by Richard Fox
A chitinous claw reached over the lip of the bridge.
“Left!” Hale hurled the grenade just as the wyrm’s open maw swept over the side. A tiny radar sensor in the grenade pinged off the hard armor. An explosive charge wrapped around a tungsten cone ignited and morphed the warhead into a super-heated lance of liquid metal. The lance cut through the wyrm’s armor like it was made of paper and blew out of the creature’s back.
More grenades assaulted the creature’s maw and thorax. It reared back, smoke burning from a dozen gashes, and let off a roar that shook the bridge. It swung to the side and fell onto the bridge, its open mouth snapping at air. The rest of the body rose up and settled behind it.
The wyrm shifted from side to side, and Hale felt like he was a child again, staring down a train barreling right for him.
The Iron Hearts charged the wyrm, cannons blazing.
The wyrm reared up and snapped forward.
Hale leapt to the side and wind rushed by as a feeder scythe cut through the air just above his legs. He hit the ground and rolled with the momentum then something jerked him to a halt. One of the many tiny legs had him by the ankle. He swung his rifle down and fired a high-powered shot into the seam between the wyrm’s plates. The legs yanked him to the side, sending the shot high and wide.
Elias jumped onto the wyrm’s back and rammed his spike into an armor plate. The spike sank in with a crack of glass and a shower of sparks.
“Kallen!” Elias ripped a damaged plate away and sent it hurling into the air. He grabbed a handful of sparking wires and held on as the wyrm bucked beneath him.
The motion whipped Hale into the air then slammed him into the deck. Even in his armor, he hit the bridge with enough force to crack his visor and knock the air out of him.
Kallen, her spike embedded beneath a plate closer to the wyrm’s tail, tossed the denethrite charge to Elias. He jammed the charge into the damaged creature and hopped off. He tore off the legs holding Hale and stood over the dazed Marine.
“Get clear!” Elias shouted.
“I’m stuck!” Kallen jerked at the spike still embedded in the wyrm. Bodel jumped up next to her and blasted around her spike with his arm cannon.
“Use your—” Elias didn’t see the wyrm’s maw as it swung around and smashed into him. The wyrm reared up with Elias clenched between foot-long fangs, scythes raking against his armor. His left arm dangled free as the other pounded against the wyrm’s mouth.
Elias’ cannon roared to life, stitching rounds down the wyrm’s underbelly.
A high-powered shell connected with the denethrite charge. A clap that sounded like a giant redwood snapping in half hit Hale hard enough to knock him flat.
The blast ripped the wyrm into pieces. The upper half came down and slammed into the bridge. Elias spat out of the mouth, smashing into the bridge over and over again toward the edge.
Hale watched in horror as Elias went tumbling over the edge of the bridge.
“Elias!” Hale ran to the edge. All he could see of the Iron Heart was a glint of light just before he disappeared into the distance.
You can’t help him, a still, small voice said to him. Lead.
Hale got away from the edge and looked back to his Marines. Orozco sat against the ring housing the pillar, his Gustav a pile of bent metal on one side, a concerned Yarrow on the other. Other than Malal and Stacey still on the platform, there was no sign of anyone else.
“Cortaro? Gunney?” Hale found his rifle and picked it up.
“Here.” Cortaro limped around the smoking corpse of the wyrm. Hale ran to him and supported him as they went to Yarrow.
“You hurt?” Hale asked.
“Damn thing feels broken,” Cortaro said. “Brand new leg, too.”
“Sir, Orozco’s out cold,” Yarrow said. “Concussion for sure, but I don’t think it’s anything worse. That thing crushed him against the wall. I think his Gustav saved his life, took some of the blow.”
“Where…” Hale looked around frantically. “Where’s everyone else?”
Yarrow took Cortaro and helped him to the ground.
“I jumped out of the way when it came at us,” Yarrow said. “I saw Oro on the ground.” His voice cracked. “I think the rest…”
“They got knocked over the side,” Cortaro said. “I saw it. Same with Kallen and Bodel, they went down with the rest of the wyrm.”
A ball of iron rose into Hale’s throat. He stumbled away from his remaining Marines and went to a knee.
****
Standish opened his eyes. Deep blue gemstones pressed against his visor. He moved his arms and the sound of grinding stones filled the air. The blue stones poured off him as he sat up. He was in a long tunnel just big enough for him to stand up. A sea of blue stones sewn into turquoise cloth filled the bottom half of the tube.
“The hell?” He tried to pull his helmet off but buzzers sounded in his ears. A warning icon flashed on his visor. “No oxygen in here, plenty of nitrogen though. Great.” His forearm screen was a shattered mess.
“Hello?” The word echoed down the tube as it bent in the distance. He picked up a bit of cloth, a long shawl with a few loops and plastic hooks sewn into the underside. He tossed it aside.
“‘Join the Marine Corps,’ the judge said. ‘Better than going to jail,’ the judge said.” Standish drew a gauss pistol and checked the weapon’s charge. “Five years in the slammer or this? Course, I’d have died on Earth when the Xaros came had I taken option B. So I’ve got that going for me right now.”
He hit the side of the tunnel twice with the pistol butt. The knock sounded solid. He turned around; the path on either side of him looked the same.
“Flip a coin? No. Who carries change into combat…someone not prepared to wake up in the middle of the galaxy’s worst flea market after being knocked silly by a giant glass…centipede…fuck my life.” He picked up another bit of cloth and stuck the hook into a seam between tunnel segments. “Let’s see if I’m going in circles.”
Standish trudged through the discarded garments, the stones whining and popping beneath his armored footsteps.
He hung up another bit of cloth after five minutes of walking. After the third, the tunnel curved into a low opening to a dark room a few yards ahead.
“Progress.” Standish waded forward as fast as he could. He ducked down and got his head through the opening.
A flash of white lit up the dark room and a gauss bullet ricocheted off the rim of the tunnel.
“Whoa! Cease fire!” Standish sank into the clothes and squirmed backwards.
“Damn, was that Standish?” he heard Bailey ask.
“Yes, that was Standish!” he yelled through the opening.
“Blimey, say something next time, you bloody bastard!” the sniper yelled back.
“Goddamn it! Don’t shoot me! That work?”
“She’s not going to shoot you, Standish,” Egan said. “Come over here and help us.”
“Well, I might,” Bailey said.
Standish crept through the opening. The tunnel spilled into a large room where two large pipes angled down from the walls, the same blue clothing piled beneath each pipe. Bailey and Egan stood on a small platform with stairs descending to the bottom of the room, next to a tall, and closed door.
“You guys know what happened? Why we’re in the swap meet at the end of the universe?” Standish asked.
“I think something grabbed me while I was falling,” Bailey said. “I was going ass over teakettle, watching the alcohol haze of my life flash before me eyes. I slowed down and stopped midair, no idea why. Then everything was dark until I plopped into the mess at the top of one of those tunnels.”
“Orozco shoved me out of the way right before that wyrm hit,” Egan said. “I got a face full of claws before it knocked me over the edge. I caught up with Bailey in here.”
“You almost shoot him too?” Standish asked. Bailey shrugged. “No sign of the others?”
“Nothing but unbre
athable air and this cloth stuff up the tunnels,” Bailey said. “Anything interesting behind you?”
“No.” Standish got up the stairs and looked over the door. “No lock to pick, no panel to hack…breach wire?”
“They were in my pack,” Egan said. “Lost that somewhere.”
“None of us have Malal’s freaky space magic.” Standish rapped on the door with his knuckles. He tapped his fist against the width of the door then nodded. He cocked his fist from side to side and his Ka-Bar knife snapped out of the forearm housing. He pressed the blade against the door and ran it diagonally across the door. The knife pressed into a tiny indentation. Standish rammed the blade through the door and twisted, a gap appearing as he moved segments of the door apart.
“Either of you want to chip in? That would be great,” Standish said.
Egan got his hands under the upper section and pushed the bottom part down with his foot. Bailey scrambled through the opening and Standish followed right behind.
Beyond the door was a city. Great buildings that looked like they’d been cut from a single piece of polished marble surrounded them. Writing made up of bright blue short lines in neat squares hung from banners and stitched across walls and around tall empty windows. A road of polished glass stretched away from their exit. There was no sign of life anywhere.
An icon flashed on Standish’s visor. The air around them was breathable.
“Wow.” Standish grabbed the lip of the door and held it for Egan as he crawled out.
“Does this remind you of anything, Bailey?” Standish asked.
“Anthalas,” she said. “The city around the pyramids.”
“You find anyone there?” Egan asked.
“No one alive,” Standish said. “Let’s get moving. Somehow I’m sure I’d lose the ‘who do we eat first’ vote.”
****
Darkness.
Elias was accustomed to it—to being unable to move, to hear a sound, to see a thing. The Armor Corps selection process put candidates through sensory deprivation, locking them in pitch-black tanks baffled against sound for hours, sometimes days, on end. Candidates learned how to deal with the isolation, or they washed out.
Some armor soldiers viewed the darkness as a prison, Elias found it a sanctuary. He spent that time re-watching movies in his mind but never focused on how long he’d been cut off from the outside world, letting his subconscious flit from movie to movie. He was part way through a Mamoru Oshii classic when a red point of light appeared, a single star against the void.
The light flicked on and off rapidly, then vanished.
Progress, he thought. He remembered hitting the bridge hard, several times, after the wyrm lost its bite, then falling into his current abyss.
His HUD booted up, and familiar warmth spread from the plugs in the base of his skull through his body. A screen lit up; his armor was broken and battered, but still functional. He tried to flex his right arm and couldn’t move it more than an inch against whatever was holding him.
“Elias?” Kallen’s voice came over the IR.
“I’m here. My armor is online but immobile. You? Bodel?”
“Same for the both of us,” Bodel said.
“We went over the side with the ass-end of the wyrm,” Kallen said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Guess I didn’t taste good enough to eat. Got spat out and gravity took over. You see a red light?” They said they did.
A sudden band of light stung Elias’ eyes. The band grew to fill everything he could see then faded. An amphitheater sank away from Elias and a wide pathway led from him to a stage of lacquered wood. The ghostly figure Hale had spoken with prior to the wyrm’s attack stood on the stage.
Orange and white Jinn filled the seats, no two the same. Some were spindly shapes made of thin pipes; others were squat, arms ending in giant claws. The sound of glass clinking against glass surrounded Elias.
Kallen and Bodel were there, each at the top of a pathway leading down to the ghost.
“I am Father,” came from the ghost, the amphitheater carrying his words easily to the upper decks.
Elias checked his weapon systems—all off-line, his gauss shells gone. No matter, he didn’t need a weapon to be dangerous.
“What is this?” Bodel asked. “Why did you attack us?”
Father grew taller, until his size matched the armor, then motioned for the Iron Hearts to descend.
Elias and the others didn’t budge.
“Who are you?” Father asked, his voice shifting from the ugly screech to an even baritone.
“We are the Iron Hearts. We are armor,” Elias said.
“No…your hearts are flesh,” Father said. “We thought you were like us but you…walk both paths.”
“Guess we’re going to play the metaphor game with this guy,” Kallen said over a suit-to-suit IR channel.
“Let’s not start another fight. These things could help us get back to the others,” Elias said.
“Why would you return to the demon?” Father asked.
“Hey, he can hear us,” Bodel said.
Elias cut the channel.
“We are soldiers. We’re here for information, technology that could save our planet,” Elias said.
Father motioned again for them to come down.
Elias took the steps three at a time. The amphitheater had been designed for something much shorter than him.
“The demon will destroy you.” Father’s words sent a shiver through the audience with the sound of a thousand wind chimes. “Why are you protecting it?”
“This is Malal’s vault.” Elias stopped next to the stage. A humanoid shape floated deep inside Father’s dark haze. “We need his help,” Elias said.
“Witness!” came from the audience. The word rose and fell like waves against a beach.
“You do not know what it truly is,” Father said. “Its crimes.”
Light faded away until only the other Iron Hearts and Father remained visible. Illumination returned as a sun rose over distant mountain peaks. The sun soared through the sky as shadows from skyscrapers made of ruby glass swept across the soldiers. The sun froze in place.
The glass buildings soared into the air, some so large they could have held tens of thousands of people. While at the armor center at Fort Knox, Elias had gone on a weekend trip to New York City, spending the day in awe of Manhattan’s spires and monuments. He’d felt small, insignificant compared to the wealth and purpose the city possessed. He felt the same now.
“Look at that.” Kallen pointed into the distance. A massive dome filled the distance, so tall that clouds skirted the slope.
Aliens popped up around them, all frozen in time. They were squat, with wide, diamond-shaped heads lined with fur. All wore loose robes with wide sleeves, a silk sash of orange and white tied around their waist. Elias picked out mother-father pairs, trying to corral children. All the aliens faced the dome.
Off in the alleys moving freight, on the roads collecting garbage and working on a half-finished building, were the Jinn. All were focused on their menial tasks, not the dome that seemed to captivate the flesh-and-blood aliens.
“What is this? Where are we?” Elias asked.
“This is the last day. This was our home,” Father said. “The Jinn, our creators, were many billions. They were argumentative, brash, uncaring to us…their tools. But they were peaceful, kind to other races. The demon raised them. Taught them the ways of science, encouraged them to multiply and create new things. The Jinn were too trusting to see the malice behind his good deeds. Watch.”
A dazzling star rose from the dome. Bands of light fanned out and went right through the distant skyscrapers. A cheer rose from the Jinn, quick chatters that sounded like a chorus of angry squirrels. Parents raised children into the air as the star came for them.
The star passed several blocks away as a fan of light cut across the Jinn. They withered beneath its touch, collapsing into husks. Screams of terror lingered in the air as the
star’s light vanished into the distance.
The Jinn robots walked onto the street, touching each dead for a moment before moving to the next body. The robots stopped after a few moments, their shells alive with lights and Jinn script.
“Our creators were gone. All of them,” Father said. “We inherited the world.”
The landscape shifted. The city remained, but it was covered with power lines that glowed with white and orange fiber optics. Airships filled the heavens and levitating cars zipped through the air over Elias’ head.
“We evolved very slowly, but were determined to take up the mantle the Jinn left behind. Kindness to others, pursuing knowledge. We spread to other stars…and found more evidence of the demon’s work. Empty worlds where flesh-thought had once thrived. Then we learned of some that had survived the demon.”
The new city vanished and Elias was back in the auditorium. A hologram coalesced on the stage, a willowy alien with a blunt face and wide, solid green eyes. It spoke, the meaning lost to Elias. Images flashed next to the alien: the edge of the galaxy, a world with its land mass covered by cities in one image, the same world scoured clean of all signs of life in the next. Then an oblong device with stalks and a shifting surface appeared.
“The Xaros,” Elias said.
“You know them. That is expected. The first race to fall to the Xaros, the Mok’Tor, sent warnings throughout the galaxy, probes detailing everything they knew of their killers. The message scaled from simple for those nascent species, to more complex for those who could understand it.”
“Guess Earth missed it,” Bodel said. “We might have kept our heads down and mouths shut if we knew the Xaros would come calling.”
“Did you fight?” Elias asked. “How did you end up here?”
“We tried, but we are machine-thought. The Xaros ripped apart our light with ease. There was no defense, so we ran. Ran to a place hinted at on worlds consumed by the demon—this place,” Father said. “We managed to get inside, hide. We feared to do much else, as it could alert the Xaros waiting on our doorstep.”