Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(52)

1.17


ARMADA

“We’ve stopped.”

The whisper woke her from dreams of white walls and a voice like music. An arm about her shoulder. Her head against his chest. A heartbeat.

Eve opened her eyes. Realized the pulse belonged to Lifeboat, the arm belonged to Lemon. She could see dim lights, a multitude, twinkling through the ship’s translucent shell. Ezekiel was leaning over her, gently shaking her arm. Cricket was in her lap, looking up at her with his mismatched eyes.

“Evie, I think we’re here,” the logika said.

She dragged herself out of Lemon’s arms. Sat for a moment, letting it wash over her. Looking at Ezekiel in the gloom, she wasn’t sure what to feel. The lifelike reached out, squeezed her hand. The Ana in her breathed a sigh and tried to smile. The Eve in her gritted her teeth, nodded slow. Turning to the girl beside her, she woke her bestest with a shake. Lem blinked hard, shook her head to clear it and leaned forward with a groan.

“I was dreaming about food.” She yawned, peered at Ezekiel with her head tilted. “Hey, speaking of delicious, do lifelikes eat?”

Ezekiel blinked. “We do everything humans do.”

“Eeeeverything?”

Cricket scowled with metal brows. “Cut it out, Lemon.”

“Awww.”

“Let’s take a look where we are,” Ezekiel suggested.

Lemon nodded. “Lifeboat, open up, please.”

The shell cracked, slipped open to show a dull night sky. The stars were so dim they were virtually invisible, their light entirely swallowed by airborne crud and the glow of the settlement nearby. Eve rubbed the old tears from her lashes, poked her head up through the hatch, Ezekiel beside her. Lem clawed her long, bedraggled bangs out of her face and whistled softly, eyes wide.

“Armada,” Ezekiel said.

They were floating low in black water, near the walls of a shattered natural harbor. The bay was ringed with broken stone, stained dark, the sea slurping and slapping at rotten makeshift piers. Looking across the hissing waves, Eve saw the hulking shape of what could only have been an ocean liner rising out of the ground ahead of them. But it was at least a kilometer from the actual water… .

The ship was planted nose-first into the ground, the concrete around it smashed like glass. It towered hundreds of meters into the sky and was pitted with rust, leaning a little to one side like a drunk staggering home after a hard night on the hooch. All around it, scattered on the ground like abandoned toys, were ships. Tiny tugboats and enormous tankers. Sleek yachts and broken freighters and even the snaggletoothed hulk of an old battleship. Sitting flat or with bellies flipped to the sky. It was a city. A city made entirely of landlocked watercraft.

Eve could see the ruins of another city beneath it. Crushed buildings and broken skyscrapers. It was as if some vengeful giant had gathered up armfuls of all the ships he could find and hurled them down onto an old 20C metropolis, smashing it to ruins. But on top of those ruins, another city entirely had grown out of the wreckage.

The ships were covered with a latticework of ladders, bridges and new, makeshift structures. Eve could count hundreds of vessels, all interconnected, surrounded by a shantytown of smaller dwellings. Laundry drying in the portholes. Knots of people gathered on crooked decks. A rusted armada, slowly corroding just a kilometer or so from the arms of the sea. Waiting for an ocean that would never come.

Lemon peered about, eyes wide.

“It’s so damn ugly,” she breathed. “And so damn beautiful.”

“There were tidal waves after the blasts that opened the San Andreas Fault,” Ezekiel explained. “They say ships were washing up as far inland as the Glass. Most of them got torn apart for scrap in the years afterward. But here, people made a city of them.”

Lemon took a deep breath, nodded slow. “Okay, Big City. I’m impressed.”

“Wuff,” went Kaiser.

Eve could see bands of bruisers roaming the dark shoreline. A few guard towers equipped with spotlights, cutting through the gloom like knives. The toughs carried choppers and rustbucket automatic rifles. Each wore a bandanna with a skull and crossbones wrapped around their faces. There were even a couple of old sentry automata perched in the tallest towers, their weaponry aimed squarely at the bay.

“The welcome wagon looks real neighborly,” she muttered.

“They call themselves Freebooters.” Ezekiel nodded. “Ar mada is an independent city, run by a woman called the Admiral. They get their electricity from Megopolis, but so far they’ve avoided falling under direct Daedalus control. They’re fierce about their autonomy. And they’re not too fond of strangers.”

She glanced at Ezekiel. The Ana in her trusting him implicitly. The Eve in her pulling them both up by the bootstraps and trying to think straight.

“So how do we get in?”

The lifelike pointed into the dark. “Over there. Just above the waterline. See?”

Eve engaged her low-light optics, squinted in the gloom. And there, its corroded lips touching the waters of Zona Bay …

“That’s a sewer outflow,” she said.

“Ten points.”

“We’re crawling into the city through a sewer?” Lemon groaned.

“You have a better plan?” Ezekiel asked.

“You could take me away from all this? Make an honest woman of me?”