Shards of Eternity

by John Triptych

  Strand groaned and tried to reorient himself while the fourth warbot entered through the breach before turning to face him. His mind was swimming in a sea of pain and befuddlement, yet he had enough awareness to throw himself down a lower hatch just as the robot opened fire once more. A ricocheting gauss round caught his left ankle, but it once again failed to penetrate the a-suit’s armor.

  Wasting no time, the pursuing warbot engaged its thrusters to near full speed, tearing past the debris as it raced towards the hole its quarry had just dived into. With the enemy robot at his literal heels, Strand hoped that his helmet’s com-link was still working as he mentally activated another detonator.

  The resulting explosion tore through the support struts of the wreck’s upper deck, bringing down the whole section on top of the warbot, pinning it with a multi-ton weight of rubble and collapsed hull plating. The robot tried to engage its thrusters to full power, but the mass of material on top of it was too much. After running another set of probabilities, it decided to shut itself down.

  Strand gingerly pulled himself up and ran a diagnostic on his battle suit. His shoulder-mounted grenade launcher was severely damaged and unusable. There was also a possible malfunction on his missile pack, and his right arm-mounted laser had been melted away. None of the attacks directed against him had succeeded in penetrating his armor, and he was lucky to be in one piece, though the medical diagnostic claimed he might have a possible concussion from the impact with the wall.

  The remote camera feeds in his helmet still worked, and they showed yet another warbot using a plasma torch to pry open a partially uncovered breach not far from his position. Strand shook his head wearily as he began cannibalizing the broken components of his battle suit to get ready for his next guest.

  I’m getting too old for this, he thought.

  29 The Elusive

  After another explosion occurred nearby, a crack soon appeared above the frozen cavern. Section Leader Unus quickly signaled his command crew to retreat further down the tunnel, and they managed to avoid being trapped when a sudden collapse happened right at their previous position just minutes after they had moved backwards.

  His com-link operator held up her hand, signaling him to take the call. “Urgent comms from the dig teams.”

  Unus tapped the side of his headset. “This is section leader, over.”

  The voice on the other line had gotten apprehensive. “Sir, we’re taking lots of casualties down here.”

  Unus clenched his jaw while looking at the virtual map. He had lost contact with Fytti and the pirates at the other end of the crevasse, while his own teams had failed to find anything so far. “Did you run a scan on the wrecks you’ve covered?”

  “Yes, sir. But there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just more frozen corpses.”

  Unus shook his head. “Okay, get out of there. Head for the designated rendezvous.”

  “Thank you, sir. Over and out.”

  “I’m getting an incoming comms from Section Leader Y’tay, sir,” the com-link operator said.

  “Patch me in,” Unus said.

  Y’tay’s voice was equally uneasy. “My men can’t get to the eastern portion of this damned canyon. The Scythian security forces are just firing blindly now, but at this rate they’ll hit something eventually.”

  “I don’t know what you’d like to do, but I’m pulling my teams out,” Unus said.

  “Alright then, so will I.”

  Unus stood up and pointed towards an adjoining tunnel. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What about Fytti?” his sub-officer asked.

  Unus gestured at his com-link operator. “Send her a short message. Tell her we’re leaving no matter what.”

  Another, more powerful tremor within the tunnel made him slip and fall onto his buttocks. Unus cursed as he got back up. “Did they just hit this cavern?”

  “That wasn’t from an explosion,” his sub-officer said fearfully. “That was something else.”

  At the other end of the crevasse, beads of sweat ran down Fytti’s forehead, despite the seeping cold making its way into the inactive shuttlecraft. She had carefully landed beside one of the wrecks and shut down her engines, hoping to blend in with the background.

  A loud beep momentarily startled her, and one of the external cameras showed a warbot hovering near the wreck beside her vessel, scanning for anything suspicious.

  Fytti gripped the controls, ready to restart the shuttle’s engines, yet hoping the enemy wouldn’t spot her. The explosions coming from nearby certainly had an effect on the robot, as it continued to keep a wary eye all around it. Perhaps the nearby fighting will be enough to distract it from checking too closely, she thought.

  A loud squawk from the com-link made her cry out in surprise. The voice clearly belonged to Unus. “Fytti, we’re getting too much fire from above so we’re pulling out. Good luck.”

  The warbot hovering close by seemed to have detected the incoming message, and it turned and began to close while actively scanning her shuttle’s fuselage.

  Enough’s enough, she thought. Running her hands across a series of switches on the dashboard, she quickly began to power up the shuttle’s fusion drive.

  The warbot hovering nearby was quickly alerted as the supposed wreck in front of it suddenly became alive. It targeted the vehicle’s cockpit and began firing its weapons.

  Fytti cried out as the enemy ordinance began damaging the front of her vessel. The shuttle was unarmed, and even though the forward viewport was shuttered, the warbot’s weaponry would easily breach it in a matter of seconds.

  In desperation, she quickly pulled up on the controls. The shuttle began to climb, but there wasn’t much space in between the crevasse walls, and the warbot continued to fire at the vehicle’s exposed underbelly, damaging one of the tilt fusion thrusters.

  Fytti cursed aloud as the entire shuttle began to veer sideways, the damaged thruster’s output dramatically decreasing, making her entire flight path unstable. A crash alarm began sounding, drowning out all other noises within the cockpit.

  Her desperation turning into rage, Fytti swung the shuttle around and dived straight down towards the enemy warbot. The hovering robot attempted to evade, but it also ran out of room to maneuver within the tight confines of the icy canyon.

  The front of the shuttlecraft collided with the warbot’s lower torso, and both the vehicle and the robot slammed into the northern ice wall. Pieces of the crevasse instantly fell on top of the shuttle’s fuselage, nearly sending it down onto the icy floor, but Fytti managed to keep the vessel steady in the air.

  The warbot had been embedded in the ice upon impact, but it continued to fire all its available weapons at the shuttlecraft, inflicting moderate damage on its front fuselage.

  More system damage alarms flooded the shuttle’s cockpit. Fytti grimaced as the entire vessel swayed; it seemed ready to drop out of the air. Playing with the throttle angle and lift, Fytti hovered the vehicle and tried to veer off, but the warbot fired a harpoon cable which attached itself to the aerospace craft’s nose.

  Fytti screamed in heartache as the warbot began to reel itself out of the ice wall. Just as the battle machine was about to finally come loose, the packed snow around it collapsed, the solid ice suddenly disappearing into a smoke-filled maw as a gargantuan ice wyrm swallowed it whole from behind.

  By my antecessors, what a monster! she thought. I thought those things were all dead.

  Drawing back on the controls, Fytti once again tried to pull away, but the cable attached to her shuttlecraft’s nose began forcing her ever closer to the beast’s gigantic, circular mouth. Its maw resembled a colossal pink crater nearly one klick in diameter, filled with concentric rows of writhing tendrils, dripping with clear acid. The sounds of battle must have attracted or awoken it!

  Angling the shuttle until the belly of her fuselage hovered directly opposite the cyclopean ice wyrm’s mouth, Fytti applied maximum thrust. Although the creature had the s
trength and mass to keep reeling her in, its acid finally chewed through the cable and it snapped.

  Fytti shrieked in terror as the shuttle spun out of control, and she tried desperately to steady it. The frozen walls loomed all around her, and the impact threw her hard against the frozen barrier across the opposite side of the crevasse. Seconds later, the shuttle tumbled down towards the ice fissure’s bottom.

  After losing the fifth warbot’s signal on his tactical display, Baz Wilkerson punched the interior wall of his battle drone’s pod bay in sheer frustration. Switching to manual control, he hovered the aerospace craft just above the crevasse and began firing all of his weapons into the chasm.

  A beep on his com-link momentarily distracted him, and Baz stopped shooting in order to answer it. “What the fekk do you want?”

  Toto Vega’s voice came on the other line. “What’s going on down there?”

  Baz became immediately apologetic. “I’m sorry, Captain. But I lost most of the warbots. Those damned rebels down below are putting up a good fight, and the security forces here are cowards who don’t want to go in.”

  There was a loud sigh coming from the com-link channel. “Alright, get outta there. I’ve already launched the nukes, and they ought to obliterate that whole canyon in a few minutes.”

  Baz instantly engaged the throttle, the sudden acceleration pushing him back into the pod bay wall as the battle drone shot up into the sky. You don’t have to tell me twice.

  Deep inside the wrecked command craft, Duncan Hauk smiled hopefully as his extended plasma torch finally bored through the incessant debris. He could now see into the next module. Using his helmet sensors, he deduced that this inner compartment of the vessel served as a VIP section due to the heavy armor around it.

  Running through a historical database, the boy began an aspect recognition scan of the four frozen corpses embedded inside the collapsed interior. In less than ten seconds, he got a match. The dead body at the far end was evidently the former sub-archon Jurt Maladore, and his fate could now be confirmed.

  “LT, I found him,” Hauk said as he tried to push himself into the adjoining compartment, but the breach he made was too small for his suit and harness to squeeze through. Cursing with frustration, he disengaged the harness and once again tried to get inside, yet all he could accomplish was squeezing in a part of his right arm and shoulder to the crawlspace’s halfway mark.

  Without warning, the entire wreck suddenly began to shift, as if an earthquake rocked the bottom of the fissure. Hauk yelped in alarm as he quickly pulled himself out of the narrow tunnel he had made and looked around nervously. “LT, what was that?”

  Garrett Strand’s voice on the other line was strained. “Kid, I can’t really talk. I got my hands full against this fekking warbot.”

  The sounds of massive rumbling started, and both wrecks began to move. A number of decks tilted one way and then shifted to the other as the two crashed ships began to separate. Hauk scrambled to get to the open hatch he had breached a while back, only to have it blocked when the once embedded wreck of the larger transport slid sideways and covered it up.

  Reaching back, Hauk reattached the engineering harness over his battle suit and checked how much fuel was left on the plasma torch. The virtual charge meter came back at twenty-one percent. I’m going to get buried in here with the archon’s son, he thought.

  Strand’s voice came over his com-link once more. “Kid, can you hear me? I got a bit of a respite when the warbot got slammed by a piece of moving hull, but now I can’t find it. What’s your status?”

  “I think I’m trapped down here, LT. I found the remains of the archon’s son, but the whole place got hit by an earthquake before I could get closer.”

  “Okay,” Strand said. “I got your transponder signal. Seems you’re about two levels below me. Looks like the wreck I was in slid a few degrees to the south just a minute ago.”

  “Yeah, the hatch I opened before this earthquake happened is now blocked off. How do I get to you?”

  “Hang on, lemme think,” Strand said. “Oh, crap. I got a signal on that enemy warbot again. It’s still around and fully operational, so keep your eyes open.”

  “That robot won’t need to attack me,” the boy said. “I’ll be dead if I can’t get outta here.”

  “You still got your missiles and grenades?”

  “Yes, LT.”

  “Okay, try to find the point where the thinnest part of the hull is,” Strand said. “From my readings, it looks like the quake partially exposed the wreck you’re in, so instead of trying to get up to me, go for broke through the ice instead.”

  Hauk began a structural scan of the room using his helmet. “There’s an old escape pod along the port side, but I can’t tell if it got uncovered when the wrecks moved from the quake.”

  “I’m going to get out into the open and try to run a scan from there,” Strand said. “I sure hope that warbot isn’t waiting outside. Anyway, see if you can open up the escape pod and make a breach.”

  “Okay, LT.”

  Fytti opened her eyes while her mind began to reboot itself. She was still sitting in the pilot’s chair of the shuttle’s cockpit, and the constant beeping of the numerous alarms meant the aerospace craft still had power, at least.

  Shaking her head fully awake, she quickly ran a diagnostic scan of the ship. Two maneuvering thrusters were damaged, but the main engine seemed operational. The shuttle’s fuselage had taken a tremendous pounding from the warbot’s weapons and the ensuing crash, but she figured it still had enough structural integrity to get them into orbit.

  The problem was the shuttle had crashed and partially embedded itself in a nearby ice shelf. Without optimal maneuvering thrusters, she could easily smash the shuttle into the opposite side of the crevasse, and it would finally be the end. The vessel’s nose was nearly torn off, and the next collision would surely destroy the cockpit as well.

  Fytti grimaced as the entire shuttle rocked back and forth. The ice wyrm had once again broken through a nearby ice wall on the opposite side of the crevasse, causing more seismic disturbances all around it. This newly awakened, titanic monster was evidently searching for her.

  Remembering the old tales from her childhood, Fytti began to channel power back to the engines once more. Those things are attracted by heat, maybe even motion. I’ve got one chance at this, and it’s got to be right.

  Activating the com-link, she leaned close to the microphone. “Strand, are you reading me?”

  The lieutenant’s voice came through loud and clear. “Where the hell are you? We’re in trouble down here!”

  “Not far from you,” Fytti said softly. “And I got my own problems. My shuttle is damaged, and I’m staring at the jaws of a six-klick-long ice wyrm that wants to swallow my ship whole.”

  “Huh? Is that what’s causing the earthquakes?”

  “Yes.” An incoming alarm made her curse again. “Now we got even more problems. My shuttle’s sensors just detected incoming ordinance from orbit, and everyone else is retreating.”

  Strand sighed audibly over the com-link. “It’s gotta be nukes. Vega figures if he can’t have the fifth shard, then nobody can.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “A few minutes, tops. Then this whole fissure will either get melted or reburied.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Stand by to execute an extraction run. I’m sending you our coordinates.”

  With his helmet sensors guiding him, Hauk used the last of his plasma welding fuel to thin out the inner hull of an adjoining escape pod. The moment his torch went out, he disengaged the harness for the last time. Placing all the explosives he carried into the hollowed-out groove, he then took cover behind the hatch leading back into the debris-filled compartment of the command ship.

  Strand’s voice came over his com-link once more. “Kid, I’m just about making my way over to you. Give me a sitrep.”

  “I thinned out a part of the escape pod
with the last fuel I had, LT,” Hauk said. “I can detonate and try to breach it now.”

  “Okay, stand by. That pesky warbot is still around, and I’m betting it’s just waiting for us to show ourselves.”

  “I could maybe spare some of the explosives to breach further in to get to the body of the archon’s son, LT. I could just pass the shard over to you and you can get moving.”

  “Don’t you try to be a hero on my watch, kid,” Strand said. “You saw the sub-archon’s body, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did your scans get the radiation reading of the shard he carried?”

  “No, but I couldn’t get that close either,” Hauk said. “If only I had maybe half an hour, I’m sure I could get to him. I think maybe the shard might be hidden in his bio-armor or somewhere in the wreckage of that compartment.”

  “Forget about it. I’m getting close to your position. Get ready.”

  “Okay, LT.”

  The sound of weapons fire could be heard over the communication circuit. Strand growled. “That damned warbot just popped up, and he’s pinning me down. We’re out of time. Breach it!”

  Hauk clenched his jaw and activated the remote detonator. The resulting explosion rocked the whole compartment, throwing the boy sideways, but he quickly recovered and peered through the hatch. A small hole had been blown along the side of the unused escape pod, and he could see the embedded ice beyond.

  The boy scrambled into the narrow breach. An unyielding piece of metal scraped his armored back and wouldn’t let go as he tried to squeeze through the jagged opening. Since the shoulder mounts on his Armatus were devoid of ammunition anyway, Hauk quickly disengaged the hardpoints from his a-suit and used his jump jets to go further for one last, mighty push. The solid ice in front somehow got thicker and would only crack instead of yielding to his bull rush. Hauk began firing his arm-mounted lasers in a maddened, desperate hope of breaking past this latest barrier.