CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE - JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE NIGHT
In pairs, they marched. Pairs, because this meant it was harder for them to be isolated - if they were isolated, they could be replaced, could be attacked, could be picked off one by one. The image of the mutant soldier with a brain trying to escape his skull had stuck with the troops, and they wound up following closely behind Tanner like... the only comparison which came to mind was ducklings following their mother, but that was deeply patronising and highly demeaning and conduct unbefitting of a whatever-she-was-now. Judges wouldn't be so unprofessional, governors wouldn't be so condescending, warlords wouldn't compare themselves to a duck, the animal least likely (in her estimations) to become the mascot of a warlord. Geese, maybe, they were big and nasty enough. Sheep, conceivably, so long as the sheep in question had horns, or had some sort of symbolic value. But ducks? Never. No animal which went 'quack' could be considered intimidating, even the bleating of sheep had a certain alien hoarseness to it, quack was profoundly undignified. Oh, goodness, her thoughts were getting odd again. How magical.
Good to know that hadn't been squeezed out of her, she thought, as she peeled a piece of mutant skin from the shoulder of her coat, letting it fall to the ground where the insects immediately assaulted it. Come to think of it, the thing hadn't even hit the ground, the swarm snatched it away before it could drift that far.
The bunker was close.
And upon reaching it, she gladly sagged against the walls, and waited for the soldiers to shift to their posts. The empty space around the bunker was filled with sandbags and piles of rubble, strategically heaped to give them some chance of sheltering from an attack. Every street leading here was either barricaded in some way, or was carefully monitored by defended positions. Every precaution had been taken. They had supplies, they had fuel, they had weapons, they had soldiers. Probably. Soldiers were still streaming in, the retreat from the wall had been... more than a little chaotic. The priority had been getting back to the bunkers, and orderliness had broken down as over-stressed and terrified soldiers just sprinted for whatever kind of safety they could find. Evidently, based on the dead infiltrator, some had never found any safety at all. Just a swift stab, and immediate darkness. She felt drained. Not quite ready for another assault, but not exactly unwilling to fight. If the mutants came, she'd fight them. But her body was protesting that it would rather have a small nap, if at all possible.
Well, it wasn't possible.
So shut up.
Huh. Thought. Hypothermia, among its many symptoms, included delayed death. People could spend some time in freezing conditions, emerge out of them, get warmed up, then fall over dead on the spot. Held together with tension and stubbornness, presumably. Maybe you could do that with stress. Maybe her heart had actually stopped, and she was just flexing her muscles to keep it going for a while longer, maybe once she took a nap, she'd never wake up. Well, it was a possibility, wasn't it? There was a chance. It was like... when she was younger, she'd had an intensely difficult exam coming up, and Eygi somehow convinced her to go and have a spot of lunch at a nice little kaff. But Tanner never ate until her work was done - somehow, though, Eygi had made the case for the lunch by calling it a... happy little break from her work. Refresh herself, then get back to it. Tanner had tried. She'd had lunch. Then she stared at her work, and found herself incapable of continuing. Her muscles itched for motion, her brain complained at being put back to the grindstone after it was clearly signalled that the day's work was completed, her foot kept tapping, and it took her four hours to do an hour's worth of work.
And that was when Tanner Magg decided that her approach to work would be 'I shall slam my head into this problem until either it dies or I do, and nothing shall intervene in this most holy process'.
Thus far, her head had won.
...now, felt almost like she was facing a problem that resisted headbutting. Almost. And it was technically possible for an eel to continue the motions of headbutting even if it lacked a head. So... the point was, she might be dead, and if she stopped feeling so tense, she might just collapse.
Oh, well.
There wasn't much conversation. Tanner was bad at starting them, sustaining them, ending them... the soldiers seemed too deferential to start anything, too. Probably thought she had some kind of mystery contained in her silence. Not remotely. She was genuinely just... too uncomfortable to strike one up. She'd think of it, come up with an idea, but... then she'd come up with all the ways it could go cataclysmically wrong, and after she'd finished that, it'd been too long. The time had passed. The silence had become absolute, and breaking it would be a point. Strategy didn't really occupy her mind either. The die had been cast, and attacking would be... it was one thing to coordinate a defence, coordinating an attack would require skills she didn't have, nor anyone else. The garrison had never been intended as an offensive force, closer to a well-armed city watch. The Rekidans had honed their tactics on staying still and waiting for the mutants to come, had never really met them as honest warriors on the field of battle. Had to keep justifying this to herself. The plan was for them to wait, to let the mutants come to them. To attack would be difficult and pointless, it would disrupt any remaining discipline, it would whittle away at their numbers when they had vanishingly few to spare. So... just had to watch the lichen march over the stones, the eagle circling overhead, the buffalo-balloons drift lazily in the sky, the insects whir, and couldn't even get most of the gore off her clothes. Not yet. Scouring took time and water. Neither of which they had in great abundance.
The bunker loomed behind her. Silent. Yan-Lam was in there. Marana was in there. Tom-Tom and the mutant, too. If she failed here, they died. Each and every one of them. Torn apart and used as meat for more soldiers.
And with that in mind, she rested on her axe.
And waited.
Staring dully at the pillar of smoke that rose from the still-burning fires of the blood swamp. The dust of the wall's collapse.
And as night approached...
They came.
* * *
The first night was an agony of strangeness. No sleep, minimal food, brackish water, and cutting cold winds. The setting of the sun brought snowfall, huge amounts of it, heaping up in great shambling drifts on either side. The red sky turned burgundy, and there it remained as enormous flakes fell, mingling with the lichen spores. The soldiers set up fires as best they could, heaping up logs prepared for the occasion... but no matter what they did, there was never a single tongue of flame. Only simmering embers and red-hued logs, the heat intense but the cold even more so. Huddling around them wasn't an option - they just took what they could while standing at their posts. The Rekidans ferried messages, as did the occasional red-faced soldier, informing Tanner that they were holding, none were dangerously low on manpower, but all were... a little depleted. Just around the edges. Enough to make everyone feel nervous. Sometimes she heard the crack of a rifle, echoing meaninglessly over the snow-dunes, but it was never followed up by much more. Could just be target practice. The mutants only came when the sun had set fully.
Only then did they slither out of the dark.
They moved silently. Not a tide, this time. Just...
Just packs of them.
A scalpel. As opposed to a hammer.
The first one to emerge was one of the living barricades. Useless, now that the wall had been taken. Or, rather, rendered near-obsolete. It was... the lizard-thing. She remembered it vaguely, one of the few that wasn't well-armoured against the onslaught, just packed on layers of gelatin and slime until it was flameproof, bulletproof... she could even see piece of shrapnel buried amidst the foggy layers of sludge. It was was huge, the colour of smog, the skin glistened like oil, and a long sail made of what seemed to be metal protruded from its back, whining faintly in the wind. Tiny mean eyes stared out of the gloom, and for a moment the entire squadron was... frozen. Utterly frozen. A second passed... and it blundered out of the dark with obscene swiftness.
It moved silently, scuttling and waddling all at once...
One of the soldiers let off a gout from the flamethrower, and the orange trail of flames illuminated the night better than anything they'd lit until now. They saw... saw eyes in the dark. The salamander soaked up the fire with ease, the liquid fuel sliding away from its flesh without taking hold, and heavy lids slammed over the eyes and turned the thing into an abstract prototype, something rude and cave-dwelling, something that ought to specialise more. It felt like this was what a salamander looked like inside its egg, if that thing hatched early and never developed. These thoughts entered her head automatically in the span of a second.
Then it lunged.
They'd barely had a few seconds to think before it clamped a toothless jaw around the soldier. In the second when the mouth opened...
She could see right to its stomach. There was no muscle around the throat, no teeth, nothing. Just a fleshy tunnel and a cavernous dark that sloshed with half-dissolved mutants.
Tanner growled.
Launched herself forwards as the creature gulped grotesquely, forcing the struggling soldier inside. A burst of flame as the flamethrower twitched erratically, and Tanner... ah, idea. Idea. She flung her axe into the path of the flame, soaking up a little of the liquid fuel. and then swung the resulting fiery blade into the salamander's side, cutting deep through matter that felt closer to liquid than flesh. The creature was illuminated from the inside out, just for a second, as her blade entered the vast stomach that had replaced all other organs. She sliced inside... and silhouetted in the glare were bones, teeth, twitching limbs, and crashing liquid. The shape of a struggling soldier.
A rip, and the stomach burst, spreading these same digested wrecks across the snow, steaming as they went. Some were still moving. Mindless, shapeless, contaminated beyond belief... Tanner kept cutting, and enormous chunks of translucent flesh landed on her coat, sliding free a moment later, but leaving trails. Dead hands pawed at her ankles as she hacked away, the low growl in her throat unending. Didn't even think. Didn't even panic. Just... tearing apart a shambling wreck of foggy flesh, a stomach on legs, a walking barricade against the flamethrowers. Obsolete. And sent out to do something useful before it was recycled. The creature lashed at her with a fleshy tail... and she ignored it. Let the disgusting worm wrap around her waist, crushing... she'd been crushed by eight hairy, chitinous legs, this thing was nothing by comparison. The stomach continued to drain around her, the salamander seeming to deflate along the way, and now there were gunshots, soldiers trying to rip the thing apart...
Black matter exploded outwards from a pocket of unusual pressure.
Drenched her torso. Steamed in the cold. She saw tiny bones, worn down to anonymous nubs. The stench was awful, it clawed at the lungs and made her stomach contracted more than the tail could compel it to, no matter how hard it squeezed.
A rip.
And the creature started to sag. It had no bones in it, just... vague jelly-like structures that came apart with a grotesque sighing sound.
The creature collapsed.
A fluid-slicked soldier tumbled out of the senseless mouth, gasping madly, scrambling away on his hands and knees, flamethrower trailing behind like an umbilical cord. The swarm lazily began to consume the creature, and Tanner wrenched the tail away from herself. It didn't come away - it tore away, ripping into several gelatinous pieces, each one of them mist-hued.
Threw them aside with disgust curling her lip.
Waste disposal. They were sending them waste they couldn't be bothered to kill themselves.
The soldier was retching inside his mask, muttering about smells and sounds in-between the gags. The monstrous reptile was quite dead, the meat it was composed of had a... monolithic character. Like there was no specialised function in the whole thing, just a loose system animating a mass of gelatinous meat. Barely qualified as meat, honestly. The bones were translucent tubes packed with translucent fluid that gasped as it emerged from snapped areas... nothing about this creature snapped, really. It tore.
She kicked the creature away.
Stalked back to her post, wincing as the black half-digested liquid ran down her front, leaving a notable trail on the ground.
The others were coming.
They'd just been probing. Testing. Getting rid of the freak.
Now the true killers emerged.
The same tactic as before - concentrate the swarm to blind and deafen, then send in specialised creatures to handle business. And out of the darkness they came. Tanner froze at the sight of them, as their pale, nimble forms flowed liquid-like over the snow, barely leaving footprints. The stink which filled the air... it defied understanding. It was rancid, it was stagnant, it was warm and cloying, it was pus and faeces and urine and meat and rot. It was sweet beyond belief, it was a smell you chewed. An abattoir in a summer heat. It was the stink of disease.
These weren't normal mutants.
They were diseases.
She'd heard of these.
Contamination was an idiot, sometimes. Give it a human with something else attached, maybe it decides the human is superior and needs to be improved... maybe it decides the other needs to be integrated. Humans in leather clothes found the leather growing into themselves, becoming a new hide. Humans with scar tissue found it expanding in silver starbursts over the body. Humans after a dinner of mutton found wool growing from under their fingernails, felt the teeth turning the texture of hooves, felt horns emerge above their eyebrows...
And sometimes the contamination thought that a disease was a natural part of the organism.
And needed reproduction.
Out of the darkness came the diseased. Humans turned into nothing but hosts.
There were dozens of them. And they moved like ghosts over the ashen snow. Nimble and clever as all mutants were... but there, the resemblance stopped.
Something that could be a man or a woman was moving towards Tanner. Nothing but black-purple buboes and inky skin, eyes swollen shut by the endless boils, fingers annihilated by them, tiny white needles sticking out from the stumps, little sharp finger bones that clawed blindly at the air. The mouth was nothing but a toothless black hole, and fetid, contaminated air issued from it. It drew it no air through the mouth, that was done through innumerable holes all over the body. It only exhaled. Over and over and over. Rabid twitches ran through it, seizure upon seizure, and the heat radiating from it was enough to melt the snow it came near. A constant stream of clot-ridden blood emerged from the mouth and the invisible pits of eyes...
Whatever had been human was gone. Only a disease inside a shell, now. The Bubonic.
When the flames kissed it, the creature just kept moving, the fire making its silhouette even more monstrous. When Tanner swung at it, stepping back to avoid any spray, holding her breath no matter how ineffective it might be... it popped with a relieved sigh, and black fluid sprayed over the ground from the countless, countless buboes... but more were coming.
A herd of Consumptives, gunshot-coughs rattling their wispy chests, cheekbones raised to austere heights by the shrivelling of skin. So light they didn't even leave footprints, legs so thin they could be mistaken for long finger-bones, seemed liable to float away on the strong wings. The fingers, though... they were clubbed and swollen. The flames seemed to leave nothing behind - just turned them to vague clouds of ash.
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Sweating sickness taking over a body. Skin wrinkled to the texture of pulped paper by constant sweating, eczema spreading in livid red constellations, eyes hidden underneath sagging lids, shivering wildly and using the shivers as momentum, launching themselves forwards with brutal bounds that strained the entire system, seemed to strain the bones to the point of breaking each time they did it. When they burned, they filled the air with the stink of salt. Used to call it Stoop Gallant, she remembered. Affected rich and poor. The Stooped stood straight and bold, twitching onwards with placid acceptance, their bodies too twisted with shivers to do anything more than their rambling twists.
Rabid hounds with bulging bloodshot faces, Everything gnarled and strange, everything tense and feral. Drooling wildly, additional mouths lining the ribs and shedding yet more spit from black gums. Their throats convulsed as they ran, and issued strange, strangled cries that resembled... nothing Tanner could classify as human. Rushing forwards so quickly Tanner had to take care of them, her axe crushing skull upon skull, sending the twisted shapes into the snow, where they thrashed wildly before passing on.
And whenever one of the diseased creatures died, their bodies would swell... and matter would spill out.
Hungry liquid.
Liquid filled with disease.
The fire put a stop to it. Tanner's voice was hoarse as she screamed orders to the others, an agony of insect calm rushing through her. She couldn't... terror had been drained out of her, all that remained was mechanical resolve. The fighting was pounding the emotion out of her, one struggle at a time. The spider. The porous man. The wall. The bird. The infected man. The salamander. And now the diseased. The diseased... they were unending, it seemed. Staggering lightly out of the darkness, marching for the bunker, before being cut down by either gunshots, flames, or the axe. She screamed to the others to burn the liquid, burn it before it reached them. It was liquid that crawled, eager to inhabit their flesh... and when it burned, it squirmed, writhed and devoured itself in an attempt to stay alive for a few more seconds... they were surrounded by an ocean of shimmering disease, and through the walls of fire came the diseased, the diseased...
They were almost human.
Almost.
And when she cracked their skulls too quickly for them to feel a single twitch of pain, she knew that this was how it felt to open a human skull to the world. Nothing malformed. Nothing twisted. Just... a human skull.
It was terrifyingly easy. To pop the front, to sink into the cauliflower-layers of the brain, to feel it oozing out around them.
Each one she killed made her think of Lyur. And each time...
It was just a little swifter. A little less hesitant. Slobbering Rabid. Whisper-thin Consumptive. Salt-stinking Stooped. Oozing Bubonic. More. Fluxed, infested with dysentery, staggering on with everything emptied out, just skin stretched over bone, all muscles excreted, all organs, all inner structures. The face was a bleached skin stretched over the skull, so tight she could see the infinite labyrinths of sweat glands, spiral snail-shells poking at the surface and leaking an endless trail of sweat down faces the colour of candle wax. Poxed, their skins made into armour with countless hard sores, their eyes buried under them, their flesh streaked with odd fluid that leaked from the centre. A thousand thousand hard leathery eyes. She saw red hair... and she realised what these were. They were the dead. They were the dead of Rekida, filled with putrid disease, animated and sent out as cannon fodder. They were corpses. And contamination had brought them... almost back. The snow had preserved them for years and years... they'd always said that some of the Rekidans had gone up into the mountains to flee the city, had never returned. Maybe these were them.
Had to burn them. The parasites driving the body would escape, otherwise. Would infect others. And burning them meant wasting fuel. And wasting fuel meant the final strike would be... ever-so easier. It'd be elementary to kill these creatures at the wall, where their limited forms would prevent them from climbing up quickly enough to be a threat.
Here, though...
They could stagger out of the streets in endless rows.
And each and every one needed burning.
Tanner's mind seemed to switch off. A breaking point reached by constant pressure. And she felt convinced that she was just... just in the fishery again. Never killed fish on an industrial scale, but she'd killed fish in the past. Pick them up by the slippery tail. Thwack them against a hard surface, and wait for the squirming to stop. They were small creatures, delicate despite how hard they could thrash against a hook. One crack, and the brain went dark. One snap. And that was all she did. The diseased came forwards. She cracked it over the skull with her axe. The creature fell. The fires finished the job. Efficient. Other soldiers stood nearby, armed with shovels, with hammers, with anything they could muster. Sometimes they shouted battle cries, but Tanner heard nothing.
All she knew was the repetition.
Step.
Crack.
Burn.
Step.
Crack.
Burn.
The splitting of skulls became instinctual. Became natural. And despite herself, she became good at it. Knew where to hit, so the blade didn't slip away and half-scalp the creature. Knew how much force was required, and how to pull her arm back at the final point - to avoid embedding into it. Shut down the nervous system by attacking the brain, then burn the body before it could hope to recover. Rabid men and rabid women, clad in elegant silks, ran on all fours out of the darkness, and she'd brutalise each and every one, her face never moving. Sometimes she heard hisses from the skull as systems detached from one another, the flesh and the bone parting. Sometimes, with the thin Fluxed, she felt skin snap like a ship's sails, and they'd come apart under their own tension. Kites in a strong wind. The moon emerged from behind burgundy clouds, and she could see the naked expanse of the skulls she snapped (step, crack, burn), and they resembled odd sea creatures, maybe polyps or jellyfish or the blobs which were shed from butchered whales, pale and luminescent, wet with sweat, some of them losing their hair, some of them red and peculiar...
Red algae clinging to sea creatures.
If she focused on that, she was fine. Completely fine.
The others were beside her.
And she saw nothing. Heard nothing. Moved in silence. Moved without moving.
Hours?
Had it been... maybe.
She crushed the skull of a Consumptive, a few gunshot coughs echoing from the hollow chest... then the fire came, and washed it all away...
And she swung...
Hit nothing but snow.
Blinked.
"Think that was... all of them, ma'am?"
Tanner almost smiled - it was all of them? Oh, that was good. Very convenient. And... no, they were asking her for confirmation.
How should she know? She was just the lady who broke skulls.
All around her were deformed bodies. The flesh had been so wasted away, so infested, that the pyres had made it slough off easily. All that remained were black bones, many of them toothless and infant-like, many with uniform vertical gashes in the front, splitting the brain down the middle. Like something done in a factory. One of the soldiers was staring at her. Tanner licked her lips.
"...wait around. Let's just see if... that was all of them. If it was, start scouring. And get some fuel laid down over the snow, we need..."
"Ma'am... running low on fuel."
"How low?"
"Maybe another night like that, we run out."
Tanner blinked. She thought they were being deliriously efficient, and... no, no, the snow out there was melted, she saw nothing crawling towards them, nothing at all. She let out a long, whistling breath through clenched teeth. Come on. Come back to reality. She wished she could pinch the bridge of her nose.
"How many dead?"
"...think we lost about four. One got his throat ripped out by one of those... drooling things. Other three just had suit breaches. Infected."
A pause.
"We put them down before they could do anything, ma'am."
Desperately wanted to say thank you. Thank you for killing them, so I didn't have to do it.
At this point, I don't even know how hard it would be to crack their skulls. There's a very specific kind of pressure you need to apply, makes it rapid, severs all movement as quickly as possible. With Lyur, I was too rough, almost had my axe lodged in his skull for good! Imagine if I'd made that mistake out here. Hey, here's an odd thought, comrade, if I hadn't killed a man with my own two hands, I would've probably made a mistake tonight, and we'd all be dead! Isn't that funny?
She kept her mouth shut.
"Right. Well."
She paused.
"Good job, everyone."
The others mutedly raised salutes, gauntlets clanking against their helmets. Tanner automatically did the same... then spoke, some part of her desperate to just talk. They'd survived, of course they'd survived, these were cannon fodder. Doubted they had more, they must've killed close to a hundred of the damn things. And where were the Rekidans when you needed them? Where... no, no, second thought, the Rekidans would've been useless here. Maybe they could get infected, and they were accustomed to fighting in close quarters. Gods, a battle against cannon fodder, with all the advantages in the world, and they lost four men... the slaughter on the walls had cost the Rekidans, who were on the front lines, two. She hated how much tonight was validating the decisions she doubted the most. Hated it. And the overall... nightmarish, dream-like quality of the entire evening - bursting a salamander, being drenched in half-digested bodies, fighting hordes of the diseased - made her talk more than she normally would.
"I imagine these were old Rekidans. Filled up with... diseased liquid, I suppose. Probably preserved up in the mountains, rotted slowly enough. Doubt there'll be more, Rekida was mostly just butchered, doubt they really cared about leaving a larder for another invasion at some point in the future. I mean, we just... killed a good chunk of their aristocracy."
Silence. One of the soldiers spoke deferentially after a few seconds.
"Oh."
A pause.
"...will the big lads mind?"
"No, they consider these ones to be mad. Don't even get to keep their family names once they mutate."
"Huh."
Another soldier poked one of the bodies, turning it over. One of the Rabid, looked like, and not totally burned...
"Cor. Always wondered what nobles looked like in their skivvies. Scrawnier than I thought."
A female soldier croaked out a few hoarse words.
"Well, they've been in the mountains for a while. Cold up there."
"Ah. Very true."
A pause, and a soldier spoke through chattering teeth.
"Wish w-w-w-we didn't h-have to burn them, that's... g-g-good red hair, could get money from w-wig shops for that."
"Oy, no disrespect to the dead."
The soldiers fell silent.
Stared at one another.
And one after the other, they let out grim, desperate laughs. Tanner hesitantly joined on. Ah. Yes. Gallows humour. Read about this. Don't take their hair, but crack their skulls open, burn them, and comment on their... business downstairs. Tanner just tried to ignore how similar they'd looked to Yan-Lam, when their features weren't totally malformed by disease and swelling. Their bodies looked eerily human now they'd been burned. Stood in the middle of a regular old crematorium, nothing unnatural whatsoever. Grinning, cracked skulls leered at her from the ground, and she kicked a few of them aside, uncomfortable under their hollow gazes.
Felt like a dream, all of this. Kept expecting herself to wake up at some point. Not... sure when the dream would've started, though. Maybe before Lyur died, and this was just a guilty fantasy of quasi-divine punishment. Which still placed her in a world where Lyur had to die, and the mutants were still coming. Hm. Maybe beforehand all of that... maybe while she was in the meat-labyrinth, about to get tortured. Maybe she got to Tom-Tom, got knocked out, adn this was all one long fantasy... no, that was terrible. Maybe it was a dying dream after Tom-Tom, or a coma from Vyuli's torture, or she was dying out in the snow, rambling to herself.
Further back, then. She was just having a paranoid delusion about the colonial expedition, and was safe in the inner temple. The matter with Eygi was just her being a weird lady who couldn't trust anything absolutely. Faithlessness encoded into her bones. Or, she was on the way up, and was going to find a lovely little settlement.
...hm. Maybe beforehand...
There was... was there...
If she woke up, and her father was there, ready to take her to school, she thought she'd be totally happy. A little disturbed at her imagination. But... no lodge, no judging, no harpoon accident, no Eygi, no settlement, no mutants, no anything.
Wondered if she should ask the others where they'd like to have fallen asleep, if a chunk of their life was going to be one long nightmare. Childhood? Adolescence? Adulthood? Maybe old age, and they were just very, very bored and imagining a different youth.
But that would be a weird thing to ask.
So she didn't.
...she'd spent most of the night crushing diseased skulls. And none of that was sinking in. No panic. No terror. No vomiting. None of the normal responses.
Like Marana had said.
It got easier.
That was the hardest thing.
She didn't sleep, really. Just... blinked, and when her eyes opened, she'd find that people had moved a little, the moon had shifted slightly. Tiny, accidental naps that she loathed herself for taking. The soldiers looked at her, standing up, leaning on her axe to stop herself falling over during her tiny naps, and they kept on looking... looking admiring. They shouldn't, her axe was covered in the severed hairs of dozens of dead mutants, glued on with blood and viscera, her clothes were dripping with the stuff, and scouring could only do so much to remove the stains. She napped, and woke, and napped again, and waited for the morning to come. Nothing else came to attack them, nothing at all. But they'd lost men, and used up fuel.
She dreamed, sometimes. In the brief spaces of darkness.
Dreamed of... of whirring bodies. Of constellations of infinite complexity, moving amidst night the colour of soot. She kept dreaming of the same details, over and over and over again. Strange scents in her nose, a mixture of vile and pleasurable. Branches of lightning, it seemed like - branching and branching and branching, a single line leading to a bursting star, which in turn produced more and more bolts. Spark leading to spark leading to spark, forming a network of both complexity and transience. Dreamed of oil welling up from the ground, black and pungent. Dreamed of creatures with glass wings. Dreamed of... it was strange, but she dreamed of sadness. When she opened her eyes, sometimes, she didn't see anything for a moment, but felt an overwhelming sorrow. Like something crucial had been torn out of her chest, and would never, ever be replaced. Loss becoming an anchor dragging her downwards, an absence with weight. Then the lightning network, then the scent, then the oil, then the loss... punctuated by other images. A man moving a small piece of plant matter between his teeth. To the front, where incisors slid from the surface smoothly. To the back... where molars could grind them up. She felt the cycle of plant matter - sometimes a nut, a vegetable, a strange pip of a strange fruit. It didn't matter, all that mattered was toughness and smoothness, being gnawed in different ways in different places, over and over and over and over-
She dreamed of teeth.
Dreamed of teeth erupting from gums, dreamed how how teeth were plants, with roots and flowering crests. Dreamed of how teeth were strange, when you thought about them. Bones were meant to be enduring, and then you had teeth - tumorous masses that just sprouted, causing pain for anyone going through the process, welling higher and higher, sometimes growing crooked as they collided, sometimes becoming painful and demanding removal... no other bone required that, not really. Teeth, she thought, were evidence of civilisation. Because otherwise, they were just chaotic bone cancers that frequently went haywire and brought paralysing pain to the unfortunate victim. The human body was just a mass of catastrophes which civilisation evolved to restrain, she idly dreamed. An unnatural convolution of grey matter, and monsters like Lyur were born - in a world without order, people like Lyur were wolves around the fire, they were unstoppable, mysterious, and took what they pleased. A shifting of mouth-tumours, and toothache resulted that could... basically make eating impossible. A loss of those mouth-tumours, and eating solid food became impossible. A solid strike could do the same thing. So you regulate. You make replacements for teeth when they break. You make anaesthetic to make removal easier. You make strong alcohol to cauterise the wounds. You punish others when they break teeth.
Without people like the judges... without administrators, controllers, synapses of a single great civilizational brain, you just... had unrestrained animals. Animals without natural limits.
Cats retracted their claws when they fought each other. Because they understood the risk of escalation.
Humans didn't.
Nor did mutants. Mutants despised one another. Mutants were their own worst enemy - for every mutant a human killed, a mutant would kill... many times as many. The moment they set aside their differences, you got yourself a war of extinction.
Humanity were just watching themselves emerge.
The same terror the old wild animals of the world must have felt...
She awoke to bursts of light in the dim morning sky.
Memory slowly returned.
The telegram wires had long-since been gnawed away, but... sometimes flares were sent up. Brightly coloured. Indicating the status of a bunker.
Alive. All of them were alive. No units had been forced to retreat, and no further major attacks were underway, no demands for reinforcements shone amongst the clouds.
But... that was all.
No idea how many had died tonight. How many attacks had occurred that were too small. Just... any of it. Sometimes she thought she saw Rekidans bounding over rooftops, armed to the teeth, bringing new equipment and reinforcement to isolated bunkers... strange, how that had become their most valuable niche. Their size and speed, their ability to carry things, their simple knowledge of the city.
Their ability to connect them together, even on a night like this.
She waited for the dawn...
And when it came, a familiar figure was running over the horizon, bounding from roof to roof, moving with unerring purpose. Red hair. Powerful frame. The General, but without All-Name at his side. Immediately Tanner stiffened, fearing the worst... no, no, he wasn't... he didn't look too anguished. He might be callous and ruthless, but he clearly wanted All-Name to live. No, in his hnads was a letter, long and hastily scrawled. She blinked a few times, struggling to wake up. Right. Right. He presented it formally, and she had to hold it up to read in the dim morning glow.
Judge.
You don't know my name. Old man, I mind the cold-house foyer.
Ah. Right. And... he hadn't signed his name. And of course she couldn't ask, not at this stage, so... old man it was. The old man, to be more formal.
We're keeping this quiet, but you should know.
Vyuli's dead. The boss is dead.
Tanner froze.
Ah.
The boss is dead, and someone killed him. Not a mutant, we know it wasn't a mutant. Killed one of us, too, on the way out. One of the bouncers, you wouldn't know him. Shot Vyuli right through the heart, he was dead in seconds. The bunker is... angry. Very angry. Word hasn't gotten to the others, but when it does, people are going to be antsy. Thought you should know about it. And given how things are, this is probably the best you're going to get in terms of evidence - we found his body in his room, shot through the heart. Small calibre, probably a pistol, easy to hide. We've already interrogated everyone in the bunker, excluded most of them. Good alibis all round, not faked this time. One other bouncer died during an escape, we think the murderer got in and out through something other than the main entrance, through... hurts to say it, but through a secret passage. No idea if the boss had it made, no idea if the murderer did, no idea how far this was planned. But there was a small tunnel leading to the outside, through one of the filters. Could move the filter, shift through. Not able to do that with any of the others. Large enough for a human. We filled it in. Immediately. Not letting any mutants in that way, and we get enough air regardless. Point is - we're paranoid, we're angry, and we want someone hung up and killed.
Only good thing is that the murder was wounded. Bouncer they found on the way out gave almost as good as he got, stabbed him right through, knife's red up to the hilt.
Find him, judge.
Find whoever killed our boss.
And hang him until his face is swollen and purple as a fucking grape.
And there it ended.
Tanner was utterly paralysed.
They were on the verge of extinction. They were all going to die - and people were still thinking about grudges. About... grudges and cartels. Tanner, who had every reason to hate the cartel and want it destroyed, had willingly set aside her grudge for the greater good. She'd done that. Willingly let it slide, all the monstrousness they'd done, all the torture they intended to do, all the corruption they'd fostered. Because of the greater good. Because she needed their cooperation.
She'd dragged this colony kicking and screaming back from the self-destructive spiral it clearly ached to explore.
And none of them could do her the decency of playing along.
Who, then?
Lyur was dead. The bouncers were loyal. Who?
...Canima had gone missing.
Canima had vanished. No way he'd... survived out here, even with protection it was dangerous, and they'd been patrolling constantly, there was no way he'd just stayed in the open. Tanner was struggling to remain out here, and she had protection, she had strength, she had warmth. Canima would maybe have the first. Not the last two. Warmth would mean fires, fires would mean detection. Strength was absent from the spindly old spider.
So who?
She wasn't... interested in another mystery, she had a colony to defend, she'd spent the night killing diseased corpses, she wasn't interested in this.
If she could, she'd just tell the old man to shut up, wire his jaw shut, and get back to hiding from the mutants. He could ask questions when they survived.
But she knew that wasn't an option. There were cartel folk in every bunker. Of course there were, there were too many to stuff in just one.
Vyuli was dead. And despite herself, she couldn't even mourn him. Not him, with all he'd done, and all he represented.
Vyuli was dead. Now she had to take care of his last affairs.
She'd killed one man for his crimes.
She'd spent a night crushing skulls.
She could do whatever she damn well pleased.
Two tiny points of foam appeared at the corners of her lips, like she was turning as rabid as the shrivelled bodies she'd crushed.
Fine. Here she went.
Here. She. Went.