CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR - ROARING TIDES
Yan-Lam and Marana stared mutely at Tanner as she began to unlock the door. Tanner turned vaguely in their direction, aware that her eyes were barely visible behind the lenses of the mask, while doors slammed shut. The bunker was subdividing to keep contamination out - an improvised quarantine, not perfect. If Tanner wanted to get back inside, and she imagined she would, then she'd have to go into this corridor, then into a side-room, then wait for the inhabitants of the bunker to come out, sterilise the corridor, let her out, sterilise her, and then, then she could return to the bunker. Not perfect, not even close, but... they weren't theurgists. Didn't have fancy sealed chambers for decontamination. She gave the two a look.
"You should get back in with the rest. Opening the door in a moment."
Marana spoke delicately.
"Tanner, darling, what... exactly are you intending on doing?"
Tanner stopped.
"Pardon?"
"I mean, you're not a general, you're not a soldier, you're not a field commander, I... don't think you've even been trained in combat."
The idea of staying in the bunker for the duration had failed to occur to her. Largely because... uh... well, it was nonsensical. She had to go out and do something. Staying indoors was cowardice, she'd go completely insane if she did this, and... well... maybe there was cowardice in leaving, too - if she left, she'd be among the first to die if things went truly awfully. This couldn't be said for the bunkers, which would be peeled open one by one as the mutants infested further. Maybe there was a suicidal element here. If she'd made mistakes, let her not live with them longer than she needed to. Don't make her endure and be forced to hold a gun to her chin when the loss came. Even victory might kill her, she could die in the first rush, become a martyr that helped repel the second, the third, however many it took. And then the colony would be up to someone else. Canima... no, not him, he still hadn't shown up. At this stage she thought he might well be dead. Seemed likely, and she was too stressed to be overly concerned about it. Ultimately, she might not live to see tomorrow, why worry about an old man who might be dead?
To leave was to surrender herself to momentum, to enmesh herself in the strands of her own plan. Surrender herself to herself. To Tanner she commended Tanner's health, to Tanner she offered Tanner's life. She grimaced, thankful for the anonymity of the mask.
"I have business. I need to supervise things."
"You're not trained, darling, you're-"
"I'm aware."
She'd still beaten one of the Rekidan mutants half to death with her bare hands, and knew she could've finished the job. She'd still fought against grown men numbering about half a dozen, and come out on top when they hadn't got the jump on her with dirty tricks. She was untrained, but she was large. She had an axe. That had to mean something. Not that she said this, because if she said it, she'd have to listen to it, and if she listened to it, she could immediately and instinctually point out the flaws in her thinking. And that would paralyse her. And paralysis would keep her here.
"I'm leaving. You two are staying."
Yan-Lam nodded obediently. Good. Marana's face twisted with familiar guilt. Not sure why she was so guilty. Every step Tanner had taken was, thus far, keeping them alive. If Tanner hadn't done this, they'd be dead. And she imagined Marana would be rather more distraught by that than anything else.
"Keep an eye on the mutant, and do not let her out. Not under any circumstances. If Tom-Tom needs to move cells, fine. If you need to let her out for her own safety, fine. Telegram the updates from the detectors to Bayai's bunker."
"Yes, miss."
A slight bow of her head.
"Good luck, miss."
"...thank you. You too."
All-Name glanced up, his own gear almost in place, his eyes wide with fear. Despite it all, he still feared what lay outside this bunker. Hadn't even needed to ask him to come, and that made her feel utterly relieved. She needed him to translate for the Rekidans - a prospect she was terrified of was the Rekidans and the Fidelizhi getting into some sort of fracas simply because of the language barrier. His voice was... surprisingly small, and his scars faded smoothly in the pale flesh of his face. He opened his mouth to say something to Yan-Lam... then shut it, and put on his gas mask, smoothly adjusting the straps.
Marana finally, finally complied.
"Good luck, Tanner. And come back."
"I'll try."
"...best I can ask for, I suppose."
A highly correct statement. The two vanished back into the deeper areas of the bunker, and Tanner continued her work. The world beyond... she saw only a sliver of it, then more and more as the metal doors creaked open. The moment it was wide enough, she dashed through, All-Name slithering behind her, and she slammed the door shut. Some of the locks were already going to be clicking into place - a measure to make it easier to prevent exposure to the outside. Not perfect, but nothing was. The world was... silent chaos. The sky was red. The sun was a bloody disk, ringed with spiralling auroras of crimson and orange. Innumerable stars danced about in the heavens, some smaller than a candle-flame, some so large and so bright that it was almost impossible to look at them. The city below, though... the sky wasn't real, she knew it wasn't, and it didn't properly reflect from the stone below, leaving everything pale and flawless, shimmering silver under the infernal heavens. Once, entering somewhere like this would've made her muscles tighten, her spare mass disintegrating in second, everything packed into the most efficient shape possible. Now... she hadn't relaxed in over a week. She had nothing left to shed.
She could smell chaos.
But to her eyes... nothing.
They were coming, though. Of course they were coming. The two Rekidans, Ms. Sulphur and Ms. Starfish, nodded respectfully to her, and the former leaned forward to pinch All-Name's cheek through his mask, a gesture he received without giving a response in return. Too nervous to object. Oddly, Tanner found herself feeling a little jealous of that. Not the friendliness or the clear affection Ms. Sulphur had for the lad, but... the fact that, without a doubt, she was friendly and accepting of his purpose. Marana was a good friend, but she didn't understand that Tanner had to do this, that there'd never really been a choice, that the momentum couldn't be denied. Yan-Lam understood a little better, but had her own priorities, her own worrying habits. Ms. Sulphur and All-Name would be in absolute harmony. Ms. Sulphur encouraging him to be the last heir of all the noble lines, the honourable final ending of Rekida... while at the same time being genuinely affectionate, removing his mutations with her teeth and her nails, picking him clean like a cat with a kitten. No guilt, no regret, nothing. The jealousy faded almost immediately, but... there was an imprint in her grey matter. Somewhere.
...hm. Maybe her own mother would've done that. Go on, you got a giant packet of money, you were able to become a judge, becoming a judge brought you here, I'm not standing around waiting for you to waste that investment. My cousin died to get you to this point in your life, by gum.
Inaccurate. Her mother never said 'by gum'. Then again, maybe she did now. Not like they talked.
She froze.
Her... father was still in Mahar Jovan. Her mother was, too. The lodge passed from her mind easily, she had no love for that place, but... those two. Those two.
She stared at her own hands.
...she'd used these hands to hold a fish slicer for hours and hours after school. Father had taught her how to do it, how to slip it through the vulnerabilities in the bones and flesh, how to rip out the spine and guts, how to... do it all in a matter of seconds.
She wanted to see her father again.
Wanted to see her mother.
Wanted to at least try and repair things with her. Not like... like she had much else. Marana was an alcoholic who'd flit away back to her life, Yan-Lam was a child and needed an actual parent, ideally two, and Eygi had never been her friend to begin with. If she survived all of this, she'd have her parents, and nothing else. Colleagues would disown her, or would certainly look at her differently. Differently enough. For a second, in the silent chaos, she felt a vast and unbearable solitude that seemed to envelop the whole world.
Then it was gone.
She clutched the axe harder.
And began her march towards the gate. The bunkers nearby were all dimly wailing as their detectors continued to climb. The red sky leered down. The red sun blazed without heat. The walls loomed.
Had work to do.
Didn't take her long to arrive at the Breach - defences were already set up, soldiers were ready, and... the moment they saw her, there was a stiffening of backs, a snapping of salutes, a clicking of heels. If Ms. Blue was here, she was probably foaming at the mouth. Bayai... was it Bayai? No, yes, definitely him, even if his face was invisible and his voice muffled and his frame obscured by layers of protective gear. Sersa Bayai was talking to a squadron of soldiers, giving them sharp orders to plug gaps in the defence, to keep an eye on angles which seemed impossible to attack from. The enemy could crawl over vertical surfaces, they could leap and glide, they could undulate and clamber and fly and swoop, they were animals, and ought to be treated as unpredictable as a basic rule. Burn them. Burn them all. And then keep burning until the detectors stopped screaming. The grey vagueness she'd once seen the eyes of her bunker's soldiers was absent here, snapped away and buried - idly, she thought of the blisters which formed over severe burns. Fluid, hazy and thin, building up over an injury to cool it, to soothe it, to comfort it... that vagueness seemed to serve an identical purpose, cooling the fire of combat and lulling the mind to sleep.
And the thumping of the explosives under the earth had popped the blisters, and let the raw, flint-like flesh gleam in the sunlight.
"Sersa."
The officer twitched, and his armour rattled.
"Ah. Honoured judge. Surprised to see you."
Tanner didn't respond, and Bayai didn't press any further.
Excellent.
"How close are they?"
"Still remaining below, we think. Probably had a few scouts coming, but... we doubt we've killed many of them. Just managed to delay them."
"Any chance of them digging through the blockage?"
Another suited man coughed, spoke in an accent that was vaguely Nalseri, something she'd learned to pick out after a week of isolation with All-Name - not Vyuli, thankfully, but one of his bouncers.
"Doubt it, ma'am."
Ma'am? A bouncer was calling her... anyway.
"Certain?"
"Certain enough. Boss said that the tunnels would just keep caving in, he tried to dig out some tunnels a while ago, repair some collapsed stuff. Stone just keeps coming down on top of you, can't get in proper supports before everything crushes it back down, eventually you just have to accept that the thing is blocked."
Tanner turned to All-Name.
"How did your lot manage it?"
"...we had nothing else to do for hundreds of years, judge."
Right. Made sense. Well, that was a relief. Still. She glanced up at the cold-houses, slumbering on the horizon, their theurgic engines still operational even though there was nothing left to preserve. Bayai had a map spread open on a nearby table, and she checked it quickly, confirming her old observations. Right - the way the city was laid out, the mutants would need to stream in from quite a distance, there was nowhere to hide in the landscape closer to the Breach. If they were still hidden, they'd need to either be underground in (presumably) limited numbers for the sake of stealth, or they were at a fair distance. Of course, that meant there wouldn't be a slow trickle of them. There'd be a crashing wave, unsubtle and blunt.
The telegram clicked, tiny metal legs stamped into a long string of paper... Tanner read it off quickly out of the corner of her eye, still figuring out some way of the mutants approaching by perfect stealth...
T - redhead is changed STOP.
Tanner blinked.
B - clarify STOP.
T - redhead is normal, no speech or screams, but seems confused, keeps pacing around in circle, based on noises.
Could be a dupe. The mutant 'commander' - still figuring out the right word, maybe Lyur's crow-wind, maybe a signal, or... there, the harmonising signal. The harmonising signal might be getting the mutant to act more ordinary to lure them into a false sense of security. Or, alternatively, this meant the forces in the tunnels were retreating, the mutant was back to her normal self. Didn't want to rely on her for this sort of thing, it was too easy to send false confirmations. But... maybe. Maybe. Even so. One of the Rekidans received orders translated by All-Name, instructing them to make sure nothing could get up. She checked every report, every paper at her disposal, even as the rattling of her filters seemed to commit to driving her to distraction. The bombs had all gone off successfully, the theurgists with their various tools had confirmed it, according to this readout. Everything else was primed to go, they'd been preparing this for days. The map showed no other ways of stealthy approach, the colony was surrounded by enough open ground that, inevitably, the mutants would reveal themselves.
She waited.
And...
And there.
There was one of the first.
Saw it, clambering over the horizon. Unmistakeably inhuman. Unmistakeably non-animal. Gods, it must be massive... the soldiers noticed it too, and a wave of change ran up and down the line. The mutants might be out of the tunnel, ready to rejoin their forces. They were about to make the approach.
The creature... no idea what it truly was, it was just a vague outline against the red sky. But it wavered there for a few seconds, presumably just... examining them. Did mutants feel doubt? Did they wonder 'ah, what approach to take, what approach to take' when confronted with a problem? Somehow that felt too human, she thought... well, they ought to just do things with mechanical ease. Problems already accounted for, doubt absent, everything done in the most calculated possible fashion. Then again, if that the case, they probably would've won the Great War.
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...then again, at least some had survived it.
The creature paused...
Then moved.
And behind it came the tide.
She'd been right.
She'd been right. By all the gods she'd been right. Still hadn't quite believed it until she saw the bodies. Bodies beyond her wildest imaginings.
This was the tide which had almost drowned humanity.
...by every god, how had they survived?
The smell of urine entered the air. Newer soldiers, raised on stories, too tense to care about embarrassment. Some were muttering to themselves. Too many were looking to Tanner, staring at her like she was a lucky charm, an idol, a totem, staring at her instead of the enemy. Bayai stuffed his hands behind his back and gripped them tightly, just to stop them shaking. The crackling stench of contamination was already in the air, the exhalations of mutated mouths and the contractions of mutated lungs. The musk that would've hung over a humanless world. The Rekidans were exultant, mouths twisting into enormous grins, weapons twitching happily in their grip, eager to get to work. In front of them was glorious suicide and smug satisfaction, in front of them was the ending they'd deserved. Ms. Sulphur growled and purred simultaneously, while Ms. Starfish oozed with happiness. The General, standing a little further back, stood to his full height and let his red hair blow freely in the contaminated wind, eyes closing for a second in sheer bliss.
They were coming.
The tide was...
It was more than she expected.
The hills were black with bodies in moments.
They crawled on enormous insectile legs. They bounded on the muscular legs of horses and wolves and buffalo and other things besides. They glided on wings, buzzed on gossamer-thin shreds of wing-matter from mosquitoes and ants. Their fangs were gleaming beneath universally ruptured eyes. The younger mutants were just... animals, malformed and combined messily with others. Dogs with the armour-plating of beetles, beetles the size of horses and packed out with anonymous furry matter from buffalo, buffalo with pseudo-fur made out of compacted leeches, their mouths distending and filling with rings upon rings upon rings of teeth, chaotic wrecks that resembled nothing at all but living cancers that moved on pseudopods and clung messily to the sides of more able brethren, fish with the legs of spiders and eyes that bulged with chelicerae, wheezing through grossly enlarged mouths and lung-matter that oozed from their gills, birds that had long-since given up flight in favour of strength and now moved on long, long legs that clicked and snapped as they articulated unnaturally, crows only recognisable by their beaks and clumps of feathers sticking out from living mounds of carrion, wolves merging into a single mass, a wolf-centipede with a hundred paws that moved with perverse grace as their many, many heads took bites of air in eager anticipation, mounds of briars that impaled dozens of animals and animated them as legs and teeth and hands, humans with mottled flesh and mindless eyes riding naked upon the land, a man who's clothes had reanimated and mutated until he seemed to be trying to grow a nest of sticky, entrapping wool in which small animals hung, a woman who crawled on all fours while a pregnant belly writhed with life, a serpent derived from a human spinal cord with venom-sacs that resembled swollen purple breasts and fangs longer than Tanner's arm, an enormous human heart that crawled on valve-ridden legs and gasped at the air through vessels filled with grinding molars...
And the water. She never... most mutants never grew to a tremendous size. But the flies, the gnats, the tiniest of insects... a living, wriggling carpet that dwelled underneath and around and on the larger brethren, a black-red-yellow-green-purple carpet that flashed with bioluminescence, that merged and split apart smoothly, rats that wept trains of oversized bacteria, flies that bumbled on malformed wings and were frequently snapped out of the air by their kin, sparrows with mosquito proboscises, lizards with smooth shells of protein, like something out of a biology textbook, jellyfish that simply clung and swung and shimmered... jellyfish in general hung above the horde, glowing a soft, soft blue-purple, their tentacles long enough to dwarf Tanner in height, more like airships than anything else...
And the stink truly hit them.
Tanner almost puked. Some of the soldiers did, and others managed to snap on the right filters. Air fresheners. She'd wondered why those were hear. This was a smell you could chew right out of the air. It was decay and contamination, it was meat and excrement and pus and bile and sea trash and river slime and industrial lubricant and boiled fish and rotting vegetables and it was... it was... the only comparison Tanner had was the summer when a dog fell into a mastication tank filled nearly halfway with fish, and hadn't been found for several days. There were smells that seemed to only reach her after passing through convolutions of white-pink gristle laced with faecal mucus and filters of black, black flesh and milky white matter that could've been anything at some point. It was a smell that seemed to issue from... from... it was like a man had contracted a hundred diseases, had lost all his teeth, and now clamped his toothless, festering gums right over her nose and exhaled deep so she could partake of the blooming green-black cankers that pervaded every organic passage.
It was the smell of fermented death.
Almost solid enough to knock you over. Solid enough that it might've been a weapon in and of itself, some sort of shapeless, gas-thin mutant that would invade every entryway and orifice and passage, clawing up like a snake and a tapeworm crossed together, constriction and infestation combined. Could almost feel the thing winding around her coat, and pressing tight, tight, tight until she felt liable to burst.
Bayai yelled, his voice made nasal by the air freshener.
"Get your damn filters on - pass it down the line, filters on! We'll be filling the air with smoke soon enough!"
Well, that was a relief. Idly, she thought... mutants didn't tend to stink. It was a bad survival strategy, stinking the place up. Made you easier to track. Some intelligence in that horde, some festering intellect, had decided that this should be the first weapon. A gardener of glands, planting them in the hides of those creatures. Imagined it, some bloated thing made entirely of glands, a living tree of them, hanging heavy with glandular fruit from spinal branches... while other mutants shoved them into their flesh like red-tinged suppositories, stuffing them deep until their biology shifted to integrate them, and the weapon could be added. Could see them, really - things with weeping sores that expelled little jets of milky liquid that immediately evaporated into a haze, a haze propelled in their direction by the unrelenting midwinter gale. The spinal-column-snake with the hanging breasts for venom glands leaked more of the stuff, in potent combinations. Perfuming the air. This was a weapon.
They really thought of everything, didn't they?
What... miraculous creatures. Truly miraculous.
Time to burn them all to death.
The horde approached, and Tanner... oh. Ah. The great cloud of insects, rodents, lizards, the small forms of life that didn't choose to become the size of bears, or simply weren't capable of doing so. A flicker of nervousness ran through her, along with the general sense of terror. Focus on the small details. The horde was pouring out of the hills, rushing in a charge that had no war cries, no chants, no shouts, just... silence and breathing and crashing. The snow muffled the last one, too. Meaning... they were witnessing a charge, and all that filled the air was their stench, and the sound of them breathing. The soldiers were tense to the point of snapping, the Rekidans were drooling, and Bayai was just trying to keep himself together in the face of... of this. They approached... would the cloud dissipate? The idea of the insects flooding over the land, nibbling at their armour, seeking every flaw... how thoroughly repaired had this coat been? How securely had she fastened it? One insect getting through would gnaw, would infect, would create problems. Venom that festered, bites that never healed, infestations that could never, ever be removed. Infestations that could contaminate. Mutate. Tanner watched, silent and afraid, incapable of... of actually fighting this swarm. Maybe one or two, maybe more...
But this was... this was beyond her.
For one of the very few times in her life, Tanner felt legitimately dwarfed by something.
The silent horde roared onwards...
And Bayai turned to her.
"The charges are primed?"
Tanner nodded, speechless in the face of such... extrapolation. Some primitive part of her consciousness was shrieking - these animals should not work together, mutants should not work together, this defied every hint of logic that had developed over countless millennia, since contamination first welled from the earth.
"Permission to detonate?"
"P-"
She swallowed.
"Permission granted."
A telegram rattled. The cables were still intact.
The theurgists... they had methods. Devices of strange potency, that could speak in silence and transmit without cables, devices that they kept to themselves and hoarded under pain of expulsion from their clientele, and exposure to inevitable poverty and ruin. If they felt kind, of course. Tanner didn't pretend to understand any of it. But she could imagine an engine humming, strange rotors moving, barrels of whale oil burning, the fruits of decades and decades growing at the bottom of the ocean igniting to allow the survival, maybe, of a handful of glorified apes barely capable of surviving a few more decades after this. Burning centuries to buy seconds. Come on, come on...
And it began.
The time was right.
The hills were covered in bodies. So completely covered there was no way of seeing the snow.
And the cold-houses had theurgic engines.
Everyone knew theurgic engines were inevitably going to decay without maintenance. Without a theurgist, the engines slowed down, malfunctioned, and depending on what they had to do, could either fail completely or detonate explosively. The mutant-hunter's vessel... that was one of the latter. The cold-houses were more likely to harmlessly peter out, internal components snapping until nothing could be recovered. At worst, a fire might erupt.
But she had theurgists.
She had theurgists tinkering, day and night, making sure the engines worked... strangely.
And by the end...
When the signal was sent, the decay spiked. The tinkering paid off.
A second of silence.
And flame bloomed.
Tanner's eyes widened. For a second... blindness. Total and utter.
And each and every cold-house ceased to exist.
A fireball erupted from each. A sphere of absolute perfection, immaculate and regular, the sort of regularity and smoothness that only chemical catastrophe could provoke. Each one expanded in a rushing wave, and she could see the limited snow evaporating suddenly, turning to steam, turning to something stranger, turning to a haze of purple that clung to the edge of the sphere like an aurora. For a second, she thought her hallucinations were prophecy - the burning stars in the sky, the burning stars on the ground. Didn't need to hallucinate to see the sky was turning a beautiful, rose red. The mutants closest... she saw them stopping. A droplet of water on hot metal. A hiss. A flash. Gone. Evaporated. The theurgic engine's progress continued, the screaming edge of the sphere... earth faded away like so much smoke.
Light.
So much light.
Four stars... four immaculate stars...
Fire just happened. She saw it in the colony. Buildings simply... began to smoke, burned without flames for a moment, charring spreading across like lightning scars, then... then fire began, and strange relief washed over her, fire, the charring made sense again, the light wasn't... oh, gods...
The explosion must've only lasted a few seconds.
But she saw mutants with skin blistering and frothing with fluid. Saw eyes dissolve in sockets and trickle down in tears to hot they charred the bones and left canyons inches-deep in the flesh. No screams. Not one. No time - and none of them felt pain. Some of them just stopped moving, remained absolutely, mechanically still as their skin blackened, their fat softened and began to fry them from the inside out, their bones heated to the point that the marrow exploded outwards in red rivers... all were reverting to infancy, their bones softening, their skulls becoming pliable to the touch, their every structure simplifying. She could still see them mutating in an attempt to live. Saw chunks of flesh peel away and slither over the ground, frying in their own fat and filling the air with the stench of bacon, beef, other stranger things. Saw mosquito steaks crawl slug-like until they boiled. Saw human organs crawl out of their roasting shells. Saw the pregnant one pop like a blister, half-formed children splashing down and undulating like tadpoles until they, too, ceased.
Must be hundreds dead in seconds.
The cloud and carpet of insects... it was dust. Fine brown dust that immediately turned black, then turned to nothing at all. Saw the wave ripple. Even those who didn't disintegrate... they changed. Their wings shredded. Their bodies spun wildly as internal mechanisms were shattered. She'd read about how insects were formed - she imagined spiracles being overwhelmed by waves of sound and heat, pushing whatever passed for blood into their bodies, into red-hot coals that popped and destroyed everything around them.
She saw the snow melt. Saw earth for the first time since her arrival. Saw dying grass dry out, burn, saw the earth carbonise, saw it fuse into glass.
She looked upon hills of glass. Upon craters studded with the melting remains of tunnels. Saw shadows of mutants burned into the soil. Saw those beyond the range of the detonations collapsing and sizzling, other mutants with less damage stepping forwards to harvest whatever could be taken, snapping them up, draining them dry, simply dragging them from the fires. The airship jellyfish had no bones to melt, so they turned to great multicoloured clouds of gas, mirages with oil-slick shimmers dancing across the surface. Nothing to leave behind but a haze.
Then the sound came.
Her ears felt like they were about to burst.
She heard the wind scream. Felt a sound through her bones, felt it as heat.
The sound of burning.
Her coat felt soft. Felt like it was about to slough right off her. Her lenses felt hot against her face. Her hair felt like it was trying to crisp up and crack away. Nothing felt... real. The world felt... felt unshaped. Felt like the normal rules had been forgotten. Evolution had already been unmade in front of her, old instincts awakening to warn her of how wrong this all was. Her own restraints had been snapped in half, releasing whatever savage thing lurked inside, however free it might actually be, however enslaved it might eventually become. And now physics was being turned to so much ash. To so much dust. All things unmade. Maybe her hallucinations might as well be real - reality was making about as much sense.
Then it was over.
The stars rose up, up... and faded gradually.
The sky remained red. The colony had burned. Carbonised matter wherever she looked.
"Gods..."
Bayai's word. Not hers. Her own mouth felt hesitant to open.
This was how they'd won the Great War.
By burning until nothing remained...
She tasted metal. And watched as the stars died. Could see tiny flecks of light around her vision. Could feel her skin warming, just a little, just by a tiny amount.
"...is it..."
Is it over? Is it done? Please, please, tell her this step had worked. A two-phase punch - demolish the tunnels, force a full-frontal assault. Then detonate the cold-houses' theurgic engines as the army rushed forward. Simple prediction.
But she already knew she was wrong.
The Rekidan nobles grinned at her, their red hair flecked with black where the light had scorched it, their faces eerily ruddy, like the shells of lobsters. Slowly healing over, of course, but... one or two soldiers were on their knees, scratching madly at their lenses, their wails barely audible. The nobles were gleeful. The General was pounding his chest with one arm, roaring madly to the red sky, eyes bulging and ruptured... beyond happy. Beyond exultant. All around her was dampness, was the sight of snow melting and trickling down. For the first time all winter, the statues on the walls were utterly devoid of frost. And from what she could see... they were smiling, savagely grinning down at the charred, fused remains. At the few slug-like things crawling feebly until their muscles burned, their systems collapsed, some sort of... it looked like invisible blades were cutting them apart, rupturing everything before it could appear.
She... had been a fool to trifle with the theurgists.
Bombs that turned hills to craters. That fused flesh. Invisible spears that eradicated life. Metal on her tongue. Spots in her eyes. Silence all around. They'd turned winter to summer - even the snowfall was melting before it could hit the ground, and for the first time since...the journey here, Tanner felt rain patter against her coat, and she was alarmed to see that the rain was hissing very slightly, the tough leather heated unreasonably. Didn't dare to move. Something childish telling her that if she moved, the invisible monster would find her. Just stay still. Stay quiet. And pretend she didn't exist.
That was their strongest weapon. After this, there was nothing but flame and brutality. At least the stink was gone. That'd been blasted away - she could almost see it, washed away into the clouds. Overpowered by the stink of metal, mud, and impossible flame.
She knew it wasn't over. They'd never go down this easily.
Another mutant crested the hill. Much... stranger than any in the last horde.
Much stranger indeed.
It was like... a bird and a spider had a child. No wings, of course. But she saw hairy brown chitin, the hairs glittering with sparks. She saw long, long chelicerae formed into a kind of beak, a neck protruding grotesquely upwards, white eyes with ruptured pupils, eight enormous legs tipped with razor-sharp claws, an abdomen that looked closer to a beehive than anything else. Already bristling with subservient insect-mutants ready to harvest what remained. It clicked forwards over the hill, tilting its bizarre head to one side - looked like a pelican, almost. A pelican and a spider crossed together, with a beehive stapled to the back, and... gods, it had hands inside the chelicerae, she could see through a pair of binoculars, at least through the blotches of blackness that pervaded her vision. Human hands, dozens of them, tipped with venomous stingers. Agile. Grasping. And binding the abdomen together were bands of near-liquid metal. Artificial and natural integrated into the same living being.
Ready to hunt.
This was a refined mutant. The sort of thing Lantha had been bred into, mutated piece by piece, done deliberately, done with a design in mind. The difference between accidental existence and planned existence, creatures of nature and creatures of the gods.
They'd cleared the freaks and the rejects, the repurposers of waste-flesh.
Now the intelligent ones came.
The ones the mutant-hunters had feared. The silent warlords. The shadow that'd appeared in front of her when she fled the wolf-thing, all that time ago.
The first clicked over the hill, placid and mechanical, insects nibbling at the remains of the others, flesh-creatures ambling uphill to be repurposed once more with a kind of... bureuacratic martyrdom.
And more followed in its wake.
Far, far more.
Marching over the burned remains of their kindred. Flesh healing faster than the molten glass could scar it. Some even integrating it into their armour, their weapons, their very being. She saw blades of obsidian tipping red, fleshy tentacles. She saw tumours erupt on creatures that immediately snipped them off with dispassionate ease. A smaller horde. But nonetheless here. The General stopped beating his chest, and roared commands to the others. All-Name was whimpering to himself.
"...stars..."
Tanner nodded in agreement.
"Stars. Four of them."
"...we told them to come here. They're humans. Like us. And they can make stars from... food preservation..."
Tanner had no response. No answers. No reassurances.
Theurgists were theurgists, that was all.
Humans... and yet not quite. Scientists... and yet not quite. Magicians... and yet not quite.
Theurgists, and theurgists alone. No other word described them fully. Too petty to be gods, too mechanical to be sorcerers, too mystic to be academics.
She was going to die after all of this. The theurgists would boil her inside a star. They'd process her down to oil to fuel their engines. Mr. Mask was cackling already at the thought, she could hear him... no, that was the clicking of many, many, many legs.
Bayai roared.
"Men!"
His voice was too dim. Her hearing might be compromised.
"We've melted most! What comes for us now are the best, the brightest, the most cunning! But they'll burn like anything else will! You stand your ground, you burn them and burn them and burn them until your fuel runs dry, or your blood does!"
A pause. He lifted his mask suddenly, recklessly, and vomited over the edge of the barricade.
"We're soldiers of Fidelizh! This is our colony, and these things already lost their war! Had their chance! They want to come back for a repeat of last time - I say we give them it! Who's with me?"
A few agreements. A few terrified moans. A little vomit. Tanner bellowed.
"The Rekidans have been getting ready for this for decades now, I don't know about you, but I'm not embarrassing myself in front of them!"
Silence.
"And for crying out loud - they're a bunch of damn animals! Buffalo run in circles, no-one knows why, doesn't matter! You don't need to understand them to kill them!"
Her speech was worse than his. And mostly stolen from Vyuli. Yet they seemed to be watching her, nonetheless. She lifted her axe, and just... screamed. Madly. Wordlessly. She had nothing in her - nothing but the desperate urge to survive. She howled like a wild primate, because she had nothing else to give to them. And they... they responded. With wild howls of their own, terrified, wounded, actively urinating, actively vomiting, a horde of her own, a bunch of recruits and colonial police driven to madness. This wasn't a war. This was a... a maddened charge, a howling orgy of violence, it was an orgy populated entirely by virgins, and all of them were too crazed by necessity and terror to actually realise this. They had flamethrowers. They had uniforms. Sink into them, let their cerebrospinal fluid leak into the fabric, let it become another brain.
Bayai was terrified, and trying to hide that fact.
Tanner was terrified, and didn't bother. She wasn't a good enough actress.
And somehow, that was enough.
Somehow.
Tanner had given up on understanding people.
The flamethrowers spat out tentative gouts of flame, testing the nozzles after the star-birth. The air filled with the stink of fuel, overpowering any last hints of the great stench of the mutants. The silent horde approached, smaller in number, greater in individual size, and ever-so-delicate, so delicate there was only a whisper as they approached, clicking and galloping and skimming and flying... the great horde was here.
She'd been right.
Lantha had been right.
Lyur's death had been justified.
Tanner's acts had been correct.
She stood at the peak of momentum. Her axe was eager to swing. And into the horde she howled, her mouth open so wide it felt like it might snap off its hinges, snapping tendons like violin strings.
She was terrified.
And she had no option but to stop.
The sky was red. She'd helped create stars. The hills had turned to the smoking caldera of volcanoes.
She unmade the land. She invented new constellations. She rewound or froze time. She held the axe of state. She wore the pelts of the dead. She could resurrect the dead, one day. The red tide was coming. History opposed her. Statues grinned. The sky was red. The sun was red. Her mouth was full of metal. Air was full of the stink of piss and rot and burning and glass and earth and fear and flame and fuel. She was howling, and she'd stopped telling if it was terror, vindication, madness, or simple adrenaline. The dried heart in her pocket was bleeding, she was sure of it. Awakened to life by the impossibilities of theurgy - she was Tanner, she lived on two hearts, she resurrected the dead by reviving the stars.
The bright calm endured. Bright calm. Burning madness. Incendiary terror. No way of telling.
And she rode the momentum onwards...
Onwards to whatever waited at the end.
Help me.
Please.
Mother.
Eygi.
Anyone.