CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT - MINOTAUR DOCTRINE

The next day began with a rumbling.

The ambient contamination throughout the colony was... high. Varied wildly, admittedly, depending on how the wind had moved, how the snow had behaved, where shelter from the falling lichen spores had given a few bunkers an easier time. Generally, though, throughout the night they'd crept from nineteen to around twenty-one across the bunkers. Debilitating mutations for those who lacked protection. Estimation was... within ten minutes of exposure, there'd be enduring skin deformities. Thirty minutes, and natural protections would be gone - the body would cease to recognise contamination as an enemy, would cease to purge it. With acute contamination, the solution to that was simple - amputate, cauterise, purge. With ambient contamination, the infection was uniform. It spread from the lungs in putrid filaments, it emanated through the skin in a solid wave, it entered the blood and wrapped around the heart, contaminating it, spreading yet further. At this point, you had a limited time before your brain went under, before the contamination decided your mind was standing in the way of a more perfect animal. Empathy, understanding, higher intelligence... nothing in the face of organic progress.

Sometimes people managed to survive for months afterwards, but this meant immediate removal from contamination, quite a bit of treatment... and a healthy amount of luck. Her filter wasn't just standing between her and a few years less at the end of her life - it was standing between her and rapid decay, between the mottling of her skin, and the rupturing of her pupils, and the emptying of her brainpan.

The click-click-click of changing filters echoed out at regular intervals. So precise it could be used to set a watch. Strange white fires burned out in the dark, and the air seemed to be alive with countless bodies. They were in an ocean of insects, a sea of whirring wings, and above them drifted the buffalo-balloons, raining droplets of lichen downwards. It was a grotesque thing, the lichen. A mixture of plant and animal into the most effective possible contaminant. When it landed, it was blue-grey-green, all the colours of rot. And then it expanded. Latched into the stone, and drank deep of the ambient contamination to sustain outwards growth. Horns of bark formed from it, little cancerous clusters which grew senselessly. Blood vessels formed, tiny hearts the size of thumbnails that pulsed wet sap through the expanding mass... and when the time came, strange geysers would form, belching more spores into the air. They burned the lichen - and when it was burned, the lichen exploded into spores. After a while... they started being more careful. Soaked them completely in fuel before igniting them, making sure everything was burning at once.

Tanner heard spores in their death throes. Writhing in the air. Unending.

They adapted, of course. Soak the lichen in fuel. Regular rotating shifts of soldiers, scouring of equipment, taking all the decontamination pills they could handle... thing was, emerging from one's equipment was basically off the table. People just didn't, not now they'd been exposed to consistently high ambient contamination. They'd dedicated bunkers to this - where soldiers sat on long, damp wooden benches, their uniforms dripping with the water from scouring, rasping through gas masks and waiting for their time to come round again. Remove the uniform, and the uniform couldn't go back on - the contamination would get inside, the insects would get inside, and the equipment would be wasted. Had to be kept nicely sealed. Food was delivered mostly through the same straws they used for water, or they risked a second of exposure in the confines of the wet-rooms to shove a bit of jerky into the mask. Tanner sat with them, sometimes. When her timer was up and she needed to be cleaned off. Since her bath, she hadn't seen her body - and she liked it that way. The bath had been a silly notion in the first place, something born of stress and exhaustion. There'd be nothing like it until she was done, the environment was just too hazardous, and she'd been in it for too long.

They sat, silent. Whenever they spoke, their voices were oddly hollow, echoing in the confines of the masks and the helmet. Quiet, like wind over dry grass. Sometimes soldiers leant together in the wet-rooms, and would take a little comfort from the contact. The Rekidans sometimes sat with them - just because they were already mutated didn't mean they were immune to contamination. Last thing they wanted was to become half-lichen, or something along those lines. So they sat, immobile in the damp, frequently with their clothes removed, mocking the soldiers with their nudity, with the rich colour of their hair, with the freeness of their speech.

She heard one of the soldiers muttering to another. Darkly.

"Too cold to dig."

"Bury me in rubble, then."

"Sounds good. Leave me till spring, I won't rot. Bury me when the ground softens and I start to stink."

"Right-o."

Another one spoke up, his voice dry as dust.

"Imagine we'll be burned, lads. Metal coffins or metal urns, nowt else."

A female soldier snorted, and her voice was thick with phlegm - happened to Tanner, too. The filters had odd effects on the air, for some people it made them absolutely congested. For Tanner, it left her face a little too dry, made her skin flaky.

"I want a metal coffin. Don't care how expensive it is."

A pause.

Tanner spoke quietly. All eyes turned to her, heads dropped, averting their gazes respectfully. A hush fell, and it took a conscious effort to keep talking past her first syllable.

"I'll look into metal coffins. And urns. Whatever you like."

"With engravings, ma'am?"

"I'll certainly look into it."

One of the other soldiers spoke up, his voice hushed with respect.

"Can we get bodies sent home?"

"I'll try my best. Actually..."

She reached into one of the many, many pockets of her coat, and withdrew a sturdy notebook. Of course she had a sturdy notebook, been carrying one around since she went to the underground river - knew there'd be a demand for note-taking, and knew the conditions down there might turn any normal paper into a pile of slush.

"What address?"

And thus it began. She took most of them over the course of the night - special requests for post-mortem treatment. For a second, she was just a judge again, and her pen moved swiftly and precisely over the page, engraving addresses, decorations, coffins or urns, cremations or burials, spring or winter... everything she could possibly note down, along with names and identification numbers. Even had provisions for when bodies couldn't be found, if memorials were preferred, and if so, what kind. And so on. And so on. She made two copies of the list, tearing one out of the notebook and posting it into the bunker where it could be kept dry and secure, keeping the other in her coat, just in case. Felt heavier, even with a whole bundle of pages removed. The Rekidans had no requests for burial. They were monsters, and deserved none of the funerary rites of their people, at least in their eyes. All-Name was their heir, and only his burial mattered - the funerary oils, the branches in his mouth, a few other details that were to be kept secret from outsiders. Civilians... she sent word to the bunkers via telegram, requesting that each of them make two copies of lists of preferred burial rites. Grim, yes. But...

It felt right.

She might be having a small breakdown, but she wasn't a monster. Just... not an especially good person, either.

And when morning came, the rumbling began.

The creatures had first come in the morning. An hour and a half of reconnaissance, and they still had close to a full day of preparations, of adding new glands, new limbs, repairing damage and refining their specialisations. And Tanner found herself wondering, again, about the intelligence that directed them. The range of it must be... terribly low, compared to the Great War. The mutant girl had shifted rapidly between being under its sway to being free, Tanner had seen it happen in real time, the shift from panic to eerie calm, from eerie calm to shivering fear. Nothing close to the sheer expanse of the Tulavanta, to the all-consuming range which had, briefly, turned the entire north into a shambling mess that was still struggling to recover. Now, assuming that this wasn't a ruse of some sort, the intelligence had approached, seized control of the mutant girl (accidentally), then Tanner had detonated the tunnels, the intelligence had retreated, and the mutant girl had been freed. Now, she was back under control, as was every other mutant in the city. So... damn it all, she still liked the idea of an intelligence rooted in something, something mobile, not just an invisible presence throughout the swarm.

Because when she looked at the lichen, listened to the swarm, gazed out at the carbonised fields...

She thought that they needed a miracle to survive this. Even if the main force was beaten back... the clean-up alone would wreck them. The bunkers weren't meant for this, there were irreplaceable components, humans would sicken if kept indoors for too long...

The rumbling began.

They were coming.

Tanner shuffled to the edge of the barricade, and stared out at the great fields. Remarkable that they'd attack during the day, when they were on near-equal footing with the humans in terms of visibility... surprised they weren't going to wait a little longer, really let the psychological impact soak in. Maybe they were eager. Maybe they were desperate. Couldn't tell which was which until she knew why they'd come here to begin with, and that remained a complete mystery. Her head was buzzing, the sound of the insects echoing around and around and around... a headache brewed, and she felt that it wouldn't go away until the swarm did. Perpetual whirring miasma, and as the rumbling grew closer, they grew angrier. Attacked with unreserved ferocity, worming into everything. Tiny bursts of flame illuminated the pale morning, as soldiers had to clear the nozzles of their flamethrowers, packed tight with stubborn bodies. The gas masks were crowded with them, their lenses were caked in bodies... a flash of old terror. The spider. The muffling webs. The cloying mass around her eyes. Blind, mute, deaf, and immobilised, crushed tighter, tighter... Tanner shook her head, dislodging them a little, and a few soldiers began to charge up canisters of decontamination spray. Basically just their pills but in gas form. Mutants hated them, and it cleared the masks enough for them to see. Not enormously effective against anything larger than an insect - and the way insects breathed through their skin made them particularly susceptible to vapours.

The stone of the barricade was littered with gore and scorch marks. Looked like the hide of an enormous albino animal, puckered with scars, infested with wounds. Ready to keel over. The mutants began to advance once again... and this time, it wasn't a mad scramble, nor was it a selective infiltration. This was more... absolute.

They were cracking downwards with ruthless force. All-or-nothing.

Tanner braced herself, ignoring the continuous ache in her arms, an ache so constant that she'd stopped noticing it most of the time. Fading into the endless list of priorities, dwarfed by the size of the others that crowded around it. Her breathing rasped and rattled. Her forehead beaded with sweat, despite the absolute cold. It wasn't so much the cold that got to them - it was the wind. Out there, the wind was like a knife, it sliced through skin and bone with ease, no amount of armour could keep it out for long. As sure a killer as the contamination was. And like contamination, once it truly set in, there was nothing that could be done. Even warming up would just kill through shock. In the Breach, they were shielded from the worst of it. But even so... there was a sense of being in a tiny bubble of calm, surrounded by oceans of frenzy. Bodies ahead of them. Insects and labyrinthine streets behind. Flaying winds the second they left the barricade, and the sky was slate-grey, the first few flakes falling and melting as they entered the warm aura of the front lines. Silent gas masks stared out, lenses black and smooth. Insects crawled over them, and at this point few people bothered to remove them unless they went for the eyes. Might as well be statues.

The Rekidans sniffed... and small smiles spread over their faces.

Wild fury reawakening in them.

The horde seemed to move at a snail's pace, but that was just an illusion of size. Anything that was huge needed to be slow, anything which moved like a single organism had to obey the normal rules of a single organism. So when the first cracks of gunfire echoed out, she almost jumped out of her skin - closer than she'd thought.

Much closer.

They were... amended, augmented for today's business. At the forefront were the living barricades, soaking up the first few bullets with silent dismissal. No war cries from the men, no war cries from the mutants, the only sound was the pop-pop-pop of bullets exlpoding from rifles, tearing off chunks of flesh and armour, anything to expose the vulnerable meat underneath for the kiss of a flamethrower. Fire that stuck, fire that had to be scooped away. For a human, near-impossible. For a mutant... inconvenient. The fires were ready - and a small trap was sprung. The fuel littering the swamp ignited with a spark tossed by one of the soldiers, and a wall of fire erupted to life. Crossing the entire breach, slicing the horde in two. The small nub trapped between the fire and the barricade didn't hesitate, just kept running. Flamethrowers activated, more reserved to conserve fuel... they didn't scream as they shrivelled and died, not one reaching the walls in time.

But the mutants behind were already adapting. Gouts of sticky fluid pulsed from odd glands, and the flames were smothered. The fuel itself still burned, but underneath layers of mucus. A tiny concentrated layer of fire, like a lake underneath ice... extinguished for good as the army advanced. They'd nibbled off a tiny quantity of the horde. A tiny quantity.

That was all they could do. Nibble. And pray that if they nibbled enough, something decisive would happen.

The living barricades surged through the flames, soaking them up and moving too quickly for the bullets to do enough damage. Their limbs tore up the mud, sinking deep and wrenching up enormous clods of rust-red soil, stained by the blood of the previous day's business. Glittering with contamination. Behind the barricades came the horde... and they smoothly pivoted to their chief strategy. Malformed, eerily fluid limbs slammed into the stone... and clung. Spinnerets wept webs, thin layers that were enough to haul up the lighter creatures. Some of the organs torn from the buffalo orchard, clearly. They looked like swollen blood clots, knots of tissue protruding underneath the skin. Ragged animals and ragged humans hauled themselves upwards with obscene nimbleness, and the smoke billowed into Tanner's face as the flamethrowers turned downwards, desperate to hold them back.

Bullets flew. A few mutants fell. Others lost limbs, blasted clean away by tremendous force, snapped out of the air by hungry jaws and immediately devoured. Something that had once been a domestic cat, now uncannily lizard-like, mangy with scales, and a face shifting to something more snake-like... she saw it peel away, stomach popped open with a bullet, and the last thing it did was to curl inwards with eerie flexibility, to snap powerful jaws over its spine and to wrench it free. Bisecting itself.

Making itself easier to consume by the seething mass below.

All she saw were bodies.

And for all they killed... more reached the top.

Bodies.

The guns rattled out sharp tattoos, bayonets plunged down like harpoons, and the Rekidans came into their own. But beyond this, her observations failed. There was nothing but chaos. Raw, unyielding, absolute chaos. She felt pressed in on all sides, felt like apologising every other second as she bumped elbows or shoulders with someone, as she was shoved and jostled and shoved and jostled others in turn. Felt like she was being digested by the crowd, squeezed along... and the mutants began to be torn apart.

She saw a Rekidan, Mr. Horn, crushing a mutant's skull with his bare hands and tossing it down, before smacking another back into the crowd with dismissive ease... yet mutants were clambering around his legs, a liquid wave of flesh and claws, clinging and biting and inhibiting. The insects were whirring louder than ever, and the air stunk of gas used to clear them from eyes. The fires were more limited now, the flamethrowers were backing up, retreating from the chaos.

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She saw soldiers firing wildly, turning their guns over and using them as clubs, and with each blast great chunks of flesh evaporated, like the mutants were just dreams being brought back to reality. Dark arterial blood rained from the wounds, and painted the soldiers, where insects wriggled in animal happiness, gleeful at the rebirth they were showered with. Their gas masks were heavy with blood, their uniforms were weighed, their guns were soaked, and increasingly they were using them just to shove wildly. The mutants were flexible, liquid, almost effete with their dancer's grace, and sometimes they accepted the shove with placid calm, falling over the side, tumbling like acrobats... to cling to the stone once again and haul themselves up. The soldiers were drenched in gore, but the mutants always seemed impeccably clean. Tanner saw as the gore mounted on all the others. Saw how... how the mutants, torn apart as they were, would litter them with garlands of intestinal chains, would burst their stomachs and loose great heaps of undifferentiated flesh that clung wetly to every crevice and surface, would cling tightly and remain clinging even as their minds were blown away by hasty bullets and crushing clubs, saw how loose scraps of skin and extremities would latch on like leeches and resist removal, saw how insects grew to the size of hands as they bloated on the flesh of their kin and gave the uniforms an animated appearance, the coats coming alive, the masks turning into rictus masses of flesh and blood, and-

She was among them.

Her axe whirled, whenever it could, and whenever it did, something fell.

A light, dancer-like mutant would be tossed free. Would crumple into a mound of shattered bones and broken meat. Something that had once been a human fell back, trachea crushed by a dismissive curl of the blade, saw blood of multiple shades flying around her like streamers as a festival, brown, red, blue, even hints of exotic shades of black that gleamed like crude oil. She ripped open another, almost by accident, her blade inexorable... and a spray of nearly-alive intestines erupted, blue and red, coiling and thick, bursting with pressure. The intestines crawled around her like a snake, constricting furiously... she snapped them with a jerking movement, but they clung with half-formed mouths. The mutants had more changes. More than she'd guessed. Their pale flesh was marked with welts of purple-blue, intricate with hundreds of capillaries, and when the blood flowed, these welts opened - lips, thin, sensitive lips, almost coy, almost sulky. And from them would lash out whisper-thin red tongues, that would swat at their own skin, drag up as much as they could, reintegrate, recombine, recycle. It left them immaculately pale and flawless, while the soldiers became filthy and stained from head to foot.

Gunshots. Pulsing weapons. Blood everywhere, blood and contamination.

Tanner heard nothing but her own breathing.

She killed everything which came her way. Every success was another moment bought. A single failure would be her end. Soft, almost liquid limbs pressed against her and tried to tear the armour from her, and the axe would crush the gelatinous digits, would fling the nimble creature from the walls. She felt strength, suddenly... the porous man, whirling by her, a single calamitous strike that almost sent her over the edge into the blood swamp, before the tide of battle shifted it away. She felt claws scraping against her helmet, and frantically beat off the eagle-creature as a sharp beak tried to enter the lenses. It flew away, but left a long, silvery scratch against the glass, far too close for comfort. But before she could catch her breath, something dog-like snapped at her, and she had to plant an axe in its skull, watching as the bone fanned out flower-like, soft layers of brain tissue peeling back to escape the force... the creature fell, and was devoured. And now the floor was coming alive. The assorted viscera was waking up, stomachs were inflating with muscle, muscle was coalescing around fallen limbs like webs made from liver-red fibre, intestines were lunging up like cobras, and her axe was swinging, swinging, swinging...

She was barely conscious of any of it.

Not even furious. All she could do was swing, and hope she survived.

And the cry came.

No idea who yelled it.

Retreat.

The improvised wall was moaning under the weight of too many bodies - the living barricades were digging long, agile claws into the stones and hauling, tearing out great heaps of alabaster dust that made their pale flesh ever paler, painted like actresses, their ruptured eyes dark and sensuous. Grenadoes were exploding as soldiers did everything they could to stop the tide.. but each explosion only weakened the structure. The moan increased, the crumbling increased, the great white animal was starting to sag... she sprinted for the edge, and grabbed a shock-frozen soldier around the back of his or her neck, hauling them along. The soldier was frozen for a solid moment, and their heels ground up channels an inch deep in the living carpet of viscera over which ghost-pale mutants flowed protoplasmic-fashion. Calm and immaculate, licking themselves clean with welt-tongues and gladly dying when required.

The armada of bloodstained troops charged from the walls, and Tanner was with them, her cargo trailing behind. Terrified to the point of absolute stillness, that was where her mind was currently lingering. Mobile paralysis. They were leaving bodies behind, and the mutants gladly took them. The Rekidans were fighting like demons, striking all about with enormous weapons, and...

And she saw one of them change.

Mr. Brewer.

He froze in the middle of the battlefield...

And the mutants flowed around him like a river around a rock.

His head tilted back, a soft trickle of spit leaving his lips and pooling in the hollow space of his collarbone.

He looked like a man undergoing a religious experience.

And with placid detachment, she saw the General raise an enormous rifle of Rekidan make, and he solemnly turned Mr. Brewer's head into a crater, the body tumbling down for consumption by the living carpet of organs. Intestine-roots and stomach-bulbs and skin-petals folded gently around the body... and it was gone.

A Rekidan had fallen.

Tanner ran.

She ran with the others. Retreating into the surrounding streets.

The walls were lost.

The walls were lost...

But...

But someone was moving.

A soldier. A soldier with a gas mask torn open by an enormous claw, and a face beneath festering with mould and mangy fur, a rictus grin spreading across a face paralysed by involuntary muscle contractions. Teeth like sticks of chalk emerging from receding lips. Eyes bulged, in the process of rupturing. Wounded, and doomed. Could feel the rot seeping into his mind. Couldn't even recognise him underneath the deformities. He had no weapons, no rifle, no flamethrower...

No.

He had fuel.

A tank of it on his back.

And a belt of small metal spheres.

He roared as he charged into the flesh-ocean...

And Tanner turned a corner as light bloomed, and the horde squealed silently, a squeal that echoed through their movements, their shifting, their sudden abandonment of meals, their rapid amputation of burning limbs. They were reacting to a sudden and unexpected disturbance. And Tanner... she felt a chill run over her. She didn't... she felt awful that a man had died. But how many others had died already? How much blood had she seen? The sight seemed to have lost its vigour. She was here, a giantess garbed in armour that covered every inch of skin, and above that, an almost priestly quantity of viscera. Of meat. She was garlanded with organs, she was ornamented with nodules of flesh, she was peppered with bone, augmented by scraps of skin, and always the insects, complex lattices of interlocking, fusing bodies that rejoiced in the feast she provided for them, that she hung up for more convenient consumption. Already the careless savagery was soaking into her. Already the flight of heroism dwindled.

And all she thought about was...

There went more mutants. Another nibble at the great carcass.

Maybe it would be pivotal.

Maybe it was just that. A flight of heroism. The blood was staining her mind.

And she hauled the person she'd rescued from the tide. Hauled with one hand, the other wrapped around her axe...

The walls were taken.

Now they fought in the labyrinth.

* * *

She sucked water through a straw, the flask itself hidden underneath her coat. Didn't slake her thirst - the water was warmed by her body, and it became brackish and difficult to swallow. Felt more like she was just... adding to herself. Not renewing, not cleansing, just adding more matter to carry around. She stared ahead. Silent. Waiting. The mutants were consolidating territory, the General said. They knew the push and pull of front lines could be... unpleasantly eroding for their resources. The longer they spent in one place, the more contamination built up, and while that was nice, it... had issues. Uncontrolled mutations, damaging additions, strange fusions. They were good about trimming off inconvenient growths, but it delayed, it inhibited, it distracted. If they consolidated territory, they could push in all directions, and continue their advance with impunity. The more directions they attacked in, the less chance of building up deleterious mutations, the more efficient the became. The wall... as terrible as it'd been, it wasn't ideal for the mutants either.

Rationality lingered in her brain like an iron weight.

And despite it, she couldn't help but find the idea nonsensical. Those pale, graceful, fluid beings... their welt-tongues and their blood-clot spinnerets, their smoothness, their casual suicides for the sake of the whole, their heroism-without-heroism, their insect calm... machines, pure and simple. Machines made out of meat. The look in Mr. Brewer's eyes, though... the sight of him changing. His mind finally slipping away, and the expression of slack-jawed... was it terror? Awe? Was he pleased to be added?

The soldiers around her were blood-cloaked priests, clutching their guns or leaning on them like archaic staffs, while her own axe was practically alive - the blood on the head flowed the wrong way, trying to form a glittering ruby right in the middle, even the blood was aware enough to obey the greater intelligence... she let out a long, ragged breath. The soldiers were still here. No-one seemed able to confirm how many losses they'd taken. At least one Rekidan. At least... maybe close to a dozen soldiers. The mutants had just wanted them off the wall, butchering them was almost an afterthought. Once they had the walls, they could consolidate, fan out, use those specialised mutants to the fullest. Her eyes flicked up - a shadow in the sky. The eagle with the beak of a stork, circling lazily, confident in its safety from potshots. Victory standard planted over the city.

Watching.

One of the soldiers was praying to himself, hands shaking uncontrollably. His voice was muffled - his filter was smeared with grime and meat, one eye of his gas mask was covered with a single scab that crawled slowly towards his forehead, aimless yet... consistently aimless, if that made any sense. Everyone seemed both bloated and shrivelled at the same time. Bloated by armour, weapons, equipment, and the endless innards. And shrivelled by the conflict. The eyes behind those lenses, when they were clear enough to see through, seemed to stare from the ends of long, dark passages, afraid of emerging into the light. A stillness lay all about them. They were all exhausted. Tanner wasn't even with the main force - there was no main force, only the scattered divisions, kept in contact by... well, by messengers. They said dogs with metal teeth were going for the telegram wires.

The last thing Tanner had said to Yan-Lam had been random facts about eels until she felt able to sleep.

And the last thing she'd said to Marana had been... what had it been?

Memories were difficult. Her head was full of steel wool, obfuscating, expansive, yet sharp and coarse. And...

And the soldier she'd rescued. The soldier she'd dragged out of the fray.

Tanner looked down.

He was still there.

Right where she last saw him.

Head buried into her side, arms wrapped around her waist, letting out long, animal sounds from his gas mask. He looked like all the others, blood-smeared and grotesque, bulked out by the uniform into something inhumanly strong, yet... weeping like a child. Had been weeping, anyway. Thought he might've run out of tears, and now he was just afraid of moving. She rested an arm on his back, patted him. The gloves numbed the sensation for herself, and the armour numbed the sensation for him. She had to rest the weight of her entire arm there before she could feel him calming down noticeably, soothed by the contact. None of the other soldiers objected to him doing this, none made fun of him. They'd all stood against the tide - they all knew the same stress.

Quietly, she wondered how old they all were. And if they'd signed up for the colonial division to see the world.

Quietly, she dismissed the thought. Nothing outside of today existed. Tomorrow was a dream. Yesterday was a strange delusion. History was so much vapour. Why think of the currents of the ocean when they were battling a single wave?

Silence.

The General loped down from the rooftops. His face was... gleeful, but he suppressed the smiles with a conscious effort. All-Name was at his side, helped along by... Ms. Sulphur, must be. His leg looked to be a little ragged, but the Rekidans had properly dressed it, and bound it with as much protective material as possible. Even so, it might need amputation before the colony was safe. If the colony ever was safe, really. He spoke in a rumbling voice, and the other soldiers looked dully at him, uncomprehending. They saw red hair, they saw Tanner not reacting with panic, and they settled down like hounds. All-Name struggled out a translation, omitting the usual... niceties, 'my general' this, 'my general' that.

"The telegram cables are being cut for good."

"Right."

"They're going to be assaulting the bunkers in the night. They attacked in the day to give themselves time to consolidate before the raids."

"Right."

"No sign of Sersa Bayai. Thought you should know."

Tanner's eyes flicked up. Really focused.

"Ah."

Something had been bulldozed out of her with the flood. Something... just washed away, and what remained behind was smaller and meaner by far. She waited, and the General continued after a few seconds of near-expectant silence.

"Bunkers should be protected individually. Just like we planned - everyone gets assigned a bunker to guard. If the bunker is surrounded and you have a choice between dying at your post or running, you run. The bunkers can hold out on their own for a while, but we always need hands for guns. Don't try and enter the bunkers - that goes for all the men. That'll just get everyone killed. Only enter when certain, if at all."

"Just as we planned. Right."

"...chin up. You're still needed."

The General smiled grimly, and patted her gently on the shoulder. That was as far as his sympathy extended. He'd lived through a worse siege than this one, and he'd seen it all go to hell. Odd thought. If Tanner mutated like he did, she'd probably be much, much taller. Might even rival Mr. Horn. Oh. Crumbs. Thought.

"How many casualties on your part?"

"...two were lost."

"Just two?"

"They weren't trying very hard to kill us. This was purely a push for territory. Extermination comes once they're in control."

"...right. Right. I'm sorry for your loss."

"They died gloriously. No shame in it."

All-Name didn't sound especially convinced. The stink of funerary oils wafted away from him. For a second, the group remained together, the weeping soldier frozen, not quite ready to detach himself from Tanner. The air was acrid with the stink of war, and the chemical pungency of flamethrowers at work. Be more useful in the streets, maybe, now they didn't have to worry so much about painting one another with tongues of sticky flame. Maybe. They were embraced by the front lines, now. The division had ceased to become clear - everywhere was a battleground. The feeling that swept Tanner wasn't one of fear, fear was... inaccurate. The carnage had already thickened her, made her too dense for ordinary terror. Just... tighter. Tense, maybe. Expectation, that was it. She was filled with the expectation of an attack. An electric current running through her blood, her bones, her muscles, everything. She felt unified with her uniform, not distant from it. She felt of one kind with the gore that stained her from head to foot. A crucial barrier had been cracked, and a sort of rebirth swept through her. The binary would never stop, now. The binary would endure until either she died or the colony was safe. There'd be no interruptions, not if she was lucky. For all the bloodshed... she felt strangely at home. All pretence drained.

And she was here.

"All-Name should get inside. Before the night raids."

The General grunted reluctantly.

"He needs me for translations. I really can't."

"...then stay safe. Best you can."

"I'll certainly try, judge."

The General hummed... and clapped her on the shoulder one more time, this time stronger and more... well, charged with camaraderie.

"He says you fought wonderfully on the walls. Pleasure to be at your side."

Tanner nodded mutely, the General barked a quick laugh... and he was off, the others moving through the streets below him. The squad immediately started preparing to move out, stiffening themselves, resuming their silence instead of prayers or weeping. Most were fine, just... stiff with stress. Tanner waited until the man around her waist unclasped himself, standing up and blinking in embarrassment when she looked down at him. She felt nothing. Just wiped her axe on the snow, and stalked off towards her bunker, where she was assigned. Sersa Bayai... gods, she hoped he was alright. Maybe he'd been wounded, maybe he was being converted as they spoke, converted like Lantha had. Maybe. Going back to find him was suicide, not to mention pointless. If he was still there, he was dead or worse. Idly, she wondered if Vyuli, who'd contentedly hidden away in his bunker, was somehow responsible. Canima vanishing, Sersa Bayai vanishing... maybe these soldiers around her were just more slaves of his cartel, ready to cut her down and leave him in command. Pettiness enduring even in the face of extinction.

She sighed. She'd heard the man at her side weeping.

Didn't know his name, but she'd heard him cry like an infant.

This man wasn't on Vyuli's side. He understood, perhaps more than most, how thinly balanced everything was. Who cared about money or prestige when you were already beaten low enough to weep into a strange woman's side?

The day's continuation felt perverse - there ought to be sharp punctuation between incidents, each battle should have a slow build-up, a prelude, a beginning, middle, end, and then darkness... then slow conversations, slow readying for the next conflict. Instead, she just shuffled on from the walls, leaving behind the dead, already preparing for another fight in the confines of her mind. The battle on the walls couldn't have been long at all. A sudden, swift strike, all the force at their disposal used, objectives achieved. Barely even morning.

For all her agonising, the mutants were just dispassionately going through the motions. Reconnaissance. Terror. Swift decapitation strike. Consolidate. Expand. Exterminate. They might've done this for the entire Great War, until they were stopped. Over and over and over.

She paused.

Shadows up ahead. The insects barely caught her attention - there weren't many in the air, thankfully. The battle had actually drained their numbers a little, what with all the fire, and the fact that they'd had to concentrate themselves so heavily to be effective as blinders and mufflers for so many soldiers. But there were enough - malformed locusts that rode the wind, and from among them emerged a soldier, as gore-slicked as all the others, staggering loosely over the paving stones. He paused.

Looked at them.

One of the soldiers in her own team raised a hand hesitantly.

"Hoy. What's your name?"

The man raised a hand in turn.

"Hoy."

Tanner felt a chill.

Had to happen sooner or later.

She stepped forwards, and the man stepped forwards towards her, hands wrapping around a gun so caked with blood it might well be useless at this point... no, mutant-hunting weapons were designed for odd conditions. Bit of cleaning, might work just fine. His lenses were black and blank. His staggering could just be a shell-shocked soldier. Could be. Tanner stared...

Then her arm lashed out, and she whirled him around, pushing him against a wall with a cursory expression of strength.

A ragged hole in the back of his skull. Barely covered by erratic growths of hair.

No sound from him. But his arms started to rotate in their sockets, moving without reference to normal ranges of motion, reaching around to grab her...

She smashed the axe into his head.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Like a slaughterhouse worker. A hammer to the skull. So quick the animal didn't even realise it was dead, just tap, and the thoughts switched off.

For a helmeted, mutated human, it took a little more than one.

But when the body slumped to the ground, it was immobile. The body wasn't mutated enough to live on its own. Still.

"Burn it, please. Equipment's useless."

The soldiers gaped. Tanner sighed.

"Infiltrators. Don't trust a soldier on their own, if they repeat what you're saying or mimic your body language, tell them to turn around and show the back of their head. Interrogate them on their memories - they never have any. And mutants are ambidextrous, that can help."

Silence.

They were staring at her in a mixture of awe and fear.

Tanner felt a growl building in her throat.

"Could you burn it, before we move on?"

The body was shifting. Erratic fibres twitching and trying to harmoinse with others, to get something out of the dead meat all around them. And the brain, pinkish and bloated, was oozing from cracks in the skull, tiny white legs, like those of crabs, emerging from the spongy matter. Anything to survive.

The fires came a second later.

And Tanner marched on. The incident already disappearing from her memory.

And overhead, an eagle with a stork's beak circled in absolute silence.

Waiting.