Ninth City Burning (48 page)

Malandeera has observed them also. “So soon?” she asks.

“That's what we came to tell you,” Jax says. “Charles thought it would be a good idea to go a little early. For practice,” he adds uncertainly.

If this news surprises Malandeera, she does not show it. “I suppose it isn't too long until we pass out of range,” she says, turning again to look at Lunar Veil. “What have you two done with Charles, then?”

Charles, however, has just emerged from the Basilica, and so can speak for himself. There is no doubt in my mind that our commanders would have preferred to bring him into this fight. The only reason they relegated him to the reserve was that doing so meant Jax and I could be sent along with him, thereby depriving our main force of only one experienced source where it might have lost three.

“All right, everyone,” Charles says. “Ready to play leapfrog?”

By “leapfrog” Charles means our plan of jumping from city to city to
keep pace with the movement of Lunar Veil. Each city along our path has a full complement of legionaries crewing its guns. All they need to be ready for combat is a source of thelemity. As Lunar Veil passes beyond one city's range, Jax and I are to fly ahead and make sure the next is fully powered. Once we arrive, Charles and Malandeera will follow with the remainder of the reserve. That way we will always have guns ready to fire, even if the Valentines attack while most of the reserve is in transit.

But I am not quite ready to forget the strangeness I sensed in the Basilica. I search Charles's face for any clue of what might have caused it, and finding none, I ask, “Charles, has something gone wrong with the battle?”

Charles appears surprised. “Why would you say that, Naomi?”

I do not quite know how to respond. There is nothing in particular I can cite as cause for my unease, and if I try, I will likely sound silly. And yet I have a notion Charles knows what I mean to ask, and also the answer, only he has decided not to tell me.

“This is a tense situation, Naomi” is what he says instead. “We each have our own part to play. I'm sure I can count on you and Jax to do what's right.”

Whatever is going on, I have had about my fill of it. I open my mouth to say as much, but just then Jax says, “Yes, sir,” at the same time resting a hand on my shoulder, and in a puff Tenth City is gone. In place of the jagged stone towers and moody sky, I find myself beneath a canopy of thick green leaves luminous with summer sun. It is a whole new world, built faster than the blink of an eye when Jax shaded beside me, and my own mijmere sprang up in response, yet it feels like a place I have known forever. Before me stretches a rolling, grassy hill dotted with gaily attired figures, all in various attitudes of leisure. The air carries the scent of herbs and wildflowers, and gentle music played on strings.

“He isn't going to tell us, Naomi,” Jax says. He stands in the same relation to me as before, only now he wears a long, smock-like shirt and a “baseball cap,” his usual attire when he appears in my mijmere. Outside this place we are already moving toward our destination at considerable speed, crossing lakes and forests and deserts like twin bolts of lightning, but here only an easy stroll is required. I have on a light, long-sleeved dress and wide hat with an excessive amount of frill. I know Jax does not see this world quite the same way I do. To him, we will likely be at one of his baseball games. The essence of things will be the same, however: We are situated together in some friendly manner.

Only I do not feel friendly just now. “Charles is hiding something from us,” I say. Pulling down my hat to keep the sun from my eyes, I set off in the direction of the music, which I see is coming from a quartet arranged on a small hillock nearby.

I set a good pace, and Jax must hurry to keep up. “Maybe he is, but he must have a reason, right? Charles knows what he's doing.”

I glare at him from beneath my hat. “What makes you so sure? It could be that something has happened, and he doesn't want to tell us.”

“Well, it can't be about the battle,” Jax says. “We haven't heard anything yet.”

He is right about that, at least. “My sister is fighting out there right now.” I cannot quite keep the quaver from my voice.

“I know,” Jax says. “And she needs us to do our part. Everyone does. Maybe that's why Charles hasn't said anything. Maybe he doesn't want us getting distracted.”

Likely that is the explanation, knowing Charles. “How long is too long a wait to fight the Valentines?”

Jax crinkles his nose at me. “What do you mean?”

“It was something Malandeera said. That she hoped we'd have a while to wait, but not too long. What do you think she meant?”

“I don't know.” He ponders, then says again, “I don't know.”

“She meant something, I'll tell you that.”

“Yeah,” Jax says with a sigh, “maybe, but you know what we can be sure about? Everyone wants to win today. Charles, Cressock, Malandeera, the whole reserve. They're doing everything they can to make that happen. So that's what we've got to do, too.”

“You're right.” It's true. I dislike being lied to, but there is not much I can do about it now, and winning this battle is far more important. If I have to bite my tongue, that is what I will do.

A gust of wind has begun blowing toward us, visible in the flapping of ladies' dresses and of blankets laid over the ground. “We're nearly there,” I say to Jax. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah, let's go.”

Together, we turn our faces into the rushing air. All at once, the sun-drenched hillside burns away, and we are in a stone plaza much like the Forum of Tenth City. There are differences enough in the shape and arrangement of this place, however, to be certain we are somewhere else. Also, the
time of day has changed. The sun, just risen when we departed, now waits somewhere below the horizon. Only a few minutes have passed, if that. It is simply that we are now considerably farther to the west than we were before, and the sun here occupies a different place in the sky.

The air is chilly, but within seconds a warm breeze begins to blow as the power Jax and I have brought with us brings this new city to life. On every side, strange sounds screech and clatter, each a sign for some different magic taking shape. The city's great guns groan and pivot into alignment. Far away on the horizon, Lunar Veil shimmers like an expanse of deep water.

Jax's eyes are on Lunar Veil as well. “Do you think they'll be all right?”

I do not know what to tell him. I dearly hope they will, but we are in a war, and in war, anything can happen.

U
nder zealous cross-examination, I would probably be forced to admit I'm the teensiest bit disappointed no one at Gun Red Fifteen seems to know who I am. After all, we're currently battling a terrifying alien threat on a flying island
I designed
, not to mention the leading role I played in putting the whole extravagantly-baroque-jigsaw-puzzle-of-a-thing together. Anyone who wanted to add a little poesy to the overall affair might have titled me the grand impresario of IMEC-1, though, of course, no one did. I realize the present situation offers a profusion of other more pertinent subjects for contemplation, including but not limited to moral and philosophical examinations of my relatively short life to this point and any number of ontological speculations. My comrades out there in the melee are probably far more concerned with simple, cerebello-medullary subthoughts, procedural memory and fight-or-flight stuff, but working heavy artillery lends itself more to introspection in a cerebral, prefrontal sense, and right now, I'm thinking I'd like it noted somewhere that I really did help build this thing.

As far as anyone on Red Fifteen knows, I'm just another gun monkey who, due to my singular lack of combat skills, is useful in battle only as power for the heavy artillery. The lack-of-combat-skills part is perfectly true, but I
was
invited up to Command to advise in case my expert knowledge of our Ingenically Mobilized Expeditionary City was required. The trouble with the invitation was that it came from Vinneas, who understands IMEC-1 just as well as I do and who also happens to be a strategic and tactical wunderkind, something I most certainly am not,
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all of which
made the invitation feel more patronizing than anything else. At least on GR-15, I'm doing something useful,
videlicet
blasting Romeo into a million microscopic smithereens. The Legion's heavy artillery is all palaketic,
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meaning it has to be crewed by revenni like myself. Every time our gun fires, a little bit of that power comes from me.

Gun Red Fifteen is a seventy-two-souler,
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and like all the big guns aboard IMEC-1, it's nicknamed after some outstandingly violent geographical feature back on Earth—“Old Faithful” in this case, a title that as far as I can tell is at least half-ironic. “Faithful” is indeed one of the oldest pieces of artillery still in operation, and while it's every bit as accurate as the new 144s and the massive 208s,
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it has developed something of a personality over the years. It is occasionally slow to fire, as though registering disapproval of the choice of target, and is suspected of holding grudges against crew members who insult or mistreat it. Faithful's loyalty is irreproachable, however. A strict yet respectful gun commander is usually enough to curb any misbehavior, and fortunately that's what we have in Tesserario Leuvenven.

The tall and barrel-chested Tessie Leu makes for a formidable presence as she marches along our gun's upper levels, gathering information from spotters and calling out adjustments to the trajectory of fire, all while maintaining a steady slew of orders to us gun monkeys below. I have a theory that the main requirement for gun commanders is not any kind of technical skill but the ability to issue repetitive commands for long periods
of time without becoming droning or dull. Tessie Leu has the at once martial and matronly air of someone used to dealing with large numbers of small children, an attitude I think would be appropriate even if this gun weren't crewed mostly by kids fresh from some Academy or other—which, as I deduce from the bug-eyed youthfulness around me, it is.

I've only seen Tessie Leu once before today, during a thirty-minute orientation session after I was assigned to Old Faithful, and I expect the same goes for my fellow gun monkeys. This is no elite, highly coordinated unit; gunner training takes all of five hours, and that's about four-and-three-quarter hours longer than necessary.

Crewing a piece of heavy artillery is possibly the simplest job in the Legion. The only conscious participation required is the most token sort of focus, summoning up just enough will to get to that nebulous state before intention forms into an actual artifice—after that, the gun takes over, grabbing hold like a hand clasping a hand, drawing the power out through you, and deploying it to deadly and destructive effect. I'm sure if the Legion could think of a way for the gun to do everything, they'd have us strapped to a stack of bunk beds, more milking cows than monkeys, but current state of the art still calls for this modicum of active involvement.

Every gun is equipped with a series of levers arranged around its base like spokes on a wheel, and each lever has a row of gun monkeys
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to work it. The levers operate by a mechanism resembling a hybrid between oars on an ancient galley ship and the hammer of a CE Old West pistol, the kind that had to be cocked before firing. At Tessie Leu's command of “power!” each row heaves back on its lever, and as we do, Old Faithful drinks up energy through us. The next step is to duck back, reflexively covering our ears and preparing for the burst of sound and shock and psychic queasiness that accompanies the discharge of so much universe-altering force. We get a few breaths to recover, then Tessie Leu is back, calling for another round of power.

Needless to say, there isn't a lot of opportunity for gun monkeys to get acquainted, to develop close personal relationships and overall
esprit de corps
. Most of us weren't even assigned to a specific gun until two days ago, when Command finalized its deployment for the rest of the Legion and
started filling in the artillery with whoever was left. But despite knowing that we are, if not outright dispensable, for the most part fungible and interchangeable, morale among the gun monkeys of Old Faithful is at a raging, thunderous high.

Part of the credit goes to Tessie Leu, who somehow manages to imbue our limited interaction with a measure of affection and encouragement, peppering her one-word commands with grains of reassurance and motivation that would doubtlessly come off as cheesy in other contexts but seem heart-swellingly inspirational in the midst of a battle, when the capacity for irony is largely nonfunctional. Nor does it hurt that we've seemingly got Romeo bent over our collective knee and are presently spanking his ass to a fine ruddy pink.

Before the General Call to Arms went up, we were all scared more or less completely shitless—in some cases literally, I'd wager, based on the suspiciously foul atmosphere around the benches circling Old Faithful's trunk. Tessie Leu had a speech prepared, of which I remember exactly nothing thanks to the thudding rush in my ears and the suddenly overwhelming importance of little details of the kids around me. The boy sitting to my right, for example, has an array of freckles along one hand in the exact configuration of the Big Dipper,
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and the girl to my left is a dead ringer for the female lead in one of the old CE films Lady Jane is always trying to get me to watch, a particularly disturbing example in which the apparent heroine is murdered only a few scenes in. I was alternately watching Big Dipper trying to steady his shaking hands by gripping the lever in front of us and recalling flashes of the scene in which my other neighbor's doppelgänger was stabbed to death in the shower by a cross-dressing psychopath, when all at once the sirens went off and Tessie Leu was shouting at us to move. The ensuing sphincter-loosening terror passed almost immediately once we set to work, and soon my whole bench was moving together, Big Dipper and
Psycho
Girl and the rest all rocking back and forth as one.

It was some time before my mind came around to the fact that there was a battle going on, and I began to take heed of the spotters mounted alongside Tessie Leu. I'm not very well versed in the brevity code used to reference targets and threats and vectors for large-soulage firepower, but I
quickly learned how to pick out the reports of a confirmed hit. Tessie Leu has begun keeping us up to date as well, now that we gun monkeys have found our rhythm and the necessity of shouting us back into synchrony has become less pronounced.

From where I sit, it seems Old Faithful has proved a terror to Romeo's creepy-crawly hordes. Our spotters have already awarded us credit for taking out several of the colossal Type 7s that typically wreak havoc with our infantry, along with no few raiding parties of 5s and 6s and whole swarms of 3s. They've even lauded us for making the final strike on two separate Type 0s, though as Zeros almost never go down except under sustained fire, it wouldn't surprise me if ten or more other guns were making the exact same claim.

As much as I enjoy hearing what a murderous, steam-rolling juggernaut we've become, the whole thing feels weirdly abstract. No one down here can see what's going on, and despite the sounds filtering in from outside—a lot of booming and banging combined with the kind of nightmarish squealing you'd expect during a fire at a menagerie of imaginary mutant monsters—it's hard to imagine how anything we're doing relates to the actual fighting. Imway's always talking about the rush of combat, but this feels more like doing laundry. Once the back-and-forth of crewing takes over, it's surprisingly easy to get the Valentines and their Hieronymus Bosch–inspired swarms out of your mind.

In fact, it's entirely possible accounts of our rampant butt-kicking are being inflated all around, but we gun monkeys are letting ourselves believe. Big Dipper, who spent the first two pulls of our volley dry-heaving onto his knees, is now the most enthusiastic gunner on our bench, while
Psycho
Girl has left off her earlier fear-drenched porcine squealing for something more like a wolf's growl. Every time news comes down of another hit, the benches of Old Faithful shout back in unison, a wordless roar that somehow articulates both a jeer to the enemy and a cheer for our gun as a whole.

And because it seems our interactions with Romeo are strictly of the our-steel-toed-boot-to-his-face variety in terms of one-sided wreckage, no one on the benches is prepared when we end up getting stomped instead.

I don't know if someone up in Command saw the tides of battle taking an unfavorable turn, if our fighters on the front lines knew they were being beaten back or outflanked; maybe our spotters were restricting their
reports to the sunny and fair. Whatever the reason, we gun monkeys see only clear skies ahead right up until the first figurative clap of thunder.

Between one shot and the next, Tessie Leu's usual call of “power!” changes to “hold!” About half of us let out the triumphal shout that's become as much a part of our rhythm as anything, and three full benches go through with their pull, only to come to an abrupt halt when they see everyone else stalled in attitudes of confusion and dawning fear.

Tessie Leu walks calmly to the console at the edge of her platform, and as she leans in, conferring with Command, silence descends over Gun Red Fifteen. For the first time since the Call to Arms, I get a serious earful of the battle, the tremors of other guns and the steady oceanic sound that must be the generalized combat beyond. An image of the huge umbris of thelemity surrounding us pops into my mind, our fighters swirling with Romeo's like weather patterns over a planet. I doubt Tessie Leu takes more than a few seconds to confirm what she's heard from Command, but the moment seems to go on forever. You can almost see the foreboding sweating from Old Faithful's gun monkeys. When Tessie Leu speaks again, her orders are sharp and forceful.

“Masks up! Straps on!” she calls, circling Old Faithful to address each row of gunners in turn. “Raise masks and strap in! Now!”

A visible shudder of shock rattles down the benches. We all understand the plain, face-value meaning of her words, how these translate into specific actions we're being asked to perform; what doesn't quite register is the reasoning behind them. Minutes ago we were winning this battle, but if we're hearing Tessie Leu right, Gun Red Fifteen is in serious peril. Whatever our status is in the overall fricassee of cross fire, whether the fontani of IMEC-1 have been killed or routed or just got distracted chasing a ball of string, one thing is clear enough: Thelemity is about to become very scarce around here, and probably our lives with it. We're about to go dark.

Our Ingenically Mobilized Expeditionary City works so smoothly most of the time that it's easy to forget the whole self-sustaining flying island concept actually depends upon a frankly ingenious diversity of artifices, without which this place would be little more than a gigantic boulder sprouting a few building-shaped crags. Among the IMEC's many lovely amenities are a breathable atmosphere and consistent gravity, both perfectly mimicking the environment of Earth, homey comforts that really show
their value in a Realm like Dis, which has neither.
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Artillery gunners are all issued a set of D-55 Tactical Survival Attire,
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featuring masks that, when closed, effectively seal the wearer off from nearly any environment not hospitable to human life, as well as straps we can attach to our benches or other handily placed buckles to keep ourselves in place in the event that gravity becomes unreliable.
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Until now, the only feature of our D-55s we've had cause to use has been the remarkably effective cooling and sweat-wicking system, but from the sound of it, there's a good chance this place will become weightless and airless very soon.