by Max Carver
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
From the author
Resistance
Relic Wars, Book 1
Max Carver
Resistance
(Relic Wars 1)
Copyright 2017 Max Carver
All rights reserved
FOREWORD
I hope you enjoy this story of space and monsters in the same spirit in which it was written. I had a hell of a lot of fun with it.
-Max Carver
Chapter One
“Your problem is, you never go to the whorehouse,” Bartley's voice crackled over Eric's earpiece. “You hardly ever drink, you don't smoke, and you live alone on the most miserable planet in the known galaxy. That's why you're all stiff and uptight. It's not healthy. Me, I head to the back district after clock-out every day, and I'm loose as a boiled noodle.”
“Yeah, you're a real fountain of sound health advice, Bartley,” Eric Rowan replied, annoyed that Bartley kept cutting in over his music. Eric liked to keep the music loud in his ears while the big drills mounted on his exoskeleton chewed into the glittering rock wall. Those glittering grains were quartz, caught in the high-powered beams of his exoskeleton's lighting array.
According to earlier surveys and soil samples, there was a high probability that a sizable vein of gold lurked within this gigantic quartz reef...but so far, they had found only quartz. Lots of quartz, and lots of worthless black volcanic rock. And pyrite. Plenty of fool's gold, but none of the real stuff. Geologists had been wrong before. If the mine didn't pay out soon, Eric could find himself out of a job, unemployed on this depressing, crime-ridden planet hundreds of light-years from home.
On the other hand, if it did pay, Eric could return home a wealthy man, maybe the wealthiest twenty-year-old on his home planet, Gideon. He'd be out of the shadows of his older brothers for once, and Suzette would have to take his marriage proposals more seriously.
“Look, I know you got your little honey-pot waiting back home,” Bartley rambled on, once again blotting out the Steel Guitar Classics playlist Eric had chosen for the day's work soundtrack. Technically, they weren't even supposed to be listening to music, but the long days working in dark, narrow tunnels hundreds of meters underground could swing between tedious and terrifying. Music evened things out. “But just today, brother, hear me out. In ten minutes, we hit the clock, I'll show you around Canyon City's back district. Show you the best of the girl palaces. I'm talking real, affordable, premium flesh-to-flesh here, no robos.”
“It's just not my thing. I'm trying to work here, Bartley—”
“I told you, call me Bark-Dog! That's what all my bros call me.”
“I just can't.” Eric pressed the pair of drills deeper into the rock. A steel mesh cage protected his head from flying rock chips and dust. The blasting tech, Naomi, had selected the points where Eric would drill. Later, she would prep these and blow open a new length of tunnel.
Hopefully, that would lead to an immense treasure trove of gold and giant bonuses for everyone involved. They worked for a small mining concern, one that provided equipment and relatively low wages in exchange for a relatively generous profit-share.
Of course, that was only a good deal if profits actually showed up at some point.
“You can't what? Call me Bark-Dog?” Bartley was a hammerman. He stood in another new horizontal tunnel down the way, smashing stubborn rock with an exoskeleton-mounted industrial hammer that looked like a massive steel battering ram. Bartley's tunnel ran parallel to Eric's and was several meters of thick rock away, but unfortunately they could communicate over fiber-optic cable.
“I can't hit Dirty Alley with you,” Eric said, thinking of Suzette in her summer-carnival dress. She'd been Melon Queen their junior year of high school; he could see her waving from a little horse-drawn wooden float that crawled along Main Street, her long strawberry-blond hair full of flowers. Gideon was a primarily agricultural planet, half again as large as Earth, nicknamed the “grass giant.” He missed the oceans of rich green prairie sprawling from horizon to horizon under Gideon's vast blue sky. He wanted to return there...but as a hero, not as the lone unfortunate weak sheep in a family of proud wolves. Suzette would relinquish her doubts and accept his ring.
If they would just strike gold.
“Well, hey, we can hit one of the robo joints, then,” Bartley said. “Machinery ain't adultery, you know. And you're not even married. Just engaged. Right?”
Not even that, Eric thought, thinking of his last conversation with Suzette. He was hardly going to explain it all to Bartley, a man whose ideal relationship lasted no longer than the amount of time it took him to put his pants back on. Bartley Flynn was a couple of years older, and had seen combat as a marine with the colonial rebels, before the current shaky armistice among the warring worlds.
Eric's older brothers were decorated war heroes, one a tank driver, the other a starfighter pilot. The rebel military had politely declined Eric's attempts to join. His legs had been badly deformed since childhood. He could stand only because of mechanical braces built onto the outside of them, wired into a data port in his lower spine.
Currently, his legs were unplugged, and lay like dead things as Eric sat in the mining exoskeleton's driver seat. Loose as a boiled noodle, Bartley had said of his own post-coital bliss, but he could just as well as have been talking about Eric's legs.
The neural cable on his back, which normally connected his spine to his leg braces, was also compatible with the mining exoskeleton. While most miners operated their gear using their hands on a control panel, Eric's hands were free even while he drilled and smashed.
The blissful sound of dozens of electric, steel, bass, and acoustic guitars with an accelerating backbeat filled Eric's ears for a moment, and then Bartley cut in again: “How about it, Row-man? Because I can guarantee your lady friend back home is taking advantage of some mechanical assistance while you're way out here digging for gold. In fact, you better hope she is, because if she isn't, then she's found some genuine skin-to-skin of her own—”
“Suzette isn't like that,” Eric said.
“This is why you're bad at making friends, Bartley.” Naomi Lentz, their team's blast engineer, had been listening in. They worked as a small, tight, heavily equipped unit.
“Lentz, are you mad I didn't invite you to hit Dirty Alley with us?” Bartley asked. “Because you're welcome to.”
“You're sick, Bartley,” Naomi replied.
“How about a beer, then?” Bartley's voice came back. “Just a beer after work. We'll keep it strictly midtown, no downtown. Irishman's honor, Naomi—”
“You still owe me fifteen credits from last t
ime,” Naomi said.
“Do I? Are you totally sure about—” Bartley's sentence turned into an unintelligible shout. A shudder rumbled through the mine, as if some giant alien lurking in the black, rocky volcanic tunnels around them wished for Bartley to finally stop running his mouth for a second. If that were the case, the unseen giant alien was sure to be disappointed. Nothing would ever silence Bartley.
“Help!” Bartley shouted. “Cave-in! I'm trapped! Loader, get over here!” That last was directed to the semi-intelligent robotic mining vehicle that was in Bartley's tunnel. The loader's main purpose was to collect and haul away the rubble once Bartley was done breaking it down. It could also prop up the roof of a tunnel in an emergency.
“I'm on my way,” Eric assured Bartley over the headset, and Naomi said she was coming, too, though she sounded a bit reluctant—maybe wary of entering an unstable tunnel, maybe just not so excited to go visit Bartley in person.
Eric withdrew his drills from the bore holes he'd created. The process of retracting them, collapsing them, and tilting them upright was laboriously slow, but necessary for safety. For anyone else, the quicker course would have been to leave the exoskeleton and just run over to the emergency site on foot.
His legs were stiff and slow, though, so he waited until he could turn the entire exoskeleton, which was mounted on a pair of tracked treads. He drove it out into the larger, sloping main tunnel, then down to the entrance to the smaller, recently blasted exploratory tunnel where Bartley had been working to clear the heavy black rock.
When Eric arrived, the loader bot was already lifting a massive chunk of rock from the heap that pinned down Bartley's exoskeleton.
The exoskeleton lay across the narrow tunnel, with Bartley trapped inside. The rig was dirty and dented even at the best of times, with few traces of its original bright yellow paint remaining. The long, dense cylinder of the industrial hammer pointed straight ahead toward the collapsed end of the tunnel where Bartley had been working.
“Still alive in there?” Eric asked, rolling forward as close as he could on his treads. His exoskeleton wobbled back and forth as he traveled over rocky debris.
“Doing great!” Bartley gave a sarcastic thumbs-up inside his protective head cage. His thick mat of curly red hair and his bulldoggish freckled face were damp with sweat.
“Loading,” the loader bot said. It was boxy, its head and arms squarish, almost like a child's drawing of a simple robot. It was a head taller than a grown man, and wider. Its blocky hands were shaped like excavator buckets, and they were busy transporting the mass of debris over to a long, low-slung mining truck, dropping it into the dumping bed in back. “Unloading,” it announced, in case anyone was curious.
“Let me give you a hand,” Eric offered. He reached out with his drills, but didn't activate them. He nudged some of the larger debris pieces off of Bartley. Even with the robot's help, it would take a long while to clear the rockfall so that Bartley's exoskeleton could be righted again.
“Loading,” the loader bot announced, shuffling back toward Bartley and reaching out its massive, blocky arms.
“This would happen just before clock-out,” Bartley grumbled. The loader bot gradually lifted away two big scoops of the rocky debris that trapped him.
“If you're in a hurry, I bet Naomi would be willing to blast you out of there,” Eric said.
“True,” Naomi answered over the earpiece. Then she arrived on a tracked single-person scouting vehicle. She wore no exoskeleton, just a mining helmet, basic safety coveralls, and boots. She parked by the compact dump truck and jumped off, then slowed as she approached the crumbling tunnel with the fallen rocks. “We need emergency bolts and shotcrete down here,” she said, touching her helmet. Then she looked at Bartley and shook her head, her beaded braids clinking where they trailed out the back of her helmet. She grimaced down at him, her teeth white against her dark skin. “Told you to shut your mouth and work. I hope you don't expect overtime for this stunt.”
“Stunt? I'm the one trapped here. I was ready to head out, hit the party scene, pop a few happies...” Bartley cast a hopeful look up at Naomi. “You should probably try to cheer me up. Maybe by heading out to Dirty Alley with me—”
“Gross.”
“You didn't hear the rest of my plan—”
“I don't even want to hear the rest of that sentence,” Naomi said.
Naomi answered questions on her earpiece, assuring their boss they didn't need medics and had the situation under control.
Eric reached one of his exoskeleton's giant industrial arms to the storage slots on the back of his exoskeleton and shed the drill bit. He replaced it with a two-fingered clamp and extended that toward the rubble pile on top of Bartley.
“Man, it's still creepy watching you do that with no hands,” Bartley commented, shaking his sweaty, freckled bulldog face. “Just sitting there twiddling your thumbs.”
“Get yourself a backjack,” Eric told him, while carefully lifting a black boulder off his co-worker's toppled exoskeleton. “A lifetime of random back spasms and weird dreams is worth being able to tap your fingers while you work your rig's arms.” He set it aside. “Can you retract your hammer yet?”
“Probably worth trying, huh?” Bartley worked at his controls. After a minute, the two-meter-long battering ram began to drag across the floor, sliding back into its housing on Bartley's exoskeleton arm. Black rocks glittering with quartz and pyrite clattered to the floor as it moved.
“If I didn't know better,” Naomi said, “I'd say it looks like you were trying to bash your way deep into that reef, looking for gold, when I told you to break up what we already blasted.”
“Look, we're all trying to save time, strike it rich, go home,” Bartley said.
“But instead we're wasting time cleaning up your mess!” Naomi snapped. “I should let you stay here all night. Everyone else is leaving for clock-out.”
“Isn't Hagen coming around with the supports and shotcrete?” Eric asked.
“Don't get involved, Eric,” Naomi said. “I think it's about time I put together a report on Bartley's recklessness. Pass that up to Burt Reamer. What do you think the general manager would say about this, Bartley?” Naomi raised her pocket screen, taking snapshots of Bartley trapped under fallen rocks and looking generally incompetent. “We'll need a damage assessment on your exoskeleton, too.”
“Come on, don't get Reamer involved. That pock-faced bean-counter—”
“Shut up!” Naomi held up one hand. With the other, she pulled the radio plug from her ear. “You guys hear that?”
“I don't hear—” Bartley began, until she glared him into silence.
Eric heard it. Like drops, hundreds of drops. “That can't be rain, can it? We're too far underground—”
The creatures emerged from the broken heap of slag where Bartley had been hammering, and they spread out in all directions—up the walls, upside down on the ceiling, over the shattered rocks on the floor to the spot where Bartley lay trapped. There were dozens of pale, hairless, mottled creatures, each one the size of a small dog.
They resembled toads. Their vestigial eyes were blind and shrunken, and their mouths were huge and full of needle-like teeth. Their four limbs ended in suction-cup toes that enabled them to climb quickly through cave tunnels. Climbers, they were called. They were carnivorous and typically hunted the small blind mammals and lizards that inhabited the underground.
Climbers usually ran from humans...but Eric usually only encountered them one or two at a time. It looked they'd hit a hive, or nest, or whatever the climbers lived in, because these weren't fleeing. They were attacking, hissing and opening their toothy mouths wide as they moved out in a spreading swarm of pale white flesh.
A line of the creatures charged over the rubble at Bartley, who shouted a string of profanity at the sight of them. The climbers weren't so much venomous as filthy, their teeth filled with alien bacteria that could leave a nasty, deadly infection.
Bartley was shielded from rock debris inside his exoskeleton, but it was far from airtight. There were plenty of openings through which the climbers could reach him. The climbers looked hungry, too, gnashing their teeth, ready to tear him apart where he lay trapped, like meat in a cage.
While Naomi screamed for their security bot to come, Eric rolled forward and activated his remaining drill bit. He stabbed it into the nearest creature, the one almost close enough to climb inside Bartley's exoskeleton and start eating him.
The spinning tip of the drill punctured the climber's pale skin, sending black blood everywhere. The creature kicked and flailed its four rubbery white limbs as the drill bit tore through its chest. Its brushy needle teeth snapped and chomped at empty air.
The ugly blind toad-thing finally fell still, lying in a sticky puddle of black blood that was barely visible against the volcanic-rock floor.
More climbers crawled over it. That was one down, but dozens more remained, and even more boiled out from the heap of rock crumbs ahead with their jaws snapping and clapping, like angry fire ants intent on defending their mound.
Eric turned his drill toward a second one, but he couldn't hope to stop them all.
Chapter Two
“Security!” Naomi shouted, jamming her earpiece back into place. “We need bug bombs down here.” Then she drew a pistol-sized weapon with a bright orange plastic shell from her belt. Heavy weaponry was prohibited for a list of safety and insurance reasons. Miners were allowed to bring electrical shockers like the one in Naomi's hand, meant for running off hostile wildlife. No intelligent life had been found on this remote rocky world, nor in any of the dozens of solar systems humans had explored so far. Life seemed relatively abundant, but intelligence rare.
Naomi zapped a creature that was crawling on its sucker-toes along the tunnel wall toward her. Its mouth opened in a shriek, electricity crackling among its needle-teeth. The climber whipped back and forth, keeping its grip on the wall even as it belched up bloody foam, and then fell silent and still. It hung there like a gruesome decoration.