Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  “You have to transfer me back!” Reamer raised his orange shocker at Alanna, drawing a gasp from Prentice. “You have to give me back my life, everything your father took from me—”

  “You could have quit,” Alanna said, coolly.

  “And start over somewhere else? At my age? I'd end up cleaning the burger-flipping machine at a Greasy Gary's.”

  “Perhaps you should have kept your comments about women's legs to yourself, then,” Alanna said. “And your hands.”

  “Hey, guy, you might have problems, but I have a big bleeding hole in my face right now, and I'm calmer than you are.” Eric was still pressing the blood-soaked silk handkerchief against his wound. “Can you please put down the shocker and let me go hit the first aid?”

  “You're against me, too?” Reamer turned the orange shocker at Eric. He backed up, giving himself a better shot at all three of them, in case any of them tried to move closer. “That thing was no accident. Alanna's people set it up, sent it down here to kill me—”

  “No,” Alanna said. “I've never seen equipment like that before. It was most likely Caffey Industries. They're disputing the claim boundary.”

  “Like I'm going to believe that.” Reamer was really sweating now, shaken up, like the mine was driving him crazy. Maybe he had claustrophobia, and that was why he never came down, just monitored everything via remote feed from his office. He looked ready to zap someone, maybe all of them. “Like I'm going to believe this was all a coincidence—”

  Then the world shook, and Reamer's personal beliefs suddenly mattered a lot less.

  For a moment, Eric thought it was an earthquake, which itself was never a pleasant experience when you were already deep underground.

  Then the wall exploded. Shattered kelp sculptures erupted behind Reamer, flinging chunks of stone towards all of them. Rocks rained down on the treasure trove, one caving in the head of a platinum marine mammal near the top, another bashing a silver shark's jaw sideways, making it disgorge its golden seahorse and starfish, which rained down to the floor like a jackpot paying off in gold coins.

  Eric dove to the floor as rocks pelted the ground around them. Some of the smaller chunks punched him in the back. He glimpsed Alanna hitting the floor, too, cursing a mile a minute.

  Then a thick cloud of rock debris rolled out, obscuring everything. Eric was glad he still had the air filter strapped over his nose and mouth, or he would've been coughing out dust for a month.

  When the ground stopped trembling, and the rocks stopped flying, Eric stood and cranked up the light on his mining helmet, trying to penetrate the haze of dusty fog.

  “Everyone okay?” Eric asked. He was trying to get his bearings. “I think someone blasted that wall.”

  “Caffey,” Alanna said. Her silhouette was barely visible in the dirt fog as she pushed herself to her feet. “Had to be them. Blasting in our claim. I can't wait until my lawyers sink their teeth into his throat.”

  “I second that,” Prentice croaked from somewhere in the dust cloud.

  “Where's Reamer?” Eric drew his shocker and stalked toward where the man had last been seen.

  Reamer was gone, but the fiber cable that had been unspooling from his belt was still visible on the floor, among the shattered kelp and sea creature sculptures.

  Eric followed the cable through the rubble, still having trouble seeing a more than a meter or so ahead in the thick dust. The cable led him ahead into the unknown, but he didn't dare give up now, in case Reamer was waiting to jump out and attack them again.

  “We need to get out of here,” Alanna said quietly, completely out of Eric's range of sight now. “Tell that miner guy to come back.”

  “Miner guy!” Prentice barked at Eric. “Come back!”

  “Wait.” Eric continued, losing sight of the cable where it ran underneath a heap of raw quartz rubble. He wished for the powerful arms of his exoskeleton.

  He found the cable again, but it quickly ran away into a mound of dirt almost as tall as Eric himself.

  Eric had reached the wall—or the spot where the wall had once been, until something blasted a huge hole in it very recently. Chunky volcanic soil had poured in after this section of the wall had been destroyed.

  The cable ran right into the huge mound of rocky dirt.

  Eric frowned. Reamer had been standing a few meters ahead of here, in the kelp-forest clearing with the heap of treasure.

  “Miner guy, hurry!” Alanna snapped. “We don't know if Caffey's done blasting yet or not.”

  “This doesn't make sense,” Eric said. “He wasn't here when the wall exploded. How could he have run back here fast enough to get buried in all this dirt by the wall? And why would he? You think something dragged him?”

  “Who cares?” Prentice asked.

  Eric kept looking at how the cable ran along the floor, under the huge mound of dirt. He couldn't puzzle it out. Finally, he picked up the cable and began to pull on it. It was heavy, but it slid as he pulled. He took a few steps back, towing the weight with him. Then it stopped moving, as if it had been caught against something under the dirt.

  “Come give me a hand!” Eric shouted to the others.

  They didn't reply, and he couldn't see them. It wasn't hard to imagine Alanna and Prentice running back the way they'd come, abandoning him.

  Then two forms emerged from the dust. Eric was shocked at the sight of them—coated in rock dust, colorless, like ghosts. He looked down at himself and saw the same. They were all lucky to be alive, and they were pressing their luck by not running away immediately.

  “Just help me pull,” Eric said.

  Alanna let out a long, annoyed breath, then nudged Prentice's arm. “Go help him.”

  “I'm hardly dressed for this kind of work,” Prentice protested, even as he took up the cable in both hands.

  “The greatest dry cleaner in the universe couldn't help your outfit now,” Alanna said.

  “Why are we even helping this guy?” Prentice grunted, while he and Eric dragged more of the cable back out of the dirt mound. “Wasn't he just attacking us?”

  “Don't think of it as helping him,” Eric said. “Think of it as making sure he's not hiding somewhere waiting to attack us again.”

  “Now that I can get behind.”

  Eric pulled harder. The cable suddenly seemed to tighten up, and he and Prentice both grunted as they gave one big, hard tug.

  Then Reamer’s screaming head popped up out of the dirt, followed by his shoulders.

  His mining helmet was gone, and his coveralls were shredded. Deep red slash marks had been carved into him from his nearly bald head, down his face and neck, and across his arms and torso. The blood mixed with the dirt that coated him, turning it into a muddy brown sludge. The man looked like he'd been battered inside a rock tumbler, or maybe thrown into a giant blender. He was misshapen, as though every major bone in his body was broken.

  Reamer's mouth had been slashed open from the left corner all the way to his ear, and his jaw hung at an odd angle, as though the hinge joint on that side had been snapped. Reamer kept screaming; it looked like he couldn't have closed his mouth if he wanted.

  Eric kept pulling, but Reamer seemed stuck in the dirt up to his chest, jutting sideways out of the shattered wall. It didn't help that Prentice reacted by dropped the cable and backing up, adding his own screams to Reamer's.

  “What's happening?” Eric shouted at Reamer, but the man slumped, falling silent. Now Eric saw the gaping hole in the back of Reamer's skull, bone and dirt clogging his exposed brain. He was dying, maybe dead already.

  Eric dropped the cable and reached out to grab him by the hands, but Reamer was instantly sucked right back into the wall of dirt. Eric grabbed the cable again, but couldn't hold it. The cable was rushing ahead into the wall, like a fishing line caught on a great white shark that had no intention of slowing down. It was moving fast enough to burn his hands. Again, Eric wished for the strength of his exoskeleton. He felt helpless down in th
e mines without it.

  The cable kept whipping past at unbelievable speed. Eric backed away from it, and so did the others. All three watched it in silence.

  Then the cable went taut, smashing through more of the thin kelp statues in the process.

  A loud, repetitive crashing sound echoed from behind them, from the path they'd taken through the ocean room. Eric turned and saw something yellow banging across the floor like a stone skipping across a pond. He managed to dodge out of the way as the yellow com box from the main hallway came skittering across, dragging one severed fiber-optic cable and another intact one.

  The hard yellow plastic box hit the dirt and slurped away out of sight. The intact cable continued to follow it.

  Another clattering sounded, and Eric turned, pointing his shocker. Something metallic banged toward them through the stone kelp sculptures.

  The end of the cable arrived. The spool of cable that had been attached to Hagen's belt was attached. Eric didn't have to time see whether it looked like it had ripped free or been intentionally removed.

  The fiber-optic spool vanished into the wall of dirt.

  Then the room fell quiet, except for the soft pattering of dust from the recently shaken ceiling.

  “Let's go back now,” Alanna said. “That's an order.”

  Eric had no desire to argue.

  Chapter Eight

  Eric, Alanna, and Prentice made their way out of the ocean area. Eric found himself in the lead, not because he wanted to be, but because the other two fell in line behind him, as if trusting him to know best how to navigate the underground world. They weren't wrong, he supposed. He'd been on Caldera working the mines for less than a year, but out of the group, he had the most experience.

  Of course, putting him in the lead didn't mean Alanna and Prentice trusted him. It could also mean they hoped he would bear the brunt of any additional robo-snake attacks.

  Eric's wound bled openly. He'd lost Prentice's silk handkerchief at some point, but the thing was probably filthy with dirt anyway. Prentice certainly hadn't asked for it back.

  Dazed, and more grateful than ever for the air filter over his nose, Eric led the way, shuffling forward through the rocky cloud.

  “Something wrong with your legs?” Alanna asked.

  “Nothing that wasn't wrong with them yesterday,” he replied, but didn't elaborate.

  They emerged into the first chamber, the one built to resemble a flowery meadow with trees. It looked like the impact had rippled this way, too, because the walls and the tree-like columns had cracked. One column lay in pieces on the floor, and the ceiling above was still crumbling and leaking dust, like it would collapse any moment.

  “Hagen?” Eric called. “Naomi? Bartley?” He couldn't recall the geologist's name in his shaken state. He'd only just met her, and he wasn't great with names under the best of conditions.

  “Iris?” Alanna called out.

  No answers came from the citrine tunnel where the other team had gone.

  “We'd better get out of here.” Eric pointed to the weak spot in the ceiling.

  “You don't have to tell me twice,” Prentice said, and he and Alanna started toward the recently widened crack in the wall.

  “We're going back to the main tunnel!” Eric shouted, in case anyone could hear him, then he followed the others through.

  “Sir, you're injured!” Malvolio called out, unicycling over.

  “Unloading,” the loader bot added, gesturing with one excavator-bucket hand at the blood pulsing from the hole in Eric's cheek.

  “Yeah, I'm unloading blood fast,” Eric agreed. He walked to Hagen's cement truck, which had a larger first aid kit. He removed the medical staple gun. “Anybody want to help?”

  “Of course,” Alanna said. “Dexter, go help.”

  Prentice nodded and approached Eric. “I'm pretty sure you're supposed to clean the area first,” he said, finding a pack of sterilized wipes.

  “Probably,” Eric said. “I wasn't going to ask for that many favors at once.”

  Prentice cleaned up the wound. Then he injected a local anesthetic into Eric's face before stapling it back together. Prentice looked a little ill throughout the episode, but he got the job done.

  The other team's voices approached, coughing and wheezing. They emerged from the tunnel—Hagen first, then Naomi, Iris, and Bartley, all of them coated in dirt, coughing, barely staying on their feet as they held on to each other. It looked like they'd had a similar experience, only without their air-filter masks on. They collapsed to the floor of the tunnel, though the air wasn't much clearer here, either. But there was more room for the dust to spread out and settle.

  “What...the hell...happened?” Bartley asked between coughs.

  “I think it was Caffey Industries,” Alanna said. “They're backed by one of my father's rivals. And they've been arguing with us over the boundaries of our claims along this quartz reef. I never thought they'd resort to murder, though.” Alanna shook her head, spilling dust from her hair.

  “Murder?” Naomi asked.

  “You don't think the blast was just a mistake?” Hagen asked.

  “We encountered a weird robot probe just before the attack,” she told him. “They knew we were there. And then Reamer...”

  “Yeah, where is old bone-dome, anyway?” Bartley looked up and down the main tunnel.

  “And what happened to the cables?” Hagen asked. “Thing dragged me halfway across the room before I got it off my belt.”

  “We...don't actually know,” Prentice said.

  Hagen scowled at the bejeweled lawyer, then looked at Eric.

  “Reamer got dragged off,” Eric said. “Took the whole cable with him. And the com box.” Eric pointed up the main tunnel to where the yellow box should have been.

  “Dragged off?” Bartley looked from Eric to Alanna and Prentice, then back again. “Dragged off by what?”

  “We didn't really see. The wall got blasted open, and he got sucked inside.” Eric shrugged. “His skull was ruptured. There's no way he survived. And that's all we really know.”

  “It must have been some sort of mining equipment,” Naomi said. “Right? Somebody blasts the wall—our area got hit pretty hard, too, by the way—then Reamer gets caught in their loader, maybe, and hauled off to the slag heap.”

  “Loading?” the loader bot said, turning its boxy head toward Naomi. “Unloading?”

  “Exactly,” Naomi said.

  “And they wouldn't have noticed they were dragging a screaming guy along with them?” Bartley asked. “You know what I think dragged him off?”

  “Aliens?” Eric asked.

  “Bet your ass.” Bartley nodded sagely. Dust toppled from the brim of his mining helmet.

  “It seems like the loader operators would notice they were dragging a human being,” Hagen said.

  “Maybe they were remotely operated,” Naomi said. “Or fully automated. Robots who don't care about human life, just their assigned tasks.”

  “Unloading!” the loader bot said, sounding indignant.

  “He's right. Loader bots have deep safety protocols. The insurance companies require them,” Hagen said.

  “Loaded,” the loader bot said, more quietly, as if mollified. It settled back against its dump truck.

  “Besides, they saw us through the probe,” Alanna said. “They knew we were there. They blasted anyway.”

  “You mean they wanted us dead?” Prentice gasped. “Over a lawsuit? That seems far-fetched.”

  “Maybe they were mad about the snake-bot,” Eric said.

  “What is this snake-bot?” Naomi asked. “And can we talk about this up on the surface?”

  “Good idea. Then I can put in a call to Caffey's offices and tell them they're all dead,” Alanna said.

  “I would advise against that—” Prentice began.

  “All of them,” Alanna said. “Dead.”

  “I'll help,” Eric offered. The side of his face was numb from the anesthetic, and his
mouth felt like it wasn't working quite right. “They've almost killed me twice already.” He climbed up into his seat in the exoskeleton, unhooked the connecting wire from his leg braces, and plugged into the huge machine. He felt himself instantly swell in size and strength, his nervous system expanding to include all the silicon within the exoskeleton.

  “Let's not rush into killing anyone,” Hagen said. “Maybe let's collect a fact or two first. Loader, give Miss Li-Whitward and her attorney a ride back up to the surface.”

  The loader bot opened the grimy door to the dump truck's low-roofed passenger cab, which was where the two visitors must have ridden down in the first place. The bot then held one arm as if inviting them in. “Load,” the bot said.

  “Uh, thank you,” Prentice said. He let Alanna go first, offering her a hand, which she ignored as she climbed up into the cab. Prentice followed and closed the door.

  Eric noticed the geologist, Iris, back in the shadows as if forgotten. She had a shocked look on her dust-coated face.

  “Everything okay?” Eric asked her. “We have first aid. And water.”

  “I'm fine. Actually, water would be great.”

  Eric passed her a bottle from the insulated compartment under his seat, where he kept snacks and water along with his first aid kit.

  Iris joined Hagen in the cement truck, and then they were off. The loader truck followed after the cement truck, then it was Eric and Bartley in their exoskeletons, Naomi on her scouter, Malvolio and his unicycle taking up the rear.

  Finally, Eric let himself relax. Once they got up top, they could breathe some fresh air—well, as fresh as Caldera offered, anyway—clock out, relax. This whole situation was way over his head, but fortunately it wasn't his job to unravel it.

  They'd found gold today, he reminded himself. Not in the way they'd expected, but once they got the blasting situation straightened out, they could return and help themselves. Maybe it would be enough that he could go home. Even if not, it was a start. A start to providing Suzette with the life of their dreams.