Mortal Engines feats, power and lore thread

[Stocking Anarchy]

Dr Popjoy created Stalkers from the corpses of non-human creatures, namely birds, and contemplates making other kinds (such as whale stalkers that can bomb cities from below).

On a T-shaped stand a big dead bird perched, watching the visitors with glowing green eyes. When Popjoy reached out a hand to it, it stretched its ragged wings and opened its beak. “As you can see,” the Engineer said, petting it, “I don’t limit myself to resurrecting human beings. Prototype Stalker-birds already patrol the skies around the Facility, and I’m considering other ideas – a Stalker-cat, and maybe a Stalker-whale that could carry explosives under a raft-city. In the meantime, I’ve been making some great strides in the field of human resurrection…”

Dr Popjoy also made many non-humanoid human stalkers of strange designs.

The Engineer’s long fingers went spidering over the ivory keys, punching in a code. The lock clunked and whirred, and the door swung open to reveal a cave of ice where strange statues waited under plastic covers.

“You see, those old Stalker builders lacked imaginative flair,” explained Popjoy, his breath smouldering as he scurried around the big freezer-cabinet, unveiling his creations. “Just because a Stalker needs a human brain and nervous system, that doesn’t mean it has to be limited to a human shape. Why stick to two arms and two legs? Why only two eyes? Why bother with a mouth? These fellows don’t eat, and we haven’t built them for their sparkling conversation…” The frosty plastic sheets were dragged aside, exposing steel-plated centaurs with twenty arms and caterpillar tracks instead of legs, spider-Stalkers with clawed feet and machine-gun turrets in their bellies, Stalkers with spare eyes in the back of their skulls.

A stalker bird easily cuts through leather and flesh.

He struck at it with his fist and his forearm and flung it away. As he hurried on up he felt pain and looked down to see blood welling out of three long cuts on the side of his hand. What sort of bird was this? Its talons had gone straight through his best leather mittens!

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Traction city tract marks are so huge that caves are dug into their sides in some places like India where people live.

Sathya had been born on the bare earth, in a squatter camp of curtain-doored caves dug into the wall of an old track-mark down in the town-torn south of India. In the dry season her people had to uproot themselves every few months to escape being crushed under the tracks of some passing city, Chidanagaram, or Gutak, or Juggernautpur. When the rains came the world melted into slurry beneath their shoeless feet. Everyone talked of the day when they would move to some settled static in the uplands, but as Sathya grew older she began to understand that they would never really make the journey. Simply surviving took up all their time and energy.

Arkangel has rotating teeth.

Arkangel, sensing that it could not stay on this course much further, put on one final burst of speed. Its jaws swung wide, wide, and the sun glittered on banks of revolving steel teeth.

The ancients had weapons platforms in orbit around the world.

If you could look down on the world from somewhere high above – if you were a god, or a ghost haunting one of the old American weapon platforms which still hang in orbit high above the pole – the Ice Wastes would look at first as blank as the walls of Hester’s cell; a whiteness spread over the crown of the poor old Earth like a cataract on a blue eye. But look a little closer, and there are things moving in the blankness.

And if you were a ghost, up there among the endlessly tumbling papers and pens and plastic cups and frozen astronauts, you might use the instruments of that old space-station to peer down through the waters into the secret halls of Grimsby, where Uncle sits watching on the largest of his screens as the Screw Worm pulls out of the limpet pens, Caul at the controls, Skewer for crew, carrying Tom Natsworthy away to Rogues’ Roost.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

The Slow Bombs of the ancients were powerful enough to destroy much of Central America, separating North and South America (Nuevo-Maya).

Memories of old geography lessons stirred in Wren's brain: the big globe in the schoolroom at the Winter Palace and Miss Freya saying, "Here is Nuevo-Maya, which used to be called South America before the isthmus that linked it to North America was severed by Slow Bombs in the Sixty Minute War."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

In the 16 years between Predator's Gold and Infernal Devices, the Green Storm took over the Anti-Tractionist League and declared war on municipal darwinism. In response the traction cities fought back, starting with a group of German cities (called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft). Since then, the two forces have stalemated each other.

"At first the barbarians were taken completely by surprise when our air fleets came sweeping down on them out of the mountains. We drove west, herding terrified cities ahead of us, smashing any that dared turn and fight. But slowly the cities started to group together and defend themselves. A union of German-speaking industrials called the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft stopped our advance westward and pushed us back to the Rustwater Marshes, and a rabble of Slavic Traction Towns attacked our settlements in Khamchatka and the Altai Shan.

"There has been stalemate ever since. Sometimes we push west and destroy a few more cities; sometimes they push east and devour a few of our forts or farms."

Entire traction cities have been outfitted for war; entire buildings have been turned into artillery guns, loaded with huge high-explosive shells (as well as anti-aircraft cannons).

It went on its way, flying into the haze of smoke above the Rustwater Marshes, where artillery duels were rumbling like autumn storms. A squadron of enormous Traction Cities was crawling eastward, trying to head off a Green Storm counterattack. On their lower tiers, whole buildings had been converted into snout guns. Railways carried huge high-explosive shells out of the cities' innards, and the guns hurled them into the marshy Out-Country ahead, which was said to be crawling with Stalkers and mobile rocket units. Buffeted by passing airships and the fluffy white thistledown of antiaircraft bursts, the gull let the leading city's slipstream carry it eastward for a while, then rose above the battle and flapped on toward the white mountains that stood on the rim of the world.

There are now entire armies of traction cities that fight the Green Storm, which on top of their guns, have now also been armoured and fortified.

The path grew steeper, and Shrike understood the reason for her haste and her men's uneasiness. Through gaps in the crags he glimpsed a great body of water glittering under the steady flashes of gunfire. Upon the water, and far off across it on the flat, dark land, giant shapes were moving. By the light of the blazing airships that speckled the sky above them and the pale, slow-falling glare of parachute flares, he could see their armored tracks, their vast jaws, and tier upon tier of ironclad forts and gun emplacements.

Traction Cities. An army of them, grinding their way across the marshes. The sight of them stirred faint memories in Shrike. He remembered cities like that. At least he remembered the idea of them. Whether he had ever been aboard one, and what he had done there, he did not recall.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

The stalkers of the Green Storm aren't as smart as Shrike or Fang, and need recharging. Shrike and Fang on the other hand, have Old Tech brains and power sources whihc makes them much smarter and gives them an endless power supply. That doesn't stop the Green Storm generic stalkers from being formidable though; they're still reanimated cyborg killing machines.

"A STALKER?" he asked, surprised. He was growing used to the Green Storm's Stalkers: mindless, faceless things who couldn't even recharge themselves but had to have their batteries laboriously extracted and replaced after a few days of action. They were the sort of creatures who gave the living dead such a bad name. He could not imagine one of them leading armies.

"Oh, the Stalker Fang is nothing like the rest," Dr. Zero assured him. "She is beautiful, and brilliant. She has an Old Tech brain, like yours, and all sorts of special adaptations. And she was built using the body of a famous League agent, Anna Fang. The Storm like people to think that Anna Fang has come back from the dead to lead our glorious war against the barbarians."

The same is with the stalker gulls (which can also carry messages inside them).

At a Green Storm air base in the Ziganastra Mountains, it landed to let the base commander peer at the slip of paper that it carried in a cavity inside its chest. She cursed under her breath when she saw whom the coded message was addressed to, and summoned a sleepy surgeon-mechanic to recharge the gull's power cells.

Fang though, is powered by an Old Tech device, as is Shrike.

Every morning she tended the Stalker Fang's joints and bodywork, and placed her instruments against the Stalker Fang's steel breast to check on the strange Old Tech power source that nestled where Anna Fang's heart had once been.

Stalker gulls have blades instead of beaks/bills and talons, and the same green eyes as all stalkers posses. They work in teams to attack their "prey". We also see the other strange and abnormal stalkers that Popjoy was working on have come to combat fruition.

Warships came and went from makeshift air harbors, and flocks of birds wheeled above the wrecked rooftops. Shrike was surprised at the intelligent way the flocks veered to avoid the airships, until The Sadness of Things passed close to one and he saw that they were not living birds but Stalkers, their eyes glowing with the same eerie green light as his, their beaks and talons replaced with blades. Below, on roadways bulldozed through the mud, more Stalkers marched, some man-shaped, others bulky, crablike, multilegged.

Although it was white like a gull and had a gull's soaring flight, this bird was not a gull; not anymore. Its bill had been replaced with a blade, and in the spaces of its skull glowed dim green lights. It rose through the circling flocks and flew away into the deepening twilight.

Stalker birds are intelligent and efficient killers, aiming straight for the vital organs.

Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face, Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try to protect himself. It had done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his evening robe into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and Remora.

This same stalker gull was also hiding in Pennyroyals safe room without anyone noticing it, so they're also pretty stealthy.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Between Predator's Gold and Infernal Devices, the Lost Boys have upgraded to wireless crab-cams entirely.

In the shadows beneath the woodpile, a wireless crab-cam trained its lens on him. In an underwater cave on one of the smaller islets, his image fluttered on a round blue screen.

THE LIMPET SCREW Worm had been built long before the Lost Boys started to use wireless crab-cams.

Even before Uncle took over Grimsby, they still had submarines around, like the one used by the scavengers he murdered.

“Oh, it was character-building stuff, Caul. I took up with a gang of Snowmad scavengers who were bringing up salvage from the wreck of Grimsby. Killed ’em one by one. Nicked their submarine. Came down here. Started doing a spot of burgling: snapping up a few unconsidered trifles to replace all the things I’d lost."

And so, for one last time, the limpet pens of Grimsby were filled with the sounds of a submarine being made ready for sea. The Naglfar was a rusty, ramshackle old tub, but Caul said that she would swim, and there was room enough in her spacious hold for all the children. He did not tell them what else he knew about her: that she was the submarine that Uncle had stolen years before from Snowmad scavengers and used to begin his underwater empire. Nor did he mention where her name came from--in the legends of the Old North, the Naglfar was a ship built from dead men's fingernails in which the dark gods would sail to battle at the world's end. He didn't want to give the children nightmares.

Uncle (Stilton Kael) fixed the wreck Grimsby so it was water-tight and worked as un underwater static city.

"Uncle built Grimsby," he reminded them. "He made the first few rooms airtight and built the first limpet all on his own, without anyone to help him."

As of the events of Infernal Devices, there are about 60 Lost Boys.

"Fishcake," she asked gently, "how many Lost Boys are there? All together, I mean."

Fishcake would not look at her, but after a moment he muttered, "About sixty, I s'pose. That's not counting Uncle and the newbies too young to ride limpets."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Brighton sent out a message on all frequencies that tricked and trapped the Lost Boys limpets, which they catch with a magnetic grapple and sell the occupants as slaves. One limpet tried to escape, so they dropped depth charges to destroy it, which can create huge plumes of water that saturate the people watching from Brighton from way under the ocean (this also gives a number to the limpets, there are at least 11 here, plus the others already captured).

But next day the storm slackened and the waves subsided, and that evening the crews of three more limpets were dragged, sheepish and weeping, into the slave pens. There were four more limpets that night, and another three the following day; one of them sensed a trap and fled before the magnetic grapples caught it, but Brighton gave chase and dropped depth charges until a white plume of water burst from the ocean to drench the cheering spectators on the starboard observation decks and bits of limpet and Lost Boy came bobbing to the surface.

More depth charges are dropped, and the resulting explosions are described as spectacular.

The original plan had been to send men down in captured limpets to explore the pirate lair. But the voyage north had taken longer than expected; it was late in the season, more storms were forecast, and the people of Brighton, who had the attention span of midges, were growing bored. Depth charges were dropped, resulting in a few spectacular underwater explosions and a lot of floating debris, which the city's shopkeepers scooped up in nets and put on sale as souvenirs of Grimsby.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Brighton is so big that at first Wren mistakes it for an island. Cloud 9 is a floating platform where the mayor (currently Pennyroyal) lives.

Fishcake brought the Autolycus up to periscope depth about a mile from Brighton. A night had passed since he'd first picked up the transmission from WOPCART. The morning sky was the color of the inside of a cowrie shell, and big gray waves heaved up and down. When Wren took a turn at the periscope, she could not see Brighton at all, just the waves, which now and then allowed her a glimpse of a big island away to windward, ringed by dirty white cliffs, with clouds hugging its summit.

And then she realized that it was not an island at all: What she had taken for cliffs were rows of white buildings, and the clouds were steam and exhaust fumes rising from a dense thicket of smokestacks. It was a city, a three-tiered raft city with two outrigger districts linked to its central hull by spidery gantries and a bank of huge paddle wheels beating the sea to foam astern. "Oh!" cried Wren, amazed. She'd seen pictures of cities in books, but she had never grasped how big they really were: far bigger than Anchorage-in-Vineland. Airships moved to and fro above a jagged skyline of spires and domes and rooftops, and a circular deck plate held up by immense gasbags hung a few hundred feet above the upper tier, anchored to it by thick hawsers. Wren could see green trees on the edge of the deck plate, and a building with unlikely onion domes.

"What's that?" she gasped.

"That's called Cloud 9," said Fishcake, who had managed to get a picture of the city from a crab-cam that he had sent up to perch upon the periscope. He had fetched out the Autolycus's tattered old copy of Cade's Almanac of Traction Towns (Maritime Edition), and was comparing Ms. Cade's diagram of Brighton with the image on the screen. "It's a sort of airborne park. The big building in the middle is where the mayor of Brighton lives."

Brighton has no jaws, and is instead powered by another source of energy (likely steam from the ocean). It has some weapons platforms in case of Green Storm attacks.

"No jaws," said Fishcake, checking the screens to make sure Brighton had not added anything nasty since Cade's Almanac went to press. There were a few air defense cannon mounted on revolving platforms on the promenades, but no more weapons than any town carried in these troubled times. "It's just a pleasure resort."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Shirke has such acute senses he's able to feel a door opening and shutting four floors down from him.

A cold breath touched him: a faint change in air pressure that told him of an outside door being opened and closed four floors below. He moved quickly to a window and looked down. A forked blob of body heat was moving through the shadows of the courtyard toward the checkpoint at the gate. Shrike measured its height and stride against the data he had gathered during his time as bodyguard, and recognized Dr. Zero.

Shrike can magnify what he's looking at.

Shrike's eyes, on maximum magnification, watched Dr. Zero show her pass at the checkpoint and followed her until she was lost to him among the barracks and banners of Tienjing.

A single punch from Shrike can kill, and a human skull is compared with an eggshell in how fragile it is compared with Shrikes power.

His circuitry hummed and tingled at the prospect of a kill. She had taken his claws from him, but he was still strong, and merciless. One blow from his fist would end her easily.

What had happened to him? He was a Stalker, a killing machine, and yet, when his quarry's eggshell skull had been in reach, he could not strike.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

The Greenstorm attack cities by bombarding them with shells, Tumblers, rockets and penetrating holes in the underside so swarms of stalkers could burst up through, until the city retreated or was destroyed. Sometimes when a city gets damaged too badly, the other cities turn on it and rip it apart for fuel.

Again and again that winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.

Massive shell craters were created from the artillery rounds fired.

The landscape below was changing, pitted and scarred by recent fighting. Enormous shell craters shone like mirrors stitched into a blanket of mud. From this height, the vast track marks of the enemy's fighting suburbs and the complicated entrenchments and fortifications of the Storm looked almost identical.

"They say we are making the world green again," sighed Dr. Zero, "but all we are doing is turning it into mud...."

The Green Storm have destroyed multiple traction cities.

He stood at Dr. Zero's side in the observation gondola as they flew west over high snow-clad mountains, then the plains of the Eastern Hunting Ground, which were Green Storm territory now, with here and there the wreck of a destroyed Traction City rusting in the grass.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Nuevo-Mayan cities have arenas with altered dismantling machines made for fighting and captured Green Storm stalkers which are pitted against slave gladiators in honour of their gods.

The guard leaned on her cage and leered at her through the bars. "You don't think Mr. Shkin'd try and sell a bunch of lairy pirates off as house slaves and nursemaids, do you? You'll end up as fighters aboard one of them big Nuevo-Mayan ziggurat cities. Lovely shows they have in them arenas. Gangs of slaves pitched against each other, or fighting souped-up dismantling machines and captured Green Storm Stalkers. Blood and guts all over the shop. But it's all done in honor of their funny Nuevo-Mayan gods, so it's quite spiritual, really."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Heavier than air flight has been rediscovered, and mercenary groups like the Flying Ferrets protect cities in packs of flying machines.

"But they've got no envelopes!" Wren cried. "No gasbags! How do they stay up? Heavier-than-air flight is impossible!"

Some of Shkin's men laughed. The slave trader himself looked faintly pleased, as if her innocence added credence to her story. "Not impossible," he said. "The secret of heavier-than-air flight was rediscovered a few years ago by cities eager to defend themselves against the Storm's air fleets. There is nothing like fourteen years of war to encourage technological advances...." He raised his voice as the flying machines came swooping back, filling the sky with the bellow of engines. "This lot are called the Flying Ferrets. A mercenary air force, hired by our esteemed mayor to protect his palace...."

Wren turned to the window again as the machines sped by. They were fragile-looking contraptions, all string and balsa wood and varnished paper, their cockpits stripped down to a bucket seat and a nest of control sticks. Some had two batlike wings, others three or four or ten; some flapped along beneath black, creaking things like broken umbrellas. On their massive engine pods were painted hawks and sharks and naked ladies and raffish, devil-may-care names: Damn You, Gravity! and Bad Hair Day; Contents Under Pressure and Delayed Gratification NOW '' . A begoggled aviatrix waved at Wren from the cockpit of something called the Combat Wombat. Wren waved back, but the squadron was already pulling away, dwindling to a cluster of specks far off above the sea.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Winter lasted centuries after the Sixty Minute War.

She tried to imagine the long-ago scribe who had so painstakingly engraved these symbols, working by the light of a seal-fat lamp in the dark of that centuries-long winter, copying out each wavering column in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the world the war had destroyed.

AS well as plagues, radiation storms were also present in the aftermath of the Sixty Minute War.

Long ago, in the terrible aftermath of the Sixty Minute War, the people of Anchorage were refugees, sailing a fleet of leaky boats across the northern seas in search of an island where they could rebuild their city. Along the way they encountered a wrecked submarine. The plagues and radiation storms had killed off all her crew except for one man, who was dying. He gave a document to my ancestor Dolly Rasmussen and told her to preserve it at all costs.

The Ancients had submarines the size of cities that could remain underwater indefinitely (modern submarines can remain submerged for 3 months).

"But it's just a load of old numbers," said Wren. "It came off some old American submarine ..."

"Exactly," said Gargle. "Those Ancients had subs way ahead of anything we've got. Ships the size of cities that could cruise right around the world without once having to come up for air. If we had that kind of technology, we'd never have to fear the Drys again. We could set the whole of Grimsby moving and they'd never find us."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

The Stalker Fangs durability; knives break against her and she emerges unscathed from bomb attacks and wrecked airships.

She would not be the first to try. All sorts of fanatical peaceniks and die-hard supporters of the old League had attempted to destroy the Stalker Fang, only to have their knives snap on her armor or watch her walk unscathed from the ruins of bombed rooms and the wrecks of airships. But Oenone Zero was a scientist, and she had used her scientist's skills to devise a weapon that could destroy even the Stalker Fang.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Multiple African traction cities are so big they're mistaken for distant mountains at first, and each has 9 tiers (making them bigger than London which had 7 tiers and was over 600m tall). They are also armoured against any possible Green Storm attacks, and the traction towns and villages are dwarved by them.

And then she looked again, and felt as silly as she had on that long-ago day when she'd first seen Brighton through the Autolycus 's periscope and mistaken it for an island. The things she'd thought were distant mountains were not distant at all. Nor were they mountains. They were Traction Cities so large that, when she'd first looked at them, her brain had simply not understood what her eyes were showing her.

They were lumbering seaward, and through the dust and the drifting exhaust smoke Wren could see that each had nine tiers bristling with chimneys and spires.

"The one on the left is Kom Ombo," the mayoress told her girls. "The other is Benghazi. Mayor Pennyroyal has contracted to meet them here so that their people may taste the delights of Brighton this Moon Festival. They have been hunting sand towns in the deep desert, poor things, so you can imagine how they will relish good food, fine entertainment, and a refreshing dip in the Sea Pool."

To Wren, the approaching cities looked at first just like the pictures she remembered from her dog-eared copy of A Child's Guide to Municipal Darwinism back in Anchorage. Then, as they drew closer, she began to make out differences. These cities were armored, the exposed buildings on the edge of each tier screened with steel plates and antirocket netting. And although the land around their massive tracks was dotted with small, scurrying towns and suburbs and Traction Villages, these cities were making no attempt to swallow them.

"Moon Festival is a sacred time," said the mayoress when Wren pointed this out. "A time when, according to tradition, no city hunts or eats another."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

A cities jaws are powerful to bite off huge chunks of rock (and rip other metal cities to pieces).

Through a slit in the armored gondola of the Stalker Fang's flagship, the Requiem Vortex, Oenone Zero peered toward the distant ground. Nothing moved down there except the shadows of the ships, but wherever she looked she could see the deep gouges made by the tracks and wheels of passing towns. Jagged bite marks pitted the hillsides where mining towns had scooped out gutfuls of ore-bearing rock.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Oenone Zero activates Shrikes coding and he attacks the Stalker Fang. He punches the heads off two lesser stalkers.

Two of the battle-Stalkers leaped forward to bar his path, and with two blows he disabled them both, knocking their heads off and leaving their blind, stupid bodies to stumble about, jetting sparks and fluids.

Shrike in his new strength is more powerful than the Stalker Fang and rips at her with his claws. He has reinforced armour and claws are made of tungstrn-alloy which are powerful enough to cut through stalker armour (even Fangs armour). Tungsten is one of the densest and heviest metals known to man.

Breaking free, he drove the blades of his right hand through Fang's chest in a spray of sparks and lubricants. The new claws were good, harder than Stalker skin. Fang hissed again, her gray robes in tatters, her armor ripped open and running with thick rivulets of the stuff that served her for blood. Oenone Zero was behind her, shouting, "You can't harm him! I built him to kill you, and I gave him the weapons to do it! Reinforced armor! Tungsten-alloy claws! Strength you can only dream of!"

Shrike smashes the Stalker Fang through a balustrade and shatters a stone pillar.

She hissed and shrieked and kicked at him, tearing the armor of his torso--she had blades on her toes too; he had not foreseen that--and he slammed her hard against the balustrade at the deck's edge. Stonework splintered, fragments of pillar and architrave exploding whitely in the moonlight and Fang tumbling through it. Shrike, all his nerves buzzing with the fierce joy of a fighting Stalker, leaped after her.

Fangs kick is enough to send Shrike reeling, but she doesn't have enough strength to follow up, as she's wounded and Shrike is stronger.

Fang sent Shrike reeling backward with a kick, but lacked the strength to follow through; instead, she looked about for an escape route, calling out in her whispery voice for help.

Shrike cuts the Stalker Fangs head off.

Shrike severed her neck with three fierce blows, her long scream dying as the head came free.

He pitched her body over the handrail, then picked up the head and the fallen mask and flung them after it. The mask flashed in the moonlight as it fell, and Shrike's rage and his new strength seemed to drain out of him. Jagged interference patterns crackled across his mind as the secret instincts Oenone Zero had installed there shut down.

The different parts of the Stalker Fang survive the fall down, and crawl towards each other to put herself together again.

A few dozen yards farther on, his sharp eyes caught a movement down on the floor of a dry watercourse. Nervous as an animal, he edged closer. A severed hand was creeping across the gravel. It appeared to be made of metal. It moved like a broken crab, dragging itself along by its fingers. Wires and machinery and something that looked like a bone poked out of the wrist. Fishcake watched it, and then, because it seemed to have a sense of purpose about it, he began to follow.

Soon he began to pass other, less lively body parts: a torn-off metal leg bent the wrong way and draped across a boulder, then a gashed and dented torso. The hand spidered over that for a while, then crept on its way. A few hundred yards farther on he found the other hand, still attached to most of an arm, feeling its way toward a slope of gravel and small boulders where stunted acacia trees grew.

And there he found the head: a skeletal gray face cupped in a metal skull, surrounded by a tangle of cables and ducts. It looked dead, but as Fishcake crouched over it, he knew that it had sensed him. The lenses of the glass eyes were shattered, but the spidery machinery inside twitched and clicked, still struggling to see. The dead mouth moved. So faintly that Fishcake could barely hear, the head whispered to him.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

General Naga is a cyborg with a powered exoskeleton made by the Resurrection Corps of the Green Storm.

Naga had been with the Green Storm since its foundation. There was a famous photograph of him, young and handsome, raising their thunderbolt banner over the wreck of Traktiongrad; Oenone had had a poster of it on her bedroom wall when she was a girl. But Naga was not young anymore, and not handsome either: His hair was gray, his long ocher face seamed and scarred. He was thirty-five, an old man by the standards of the Green Storm military. He had lost an arm at Xanne-Sandansky and the use of his legs at the air siege of Omsk, and he could walk and fight only because the Resurrection Corps had built him a powered metal exoskeleton.

Naga's exoskeleton is also his battle armour, and he wields a huge hand cannon.

"Stop it! Stop, Stalker, in the name of the Green Storm!" Led by Naga in his clanking battle armor, the Once-Born approached cautiously, leveling huge hand cannon and steam-powered machine guns.

Despite his strength, even he is afraid of Fang.

Even Naga was afraid of her.

Naga had followed the Stalker unquestioningly for sixteen hard years, but this was almost too much for him. As his subofficers scrambled to relay her orders and fetch sidearms and battle armor, he stood for a moment, looking as if he'd been slapped. Then, recalling what became of officers who disputed the Stalker Fang's commands, he hurried to obey.

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Tumblers are piloted bombs made by the Green Storm to dodge artillery fire, which is done better by kamikaze humans than by Stalker Brains.

Just off the edge of the gardens, a larger ship circled, waiting for the fighters to finish off the Ferrets, and beyond it Wren could see the upper tiers of Kom Ombo rising like an armored island from a sea of smoke. A fat airship was hanging above the city, showering down clouds of tumbling, twirling things that looked like silver seedpods until they struck a fortress or a gun emplacement, where they burst with white flashes and flung wreckage high into the night. Wren felt the explosions in her chest, like the beat of a huge drum.

"Tumblers," Theo muttered.

They went for it, releasing their clamps, and then the long fall, down and down, slaloming between the lovely, deadly blasts of enemy rockets. The earliest Tumblers had been automatic, fitted with Stalker brains, but Stalker brains couldn't zigzag through ground fire the way a human pilot could, and why waste Stalkers when there were young men like Theo, eager for glory and ready to die in the name of The World Made Green Again?

Tumblers are supposed to detonate when they hit, but Theos hit some silage bales and he survived (though there is a manual override).

They're supposed to go off automatically when you hit, but there's a manual override in case of a failure like mine, and I reached for it as soon as I came to, but I couldn't... I couldn't bring myself to ..."

 

[Stocking Anarchy]

Greenstorm airships have machine cannons.

Feathering their steering vanes, the warships swung toward their target, spreading out across the sky while their crews prepared rocket projectors and machine cannon, Tumbler bombs and flocks of raptors, and their fighter escorts, went prowling ahead.

Ferrets' flying machines, slashing at the wings and rigging and the unprotected pilots, and as the Ferrets stuggled to evade them, they made easy targets for the airships' rockets and machine cannon. Wings were shredded; fuel tanks blew apart; rotor blades came flipping and fluttering across the Pavilion's lawns like bits of an exploding Venetian blind.

These aren't exclusive to the Green Storm; the Flying Ferrets also have machine cannons.

Already she had learned to tell the high yammer of the Ferrets' machine cannon from the throatier stutter of the Storm's guns. The rockets were harder to tell apart, but she always knew when a Tumbler went off, because Theo would jump and hunch his shoulders and squeeze his eyes shut.