by Kyle Noe
Quinn ran forward, confronted by a drone that swung at her on its leader. She went airborne, throwing out a boot, smashing the drone backward. The machine swung back like a wrecking ball and Quinn loosed a single shot that tore through its turret, destroying its CPU. She barely had a chance to savor the destruction of the drone before another one angled at her, swinging an arm with a rusted blade attached at the end.
She slid under the blade and clutched her rifle like a baseball bat. She cracked the drone across its mini-turret. The machine tottered and Quinn brought her gun down and fired point-blank, blowing the drone’s robotic brain to bits.
Quinn pulled back her rifle and gave cover to Hayden and Hawkins who were crouching fifty feet behind her. Hayden fired out his gun and then commenced using his mallet-sized fists. Quinn watched the big man punch several of the drones before grabbing their arms and dashing them to pieces on the ground.
Another drone whipped out a metal cord and swung it at Hayden, slashing him on the shoulder. The hook at the end of the cord gouged into Hayden’s armor and he screamed, blood blossoming from the wound even as the armor sealed up around it. Hawkins fired a shot that severed the cord and then finished the drone off. Hayden grabbed his shoulder and retreated with Hawkins as Mira and Milo riddled the attackers, the air filling with smoke and dust.
The warriors continued to battle their way across the antechamber and then Quinn kicked down a door and led everyone down the flight of stairs. There was a final entry point up ahead, a circular doorway.
“I got it!” Renner shouted.
Quinn ducked as Renner brought a massive pistol around. He fired a high explosive round that wavered the air over Quinn’s head, before ripping the door from its hidden hinges.
Quinn ducked through the doorway to see an interior space that resembled Cody’s lab from back on the command ship. The room was in disarray, but a scanner (much like the one on the command ship) was visible, along with several tablet-like devices, lying scattered and cracked, covered in an inch of yellow dust.
The map on Quinn’s HUD revealed the totem hidden behind an alcove on the far wall which she ran to. She inserted the barrel of her rifle into the joint between the alcove and the wall. She pulled back, prying open a hidden partition that sprung loose to reveal the totem, dusty, but still shimmering like salvation in the semi-darkness.
Quinn stared at the object, grinning hugely.
Then she reached up and grabbed the totem and pulled it free.
That’s when she noticed it.
Noticed that the totem was attached to something.
A long, rusted metal cord.
Before she could react, the cord broke off.
Quinn lunged for it, but the cord snapped back into the wall, disappearing from sight. She cursed under her breath, turning as the entire room began to shudder.
“Um, Quinn,” Milo said, quietly. “What the hell did you just do?”
Quinn held up the totem and smiled sheepishly under her helmet. “I … saved us?”
Several small explosions echoed in the distance and somewhere above the ceiling. Quinn saw the doorway that they’d just entered through vanish, hidden behind a slab of concealed metal that dropped down to cover the exit. The ceiling shook and a chute opened and sand began pouring down.
“I think somebody booby trapped the totem,” Mira said.
Milo held her look. “Ya think?”
Quinn tossed the totem to Renner who secured it in a rucksack. Then she consulted the map and saw another exit on the other side of the room. She pulled her gun around and fired her remaining rounds into the wall which buckled, opening up the rest of the ceiling. The warriors shouldered their way through the wall as the ceiling collapsed behind them, flooding the room they had just vacated with sand.
The area on the other side of the wall was unfinished, just a small cavern that had been bored into the ground. The cavern branched off, running in opposite directions and appeared to be large enough for Quinn to stand up in.
Here there was no light and so Quinn used her helmet to illuminate the ground ahead. There was a ledge and then a drop off of several feet down to the cavern floor. She tried to reach Cody on her communications link, but the fact that they were so far underground made transmissions of any kind impossible.
Quinn dropped down into the cavern and it was solid if a little slippery. She took a step and froze. A sound was building in the distance, coming from the branch of the cavern that dropped down to Quinn’s right. She swung her helmet, but nothing was clear.
“What the hell is that?” Renner asked, from behind.
“What would be living down here?” Hawkins asked.
“Whatever it is, I don’t wanna know,” Hayden replied.
Quinn didn’t reply, just strode forward, following the contour of the cavern that rose for a hundred feet straight up. The warriors fought their way up the incline only to see that the cavern sloped down farther into the ground. There was a profound blackness here that made visibility almost impossible. The light from Quinn’s helmet stabbed the darkness, allowing her to see that the cavern fell off and ran for a dozen feet below her and then vanished around a corner.
The sound continued to build, a chirping sound, the kind of note made by insects when they swarm. Quinn had heard a similar sound years earlier, back when she was just a girl on her family’s farm. A pack of grasshoppers had invaded the area during a particularly nasty summer day. Seemingly immune to pesticides, the insects devoured an entire field of sweet corn in less than an hour. The sound the grasshoppers made when they rubbed their long hind legs against their wings was eerily similar to what Quinn was hearing.
Then the sound grew louder and Quinn’s gut told her it was not a natural note at all. Not something created by a living creature, but by a machine. She saw the first drone peek around the edge of the cavern behind her. She could tell from the silhouette that it was one of the spider drones from the antechamber. The metallic beast spied her and loosed a squeal that sounded like two knives scrapping against each other.
Quinn turned and pointed in the other direction. “RUN! THEY’RE COMING!”
She grabbed the others and ran blindly down into the murk, guided only by the light from her helmet. The ground grew increasingly slippery and Quinn scanned the readings on her HUD. The temperature was dropping with every foot of forward progress.
“ICE” someone shouted from behind and Quinn felt her feet give out from under her. She landed hard on her back, the light from her helmet casting weird shadows on the ceiling of the cavern. Before she knew what was happening she was sliding down into the darkness.
She fought for purchase, but the ground was too smooth and her descent too rapid. She rocketed past, the walls a blur, Quinn following the curves of the cavern. The others were directly behind her, Quinn listening to the shouts and screams of Hayden, Renner, Milo, and the resistance fighters. She prayed that the drones hadn’t followed them down and that Renner had managed to keep hold of the totem.
Her vision was woozy, but she managed to scan the map on her HUD, Quinn saw that the cavern was ending up ahead. Visibility grew with every inch, a wall of white light filling the cavern.
“WE’RE ALMOST AT THE END!” Quinn shouted.
She smiled to herself and looked up and then everything just dropped away as—
WHUNK!
Quinn felt herself blasted out of the cavern at high speed. She’d been underground in the darkness for a sufficient amount of time such that the outside light seemed brighter than a supernova. She squinted and saw that she was falling, straight down, plunging fifteen feet toward a desert floor.
Her arms and legs chopped the air, Quinn braced for impact as the ground rushed up to greet her. She listened to the cries of the others and then—
WUMPH!
She crashed down onto a pile of particulate, a massive mound of yellow dust that seemed as pillowy as a bed of down feathers. The impact drove her face first into the dust and th
en she reacted and rolled to her left, seconds before—
WHUNK! WHUNK! WHUNK!
The others landed nearby in a heap, barely avoiding slamming into her.
Quinn elbowed herself up and brushed a smear of grime from her helmet. She was out of breath, and every fiber in her body seemed to pulse all at once. She’d been in a gruesome car accident as a teenager, riding shotgun in a truck that had been T-boned by a drunk, but her body felt worse now. She looked over to see Milo lying across Mira, almost in a missionary position.
“This was by accident,” Milo said. “I swear.”
Mira whacked him across the helmet, shrugging Milo aside as everyone heaved themselves upright.
“Everyone in one piece?” she asked.
There were grunts and nods.
“Please tell me you have it,” Quinn said to Renner.
The little man dropped the rucksack on the ground and Quinn hunted inside, but it was nowhere to be found. Her stomach seized and Quinn was readying to scream when she looked up to see Renner bringing his hands around to reveal the totem. He had it hidden behind his back.
“You are such an asshole,” she said, grabbing the totem, shoving him back.
Renner held up his hands. “Relax, Quinn, it’s over. We won.”
“Tell that to them,” Eli said, gesturing up. Quinn pivoted and glanced up to the mouth of the cavern, the place they’d just dropped from. The opening, a hole on the side of a mountain of stacked stone, was covered in spider drones.
Eli’s jaw dropped. “Those little buggers are busier ‘n a one-legged cat in a litter box.”
“So what’s the plan, jefe?” Milo asked.
“Run like hell,” Quinn answered.
She tucked the totem under her arm like a football and bounded across the mound of yellow dust, the others scampering directly behind her. She ran the length of the mound that ended at a gravel slope that dropped gently to a desert plain several hundred feet below.
Quinn jumped and landed on the gravel, skidding on her side down the slope, eventually coming up on the balls of her feet. She looked back to see the others following. At the top of the slope were several dozen spider drones and in the air over the cavern were additional airborne machines, part of the army from back on the lake Quinn surmised.
The warriors fired out their remaining ammo and lasered onto the desert plain, struggling to reach the exfiltration spot before the drones overran them.
Quinn cued the communications link, fighting to reestablish a lifeline to Cody.
“Cody! Do you copy?!” she screamed, while on the run.
“Loud and partially clear,” came Cody’s response. “I’m overhead at twenty-thousand feet and dropping. I assume you found what we came for?”
“Affirmative,” she replied.
“Was it as easy to retrieve as I said it would be?”
“The answer to that will have to wait.”
“How come?” he asked.
“Because we’ve got an army of killer robots right on our ass!”
Quinn and the other warriors plunged forward as the sky filled with what looked like flares and rocket fire.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The ground shuddered, geysers of sand sent up into the air as the alien ordnance landed. Quinn zigzagged between the explosions, feeling the warmth from the blasts, listening to pieces of shrapnel ricochet off her helmet. Somebody screamed in pain behind her and Quinn prayed it wasn’t one of the Marines. An object blinked on her HUD and Quinn spotted something, some large structure up ahead. If she and the others could make it there, they might just be able to form a defensive perimeter before Cody arrived.
Her lungs burning, Quinn doubled her efforts and soon saw the shape of an alien craft lying up ahead, partially buried in the sand. The vessel’s form matched that of the glider the Marines had stolen from the Syndicate command ship, but its exterior was weathered, seemingly worn down by time and the elements. Quinn could tell that the glider had been brought down by fire, the ship’s underbelly blackened and spotted with holes, a huge trench at least ten feet deep carved in the sand from where the glider crashed and came to a rest.
Quinn had no idea how long the craft had been here, and it didn’t matter. All she cared about was buying some time for Cody.
Quinn dove to the ground behind the glider’s rear engines and readied her rifle. She was heartened when Hayden, Milo, Renner, Eli, Hawkins, Mackie, Mira, and one other resistance fighter collapsed alongside her.
“Where’s the goddamn cavalry?!” Hayden shouted.
“Cody, talk to me,” Quinn said.
“Twelve thousand feet and closing,” Cody replied.
“How long?” Quinn asked.
“Four minutes, maybe less,” Cody said.
Quinn cursed. They wouldn’t’ last four minutes. They had to do something fast.
“We need immediate evac, Cody. Our position is about to be overrun.”
“Yeah, there’s this thing called science, Quinn. I can only make the glider go so fast.”
Quinn slapped her helmet. “SCIENCE CAN KISS MY ASS!”
“Three minutes!” Cody shouted.
“WE’RE NOT GONNA LAST THAT LONG!” Quinn screamed.
Quinn and the others turned as the ground thundered with the metal feet from the advancing drone horde, the metal monsters seeming to appear from every quadrant. Hundreds of them, hopping and sprinting on all fours, rolling over the dunes and the dusty plain, firing rockets that landed just short of the glider. The warriors fired out their rifles, but it was no use. There were far too many of the enemy and they were soon out of ammunition.
Quinn doubled back and fell to her side next to the glider’s cockpit window. She was utterly spent and out of options. She hoped that Cody would arrive before the drones did. Turning to her side she spotted something inside the glider. Reaching a gloved hand out, she brushed aside the grit and grime on the window and looked inside.
She could see him now.
His body was just a husk, slowly decaying, the life sucked out of him, but she recognized the clothes he was wearing. She recognized his face, his slender body still strapped behind the glider’s controls.
Jesus! It was Cody.
Somehow, some way, he’d crashed here in the past.
Quinn’s mind wandered back to the bodies trapped in the lake and suppressed the urge to scream. The fact that she and the others seemed like pawns stuck in the middle of something beyond their comprehension left her stupefied, filled with anxiety. For a moment she felt like she was on the verge of a mental meltdown. What if all of them were trapped in some kind of neverending spiral, some quirk in time that would cause them to relive the same terrible events over and over again. The vertigo she’d felt in the past returned with a vengeance, the blood roaring in her ears. She had enough to worry about with the battle, the incoming horde, trying to link up with Cody, but now this?! It was all too much.
Hayden saw Quinn reeling and knelt beside her. “This ain’t no time for browsing, snowflake,” he said. “We’ve got an army meeting us for lunch, so time to own this shit and find a way out of the suck.”
Quinn shook off the dark thoughts. Hayden was right. There wasn’t any time for this. She had people counting on her here and now, and Samantha waiting for her back home. Besides, if they failed the world might be doomed. She could figure out what she’d seen on Hygiea when she had time. But not now.
The pair looked out over the desert plain, surveying the approaching drones. “Can’t say that I feel real good about this, Quinn.”
“Really? Why’s that?” Quinn asked.
“For one, there are lots of ‘em,” Hayden replied.
“Yep.”
“And few of us.”
“True.”
“Oh, and we don’t have any weapons.”
“I’ve got a knife,” she said. He looked over and she removed a Swiss Army-like pocket-
knife. “It’s got a magnifying glass and everything.”<
br />
“What else ya got?” he asked. “Biting wit?”
“That’s probably not gonna cut it.”
Quinn unfolded the largest blade on her knife and ran toward the
fallen glider.
“I hope like hell you’ve got a plan!” Hayden shouted after her, Milo and the others following behind him.
Quinn didn’t respond. She was too busy using her pocket-knife to pry off a latch on the
aft of the machine. Inside sat a tremendous, partially blackened turbine yoked to what looked like a green battery.
“‘The hell is that?” Milo asked, catching up with Quinn.
“The heart of the Parallax engine,” Quinn said. “Same thing on a bigger level that
powers most of their tech.”
“In the last few seconds we have to live, mind telling me why I should care?” Milo asked.
“It’s got a nuclear core. At least a reasonable facsimile of one.”
“And?”
“And I’m thinking we can trigger it,” she replied.
“Trigger what?” Renner asked, looking over.
“A stimulated isomer energy release.”
“Is that a fancy way of saying nuclear blast?” Milo asked.
“Kinda sorta,” Quinn said.
“Okay … so, basically, you want to create a quasi-nuclear explosion right here?” Milo asked.
“You make it sound so ominous,” she replied. “Think of it like all the fun of a nuclear blast without the radiation or fall out.”
“Oh. That sounds much better,” Milo said, a terrified look on his face.
Milo and the others stood back, giving Quinn enough room to work. If she was suffering from any internal doubt, her composure betrayed no infirmity. She threw open Renner’s rucksack and removed the last Hafnium rocket launcher round. Looking over her shoulder, she witnessed the approaching drone army, churning across the sand, mere seconds away from overrunning their position. Hayden dropped down alongside her, helping her lift the round from the Hafnium launcher.