“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.”
“Could be dead within the hour.”
The room they ended up taking over as their own was a corner office whose two converging walls of plate-glass window afforded a clear, uninterrupted view outside. There was a crossroads below, a cocourse with a monorail platform and a bunker entrance. Diagonally opposite the office building lay a block which Mal quickly deduced must be a Serpent Warrior barracks — rows of small rooms, each with a single narrow bed and little in the way of interior decor. Adjacent stood a water tower and, behind that, the functional concrete bulk of a fusion plant, the city’s source of power.
She used the desk to barricade the door, and for the next few hours she and Reston crouched by the windows and watched.
It was a hell of a show, and they had the best seats in the house.
About an hour after Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl called off their initial assault, they returned for more. This time they brought along Quetzalcoatl himself.
Quetzalcoatl was as adept at aerial combat as the other two gods. He was also invulnerable, thanks to the spherical forcefield which enclosed him like an oily bubble and absorbed direct hits from the Serpents’ l-guns.
The Serpents, however, had upped their game since the previous attack. Not only were gunships in play now, but the sentinels on the outer walls were contributing intense surface-to-air barrages. The gods found making their approach runs to the city much harder. Beeline flying was impossible: Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had to dodge and swerve, and even Quetzalcoatl was knocked off-course by the pulses of heavy plasma fire. His forcefield repeatedly took a pounding and he was batted this way and that like a tlachtli ball.
Tenochtitlan did suffer during the second wave, but not as badly as before. When the three gods relented and pulled back, it seemed more like a retreat than a tactical withdrawal.
In the hiatus that followed, many of the armoured Serpents returned to the ground and trooped off down into the bunkers.
“Bingo,” said Reston. “Bet you anything they’re going to recharge their suits’ power packs.”
“Probably to have a pee, too. I would if I’d been stuck inside one of those things for so long.”
“Only you would think of a practicality like that.”
“Hello? Woman.”
“Yes, and therefore incapable of bladder control.”
She punched him on the arm, hard enough to leave a mark. “I bet you’d just piss inside it if you had to.”
“Actually, I would.”
“You’re even fouler than I thought.”
“You’re talking to a man who lay in a pile of fresh corpses for two hours, pretending to be one of them. I know foulness.”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “D’you know, when I realised that’s how the Conquistador must have got away from the City of London ziggurat, all I could think was how fucking batshit crazy this guy must be, whoever he was.”