Chapter Fourteen

A human brain. In a jar.

Cyrillic characters ran around the top and bottom of the glass container, etched in a looping cursive hand. Inside the jar the brain floated in yellowish liquid, dangling from a web of silver chains. It was a human brain, most definitely, and most certainly it was dead. Ayaan lacked the sensory sensitivity of a lich but even she could tell that something had taken up residence in the disembodied organ. It didn’t pulse or glow but then again, it sort of did.

A mummy carried the jar. Not just any mummy. The fiftieth mummy, the former high priestess of Sobk who had crocodiles painted like a print on her ragged linen. The last mummy, the one Ayaan had been about to slaughter when the ghost had appeared.

“Enough, enough, enough,” the ghost had chanted then, rushing into the room, possessing the crumbling flesh of a Cypriot ghoul in order to steal its voice. True intelligence had shown in its borrowed eyes and Ayaan remembered the story Dekalb, Sarah’s father, had told her, of a creature that could inscribe its personality over the blank slates of the undead. A creature that had helped him in the final mad rush of corpses in Central Park. A creature that had a special affinity for mummies.

It had to be the same intelligence, the same spirit. The ghost which the Tsarevich so desperately wanted to contact had to be the thing that saved New York from Gary’s final, horrible revenge. Ayaan had looked around the bunker and seen for the first time just what they had made her do and it gave her gooseflesh.

“Enough. Spare her and… I’ll do as the lad wants,” the ghost had said. Its face fell—not with the torpor of the undead but with genuine sadness. “Tell him he has me, you lot. Go and tell him now!” With its temporary hands the ghost had thrown over the bunker’s table, smashed to kindling one of the chairs. Ayaan had been afraid, truly afraid that it would seek vengeance on her for what she had done.

If it was planning revenge it was taking its time.

“This is our beloved leader’s friend. The ghost,” the green phantom told her, a week later in the officer’s mess of the nuclear waste freighter Pinega. He waved a few bony fingers at the thing in the jar. “We had to take steps to make sure he didn’t run out on us again. He’s shown himself a very slippery fish. Supposedly he has something he wants to tell you.”

“Me,” Ayaan said, rubbing her suddenly moist palms on her pants. “Well, I suppose that makes sense. Um. Hello,” she tried.

Neither the brain nor the mummy so much as twitched. Across the room Cicatrix put down her magazine to watch. The green phantom rose and went to the icy trough where Ayaan had unloaded her grisly haul. He made no attempt at nicety, digging in to the bony meat in the trough like a starving animal. Between bites he managed to choke out, “He says he wants you to know there are no hard feelings. He would have done the same in your position.”

“That’s… I mean, tell him I’m grateful for his… his…”

“’Magnanimity’ is the word that leaps to mind.” The phantom wiped clotted blood from his cheeks and lips with a silk napkin. “He can hear you, you know. I don’t have to translate for him.”

Ayaan nodded. “So, well, thank you. And I am sorry. So truly, truly sorry.”

“He had something else for you—a message. I don’t claim to understand it. He says she’s just fine, and closer to your heart than ever.”

“She?” Ayaan asked. “She who?”

“That’s what he said. Listen, I can barely understand him myself. I won’t be arsed to play twenty questions with him just to appease your curiosity. I’m sure it’s just talking about its mummy friend. Get back to work.”

Ayaan nodded agreeably and backed out of the room. With a moment’s thought she had answered her own question and she didn’t feel like sharing. “She” had to be Sarah, the only female person in the world Ayaan wanted to be alright. The brain’s other statement wasn’t so easy to decipher. Had it claimed that Ayaan was closer to Sarah’s heart than ever it would have made perfect sense, though it would have conveyed nothing she didn't already know. It was possible the ghost lacked a grasp of the finer nuances of English idiom.

She didn’t think so, though. She thought the ghost knew exactly what it was saying. Sarah was closer to Ayaan’s heart—did it mean—could it mean that Sarah was nearby? Physically close to Ayaan’s heart? But how, and more importantly, why?

She had a feeling the brain was quite genuine in its forgiveness. She had a feeling it knew exactly what had happened, and that it saw her not as a butcher of mummies but as an ally against a common enemy. She could use whatever help it might offer but she didn’t worry too much about whether to trust it or not.

She had a mutiny to pull off, after all, and there were going to be casualties. If the brain or its attending mummy got in the way it wouldn’t hold her back.

On her return trip to the stern surgeries she passed around a side of the rear superstructure, a four-story structure that tapered to a spacious suite of officers’ quarters with a magnificent view of the surrounding ocean. Only the radar tower stood higher. There was a reason for putting the officers’ quarters up so high—it kept the ship’s most important personnel as far as possible from the depleted fuel rods in the forward compartments. The liches were hardly bothered by the stray gust of ionizing radiation—it probably did them good, actually, because it would sterilize their putrid flesh of microbes and slow down their decay. They had taken the tower for themselves simply because it afforded the best view.

On the lowest level of the tower Ayaan passed the zealots she’d seen earlier laying down a second coat of marine paint on the hull plates. They didn’t so much as glance up at her.

They didn’t have to. One of them, an old man with a Russian accent but the Asian features of a Siberian, stood up with one hand holding his back and stepped into the shadows of the tower entrance. Ayaan passed the hatchway by, then doubled back once she was out of sight of the cultists and stepped in through an emergency exit. The Siberian was busy in the darkness inside, shoving bits of torn-up, paint-stained rag into a crawlspace near the floor. Ayaan bent down to help him. “You know the sign we’re looking for,” she said to him.

He didn’t nod. He didn’t stop what he was doing. He had been a librarian in another universe, a better one, and a closeted homosexual. His partner, a colonel in the Russian air force, had convinced him to join up with the Tsarevich, had been one of the most fervent recruits when the call first came. He swore up and down that they would not be persecuted in the new life, and to be fair, they hadn’t been. When the liches carried the colonel off to satisfy their appetites they hadn’t even considered his sexual orientation. They were equal opportunity devourers.

“When all of them are inside, that’s when you set the fire,” Ayaan repeated, just in case. Perfect timing would be the only way to carry this off. Even then she would need a great deal of luck.

It would be impossible to foment a revolution on the Pinega, she knew. There were too many true believers on the ship and far too many animated corpses. With the help of her friend in the navigation room however she had learned of a way to cut those odds in half. When the Soviets fabricated the nuclear waste hauler they had built a special feature into the holds. By throwing certain unmarked switches on the flying bridge anyone could open hatches on the bottom of the ship, hatches meant to dump the enclosed wastes into the ocean at large. It had been standard practice to take the fuel rods and radiothermic generators and depleted uranium cargo out into international waters and just let them go. According to Ayaan’s informant, there never had been a containment facility near the North Pole—it would have been prohibitively expensive to build it, at least compared to the cost of open-sea dumping. The bankrupt bureaucrats at the end of the Soviet empire had little concern for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and even less for Greenpeace.

Now, if Ayaan could get those hatches open, the undead stored in the compartments would be flushed away like so much toxic waste. The tepid waters of the Mediterranean might not kill them but she really didn’t care. They could wander around the bottom of the sea forever, spearing whatever fish were stupid enough to wander by with their sharpened forearms. She would have bigger problems to deal with—namely the liches. As soon as they realized something was up they would retreat to their tower. The green phantom could kill from a distance. Other liches could turn their own powers against Ayaan and her tiny cadre of rebels.

If the tower was set on fire once they were inside, however, she imagined they would be too distracted to put up much resistance. The doctor, who had access to bonesaws, fire axes and hammers (his surgery was neither precise nor delicate) would stop anyone from trying to get out of the tower—or anyone living from trying to rescue the liches trapped within. It would take some time for the tower to burn down but the Siberian’s hard work secreting inflammables in its various nooks and crannies meant the blaze would get off to a good start.

The Tsarevich lived in the penthouse on the fourth floor. He would be the last to be incinerated, which was a bit of a risk. It would give him time to realize what was happening and maybe do something else about it.

Another risk was that she had no way to put out the fire once it started. The Pinega had a steel hull but much of its interior fittings were made of wood. It would burn like a torch for days, perhaps, and maybe kill everyone onboard. If the fire got into the vast tanks of diesel fuel at the bottom of the ship everything inside the hull would be incinerated.

Then there was the question of what the living faithful, the zealots who worshipped the Tsarevich, would do once they saw what was happening. Ayaan hoped they would listen to reason. With the Tsarevich dead they would be leaderless and their power would be cut down to a fraction. If they strung her up from the yardarm, well, at least she would have spared the rest of the world from whatever it was the Tsarevich had planned for his ship of fools.

She had only one certainty—that this was the best chance she would ever get. The Tsarevich was bent on something, some unknown scheme. Capturing the ghost had set his entire operation into motion. By the time they reached dry land it would be too late to stop him. She had to act with real haste or lose this opportunity forever.

“Get back to your station or someone will see,” the Siberian told her. He never looked at her eyes. He had lived as a gay man under Soviet rule long enough to know how these things were done. He’d been trained by the best—the KGB. Under their ever-present gaze, just to have a love life he had become a master conspirator.

Ayaan had little experience at plots and schemes. She’d always believed that the Avtomat Kalashnikov Model 1947 was the answer to every question life posed. She was learning so much. The girl navigator, the Siberian, the doctor cutting hands on the stern—they had been secret agents from the beginning. They needed her, too, though. None of them would ever have acted on their own. The Tsarevich’s power felt too great, too pervasive. They needed Ayaan’s leadership.

She headed out of the tower and back toward the stern, back toward her official duties. When the time came she knew she would be ready. She had no choice.