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.”
Outside, 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
