Tool of War

  At least then she’d have a chance for the pod’s chutes to open.

  A new warning klaxon sounded, deafening. General evacuation. Other crew emerged in the halls, all making their own way toward designated escape pods, helping one another scramble through the tilted corridors.

  A voice warning sounded: “Time to eject, fifteen minutes. Nineteen minutes to ground contact.”

  The alarms were deafening. She hoped Tory was making his way out—

  She felt her wrist buzz and saw on her comm an eyes-only text warning:

  EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. AVOID AUGMENTED

  PERSONNEL. USE EXTREME CAUTION. REPEAT.

  AUGMENTED PERSONNEL MAY BE COMPROMISED.

  AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

  Fates.

  It was just what Caroa had feared. The impossible had happened. Karta-Kul was on board. Somehow, he had gotten on board, and now he’d turned the augments against them.

  No sooner did she get the warning than she spotted a cluster of augments moving fast and graceful through the corridors, unimpeded despite the canted decks. They scampered and leaped, a team optimized for fighting even in the mad environment of this slowly crashing dirigible.

  A human officer stood in front of them, demanding that they return to their posts. They ignored him. He drew his pistol.

  Their response was so fast that the afterimage was all that was left for Jones to decipher. The man didn’t even have a chance to shout. The augments roared and leaped, and a moment later the man exploded in a rain of blood and body parts.

  Jones pressed herself back into the shadows of a doorway. Her security pass refused to open the door. She was just a passenger, now. She cursed that she was off the crew roster, without rights to most parts of the airship.

  The augments paused over their dismembered victim, sniffing the air.

  Jones held her breath.

  Creatures that she had trusted and believed she knew well now stood in the corridor, snuffling like wild beasts. Their muzzles and jaws dripped with blood. Tiger teeth glinted, hyena ears pricked high, doglike snouts sniffed the air for enemy scents. Monsters, built to rend and slaughter, now independent just as Caroa had foretold.

  Fates.

  She realized that she recognized two of them from her days in the Intelligence Center. Brood and Splinter, the pair who had stood guard and greeted her each shift. And now they stalked the Annapurna’s corridors as if they owned them.

  Jones shied deeper into darkness, trying not to breathe, praying they wouldn’t notice her.

  Brood and Splinter were growling with the others in their own language. Snarls and gutturals that she barely understood. She listened, trying to make out the language that was more than half made up of scent and posture.

  Abruptly, one of them touched his comm and snarled into it. She caught the words, “Rendezvous. Escape pods.”

  Jones’s heart fell. The escape pods. Her last chance to get out of the ship, if the ExCom had already left without her, and now the augments were headed in the same direction.

  The augments bounded off down the corridor, lithe and terrifying. She could never get ahead of them, and it sounded like others would be headed in that direction as well. It would be a bloodbath for the humans.

  Her only chance was the ExCom glider now, a fool’s errand. She wasn’t important enough for them to wait for her. ExCom mattered, but she was expendable.

  Even though it was futile, she set off once more, scrabbling up the steeply sloping corridors.

  At last she reached the hangar deck. As she hauled herself up through a final hatch into the launch bays, her heart leaped and she almost sobbed with relief.

  The glider was still there, its boarding hatch open. A sleek delta-winged shape, waiting for her, its launch lights glowing. Ready for takeoff, and yet they’d waited.

  With a glad cry, she scrambled for the glider, scrabbling up the slick steel deck. She grabbed on to the entry door and hauled herself inside.

  “Thank you—” for waiting, she almost said, but stopped short.

  All of the ExCom was there, belted into their seats, ready for launch.

  Unfortunately, their heads were missing.

  “Captain, we have to go!”

  Am I supposed to go down with my ship? Ambrose wondered.

  Out loud, he asked, “Are the escape pods cleared?”

  “Soon, sir. Almost all of the starboard bank is already cleared. People going downhill, it’s easier than going up.”

  “Do we have a roll call?”

  “It’s coming in, sir. More than ninety percent of personnel are showing that they’ve already debarked. We can get updates on the move. At least let’s start getting you to the pods.”

  Still, Ambrose hesitated. My ship. My duty.

  Caroa gripped his shoulder. “Go,” he said. “I will take command.”

  Ambrose stared at the old general. “It’s not your responsibility.”

  Caroa shook his head. “It’s more my responsibility than you know. See to the crew evacuations. There’s no need to add one more to the casualty list.”

  “I can’t raise ExCom,” Ambrose protested.

  Caroa snorted. “That’s because they’re already dead. Don’t worry. I can command. Patch me into the command systems. I know what to do.” He glanced out the observation windows at the moonlit sea that glittered below them. “Certainly I’m qualified to crash a dirigible.”

  Ambrose exchanged glances with the last of his command staff.

  “We have to go, sir,” Tolly said. “We’ll need some clearance space to launch a pod, and if the Annapurna rolls much more, we’ll be ejecting straight up. It won’t work.”

  Caroa’s eyes were gleaming. “Patch me in, Captain. You can sweep for stragglers on your way out.”

  “What about you?” Ambrose asked, not sure he wanted to know what the general intended.

  “Me?” Caroa laughed. “I’m going to meet an old friend.”

  41

  TOOL SQUATTED IN the darkness of the hangar, resting.

  Tearing the ExCom apart had been a matter of moments. All of them strapped in their flight couches. All of them believing that they were about to fly away.

  As he’d lunged for the glider, he’d wondered if he would be able to do the deed he had promised himself he would do, or if he would find himself, once again, overawed by his own blasphemy. His earliest memories were of bowing down to General Caroa and Mercier. He owed them his existence.

  And yet, when he had entered the glider… they had all looked up, and he’d felt nothing. No sense of disloyalty, or fear or shame. Just more humans to be slaughtered. Easy pickings, slow and soft. Some as pink as salmon, some as brown as deer, some as black as goats. And yet all so soft and red on the inside.

  Tool licked the blood off his claws as the Annapurna’s evacuation klaxons continued to wail.

  He hadn’t felt a twinge of guilt as he dismembered them.

  I have slain my gods, Tool thought. I climbed into the sky, and I slew my gods.

  He bared his teeth at the thought, trying to feel pleased, hunting for the feeling of triumph that he had hoped for.

  I am Blood. I am Blade. I am Heart-Eater. I am Karta-Kul, Slaughter-Bringer. I am Tool.

  I am God-Slayer.

  The dirigible shuddered and the deck tilted again, the airship rolling to a new alarming angle. Tool would soon die in the freezing ocean, but he was at peace.

  I climbed into the sky, and slew my gods.

  He ticked them off in his mind. Finance. Trade. Science. R&D. Commodities. Protectorates. Joint Forces… All of them fumbling frantically with their flight buckles, unable to escape as heads flew off, panicked meat animals, strapped in for slaughter. Not a single one of them capable of fighting back. They had always relied on others to do their killing, so of course, none of them presented much challenge.

  He thought fondly of Titan. Ah. That one would have offered up a fight.

  Tool picked up a stolen comm and
shook the blood from it. Titan answered.

  “Leave,” Tool said. “Save our brethren.”

  He crushed the comm in his fist. Titan would get his kin to safety. They were too strong and too resilient to do anything but survive. Perhaps they would form an outpost of independence. Take Greenland for themselves. Tool liked the idea, and wished them well.

  The air outside the hangar, blasting in through open bay doors, was warmer now, but still frigid. Soon they would hit water and this whole massive airship would die. All because of him.

  Tool felt no twinge of guilt. These people had rained fire down upon his pack. Once in Kolkata. Once in the Drowned Cities. If the airship died because of him, so much the better. Let them take the collateral damage of ExCom’s death. They deserved it.

  Tool lapped at the blood around his muzzle with his long tongue, tasting iron and life. He hefted the skull of ExCom’s Joint Forces director. Jonas Enge. A dimly remembered name. The pink man’s face was frozen, a mask of terror. Tool studied the expression with disgust. The head of Joint Forces, literally. The man who had ordered all the other soldiers.

  Tool eyed his dead enemy. There was something dissatisfying about the man’s pathetic terrified expression. It had been the same with all of them. Not a single worthy opponent. Just soft sacs of flesh, waiting to be ripped open. Kindling necks waiting to be snapped. Round heads waiting to be popped off.

  Pathetic.

  Tool knocked Enge’s head against the bulkhead. Thunk. Thunk.

  Their hearts hadn’t even been worth eating. These leaders of humanity were less than garbage. Let the fish of the Atlantic eat the tainted meat. There was no battle song worth singing to memorialize this victory.

  Tool closed his eyes, feeling tired. The evacuation klaxons continued to shriek, warning the crew that they were running out of time to flee the crashing dirigible.

  Now I will rest.

  The klaxons were so loud that Tool didn’t hear the young woman come stumbling into the hangar. He smelled her first, closer than he would have expected.

  His eyes snapped open, tracking the threat. He spied her clawing her way up the steeply canted deck. He remained still, blending with the shadows, taking advantage of the way human eyes only responded to movement, and were set forward, so that they could chase their own prey.

  It didn’t even occur to the woman to look around.

  Tool narrowed his eyes. His ears slowly laid back as he watched her scramble. She was headed for the glider.

  Interesting.

  She clawed her way inside, clearly desperate to board the glider. Tool smiled contentedly at her scream. She came piling back out of the glider, panicked and clumsy. She hit the deck and lost her footing, slid down the deck until she hit a wall, and came to a thudding, whimpering stop.

  Tool wondered at her relationship to the ExCom. He had slaughtered all the directors of Mercier—he was sure. She wasn’t some missing member. And yet she seemed to think she belonged with them. But the rank on her uniform marked her as far below their august status.

  She wasn’t another god to slay, just a lowly servant of the gods.

  To kill, or not to kill?

  Suddenly the evacuation klaxons were overwhelmed by the blare of loudspeakers.

  “Blood!” a familiar voice shouted. “Blade! Karta-Kul! I know you’re here!”

  Tool’s hackles rose. That voice. A voice from Tool’s dreams and nightmares. A voice from the past. A man whose head he had once held in his jaws…

  “You missed me!” the voice taunted. “You hear?”

  Memories of pack, of warfare.

  “I’m still here! I’m still alive, you coward!”

  Caroa.

  General Caroa.

  Father Caroa.

  God Caroa.

  Suddenly Tool’s pulse was pounding. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to roll over and beg for forgiveness, to show his belly, to bare his throat… Tool’s lips drew back in a rictus of hatred.

  Old friend. Old master. Old enemy.

  Caroa’s voice echoed through the hangar deck. “If you want to finish this, I’m on the bridge! I’m here, and I’m not afraid! Come to me, dog-face! Face me, you coward!”

  White rage boiled through Tool. He was up and moving in a flash. The young woman whirled and stared, terrified, as he exploded from hiding, but she was nothing to him. The ExCom had been nothing. It was Caroa. It had always been Caroa. He was the god Tool was meant to slay.

  On the loudspeakers, General Caroa continued his taunts. “I’m still here, coward!”

  Tool charged and leaped and crashed through the corridors, arrowing for the bridge and his oldest enemy.

  “Come to me, Blood! It’s time I put you down!”

  42

  KARTA-KUL ROSE FROM the shadows, a nightmare rising, the severed head of Jonas Enge dangling from his fist. A god of slaughter, war incarnate. Bloody, scarred, and primal.

  He favored Jones with a single contemptuous snarl that sent her scrabbling backward and pissing herself, her bladder opening up against all control, knowing that she was about to be torn apart just like ExCom—and then he was gone, a blur of savage speed, roaring for Caroa.

  Jones couldn’t stop shivering.

  If she’d thought Mercier’s security augments were ter-rifying, this creature was something else entirely. Her own instincts were thrown into immediate disarray at the sight of him, her rational human brain collapsing into the gibbering terrors of her ancestral ape brain, when her forebears had cowered from the violence of thunder.

  She couldn’t stop shaking. Even as she tried to stand up, she simply fell back, her mind still assaulted with the scattershot afterimages of his size, his snarling monstrous face, his blood-drenched teeth and claws.

  So, this was what Caroa had created. This was Karta-Kul, Slaughter-Bringer, unique amongst all the monsters that they had designed before.

  This was what General Caroa had feared.

  But Karta-Kul was gone already. She could hear him in the distance, crashing through the corridors, roaring for Caroa as the general continued to taunt the monster, his voice half crazed with rage and battle lust.

  “Where are you, yellow dog? Show your belly!”

  Let Caroa have him. It was his creation. Let him face it.

  “Come to me, Blood! I’m on the bridge! I’m right here, waiting for you, you coward dog!”

  Leave it, she told herself. Run.

  Run where, though? The renegade augments were headed for the escape pods, too. She wouldn’t stand a chance against them. So then…? Just sit here and crash? Her eyes went to the glider. She shuddered at the thought of what was inside. It wouldn’t launch anyway, she realized. Not at this launch angle. The deck was too tilted.

  With a soft curse, Jones drew her sidearm. I must be insane. But she stumbled toward the door, clumsily following the holes that the augment had ripped in the walls as he clawed his way toward the bridge.

  It’s suicide.

  And yet she couldn’t resist the draw of the monster. Was it because she needed to see the end of this quest? To see the final confrontation between creator and created? Or was it to catch one more glimpse of this creature that had survived their every attempt to destroy it? She would die, but this thing, this creature, it had been her job to hunt it down.

  So, I’ll hunt it.

  Feeling hopeless, she headed forward, stumbling on the steeply canted decks, wondering how long the Annapurna would float after hitting water.

  Fully filled with helium, the dirigible floated easily on the air, so the great airship would have some natural buoyancy, Jones assumed. And yet they were plunging out of the sky now, and once they hit the ocean, water would rush in through open launch decks. It would pour into the holes where helium had been leaking out. And once those empty helium tanks started filling with the sea, how long would it take before the whole dirigible was swallowed under icy, salty waves?

  I should try for the escape pods. Maybe there’s o
ne left.

  But still she scrambled through the corridors, making her way forward, to the bridge.

  The halls were empty now. Most—if not all—of the crew had already ejected.

  Caroa kept bellowing into the loudspeakers, baiting Karta-Kul.

  “You were a coward then, and you’re a coward now! You’re an insult to your kind! Pathetic! Weak! Nothing but meat! Nothing but prey, you hear me? Not a Karta-Kul, at all! I’m going to rip out your heart and feed it to mice! You hear me? Mice will eat your heart! Your betters will eat y—!”

  The general’s voice cut off abruptly, leaving only the alarm klaxons screaming madly, telling an empty ship to evacuate.

  That’s it, she told herself. It’s over. Get out.

  But she kept on, hauling herself through the canted corridors. She’d tracked him too long. Studied him too much. Karta-Kul. Something in her yearned to see the creature, even if it meant her death. There was something absolute about him. Something undeniable…

  Jones reached the bridge and gasped. Outside the observation windows, the cold, moonlit waves of the ocean were sliding fast beneath the dirigible as it descended, growing larger every second. She’d been fooling herself to think she might still have time to escape the ship.

  Caroa and his creation were faced off before the glass windows. Caroa’s expression was frozen in a death’s head grin as his war monster circled, demonic and predatory.

  But to Jones’s surprise, the creature didn’t attack. It snarled and snapped its teeth. Froth and bloody spittle flew. But it did not leap.

  The augment’s growl was low and full of warning, its ears laid back. It snarled and feinted, but Caroa didn’t flinch. The general stood squared before the augment, turning always to face the beast as it stalked around him.

  Caroa’s own teeth were bared in a crazed rictus grin.

  “I named you Blood!” he taunted. “I called you Blood! From my blood you came! From my hand you fed!” Caroa shouted. “You are mine! My blood! My kin! My pack! MINE!”

  Jones stared, shocked by the general’s words.