heaped on the quay alongside it. He could faintly hear a sailor on deck yelling down through a hatch to someone in the hold. A moment later a head popped up from the hatchway and a hand holding an adjustable wrench gesticulated to the wheelhouse. The sailor relayed a message to whoever was in the scow’s wheelhouse — the captain, presumably — and then there was a mechanical coughing and a blurt of diesel smoke. A cheer went up from the other crewmembers.
“Hurry the fuck up!” Vaughn shouted at Stuart. “They’ve got it started.”
Stuart lowered himself stiffly to the clifftop while Vaughn sprinted for the zigzagging leading down to the harbour. She yelled and waved as she ran, hoping to catch the scow’s attention.
Meanwhile, the siege continued. Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl were, as far as Stuart could tell, the sole attackers, but the two of them were causing enough devastation and destruction for a strike force a hundred times as large. They operated according to a pattern. Huitzilopochtli inflicted property damage while Itzpapalotl ran interference for him, keeping the Serpent Warriors off his back. He was the heavyweight bomber, she the smaller, nippier fighter craft giving him clear passage to his targets.
Softening up, Stuart thought. A first phase of attack to weaken defences and sow disarray. A teaser for the main event.
Vaughn tackled the harbour road vertically. Rather than follow its back-and-forth course she vaulted the guardrails and slid down the embankments between one incline and the next. All the way she kept calling to the scow, begging it to wait. Just half a minute! Civilians wanting safe passage off the island!
Perhaps none of the crew heard her above the noise of the scow’s engine and the booming detonations rolling across the city. Perhaps some of them did, but refused to listen, too concerned for their own lives. Perhaps the sight of a female acolyte was just too bizarre to make sense of. Whatever the reason, the boat didn’t stop. It chugged out onto the lake at flank speed and was a hundred metres from its berth at the quay by the time Vaughn got there. She jumped up and down on the spot and implored the crew to turn back, to no avail. Stuart saw one of the men on deck give her what seemed like a shrug of apology. The others pretended not to notice her.
A volley of foul language echoed across the water from Vaughn, and then she slumped to the quay with a grunt of frustration.
Stuart put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry.”
She rounded on him. “Don’t worry? Don’t worry!? We’re trapped on this fucking island, there’s a major-league conflict starting up around us, and we just lost our only way off.”
“Who says? What about the Serpent aerodiscs?”
“Do you know how you fly one?
“Well, no, but maybe we can find someone who does and coerce them into being our pilot.”
“Sounds pretty thin to me.”
“Me too,” Stuart admitted. “It’s not our only option.”
“Go on. I’m all ears.”
He looked up. A squadron of armoured Serpents were flying above in echelon formation, on course to intercept yet another raid by Huitzilopochtli. Itzpapalotl came at them like a bowling ball hitting the pins, scattering them in all directions.
“If we could get our hands on a couple of those suits…”
“You’re not serious.”
“Oh, but I am. We wouldn’t need anyone else to fly us out of here. We could do it ourselves.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Same Day
Thelast thing Mal wanted to do was head back into the beleaguered city. It was counterintuitive. Worse than that — it was downright crazy.
But Reston, damn him, was right. The Serpents’ suits of armour were their one real shot at escaping. She didn’t know how difficult the suits were to fly. Probably quite difficult. But simpler, surely, than a disc.
As she and Reston made their way back up the harbour road, they met a crowd of people heading in the other direction. It seemed the idea of hitching a lift on a boat had occurred to several of Tenochtitlan’s ancillary and domestic staff. They’d crawled out through the shattered part of the wall, only to discover that the harbour was now empty, but they were continuing anyway, because conditions had to be less hazardous to health outside the city precincts than within. Mal and Reston butted past them, against the tide of exodus, and climbed the wall and over the breach. A look back showed Mal that several of the workers were so desperate to leave that they had dived into the lake and begun to swim. It was a good five or six miles to shore, a distance even a strong swimmer would struggle to cover. She wished them luck.
Just as she and Reston re-entered the city, there was a lull in the onslaught from above. Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had fulfilled their mission remit and returned to base. Serpent Warriors patrolled the skies, scanning the horizon. Gunships were now airborne, too. They soared out to form a defensive perimeter a mile around the island, their double-barrelled weapons nacelles swivelling.
On the ground, non-armoured Serpents were regrouping and entrenching. Blockades were set up at strategic points throughout the city: on plazas where there were clear lines of sight and enfilading crossfire was possible, and at street chokepoints where any invaders coming in on foot could be pinned down and pincered. Heaps of rubble from ruined buildings were put to use as shooting cover. Holes in facades became sniper nests. Places of refuge were established too, for the injured and for noncombatants who’d been caught out in the open.
All of this impacted Mal and Reston, hampering their progress through the city. Their aim was to infiltrate one of the underground bunkers. That was where the suits were stashed, Reston reckoned, recalling Colonel Tlanextic’s instruction to Ueman and his men to “go to the bunkers and get armoured up.” But the bunker entrances were now the city’s most heavily fortified spots, which seemed to confirm his theory but at the same time made it almost impossible to take practical advantage of. It was tricky even getting near them, and they had several too- close-for-comfort encounters with Serpents. They couldn’t risk being spotted by the soldiers; Tenochtitlan might be on a war footing, but the two of them were still officially wanted. Colonel Tlanextic was under the impression they were dead, but that false report couldn’t yet have filtered out among the main body of his troops. All in all, although they had a clear objective, the obstacles to attaining it were well nigh insurmountable.
Reston remained upbeat.
“What we have to do,” he said, after they had once again been stymied by the concentrated Serpent presence at a bunker entrance, “is lie low and wait. As Quetzalcoatl’s lot step up their attack, order will break down. Chaos will be our best ally. Maybe by nightfall we’ll be looking at a whole different set of circumstances. And then, of course, we’ll have the cover of darkness on our side as well.”
“You just don’t give in, do you?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Would you rather I turned into a quivering jelly?”
“No, it’s simply, I find it really annoying, and I shouldn’t. Not now. Not any longer.”
“Not when it might work in your favour.”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
They found themselves a bolthole on the third floor of a ziggurat that turned out to be the administrative hub of Tenochtitlan, a warren of offices where smartly dressed workers cowered under their desks or congregated in frightened huddles, unsure what to do with themselves. The borrowed hieratic vestments, though tattered and torn now, were still in good enough condition and still carried enough inbuilt authority to allow Mal and Reston to walk the corridors unopposed and unquestioned, especially since everyone else was so preoccupied with other matters. They searched for a room that was unoccupied and would provide a good vantage point. One door they tried opened onto a supply closet where a pair of respectable-looking middle-aged bureaucrats were in the throes of strenuous upright sex, she braced against the shelves with her skirt hitched up, he taking her weight and pumping hard with his pants round his ankles. Both were so engrossed in their business that they didn’t notice the intrusion.
“Get it while you can,” Mal observed, quietly closing the door.
“An office romance blossoms under adversity,” said Reston.
“Now or never.”
