Arcfire of Antiquity, page 20
“What are you saying, Raph? We’re going to space?”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”
“Dammit!” she yelled, caving in a section of paneling with one armored fist. A diffuse spray of sparks popped and then fizzled pathetically.
Chapter 10
Grand Theft Shuttle
Galas hurriedly scouted for a viewport, but found nothing. At the dead-end corridor containing the pilot’s seat, there was a viewscreen, but it wasn’t functioning at the moment.
“Raph, can you activate the viewscreen so we can see where we’re headed at least?”
“I’m afraid I no longer have access capabilities, ma’am. It would seem that the mantids know they have a hijacked shuttle and intend to confront the situation on their own turf.”
“So, we’re definitely headed for a transport, if not something heavier.”
“From what little I could access from the surface network at Daxn, there appear to be several ships. Which one we’re headed to, I am uncertain. But heavier would be an understatement.”
“Based on altitude and velocity at the time you lost control, how high up do you think we are?” she asked, scanning the space, then, “Never mind…” She spotted what looked like a control panel at the bulkhead of the cargo bay. She ran over to it and tapped the panel, but nothing happened. Galas pulled off her gauntlet, letting it swing back and lock into its stowed position, and tapped again, but still got no response.
“Raph? Are we locked in?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, hell no,” she exclaimed and then ran back to the cockpit area, pulled out one of the orbs from the psych-bully’s satchel, armed it, and threw it at the bulkhead. It exploded, bending reality and looking much like a water droplet squeezed through a tiny opening, and then quickly sucked back in. What was left was a three-meter circular hole in the bulkhead wall and door.
Lights in the cabin dropped from bright white to dull red, and an emergency beacon started sounding. These signs appeared to be common across space-faring beings, Galas recognized with a small part of her mind not focused on the problem at hand.
“Effective,” was all that Raphael could manage before Galas was bolting through the hole into the cargo bay and arming another.
“Do you think that that’s the best solu—” was all he got out before another blur in space opened up at the back of the cargo hold and wind and condensation ripped through the cabin, covering surfaces with a sheen of frost. Galas bolted forward and dove through the hole. She tumbled through the air chaotically before settling into a semblance of stable flight, settling into the freefall position.
Her pulse pounding and her stomach in her throat, she was immediately greeted by a yawning view of verdant jungle and altiplano desert peeking through columns of cloud below. It helped her orient, at least. She knew the mountains ran north-south, and that she’d come from the jungle area to the south. She didn’t want to overshoot her destination, though.
“Raph. I’m gonna need a soft spot. Thinking deep water, somewhere near Xiocic. Thoughts?” she yelled over the roar of wind whipping past the suit before realizing she could modulate the audio to drown it out. When the racket faded, it seemed as though she was hanging in space above the surface of the planet, only the billowing clouds sliding away, and the mildly buffeting wind contradicted the feeling. Occasionally, a more enthusiastic movement would threaten to tip her over, so she spread out her arms and legs a little farther to smooth things out and slow her descent. It’d give her a better glide angle as well.
By the types of clouds below her and the visible curvature of Epriot Prime’s horizon, she guessed she was somewhere between seven and twelve thousand meters up. It meant she didn’t need to pressurize her suit, but it also meant she had less time to work with and less distance she could cover.
“Well, we still have a couple of drones that are MIA,” Raphael told her. “I imagine that they’re either destroyed, or they followed the shuttle on its way to Xiocic. If that was where it was going. We should have a much-improved comms envelope, considering we now have line-of-sight virtually everywhere and thinner atmosphere for the next two and a half minutes until terminus. Chances are good we can make contact and have the drones scout out a deeper pool within our glide path.”
Galas scanned the terrain before her. She estimated that they were considerably farther north of Daxn than she could have even hoped for. They had made good time on their northbound journey before the mothership took over control of the shuttle. That, or the main element of the looter flotilla, was in geostationary orbit north of Daxn, to begin with.
It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she was now falling toward her destination and needed a way to land without breaking her suit and herself in the process. And she needed to do it as close to Xiocic as she could. Hopefully, there isn’t another mantid encampment at Xiocic, she thought.
“Raph, do we have a name for these xenos? Are they in the database?”
“I’m afraid not. Our proximity to the warp channels means that we see a lot of xeno activity and don’t always have the opportunity to add those encounters to our knowledge base. Plus, as you know, Epriot governance is at a low ebb at this point in the war with the Delvadr.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Okay, we’ll log these in the SortieNet. What’s the next letter in the sequence of mantid varieties?”
“That would be the sixth. Zeta.”
“Mantid-Zeta. MZ’s.”
“If we manage to interact with one without killing it, you can ask what they call themselves,” the AI offered.
“Good thinking, Raph. If we get close to one of these space vultures without me killing it, check me for jungle fever while you’re at it. Any luck on those drones? Or do we have to do this the old-fashioned way?”
Galas scanned the jungle floor for structures and lakes while trying to guide the power armor’s rapid descent in a somewhat northerly direction. The ridgeline was easy enough to follow. She knew Xiocic was at the base of the mountains along the river and the symbol that had been everywhere—provided so generously by Sun-Thurr—made it easy to approximate a location. She was heading that way, the suit having a marginally better glide angle than she would if she were falling on her own due to its lower weight-to-surface area.
“Here we go. Both drones appear to be online. That makes three, including the one still augmenting the suit’s systems. I used it to boost the signal to pick up the other two,” Raphael offered.
The drone feeds came up on Galas’s HUD. She mentally issued the command for them to scout for lakes and pools deep enough to stop the suit’s fall without hitting bottom—that hard, anyway. Both drones immediately gained altitude and, between the suit’s feed and that of the drones, an enhanced map of the area resolved, the battlespace reaching down to the surface in a cone shape likely representing her glide path. At the north end of it, the surface bubbled with higher resolution data filling in the low-res features of the planet.
The visible extents of Xiocic were automatically tagged and highlighted now that it knew what to look for. Galas was glad to see the vaguest impression of structures appear around what was an expansive complex of river canyons.
The ground was coming up faster now, thin stratus clouds whipped by, and she guessed she had less than sixty seconds before she made a significant crater somewhere on the surface below her. A glance at the battlespace data streaming on the right side of her HUD confirmed it.
“Raph, any luck on our landing? I’m not seeing anything jumping out at me.” That was in response to a host of yellow dots beginning to populate the high-res area.
“None. We’d need something roughly twenty-six point seven meters deep to arrest our fall, and there is nothing close to that in the river or in any of the pools. There is a pool at the edge of our glide path. It may be the temple grounds, but it’s not a good angle, and the bottom is less than forgiving.”
Galas made her decision and recalled the drones. It would be tricky for them to return and attach considering they would be coming at each other from opposite directions, effectively doubling impact velocity.
“Raph, guide the drones back. Have them augment the repulsors. We’re going in at the temple pool.”
Thirty seconds, she judged. Three drones that might add eleven percent to repulsor power. Entering at an eight- to ten-degree tilt…
Raphael didn’t need to be asked to highlight the deepest part of the pool. There was only one section she could make it to. Galas focused on that spot, feeling terrified that it was just too far to make. If she did, she was barely going to clear the edge of the twenty-meter cliff above it. A wide, V-shaped pattern with arcing lines appeared on the HUD and Galas recognized it from her lunar escapades. It was her glide path.
“Distracting. Kill the training wheels,” she demanded, and the glide path disappeared.
Fifteen seconds. She was unconsciously holding her breath. The drones blurred in from either side, and the suit thudded as they each connected. The repulsors roared as they pounded on, and she punched through foliage, skipped glancingly off the sloped edge of the cliff, and then hit the water.
Everything went dark. The bone-jarring triple impact of first dirt, then water, and then the bottom of the pool, while effectively scrubbing all her gravity-induced momentum, still left her stunned and floating in a cloud of silt and quickly fleeing bubbles.
The floodlights kicked on, and Galas’s first thoughts were of the guardians, the mutated fishmen. She wanted to know whether they were here and, if so, how many. Her second thought was that she was still seeing stars and tasted blood in her mouth. She’d bit her tongue, maybe clean through. It was swelling, and blood gathered in her mouth.
“I count twelve of the creatures. At least those that I can distinguish using the sensors. Whether they’re the same thing that we encountered farther south or not, remains to be seen,” Raphael provided. At least he was online.
“Twe-oov? Tweh…” she breathed out through her nose in exasperation and growing pain. “Fwed, anomedth … th-woo the thtwaw, pweave,” she tried to say before abandoning it entirely and using thought-to-text.
“Of course, ma’am. Administering nanomeds.”
Galas took a long but mild pull from the bite tube positioned near her jaw. The taste of blood was overpowering but, within seconds, her tongue tingled and went numb.
Moments later, there was a flurry of activity in the outer edges of her visibility. Dark shapes flitting out of the shadows and darting back in. Flashes of silver in powerful pulses as large fish grew less fearful and more agitated, more aggressive.
Galas pressed her teeth together carefully and fired the repulsors again. She shot toward the surface and fully out of the water. Hovering there momentarily before sinking back into the pool, the surface bubbling like a cauldron due to the firing repulsors. Quickly scanning her surroundings, she shot forward toward the falls and the safety of the shoreline a short distance away.
Her display barely chirped before she was rammed hard from below. Her plasma blades were out before she broke the surface, and she was slashing at the darkness where she knew her attacker would appear. Teeth and a massive mouth exploded into view, and the glowing cloud of steam and bubbles created by the blades quickly turned red and murky with fish gore. She let the suit carry her forward at speed and slammed into the rocks of the shoreline.
She made it out of the water without another attack, but a splash of water and a flip of a large tail told her just barely. Here the falls came crashing over hazy pink walls that towered above her, revealing a cobalt river of sky between them. Much of the pool here was in shadow from those cliffs, but where the sun peeked through, the water was clear enough she was sure she could see the bottom if not for the rippling surface.
She had exited the water only a few meters from the falls themselves and reminded herself not to get complacent just because she was out of the water. She made her way back behind the falls to pause and assess the situation. And to perform any triage. She hadn’t had a moment to figure out if the suit was damaged from the fall before being attacked.
“Fwed, wun diag-noth-dic an invendory p-leaz,” she said, mildly irritated but also appreciative that the nanos were working quickly. She peeled off two of the drones for recon while she pulled up the feed from her high-altitude, no-arrest descent, freezing the footage around a clear shot of the temple pool.
It looked much the same as the one found in Braex. Only the layout of the columns that she could see underwater was different, maybe. Here they were aligned exactly opposite of the Braex formation, from what she could tell. There was something about the shapes that tickled her memory, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“Systems are functioning normally, ma’am. No more damage than could be expected. I’m utilizing the suit’s self-healing circuitry to repair and augment weak points. You appear to be placing considerably more demand on it than the designers anticipated. This is a newer version of the fourth-gen model, so … still some room for improvement.”
“Th-ank you,” she worked out.
Just then, a rumbling noise, barely distinguishable from that of the falls, could be heard but was steadily building. Within seconds, a shadow cast down on the pool, sliding in from upstream until a heavy craft could be seen through the gaps in the falls, traveling slowly overhead. This was no exploratory shuttle. This was a gunship or heavy troop transport. The drone feeds confirmed it, too. The gunship hovered slowly over the pool, continuing downstream at an interminably slow pace.
“Looking for us?” Raphael asked, his voice barely more than a whisper, though that was an unnecessary precaution.
Galas kept completely still. She thought the response into text: “Definitely.” Also using unnecessary precaution but, given how outgunned they were, she forgave herself the overabundance of caution. She dialed the suit’s power output down to the minimum rather than request Raphael to do it and waste precious time. She wanted her profile as small as possible while that ship was around. She had no desire to see what mantid-zeta heavies looked like, even if to log it into the SortieNet. A minute dragged into two before the craft continued out of sight downriver.
“Well, that throws a new wrinkle into things. I wonder how many more of those they’ve got?”
“I hate to pile on, Miss Galas, but the clock is still counting down to the Delvadr’s inevitable arrival. We need to awaken that temple … to use the professor’s term.”
Just then, Galas had a terrifying thought. Her hand flew to her side where the satchel had been. It was gone. Had she lost it when she hit the water? Or sometime before that? While she was falling? If so, it could be anywhere.
“Raph, the satchel is gone. The artifact. How am I going to activate the node without it?”
Galas dismounted the remaining drone, sending it into the waters to look for the satchel. She piloted the drone herself using augmented reality controls that showed up like faintly glowing compass dials around both of her outstretched hands. She kept it close to the rocks to avoid attracting the over-sized and highly aggressive fish creatures.
She found the satchel almost instantly at the bottom of the pool. Right where she’d impacted just a few minutes before. That meant she was going to have to face the guardians again rather than try to sneak around them to the temple.
Or maybe there was another way?
Galas called in the other two drones.
“Raph, you use the drones to draw out the fish-mutant things. I’ll use this one to drag the artifact to the temple and activate the node that way.”
“Worth a shot,” Raphael surmised, sounding less like an AI vocalized interface and more like the wingman Galas had demanded. “Should I log Fish Mutant Thingy as their formal name in the SortieNet, or would you prefer Guardians as your salamander friend suggested?”
“FiMu’s. At least until we can uncover the missing data on what they are. That or Ichy’s for Ichthyological Entities. You choose.”
“Okay. I like Ichy’s,” he offered.
“Wrong. It was a test. FiMu’s.”
“You are uniquely disturbed.”
“I try,” she quipped, flashing a girlish smile.
And with that, the drones plunged into the water with a splash and instantly dark shapes from below were thrashing to the surface after them. Raphael had no trouble guiding both drones simultaneously. He dodged and slipped between them, even though the FiMus were fast and nimble for their size.
“Galas, a little help?”
Just then, one of the drones burst out of the water, followed quickly by one of the aggressive river monsters. It dove back down, heading in Galas’s direction. She strode down toward the edge of the pool, stepping out from behind the falls just as the drone and the fish burst from the water again. A flash of purplish light and the large creature hit the water in two parts. The drone dove back under the waters as Galas returned the plasma blade to its forearm sheath.
Galas returned to her job of remotely salvaging the satchel and dragging it with one of the drone’s multi-tool appendages. It was a slow but steady process but, what seemed like only moments later, Raphael requested her assistance again. Another drone escaped the surface of the pool, followed closely by a flash of dark silver and, again, a slash of the plasma blade rendered the FiMu into separate halves.
Galas, having lived off nutrient bars for days now, found herself wondering what they’d taste like over a fire. She quietly mulled over just how intelligent the fish-mutants were and whether that created a moral dilemma while dragging the satchel closer to the temple. The strength of her argument seemed to be directly proportional to the growing hunger in her stomach. She knew sooner or later it would be a moot point, and she could begin justifying her decision once her belly was full.
