Monster Planet(25)

'Ayaan shot Gary in the head. It didn't take.' Osman handed Sarah a thick plank of wood. One end was covered in sharp white barnacle shells. She used the plank like a club and smashed the lich's head into pulp. She lifted her arms again and again until they were sore, bringing the wood down on the diseased flesh as if she were winnowing grain.

'Alright,' Osman said when she was merely spreading the gore around. 'Alright, enough. Good. Now.' He jerked his head a fraction of a centimeter in Ptolemy's direction. 'When the time comes, you'll know what to do.'





Monster Planet





Chapter Thirteen


Everyone worked on the ship. The Pinega had been rated for ninety crewmen when she was launched and that had been for trained, veteran sailors. The hundred-odd living people on board the ship had their hands full since most of them had never left dry land before. Seasickness, the occasional midnight snack for the liches (everyone knew it was happening, nobody breathed a word) and the ship's particular problems took their toll and on an average day only perhaps two-thirds of the women and men living on the main deck could be accurately described as able-bodied. So everyone worked.

They kept the most gruesome and repellent task for Ayaan. She got to carry the hand bucket.

'There are two hundred and six bones in human body,' a doctor told her, kneeling next to a patient who didn't so much as flinch as he began to carve. 'Twenty-seven of them are in each hand. That's a quarter of the bones in body. There are more muscles, more, more''

'Here,' she told him, and lifted away the inert piece of meat from the patient's arm. The patient of course was already dead and it had no liquid blood to mop up, just a dry brownish powder that blew off the stern deck in a playful ocean breeze.

'Is more complex than any organ in body, except perhaps brain. Is evolution's greatest miracle. But to them' to them is almost useless. They lack fine motor control. These hands might as well be lumps of' of meat.' His eyes, what she could see of them behind his scratched glasses, went very vacant for a moment. Then he leaned forward with a metal rasp and started to sharpen the exposed lengths of ulna and radius. 'You're going to do it, aren't you?' he asked, in a whisper.

'Yes,' she said. She didn't whisper. They had powers she lacked, senses she didn't have. If they were going to overhear her there was nothing she could do.

'Find me when you are ready,' he told her.

She gathered the excised meat from the neat piles the other doctors had made on the open-deck surgery (no need for sterile conditions with these patients). She watched the eyes of the dead men and women who lay stretched out on the deck, looked for the hunger in them. She had to give the Tsarevich some credit'he kept his charges under tight control.

To reach her next stop she had to pass one of the seven hold compartments of the Pinega. There were a couple of reasons to wish she could avoid that part of her route. For one thing there was the ship's original mission, and the residue of its old cargo that remained. The Pinega had been built by the Soviets to ferry nuclear waste to containment facilities near the north pole. It could hold a thousand tons of solid waste'spent fuel rods and entire disposable radiothermic generators, mostly'in two of its holds and eight hundred cubic meters of liquid toxins in the other five. It had been emptied out, of course, but on the first day of the voyage as the living and the dead were herded onboard the lich overseer of the deck had passed around a Geiger counter so they could all see just how little concern the Tsarevich had for their bodily safety. Ayaan had taken away her own lesson from that. The cultists'the faithful'had taken it in stride. If their deaths could be hastened on by service to their master, that was a reason to rejoice. They thought being dead was just the next phase of existence, and a better one at that, compared to the harsh life the living had after the world ended. Very few of them were allowed to see what happened in the surgeries at the stern, but Ayaan wondered if even the gore back there would dissuade them. These were true believers and they outnumbered the sane living people onboard considerably. For every doctor horrified at what he was asked to do there were five or six deckhands who scrubbed and scrubbed at the decks long past the limit of human endurance, who would rather scrub than eat just in case the Tsarevich walked by and wanted to see his reflection in the wood.

A few like that were painting the superstructure as she passed by. They were covered in grey paint, their faces and hands and torsos daubed with a redolent and probably toxic chemicals. Their eyes were flat and lifeless in their heads as if they were already practicing the traditional empty stare of the ghouls they hoped to become. They gave the heavy plastic buckets she hauled no more than a passing glance. Ayaan didn't look at them, didn't look at the deck ahead of her. She stared out to sea at the ever-changing, never-changing waves and tried not to think about what lay ahead.