Angels and Exiles (31 page)

The keel had ground into the sand; the ship was halfway lying on its port side. The starboard side had been torn open by the bone-smashers, to below the water line. A network of cicatricial ropes had partially sealed the breach, whose edges were crusted with dried blood.

The gulls fled at her approach, letting a few scraps of flesh fall to the sand. A rope ladder tied to the gunwale paralleled the wound and reached further down to the ground. Lise climbed it clumsily, shutting her eyes at intervals to avoid vertigo. Bone shards protruded here and there from the lips of the wound. On the tilted deck, the shattered muzzles of missile launchers stood against the dark blue of the sky.

She went inside. She was in a corridor walled by flesh, drowned in the red glare of the emergency lights. She wanted to call to the soldier, but realized she had already forgotten his name.

She followed the corridor toward the prow. The floor was some gray matter, its surface ridged like an old man’s nails. Lise had to walk leaning to her right to compensate for the ship’s slope.

The corridor ended in a circular wall of muscles. Lise touched the sphincter, struck it with her fist, in vain. The flesh was warm and rigid under her touch.

Lise hesitated. The dampness of the corridor was getting difficult to bear. The emergency lighting seemed to have dyed her skin. She was on the verge of turning back when the door dilated. Behind it stood the soldier.

“Well, if you’re here, then come in,” he said.

She crossed the threshold. What else could she have done? The soldier manipulated a growth on the wall and made the door close. He had severed his dead arm and everted the left sleeve of his uniform inside his vest. His pelta hung on his belt.

She followed him through several corridors; at long intervals, other doors opened in the bulkheads; over the doorways letters and numbers had been tattooed into the flesh. Sometimes the ground shook under Lise’s feet, as if it echoed the beatings of a gigantic heart.

The last door opened onto the bridge. Daylight entered through unpolarized portholes and painted ellipses on the horn floor. Metal panels full of screens and indicator lights were set in the walls. Over one half of the room, the flesh was swollen, blackened, peeling in long strips.

Two uniformed corpses were crumpled in a corner. One a true man, without visible augmentation; the other a silver-haired elf, retractable claws at her fingertips and spurs at her ankles. Whatever had charred the flesh of the room had left them faceless; their limbs were broken in many places.

“Don’t touch them,” ordered the soldier. “We’ll bury them tonight, with full honours. You’ll find me an appropriate spot.”

“Are there any others?” she whispered.

“The others are at the bottom of the sea. But officers need a burial in due form. Now be quiet and stay where you are.”

The soldier went to a neural access point, extracted the nerve webs slowly from their sheath, laid them on his temples, smoothed them gently with his fingertips until they penetrated his epidermis and linked up with his cortical receptors.

He stayed immobile and silent for several minutes. Lise leaned against a bulkhead to avoid losing her balance. One after the other, the few indicators that were still lit were going out.

She could almost see how things had gone. The attackers—sentinel-medusas, assassin-eagles, torpedo-belugas?—swept the convoy with blood-freezers, then switched to bone-smashers, flesh-gnawers. The transport ship, its rudder damaged, broke formation, drifted away from the others. The enemy, knowing that the ship was finished, concentrated their assault on the other, less-damaged vessels, whose missile-throwers still vomited death.

On the bridge, all were dead. The few soldiers who had been elsewhere on the ship had not been spared—except for one, half of whose body had been crushed, but who still lived.

He returned to consciousness, dragged himself to the railing, tried to awake a seeker-tadpole; but the animal was dead. The soldier opened a hatch, went to the lower levels, in the scarlet light of the emergency lamps. He reached a still-functional escape hatch, crawled into the tadpole.

The ship had long since beached itself. The craft, expelled from its belly, dove into the sea, swam to the shore where the Princess of New Avalon awaited. And then . . . 

No, then the story had not proceeded as it was supposed to. There should have been something else, a smile on the man’s lips, a light in his eyes, a warmth in their bodies . . . 

The soldier shook himself and withdrew the webs. He turned to Lise.

“There’s a lot of work to do. I’ve shut down the electronics, but biologics have to be worked by hand. Got to kill the entire starboard side and draw all the blood to port; and all that will yield hardly enough reserves to finish the work. Come on.”

He led them first to a storeroom, where he got a coil of rope and a lamp, which he forced Lise to carry. Then he opened a door coded to his palmprints; it led to an armoury.

He equipped himself with a heavy cleaver and a nerve-dazzler. Seeing that Lise had followed him inside, he pushed her back out, closed the door behind him. He took the lead again, and as she followed him, she held tight to the heart-breaker she’d hidden in the coil of rope.

They descended to the lower deck. In places, the sphincters that sealed the passageways refused to open; the soldier would carve them to pieces with the cleaver. The energy blade’s glare, even at half power, hurt the eyes. When the emergency lighting failed, Lise had to turn on the lamp and hold it high.

In one precise spot of the corridor, indicated by letters graven in the flesh of the bulkheads, they stopped. The soldier cut into the flesh, revealed a metal panel blazoned with a danger symbol. He unlocked the panel, slid it aside. A nerve node emerged from the flesh at that point. He anchored the thin muzzle of the nerve-dazzler into the node, depressed the trigger.

The ship’s muscles convulsed. Lise was thrown violently against the port wall, again and again. The ship’s scream of pain filled her ears. After a few seconds, she got up, bruised. The corridor had ceased to tremble. All the emergency lights were dead. She activated her lamp, lit the soldier’s face, which showed the ghost of a smile. “Five more left,” he stated and ripped the nerve-dazzler from the charred fibres.

They advanced silently toward the stern. The soldier opened a door beyond which spread a wide low-ceilinged room, its walls covered in plush-soft fur. There was a series of alcoves along the walls; in the centre of each alcove, a pale swelling tipped with a dark projection.

The soldier hesitated a moment in the centre of the room, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I may need this one. We’ll isolate it.” He opened another panel, severed some nerves and spared the others, closed the panel. He dragged Lise behind him out through the door, and not far from the exit, he killed another section.

They went through the crew quarters. The soldier made a perfunctory check of the cabins, found nothing to keep his attention.

At the end of the row of cabins, a door was left ajar. A curious smell seemed to emanate from the opening, a smell which made Lise’s heart thud, though she couldn’t say why.

She opened the door wider, lit her lamp to see better. It was warm inside the room. The floor was soft and resilient. At the far end of the room, the bulkhead took on a half-human shape: the lower half of a trunk, the hint of wide-open legs. Between the thighs, a woman’s sex with disproportionate labia, bright red and dripping. The smell made Lise shiver to the bones.

“Leave that alone.” The soldier’s voice was uninflected. Lise extinguished her lamp and followed him to the next neural nexus.

The soldier killed the crew quarters, and then the ship’s starboard lung. After the convulsions, Lise would light her lamp and hold it up high. The man cast a very dark shadow on the pale flesh.

At a branching of many corridors, he stopped for an instant, leaning on the cleaver like on a cane, apparently trying to figure out his way.

Lise took out the heart-breaker and fired.

There was a sound like the noise a metal projectile makes when it hits armor. The soldier turned to face her; the gem in the centre of his pelta shone like a false-sun.

He took a step toward Lise, struck her arm with the cleaver. The heart-breaker fell to the ground and slid along the sloping floor. The soldier dropped his own weapon, seized Lise’s throat, slammed her against the bulkhead, pressed against her. His breastbone was bruising her chest.

He pulled down her skirt and underclothes. His sex tore into her. She could not find voice to cry out.

When he was done, he took two steps back, let Lise fall into a heap. She was knuckling her lower abdomen to ease the pain. Her thighs were flecked with red.

The soldier’s penis was still turgid. He turned aside, pressed the base of his scrotum, opening his spermatic valve. He let a long jet of semen fall to the floor.

“Stand up,” he said. She obeyed. “Pick up the rope and the lamp.”

He killed the two sections that were left. When it was done, he led them to the port section, opened a hatch that led down to the hold.

It was warm and damp and the bulkheads were bright pink in the light, irrigated by enormous arteries. A vast door not far from the ladder almost reached the ceiling, ten metres from the floor; it responded to the soldier’s palm.

Behind it opened an immense room, dimly lit by bioluminescence. Bone catwalks ran along the bulkheads, on six levels. At regular intervals rose cylindrical pillars also surrounded by catwalks.

The cargo was arranged in two or three rows along each accessway. There were thousands and thousands of them, more than halfway to term, floating in translucent pouches that emerged partially from the walls and pillars of flesh.

The soldier walked to one of the bulkheads. “A shame,” he said. “We’ve barely got enough to bring a few hundred to term. The others will have to be interrupted.”

He sliced into a section of the wall, cut a series of minor nerves and muscles surrounding blood vessels. “I’ll only keep those in the central pillars, the basic stock. The augmented ones are too fragile. Stand here, give me some light.”

Lise obeyed. Close to the lamp, sheltered in its semi-rigid pouch, floated a fetus. Pain filled the Princess of New Avalon’s belly once more. A symbolic belly. A symbolic belly for a symbolic princess.

Seasons would turn. The ship’s dead flesh would be eaten away by the elements, its frames of bone would shine under the pale winter sun.

Hidden under a camouflage of sea-wrack and sand, what remained of the ship would see the birth of the soldier’s hundred children. Their abnormally rapid growth in the room of plush alcoves and ever-available nipples. How many seasons before they would receive in trust the heart-breakers, the blood-freezers, the gland-burners that slept in the armoury?

One day, driven by the unbridled hunger that would accompany their final maturation, they would end up devouring the flesh of the tilted world of their birth. They would be the army of New Avalon. They would go forth to fight. And their Princess would remain alone.