CHAPTER TWO
Akwesasne, New York
May 18, 2123
When Mary Brant rose to her feet at the end of the long table, the crowded room fell silent. More than just the host—the “firekeeper”—of the gathering, the lovely girl in the beaded, buckskin shift with the waist-length, double braid of black hair was sachem of the Six Nations, and commander of the continent-spanning Alliance that her father had created, and died for. Her dark eyes radiated a confidence far beyond her nineteen years.
Above the center of the meeting table, a crystal chandelier festooned with cobwebs hung from a plaster ceiling zigzagged with cracks. The chandelier’s bulbs hadn’t burned for more than a century; its dusty glass pendants gleamed a dull gold in torchlight. Long ago the slot machines and video games, the blackjack and craps tables had been cleared away; the disintegrating carpeting had been pulled up, exposing the bare plywood subfloor. Of its own accord, the room’s water-stained, red-flocked wallpaper had delaminated and peeled from the Sheetrock in pendulous scrolls. Six-foot-high, eight-foot-wide walls of stacked sandbags formed aisles that led from the central meeting hall to armored gun ports controlling the fortress’s perimeter.
The Tumbling Waters Casino had survived many sieges during the hundred years of Species War. With the coming of a tenuous peace, the stronghold had become the formal meeting place—the longhouse—of William Brant’s Alliance.
A cache of weapons lay on the table in front of Mary: an ancient Japanese katana with a gray, sharkskin-sheathed grip and scabbard; and a midnight-black, Benelli M4 Tactical 12-gauge shotgun. The rear stock of the compact, eight-shot, semi-automatic was collapsed into a stub, its sculptured pistol grip inches from her fingertips.
Similar piles of armament marked every place round the rectangular table. “Hands visible at all times, weapons visible at all times” were the rules established by her late father. None of the Alliance delegates could touch their guns or blades until the session adjourned.
Huddled in rows of chairs behind the other emissaries were their respective advisors. Two-legged. Stereo-optic. Air-breathing. But all were semi or quasi-human. Unique external mutations distinguished the panorama of humanoid races: scales, feathers, fur, chitinous shell, even vestigal leaves. They called themselves “this people” or “that people” based on outward appearances, but on a cellular level they were mixtures of unidentified DNA—animal, plant, fungus.
More than a hundred years ago a firestorm of uncontrolled gene-jumping had swept the planet, wiping out millions of species, and billions upon billions of individuals, all in the span of a single generation. Although 99.9999 percent of the helterskelter genetic crosses never produced a viable first cell, here and there a few of the new entities survived; and fewer still ultimately grew to adulthood and found themselves able to reproduce their own kind.
Seated around the table were the results of a half-dozen generations of artificially-induced evolution—and constant war.
The delegate of the Owl people scowled up at her with huge yellow eyes. A fringe of white pin feathers encircled his face, from the point of his round chin, running up both sides of his jawbone, up the temples, across the brows, and meeting in a soft tuft above a prominent, narrow nose. Longer white feathers sprouted along the outside edges of his bare forearms. He had five fingers on each hand, but the fingers ended in horny, black talons.
Beside him was the emissary of the Mushroom people, a mutated species easily recognized by their always-slimy beige skins, and the rows of gill-like structures that drooped beneath their chins and along their jawlines. The “gills” weren’t for breathing; they were for reproduction, for the transmission of spore-like genetic material. The Mushroom people inseminated by ardently nuzzling into each other’s necks. They could also self-fertilize if no partner was handy during estrus.
To her right sat the leader of the Scarabs. He had a thick skull cap of iridescent, blue-green chitin, and matching blue fingernails. A bristling black moustache of segmented appendages, too thick in diameter to be hairs, half-concealed constantly moving, glistening mouth parts. The same sort of “not-hairs” cascaded from the centers of his tiny, shell-like ears down to his shoulders. His pale-as-snow skin looked completely human, but it exhuded the bellwether chemical odor of his species: concentrated ammonia.
The nine other places at the table were filled by beings just as unlikely. One sported translucent, black-veined, vestigal insect wings; another had a cape of velvety brown skin that draped between wrist and hip; another had delicate, rodent-like claw hands. There were cruel fangs, pale green skins, massive bony heads like pike or barracuda; missplaced mouths, absent ears, twitching antennae.
Sitting behind Mary Brant, also clad in buckskins, was the war council of the Six Nations. Unlike the other members of the Alliance, her three advisors were pure human, as was she; some of the last pure humans on earth. A quirk of DNA had given their direct ancestors immunity to the mutaplague that had unraveled the very fabric of the world.
Through plague and decades of war, the history of Mary Brant’s people had been passed down by word of mouth. The concept of an Alliance was a reframing of the “Longhouse Movement” of half a millennia ago, when the five nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca (eventually becoming six with the addition of the Tuscaroras)—came together in the first American democracy. Although they called their loose confederacy the Haudenosaunee, European invaders lumped them together under the name “Iroquois.”
In the previous incarnation of the longhouse, chiefs and clan representatives of the Nations planned joint strategies against their enemies, deflected and resolved internal disputes, and dealt with spiritual matters. The clans were connected by their namesake animal spirits—creatures of legend whose existence predated the appearance of the first humanlike being—to specific ecologies that provided the Haudenosaunee sustenance.
Bear.
Wolf.
Turtle.
Clan species that were no more.
The ecological systems that supported them were gone, too.
Not vanished, as in nuclear war. Or asteroid collision. Or polar ice caps melting. They had been subsumed. Amalgamated. It was as if all the living things of the world had been dropped into a gigantic blender and pureed.
Even at this final tipping point in the planet’s history, the Alliance delegates and their entourages glared at each other across the sacred table, remembering battles won and lost, annihilations they had wrought—and they had suffered. A century of fallen loved ones, of stillborn vengeances pushed hatred deep into the marrow—or root.
At one time or another, Mary Brant’s forbearers had fought each of the delegate races to the death. Littleburg, Gnarly Loop, Mount Battenkill, Parker’s Glen: the names of battlefields burned into the Six Nation’s oral history. Places where the blood of pure humans and mutant peoples had mingled and painted the hard ground red.
Mary despised all of these creatures, as much if not more than they despised her, but vengeance and justice had to be postponed for the sake of mutual survival, out of respect for her father’s memory, and above all, for the sake of Orenda, the power of the shared dream that linked one generation of her people to the next.
“You all know why I’ve summoned you here,” she said, her clear, strong voice ringing off the peeling walls and cracked ceiling. “The time for debate and foot-dragging has passed. We must prepare for an all-out attack from above, and we must do it now, while we still can. That means we all must sacrifice. If we are to survive, we need to work out defensible lines of mass retreat, and preposition stockpiles for the sieges and running battles that are sure to come.”
“By ‘from above’ do you mean the ‘flying saucers’ that we’ve heard so much about but no one has actually seen?” the Owl delegate said.
“The saucers exist and they’re coming—today, tomorrow, next week,” she countered. “And when they come, they will do their best to kill us all.”
With a nod and a wink to the others around the table the Owl man said, “And did you learn of this development during a cat nap?”
Though a few of the delegates chuckled at the gibe, the majority went stone-faced or shifted uneasily in their chairs, this while discreetly eyeballing the distance to their surrendered weapons.
Her mother’s lineage—Ohwachira—had passed along the future dream, a vision that had flourished and spread like a weed from its first germination by her great-great-great-great grandmother, Lonnie Brant. Generation after generation of blessed dreamers had repeated and embellished it. The creation of the Alliance by her father, her standing without him at the head of the long table—all of that and more had been foretold.
Mary Brant was many things, but she was not her father. The reigning sachem of the Six Nations was neither patient, nor by nature given to an excess of analysis or caution. Perhaps because of the terrible burden she’d carried since birth, her temperament was mercurial. And when it turned from delightful to decidedly unpleasant, it was a good idea to have a loaded gun in your hand.
At far end of the long table, a slightly stooped figure slowly rose to its feet, making heads turn, breaking the tension of the moment.
He had extremely narrow shoulders, and relatively wide hips; the main strength of his body was in its lower half. An uncertain mixture of plant and human physiologies, the pale green of his skin was faintly tinged with yellow. Fine, but visible ribs ran vertically down his face, and his exposed neck and arms. The broken, brownish-green stubs of some of these structures poked through breaks in the surface of his cheeks and neck. His “hair” was green also, but a much darker shade. Flattened, spade-shaped, and fringed on the edges, the individual “follicles” hung in drooping clumps from the sides and top of his skull.
Of all the assembled former sworn-enemies, Mary Brant hated this one the most. Before him on the table, beside his CAR-15 carbine, lay an unsheathed blade, a wickedly-curved, jewel-encrusted scimitar. With that very weapon, Nav Licim, the wilted patriarch of the Celery people, had cut off the head of William Brant.
The passing of time hadn’t dulled the wrenching pain of Mary’s loss, nor her need to repay agony with compounded interest. Though her assault shotgun was inches from her grasp, she made no move to grab it. Killing his kind with small arms was infuriatingly difficult. The prominent, string-like ribs than ran the lengths of their bodies were as tough as Kevlar braid. When manipulated by the muscles of torso and limbs, the ribs drew taut—the combination of tensile strength and dynamic tension enabled them to deflect bullets away from vital organs. She knew the Benelli’s eight, high-brass deer slugs might not do the job: you could punch fist-sized holes in the Celery people and still they kept on coming.
The only quick and certain way to dispatch her father’s murderer was to cut him in two, crossways, with her katana, but as Licim’s sword was also within easy reach, that wasn’t going to happen without a struggle. Win or lose, a prolonged swordfight in the longhouse would have been an unthinkable desecration of William Brant’s legacy.
As Mary stared at Nav Licim, the best way of killing him wasn’t the only thing on her mind. She was also considering the best way to cook him afterwards, how to get the most flavor out of his overripe, green flesh.
A little over a century ago that would have been a horrifyingly uncivilized proposition. Five hundred years before that, well before the European invasion of America, the Algonquian enemies of the Mohawk referred to them as “the Maneaters.” A name based on grisly fact: tribal members were known to roam field of battle after a victory, ceremonially picnicking on the enemy captives and the newly dead.
Mary Brant, a Mohawk and a child of the plague-altered present, thought nothing of eating fallen foes. In a world where everything was part-human, every biped was a cannibal.
“Only the people of the Six Nations believe in the prophecy of dreams,” Nav said, his black eyes bulging from the strain of producing intelligible, multi-syllabic speech. “But belief isn’t required to see the truth in what the Iroquois Ninja Princess is saying.”
A chair behind Mary scraped the floor as one of her advisors jumped to his feet. Over her shoulder came a hiss, “Don’t call her that, you dirty stalk of … ”
But before Odianne could add a final epithet she silenced him with a raised hand. The leather headband couldn’t keep strands of past shoulder-length, midnight-black hair from streaming across his angular, square-chinned face. A brushed deerskin vest left bare his lean, well-developed arms and chest. Born a month apart, she and Odi had been constant and devoted companions since childhood. As he sank back into his chair, she saw the hurt in his eyes. First hurt, then a flash of anger. Of late, he took every dismissal as a personal rejection.
“That’s how enemies refer to me,” Mary reminded the green patriarch.
“Slip of the brain led to a slip of the tongue—old habits die hard.” Nav’s smile revealed a few splayed, yellow-orange teeth, and the interior of a mouth glistening with a brown fluid that looked like grasshopper spit. He made a little
bow-and-arm-sweep—a flourish of acquiescence—then said, “My apologies, Commander.”
“What ‘truth’ are you talking about, Licim?” Owl man demanded.
“For a very long time, everyone thought the earth had been devastated by the accidental release of a bioweapon,” the patriarch replied. “In the chaos that followed the plague apocalypse, the new and old races were too busy killing each other to challenge that assumption. The Species War rolled on for decades with no end in sight, until we learned that the conflict was being manipulated from within and from without by creatures with a secret agenda.”
“By ‘we’ you mean my grandfather,” Mary interrupted, unable to keep the venom from her voice. “Giant Bear Yokohama uncovered the turncoat species—Morning Glories, Bats, Hornets, Vipers—and through captured traitors, the alien scheme to prolong the war until the most powerful races had destroyed one another.”
Nav continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “The aliens’ plan from the outset was to soften global resistance to invasion,” he said, his black eyes goggling. “First with plague, and when that didn’t achieve the desired results, with endless internecine war. The Alliance not only derailed that plan; it turned it on its head—resistance to attack has been unified; if we aren’t killing each other, our numbers and our power will grow. The aliens have no choice. And therein is a ‘truth’ based on logic, not dream prophecy: our enemies must come out of hiding and reveal themselves. They must attack us directly and in full force, or risk losing everything they have gained.”
A blast of hurricane-force wind slammed the Casino, as if he had inadvertently called down the wrath of God. The impact shook the walls to their foundations, rattled the chandelier, and rained ceiling plaster down onto the long table and the
delegates’ heads. The sudden whoosh was punctuated by a shrill, grinding, mechanical scream that rapidly faded into the distance.
The Alliance emissaries and their entourages sat paralyzed amid the swirling clouds of dust as explosion after explosion rocked and rippled the floor underfoot. Small arms rattled from all sides—the fortress’s perimeter was under attack. And the anti-aircraft batteries hadn’t fired a missile, not a single cannon round.
“They’re here, you idiots!” Mary shouted down the table. She lunged for the Benelli M4 and slipped an arm into her sword scabbard’s shoulder sling. “Move, damn you!” she yelled as she and her war council rounded the table on a dead run. “Move now or die!”
But before they and their advisors could rise from their seats, with an earsplitting whine enormous turbines descended directly overhead. It was like being caught in the funnel of a tornado—everything was shaking apart and the static charge stood short hairs on end.
Hard on the heels of Nav Licim and his entourage, Mary and her council raced for the entrance to the sandbagged maze. Then the ceiling behind them imploded and the chandelier crashed down onto the table.
Glancing over her shoulder Mary saw a ten-foot-wide, yellow-white beam shoot through the ruined ceiling, into the heart of the meeting room. With the blinding light came a blast of withering heat, and the sound of sizzling bacon amplified to a crackling roar. The middle of the long table dissolved in a flash; the delegates struck full-on by the beam vanished in puffs of steam and white smoke. Those three feet from the beam’s edge became thrashing, head-to-foot fireballs. And the advisors seated back against the wall couldn’t escape sudden death, either. In the light of the beam their flesh melted from the bone like candlewax.
Mary turned from the slaughter and poured on speed, struggling to catch up to Nav Licim. Shotgun in fist, she was close enough to blow off half his head with a single shot. And the balance and recoil compensation of the weapon allowed her to fire it accurately one-handed. But at that moment, taking her most-hated enemy’s life was the last thing on her mind. It was hard to breathe because of the smoke and the intense heat. And it was getting more and more difficult to see down the winding passage. The small arms fire had stopped, which meant the casino’s perimeter had fallen.
“Escape tunnel to the river!” she shouted at Nav’s back. “Turn right!”
But it was already too late. As they veered off at the branching of the sandbagged aisle, they were met and bumrushed by helmeted men with broadswords and turncoats with guns.
Mary swung the Benelli’s skeletonized, blade front sight onto the nearest oncoming attacker, a towering, bearded figure in a horned metal helmet with upraised, double-edged sword. Seizing the shotgun’s foregrip she rapid-fired a double tap, range to target five yards. In her powerful, practiced grip, the 12-gauge muzzle jumps were insignificant: two deer slugs slammed into the center of the broad, fur-vest-clad chest no more than an inch apart. Disbelief washed over the Viking’s filthy face, bright blood gushed from his mouth onto his scraggly beard, but his legs kept churning. Mary shifted her aimpoint. He was eight feet away when she fired a third round. Beneath the horned helmet, the deconstruction of skull and brains was instantaneous and spectacular, but the massive body’s momentum kept it hurtling onward.
Mary had to dip her right shoulder and twist away or be buried under the avalanche of dead-on-its-feet Norseman.
The corpse had no more than toppled past her, when something slammed hard into her back, driving her down to her knees. As Nav vaulted over her body, a charging, snake-headed turncoat opened fire from the hip with a fold-stock SKS assault rifle. A flurry of slugs hammered Licim’s torso. Great gobs of fibrous, lime-green matter splattered the wall behind him—wounds that by rights should have been hers. Nav grimaced at the impacts, but did not falter. With a surprisingly nimble reverse pivot, he avoided the traitor’s gun muzzle; gathering momentum, he swung the scimitar up from the soles of his feet. As the blow landed, pinwheeling the Viper man’s flat, scaled head from his thick neck, the patriarch’s war cry rang cut through the din of pitched combat:
“Stalk this!”
Continue to Chapter 3