Tool of War Read online

  “It’s over,” Stub murmured, awed. His voice strengthened. “The Drowned Cities are yours, General.”

  Tool smiled affectionately at the boy. “They always were.”

  All around, the youth of Tool’s command staff had paused in their tasks, some in midstep. All of them were listening, too, all of them anticipating a new round of violence, and yet all of them hearing only peace.

  Peace. In the Drowned Cities.

  Tool took a deep breath, savoring the moment, then paused, frowning. Oddly, his troops smelled not of victory, but of fear.

  Tool scrutinized Stub. “What is it, soldier?”

  The boy hesitated. “What happens now, General?”

  Tool blinked.

  What happens now?

  In an instant, Tool saw the problem. Looking over his command staff—his finest, his sharpest, his elites—it was obvious. Their expressions and scents told the story. Stub, the brave one who had fought even after his leg was destroyed. Sasha, his Fist gauntlet, who frightened even the coldest of new recruits. Alley-O, so apt at chess that Tool had recruited him to the central command. Mog and Mote, the blond twins who ran the Lightning Claws, brave and gutsy, with a flair for improvisation under fire.

  These young humans were wise enough to know the difference between calculated risk and wild recklessness, and yet they were still years shy of even two decades. Some of them barely had the fuzz of manhood on their faces. Alley-O was no more than twelve…

  They are children.

  Drowned Cities warlords had always valued the malleable qualities of youth. Savage loyalty was an affectation of children; their eagerness for clarity of purpose was easily shaped. All the soldiers of the Drowned Cities had been recruited young, brainwashed early, given ideologies and absolute truths that demanded no nuance or perspective. Right and Wrong. Traitors and Patriots. Good and Evil. Invaders and Natives. Honor and Loyalty.

  Righteousness.

  Blazing righteousness was easily cultivated in the young, and so the young made excellent weapons. Perfect fanatic killing tools, sharpened to the bleeding edge by the simplicity of their worldly understandings.

  Obedient to the last.

  Tool himself had been designed by military scientists for exactly this sort of slavish loyalty, infused with the DNA of subservient species, lashed to blind obedience by genetic controls and relentless training, and yet in his experience, young humans were far more malleable. More obedient, even, than dogs, really.

  And when they were free, they became frightened.

  What now?

  Tool scowled down at General Sachs’s head, still in his hand. What did a sword do when all of its opponents had been beheaded? What use for a gun, when there was no enemy left to shoot in the face? What purpose for a soldier, when there was no war?

  Tool handed the bloody trophy back to Stub. “Stack it with the rest.”

  Stub cradled the head carefully. “And after that?”

  Tool wanted to howl in his face, Make your own way! Build your own world! Your kind constructed me! Why must I construct you?

  But the thought was unkind. They were as they were. They had been trained for obedience, and so had lost their way.

  “We will rebuild,” Tool said finally.

  Soldier boys’ faces flooded with relief. Once again, rescued from uncertainty. Their God of War was ready even for this terrifying challenge of Peace.

  “Spread the word to the troops. Our new task is to rebuild.” Tool’s voice strengthened. “The Drowned Cities are mine now. This is my… kingdom. I will make it flourish. We will make it flourish. That is now our mission.”

  Even as he said it, Tool wondered if it could be done.

  He could shred flesh with his clawed hands, he could slaughter multitudes with a gun, he could shatter bones to dust with his teeth. With a Fist of augments he could invade a country, emerging on a foreign shore to spread blood and slaughter, and end victorious—but what of a war of peace?

  What to make of a war where no one died, and victories were measured by full bellies and warm fires and…

  The harvests of farms?

  Tool’s lips curled back, baring tiger’s teeth. He growled in disgust.

  Stub retreated hastily. Tool tried to control his expression.

  Killing was easy. Any child could become a killer. Sometimes the stupidest were the best, because they understood so little of their danger.

  But farming? The patient cultivating of land? The tilling of soil? The planting of seeds? Where were the people who knew these things? Where were the people who knew how to accomplish these patient, quiet things?

  They were dead. Or else fled. The smartest of them long gone.

  He would require a different sort of command staff entirely. He would need to find a way to bring in trainers. Experts. A Fist of humans who knew how to engineer not death, but life—

  Tool’s ears pricked up.

  The placid silence of the Drowned Cities at peace made way for a new sound. A whistling sound, high overhead.

  A terrifying sound, barely remembered…

  Familiar.

  3

  “STRIKE RAPTORS ARE on station, General.”

  “You have the target?”

  “Target locked. Havoc 5s, loaded. Havoc in the tube.”

  “All tubes, fire at will,” the general said.

  The analyst glanced over, surprised. “All of them, sir? It’s…” She hesitated. “There will be a lot of collateral damage, sir.”

  “Make sure.” The general nodded definitively. “Make absolutely sure.”

  The analyst nodded and tapped her keyboard. “Yes, sir. Full six-pack, sir.” She spoke into her comm. “Munitions control, confirm: Six-pack to strike. General Caroa confirms.”

  “Six-pack to strike, confirmed. Six-pack Havoc.”

  “Six, up. Six, armed…” She tapped more keys. “Six-pack in the tubes… Missiles away, sir.” She looked up. “Fifteen seconds to Havoc.”

  The analyst and the general both leaned forward, watching the computer screens.

  The monitors were filled with a rainbow of infrared signatures. Muddy reds and blues and purples of heat. Small heat blips for the human troops—oranges and yellows mostly—and a large blot of red where the augment stood.

  The analyst watched. There were quite a number of heat signatures. The augment’s command staff, most likely. Troops all doing their jobs, not knowing that death was arrowing down upon them.

  The Raptor cameras were so precise that she could make out the residue of handprint heat when people leaned on their desks. Footprints appeared and disappeared ghostly as a soldier walked barefoot across the capitol building’s ancient marble floor. It all looked so still and calm, from this distance. Silent. Unreal.

  The augment was standing close to a couple of other troops—possibly giving orders, perhaps receiving some intelligence—none of them realizing that they were about to be erased from the face of the earth.

  “Ten seconds,” she murmured.

  General Caroa leaned forward, intent. “All right, old friend, let’s see you escape this time.”

  The strike monitor counted down.

  “Five… four… three…”

  The augment must have sensed danger. It began to move. Heat flooded its body as it threw itself into motion.

  They were designed to be preternaturally alert, the analyst thought idly. It was hardly surprising that even now, this war beast made one last attempt at survival. It was the very nature of augments. They were built to fight, even when fighting was futile.

  The screen flared.

  Red, orange, yellow—

  White.

  Searing white. Brighter than a thousand suns all burning. More impacts followed, flare after flare as missiles pounded the target.

  The heat registers on the oversight drone flickered to black, overwhelmed by the hell unleashed.

  “Contact,” the analyst announced. “Six-pack, contact.”

  4r />
  MAHLIA WAS LYING on the deck of the Raker, which was odd, because last she remembered, she’d been standing. But now she was lying down.

  No. She wasn’t lying on the clipper’s deck; she was leaning against a cabin wall, next to a porthole. No, she was lying on the cabin wall. She wasn’t standing up at all. In fact, the whole ship wasn’t standing up.

  My ship is on its side.

  Mahlia stared up at the orange roiling clouds overhead, trying to make sense of that.

  The Raker is on her side. My ship is not standing up.

  Mahlia thought about that some more. The world around her felt surreal and distant, as if she were peering at everything through a very long length of pipe. It was all so far away, even though it was quite close.

  And hot.

  Viciously hot.

  Shards of fire looped and spiraled through the sky, flaming crows, swirling. Burning debris, flying free, bright and chaotic in the winds of conflagration.

  One minute she’d been supervising the loading of a canvas-wrapped painting, an Accelerated Age masterwork, worrying about getting it secured in the hold before the hurricane rains got too heavy, and now she was lying on her back, staring up at the throb of fire on the bellies of storm clouds.

  She had the feeling that she needed to do something urgent, but her body ached and the back of her head was tender. She reached back to probe the wound, and hissed in pain when metal banged her head.

  Fates, she was so confused, she’d forgotten she’d lost her right hand to the Army of God’s soldier boys years ago, and replaced it with a prosthetic in the Seascape. Mahlia hesitantly reached back to probe her scalp with her left hand, testing with fingers that actually had feeling.

  Big lump, but no open wound, it seemed. No shattered skull, no spongy brain. She checked her fingers. No blood, either.

  The Raker was coming upright, slowly righting itself. Mahlia started sliding down past the porthole. The deck rushed up to meet her. She braced to catch herself, but her legs crumpled and she fell unceremoniously onto the carbon-spool deck.

  The clipper ship came fully upright, bobbing and sloshing, pouring seawaters from its decks.

  Mahlia struggled to move her feet, afraid for a moment that she had a spinal injury. Please, let my legs work. She concentrated, and felt a flood of relief as one leg moved, then the other. She grasped for the lip of a porthole and hauled herself to her feet, groaning. Puppet body, wooden limbs, missing strings, but she made it up, and staggered to the rail.

  “Where the hell is everyone?”

  Something big had hit them. Epic big, as Van would say. Maybe a stray shell from the 999s? Dropped out of the sky, right onto them? But that didn’t make sense. Tool was the only one firing 999s these days, and Tool’s soldier boys were too well trained to screw up like this.

  Mahlia looked down the length of the ship, taking stock of the Raker. Her beautiful ship. Water was still sluicing off the deck where it had been submerged, but otherwise, the clipper ship seemed all right to her eyes.

  “Damage?” Mahlia croaked. “Captain Almadi? Ocho?” She spotted Shoebox staggering her way, eyes wide and disoriented. She grabbed his arm and pulled him over.

  “You know where Ocho is?” She couldn’t hear her own voice, but Shoebox seemed to understand. He nodded and stumbled off. Hopefully to find Ocho.

  Ash debris rained down, flaming black flakes of plastic, sharp against the darkness of storm clouds. Mahlia followed the flaming debris across the sky and down to its source.

  “The palace.” She could hear her voice this time.

  Where the palace had been, pillars of black smoke boiled up into the sky. She shaded her eyes against the fires, squinting against the intensity of light and heat. The whole palace had been leveled, along with neighboring buildings. Even the marble stairs that led up to the palace—Mahlia stared, astounded. The stairs appeared to be sagging, running lava…

  Melting?

  It was like the hell that Deepwater Christians wished on unbelievers. Even the lake in front of the palace was on fire.

  How the hell does water catch on fire?

  Nearby, someone was screaming, a sound more animal than human. Mahlia’s hearing was definitely returning. She could hear the roar of the fires now, and the screams of the burned, and the shouted orders of soldier boys down on the docks. The fires were spreading, engulfing adjacent buildings, burning with an unnatural fury. Rising storm winds fanned the flames higher. A gust of heat and smoke washed over her.

  “Damage report?” Mahlia shouted again, coughing, covering her face from the smoke. Ocho staggered up on deck. He had a bloody gash on his forehead, but was still moving. He lurched through the smoke to join her.

  “They hit the palace,” he shouted in her ear.

  “I can see that,” Mahlia shouted back. “Who did it?”

  “Dunno. Van says something came out of the sky. Whole bunch of fire needles.”

  “Army of God?”

  “Can’t be,” Ocho said. “Tool was crushing them.”

  Tool. A new, sick horror filled her guts. He’d been in there. In the palace. She’d been stupid not to see it sooner. Tool had been killed. She was alone in the Drowned Cities again. She had no allies. She was surrounded by soldier boys—

  Mahlia gripped the rail, fighting against terror. Memories of lying belly-down in mud, praying to the Fates, to Kali-Mary Mercy, to the Deepwater God and every other religion’s god or saint or avatar she could think of that soldier boys wouldn’t notice her as they gunned down her fellow castoffs. Memories of slogging through the swamps outside the Drowned Cities, starving and alone. Of catching snakes for food. Of finding villages where every single person had been slaughtered. Soldier boys holding her down, lifting a machete high, chopping off her right hand—

  And then she’d found Tool.

  Thanks to Tool, she’d escaped the civil wars of the Drowned Cities, and then later returned with the Raker, for scavenge. Thanks to him, she’d escaped and made a life for herself.

  And now, in an instant, it had all been ripped away.

  Ocho was clearly coming to the same realization, rocked by his own memories from when the Drowned Cities had been chaos, and he’d been a soldier boy for the United Patriot Front. “Fates,” Ocho said. “This place is going to fall apart. It’s all going back to…”

  Hell.

  The one person who had dragged the Drowned Cities out of chaos had just been burned to ash. The one person who had protected them and allowed them to trade successfully was gone.

  A part of Mahlia wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all—We were just starting to win—but the other part of her, the wiser part, the part that had kept her alive through the worst years, knew it didn’t matter. She didn’t have much time.

  “Can we sail?” she asked. “Can we get out of here?”

  “I’ll check with Almadi. See if she thinks the ship’s seaworthy.” Ocho started to run for the bridge, then paused and waved up at the thunderous black clouds swirling overhead. “How bad a storm you want to risk?”

  Mahlia gave him a bleak smile. “You think Tool’s former troops are going to let us keep the Raker if we stay?”

  Despair flashed briefly on Ocho’s face. “Fates. Just once…”

  Whatever he’d been about to say, he cut himself off. His expression hardened into a stone mask. “I’ll get it done.”

  He sketched a tired salute at her, glanced one last time at the burning palace, and ran for the ship’s bridge. He was a survivor, just like her. Steady. Even when everything was falling apart, he was steady. With him at her back, Mahlia could pretend she had the strength to go on. They could both fool each other into believing that they were strong.

  More of the crew were climbing out from belowdecks: former UPF soldiers that Ocho commanded, along with Captain Almadi’s sailors. The sailors were already telling the soldier boys what to do, all of them trying to get themselves sorted out and oriented.

  Two sailors
came up bearing Amzin Lorca, Almadi’s second-in-command. He had a shard of something metallic sticking out of his chest, and Mahlia didn’t have to look closer to know that he was dead.

  Where was Almadi?

  Down on the docks, Tool’s troops were trying to get a handle on the chaos, small groups of soldiers forming into larger ones. Tool’s Fists and Claws and Fangs. Tiny biodiesel skiffs had begun firing their engines and heading across the vast rectangular lake that lay in front of the palace, speeding toward the strike zone, circling through flames and hunting for nonexistent survivors.

  The troops still looked coordinated, but once the reality of Tool’s death sank in, the fighting for control would start again. All those commanders and troops and factions that Tool had conquered and forced into his army would splinter apart.

  And then they’d fight to fill the vacuum that he’d left behind.

  Either that, or some clever lieutenant or captain would decide it was time to get the hell out of the Drowned Cities once and for all, and just take the Raker for himself.

  Either way, she needed to be far away by then.

  The fires continued to spread, fanned by rising storm winds. The palace rubble glowed with an unholy lava heat.

  Just hours ago, she’d been right inside there, getting paid by Tool’s Supply & Logistics people for shipping down more ammunition, and getting her passes stamped to haul their new cargo out. Paintings. Sculptures. Revolutionary artifacts. Old museum pieces bound for the art markets of the Seascape.

  If the day had gone even a little differently, she might have still been inside. She might have been sitting beside Tool as he and his officers plotted their attacks on the Army of God.

  By now, she would have been ash and fire and smoke, rising up to meet the war gods that Tool claimed as his own.

  Ocho returned with Captain Almadi. The captain was tall and regal and, by the standards of the Drowned Cities, ancient.

  Mid-thirties, at least.

  When Mahlia and Ocho’s soldier boys had first escaped the Drowned Cities with their initial haul of art and historic artifacts, Mahlia had used the proceeds to buy the Raker, and then hired Almadi and her crew to run the ship. It was an arrangement that had been profitable for all involved, if occasionally troublesome.