Elaine felt terrible for him.

“Have you ever heard of fuel oil?” she asked, before Alzabeth could continue lambasting him. 

Voy tried a few translations of that, until the man shook his head. “Not around here, no.”

What else was she supposed to bring up? “Any food to trade? We can give you guns, probably. Not,” she waved to shut Alzabeth up, “our biggest guns, obviously, but some smaller guns? We could use food, and any alcohol you might have.”

“Lots of corn. Fish, sure. Listen … Are you planning to fire those guns again? At us?”

“Depends. Are you going to attack us, punch holes in our boat with your bare hands? Because we had some trouble with that.”

The Duke had given up trying to understand this slurred quasi-English, and was relying entirely on Voy for translations.

“Ah,” the man nodded, looking conciliatory. “You met the President’s men. No, we do fishing here. Mostly fishing. Fishing, fishing and drinking.”

“I can forgive the fishing, sir; we’ll get along just fine.”