Revelation, page 22
part #3 of Relic Wars Series
“Look.” Alanna pointed at a monitor. “The battleship.”
The colossal alien warship had finally rotated itself around to face the Rex. The glowing plasma at its nose was a fully formed sphere, a miniature sun whose glare made all the monitors go blindingly bright.
“Sorry, Ras-mo,” Bartley said. “I guess this is it.”
“This is not good-bye,” Ras said, from all their pocket screens. “This is merely...oh, no, it's totally good-bye.”
The battleship released the huge plasma sphere, and it streaked toward the Rex like a comet. The asteroid-cutter was still chewing into the rocky ring with its saws and drills right up to the moment of impact.
The plasma sphere struck the Rex dead center, burning right through its core, leaving only a dripping, melting framework behind. The plasma didn't strike with any particular force; it just burned through silently, like a rapier through the ship's heart.
There was no going back.
Ahead, where the shell of the ring had been torn open by the Rex's tools, waited rocky tunnels with a growing number of worms emerging from them, ready to fight the invaders who'd breached their defenses.
The land destroyer dove directly toward the cavernous, enemy-filled opening below.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The worms' rocky ring rotated very slowly around the gas giant it encircled, creating a kind of large-scale artificial gravity in the same manner as the rotating cylinder shape of Madbox Colony. It wasn't much, maybe one-tenth of Earth standard gravity, but enough to create a clear sense of up and down inside the ring.
The destroyer crashed in through what Eric considered the top of the ring, but once they were inside, it was as if they'd crashed in through the wall.
Bartley spat out a long string of profanity, much of it involving anatomically impossible acts of bestiality, while he wrenched around the steering wheel and tried to land the destroyer properly on the cave-like floor. It slammed down on its side, then slid, with a terrible scraping sound, across the bumpy rock, jostling all of them into each other until it finally came to a stop.
They landed among a network of caves and machinery at the edge of the shipyard-industrial sector they'd been passing over.
Worms rose around them; the alien beasts wore chunky metal tipped with strange, sharp tools. Smoke rose from grimy machinery on all sides, and dark fluids ran through open canals on the floor. Fiery bursts from the machinery provided a dim, reddish light that left far too many shadows.
Above, sheets of steel extended over the hole they'd blasted in the ring. The sheets were uneven and irregularly shaped, but they did the job, overlapping and sealing the atmosphere inside the giant rock reef. They also sealed out the feeble light of the stars above and the rotten-looking gas giant below, deepening the cavernous darkness and trapping the humans inside.
“Whose idea was it to let Bartley drive?” Alanna asked.
“Are you volunteering?” Bartley asked.
“We are lost!” Malvolio cried. “Our noble craft torn asunder, while our fellowship lies stranded on the enemy's briny shore—”
“Adjusting attitude,” the destroyer's AI's grunted, and that was all the warning they got before the destroyer righted itself and they slammed into each other again. Iris's elbow hit Eric's stomach, while Eric's shoulder cracked into Malvolio's weird melted face and unblinking eyes.
The destroyer landed on its multiple sets of tracked wheels.
The worker worms approached, torches glowing, sharp points spinning, and swarmed over the destroyer.
“We should get going!” Eric shouted, while grabbing the controls closest to him. The destroyer had an array of weapons—rockets, guided grenades, artillery shells, a couple of railguns stocked with uranium-jacketed rounds. The four of them had divided up the weapons—Iris had the left side of the destroyer, Alanna the rear, Eric the right. Bartley faced ahead, focused on driving but with a couple of weapons at his fingertips, too. He had some tank experience, which made him marginally more qualified to drive the rolling fortress than the others. Fortunately, the AI was there to assist, though grumpily.
“I'm working on it!” Bartley shouted, his fingers gliding cluelessly over an array of buttons. “Just looking for something to clear the path.”
“Use the shrapnel shell,” the destroyer's AI grumbled, while lighting up a pair of buttons.
Eric focused on a worm trying to burn its way through the destroyer's armor with a cutting torch. He took a moment to eyeball the worm's fuel lines, identified the fuel tank a couple of meters back along the worm's body, and took aim with his rail gun.
The round cracked out at supersonic speed—and for once, he was inside an atmosphere and could actually hear it.
The fuel tank cratered, and thick, gelatinous fuel glopped all over the worm. The worm immediately killed its torch and turned, growling, to look at the damage.
Eric hadn't gotten the big worm-frying explosion he'd been hoping for, but he followed it up with a grenade. The impact struck the worm in the face and engulfed its head in fire.
Then the flames reached the thick fuel, and the explosion filled half the cavernous room and rocked the destroyer on its treads.
“What happened over there?” Iris turned to look.
“Just a bunch of worms blowing up,” Eric said.
“Sweet,” Bartley commented. He pressed the accelerator and the vehicle lurched forward, bobbing slightly as it crawled over a heap of industrial-worker worms, crushing them under its treads.
Firing in every direction, they plunged ahead, deeper into the smoking factory area, going back the way they'd come in the ship. None of them expected to make it out alive, and there was no ship to take them home, so they were determined to deal as much damage as they could before the worms inevitably overwhelmed and killed them.
Eric saw a row of industrial vats and hit them with a rail-gun fire, riddling them with holes.
A tidal wave of molten metals rushed out, glowing red, pouring over and burning through more of the factory worms. It rushed toward the destroyer, deep and thick, coating the factory floor.
“Bartley, swerve left!” Eric shouted.
“Why?” Bartley looked, saw the wave of metal rolling toward them, and let out another string of anatomically improbable profanities. He swerved the destroyer away from the rush of glowing red, through a cage-like barrier, and up onto a massive assembly line. The trash-can-sized barrels of scrap guns hung over it, suspended on wires, moving slowly as worms on either side worked to build the weapons. They were in an enemy arms factory.
Bartley smashed through one partially assembled scrap gun after another as he drove down the assembly line, crushing the line as he went. Eric, Iris, and Alanna kept up their attack, blasting away worms, though many of these workers seemed to be retreating rather than fighting. A couple of them flipped their lips outward, flashing sparse rings of stumpy teeth.
Eric mowed them all down, not giving them any chance to organize a response. They weren't the biggest worms he'd seen, but any one of them could reap off his arm or leg with a single chomp.
Bartley drove them onward, smashing through another mesh-like wall into the next bit of the ring...and then hit the brakes, slowing them to a crawl.
“What are you doing?” Alanna screamed, while keeping up a stream of fire behind them.
“Just watching where I'm going,” Bartley muttered. On the forward monitors, the path ahead divided into a cluster of rocky tunnels, wide enough for a worm but too narrow for the rolling destroyer.
“It's a dead end on this side, too,” Eric said, looking at towering heaps of scrap, iron and copper in all sizes and shapes.
“Over here!” Iris said. “That looks big enough. I think. Maybe.”
“You got it.” Bartley put on speed as he took a sharp left.
They moved through a gap into a long, cavernous tunnel lined with machinery, with enormous chains of metal plates clunking along the walls, stretching out of sight along a slight curve in either direction, following the shape of the giant ring world. A couple of worms shot past, each one gripping a series of the linked plates, their segments held in place by metal arms. Another worm rode by in the opposite direction, flipping its lip to bare its teeth at them, but it didn't stop.
“Looks like...wormy mass transit,” Iris said.
“Works for me,” Bartley said, pulling into the middle of the tunnel. “Plenty of room to drive.”
They continued onward, opening fire again as they passed another hellish industrial area, destroying all they could of the enemy's industrial base along the way.
The factories were a valuable target, but they weren't the final destination.
“There,” Iris said, pointing after they'd fought their way ahead a little farther. “That must be it.”
Bartley slowed as they reached an opening in the worms' internal railway system, similar to the gap where they'd entered, indicating a sort of station where worms could jump on or off the high-speed chains.
The land destroyer turned sharply and charged into another large chamber. There was no machinery and smoke here, but instead enormous marble statues of worms twined together, either fighting or mating, Eric couldn't really tell. They reminded him of the asteroid-rock statues on the outside, but there was something unnervingly reminiscent of humans here, using marble sculpture to portray prominent aliens of some kind, perhaps their leaders or their gruesome worm-gods.
In front of the great statues lay altars of marble, each one as large as a two-story house, piled with carcasses of all kinds. Eric had never even seen most of the creatures that lay dead on the marble—slimy tentacled beasts, spiky fish-like, scaly reptiles split open with their guts half pulled out, mammalians with dried blood matting their fur. He supposed they came from worlds all over, made easily accessible by the worms' control of the nexus gate connecting a hundred or more systems, their bodies brought back here and turned into offerings.
“This is freaking me out,” Bartley said. “Let's blast those statues.”
“That's a waste of ammunition,” Eric said.
“It's not wasted if it gets rid of these weird-ass statues with the blood sacrifices.”
“Look at those doors.” Iris pointed ahead, along a broad marble-paved path flanked by the worm statues and altars. A circular doorway stood at the end, with a pair of immense doors engraved with more worms. They looked sealed, with no obvious way to open them.
“We've got problems on the way,” Alanna told them, and then she opened fire with her rail gun.
A worm had emerged from the mouth of one of the tunnels leading into the room. Now more emerged, all around them. These weren't the smaller factory workers mounted with power tools, but larger warrior worms, armor protecting their segments, artillery-sized guns on their backs.
They struck the destroyer from all sides—plasma bursts and scrap, but also smaller versions of the spiky balls that the worms sometimes fired from their warships. The spikes on these metal balls were spinning at high speed, though, turning them into drills. When the balls struck the hull of the land destroyer, they dug in deep, boring right into the armor like it was nothing more than soft wood.
Then the balls began to detonate, one after the other, shaking the interior of the destroyer as they blasted away its protective armor in broken chunks.
“We've got breaches all over,” the destroyer's AI growled. “I hope you people have a better plan than whatever you're doing now.”
With a loud squeal, the left side of the cab crumpled inward, shattering the monitors in front of Iris and slamming into her face, sending her crashing into Eric. A metallic whine sounded from the other side of the wall, and then a drill bit emerged, smoking, through the inward-dented area.
“Are you okay?” Eric asked. Her eyes were glazed over, and she didn't respond, but at least she was still breathing. His hand came away bloody from her head.
The bit opened like a flower of metal blooming, splitting into triangular petals spinning in a deadly halo. A black mechanical eye looked out from the center of the spinning blades.
It was one of the robo-snakes they'd first encountered down in the gold mine on Caldera. Initially, they'd thought it was some kind of probe sent by Caffey Industries, rival to Alanna's family businesses, collecting mineral data or just spying on the Li operation—but they'd been completely wrong about that. It was the first sign of the worms that they'd ever encountered.
The robo-snake slid in through the hole it had drilled, while more explosions rocked the destroyer.
Alanna fired both her laser pistols, probably the safest available weapons to use in such a confined space, and it toppled to the floor, writhing and burning. She crushed its scorched head under her armored boot.
“We've been penetrated by the enemy,” the destroyer grumbled. “Better do something quick.”
“We're a fat duck in a small pond here!” Bartley said. “We have to fall back.”
“No.” Eric pointed at the sealed doors ahead, flanked by the huge statues and altars full of rotting bodies. “We're going forward. Blast them open.”
“I'll do what I can.” Bartley unleashed the forward-facing weapons, while Eric added what firepower he could swivel in that direction.
“I can't hold them all off!” Alanna shouted, firing the last of their artillery shells at the worms that crowded in around them.
“Down to five percent armor,” the destroyer said. “None of you have had a lick of training, have you?”
“Bad news,” Bartley said, after a moment. “We're huffing and puffing all we can, but we're nowhere close to blowing those doors down.”
“Eric,” Iris whispered.
“What is it?” He leaned closed, glad she was awake.
Her dark eyes bored into him. “The relics.”
He hesitated, then nodded. He'd hoped to never use the relics again, but they were backed into a corner now, with a swarm of armed aliens attacking them—and holding back, in fact, while their bombs and machines tore the destroyer apart. Once that happened, everybody inside was worm food.
Eric drew on the gauntlet first. A painful, freezing, crunching sensation filled his arm while it sank its nano-sized tendrils into his flesh.
Then he put on the mask.
“Cover me,” he said, and then he climbed up through the top tier of the destroyer, which was all weapons, ammo, and thick armor plating, though there wasn't much of the latter left now. A narrow set of rungs led up to the top hatch.
Eric opened it and climbed out.
The smell hit him first—the reek of so many dead creatures, piled so high, made the air almost impossible to breathe.
Worms turned toward him, metal scrap-gun barrels spinning. One worm was outfitted with more than a dozen segmented metal tentacle-extenders, and had wrapped several of them around a set of the destroyer's tracked wheels, holding the vehicle in place. It still had a couple of spare metal tentacles, which it now reached toward Eric. They snaked up along the outside of the destroyer.
The mask was freezing cold, clinging to his face. Eric tried to decide what he wanted it to do.
Strength, he thought.
What would make him feel strong?
He thought of his bulky BodgerTech U300 mining exoskeleton, a yellow beast of a rig outfitted with a roadheader and massive deep-rock drill bits that had been very useful against the worms. He'd been able to plug his spine directly into it, turning the machine into an extension of himself. With that rig, he'd torn through deep veins of tough rock, and survived a close encounter with a worm.
He'd done even better, briefly, with the sleeker, more powerful Arenson suit, developed from a wartime combat chassis. It had been a Dragonfly model, four-armed, each arm capable of being independently programmed. With his external spinal cord, Eric had found he could control all four in real time with a little practice.
Now he imagined wearing it again—not the mining version, but the armor-plated original. He'd seen images of it while researching mech suits, a topic that quickly became of interest to him the first time he'd used the mining rig.
As he emerged from the top of the destroyer, he held an image of the combat exoskeleton steady in his mind.
The mask flowed over his head, forming the protective face shield and cranial housing of the suit. It expanded, moving down over his body like a wave of freezing water as it took shape.
At the same time, the gauntlet grew up over his arm and mingled with the material of the mask. He hoped it would bolster the armor and weaponry created by the mask.
The worms approached him from all sides, their bombardment of the destroyer slowing as they moved in for a look at the armored human climbing out of the top.
Then they opened fire on him, attacking upward from every side. He wasn't sure whether his still-forming armored suit could resist the onslaught, but it didn't have to. He remembered how its thrusters had enabled the suit to propel itself in long leaps, though not to fly.
Eric jumped off the destroyer, rising toward the cavernous ceiling, higher than the tooth-ringed mouths of the marble worm statues. He twisted in the air as scrap and plasma flashed all around him, the suit apparently using its own artificial intelligence to avoid collisions.
As with the mining version of the suit, the lower two arms were smaller, though still a couple of meters long, with fully articulated five-finger robotic hands, and the upper two arms were much larger, industrial-sized monsters.
One of the spike-balls lobbed toward him, spikes spinning like drill bits, ready to attach itself to one of his large arms and blast his suit to pieces.
Eric lashed out with the arm that had been targeted—a little risky, since he might just impale the suit's arm on the ball like the worm had intended, but it seemed better than sitting and waiting for the anti-tank weapon to nail him.
His giant-sized fist smashed into the spike-ball, cracked a few of the spinning drill-spikes, and sent the weapon racing back toward the worms.
It drilled its way into the armor of one sizable worm, and the beast got off a roar of pain before the ball detonated a few seconds later. The worm's armor ruptured open, and its guts splattered the worms around it.
