Embassytown - China Mieville [113]
We came fast and armed over the wild, over paths made by Ariekei and their animals and zelles, perhaps by wild outsider humans, exiles from Embassytown, in outland farms. We hadn’t established contact with all of them. I was surprised by a brief and strong sense of loss for floaking, of all things. I tried to tell myself that this, what I was doing, was heir to that tough going-with-the-flow, but I was hardly taken in.
The airship was spread across the ground. We descended into a terrible aftermath. Eventually we went to work. The closest thing we had to a specialist took samples from what might be bite-marks or burn-marks on all the corpses. They were everywhere.
“Oh God,” said our investigator. There was Lo, of Ambassador LoGan. His chest was caved and cauterised. “That’s not a crash injury. That’s not a crash injury.”
Vizier Jaques was there, and the edge of his wound, his missing arm, was neither shorn clear nor burned, but a rip from which he’d bled out. He’d died in excruciation, it looked like, scrabbling for his flung-away limb. The microbes the group had brought inside them had started the job of decay, and the Ariekene landscape in which they worked made for chemical oddness, so the rot wasn’t like rot in Embassytown.
Everyone was dead. The expedition had included a rare Kedis functionary. A mature hermale I hadn’t known. “Oh Jesus, it’s Gorrin,” someone said. “The Kedis are going to be …”
We went slowly from body to body, putting off each as long as we could. The wind was cold as we picked through the remnants of our friends. We tried to gather them: some fell apart; others we wrapped to take home.
“Look.” We were trying to reconstruct what had happened, following the scraped earth, reading it, it and the dead become hieroglyphs. “This was brought down.” A hot toothed missile had burst into the flyer’s side.
“There are no predators like that …” someone started to say.
“But it came down slow enough for them to get out.” That was I. “They came out and then they were … they were hit outside.”
We found remnants of biorigging eggs, from a recent barter trip, smears of yolk and foetal machines. The crew had been returning. The aeoli we wore made our own voices loud in our ears, as if each of us were alone. Carrying our dead we flew with carronades ready, looking for the ranch where our compatriots had been. It was announced by smoke. Outlying dwellings were ruined, the nurseries mostly gone. There was one hutch that seemed still just alive, and in distress, but we had no idea how to provide it a coup de grâce, and could only try to ignore its pain.
There were no Ariekene dead. The kraal was empty. Dust-coloured animals ran away, and our arrival sent up rag-paper scavengers, flocks that moved like thinking smoke.
Someone fired and we all dived for the floor shouting. The gun howled: it was of one of Embassytown’s treasures, an old bansheetech gun cobbled into a form humans could use. The officer had shot it at nothing—a movement, a scuttling of tiny fauna. Ariekene young had been abandoned, and floated in a broth of dead. There were bodies of their elders. Hoofprints were everywhere. We set cams to follow what we thought might be trails.
Body-thick arteries emerged from the farm, entangled in the earth and the tube that went over the rockscape toward the city. The pipeline was burst. The matter of it was spewed by a sabotage blast, the ground a quag of dirt and amniotic fluids.
“What’s this?”
In a hollow were organic discards. Frameworks like splayed fish ribs; skin in webbing between tines; a nest of intricate bones. These were remnants of fanwings. We gathered the little trophies. Behind us we heard the distress call of a last building left alive.
We’d put speakers in the farms with which we’d made contact, and the ongoing supplies of EzCal’s voice should have guaranteed us what we needed, but