CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN - THE MADNESS OF CROWDS

A plan was developing.

She explained it to no-one. Not because she was... convinced they'd rat her out to the mutants, but because she genuinely didn't feel the need to. Ms. Blue hadn't asked for her plan, the soldiers hadn't even asked where she'd been when she returned from the great expanse of pale stone where burning mutants lingered dumbly amidst white fires. And that was it - there was no-one else to question her, no-one to confront her. Just her mind, still and bright, a living channel of herself to the world, without reference or filter. And thus the plan grew in silence, as she lingered around the bunker, leaning on her axe and thinking. Ms. Blue was always at her side, seeming to have appointed herself unofficial batman, keeping an eye on her, bringing sealed containers of food or water, generally hovering like an attentive (and obsessive) mother hen.

Well. If a mother hen called her chick 'ma'am' and was painfully deferential.

Tanner pondered.

She'd heard of buffalo running over the edges of canyons out of terror, because all the other buffalo were doing it, but what buffalo would, if it had the choice, keep going while its hooves were clawing at air, and the rocks below began to sink closer? What buffalo wouldn't want to turn back and return to solid ground, if it could? The mutants had that choice, the intelligence governing them had that choice, and... they didn't even have the excuse of moving like a herd, driven by furious momentum. Excuses filtered through her mind, and none stuck. They were being disposed of after outliving their usefulness. Nonsense, that light-vomiting dog had looked new, it had a perfectly functional set of mutations, and regardless, when the intelligence wanted mutants gone it sent them into pointless battle, it harvested them for parts, it never just... purged them in the most sterile fashion possible, recycling nothing.

They were mutating to the point that the intelligence couldn't control them, so it disposed of them in a way that wouldn't contaminate the rest. Something useful there, but... one of them had even tried to come for her when she saw it, still tried to move. If it hadn't broken apart, it would've attacked her like all the other mutants had during the siege. If they were meant to die out there, why move? If they were 'free' from the intelligence, why come for her when she had nothing to give? Alright, yes, she was covered in contaminated gore, but she was also large and well-armed, as was her companion. No stable mutant would attack on sight in a circumstance like that, they'd wait for a second, consider things, find the best opportunity.

They were attempting to get to the centre. Already dismissed, there was nothing there, that entire disk was just... poison and fire. Literally no reason, not when there were other ways down to the underground river. Hell, probably easier to dig upwards from the (eminently accessible) river if they wanted to, the rock down there might be less fused, less hard-packed by whatever the theurgists had done.

It's a distraction intended to confuse you and everyone else, obscuring their real goal. The mutants were clever, she'd give them that. The intelligence governing them had a good sense for timing, for how to mutate, for how to divide up forces... it'd almost sneaked into the city under her nose, then divided its army to make sure only the useless ones died to whatever defences she had, then had reconnaissance done and dusted in a day, then took the walls, and was now basically winning. The tide of battle was definitely in its favour, it surrounded them on all sides, it held the city, the only question was how long the colonists could hold out against it - both the soldiers at their posts, and the civilians in their bunkers. Surviving to spring with their current tactics was obviously off the table. And yet... this felt...

Far-fetched.

The intelligence deliberately sacrificing valuable, viable mutants over and over (for an extended period, based on the number of bodies), on the off-chance that someone would see this happening, then... come to what conclusions, exactly? What was she being led towards? Was it just a regular old act of obfuscation, confusing her and nothing more? The intelligence was winning, and thus far it had been intensely mechanical. Preferring to just... fight, retreat, adapt, fight, retreat, adapt, sticking to the methods which were clearly working. Predicting the enemy felt foolish when the enemy was so inhuman, but... there was no ego to this horde. No bold, decisive moves, no dizzyingly risky strategies, because animals didn't do those, not unless they had to. Constant pressure on a variety of fronts, never relying completely on one - ambient contamination, infiltration, assassination, assaults in the night and the day - when it could utilise all of them to exert constant pressure on the enemy.

Why would it change?

Why would it decide to perform this little act, that would be more understandable if she was fighting a character from the Annals of Tenk, who insisted on being dizzyingly brilliant and decisively daring because that made for more entertaining listening?

If she had Sersa Bayai around to talk to, instead of having him locked in a bunker, she could ask him what had happened in the war. How it had... hold on. She could ask the General. He'd actually been there. She glanced around, noting the silence of the soldiers, the distant shadows of the dwindling Rekidan forces... normally she'd go 'right, ask the General', then lean on her axe and wait for things to proceed. When in doubt, find a queue and stand in it until something happened, never act when she could ask advice first... and she would, she promised she would, but... just assume she was right. Be confident, be bold. Assume she was entirely correct, and the mutants would always prefer slow wars of attrition to devastatingly brilliant - if risky - strategies. Assume they'd done the same thing last time, rather than waiting for confirmation. Ignore the instinctual panic at working without precedent - she was being without precedent, she existed in one second, died as it ended, was born again as the clock tick onwards, she was a non-relative being, being being relative would mean being the old Tanner would mean being a coward would mean wallowing and fearing and weeping and breaking. The old Tanner had been a useless coward who had no idea how to deal with power.

The new Tanner didn't care if she had no idea what to do with power thrust into her hands, because she had no past, nor any future, but only an infinite and instinctual present.

So shut up, stomach.

And stop. Churning.

Right. Assume she was correct. Assume attrition was the way to go. This meant something was rotten with the intelligence of the mutants, something was going wrong. They were here for, genuinely, no apparent purpose. They were here to wipe out humans, and... then walk into the middle of that pale disk and die. Maybe this was an extended act of suicide, but if so, why the genocide? Why fight them? Unless they thought that the humans were the aggressors, and they were just fighting back in self-defence, and that was nonsense. Because the mutants devoured their own without hesitation, and could easily flow around the bunkers to run for the pale. Anyway. Anyway. Don't get bogged down in mutant psychology, don't project human emotions onto them. The point was, something was wrong, and this might, emphasis on might, be a silver bullet. Some kind of crucial weakness that could allow the colonists to win. Imagine if it turned out that the pale was hypnotic to their kind, and destroyed them completely. Imagine if the mutants were afraid of this, and were trying to kill all the humans in the colony before they figured it out. Imagine if the mutants were suffering a crisis in the 'leadership', and the pale was a way of restraining this, sterilising 'rebels' before their disease could spread. The best predator for a mutant was another mutant - if they could turn the horde against itself, victory would be right around the corner.

No idea what she'd do afterwards, though.

The new Tanner didn't think about what she'd do afterwards. The new Tanner didn't want to martyr herself for a doomed cause, she wanted to do something.

Talk to the General. Yell to Sersa Bayai. Find someone. Find anyone. Talk to Marana. Pray to something. You're a judge in her twenties who's having a nervous breakdown, no part of you is ready for whatever you're planning, whatever that might be.

Well.

Maybe.

But there was no going back. Momentum and... whatnot. Momentum and bright calm and becoming more fully herself and ceasing to be relative. All of that.

No, no, think it with spirit. Think of it with italics.

Momentum. Bright calm. More fully herself. Ceasing to be relative. A being of the present. A living sun.

These were all thoughts normal young ladies had.

So.

The plan.

She nodded to Ms. Blue, and marched off, leaving the soldiers behind at their posts. Not abandoning them. They saluted her as she departed, and watched her as she vanished into the streets, buffalo pelt swaying about her shoulders, lacquered axe gleaming in the winter light, boots crunching at the snow which had fallen almost enough to devour the ash. Almost. Her face was warm, her skin felt like it was growing into her armour. Ms. Blue trotted after her, eyes glowing with enthusiasm and... gratefulness for being brought along. Rewarded for her loyalty. She'd abandoned her post to come and join Tanner, hadn't she? So hollow that she needed a commander to complete her, so squeezed dry by the tension of the siege that she demanded another half, an axis to orient around, a... stable figure that gave her permission to become more juvenile. An excuse for regression.

...ma'am was an anagram for mama, now she thought about it.

She chose not to think about that. No reason.

Ms. Blue, at least, was silent. Glad to follow. Unwilling to question. Clinging to her heels as they made their way to the theurgists' bunker. It was odd, being out here. Very odd. Because each bunker was its own little universe. She walked around, she saw soldiers, they saluted smartly and watched her closely as she walked away... and she had no idea what mutants they'd fought, what experiences they'd gone through. But they were all hollow men and hollow women. Not a single one was fully human at this stage, all had been changed, all had been wrung out until only obedience remained. And inside the bunkers... for all she knew, they were no better. Shrivelled up by isolation and the silent march of the mutant horde. Maybe the governor had missed a trick when it came to social control. He thought about regulating housing and inns, managing food prices and carefully negotiating with various forces. Tanner just locked everyone up and commanded them during a crisis, waiting around until all her competition died off or lost credibility, then waited until she became an object of fascination. The one person who seemed to know what was going on, the only suitable vessel for their agency. Pour it all into her, and let them sleep on their feet, fire with their eyes closed, gently murmur their battle cries and die with silent relief. Let them become comatose, because there was someone out there who knew better than they did.

They had no idea.

It was a good thing she wasn't thinking at all about the future, on account of her habit of inventing catastrophes wherever she looked.

If she was thinking about the future - which she wasn't - she might start to worry that something ugly was brewing in the colonists. That maybe something was going very, very wrong.

Thankfully, of course, she wasn't thinking about that at all.

She was thinking...

About spyglasses.

* * *

There ought to be something of a conversation that she remembered. But... honestly, she couldn't remember a single word. Must've been at least one, if not more - spyglass was really just two words under a single hat, and it basically had to be communicated. But when her mind flickered back, it found nothing but a vague haze of 'this conversation occurred, and something was achieved'. Just slid away immediately afterwards, her memory-room had no slots for it. Something worrying there. And something telling - she was busy, and couldn't be paying attention to everything. What did it matter if Mr. Mask was rude to her, if the female theurgist had been pleasant, if they'd talked through the grille or through her yelling... no, no, she remembered something. Mr. Mask had been pointed about avoiding cross-contamination, didn't want her coming inside the bunker, not in a hundred years. So Tanner had politely asked Ms. Blue, someone rather smaller, to scour herself as best she could before slithering in through the vent at the base of the bunker, the same kind as the one Bayai had used to kill Vyuli. Turned out all the bunkers did have one, in the end. A little bit of paranoia by the governor, as per usual. Couldn't have anything without some means of controlling it without it knowing, a mistake repeated over and over and over until he was being controlled without realising a damn thing. And then the General had crushed him to death and left him alone in the darkness of his hidden office. If the General wasn't helping her, and wasn't going to die soon...

Well. It was easier to let that crime slip from her mind these days. Much easier. Injustice was an instinct, one she was slowly ingraining into herself.

She'd sent Ms. Blue in, and listened to the squeaks of surprise and alarm as she knocked politely on the door to their bunker. The act hadn't really stood out as remarkable to Tanner, honestly. There was such a thing as necessity, and at this point sending a slightly weird woman to intimidate a mound of theurgists was fairly ordinary, compared to... well, crushing skulls all night, burning innumerable bodies, getting blinded by a dog with a cone for a face, seeing a pale disk with white fires that carbonised mutants, working with Rekidan nobles, intimidating theurgists with those Rekidan nobles...

Really, she'd toned down. A weird woman was several ranks below intensely mutated slaver aristocracy dwelling amidst the bone orchard of the underground river, on the scale of 'things which stand out as being particularly odd'.

Maybe that said something about her. Who she was becoming.

Thankfully, such thoughts were beneath her. She'd thought about obtaining a spyglass. Now she had one. A theurgic spyglass which was uncomfortably warm to the touch, and hummed very, very slightly. The reasoning was simple, she thought to herself as she settled into a perch on one of the rooftops. The General's movements over the last few days had surprisingly helped when it came to this - the way he swung, the way he found handholds, the general confidence required for climbing. A willingness to bound up higher and higher rather than hang on and lose one's strength. Really, that was the perfect summary of her mental state presently. Keep moving, because if she remained in one place too long, she weakened, she slipped, she fell.

Move, move, move, move, move. Upwards momentum only lasted so long as she was moving, it was startlingly easy to break free of. Forward momentum was damn easy by comparison. She clambered up a little unsteadily to the roof, settled down around some rubble...

And barely flinched when a Rekidan crouched ape-like at her side, blinking curiously.

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Tanner glanced.

Ms. Sulphur. The one with the weapons fusing into her body, the body convinced that all this metal needed some purpose. Maybe as an exoskeleton, maybe as an integrated weapon... the woman smiled with uncannily sharp teeth, stained black with gunpowder, gleaming with little filaments of metal.

She said nothing.

Just smiled. Watched. Clearly a little interested. Tanner idly added Ms. Sulphur to the list of Rekidans who were still alive. Not many, now. They'd lost... maybe ten, to concerted attacks, delicate assassinations, simple contamination driving them to madness as the days wore on. Her little miracle force would be gone within the month. Never see the spring thaw. No chance.

The woman didn't seem very fussed by this.

Tanner returned to her spyglass. Staring out, ignoring the low hum of the metal that set her teeth on edge. More so than they already were. Right, the Breach, the Breach... could see it from here, and the spyglass let her scan the barricade with perfect accuracy. Dizzying, really, seeing... goodness, they'd really made the place their own. Knew they'd taken it, but... there was a living bridge. The buffalo orchard, the fused mass of animals that kept their specialised organs fresh and available, had been draped over the top of the little improvised wall the colonists had put up, their fur knotted into handholds for mutants to scamper over, moving back and forth, back and forth... now that was odd.

Why would they be doing that? Why not... move into the city proper? Why bother having forces outside the walls when they'd taken the gates?

...two reasons. One - they feared a retaliation that destroyed sensitive assets. Two - they didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket, liked to have guards outside. Both reasons failed on closer inspection. Sensitive assets - they had their armoury draped over the damn wall, immobilised by stone, pinned by mutants, vulnerable to a flamethrower at close range. She could see the organs still hanging like udders from underneath the silent mass of black fur and scarred skin, the heads staring out with dull mournfulness at the great expanse of soldiers that crawled and slithered and flew and oozed around and over them. How much more sensitive could their assets get? And the second... all their eggs in one basket, they were besieging a city and losing dozens of mutants a day. They couldn't get all that contamination back, not with the measures the colonists were taking. They were cramming their eggs into a single basket, then cramming their bodies on top of it, alongside their extended family. Guarding their flank against what, other mutants? Reinforcements, they were guarded against... alright, could be there were facilities outside the walls, could be. Could be.

But that still struck Tanner as wrong. The bunkers were immobile, the soldiers were glued to the bunkers, the Rekidans were glued to the soldiers - needed them for backup, for shelter, for equipment. They'd launched no offensives.

So...

Why were bodies swarming over the walls still?

She focused a little more, and... Ms. Blue snarled suddenly, defensive. Tanner glanced idly at her. Ms. Sulphur appeared to be trying to pick flecks of mutant flesh from Tanner's coat, a happy, almost maternal expression on her face. Remembered her doing this to All-Name. Ms. Blue didn't speak a word of Rekidan, so the snarl was all that left her lips, and she moved forward, gun in hand...

"It's fine. Let her do it. Need scouring anyway."

The snarl stopped, and Ms. Blue's entire demeanour changed.

"Of course, ma'am. I'm very sorry, ma'am. Please, continue, Rekidan."

And that was all.

Gods, it was eerie seeing anyone being so deferent to her. No, no, not eerie, expected. And permitted. She didn't think for a moment that it was odd.

Not one little bit.

Ms. Sulphur continued to pick away, humming an old song to herself. Wondered where All-Name was. Hadn't seen him for a bit. Probably not dead, the Rekidans weren't... ah, anyway. Back to work. The spyglass focused a little more, and... waiting.

She waited for close to an hour before she saw what she was looking for... there. There. She picked out a single rapid mutant, moving like it intended to really get somewhere, not just moving with placid speed to a position nearby. It wasn't reinforcing, it was on a mission. Looked like a rat, albeit with a much longer, fleshy tail that was almost twice the length of its body, and was studded with black, oozing stingers which scraped against the ground as it ran on legs that were slowly coming to resemble a dog or a wolf. More nimble. The back was what stood out, though - tiny plates of yellow-black chitin, almost like a wasp. And with the stingers... well. The wasp-rat scurried along through the city, and from her vantage point she could... mostly track it. The chitin helped, not very subtle. Her eyes always seemed to find it, no matter what. Always seemed able to just... trace it across the landscape.

She scanned, examined... watched as it ran and...

Stopped, meeting with another group of mutants. Too close to the Breach to be assaulted at this point, much too close. Clearly waiting for the night.

OK, another... wait for almost another hour, glancing at the sun to make sure the night wasn't too close, that the nightly assaults weren't about to start without her... being at them was something she felt nothing about, no pleasure nor sorrow nor panic, not any more, but the idea of missing one was... almost repugnant. And... and a twitch in her gut. She knew one was coming near, and her eyes flickered down with decisive speed.

Another one found that was moving with purpose, a purpose that demanded a higher speed than the others, moving in a direction contrary to the others, moving through the city rather than getting ready for an assault...

A deer. Just a deer. Well. Almost. It was slowly transforming into an insect hive, really. Not infested, not being controlled, this was a cervid hive. Honeycomb made out of white bone and yellow fat, glittering blood thicker than honey sustaining wriggling larvae covered in dense, wiry pelts, slithering up to crawl around the antlers where weeping sores provided yet more sustenance, and hung heavy with odd cocoons. No mutant was capable of truly breeding, thankfully - this swarm would die with the mutant. Still. The hive-deer ran strangely over the stones, mangy fur glistening with nectar, hollow eyes packed with tiny chambers in which swam innumerable larvae, a little cloud of creatures that resembled flying beetles with ragged strings of fur around their wings and antlers instead of pincers circling around it. It ran...

And ran...

And didn't stop.

Tanner's heart-rate increased very slightly, and. Ms. Sulphur felt it, letting out a strange chirp as she followed Tanner's gaze, curious at her curiosity, while Ms. Blue huddled closer and shot Ms. Sulphur looks of mild suspicion. Only mild. She'd been instructed to moderate herself, after all.

The deer-hive - the apicervid, and yes, she was proud of that name - was running, running... running...

Finding the pale.

From here, it just looked like a mass of stone. The fires weren't really visible, save as faint glitters. Almost looked mundane. But the deer was running for it, and like the others, it ran straight into the pale... and froze. The spyglass picked out in excruciating detail how it was jittering, looking around, definitely looking confused... before locking up as the carbonisation took place, insects clattering to the ground around it like tiny furred pebbles, the fur burning swiftly into a bristle of coal-black hairs, filaments thinner and darker than pencil lead, but just as rigid.

Another one dead.

For no apparent reason.

That one had looked totally viable. Totally normal. And she could see the insects still flying in, following the hive to its death. There was no excuse, they'd seen their 'parent' burning, and they were still going. This was deliberate, this wasn't an accident, this wasn't anything but a deliberate action of mutant erasure, and...

Again, her mind flickered to the wall. Why would the mutants be swarming over it, what were they so paranoid about they were willing to put walls between it and the humans, what did they have which needed to be kept secure out of fear of reprisal?

Ideas were blossoming. Not particularly nice ideas, it must be said. But... now...

She wasn't thinking of some sort of mutant general standing there, eerily human, with golden hair coursing around his malformed shoulders. Sneering and laughing and cackling as he ordered yet another mutant to die for his amusement, or to satisfy his madness. But she was thinking... well...

Tanner murmured to Ms. Sulphur, who was picking gunpowder from under her nails.

"General."

A blink.

Tanner tucked one arm behind her back, then stood boldly and strode about for a moment, her eyebrows so deeply furrowed they were visible behind the gas mask. Ms. Sulphur blinked again... then let out a barking, seal-like laugh, nodded smartly, and set off, practically gliding from roof to roof. An expression of clean-faced zealotry plastered across it. Must be what martyrs looked like when they were marching off to die. The General returned with her... Tanner ought to be examining how tired he looked, how stressed, how close to breaking...

But he just bowed his head politely and waited. And the idea of examining him like she'd examine a threat vanished from her mind. He was in on the game. He obeyed. He would do what was required - and that meant she could calmly factor him into her life, without studying him like one would a... a cloudy sky while at sea, terrified that each one might signal a storm.

Clear skies all around her. Clear and red and full of bleeding stars.

Right-o.

All-Name was nearby, she idled noted. Wonderful. Made life more convenient. Though he was... definitely a little delicate. Bunker-bound, without a doubt. A little stretched thin under his well-worn equipment, skin pulled tight enough around his bones that it seemed as though he was spontaneously growing more bones simply to create a more taut frame for his skin-canvas.

"I need to know about the Great War. Specifically, how large this army is, compared to the one you fought."

The General blinked, tilted his head as All-Name translated with a weary, weary voice... and his rumble was a curt one.

"This horde is nothing compared to the one which overwhelmed the city in the war. Many times smaller. Many, many times smaller."

"And when the city was breached, did they linger outside the walls, or immediately rush in?"

"They surrounded the city, slaughtered all who opposed them, left enough to work on the city, then the bulk left. Heading for another battle. Only a certain number went into the city, they never... filled it with their entire army."

"Do you know how they drilled through the foundation stone?"

"...we believe they used a combination of human tools, equivalents grown from their own bodies, and creatures which could gnaw at the rock."

"Was the centre of the city taken immediately?"

"It was a priority for them. Once they had the centre, they spread outwards and overwhelmed what remained. But this was after cracking open most of our defences - the wall-guards were dead at this point, as were the rest. Mutants on the walls could rain down support, while the main army thrust through and took the temple complex in the middle."

A single sharp dagger-thrust into the city's heart, while support kept everything else immobilised.

Sounded familiar. Different was, the dagger-thrust was ending, over and over again, in carbonised bodies. And never enough bodies moved through to accomplish anything, even if there was something to take. A few mutants every couple of hours was... nothing.

"I see. Thank you."

"...is there a plan brewing?"

Tanner was silent. Keeping her plan to herself, because it didn't need to be approved by others, only carried out. You could carry out a plan while disapproving of it, that was a soldier's prerogative, but they had to obey. And she knew they would. The hollow men and hollow women had nothing left in them but obedience. The Rekidans had nothing left but martyrdom - they'd follow her to the death. So long as it was to the death. The plan... well...

"Were there ever any plans to... prevent the mutants getting what they wanted? I mean, you must've known they were after something, not just the people of the city."

The General puffed his chest a little.

"Of course we knew. Our men butchered so many of theirs that they made, to put it bluntly, a complete loss on the invasion. All the Rekidans in the world wouldn't make up for the mutants we destroyed. Only the godsblood under the city would've ever satisfied their hunger."

He spoke grandly, but All-Name's translation was dull, toneless, his eyes struggling to focus on Tanner. A General slowly going mad from contamination, and a young man breaking under the weight of weariness, of combat, of simple stress. Exemplification of why things either needed to end soon, or not at all. The hollow soldiers wouldn't come up with anything. The Rekidans just wanted death. She had to do it. Had to think of something, then blaze with the confidence and self-belief (arrogance) necessary to power through without doubt clouding her actions.

Hm.

"And you ever considered attacking this goal, rather than the mutants? Make them give up because there was no reason to continue?"

The General shrugged vaguely.

"By the time the siege started, our options had long-since dwindled. We had no choice but to fight on. Though... we had forces in external fortresses to exploit that reason. The mutants were concerned to the point of obsession with the city, giving us leave to harass their flanks whenever we could, place pressure on their forces. Hardly perfect, but..."

Tanner remained silent, not probing further. So. They'd never gone after the actual priority. Not like they could. Rekida was an isolationist kingdom, she didn't even know if they had a dedicated corps of theurgists, if they allowed the broader theurgic colleges to influence them when they refused to let anyone else influence them. The capacity to seal their foundation stone, to create the carbonising pale which now served as the graveyard for an inexplicable number of mutants, to make an expanse that couldn't be easily drilled through, that resisted intrusion, that resisted life... this was a capacity that they lacked. Completely and utterly. For all she knew, that was why Rekida had been sacked the way it did - the mutants knew they had a piece of canned food in front of them, incapable of resisting them in a way that mattered. And thus they took their time, acted thoroughly and comprehensively, soaked up losses... then started drilling. Not sure how they operated in other cities, but it could've been more subtle, more based on sapping and infiltration, the destruction of food supplies, crucial targets, and the slow starving of the populace, than something like... this.

Put bluntly, if this horde attacked the colony by assassinating key targets - in one night, they could handle the governor, Canima, Vyuli, and so on without much effort - well in advance, they could really have achieved something. There was a reason Tanner had, for a time, suspected the advancing horde of having killed the governor. But they hadn't. They simply hadn't.

Why had they not. They could've compromised all defences, they could've sealed off the theurgists before Tanner got to them, they could've made it so that their smaller horde could take the same city a much larger one took years ago, despite all the experience built up over the Great War. And that was assuming that they'd attack anyway, because why would they.

They were attacking for no conceivable reason.

They were campaigning with suboptimal tactics.

They were sending their own soldiers to die pointlessly in the pale.

Inexplicable at all three levels. Erratic. The General watched her carefully, not interrupting as she thought...

And there it was. The plan snapped into place.

"We're going to set some explosives around the seal."

All-Name blinked. Translated. Ms. Blue was starting to jitter.

"...judge, you know... it's rather large, yes? We don't have the-"

"It doesn't matter. Order your men to prepare for an assault. Relay messages to the bunkers, tell the soldiers to get ready to follow my orders. Ms. Blue, we're going to the theurgists again, I imagine you won't need to crawl this time."

Ms. Blue blinked.

"..Ms..."

Ah.

"Kal. Come along. Work to do."

Confidence, confidence, confidence - confident and self-assured people possessed of inestimable bright calm were invulnerable to such things as embarrassment, they threw around nicknames like they were no-one's business. She kicked aside a mutant's burned and blackened skeleton as she went back to the edge of the roof, drawing her cape around herself. She was in a war-zone. Numerous behaviours were permissible here. Such as...

Ah. Ms. Blue appeared to have rather taken a shine to the name.

...come to think of it, Tanner gave people substitute names in the Mahar Jovan dialect, Diarchic. Which was distinct to the Fidelizhi dialect. Blue was... ah. Maybe she just thought this was a fun name, and not her being painfully unimaginative and awkward.

"Of course, ma'am!"

Excellent.

They had business to be getting on with.

It didn't matter that she was... oh, gods, she was... her head was buzzing, her face was burning, her palms were sweaty, her neck was stiff with tension... she'd been crushing skulls for assault after assault, seeing the fires rise, her mind was becoming stranger, she just... she wasn't...

What was she doing?

Why was she here?

Oh, gods... there was a second of clarity, embarrassment snapping into her with vicious force, momentarily cracking her out of whatever this was. She was as hollow as everyone else. She'd had the important parts squeezed away, leaving behind... behind machinery colder than any she'd ever managed to construct, even when she was a judge. She was unstable, she was out of control, she had no idea what she was doing. She wasn't a commander, she was a twenty-something academic who'd wanted nothing more than to live a quiet life with her creature comforts, and now she was here, in the cold and the dark and the endless stench, under a red sky that was not real, no matter how much it refused to go away. She was Tanner Magg, she missed her mother, she missed her home - both of them, the inner temple and the little house in Mahar Jovan. The gyre of her mind was expanding wider and wider, and she didn't like what it was becoming, what conclusions it was spinning to. Hollow men and hollow women being directed around by someone possessed of bright calm and superior will, that was insane, that had no reference to the law, that was something the surrealists would come up with, something Marana had warned her against pursuing. She wasn't liberating herself, she was just becoming something worse, being free didn't mean being debauched, she... she... she wanted to see Eygi, she-

Eygi.

The girl who lied to her. Who strung her along for years and years, then ditched her. Didn't even invite her to her wedding. Marana, who was an ageing alcoholic and cocaine addict who'd lied too. Yan-Lam, a child and the first sign that the world was full of hollow things that could be propped up by someone with actual beliefs and principles. Most people just wandered through life meanderingly, unsure of where they were going or what they were doing, she knew this because she was like this, and she'd moved past it. She could've bowed her head and done was she was told, and she'd stood up, done something with her life, shook off those who clustered around and above to immobilise her and leave her vulnerable. The hollow eyes of soldiers stared up from the street. Empty. Broken. When you stressed a human enough, they snapped. When you stressed a human with mutants, they infantilised. She hadn't. She'd stayed exactly the way she was, and remained potent. Her mind contained their minds, and she understood them, she controlled them, she was them and more.

She didn't need Eygi. Nor Marana. All she needed was Ms. Blue, who knew what her job was, and didn't complain. Who understood how the world was, how the situation was. A mental breakdown... pointless, a genuinely pointless and useless diagnosis. A cocoon 'broke down' when the insect inside escaped, and the insect going through metamorphosis was 'breaking down' into a sludge of matter before reforming. Eels broke down at the end of their lives, their stomachs vanished, they became immaculate beings of pure purpose, and if they didn't, then their species would die out. This was the nature of her life. Breakdown and crisis were the means to prosperity, to advancement. If this crisis hadn't happened, she'd have remained a boring, stuck-up judge serving others. She'd obeyed the Lord of Appeal like a good dog - now, she ordered people around, she wouldn't take a word of argument from that shrivelled, grey-clad wretch. She'd evolved, hadn't she? Changed? She was the eel in the final stage of her life, she was ready to swim across the ocean and do her damn job, she was ready to transform completely into whatever she needed to be. Who cared if she was stressed while it happened, and who cared if she was injured? None of that mattered. The crisis was all around her, the crisis was in her bones, the crisis wrapped around her mind, the momentum was driving her, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster - look at all the ash, at the swarm, at the ambient contamination. She would always be needed to manage this colony, to move these hollow people around, because no-one else was here to do it. All the others were dead. She'd become the absolute leader of this place mostly by accident, and partially by her own will. This was her life now.

This. Was. Her. Life. Now.

So.

Time to get on with the plan. Because that was what the new Tanner did.

She could feel droplets of spit at the corner of her lips, frothing up like she was a rabid dog. Her face was intolerably warm. Her eyes felt bloodshot.

Ms. Blue saw nothing. All Ms. Blue saw was her commander. Her governor. Her leader.

That was all that mattered.

Her bright calm was recognised and rewarded. She was ignoring the shadowy version of herself that lived in the minds of others, now she looked at the golden version of herself that rode on the backs of others, that commanded them rather than being commanded.

Now. Time to blow up that stone. Just to see what happened. The old Tanner would be a coward here, would need more proof, more confirmation, would dally around and ask for constant advice. But her biggest successes had always come from spontaneity and unpredictability, from her silences and her stillness. Just had to do it again.

With more explosives.

She licked her lips to clear away the spit, and soldiered on, eyes boiling.

Face unpleasantly warm.