Just then, I heard voices at the mouth of the tunnel. I ducked down below the crest of the ridge and waited, listening. The first voice was clearly a ranger, if for no other reason than that he sounded like he was overworked and in a foul mood. The second was probably a Stormcaller, judging by the arrogant tone of her voice and the condescending manner. After a moment, they came close enough that I could hear what they were saying. “...doesn’t make sense is all I’m saying, right? One day he’s one of the best of us, and then he disappears for a month and now he’s dead? I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t add up to me.”
“What’s not to understand?” The Stormcaller scoffed. “He was corrupted by the Dark Ones. It happens from time to time, you know. You’ve heard the stories, like everyone else. The Dark Ones sometimes take the minds of the weak-willed. Warriors don’t tend to resist the pull of those evil powers very well.”
The ranger was silent for a moment, and I imagined he was restraining himself from making a sharp remark to the mageling. The Stormcallers didn’t always respond rationally to confrontation, often with spectacular results. Eventually, he replied, “You may be right, mage, but I saw the man’s initiation, his gauntlet. He didn’t fall, not once, and we hit him as hard as anyone, harder, maybe, since he seemed to come by his skills so easily. Nobody goes through that, not the way he did, not if they’re weak.”
The Stormcaller didn’t reply for some time, perhaps thinking. Eventually, she conceded the point with a noncommittal grunt. “This god may have been more dangerous than some,” she admitted. “After all, no one has seen the Deepseeker since we felled the false god’s tower. And if this metal god could infect the Deepseeker himself, it must have been quite dangerous indeed.”
They stopped no more than a few paces from where I lay. I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing as much as I could. They would pass by and I would remain unseen. It would be fine. I lay there for what felt like an eternity, waiting for them to speak again, to let me know where they were. My mind filled with visions of them coming up over the ridge and spotting me, and the Stormcaller rending me apart with howling wind and razor ice.
The Stormcaller spoke again. “The real tragedy of this whole mess is that we lost Nissikul. Fallen with the false god, determined to get her revenge for the death of her brother,” she paused, her tone regretful, laced with just a little awe. “At least she went out swinging. Bringing down the false god’s whole tower with a single stormhammer- I’ve never seen anything like it.” Nissi? Dead? I shut that thought down quickly. There would be enough time for that when I stopped for the night.
“Few of my friends lost in that fall, too,” grumbled the ranger. “No offense, but things like that are why most of my brothers and sisters don’t really like your kind.”
The mageling snickered, a little girlish sound completely incongruous with the frightening power I knew one like her could wield. “I don’t care what your comrades think. Besides, you like me just fine.” The ranger only grunted in response, and a moment, later, the Stormcaller let out another high-pitched squeal. I rolled my eyes. Of course. They weren’t going to be noticing a damned thing. I had never really understood why some of my comrades thought Stormcaller women were so attractive. They had a tendency to main the men who did them wrong, and to those power-addled minds, the definition of doing them wrong might change daily. Nevertheless, I wasn’t one to ignore an opportunity like this. As the sounds from the other side of the hill began to come more frequently, more insistently, I rolled to my feet, careful to move in silence so as not to disturb the impulsive lovers.
I crept away, carefully, and made my way toward the pit where Joanna’s encampment had once been. I approached the edge warily, looking down into the darkness. The abyss seemed to go on forever. It was even worse than it looked from far away. There was no way someone survived falling into a hole like that, much less if they ended up in a crack in the glacier. But the Deepseeker said Joanna was alive, and I had to proceed as if that was true. My tribe thought I was dead, and I was not. Perhaps she had gotten as lucky as me. Maybe Nissi got lucky too… I clamped down on that thought. Hope was as dangerous to me right now as grief was.
I gritted my teeth and drew my axes. This was going to be a difficult climb. Down was always harder, and this time, I was going all the way down... to where the dead gods dreamed.
Joanna
I ran, hard. The tunnels, being random cracks in the ice mixed with the burrowed paths of unknown fauna, were hardly straight or even, so I lost my balance pretty much every fifth step. I would careen into a wall or a low opening into another tunnel, pulverize some ice with the prodigious weight of my armor, and keep running, knowing that every delay like that meant that the burug was gaining ground. It chittered along on its millipede legs, great mandibles grinding aside the ice as if it was loose dirt rather than glacial ice. The thing could move surprisingly fast, and only the fact that I was fleeing through narrow openings in thick segments of ice allowed me to stay ahead of it all. At first, I turned and took pot shots at the monster whenever I felt I could keep the pace and aim. But the gauss pistol’s shots were about as effective against the monster’s thick chitin as slingshot stones against steel, and I decided to stop wasting those precious seconds on such a futile effort. I put my head down and ran, pumping my arms and legs, my heartbeat in my ears. So I was caught entirely off guard when I crashed through a narrow opening into what I thought was another tunnel, and instead of another passage away from the ravening insectoid monster, I stepped into an open crevice and fell, too surprised to even scream.
This time, as I fell, I kept my head. There would be a bottom to this open shaft, and I just needed to control my fall so that I would get there alive. Once I got my bearings, I would find a way out of here. There would be a way. There had to be. I kicked out and pushed away from one wall of the crevice. This sent me tumbling through the air to crash hard into the opposite wall. I turned as I hit the wall and dug hard into the ice with my power-armored fingers, tearing huge splintering rents in the ice. Shards and flakes of ice sprayed up all around my faceplate, but I slammed my other hand into the ice in a fist, grinding my metal knuckles and checking my momentum even further. It was working! I was getting everything back under control. I just needed- CRACK! My rigid grip on the frozen wall slipped, one hand coming free from the ice completely. I looked up, horrified, to see a great slab of ice plummeting towards me, closely followed by the scrambling, milky-eyed hulk of the burug falling straight down to me in its wake. This time, I did scream, but I let go of the wall immediately and pushed away from it as hard as I could, flipping ungracefully across the chasm and striking chunks of ice the size of my fist from the side.
I fell in a shower of blasted ice and vapor, and when I hit the bottom, all the air was driven from my lungs in a hard grunt that fogged up the inside of my faceplate. I knew what was coming and that there was no time for me to escape, so I rolled into a tight ball and clamped my arms tightly over my head. My whole world became a series of thundering impacts that rattled my teeth in my skull and pounded a merciless tattoo on my chest plate like a hundred steel drums. I squeezed my eyes tightly against the onslaught, knowing that if the burug found me, my armor would mean nothing to those horrible jaws. After a short, tense moment, there was a heavy, solid thump, like a one-ton sack of sand being thrown onto a concrete floor. The burug, I thought, trying in a spurt of subconscious paranoia, to think ‘quietly’. As if the damn thing can hear me. Even so, I lay as still as I could and tried to slow my breathing. I didn’t know what senses that thing had, and I had the feeling that any overconfidence or underestimation of the creature on my part would be swiftly corrected via a hooked mandible puncturing my faceplate.
My own shaky panting was all I could hear. It was too loud, no matter how I tried to suppress it. The burug’s legs clicked over the ice in an erratic rhythm, its rattling progress ever closer, ever louder. I felt panic rising up in my chest, heralded by a wave of bile cl
imbing the back of my throat. No. I couldn’t die this way, not here, not like this. Go away! I willed the monster to leave, knowing that nothing I did now would even really irritate the enormous insect. It was right on top of me now, the chatter of its dozens of legs a staccato threat in my ears. This was it. Joanna. I was done for. Oh, Maker, is that you, Joanna? The monster was about to jam its hideous face down through the ice and pluck me out, crush me in its jaws like a piece of hard candy. It probably wouldn’t even notice the armor. Shit, it is you! I’m not crazy! Am I?
My terror evaporated in an instant. Those weren’t my thoughts. Someone was speaking in my head. “Barbas?” I ventured and instantly regretted it. The ice in front of my face was torn away in a shower of shards and vapor, and I was staring into the face of death. The mandibles were spread wide, the serrated jaws dripping with acid. Some of it spattered on the quartz of my faceplate and immediately began sizzling, though it did not seem to be damaging the plate itself. Through the vapor, I could see the inside of the creature’s throat, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. Dozens of tiny appendages worked mindlessly inside that gaping maw, little legs doubtlessly gripped whatever prey that the burug had found and forced it down toward digestion, alive or not. I fumbled for my gun, but it was no use. The monstrous mandibles closed around me and began to squeeze. I could hear my armor creaking, feel the horrendous pressure all about me, and I knew it was over. Done. My life ended here, just like this.
An idea struck me, even then, in just moments from death. It was a terrible, horrible, idiotic idea. It was the best I had. I was the tigress, and the tigress didn’t die. I brought up the control screen for my fabricator. The holographic projection sprang to life in front of me and I quickly cycled through the menus with flicks of my fingers. The squealing of metal filled my ears, and I all of a sudden I felt a shaft of unbelievable cold slice into my neck. The suit was breached, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I keyed in my commands hurriedly, biting back panic and making sure the programming was sound. I was wrenched into the air, ice falling away all around me. Keep going… Another spike of horrid cold touched my side, quickly followed by another at my back. Alarms were going off in my helmet, but I paid them no attention. They couldn’t help me now. I finished the program with the execute command and squeezed my eyes shut; praying to whichever deities could hear me. Just one word. “Please!” The crushing weight bearing down on my body abruptly vanished. I fell for a second and then hit the ground, hard enough to stun me, but only for a few heartbeats. Then I was scrambling back, wiping pulped ice and steaming acid from my faceplate, and staring up at what I had wrought.
It was a magnificent and revolting sight. The burug reared, its long, segmented body flexing into a grotesque ‘S’ shape, all of its legs writhing spasmodically as it tried to escape an enemy it couldn’t even see. The fabricator nanites clung to it, a barely visible, nearly insubstantial cloud that refracted my suit’s headlamp into tiny bursts of prismatic spectra. The microscopic robots zipped back and forth, through the alien monster’s armor, each movement too small to follow individually. En masse, however, the effect of what I had done was like watching ice sublimate. It was like watching a time-lapse video of a cow carcass being devoured by ants, only the victim was alive, and it was happening in front of me. I huddled in shattered ice, staying away from the burug’s futile thrashings and watching it all happen in a trance of hideous fascination. The monster quickly shrank before my eyes, shriveling down from twice the size of a city bus. It became a quivering lump of pale, ichor-soaked flesh, then a tattered chitinous endoskeleton, and then nothing but a smear of smoldering, liquefied goop on the ice.
I stood, slowly, surveying the mess I had made. All I felt upon seeing the final result was a kind of grim satisfaction. The monster had come to kill me, and I had done unto it first. It was the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. But wait… What is that? I took a hesitant step forward, avoiding the tendrils of viscous muck that seemed to slither from the puddle that used to be a burug. At the center of the puddle of rapidly freezing gunk, there lay an object, roughly the size of both of my fists- my actual fists- balled and held together. I bent and picked it up, against my better judgment, and I was shocked to realize that I recognized the general shape of the thing. I lifted it as I straightened up, and held it up before my headlamp so I could look at it more closely. Black ooze dripped from it, and I shook it until it was relatively clean, so I could see it more clearly. I gasped. It was shaped like a human heart.
The heart was smooth but for whorls of faintly glowing patterns, a delicate tracery of inset symbols that reminded me of fingerprints. It was heavier than it should have been, and I was pretty sure that the only reason I wasn’t bent double with the weight of the strangely dense artifact was that my power armor was thoroughly augmenting my own physical strength. As I held it, I felt a strange, hypnotic rhythm pulsing from it in regular intervals, and it emitted a buzzing sound so low that I felt it rather than heard it. I heard distant thunder in the shape of words I couldn’t understand. Vast impossible syllables that grew somewhere behind my ears and crashed down over my mind like a tidal wave. I dropped the heart, quickly, and the voices stopped. I backed away a few steps, very fast, adrenaline spiking through my body again. What in the hell-
“Joanna?” Barbas’ voice came in too softly, muffled as if behind a thick wall. “Joanna, the gun- I’m in the gun.” At least he was loud enough that I didn’t mistake his voice for my own thoughts again.
Gun? I thought. What gun? I looked around wildly, realizing for the first time that I seemed to have fallen into another pocket of wreckage that had collected within the glacier. Parts of my tower lay scattered in random ruin, wedged into chunks of ice and scattered all around the little pocket cavern I had fallen into. Perched high up in a tangle of cables and girders was the familiar shape of the gauss rifle turret I had put in the tower for self-defense. Too bad I hadn’t planned for a “massive native invasion, with wizards” when I had put that thing up. “I see you,” I called, not sure if Barbas could actually hear me. If he wasn’t in my head, then he might not be able to hear my thoughts. Hell, he had probably only been able to see me through the targeting sensors on the gun itself. I guessed that he was transmitting messages at me wide-band, and hoping that I would hear them.
I scrambled up the ramshackle pile of rubble, using my armor’s superhuman strength to make leaps and gaps I would never have managed without it. The rubble shifted unevenly beneath my weight, but I rode out the tremors and kept climbing, pulling myself up through a bird’s nest of cables and wires until I reached the gun. I popped open the control box quickly, not even bothering with the latch, just tearing the little hatch off of the back of the weapon to reveal the switches and ports hidden within. I took a quick look at them, frowning, then spotted the loose connection inside it and plugged it in. The gun powered up completely, and then began displaying a low battery warning. We didn’t have a lot of time. “Barbas?” I called, urgently. “Barbas! Can you hear me?”
There was a sensation of someone reading over my shoulder, a sort of itch on the back of my head. And then I felt his presence in my mind, so warm, so comforting. I had started to take the feeling for granted, and just that short time without my Qarin in my head had been one of the loneliest times in my life. It was strange what you could get used to. “I’m… here…” Barbas said, slowly, his voice strangely toneless, without any emotion at all. “You already… uploaded…”
“Are you okay?” This didn’t sound like my Barbas at all. He seemed… lesser, somehow. “Barbas, are you alright?” A creeping prickle of dread ran its way up my spine. Could Barbas be somehow crippled?
“Not… quite.” He managed a chuckle, though it sounded tinny, as though it had been processed through a primitive soundboard. “I was… busy… when the Tower… fell. There… are pieces…” He faded out suddenly, his voice dipping low, as if someone was playing with the sound quality. Before I could say anything, though, he
was back, and a bit more humanity crept back into his voice. “There are pieces of me scattered all about…” his voice turned to an incomprehensible babble, before returning to Pan Standard. “I’m scattered to all of the machines I was controlling when we were attacked.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure what that means, ‘Bas. Are you saying you’re… damaged somehow?”
“Yes. No. Not damaged… not whole. I need you… need you to find the parts of me and… connect so that I can collect them… return to myself again.” Some of the humanity leaked out of his words again, turning them tinny and modulated.
“What were you networked to? Do you remember?”
“No,” he replied, returning to himself a little bit, a little warmth coming back into his voice. “Transmit… transmitting on wide-band. Probably. Find signal… find me.”
“I can do that, ‘Bas,” I whispered. “You already saved me. It’s time for me to save you.” Barbas didn’t answer. I disconnected from the railgun, partially wishing I could find a way to take the heavy weapon with me as insurance against any other burug. I jumped down from the gun, landing amidst the ice and the burug goop in a shattering crash. I realized all of a sudden that the suit alarms were beeping at me again, and I brought up the status screen for my power armor. The breaches. Right. I keyed the fabricator to repair my suit, and then found myself a shadowy spot beneath some scrap metal to sit down while the little buggers worked. It had been a long, shitty day, I needed some sleep. Chances were, tomorrow would be even worse.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 14