Submantle- The Alpha Key

by Patrick Lane

  “The Key?” Nifty exclaimed, his mind racing as he began to piece things together and an anger began to surface. “What the scrap is going on here?” he barked. “What did Doon tell you when you met with him? First the dreadnaught and now we find this Key. It’s about as far from a coincidence as you can get. In fact this feels like a set up.”

  “It was my idea to come here lad. Doon recommended the libraries, no more.” Scotty defended, yet Nifty could see the selfsame questions reflected in the old man’s eyes. “I’ve know the man near fifty years, Doon wouldn’t have sent us…”

  A grinding noise, punctuated with loud hissing pops, echoed up through the chamber from the boulevard below, sending a chill up Nifty’s spine and stopping further debate.

  Scotty cursed quietly as Nifty shoved the arm at him, causing more fluid to ooze out. The young Ranger jumped onto the console closest to the edge of the platform so he could lean over the railing to find the source of the noise. Hey froze at the sight sixty feet below him, his body surged with adrenaline, and his heart began beating like a crank-hammer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  All around the service bay, countless machines had discharged their lava tubes and, despite being over a thousand of years old, most of them started to roam about on their own. The Dominion had left its mooring and was flashing instructions from its deep purple headlights, to an ever-growing cluster of machines following it.

  The top loaders left the courtyard and headed for the aisles between the racks, their forked arms opening and closing expectantly as they moved. The Dominion followed them at a slower pace, along with a good number of smaller machines that Nifty impulsively named rack rats. The cleaners, however, started breaking off from the group, and were heading straight towards the tower.

  “The machines!” Nifty barked over his shoulder. “They’ve activated.”

  One of the cleaners had already reached the base of the tower; it tilted its body back to magnetize its gyrocaster to the wall, and began circling up the tower following the spiral staircase.

  Scotty moved over to join him, but Nifty took charge. “No! You take care of the body, and I’ll see what I can do to keep them busy.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Nifty pulled his shatter bat from its holster and felt the Link surge through him. He spun the weapon for a better grip, and activated the auto loader. Well, let’s see if the upgrades were worth it. As the weapon auto-cranked the charging piston five times in rapid succession, Nifty timed the foremost cleaner’s ascension, and jumped over the edge.

  Using his favorite strike, the granite slam, he connected with the leading edge of the machine, and released the bat’s energy with a low thud, collapsing the cleaner back into itself, sending it crashing back down to the courtyard.

  Anticipating the recoil of the strike, Nifty shifted the bat, using its weight to control his descent as he was sent sailing out into the chamber floor far below. Landing with a quick shoulder roll, he sprang to his feet and ducked behind a crate just as the ruined cleaner crashed down, releasing the energy from its core in a horrific explosion, sending metal plates, cogs, and rivets zipping by angrily in all directions.

  Scanning the outer chamber, he could see that for at least half a mile to either side of the machine room doors, more robots had sprung to life. Much to his relief, most of them seemed to be following some sort of pre-set pattern and were ignoring him completely.

  The cleaners, however, were not. Their pincers snapped dangerously as they advanced on him. Ranging in height from six to nine feet, their multi-ringed, barrel-shaped torsos were mounted on a single, remarkably agile, gyrocaster. A cycloptic glass disc on the head served as an eye, and as if two arms weren’t enough, a third one emerged from behind a sliding panel in most of their chests.

  The machines drew closer, and Nifty noticed the tips of their middle arms shimmered with an angry red glow, and his eyes widened when he saw not a pincer, but a multi-sided roller, clasped between two prongs. As the cylinder began to rotate slowly, Nifty could make out over a dozen rows of white hot numbers and letters. It struck him at once that these weren’t simply cleaners. Scotty hadn’t been quite right: they were some sort of branders. They may have had something to do with cleaning, but based on their current behavior, he guessed that a good deal of their time had been spent on the markings covering most surfaces of the storage bay.

  What in dross-stone were these things doing? He puzzled, looking down at the patterned floor. Whatever instructions they followed, they were getting far too close, far too quickly.

  He took a deep breath and drifted into the battle calmness drilled into him at the Ranger academy, focusing on linking his senses with his uniform and weapons. He was ready. Using a nearby crate as a launching pad, he leapt high into the air and landed with an ugly crash on top of the first machine. His power boots sending a blast of energy from their soles into its mechanics, causing its eye to shatter. He swung Riot high, and he drove her down hard in a ground grind strike, smashing the upper chassis off the next brander. Using the momentum, Nifty leapt over it, back to the ground, and kicked another machine right in the center of its torso, blasting it back into its trailing brethren.

  “You want some of this?” he growled

  He cast glances toward the tower for sign of his partner. Nothing. So he smashed and pole-axed his way through more than half a dozen machines. More streamed in from further down the storage bay. And as if their numbers weren’t enough, they started working in unison, bobbing and weaving to avoid the worst of his blows. Slowly but surely, he was forced backwards and found himself wedged between a sea of pincers and the immense silver doors of the machine room.

  Finally, he spotted Scotty lumbering down the stairs. His jaw clenched in annoyance when he glimpsed the bundle on Scotty’s back. The stocky Ranger had obviously bent the body in half, mashing it down into an incredibly undignified and macabre package. All for the sake of ease of transport.

  For reasons he couldn’t quite say, this simple lack of decorum piqued his anger enough to send him on full offensive. Despite the danger at such close range, he quickly set the auto loader to four, and carved down two branders with an up-sweeping strike, repeating the move on his other side.

  To Nifty’s dismay, several of the new arrivals had turned suddenly in Scotty’s direction, gyrocasters propelling them determinedly toward the senior Ranger. He tried to reassure himself that, despite the bundle, Scotty could handle these branders. He failed.

  Pushing forward, Nifty danced through the strike patterns, flowing from crust cutter into a iron spiral, then dropping to his knees for a shin slice, the moves working just as well on bots as they did with soldiers.

  He spied a gap in the sea of machines where a Trussing machine was closing in slowly, hindered by its brethren. Leaping high he managed to launch himself over three ranks of the machines.

  Landing in a tuck and roll, a heavy swath of thermosilk slammed down on him out of nowhere, knocking him on his back, sending his helmet flying. He just barely managed to jerk Riot to his side before he was flipped over and neatly caught between two layers of industrial grade silk.

  “What the…?” Nifty grunted, struggling to escape the Trussing machine’s trap. He’d dismissed the machine earlier, for being too big and too slow and lacking any offensive capabilities, and he berated himself for the oversight. How in blazes had it kept it’s thermosilk intact for a thousand years?

  The Wrapper picked him up and began to spin him like a spider with its prey, adding layer after layer of silk from the containers on its back, leaving Nifty barely room to breathe. A dizzying few moments later, he found himself strapped to a metal pallet that the Wrapper removed from a bracket on its back, and then dumped unceremoniously on the ground, completely helpless.

  With the Wrapper’s cumbersome chassis hindering any approach, Nifty gained just a few precious seconds to find a way to get himself free. On a hunch, he activated the bats auto loader. The motion of the ridged pist
on auto-cocking itself several times caught some of the thermosilk, and pushed it aside just enough to let him rotate his wrist and spring out one of the long thin blades from the band of his mantle watch.

  Sweat blossomed across his body when the sudden impact of branders punching into the thermosilk covered pallet, triggered in him what he would have liked to think was a controlled panic. With a quick sawing motion, he freed his arm just in time to seize a branding arm that was about to permanently etch letters into his forehead.

  Other machines had worked their way closer, and he could feel pulsing strikes on his boots as they attempted to label the heat-stoked uppers. Luckily for him, the brander attempting to bore into his brain was blocking the rest of the units from the squishier parts of his body.

  The muscles in his left arm began burning with fatigue as he fought against the weight of the brander pushing down its white hot cylinder. He didn’t know how long he could keep the glowing implement from his face.

  “No!” he yelled angrily, as the brand inched down and he struggled to get his other arm free.

  He closed his eyes and held his breath, ready for the inevitable burning sensation when suddenly the pressure was gone and the arm was jerked away with a loud, metallic crunching sound.

  Snapping his eyes open, he saw Scotty’s scarred fists wrapped around the brander's arm. Despite being one of the oldest Rangers still in the field, decades of brutal work had left Scotty with a heavily muscled frame and an iron grip. He’d managed to twist the metal appendage back on itself, and was ramming it up into brander’s sensor disc.

  “Not bad for someone who pilots like your mother, eh lad?” Scotty grunted through clenched jaws, sparing Nifty only the briefest of glances. “Are you going to help? Or should I carry you back to the gate as well?” he added, finally letting go of the arm, looking somewhat satisfied.

  The brander, its simple mechanical pre-sets not designed to deal with this kind of variable, had made no move to defend itself and kept on thrusting its stamp forward, still trying to brand everything in its path. With the arm bent over itself, the machine was now stamping its own sensor disc. Over and over it jabbed, until the circle shattered completely, the brand burning its way into internal workings. Finally, shuddering erratically, the machine toppled backwards, an eerie, hissing sound emanating from its innards.

  Nifty slashed away at the rest of the thermosilk and was quickly back on his feet with Riot in hand and he wasted no time evening the score. Taking the lead, he struck high and pushed forward through the ranks of machines.

  Scotty stayed low, with Surge still strapped on his back, and fought his way forward with the close range punch-picks instead.

  Decades ago, during game days at the academy, Scotty had earned the nick name Power Merchant, a title that had since been shortened to just Merchant. It was a name that rung in Nifty’s ear as he bore witness to the older man’s fighting style. Scotty had locked four-sided concussion wedges, resembling small pyramids, into the knuckle-duster style tools, and true to his earlier plan, he stayed low, targeting the gyrocasters, and systematically immobilized one brander after another with metal crunching punches.

  “Nifty!” Scotty shouted.

  Nifty turned his head just in time to catch the spinning helmet sailing towards him. “Thanks!” He donned the helmet, and this time secured the chinstrap. “How do we get out of here?”

  Three massive Trussing machines were heading in their direction, trying to slip through the ranks of branders. “I don’t know, let me think on it a moment.” Scotty grunted, crust cracking a strut holding the nearest gyrocaster, buckling it sideways with a loud snap. The machine it carried collapsed to the ground, dragging two others with it.

  With Scotty’s help, the pair managed to fight their way back to the middle of the floor, between the massive doors and the control tower. They began slowly working their way towards the stacked cargo containers, hoping these would help provide a brief respite.

  “I don’t think the Scourge is still at work, but I do think that it may have left permanent damage to their reasoning mechanics. I think maybe it’s time we us our launchers. No organics here, so no shame to be had.” Scotty ventured.

  Even in the midst of the fight, this gave Nifty pause. The unwritten Rocktower Ranger code of honor disallowed projectile weapons that weren’t powered with one’s own flesh and bone like the arc-shots, especially those with any kind of range. And the use of them was frowned upon by most in Submantle. If you weren’t prepared to face your opponent directly, preferring instead to attack them from a safe distance, like a coward, then you didn’t deserve to be named a combatant.

  Of course, this didn’t make the user of such weapons safe from reprisals – only a fool would assume every adversary would follow the unwritten rules and not be prepared with adequate countermeasures. In his years of service Nifty had only been forced to use the more powerful projectiles of his launcher as weapons only a handful of times, and even then it was only when he’d been fired upon first.

  The rules didn’t apply when dealing with non-organics and Nifty cursed himself a fool for not thinking of this earlier. Plucking the launcher from his hip, he slammed it home above Riot's handle and, instead of the mapping function he opted for…well his mind raced for a moment before finally selecting the lava bridge.

  Smashing two more branders, Nifty finally managed to target one of the Trussing machines with the launcher and fired. With an angry whirring, the disc covered the distance, squarely striking the Wrapper’s optics. The bridging disc was typically used for lava flows, freezing the top layer so they could be crossed.

  Nifty felt his ears pop as the sensation of the air drying out around him assaulted his senses. The energy from the disc ceased all molecular vibrations across the Wrapper, creating a freezing surface that sucked in the chamber’s water to create a thick layer of ice across the machine, locking down its limbs and gyrocasters, causing it to teeter briefly before toppling over with a crash, onto half a dozen milling branders.

  Nine discs left. He considered using his arc-shot as well, but it really wasn’t suited for such close range combat.

  Scotty had un-holstered Surge and with surgical precision deployed five of his rounds. He’d opted for stabilizer discs. They were typically used to liquefy unreachable rock deposits on the roofs of caverns, welding them together to strengthen a weak point. But it seemed they worked equally well on murderous branders. A neat line of them lay flopping on the floor, their partially liquefied remains creating a pathway for the two men.

  With Scotty taking the lead they began clearing the branders to either side, when a high-pitched hissing sound, almost like a tea kettle’s whistle, with nerve-racking resonance, halted the two men momentarily.

  “Get down!” Scotty yelled. “That machine with the branding roller through its optics, I think it’s about to express its power rod!” He pushed forward between two armless machines to shield his body from the blast, but too late. The high-pitch whistle ceased and the brander exploded with a deafening roar. Nifty was thrown into the air and sent crashing down into the floor, along with over a dozen machines around him.

  With his ears ringing and eyes watering, Nifty rolled onto his belly and forced himself to his knees amongst a litter of dismembered machine parts. His heavily reinforced jacket had taken the brunt of the buffeting, and apart from getting the wind knocked out of him, he felt stunned but unharmed.

  A number of machines had been destroyed in the blast, but those still functioning managed to reorient themselves with dismaying efficiency. Strangely though, some had ceased hostilities and were now bent over, compulsively branding the floor, while others began branding pieces of their damaged co-workers.

  In a daze, Nifty searched the area for Scotty, the panic of not seeing the big Ranger instantly shattering any sense of confusion. He willed himself to his feet and scanned the debris until his eyes lit upon the shaft of Scotty’s pick jutting out from behind a wrecked machine.


  Darting across the floor, he hauled and kicked machine parts from his path and was flooded with relief when he finally managed to uncover his friend still in one piece. “You alright?”

  Scotty struggled to sit upright, grunting from the effort. The right side of his face looked like he had been shaving with a potato grater, and he was bleeding around metal fragments imbedded in his skin. “I’m alright, lad. Just had the wind knocked out of me, is all.” He tried to smile, but only managed a painful wince.

  A loud sound of metal on metal diverted Nifty’s attention and he pried his eyes from Scotty to discover what new terror might be spawned from this chamber of death. To his short lived relief it, was the access port for a repair solution, no immediate threat. Yet as thousands of gallons of the slivery liquid, with its highly unusual dark purple tinge, began to flood its way across the floor and gather in machine parts Nifty’s heart began to sink. It sank even further when like a cresting wave it began propping up downed branders for repair, encasing them in its purple folds, sparking and spraying as it began making them whole once again.