“Maybe we can get out that way,” I said.
Cup kind of exploded at me. “By going down even further?” When the echoes of her voice come booming and clattering back to us, she tensed and hunkered down and muttered a curse, low enough that it didn’t have no echoes.
“I think we got to try,” I said.
“I’m gonna play the stone-game with your dead-god-damned head once we’re out of this,” Cup said. But she went ahead of me to the steps, and down them, knife out and ready. She knowed how much use I was in a fight, which was not much, and she was protecting me even though she sweared at me for my foolishness.
I sweared at my own self too, in case you’re wondering. Instead of finding a way off the ship, I had digged us deeper into it. I wished more than anything that I hadn’t ever touched that button.
We come down to where the drudges all was. We didn’t go among them, but still they was standing in long lines right in front of us. The sour grease smell was stronger down here, so it hit the back of your throat when you breathed and you could taste it when you swallowed.
Now we was this close, I seen that these drudges was not the same as Ursala’s, that had fought the sea-bear for us and got broke in pieces doing it. Ursala’s drudge had got just the one gun, sitting right in the middle of its body. These drudges had got that middle gun, and guns at both ends too. They also had got six arms that was sitting under the guns and pointing out to both sides. Two of the arms had hands on the end of them, two had pointed blades, and two was hollow at the end like they was more guns or maybe fire-throwers. The arms was sort of halfway inside the drudge’s body, like a tortoise’s head is halfway inside its shell, but I knowed without needing to see it that they could come out a lot further when there was need for them.
Ursala’s drudge had been mostly made for carrying things, especially the dagnostic. These drudges looked like they was made for something else, and I didn’t want to be anywhere close when they started doing it. But I took my courage in both hands and walked right up to the first one. I was looking to see if it had a dagnostic inside it, for if it did there wasn’t no need for Ursala to repair her own.
But there wasn’t any cupboard in the side of this drudge. The folded-in arms filled up most of the space where a cupboard would of been. These drudges was different from Ursala’s drudge in another way too. There was thick brown grease smeared all over them that had dried to a crust. I guess that was what we was smelling.
Now that we was on this lower level, we could see further in all directions. It was only the place we was in that was lit, but the light was bright enough to reach a great way out. There was levels on levels down here, all hanging in the dark like floors without no walls to them. Each one seemed to be carrying its own load, but there wasn’t enough light to tell if it was drudges or something else. Most of the floors was further down than where we was but some was up higher. Where they was higher, we could see that they was standing on big metal columns wider than tree trunks.
“Hydraulic lifts,” Monono said when I pointed. “They’re meant to be raised and lowered.”
“Raised and lowered to where?”
“The deck, most likely.”
Cup touched my shoulder and pointed. At the end of the line of drudges, a long way away, there was more stairs – and I was happy to see that they was leading up. I give Cup a nod and we headed that way. I was scared to the heart of me that one of the drudges would turn its head to look at us as we went by, but they didn’t. The only sounds in the enormous room was from our footsteps and our footsteps’ echoes. We was walking as softly as we could, but every noise down here turned into a hundred noises.
“You’re sure they’re asleep?” I whispered to Monono.
“Tucked up in dreamland, little dumpling, and counting electric sheep.”
We went up onto another level, exactly like the one we just was on. There wasn’t no drudges here though. Instead there was racks like the ones in my mother’s mill that she used for storing steeped wood. The racks went up higher than our heads, and on every shelf there was drones stacked up. Like the drudges, they was covered in brown grease, but underneath they was all the colours you could think of. We walked past them on our toe-tips, but they held their peace and didn’t offer us no harm. I was starting to think they would not wake up unless someone bid them to, and since there wasn’t no one down here besides us we was most likely safe.
More lights come on around us so we could see the floors that was closest to us more clearly. On the next one along there was maybe ten or a dozen metal wagons like the one I seen at Calder’s ford, that Cup had called Elaine. The one after that had ravens.
I went to the edge and looked down. There was stranger shapes down there – things with teeth and claws and wings and wheels that I couldn’t make no sense out of at all. They might be beasts made out of metal, or golims like the ones Stannabanna made to fight against Dandrake.
I licked my dry lips, but found my tongue was too dry to make any difference to them. That heavy grease smell was hanging all round me and – it seemed like – getting inside me every time I opened my mouth. But still I had got to ask. “Monono, what is this? What are we looking at?”
I took the DreamSleeve out of its sling and turned in a circle slowly, holding it up so Monono could see everything that was here through her little window.
“Military ordnance, Koli-bou,” she said when I was done. “Weapons. Enough for a whole army.”
An army. I had heard that word before, a long time ago, in the ruins of Birmagen. Captain’s not my name. Captain’s my rank. Captain Shur Taspill. I’m an officer in the army of the Peacemaker. An army was like a red tally, but much bigger. When Napoeyon and Wellenten met on that big field, armies was what they brung.
“There ain’t no army here though,” I said. “There’s nobody on this ship except the three of them and the four of us.”
“I think this is the army,” Cup said. And I seen at once she was right. These weapons was not the kind you’d need to heft up in your hands and throw or thrust at some other woman or man. They was weapons and soldiers both. A picture come into my mind of all this tech waking and rising up. A million drones flying out into the world, and a thousand drudges marching right behind them. The wagons coming last, as slow as sunrise and as heavy as mountains, rolling over everything that moved and everything that didn’t. My stomach come up into my mouth.
“They’re old though,” Cup said.
“Centuries old,” Monono agreed. “And probably never used. The brown grease is a corrosion inhibitor – cosmoline, most likely. It’s used to stop stored equipment from rusting. Take a sniff. If it is cosmoline, it will smell like a cat peed in your frying pan while you were cooking kippers.”
“That’s what it is then,” I said. “But if this stuff didn’t wake up in all the time that’s gone by since the Unfinished War, I guess it’s not likely to wake up now.”
Cup made a Dandrake sign. “It can sleep till the dead god speaks his name.”
“There is something that’s awake down here though,” Monono said. “I’m reading an active system, about two hundred and ninety feet ahead of you. Assuming all these sub-deck storage areas are the same size, that’s three platforms away.”