Revelation, page 23
part #3 of Relic Wars Series
Eric landed on the back of a different worm, one that had been hammering the destroyer with a scrap-gun. The heavy armored feet of the exosuit slammed into the alien's armor, making it grunt. It rose up, rampant, like a cobra, trying to shake him off, and Eric struggled to keep his balance even with the suit's help.
He seized the rear of the scrap-gun and tilted it forward, ripping loose some of its housing and sending bolts flying in the process. The worm's tentacle withdrew from the hole at the back, ceasing to fire the gun. Eric extended the middle finger of one of his suit's smaller arms—it was the longest finger, after all—and reached down and jammed the finger into the hole.
The scrap-gun sprang to life again, firing a barrage of high-speed twists of sharp metal right into the back of the worm's head, ripping through armor and flesh to butcher the monster's brain.
As its course flopped forward, Eric turned the scrap-gun onto the next worm, stippling it with more twists of metal, but striking it in the side didn't have quite the same effect as blasting the first one in the back of the head. Scrap jutted out all over the worm's side like porcupine quills, a couple of the impact sites leaking blood.
The scrap-gun's ammunition ran out, and Eric jumped off the dead worm, leaving the empty gun revolving like a dented steel trash can, squeaking uselessly.
The worm he'd shot in the side twisted toward him, bellowing as a plasma cannon on its back rolled into position, turning away from the destroyer and toward Eric.
Eric used his four arms to hammer the pieces of scrap half-lodged into the worm's side, driving them deeper into the monster's body. Streams of bright blood ran down from each wound.
A mechanical tentacle, several meters long, coiled around one of his suit's two large arms and dragged him back and away from the worm he was hammering. That worm's plasma cannon locked into place, aimed at Eric's head, and the worm roared.
Behind him, the worm with the tentacle-extenders was drawing him close.
Eric reached up with his suit's remaining large hand, grabbed the mount underneath the cannon, and ripped it free.
Spots of pain welled up all over his arm as the gauntlet fed on Eric's body to power this feat of strength.
Eric didn't care. He didn't care if the relic drained him down to nothing and left him dead, as long as he could finish this job first.
He turned his pilfered plasma cannon on the tentacle-extender worm and roasted it alive inside its armor. Its tentacles flailed and coiled blindly as it died.
Eric turned the cannon on another worm, but a barrage of high-speed scrap knocked him over on his side. One of the scrap pieces lodged deep in the plasma cannon and began to melt. Eric hurled the cannon as hard as he could into the first worm he saw, and its reservoir of plasma erupted all at once, engulfing that worm in a blinding, burning mantle of white.
The crew inside the destroyer kept up the fight as best they could, but their armor was mostly melted, battered, and blasted away. Their weapons had been damaged, too; they had one overheated rail gun and a little plasma left, but that was about it.
A worm with a long tube on its back, much longer than the worms' scrap guns or plasma-throwers, launched another of the drill-spiked balls at the destroyer. It burrowed into the front and exploded, flipping the rolling fortress onto its back.
Eric heard screaming—then realized it was his own voice, howling in his own ears as he watched flames engulf the overturned vehicle.
He leaped at the worm with the spike-ball launcher, landing on its back. Using all four arms of his suit, he ripped the elongated tube loose and turned it on two other worms that rushed toward him.
Eric fired a spike-ball into the face of one worm, then the other. The spikes whined and sprayed blood as they drilled into the worms...then detonated, flooding the room with boiling-hot blood and guts.
The other worms ceased their assault on the destroyer for the moment and turned to look at Eric, at least ten more of the giant beasts, each one flaring its teeth in the worms' typical gesture of aggression.
He shot them with the spiked explosive balls, one after the other, and it was like a roll of thunderclaps as the worms blew apart.
When it was over, there wasn't a surface in sight that wasn't dripping with blood and entrails. Scorched worm guts were draped over the marble statues; more clung to the ceiling, drizzling bile and gore.
Eric released the giant firing tube and ran to the wrecked destroyer. He ripped away the armored side hatch, since the top wasn't accessible. He lowered himself on his suit's powerful mechanical legs and peered into the darkness within.
“Everybody okay in there?” he asked, opting for optimism.
“It was a terrible disaster, sir.” Malvolio crawled out on his elbow and knees, his face stuck with its fleshless grin and staring eyes. Eric didn't care to look at it for very long. “All of us went a tad ass over teakettles, to be perfectly frank.”
“Is anyone hurt?” Eric snapped.
“Ah...yes. I believe so.”
“Iris is conked out,” Bartley said from within. “Alanna's fine.”
“I am not.” Alanna crawled out, visibly battered and bruised, like she'd just gone a few rounds in the ring. “Fine would be a suite at the Lapierre Chalet on Aquaria, with a view of the beach and a bottle of pinot.”
“Make it whiskey and I'm with you,” Bartley said.
“Pinot. And find your own suite.”
Bartley brought Iris out. “She's breathing, she's got a pulse, and that's about all I can say for her.”
“Malvolio, carry her.”
“Of course.” The android lifted the unconscious woman gently. “Where shall I carry her, sir?”
Eric stood and looked toward the entrance from the chain-rail system. The way was partially blocked by worm corpses, armor, and debris from the battle. More worms would surely be pouring in at any moment, drawn by the destruction.
He picked up the tube launcher and fired a spiky ball at the marble worm statue closest to the entrance. It detonated, raining down an avalanche of broken marble to help fill in the opening. Then he blasted the walls on either side of the opening, bringing the entrance's rocky ceiling down on top of the broken marble.
“Wasn't that our way out?” Alanna asking, coughing.
“Not anymore,” Eric said. He turned and looked at the sealed doors. They'd taken some incidental damage from the battle, but remained firmly shut and in place. “We have to go forward.”
“Not to be picky,” Alanna said, “But maybe you could have tried making sure we could do that before sealing us in here.”
“I'll keep that in mind next time.” Eric stepped toward one of the immense doors, covered with bronze sculptures of worms, their coils wrapped around a hundred worlds.
Or maybe, he thought after studying it a little longer, it was all a single worm, coiled around and around, its maw wide open and lined with rows of tusk-like teeth.
Eric reached out to one of the doors and pushed.
It didn't move.
He leaned against it, gritting his teeth, feeling the ancient relic draw strength from him, breaking down his body to amplify his strength.
He felt like he was trying to move a mountain. The door refused to budge.
“Maybe it's a pully,” Bartley said.
“A pulley?” Eric asked, bewildered. “Like a...like an elevator?”
“No, I mean a pully. Instead of a pushy. The door.”
“You mean maybe it swings out instead of in?” Alanna asked. “An outie instead of an innie?”
“If you want to put it that way,” Bartley said.
Eric looked up along the door. He didn't see anything like a doorknob or handle...but then, worms didn't have hands. They had tentacles, so he needed to look for a hole like the one on the back of the scrap-gun.
The only thing he could see was the tooth-lined opening of the worm carving's mouth. He reached an upper arm of the suit into it.
The sharp teeth clamped down around the arm of the exosuit.
Eric pulled—feeling even more of his substance drain away—and, with a deep shudder, the doors began to slide apart, retreating into the walls on either side, revealing an immense space beyond.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
If the chamber of statues smelled like rank decay, the place beyond it smelled like pure, concentrated death.
The sliding door didn't seem to have any intention of letting Eric's exosuit arm go, even as it retreated into the wall. He couldn't pull it loose; in fact, the teeth bit down harder when he tried. He couldn't break free. Maybe he'd failed some kind of security measure.
He imagined the hand reverting to the white fluid-metal material that the mask became when it was changing form.
The hand obeyed, shifting to a soft, fluid metal that flowed back out through the carving's teeth, escaping easily. Once the metal was out, the sharp metal teeth clamped together, forming a solid circle inside the carved worm's mouth.
“That...is foul,” Bartley said.
Eric looked ahead, now that he was disentangled from the door.
“I'm going to be sick,” Alanna said.
“Yea, what wretched perdition is this?” Malvolio mused, still holding the unconscious Iris in his arms. Gunsy rolled up beside him, saying nothing at all.
“I guess that's what happens to all the carcasses from the altars,” Eric said.
In the room ahead, even more cavernous than the one they were departing, a great earthen mound dominated the center, like some kind of primordial nest. Smoky fires in marble fireplaces scattered along the walls provided some warmth and dim, flickering red light.
All around the great muddy mound, vast wire nets hung suspended from the ceiling, each one piled with hundreds, maybe thousands of rotting animals from around the galaxy. Each one hung over a stone pit that collected all the fluid leaking out of the dead creatures, the blood and urine, the draining guts, bile and acid, the thick drippings of slow decay.
Worm larvae slurped at the dark pools of rotten death-fluid. Eric had glimpsed worm larvae before, pale and white in the scrap-collecting ship at Valentine Station, but these looked different. They were larger, twice the size of those he'd seen before, and dense networks of blood vessels just under their skin colored them with spiderwebs of red and blue that the others hadn't had. Maybe these were some kind of royal worm larvae, drinking an elixir of decay from all across the galaxy, the worm equivalent of royal jelly.
Eric tried not to throw up.
“Are those the...mothers?” Alanna pointed to adult-sized pink worms that slithered around the edges of the pits, seeming to watch over the larvae, but not partaking of the concentrated death ichor in the pools themselves.
“Or nurses,” Eric said. “Don't ants have those? Or bees?”
“Worms don't,” Bartley said. “It's unnatural as hell, you ask me. And I say we put a stop to it. Come on, Gunsy.” He advanced into the chamber, the security bot at his side.
“Bartley, wait—” Alanna began, but he didn't wait.
Bartley lit up the place with his pulse rifle, striking one clump of fat larvae after another, splattering their still-forming guts all over the floor, filling the dark pools with their blood. Gunsy blasted larva to pieces alongside him.
The adult pink worms rose, hissed, and howled. These had no shark-like teeth ringing their maws. The nurse worms—or perhaps mother worms—had stubby, peg-like teeth. They were virtually defenseless.
“I guess the die is cast,” Alanna said. She raised her laser pistols and fried a few of the bloated larvae slurping at the nearest pool. When a pink nurse coiled around to shield the larvae with its body, Alanna fried that one, too.
Eric had left his rifle back inside the destroyer, but he started lashing out with his suit's massive upper arms, crushing larvae and any nurse worms who got in his way.
“What I wouldn't give for a flamethrower,” Bartley muttered. “And a tanker full of gasoline.”
The large pink worms threw themselves forward, trying to protect the fat, slurping larvae, few of whom even raised their heads from feeding in response to the danger. Eric and the others mowed them all down while advancing deeper into the cavern, toward the great earthen mound at the center. He didn't know what might lie inside that mound, but it was bound to be something of extreme value to the worms. And that meant it was something he would be pleased to destroy on his way out, before the rest of the worms arrived and slaughtered them.
The ground shuddered as though an earthquake had struck. Rotten carcass juice sloshed up out of the pits and over the floor. The nets above swung sideways, and carcasses rained down everywhere, cracking and splattering against the floor.
“More worms?” Bartley eyeballed the perimeter of the room, or at least the area that wasn't obscured by the towering earthen mound in the center. All three of them checked the floor—it didn't take many encounters with these creatures to learn to expect an attack from below.
“The hill,” Eric said, raising his four mechanical arms, and his two real ones, while he watched the mound break apart.
It seemed to crack in layers, as horizontal rings broke open along the hill, starting at the top and working their way down.
The peak of the hill rose, turned, stared down at them with clumps of black spider-like eyes, each eye the size of a boulder.
“It's not a hill,” Alanna whispered. “It's the biggest goddamn worm in the galaxy.”
“Great observation, Detective,” Bartley said. “I'd say you've got this case just about wrapped up.”
The worm's mouth opened like a hangar door, revealing rows of teeth like stalagmites and stalactites, each one long enough to impale a human being. The creature was the size of a coiled-up skyscraper, resting on a bed of crushed bones.
It bellowed and flipped out those impossibly large teeth.
Eric looked up warily, feeling the fear growing inside him, threatening to take over. They had faced some huge worms before, but this dwarfed them all. Even the enormous beast they'd slain at Valentine Station would have been a light snack for this guy.
Still, only Eric had alien relics on hand. This was going to be his job.
“I'll take him,” Eric said, stepping forward with a lot more confidence than he felt.
“Are you crazy? We'll all take him,” Bartley said. “I personally have nothing else to do.”
All of them opened fire—Eric, Bartley, Alanna, and Gunsy. Malvolio hung back, keeping hold of Iris, shielding her with his body.
Incendiary rounds and lasers slammed into the worm, but didn't seem to bother it. The colossal worm's armor seemed fully resistant to their weapons.
The worm's own heavy weapons ascended along tracks on its body from somewhere within its mass of lower coils; the alien monster really was horrifically large, larger than any dinosaur that had ever walked, larger than any dragon of legend. This was the great serpent, the Leviathan, the unholy beast of the deep.
And it was about to kill them all.
Eric leaped as high as his suit would allow, hoping to leap over the rampant worm's head and divide its attention. Unfortunately, he didn't have quite enough power, and ended up drawing almost even with the thing's cavernous mouth. Teeth lined its gullet as far as he could see, larger and more densely concentrated than he'd ever seen in these creatures.
He wished he'd saved back a couple of the giant spike-balls to try and shoot down this thing's throat, but he'd run out of those.
He fired a barrage with the exosuit's heavy machine gun, but he immediately felt a deep, lashing pain in his own gut, like each round he fired carved out a sliver of his own flesh. Considering that was exactly how the gauntlet worked, he decided to stop shooting before it killed him.
As the momentum from the suit's jump ran out and he began to sink, the worm fired back. It shot him with a kind of scrap-gun, though a bit different than others he'd seen; instead of one large barrel, it had a cluster of them, more like the worms' plasma weapons.
It shot at Eric with long, thin splinters of metal, each of which exploded on impact, as if they'd been dipped in plasma. The explosions dented Eric's armored exosuit while also making the interior roasting hot. A fan turned on somewhere as the suit's climate control was activated, but it didn't begin to cut the painful heat.
The explosive metal splinters continued to pound him as he dropped back to the ground. The suit's shock absorbers barely blunted the jarring crash as he landed unsteadily. The rocky ground cracked under the suit's heavy steel feet.
Gunsy was firing with all barrels, until a high-speed barrage of plasma took down the security bot, destroying most of its weapons and turning its core to a puddle of molten red.
Bartley probably would have been upset by this if he'd had time to look. Instead, he was taken down by a barrage of the long, exploding slivers of metal, which seemed to dent Bartley's armor even worse than they had Eric's.
Malvolio managed to turn his back as the worm struck him with a barrage of plasma, which protected Iris for the moment but left the android's back a molten wreck. Malvolio sank to his knees and placed Iris on the ground. She was starting to stir and blink.
“My apologies, my lady,” Malvolio said, his exposed jaw no longer opening and closing in time with the words he spoke. “I can offer you little more service.”
“What's happening?” Iris groggily pushed herself up to a sitting position and touched her swollen head.
“We seem....to-have-found...the....alpha...worm...in-its-lair,” Malvolio said. His voice sped up and slowed down at random, stretching some words and compressing others into near-squeaks.
Alanna was firing her laser pistols at the worm, depleting whatever charges the weapons had left. Eric wished the land destroyer hadn't been blasted into scrap on their way in; they desperately needed its weaponry against this massive armored creature.
A metallic tube swiveled toward Alanna and blasted her with a blinding beam of light. Eric heard the hissing of scorched flesh and smelled burning hair and skin. Eric had seen this kind of weapon before, like a high-powered microwave that cooked the target. One of the worms attacking his home on Gideon had used it to roast an attacking devilhorn.
