CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN - THE EEL WHO BRIGHTENS THE WORLD
Strange. Having this much power.
Very strange indeed.
Not very pleasant. If anything, it was making her feel like even more of a spiralling catastrophe wrapped up in flesh and armour. And if it wasn't for the fact that her role, the one point to which people looked to her for leadership, the point which everything hinged on, was... surviving. If it was anything more complex - say, the implementation of complex agricultural policy, or a plumbing network - she'd have had a heart attack when the man behind the door called her boss. Survival, though... that was more conceivable. Because if she failed, then she, too, was dead, and wouldn't have long to mourn her failure. Gods... if she hadn't killed Lyur, she genuinely doubted the cartel would have fallen into line so quickly. Lyur had clearly not been well-liked, and they'd stood by as he was crushed. They'd allowed their leader to hand over one of their own, to organise hunts for him, and even then he'd failed in the end - Tanner had needed to go out and fetch the man, risking her life in the process. Vyuli's authority had been consistently undermined, and eventually, the things he had to offer were rendered worthless. Money became pointless. He couldn't guarantee survival - he was actively handing them over for execution. Solidarity became meaningless with the evacuation, and a whole suite of their own abandoning the rest, leaving them to die in the dark and the cold.
They were common criminals. They fell in behind the person who could crush them - as she'd done on several occasions - and who could shelter them. She could do both. Vyuli could do neither. Odd, to imagine that his legacy was just... done. Like that. Tom-Tom would never continue it, his two other daughters were dead, his wives were dead, his city was dead, his culture was fading, the shantytown was homogenising the Nalseri into the same stew as everyone else, and Rekida had never truly been his. He'd arrived, fed on the layers of conspiracy and corruption, and was then torn apart when the Rekidan nobility had killed the governor. For him, this might've been one long nightmare from start to finish. Watching as his cartel unravelled around him. And then staring down the barrel of Bayai's gun.
Wondered if he'd known, in that second, how everything would play out. If in his last days he'd been like Canima, hunched over and immobile in his room, an old man waiting for a train that would never stop for him. Moving on, leaving him at the platform, incapable of moving on or going home.
Hadn't seen his body. Usually she saw the bodies of the dead. The idea of the dead just appearing and remaining out of sight had become oddly perverse in the colony, where everything was connected, nothing was hidden. Still. He'd influenced her life enormously without being seen once. He'd created the conditions that had sculpted her into this, and they'd talked... less than ten times. Closer to five. He'd entered her life as an unknown, and he left her life as an unknown. Liked it that way. Seeing his broken, thin body would've probably made her feel genuinely sorry for him, and despite everything, she did. Faintly, yes. And thinking of his sad eyes and his sharp knives... that still made her shiver, but there was something undeniably tragic about an old man dying in the dark in a foreign city after futilely trying to recapture something which had long-since gone away.
Despite it all, empathy still lived in her.
She was stranger, yes. Angrier. Deadlier. But she could still... feel things.
Good. That was good. And Canima...
Snuffed out without a last word. Dying alone with a gun in his mouth, convinced it was the only way to protect his family, his friend's legacy lying in tatters around him, his nephew maybe dead in pursuit of a doomed urge for revenge...
Even imagining how that felt made her pace quicken. Running away from the thought.
Returning to... her own bunker, that was it. That was where she was going. Everything had been handled. Soldiers were dispatched back to the cartel bunker. The mutants were likely readying for another push. The layers of conspiracy had finally devoured themselves, she realised. As auto-cannibalistic as the swarm that was twitching back to life around her, insects emerging to blind, deafen, and muffle, the first signs of an attack. The governor's conspiracy for control had allowed the theurgists to come and the cartel to grow. The presence of these two forces eroded that control, and drove the Rekidans so far into the earth they had no choice but to strike back, to lash out. Which had killed the governor. Now it had killed Vyuli and Canima by extension, Canima killing himself because of the theurgists he'd brought in, and Vyuli dying because of Canima inserting an agent into the colony in the form of his nephew, and installing backdoors in the bunkers in a fit of paranoia. Layer upon layer upon layer...
Devouring itself.
No more.
Now it was just her. Just her. The other Sersas were despised by their troops, she knew that. They saw those two as traitors and saboteurs, wouldn't obey them reliably. But her... they obeyed her. The Rekidans were here because of her, they had no loyalty to the colony or Fidelizh. The cartel obeyed her.
What didn't she control at this point?
The bunker faced her. Coffin-like and dark, eerie against the pale sky. She fell in line with the others, swallowing a decontamination pill, leaning against her axe. The day wasn't even halfway done, and she's seized power over the cartel, then covered up a murder. What a productive lady she was. And she refused to take off the buffalo pelt - it was part of the uniform now, no matter what happened to it in the ever-rising ambient contamination. Her headache was swelling as the swarm's buzz escalated, a migraine that pressed around the sides of her head like a vice. They were coming. Of course they were coming. The soldiers saluted sharply, despite their weariness, and she barely noticed enough to return the honour. There were no intermediaries. She was in absolute command. Her axe gleamed in the winter light. The snow was beginning to fall again, covering up the last of the boneyard.
She gritted her teeth. Took a deep, deep breath...
Felt something drain away.
And waited for the tide.
* * *
There were no more barriers she had left to cross.
And... in a way, thought ceased. She had the bright calm in her now. The absolute simplicity of survival. Her thoughts flowed to her actions, both in perfect unison. And when the tide came, her heartbeat barely rose. When she gave orders, there was nothing standing between her and the soldiers. There were no more factions to negotiate, no more subordinate leaders to go through. Human and mutant - that was it. Bayai had given her the simplicity he'd craved for himself. The supreme reality the surrealists had sought... it flowed through her without resistance, communicated with her every muscle. Bright calm. Red terror. What she'd felt in the tunnels, though only as a vague shadow, now consumed her completely. The mechanisms which had filled her up as a judge were back, but better, more refined, more... when she was a judge, she filled her head with machinery to make the world a more peaceful place, to make her fate absolutely dictated and safe, a golden braid extending into the future. Now, she'd lost that braid. She had no idea what each further link would give her - life, death, pain, mutation, something else. The previous second was non-existent. The next second was quite possibly never going to come. She existed as a series of tableaus that incarnated themselves, emanated themselves, birthed themselves. Each second that passed was another Tanner. She was deracinated from time.
Was she free?
Was she just terrified?
Had her breakdown reached some sort of climax?
Seemed... possible. Somehow. She was beyond frightened. But she had control. She had power. She'd grabbed it and torn it out of the world, raw and bleeding. Every routine and ritual had been broken within her, and she'd become transfigured. The world stopped at the walls of Rekida. The world stopped where the mutants did. Her muscles moved immaculately over her bones, her bones were iron rods driven together and soldered into a complex lattice. Her head was buzzing with fury. Her axe grew into her arm. She could feel a long, black eel slithering up her spine, moving through the fluid, and she let it. Let it nest in her head, projected a single-minded, mad purpose which admitted no doubt and countenanced no surrender. Tanner stopped existing. Didn't want to be here any more, wanted to go home, needed to go home, someone tell mother that she was coming, she needed time to get the tea things ready. All that existed was an engine, was a final state, was some sort of feverish thing which wore human skin but had long-since stopped being human. Absolute action - that was it. Absolute action was action and thought occurring simultaneously without reserve, simply happening. One might as well become the sun, glowing and burning without any direction or any intention or any thought, but with more power than a hundred intentional acts could possibly muster. A million thinkers couldn't equal a second of the sun's power.
She was unconscious. She was a comatose berserker. She was a boiling sun. She was terrified. There were no more relatives to think through. Her mother was far away. Her father had stopped thinking a long time ago. Eygi wasn't her friend. Marana pitied her. Bayai was spying on her. Yan-Lam was... better off without her.
All she had was herself.
Somebody help. Somebody. Wake her up.
Please.
A mutant came to her.
The porous man. With his crater-for-a-face and the long red tongues which emerged from the damp dark, with his pale flesh perforated. He was a blurring wheel of motion and muscle, fluid and gas exploding from the pores and launching him into graceful paroxysms. He was garlanded with red - the blood of a soldier. He'd lashed through him, and torn through with a single, awful kick, so terrible that the porous man had shattered his own leg, and was still healing it, contamination-laden mosquitoes landing to inject him with restorative fluid, draining themselves until they were smaller than pin-pricks, and then his body devoured them as yet more meat for the regrowth. It spun to her, too, but it was a little slower. Tanner didn't think - she just moved.
Her axe slammed into it. Felt meat parting, felt bones straining... the creature was already slithering away from the blade, using the momentum of the strike to turn to strike at her...
Her other hand lashed out.
Plunged into the vacant red-black crater. Felt thin tongues lashing against her gauntlet.
She crushed into the mutant, driving it into the ground, riding it downwards. It moved by expelling fluid and gas - so she embraced it, stopped it from doing so. And with her free arm...
Slammed the axe down until the head was red mush plastering her. The man squirmed on the soaked ground, crushing ashen bones and staining its pale skin. Tanner didn't notice. Already standing, and driving her boot down into the head until she felt the spine pop, saw fluid ooze around her heel. Her gas mask rattled. Her eyes were flat and cold. Her heart was slow and reptilian. The sky was red, the sun was red, there was fire everywhere she looked. A soldier nearby was crushed by a mutant, a hairless creature that resembled a... kind of ferret, but tremendously large, and with features that erred towards the human. Particularly the teeth. It crushed the soldier by wrapping it up in its coils, and squeezing until blood seeped from his gas mask, and his screams choked off into a wet gurgle. Squeezed until she could see his intestines being shoved into his lung cavity, swelling his chest like a pimple ripe to burst.
She didn't want to die here. Please.
The axe slammed into the ferret, displacing it a little. A head that... almost resembled a human, but with no eyes, and a mouth arranged like a lamprey's, albeit with human teeth, swivelled on a boneless neck to face her. She planted the axe right in the centre with precisely the right amount of force, and watched as gelatinous protoplasm bubbled and squirted around the gash, steaming in the cold. The creature moved regardless, slithering to try and grip her, sides still wet with the soldier's blood... Tanner plunged her fist into the gaping lamprey mouth, shoving deep, feeling warm, warm meat all around, ripping and tearing... until she found something spongy, something soft, and then she could rip.
The creature went through agonising spasms, failing to crush her, brain failing... the commands which controlled it were fading, distorting. Yet it tried, it tried, to crush her like it'd crushed the others. Tanner let it happen, she let it try, she let it contort around her midsection. It wouldn't find anything, she'd lost everything in there, it was just muscle and bone and fire. Melted away all the wax, and now she was just solidity. She dared it to try. She dared it to try.
Stop it. Please.
When her fist emerged, it was studded with human molars. Didn't even feel the pain. She punched the creature again, pummelling into its brain with its own teeth. The brain, perversely, tried to crawl up, senseless and blind, eager for the contamination littering her coat and armour and pelt. Grey-pink and shaped like clouds, undulating up on half-formed appendages, moving with a sound like a boot being dragged out of mud over and over and over, the sucking, slurping wetness that made Tanner shiver in disgust. Another punch, a flick to send the brain into the mire where bloated cockroaches set up it in an orgiastic frenzy.
Finally, the hairless ferret-man-lamprey fell back, twitching silently.
Fire put it to sleep for good.
Another soldier died nearby. This one was... eaten from the inside out. She didn't know how they'd gotten inside, but they had. He gibbered and spluttered, incomprehensible sounds emerging from the rattle of the gas mask... and a set of long, long, spidery legs began to emerge from the filter, twitching and tasting the air... then more, more still, from the eyes, and more from the gloves, and more, and more, a great collective swarm of spider legs, brown and full of ingrown hairs that rasped and stuck and clung. He was twitching, the spider-collective learning to pilot him, and all the while more legs emerged, spiralling onwards and onwards until they were closer to articulated, jointed tentacles, and they were growing in such numbers that they could wrap around the entire body, piloting it inside and out, until there was nothing but a man-shaped sculpture of brown clicking legs, wrapping around and around and around like a primitive idol woven from roots, and-
Tanner crushed his head into a crater with her axe.
The legs tried to hook around it. To bring it into the mass. Tanner knew not to kick this one - she just wrenched her axe out, then got to work on the limbs, crushing and cutting and slicing and-
It fell apart, and the legs began their evacuation, losing all form and slithering in Tanner's direction with genocidal fury, and Tanner used the axe to fling it, end over end, this slithering mass of hungry roots, into the nearest fire. When it writhed, the fluid inside evaporated and popped from the joints, one at a time. The smell was like that of a dry field in summer - just for a second, she remembered summer.
And just as quickly, she forgot it.
Turned away and got back to work.
The tide was serious, this time. They were killing more soldiers than ever before, but... the soldiers were giving as good as they got. Struggling to defend. The bunker was silent and almost mocking, demanding to be guarded yet remained locked to the soldiers dying in its name.
A crab-thing, albino, with a tiny toothless mouth filled with yellow fluid, and claws made of metal while human-like ruptured eyes protruded from stalks, scuttled over, fluid dripping, melting everything it touched, virulent venom-poison... and near it were more of the Rabid, the insane diseased hounds that wept poisonous drool from mouths opening along the head, the back, the sides, the legs, the arms, the scalp. A tapestry of interlocking mouths, filled with so much clear, thick spit that there was no telling if there were teeth inside. Tanner knew there must be. Small and black, ragged and spiralling, closer to drills than anything else.
She crushed them all out of the way, and flung them into fires.
They were efficient, now. Not giving fire to each mutant. But forming a towering pillar of the stuff, and simply fuelling it up. Flinging all mutants into it. Shoot to divide, shoot to obliterate limbs and neutralise threat, then attack with anything - pistols for short range, shotguns too, and bayonets, swords, clubs, anything to shove the bodies into the pillar. Offerings to an unknown god. Or goddess. The mutants had changed, once again. Not only were they acting more brutally, more relentlessly, they were... covered in boils. Each and every one, huge red boils that detonated before they could enter the fire. And from the boils would emerge worms, long and twisting, blind and seeking. Evacuations for the contamination. Slash them, and they popped readily, popped and sprayed their milky-white medium - itself cells of the worm, bursting with contamination to devour. They'd slither madly for the nearest mutant, which immediately collected them, or they turned black with reclamation-insects and shrivelled up quickly. A mole approached, something like a mole, with black-pink flesh, and thick, long, white tendrils sprouting like trings of mould from all over its body, each one lashing and dripping with venom... she crushed the skull, winced as it flailed madly, then flung it into the flames.
The mutants were just trying to exterminate them, by any means necessary. Strategy was reserved for their glands, which were many - some of them were weighed down with white spongy armour produced tumour-like from infernal red glands along the back, the aforementioned worm-boils to keep their contamination intact, the implanted diseases that festered and transformed, the spinnerets in their hands which let them clamber up the sides of the bunker when they reached it, leaping down to embrace the soldiers from above. One such soldier was crushed under the weight of a twitching thing, translucent and silvery, almost a monkey but not quite, more like a human at an earlier stage of development, covered in suckers. Every last inch of the creature was covered in suckers, especially the large blind head, which extended backwards in a long, elegant crescent, so long it almost touched the small of the sucker-linked back. The soldier crumpled... and when others ripped the creature away, it left its skin behind.
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A layer of cloying, mucus-like sucker-laden skin that refused to leave, and base don the gurgling, was slowly entering through the filter...
A soldier executed him on the spot before he could suffer much more. Dumped the whole thing on the fire.
The addition of a genuine, unmutated human was enough to make the air smell like cooking pork, and Tanner's stomach rumbled involuntarily.
...Eygi...
I still want to talk to you.
Would you apologise for what you said about me?
Or would you double down?
Wonder if you have children yet. If you'll ever have children. I hope your husband is a good one, he ought to be to deserve you.
Stop it.
Tanner was an unexternalised woman. She had no referents. Her precedent was her present was her future.
If you turned back time, you might find a mind like hers. All the unnecessary elements drifting out of her ears in a putrid green haze, her mind replaced with a slumbering black eel with a yellow stomach, her eyes widening and widening and darkening until they resembled the reflective stones at the bottom of rivers, until they resembled mutalith - the dark eyes necessary to see in the primordial nothingness. She'd seen a diagram of a foetus once, they always had black eyes, all the better to soak up the limited light of the womb, to detect everything. Her skin would sink against her bones and muscle, her organs would be exhaled... and she'd become this strange unexternal creature, self-sufficient, generating everything she needed through careful glands nestled amidst the twitching coils of muscle like pearls in an oyster. She would be a pearl-fed creature, and her mouth would heal over like an old wound...
She crushed old bones under her boots, she drove aside the fallen, red-hot iron of lost guns and armour and chitin, she stood beside Rekidans who towered above her head and fought like devils with mad laughter on their lips. The sky was red - she was certain of it. Might as well be, she was no longer an external being, and that meant the universe was only the one she built around herself. The white of the snow seemed to be the white-hot glow of combusting magnesium, the black was volatile coal, the red was fire. The cremation pillar was apocalyptically high, it seemed to be a burning ladder stretching from the earth to the sky, it sent out scout divisions of smoke to explore the heavens before long thrusting tongues of flame could enter through them, concealed and protected by the greasy smoggy outriders, until Rekida was the centre of the world, the pillar which held it all up.
One day I'll have a little house by a river, and I'll wear small spectacles on my nose. I don't know why the spectacles are important.
But they very much are.
The mutant tide was constant and savage.
All around her people were dying. Maybe she was dying, too. A creature approached wetly over the mud... it was a slunk. Premature birth of a cow's calf. Skin as thin as tissue paper, eyes too large for the skull... still glistening with amniotic fluid that presumably served some combat purpose. Skin was the colour of mud, and was immaculate, each hair perfectly formed, not a single deformation or flaw or scar. The snout was gone, all that remained was a long red stinger that dripped with more liquid, and a nodule of bone clung to the top. It stumbled over the ground towards her on hooves that clattered against the bones and metal... the back legs contorted like those of a grasshopper, joints clicking, and the stinking, slippery thing launched itself in her direction. It was too fast - crashed into her chest, and the limbs were now spreading out, locking around her like a harness while the stinger tried to force its way through her mask, the huge, dark, infantile eyes continuing to stare up. She was near the pillar-
And she leant towards it.
Heard the creature begin to fry, and her arms worked to tear it off. The huge eyes continued to stare unblinking, swimming like great pools of oil, the hooves around her back starting to lock together into a lattice of bone tissue...
One of the soldiers impaled it with a bayonet. From the pierced lungs issued an involuntary sigh of escaping air. The creature sagged...
And she flung it into the fire.
The amniotic fluid was still on her. Thick membrane, crawling up to suffocate her.
"Let me."
Ms. Blue. Thought she was assigned somewhere else. She was scraping at Tanner's front with the blade of her bayonet, gently removing the crawling membrane, sending it away in chunks into the fire until all structural stability collapsed and the effort to smother her was abandoned. Tanner nodded in thanks, before moving back to the carnage.
Her mind continued to slip.
Endless vignettes of warfare. Animal bodies, human bodies, abstract bodies, all of them just vessels for the same basic rot. She wasn't fighting them, she was fighting the thing inside of them, and that... that was always being reclaimed. The horde was the pulsing of a sluggish heart, she realised. Blood was sent out, they repelled it, and the blood was drawn back in. The Great War must've been just... one tremendous beat of the world's heart, whatever it was that pulsed contamination through the underground rivers. One day it would beat again, and a crimson tide like no other would come. She realised, suddenly, that that was it - the intelligence controlling it. Just another heart. Find the heart, stab the heart, and the horde would vanish. She'd... no, don't be silly. Focus on fighting. The mutants were killing more than before. And by the time the pillar was no longer needed, when the tide was retreating...
They'd lost most of the humans defending this bunker.
Those who remained were dead on their feet. Exhausted. Staring ahead sightlessly, and taking in long, ragged breaths. Tanner barely realised the battle was over until the pillar started to decline, no-one bothering to add more fuel to it now that there was no need for cremations. It slowly burned down, until nothing but simmering, sullen coals gleamed in the night. Tanner was very, very still. Leaning on her axe for support. Somehow, she didn't feel remotely tired. Too refined for that. Too bright. She waited... and all eyes were on her. She knew that. She could feel their eyes, could sense them as keenly as she sensed light or sound. They were looking to her like a farmer would look to the clouds, worrying about rain and sun and snow and drought. She stayed standing - not because she wanted to lead them by example, just... she wanted to stand. She was unexternal. She lacked referents. The business of her mind was her own, she didn't outsource any element of it, not a jot, not an atom. She was devoid of anxiety, because there was nothing for her to be anxious about. Right now, her business was drawing breath.
She did this successfully.
Now, she had to draw it again.
Good job, Tanner.
Really aceing respiration.
Almost as well as she aced skull-smashing.
...oh, that was a career choice. Maybe she could become one of those bone-breakers that worked in the colonies, smashing up things to make glue and whatnot. She could become silent and- stop it. Time was here. Time beyond was none. If she thought about time for too long, she became mired in responsibilities and stress and the knowledge that she now had control of the entire colony. She gritted her teeth... and began to examine the losses. They were down by most of this bunker's force, and the flares in the sky... all the bunkers were under attack. Her own men (her men, a judge should not think these things, a judge shouldn't have people, shouldn't command based on her own inclinations, she should just be a living channel of the law - stop it) were too tired to go and reinforce them. She couldn't travel alone for the sake of safety, bringing someone else wasn't an option... and if the tide here had retreated, it might well be retreating elsewhere. The bodies of the dead needed to be heaped and burned, their equipment with them. Too contaminated. Get them out of their armour, and they'd have armour contaminated beyond belief on one side, and swiftly contaminated on the other, if not already completely ruined by whatever mutation had killed the soldier in the first place.
Each one of these soldiers required shipments from Fidelizh to outfit. Not one soldier could be produced by the colony, they lacked the resources, they lacked the facilities, they lacked the expertise. Each lost man was a permanent lacuna in their supplies until spring came and... did something.
They couldn't survive months of this, she realised wearily.
They just couldn't. It wasn't possible. Her head was full of steel wool, and the buzzing of the infinite insects, still plentiful as they recycled the last of the matter, seemed to emanate from inside her own skull as much as from the world beyond. Even if the food reserves held out, even if the bunkers remained secure... alright, be generous. Worst case, if the severity of the attacks went down over time, as the mutants found themselves starved for contamination to perform all these exceedingly severe mutations on their own kind, and ran out of basic meat to mutate and had to start resorting to suboptimal samples, they might last a few weeks, at best. Then they'd run out of soldiers. Even if the bunkers held, the soldiers guarding them wouldn't. And if the soldiers went into the bunkers for shelter, the mutants would have free reign to just... drown the filters in acute contamination. If the rate remained the same, they'd be out of soldiers in a week. Less, likely. Assume that novices were weeded out and only the skilled remained, a kind of warrior aristocracy that had the right fitness, the right instincts, the right luck... now, factor in the bouncers she could bring...
The numbers just weren't adding up to anything close to survival.
The mutants had sealed off the Breach. Getting out that way wasn't an option, evacuation wasn't an option. And... as much as she hated to admit it...
Each time she was out here, she brushed death. That porous man had been almost immobilised by his previous strike on a dead soldier. If that had hit her, she'd be in that soldier's place, or very close to it... and that calf, she'd actually been a little taken aback by it. Still. Maybe the fact that the intelligence was sending snucks at her said that it was running low, maybe it'd already burned through the best and brightest of its mutants. Who could say? That... pelican spider had been tremendously strong, the bird overhead continued to circle in defiance of the occasional gun levelled at it, the occasional bullet that invariably missed... the porous man had been deadly, and... well, who could say how many.
...the mutants had massacred people tonight.
They could replace themselves. The humans couldn't.
This alone would turn the colony into a mass grave.
Suddenly, out of the darkness came a sharp, sharp cough.
Tanner's mind immediately slipped back to the bright calm. She knew that cough. The cough of a Consumptive, one of the diseased things afflicted by tuberculosis. Did they have more diseased? Did they have more stored under the ice? Was that how this war was going to go - alternating attacks, the flame-hungry bodies of diseased, then the sharp probing decimation of the intelligents, and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until every human was wiped out?
The thought was beyond her. She was just a machine. No humans here.
Her axe swung up to her shoulder, and she loped forwards, crushing carbonised bodies underfoot, empty sockets staring at her from malformed skulls. The snow was starting to fall, and she could feel the wind cutting through her uniform, chilling her flesh. Her buffalo pelt flowed around her... that made her feel better, feel stronger. The cough came again...
And a familiar face stared out of the dark.
Tanner froze.
Canima.
Canima's face. The same... the same hardness, the same sharp bones, the same downcast tint of the mouth. Even had the same suit, tweed and tight and with gleaming cufflinks... his nephew was inside the bunker he was attacking. No-one was behind him. No bodies. And Canima... there wasn't much of him left. His chest had shrivelled until the suit hung lank and limp from his frame, soaked with melted snow until it stank of must and mould. His coughs were sharp as rifle retorts, and his face was starting to shrink around itself, just a little. And the back of his head remained missing. The disease didn't need his brain to function - it just needed a hollow shell, flesh, bones, a functional system once animated by dreadful intelligence.
Tanner removed his head with a single swing, her heart absolutely still.
His flesh cracked when she struck it.
Cracked like the ice on a lake.
Head in one direction. Body falling in the other. Ms. Blue was at Tanner's side in seconds, and her flamethrower turned the body to ash, killed the disease before it could move on. No others came. But Ms. Blue...
"Bastard."
Tanner's eyes slowly slid to her. Ms. Blue flashed a feral grin behind her mask - Tanner could tell by the sudden and vicious crinkling of her eyes.
"He was, ma'am. Bastard. Glad you took over."
Tanner was very still indeed.
And the bright calm erased the instinctive terror, disgust, cowardice. There was no space for those feelings in her, because they were rooted on a past which didn't exist. All that existed was herself in this instant, the master of her own little universe, a blazing star which glowed with unyielding fury without reflection. Normal humans were fragmentary - a child, an adolescent, an adult, a senior, a corpse. Unemployed, enslaved, freed, profitable, commanding. They were fragments, existing as temporary aspects which unfolded, flowered, and then burst to reveal the next, a schizophrenic nesting doll. When the aspects wouldn't unfold, she felt sick, a kind of ingrowth of the soul, as happened to toenails and hairs. The debauchee struggling to climb out of the worker, the worker struggling to climb out of the student, strangling on their own umbilical cords. To be her was to be bright. To give without thinking, to emanate without imagination, to just be. To be... be total. Absolute. Irreducible. It was calm. It was terrifying. It was chaos and light and sound. It was to be an explosion. It meant unreflective violence, it meant unthinking action, it meant forgetting the past, because... because she'd seen that shadow on the horizon, the representation of all she left behind, the impressions she cultivated, and it was a shrivelled, mean, cruel thing. The only thing to do was to burn it, to live without thinking of it, because it was still there. But in the bright calm, there was no shadow.
I wonder what Marana's sister looks like. I wonder if she's a nice enough person who just wanted to do something different to her alcoholic sibling.
I hope she doesn't miss her sister. I hope she's happy with Algi. I wonder what that would be like - wrapping around someone, knowing them, loving them, being with them. I wonder if Mother felt that way with Father.
It sounded woefully relative. Sounded like going back to the way she'd been before. Cowardly. Weak. Crumbling. Spider tangled in a web she spun.
As she was...
She was as calm as she appeared.
Yes. She. Was. And. She. Brooked. No. Argument.
"Hm. Why are you here? This isn't your post."
"Oh."
Ms. Blue seemed to be blushing.
"Well. Ah. Well, I was... part of the group that the freaks in that criminal bunker sent away. And I was wondering how... you were. Ma'am. I wanted to make sure you were alright. Things being as dangerous as they are. Honoured judge. Ma'am. Commander."
Tanner was a very calm person. Not sure if she'd mentioned that yet.
"Hm."
She turned away.
Turned back.
"...may I ask something, Kal?"
"Of course, ma'am. Anything."
"...what do you think of the siege? At present?"
The woman blinked.
"Oh. Well. I think it's just... awful, of course. But I'm glad you're with us. I think, if you're... with us, we can probably pull through with anything. I mean, you just exist, and... all the corruption, it just drains out. Canima and his Erlize spooks, they're gone. The corrupt Sersas, they're gone. The cartel, that's gone. I mean, you go into the earth and bring us giants, ma'am. I think if anyone can lead us to see tomorrow, it'll be you. Better than any of the others, in my eyes. If you'll pardon me being so forward, ma'am."
Tanner stared. Made no indications of objecting. Ms. Blue let out a desperate, strangled little giggle, muffled by her gas mask, and kept going, rushing over her own words.
"It's... like you're larger than life, ma'am. It's like something out of a myth, like... something you talk about when founding something. They'll tell stories about you for years, ma'am. I'm sure of it. But with the governor, it was like... everything was so real. He wore suits, he ordered us around, he was just so grey... and Canima, he was a spook, a spook and a half. And there were criminals, and corruption, and everything was just so... so normal. But then you came along. And it's like you brought a whole world with you. A world we used to think about, a world with giants and ancient legacies and heroes and villains and conquerors and good against evil and monsters in the dark and..."
She pressed a little closer.
"You make the world so bright, ma'am. You make me - and the rest of us - feel like we're in something so... so big, it's hard to even be tired. I mean, the heroes never got tired, and their armies were always in their service, and it's just... you make us feel like children, ma'am. Children listening to stories for the first time, and believing them. Now we just have more firepower, ma'am."
Tanner was trying to invent a reason to leave. Gods, this was... awful, she... she didn't do this, she was blundering, she was... she was possessed by bright calm. If she was blundering, then that was because the old Tanner had been a blunderer, now she was smoother, harder, paler, stranger, brighter. Her mind warred between two poles. One screamed to anchor herself in embarrassment and humiliation, all the usual tools of restraint. Another screamed to shed them, because if she didn't, then she would be crushed under the weight of command that had been foisted on her by the incompetence, corruption, and bad luck of others. The two were irreconcilable. Humiliation and restraint... bright calm and boiling ego.
One Tanner and another Tanner. Never the two should meet.
The choice was... simpler than she thought it would be.
One Tanner was a panicking, nervous girl who was obsessed with how others saw her and had starved herself until she was practically fainting on her feet because she was so... completely devoted to not looking lazy.
The other Tanner had taken over the colony, and smashed skulls. Was a non-relative being. Completely deanxietised.
She hummed. Thoughtfully.
"I... see."
Ms. Blue shrank back a little, cringing with a fair amount of embarrassment at how open she'd been.
"...once morning comes, I think... there needs to be consideration of further plans."
"Beyond holding out?"
"Beyond that. I'm sure that's working, but I think we have more to do."
Normally, she'd just shrug and get back to work, get back to hacking at the bodies. Like she'd said - attacking was a move of incalculable risk, it was something that required genuine expertise, that could go catastrophically wrong. Any idiot could stand still and hit things, moving into the city would be significantly more complex. And two Sersas, who she still hadn't met and doubted she ever would, were poorly trusted by the men, and the last Sersa was connected to the Erlize, not to mention seriously wounded. Leaving her. And her alone. All the others were dead or gone. The burning body of Canima lay at her feet, and his skull, the back cracked away like he'd been scalped rather too vigorously, grinned toothlessly at her. Never even seen Vyuli's body. Wondered if he looked sad or angry when he died.
...but... but...
The bright calm carried a hint of confidence.
A hint of... of self-belief.
She might as well try.
"I want to see what they're actually here to find."
A small, deep breath.
"I want to see the plug at the centre. The seal the military made when they first arrived - the place where the mutants drilled through to the underground river back in the war."
Ms. Blue blinked in confusion.
"Ma'am?"
Tanner stared.
"Hm?"
The confusion vanished, replaced with conviction, obedience, devotion.
"Nothing, ma'am. Nothing at all. Whatever you say, ma'am."
Tanner shrugged vaguely.
"I know it seems odd. I'm just trying to figure out what it is they want."
Because she needed a silver bullet. Because she could see, looking at the wounded and the dying and the dead, that the defences she'd set up... she was barely holding the colony together, she'd stopped two civil wars and a doomed evacuation, she'd organised a defence and recruited allies, she'd kept things stable when Canima, Vyuli, and the governor were all lying dead in the ground - or on the ground, as the case may be. When the conspiracies around the colony cannibalised themselves, she'd been there stopping the colony itself from being swallowed up with them.
And her bright calm refused to tolerate any kind of... of placid acceptance of martyrdom. She had to try something, she couldn't just lie down and die, that was... that was something the old Tanner would do, the coward Tanner, the friendless and ignorant Tanner, the relative Tanner. Had to... had to at least do something. If she found out what they wanted, maybe she could counter them more specifically - her original tactic of 'build dam after dam after dam and hope the tide would eventually wear itself out' was being disproved in front of her eyes, they were running low on fuel, equipment, and men, they were surrounded by mutants who were growing more sophisticated with their attacks, they did not have time.
When she'd started out, she'd been... almost convinced they'd win, because the idea of a well-armed colony losing to a bunch of mutants was just beyond her. That was before she saw just how sophisticated contamination could be.
Made her wonder how humans had ever survived the Great War.
Now, she was realistic. The old Tanner would've crumbled under that realism, her cowardice taking hold - stay still, stand her ground, die like a good judge. The new Tanner, the one who could function in these conditions, wouldn't do any of that. Not unless there was no other option.
What would the mutants want? Option one - the colonists. Capture them, and drag their bodies for processing. This was unlikely. In the last few days, they'd probably lost more meat than they'd gain from devouring the colony, and restarting the Great War wasn't really on the cards, not with the south so prepared, Still had veterans of the war in charge in some states, for crying out loud. The underground river could be accessed, there was a lift down there, built by theurgists. So... what? What could they want? What could they possibly want, if she assumed there was a reason?
The centre of the city, maybe. Total control of it. Maybe something had been buried there, maybe they wanted this city for themselves, needed all the colonists gone, wiped out, needed this place for an extended period. Maybe something was buried. A weapon... she had a sudden idea - maybe a titan, maybe one of those creatures that had been by the Tulavanta, incapable of dying even decades later. Maybe they were looking for one, or something else, something...
She didn't know.
But she wanted to look.
"Do you know the way, Kal?"
"Yes, ma'am. Happy to lead you, ma'am."
"Need to rest?"
"Not at all, commander. Not at all. Whatever you require of me, I'll be happy to provide, ma'am."
And that was all that needed saying.
Their uniforms still drenched in gore from the last battle, their eyes still hollowed from the carnage, the skin around them red and raw from gazing at too-bright fires, their skin bruised by gripping limbs, their hands taut around weapons, incapable of letting them go...
They moved out.