Revelation, page 20
part #3 of Relic Wars Series
“What are you saying?” Hagen rose from his seat and turned toward the door just as Abel walked in, a light machine gun in his hands, a wide grin on his face.
“Mission accomplished,” Abel said, and he opened fire.
He took Hagen first, bloodying the man from his guts to his head, and the old infantry sergeant collapsed over the arm of the command chair, instantly soaking it in blood.
Eric gaped stupidly as his brother swept the gun across the bridge. Depleted uranium rounds tore into consoles, sending up jets of sparks and igniting electrical fires. Alarms sounded and red lights flashed. The hologram of Iris flickered and vanished.
Abel shot the fleet pilot, bronze-skinned Madeira, sitting next to Carol. She'd often looked at the tall pilot with a flushed face, clearly attracted to him.
Now Carol rose, screaming, bullets shredding her chair as she pushed her way out of it. She turned to run toward the nearest cover, an engineering console, but she never made it. Abel cut her down.
Carol sprawled across the floor, her entire torso turned blood red, strings of blood drooling from her shocked, gaping mouth.
Bartley and Dimakos dove for cover behind the nearest console. Eric lost sight of Bartley, but Dimakos's milk-white head was pulverized, the upper half turned into a wide spray of brain and skull fragments that painted the floor behind him.
That left Eric alone on the bridge. Alanna was away, perhaps grabbing a snack or hitting the ladies' room, maybe even sleeping. Eric had assumed she was off with Abel somewhere, but apparently he'd been wrong. Or maybe he'd been right...and Abel had killed Alanna first.
His brother turned toward him, smiling as brightly and coldly as Eric had ever seen him, and he stalked toward Eric.
“Abel?” Eric whispered. “You're one of them?”
“Afraid so.” He leveled his weapon at Eric's chest, ready to shoot him through the heart. “Hand it over.”
Eric looked at the medical-storage bag with the gauntlet inside it. He had it on the console in front of him, only a short reach away.
“You might be thinking about doing something interesting,” Abel said. “Like trying to rip me apart the way you did that battleship. Don't. You'll be dead before you can open that bag.”
“So why aren't I dead now?”
“You have a relationship with these relics,” Abel said. “Maybe they'll want to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“The thinkers.”
“You mean the brain worms?” Eric said. “Like the ones inside your head, controlling you?”
“If that's what you choose to call us,” Abel said. Our name is Legion, Eric thought. A line from Scripture. “Hand it over and I'll let you live a little longer. Maybe we'll even spore inside you, little brother. You can be like me. Maybe the worms want more of us. Maybe they'll want you to join up, like me.”
“I don't believe you. I think you're resisting their orders to kill me, Abel. Because you don't want to.”
“We control your brother, Eric,” Abel said, touching the side of his head. “We have for some time. Gregorski saw the way forward for us. He was a visionary. He showed us more ways your kind could be useful to us. We will still destroy your civilization, of course. And exterminate most of you. Your species could one day grow to threaten ours. We will strangle you in your crib before that happens.”
“We've already left the crib,” Eric said, tightening his grip on the bag with the relic. Abel was right; there was no way he could get it open, slide the gauntlet onto his hand, and fight back before Abel simply killed him. All he could do was delay and hope he saw a chance to make a move. “You're too late. Humans multiply and spread out, adapting to whatever we find. We can live anywhere. And we will continue to grow and multiply throughout the galaxy.”
“Like vermin,” Abel said.
“Your species is worse than vermin,” Eric said, imagining himself looking through Abel's eyes and into all the monsters he'd been fighting since Caldera. His anger rose as he addressed them. “You destroy more than you build. You kill, you eat, and that's it. You make nothing of any value. Look at your ships. Look at your nest down there. Everything you make is garbage.”
“And that's why we survive,” Abel said. “You are not the first species we've encountered with pretensions of greatness, of being more than the filthy animals you truly are, underneath your myths and the stories you tell yourselves. You rate yourselves superior to us? Your kind is small, weak, fragile, and cowardly. We can see all of this in the memories inside your brother's brain. What makes you superior to us?”
“We...” Eric struggled to find and articulate an answer, which wasn't easy to do with his brother possessed and staring at him, ready to kill him. It was strange how little Abel's personality had really swayed under the aliens' influence; he'd always been cold, arrogant, and distant, after all. “We have...you know...real civilization. Art and music and...religion.” Eric felt his spine stiffen a little at that. “We have God. Do you?”
Abel smiled, baring perfectly white and even teeth. They hadn't always been like that; he'd worn braces to fix them in middle school. “We have met others, you know. Species who built civilizations, who considered themselves vastly superior to other lifeforms, as you do. But they were only comparing themselves to the simple creatures of their own worlds. They were not prepared to meet a truly superior life form.”
“Like you?” Eric asked. “You can't even talk without using a human for your mouthpiece.” He thought of his father, the worm's tentacles jabbed deep into his brain, controlling him, and immediately shoved that memory as far back as it would go.
“Only when speaking to you. We communicate quite well among ourselves. Do you not understand what makes us the supreme beings of this galactic arm? We have none of your weakness, your softness, your fragile and delicate emotions. Superiority in this universe has nothing to do with beauty, nothing to do with feelings. There is only strength, durability, and calculation. All existence is competition, and your kind is too soft to win. You will yield to us, and we will devour and displace you. This is inevitable. It is the way of all that lives. Your species would have learned this, and shed your distracting pretenses, in time...had you lived long enough.” Abel touched the mouth of the machine gun's barrel to Eric's chest. “Now you have your choice. Die if you like. Or surrender, hand over the relics, and join us. You'll help us study them and learn to use them. And together we'll unlock their true powers, not just fumble around them like you've been doing.”
“You really think I would join you?” Eric asked.
Abel opened his mouth and made a horking sound like he was about to puke his guts out.
A gray-white worm emerged, the size of a thin garden snake. Tentacles like dendrites spread out in a corona around its head; Eric could imagine them sliding into his eye and ear like the larger worm had done to his father. Its mouth opened, revealing a ring of teeth like sewing needles.
A pale light glowed off to their side. The holographic projection of Iris was sputtering back to life, though blurry and full of static. She remained in lotus position, eyes closed, cables still attached to her head. She seemed to be so deep in meditation, or maybe in communion with the nexus wormhole gate that she'd been gushing about, that she seemed to have no idea what was happening on the bridge. Her quarters were soundproof, but she should have noticed the incident over her audio and video connection before the bullets damaged the equipment.
Regardless, she was seated with her eyes closed, connected to her equipment, while someone slipped up behind her.
Bah. The diminutive pilot was supposed to be down in the hangar, standing by in his starfighter.
Instead, he was walking up behind Iris, a laser pistol pointed at the back of her head.
“Iris! Behind you!” Eric shouted, but she didn't respond. He couldn't hear any audio from her room, either; he could only watch as Bah stood behind her and aimed for her skull.
Three cables pulled away from her head, already detached from the plates there.
They charged Bah like a trio of metal serpents. A cable burrowed into each of his eyes, blinding him on their way to tear into his brain. The third charged down his throat, choking him.
Iris rolled aside while Bah's pistol discharged, striking some of the remaining cables as they lashed toward him. He fired again and again, shooting blindly while he died. Then the hologram vanished, one of his shots frying the holocam equipment.
“Bah had worms, too?” Eric turned back to look at Abel...just in time to see him cough out the slender gray-white worm, which was about half a meter long.
The creature landed on Eric's chest and shoulder, its body dripping with Abel's saliva and blood. Its needle-lined mouth hissed, and its dendrites unfurled across Eric's cheek, crawling toward every opening in the upper half of his head. The dendrites were damp and sticky, and they burned like jellyfish tentacles wherever they touched his skin. The little worm's teeth bristled, approaching his eye.
“Cease and desist!” Gunsy's voice boomed at ear-cracking volume. The security bot rolled into the room on its treads, all its barrels trained on Abel. “Abel Rowan, drop your weapon!”
Bartley rose up from behind the weapons console, coated in Dimakos's blood, holding his personal pocket screen in one hand. “Good boy, Gunsy.”
Abel turned to look at the heavily armed robot, and Eric took the risk of grabbing the machine gun barrel and shoving it to one side, while he moved into the other. Abel looked back, surprised, and squeezed the trigger, but his burst went wide, shooting holes in the wall instead.
Eric looked his brother in the eyes, telling himself that Abel was already gone, that he was just looking at an alien that had taken over his brother like a parasite. He wanted to see no trace of his brother in those blue eyes, but in truth Abel looked about the same as always. His speech was a little more stilted, but that was the only noticeable difference.
“Sorry,” Eric whispered, while he swung his leg forward.
He sent the brace forward with all the power it could summon, doing an end run around its normal limits. The steel band at his ankle connected with Abel's shin through his flight suit, shattering the bone.
Abel howled and dropped, squeezing off another burst. Some of the bullets ricocheted off Gunsy and blasted apart another console.
“Drop your weapon!” Gunsy repeated, advancing on Abel but still not shooting.
Eric looked at Bartley, who gave a small nod, and he understood. Bartley had silently summoned Gunsy and instructed the bot to try and disarm Abel, to seek a no-kill solution. He'd done for that Eric's sake, not wanting to order the death of Eric's brother.
Because he was letting Eric make that call instead.
“Gunsy,” Eric said, while using his hand to block the stinging dendrites trying to worm into his eye. “Kill Abel.”
Abel's eyes went wide, while Gunsy responded, “Yes, sir!”
Lasers, uranium rounds, and slender blades hammered into Abel, ripping him open from his head to his knees. He toppled over, dead instantly. Worms wriggled in the shattered red mass of his head.
The worm on Eric's face tore into his cheek, its circle of needle-teeth digging deep into Eric's flesh. Eric grabbed the worm and tried to pull it loose, but it was holding on tight with those teeth. He felt his face burning; maybe it had some kind of neurotoxin in its saliva, too. Maybe the same as the venomous juice on the tentacles that were still trying to pry into his eye.
He felt a new, deeper burn as one of the stringy tentacles entered his ear canal. Another was crawling up his nostril, stinging the whole way as it reached for his brain.
“I got it!” Bartley drew a knife from his boot as he dashed over. He sliced the worm in half. The front half hissed, the back half writhed and lashed, and both halves splattered bright red blood everywhere. Eric grimaced as he grabbed the worm's bulbous head and worked it back and forth to loosen its teeth, until finally he could pull the alien creature free of his face and toss it on the floor.
Bartley stomped on it, crushing its pulsing head under his boot, since Eric was still barefoot. “You okay, bro?”
“I'm doing just terrible, thanks.” Eric touched his ripped-open cheek, then looked down at his brother's shot-up body. Small worms wriggled their way out of the broken ruins of Abel's face. “Mind killing those for me?”
“You got it.” Bartley stomped the small worms and ground them into a bloody paste against the floor.
Eric started for the door, intending to check on Iris, but she entered the room holding the laser pistol that Bah had attacked her with, her robes smeared with blood. Her eyes widened as she took in all the bodies on the bridge.
“Abel did this,” Eric said. “He had brain worms.”
“I saw,” Iris said. “Bah, too. He's dead now.”
“I saw.”
“He shot up my gate-interface gear pretty badly,. I can't reach out to open and control the gate, even if we make it back to the wormhole.”
“Great,” Eric said. “Ras, where's Alanna?”
“On her way to the bridge now,” Ras's voice crackled over only a couple of the speakers, and his hologram didn't appear at all. “Along with the drama-bot.”
“Of course Malvolio would still be around and kicking,” Bartley said. “Maybe we can use him for a shield or something.”
“We have some, like, serious issues, and for once I don't mean the psychological kind,” Ras said. “Worms are crawling all over my hide. I think they're figuring things out. Also, the traffic jam is turning into a traffic stop. So I'm having to slow even more here, unless someone wants to give me clear instruction or, you know, fly me. But I think Carol's too injured for that.”
“Injured?” Bartley turned to look at the former helicopter pilot from Earth. She was sprawled on the floor near the bullet-riddled chair where she'd been sitting. Eric had assumed she was dead, but now she was breathing faintly. Her cheek rested in a puddle of her blood. Her eyes were open, looking at them. Bartley went to kneel beside her. “Carol?”
She took a sharp breath. “Not...for long. Soon, I'll be...” She took another breath. “Nothing. Can't...fly. Sorry.”
“Nobody's expecting you to fly.” Iris knelt beside her and brushed bloody hair away from her eyes. “Carol...”
Carol looked up at her, green eyes wide as she took another ragged breath.
“Your husband,” Iris said. “Mark. Mark Foster. Right?”
Carol mouthed something silently. Yes. She looked confused.
“I was on the reclamation ship with him, on that last job,” Iris said. “I was part of the crew. We were there to clean up after the battle, but I had a secret assignment. Well, standing secret orders, really, from the Antikytheran Society. As long as I was with the reclamation crew, I was supposed to watch out for any sign of relics left by the ancients. They are scattered around the galaxy, not many of them, each one powerful in its own way, each one a clue to who they were and what they could do.
“We found one there. I was to stop at nothing to bring it back to the Antikytheran Society. We were still at war, you understand? The Colonials needed whatever advantage we could get, and we also couldn't risk the Allies getting hold of such relics and developing them into an advantage against us.
“Your husband refused to go my way,” Iris said. “He insisted we head for Earth. I couldn't allow that; I couldn't allow the relic to fall into the hands of the enemy. You understand? I offered him everything I could. A different life. But all he wanted was to get back to you. It was the one thing I couldn't allow.”
Carol looked more and more perplexed the longer Iris spoke.
“I...killed him,” Iris said, finally.
Carol bared her teeth, each one outlined thickly with blood. It was a fierce, animal-like expression like Eric had never seen on her face; she'd been calm and collected ever since he'd first met her, when she'd been dropping from a helicopter, pumping a giant armored worm full of rounds.
With a surge of strength, Carol managed to raise her face from the floor.
“You...” Carol whispered, blood running over her lips, baring her reddened teeth at Iris.
“I hated doing it. But it was an act of war. I had no choice. We all did things we regret. But I've known it since we met. He told me about you. He fought bravely against the worms. He and I were the only ones who survived down in that swamp. He saved my life. We escaped together.”
Carol hissed angrily as she breathed in and out, apparently unable to form words.
“I did it later, up in the scavenger ship,” Iris said. “First I tried to convince him to come with me. I didn't want to kill him. But he refused, and so I...cut his throat.”
Carol's teeth opened wide, then snapped together. She was shivering, losing blood everywhere, her skin even paler than usual.
“I'm sorry,” Iris said. “I've felt the guilt for it all over, every time I've looked at you. I wish I hadn't...I wish...” Iris shook her head. “I wish you could forgive me. You're the only who can, really. I can't forgive myself.”
Staring up at her, Carol moved her hand forward, through her own blood, and clenched it around Iris's.
“You...” Carol whispered. “You...bitch. I hope the worms eat you.”
Then she spat blood into Iris's face.
Iris recoiled, gasping, while Carol's face drifted slowly to the floor, eyes glittering with hatred as she breathed her last, staring at Iris as she died.
“What's...oh, God.” Alanna arrived, along with Malvolio, taking in the bloodbath with more obvious horror than Iris had. She looked around, blinking. “What...?”
“Brain worms,” Eric said.
“Hey, I don't want to interrupt the natural and healthy primate mourning period here,” Ras said, “But you'll probably get all 'tudey with me if I don't point out that the worms are tearing into the hull all over the place, so I don't think they're buying our ruse any longer. And warships ahead are preparing to attack us, so there's that.”
