Gruizer

The gruizer is a living vehicle. This took some time to understand and longer to accept. Van described his first encounter in terms of ships — vast floating platforms moving across the sky of The Dark Peak — before mentioning, almost as an aside, that the craft were alive. The lexicon entry was brief on the subject. I have since sat inside one while it moved at speed across the Sunderlands, felt what I took for a mechanical throb through the decking, and watched its flank flinch when struck by funget fire. I am still working out how to feel about this. Van said the feeling passes. He said this with the tone of someone describing a dietary adjustment.

At rest, a gruizer reads as armoured reptile — hull plates overlapping like scales, heavy at the flanks, blunt at the nose, the design aesthetic of a fish or a bird pressed into something built to take a hit. Open the bonnet and you find the engine: not combustion, not a cylinder in sight, but locomotor muscle fibre — thick cable-bundles, bioengineered, packed into the bay. They expand and contract at different frequencies when fed nutrient solution to generate drive. Filling stations exist in Hellsborough for this purpose. Van calls the fuel juice. What you feel through the decking when a gruizer is running hard is not vibration. It is muscle working. In motion, a two-man flier is fast and responsive, agile enough to swing through a combat pass and bring its weapons to bear without slowing. The Woad fly their battle-gruizers at the larger end of the scale: black craft, blunt-nosed, built to carry a boarding party and absorb incoming fire on the way down. All gruizers carry anchors. Van, when I asked why, said: "because they're ships." The clown and crosslander variants run smaller and less armed, but the design logic is the same — living hull, organic drive, hivemind-capable. They access the network the way a Mentiloth does: not via instrument but by instinct.

The targeting equipment is organic and part of the craft itself. The xin knew this. Their first volley in any engagement with a gruizer fleet went for the sighting organs — not the hull, not the drive, but the eyes. A blinded battle-gruizer can still fire, but its accuracy drops to the level of a very large and very angry thing shooting in the approximate direction of a sound. This is still dangerous. It is less dangerous than the alternative. The woad descend in formation: circling first, drawing fire, reading the defences before the larger craft follow. Their funget fire at altitude is poor; at close range it is not. The milting temple guards learned this the hard way.

A gruizer that has been well used develops a husk quality to its shell — hull plates pulling away from the underframe as the organic tissue contracts, the outer surface going bark-dry. Dead ones are stripped of anything edible before being left in the netherlands junkyard above Hellsborough, where thousands of them lie in various stages of decomposition, bankweed and filchgrass growing through the bodywork and into the ground. The ones that died recently still make sound. Not often. Mostly when the murk is low. The living ones are sensitive to weight: a craft rated for two occupants will not lift a third. I have tested this inadvertently. The drive engine knows before the pilot does.

Field note: a gruizer responds to its pilot's voice before it responds to its controls. I have seen this work. Speak to it before you touch anything. It is not as strange as it sounds, and it is safer than the alternative.

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