“Faceplate appears and disappears at the touch of this sensor,” said the head technician. He pressed a spot on the side of Mal’s helmet, and all at once everything went yellow and she realised she was staring out through the snakelike lenses. “The tinting on the eye screens filters out glare from l-gun bolts. That’s crucial after dark, so as not to compromise your night vision.”
Reston tried his faceplate too. “Nice.”
His voice came directly to Mal via her right ear.
“All the suits are in constant comms-link contact,” the head technician explained. “There are two channels, proximity and general. Proximity, the default setting, works up to a range of three hundred metres. General is a wide-spectrum band that picks up all Serpent Warrior chatter at all times. Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Is there anything else we
need
to know?” Reston replied.
“I don’t think so. Now, will you kindly let poor Yolyamanitzin there go? The boy looks like he’s about to faint.”
“Give us a couple of l-guns and we’re done,” said Mal.
The guns were lodged into her and Reston’s hands. Mal laid her
macuahitl
aside and gave Yolyamanitzin a gentle shove. “Off you go.” The young technician almost collapsed to the floor in relief.
“I would wish you godspeed, but I can’t bring myself to,” said the head technician, finding some courage now that none of his people was in direct danger any more. “Whoever you are, coming in here dressed in holy garb, you don’t deserve to get away with this. The Great Speaker knows all, sees all. Vengeance will be his.”
“What you mean is you’re going to blab to him about us as soon as we’re gone,” said Reston.
“That’s right.” The man blinked defiantly. “And to Colonel Tlanextic.”
“How?”
“Through the hotline link.”
“What hotline link? That one over there?” Reston was looking at a console with a number of telephone receivers attached to it, each a different colour.
“That very one.”
Reston charged up his l-gun and blasted the console to pieces.
“Not any more you’re not,” he said.
M
AL LIFTED HER
head... and flew.
It was strangely exhilarating and exhilaratingly strange. Her feet were off the floor. She was floating. She had to resist the urge to waft her arms and legs as though treading water in a swimming pool.
She lifted her head again and rose a little higher. She wobbled uncertainly in the air. She felt on the verge of overbalancing and inclined herself forwards ever so slightly to compensate. All at once she was in motion. The further over she leaned, the faster she went. Wishing to decelerate, she instinctively straightened up. The suit of armour halted, returning to hover mode.
“This is...” She couldn’t think of a word for it.
“I know!” Reston beamed, executing a tentative midair pirouette. “Where has this been all my life?”
Mal tried for speed again, bending forward until she was near horizontal. The armour flung her towards the tunnel, far faster than she was expecting. She collided with the edge of the entrance and rebounded off. Picking herself up off the floor, she marvelled that she hadn’t felt a thing. It had been like sprinting headlong into a wall of cotton wool.
What was it Tlanextic had called it? “Impact-dispersant.”
Phenomenal.
She resumed her progress through the tunnel, warier than before but only marginally. Reston caught up and flew alongside her. They exchanged looks through the snake-eye lenses. His eyes were boyishly wide. He was having fun. And so, she had to admit, was she.
The bunker doors could be opened manually from the inside; Reston turned the wheel, and the doors ground grudgingly apart a few inches, then stopped, refusing to go any further. They’d warped them when they’d blasted their way in, and they no longer neatly followed their tracks.
“Let’s see if we can get them to budge the old-fashioned way,” he said, and grabbed one and began to tug sideways.
What happened next surprised them both. The door started to bend as Reston pulled on it. The more pressure he applied, the more it curved inwards. Solid metal buckled in his hands as though it were cardboard. Finally, with a cracking screech, both the top and bottom edges of the door jumped out of their tracks and the whole thing hung askew.
“Well, either I don’t know my own strength,” Reston said, “or this suit enhances the wearer’s muscle power by a factor of ten. The head technician didn’t mention
that
.”
“Maybe he just wanted us out of there as soon as possible,” Mal said.
“Imagine if I’d had one of these instead of my Conquistador armour. Imagine what I’d have been able to accomplish then.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Too late. I already have.”
“Let’s focus on the now. We still have to get off the island, and armour or not, I have a feeling it isn’t going to be easy.”
“Why not? The only people who’d have any interest in stopping us are Serpents, and to them we look like, well, them. They won’t bother us.”
“Yeah,” said Mal, “but to Quetzalcoatl and pals we look like Serpents too. And on recent evidence, gods don’t show their enemies much mercy.”
Reston was sobered. “Ah. Good point. We’d better go carefully, bettern’t we?”
“No shit, sunshine.”
O
UTSIDE, THE CONCOURSE
was as before, a field of corpses. Wounds and spilled blood glistened blackly in the lamplight.
The worst of the fighting seemed to be taking place over on the west side of the city, so they elected to head east. As she took off into the open air, Mal was filled with a giddying sense of possibility. The exhilaration she’d felt down in the confines of the bunker was magnified a hundredfold. This suit of armour could transport her
anywhere
.
She reminded herself not to get cocky. Just because they’d got themselves some paddles didn’t mean they weren’t still up shit creek.
They rose into the night sky, Tenochtitlan dropping away beneath them. In mere moments they were level with the summits of the ziggurats, the tops of the towers. Shoreline lights twinkled in the distance – so far and yet, now, so near. Below her, Mal could see fires raging in at least three areas of the city. The eye screens on her faceplate reduced the brilliance of the fires to the muted throb of embers in a grate, but these were still clearly, from their size alone, serious infernos. One whole ziggurat was ablaze from lowest tier to highest, sending up dense clouds of smoke. An tanker aerodisc was scooping up water from the lake and dumping it onto the flames, but in vain. Elsewhere there were intermittent strobe flickers of l-gun fire. It was a garish, hellish scene. Mictlan itself surely had nothing that could compare.
If there is a Mictlan
, Mal thought. The gods were real, but somehow that made the myths attached to them seem less plausible, rather than more. It was like the first time she’d realised, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, that her parents weren’t the infallible, matchless beings she had believed them to be. They were just humans after all, with as many faults and failings as she had. It was that kind of loss of innocence. Nothing was safe any more, nothing sacred. Every measure she knew had had to be recalibrated.
When she and Reston had gained sufficient altitude, they set a course for the shore.
They had gone a mile – less – when trouble reared its head.
“Airborne troopers, please identify yourselves.”
Mal and Reston looked around. Looked at each other. Was someone talking to
them
?
“I repeat, airborne troopers, currently eastbound out of Tenochtitlan. Who are you and where do you think you’re going?”
The challenge had come over the comms link, but neither of them could see where it originated from.
“You two,” said the voice testily. “The ones heading away from the combat zone. I’m talking to you. Please respond. Over.”
“Er, yes,” said Reston. “We’re, er... This is us. Where are you?”
“Right up your backside.”
And there, behind them, out of nowhere, loomed a Serpent gunship. Mal and Reston slowed to a hover, and the aerodisc braked accordingly. A trio of pilots were visible in its cockpit. One of them spoke into a microphone handset, and the suspicion-filled voice resumed in Mal’s and Reston’s ears.
“Sound off,” it said. “Name, rank, platoon.”
“Uhmmm...” Mal was stumped. They hadn’t banked on something like this. “I’m Lieutenant...” She groped for a Nahuatl surname. “Yolyamanitzin.” It was the last one she’d heard, the first one that came to mind.
Unfortunately, Reston had had the exact same idea, and just as Mal was dubbing herself Yolyamanitzin, so was he. He even awarded himself the same rank as her.
“Let me get this straight,” said the pilot. “You’re both lieutenants and you’re both called Yolyamanitzin?”
“Yes,” said Reston. “Funny thing, eh? And we’re not even related.”
The pilot wasn’t buying it. “And your platoons? Which? Viper? Boa? Cobra?”
“Viper,” said Reston decisively. “Both of us. Another coincidence.”
“Nice try, dickhead. Serpent platoons are known by numbers, not the names of snakes.”
“Yeah, nice try, dickhead,” Mal muttered.
“So, really, who the hell are you two? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow you out of the air.”
“We’re on a special mission,” Reston said, stalling for time. Surreptitiously he flicked a switch and his l-gun started to power up. “Top secret. For the colonel.”
“Yeah, pull the other one. What accent is that anyway?”
“British,” said Reston, and in English he added, “Vaughn. Brace for evasive action.”
“What was that?” said the pilot. “Didn’t catch that last bit.”
“I said...”
And Reston opened fire.
Someone on board must have been anticipating this very move, because just as Reston unleashed the bolt the gunship flipped up onto its starboard side. His shot grazed the hull, leaving only a scorch. Then, still canted almost perpendicular, the aerodisc lunged forwards, its front-facing l-gun nacelles belching plasma.
But Mal and Reston were already racing away, flat out, in reverse. The gunship gave chase. More plasma bolts blistered around them, and they both twisted and sidewinded. There was no skill to their manoeuvring, only desperation, but the suits of armour were superbly responsive, almost as if they wanted what their wearers wanted. One bolt struck Mal a glancing blow. She was barely aware of it. She felt like laughing. But the next instant another caught her full on, and although the armour took the brunt, it seemed there were limits to the levels of energy discharge it could absorb. Mal was sent spiralling through space. Flecks of brightness whirled against a dark background. She couldn’t tell what was up or down, what was firmament or lake surface. She struggled against the spin, and finally managed to correct it and right herself. Her head took a few seconds to catch up with the rest of her.
As the dizziness cleared, she got her bearings. The gunship was hounding Reston hard, and only by some miracle was he eluding its fire. He managed to loose off the occasional shot of his own, but the disc outclassed him in terms of both gunpower and airspeed. He was fighting a rearguard action and it wasn’t doing him any good; it was only a matter of time before the Serpent pilots got in the two or three hits in quick succession that would polish him off.
“Reston! Keep that thing busy. I’m coming to help.”
“Whenever you like, Vaughn. No hurry. What are you going to do?”
“I have an idea, although I’m not too fond of it.”
They were using English. The pilots would be aware they were hatching something but wouldn’t know what.
“Well, like I said, no hurry. Whatever works for you. Any time in the next three seconds would be fine.”
Mal took a deep breath –
I can’t believe I’m doing this, I can’t believe I’m doing this, I can’t believe I’m doing this
– and soared towards the gunship. It opened up at her with its rear nacelles, but she made herself the zippiest, most elusive target imaginable, corkscrewing and loop-the-looping unpredictably, like a fly avoiding the swatter. Soon she was above the disc, out of the line of fire from any of its guns. She dived down and crash-landed on it, belly-flopping. Momentum carried her slithering across its roof to the front, where the cockpit windshield was.
Clinging on with one hand to the ridge of the windshield fairing, she started hammering the glass with the other. The pilots yelped in alarm. Over the comms link, the one who’d spoken earlier shouted at her that she was a madwoman. What was she trying to do?
“What does it look like?” she replied in Nahuatl.
The gunship went into a series of crazy bucking-bronco manoeuvres, the pilots doing everything they could to throw Mal off, but she hung on, still doggedly punching the windshield. The glass was tough but the suit of armour, or perhaps the woman inside it, was tougher. Spiderweb cracks appeared. Then a hole. Finally, with a sudden sucking crash, the entire curved sheet of glass caved in. Wind pressure drove the fragments into the cockpit at bullet speed. Mal heard screams. She detached herself from the disc and shot upwards.
The gunship slowed to a complete halt. Reston did a hairpin turn and aimed his l-gun at the hollowed-out windshield frame, and pumped a full-charge bolt into the cockpit. The disc rocked and shuddered. A tongue of flame erupted from the front like a dragon’s breath.
The gunship began a leisurely, seesawing descent, like an autumn leaf falling. It hit the lake surface quite gently, with a discreet splash. Its neg-mass drive was still functioning but was cycling down, so the disc remained buoyant on the water for nearly a minute before it began to sink. Still afire, it slipped into the darkness below with a surge of boiling bubbles and a hiss of steam.
Reston flew to Mal’s side. “We are definitely even now. That was magnificent stuff.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“I thought I was a goner for certain.”
“To be honest, I thought so too.”
“And now, surely, we have an uninterrupted journey to shore. Nothing else could possibly go –”