by Max Carver
“You hired me from the Antikytheran Society,” Iris said. “Your people approached them looking for a top-quality geologist. Which I am. But there was a possibility of discovering a relic like this, yes.”
“Like what?” Alanna snapped. “You say it's of extremely high value to both schools of gatekeepers. Yet you say you have no idea what it is.”
“Exactly, yes.”
A tense silence arose as Alanna and Iris stared at each other. Eric looked for Naomi to check on her. She sat under the bug altar, leaning against one of the mantid statues supporting it, staring off into space.
“If you don't explain yourself, then you, and your weird cursed relic that you're too scared to touch, can walk your way up out of this mine,” Alanna said. “You think I won't fire you and leave you alone in the dark down here? Try me.”
Iris sighed and ran her fingers through her blue-black hair.
“All right,” she said. “Unlike everything else down here, this relic wasn't created by the mantids. One mantid—from the looks of the body after we removed it, it was originally just a small mantid, maybe one of the working-caste ones— obviously found this relic and used its power to make himself a god-king among his species, ruler of the gray-mantid civilization.”
“What power?” Alanna asked, her ears practically perking up at the word, like a dog hearing someone mention food.
“Like I said, I don't know what it's really supposed to do,” Iris said. “I can tell you it was made by the ancients, the same ones who built the wormhole gates, who connected all these habitable systems together across impossible distances. We don't know how long they've been gone, or why they vanished, but we think it's been a hundred thousand years or more. Aside from the wormhole gates, we've found only a few scattered relics of the ancients. But like the gates themselves, these relics possess powers and capabilities we barely understand. It's imperative they be collected and studied. I told you the Antikytheran Society is devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We have no higher priority than finding whatever technology of the ancients that we can.”
“And what happens when somebody decides to use these old relics and their powers to make himself god-king of the humans?” Hagen asked. “Is that possible?”
“It's a very real danger,” Iris said. “That's one reason these relics must be found, gathered up, and placed under control.”
“Under whose control?” Hagen asked.
“The Antikytheran Society. Of course.” Iris looked annoyed with him.
“All right,” Alanna said. “Your gatekeeper masters may have you on some secret mission here, but that relic belongs to me. Not your Society. This is my claim, and I spent a lot of cash securing it. You are here as my employee or not at all, Iris. Understood?”
Iris nodded. “Yes, ma'am,” she whispered, meek and quiet again, looking down at her boots. Alanna gave a curt nod, as though this show of submission satisfied her.
“One more question,” Alanna said. “Why did you want Eric to pick up the relic, but not Naomi?”
“Women are typically more sensitive to the technology of the ancients. Most gatekeepers are women. There's an intuitive aspect to the interface. We hesitate to call it 'psychic.' But there was less risk in having a male come in contact with the relic.”
“But there was a risk?” Eric asked. “Of me turning into a kilometer-high snarling demon like Naomi?”
“She got better,” Iris pointed out.
“So wrap it up and throw it into the dump truck,” Alanna said. “And move out, back to the surface. Finally.”
Hagen removed his jacket and bundled up the masked helmet inside it. Then Eric lifted the bundle with his clamp, much less worried about damaging the ancient relic than he had been before learning it was brimming with strange and possibly dangerous powers. After what they'd just seen, he would've preferred to leave it behind—but technically, it did belong to Alanna and her family. Eric just worked here.
As he deposited the relic into the dumping bed of the dump truck, another rumble sounded above, and dust puffed out from one of the archways. Scraping and dragging echoed from there.
Something was approaching.
Eric and Bartley rolled slowly toward it, ready to use their exoskeletons to try and grapple with whatever came next. Naomi finally stood, looking toward the sound, and walked back over to rejoin the group, quietly seeking safety in numbers.
The scraping, rasping sound grew louder and closer. Finally, a form shambled out of the shadowy archway, dragging pieces of itself, several of its antennae snapped and sensors hanging loose and broken.
The little porcupine-shaped scouting drone was battered, beaten, and scorched, but it was still working, and it had finally found its way back to them.
Chapter Sixteen
“Little guy made it!” Bartley said, while Naomi picked up the small, badly injured crawling robot. “I thought it he was a goner. A long goner.”
“He'll need to charge,” Naomi said. She carried the porcupine to the dump truck cab. The porcupine extended its tail-like charging cable from its rear end and plugged into a dashboard charger. Then it curled up like a sleepy cat inside the grimy windshield and fell still, contentedly sucking power from the truck's fuel cell.
“Eric, I didn't tell you everything,” Naomi said. She didn't seem to care that everyone could hear her, despite the privacy of the subject she was raising. “Taryn wasn't my first son. He was my second. Arris was my first.”
“Oh,” Eric said, feeling everyone's eyes turning on them. “What...happened to the first one?”
“Nothing. Except when he was three years old, his baby brother died. Then his mother ran away and never came back. That's all that happened to him.” Naomi looked steadily into Eric's eyes, her jaw set, her eyes wrung out and red from crying, but her crying was done. “I broke after the new baby died. I ran. My son doesn't know where I am. He was three when I left. Seven by now. What you all just saw? That's who I am on the inside. The evil mother. The monster mother who destroys her children.”
Everyone was quiet for a minute, and then Hagen said: “I can tell you one thing, Naomi. That mask might have shown us how you see yourself, but it wasn't showing the truth. Those are two different things.”
“What matters is what I did to my little boy, abandoning him like that. It's unforgivable.”
“I am sorry you have all these bad memories,” Alanna said, her tone indicating that she was trying to sound sympathetic, but it was taking her a real effort to do so. “We have to get moving, though. Urgently.”
Naomi nodded.
Then the huge worm, its anterior end encased in a now-solid mountain of concrete, twitched and shifted where it lay on the floor. Much of its length was still beyond the archway where it had entered; they had yet to see its far end.
“Oh, hell, no! You stay down!” Bartley shouted. He and Eric veered away from the archway where the porcupine had emerged and rolled toward the worm instead.
“It can't still be alive,” Eric said. “Can it?”
“Loader, Malvolio, get ready for a fight,” Hagen said. Malvolio raised his hands in karate-chop fashion.
The boxy yellow bot, still standing by the fallen worm, swiveled its head toward Hagen, then raised and lowered its arms in a shrug. “Load?”
“Right, you don't have combat software.” Hagen removed his screen from his pocket and expanded the clear plastic display screen by pulling two opposing corners apart. “I'm going to take manual control of you for a bit, okay, buddy?”
“Loading.” The robot swiveled its head back toward the twitching, shifting worm and raised its excavator-bucket hands.
As Bartley and Eric drew close, the big worm rocked from side to side.
Two more worms crawled out of the archway, one atop the giant worm and one alongside it. The giant worm wasn't coming back to life, it was getting jostled by new arrivals. These two were smaller in diameter, but each one was still as thick as a rhinoceros. Eri
c felt his blood go cold at the sight of them.
The two worms blindly nudged along the length of the huge dead one, repeatedly bumping it with their heads as if trying to awaken it.
Everyone in the room froze, watching, waiting. Eric didn't dare breathe, afraid the slight noise might draw their attention to him. He would prefer if they decided to turn away and leave quietly; the last thing he wanted was to try and survive another fight with these monsters.
One raised its head and flipped its lip outward so that long, sharp teeth radiated out around its maw. It let out a wailing bellow, higher-pitched than the giant worm's had been.
A moment later, the other worm did the same, flipping out its teeth before emitting a high-pitched wail.
“Are they...mourning the big one?” Naomi whispered.
“They're calling for help. Attack!” Hagen shouted. He turned his attention to the transparent screen in his hands, using his thumbs to control the yellow loader bot. The bot closed up its bucket-hands into fists and punched the nearest of the two new worms, the one that lay alongside the huge dead worm.
The worm recoiled at the impact. While it gave no sign of retreating, it at least ceased bellowing for a moment. It turned toward the loader bot, which dealt it another solid wallop. The worm rocked back, then swayed like a cobra, weirdly reminding Eric of a boxer in a ring.
Bartley struck the same worm with his industrial hammer, slamming the worm back into the wall.
“Come at me again!” Bartley shouted, retracting the thick steel battering ram. “I can do this all night.”
Eric activated his roadheader and reached toward the second worm, the one on top of the huge dead one. The roadheader's dozens of steel teeth spun, ready to chew and destroy. But the worm pulled back, swaying like the other one, staying out of reach.
“What are you waiting for?” Eric shouted. “Come at me!”
The worm stiffened, and a series of crashing metallic clangs sounded from beyond the archway, from the portion of the worm's body Eric couldn't see.
It took Eric a moment to process what happened next.
A wave of metallic dinner-sized plates washed over the worm, like an ocean wave crashing on the beach. Each plate seemed to find its own predetermined spot and then lock into place. Scores of the plates surrounded the worm, connecting to each other like intelligent puzzle pieces, creating a spiked metallic shell.
“Armor,” Eric said, but his voice was too quiet for anyone to hear over all the clanging, self-directed armor plates. So he switched on his suit's speakers and shouted: “Armor! They've got armor!”
Something similar happened to the worm battling Bartley and the loader. A dozen or more long, thin, segmented metal snakes—similar to the one that had drilled a hole in Eric's cheek—slithered up along the worm's body on all sides. They attached themselves to the tiny rat-tail tentacles dotting the worm's hide.
Suddenly the worm had more than a dozen robotic tentacles, each one several meters long, extending its reach and strength just as Eric's exoskeleton arms did for him.
Eric had no time to indulge in his shock that the worms possessed advanced tech, because the big alien beasts immediately went on the warpath.
The first worm lashed its metal tentacle-extenders at the loader and Bartley, coiling around every limb of the big robot and the hulking exoskeleton. One tentacle coiled around Bartley's protective head cage, and another probed at the treads supporting him.
“Uh-oh.” Bartley put it in reverse, but the powerful robotic tentacles held him in place.
The loader bot was completely caught, too, despite Hagen's desperate remote-control attempts to get it free. Hagen's thumbs flew up and down all over his screen. His face was sweaty, his eyes bulging.
At the same time, the plated worm finally decided to fight Eric, a convenient choice now that it was heavily armored.
The plated worm lunged down toward him, turning to broadside him with its armored shell. Eric's rig shuddered hard at the impact, and his teeth clattered together.
Eric attacked the worm with the weapons he had, bashing it with the clamp arm, then slamming the spiraling cutting teeth of the roadheader into the worm's side.
A storm of sparks and metallic screeches erupted where the roadheader attempted to dig into the armor. The device was designed for cutting tunnels in rock, and it had managed to penetrate the first giant worm's tough hide, but Eric wasn't surprised to find it wasn't very effective against armor that was advanced enough to crawl into place on its own.
With a thought, Eric shut down his clamp arm and his treads, diverting all his exoskeleton's power to the spinning drum of the roadheader. He pushed it far past its top-rated speed, brushing away the suit's automatic safety and shutdown protocols.
A layer of glowing red formed at the contact point between spinning roadheader and armor plate. Red-hot steel teeth popped off the roadheader, flying here and there across the vaulted cavern. The teeth that remained turned to glowing, molten mush.
He pressed the red-hot spinning tool forward, determined to do at least some sort of damage to the worm while he could, hoping he could puncture at least one armor plate.
And it worked.
His roadheader attachment pressed forward, crushing hot, soft metal inward against wormflesh. The worm screeched and recoiled, wriggling back atop the giant-worm carcass.
“That's the brand of the double-R ranch on Gideon,” Eric said. He could imagine the double wrought-iron R's on the front gate—for Roy Rowan, his father.
The sound of bending, twisting metal grated on his ears. The worm with the tentacle-extenders was prying Bartley's rig apart, pulling it in all directions, stressing and snapping it, breaking it down bolt by bolt, screw by screw. Another minute and Bartley would be completely exposed, and the worm's tentacles would be able to strangle Bartley to death, or maybe rend him limb from limb, quartering him like a medieval criminal.
“I'm going to get killed by a giant freaky sex toy,” Bartley said, shaking his head at the many-tentacled alien worm dismembering his rig. “Grandma was right.”
The loader wasn't getting torn apart, not yet, but half a dozen steel tentacles held it in place, rendering it useless. Hagen swore again and again as he worked the remote control app, trying to get the robot to budge.
A rattling sounded above Eric, like one of the railroads that crossed the immense green prairies back home.
A roughly cylindrical arrangement of long metallic tubes, curved and twisted together, embedded in some kind of brownish rock, clattered toward him down a ridge in the worm's armor, exactly like a train on a track. The construction of the device, whatever it was, seemed asymmetrical, sloppy somehow, in a way that almost bothered Eric's eyes to look at.
The twisted tube-cluster swung toward Eric as it approached. He saw the tips of seven metal tubes—different sizes, unevenly spaced from each other, held together by some kind of concrete—pointed toward him, glowing an intense bright blue.
Seven tiny streams of blue light flowed out of the tubes and joined together to form a single bright blue cutting laser as thick as Eric's arm.
The laser lopped off Eric's glowing red roadheader attachment, which fell and clanked to the floor beside him. Eric barely had time to duck before the laser sliced through the cage that protected his head. He still had his mining helmet on, but he doubted that would protect him from the cutting beam.
The destruction of his suit created warning signals that flooded his nervous system like peals of electric guitar feedback, only less pleasant.
While Eric tried to get his suit responsive and under control again, the massive blue laser continued onward, hacking apart the sculpted mantids holding up the altar and idol at the center of the room. The entire sculpture came crashing down in a heap of rocks that glowed like burning coal along their cut edges.
Eric realized the worm was only destroying the altar to open a direct path to the area near the spider statue, where Iris stood with Naomi, Hagen, Alanna, an
d Malvolio. The group ducked and ran, seeking shelter in the next archway over, closer to the bat statue that hung upside from the high ceiling.
The beam hit the spider statue first, cutting its rock legs out from under it. The spider fell in chunks into the cavity below, filling the tunnel to the treasure room with even more rubble.
Eric tried to focus through the distress signals running all through his exoskeleton. He grunted as he managed to lift the one intact arm, but he couldn't get a response from the clamp at the end, couldn't get it to open or close.
A few meters away, Bartley yelled as his exoskeleton was finally torn apart around him. He leaped out from the seat and planted his heavy boots atop the tentacled worm. All of its tentacles were too wrapped up to immediately grab him.
Bartley bounded up onto the huge dead worm, and from there onto the armor-plated back of the worm with the big cutting laser.
He grabbed the rock-and-metal device that was firing the laser and wrenched it around, stretching and pulling the worm's stubby pink tentacle, which was inserted into the back of the worm's laser cannon.
Bartley pointed the laser upward so it wouldn't cut through the people in their group—but this dug a huge trench in the ceiling, and cracks spread outward from it. Chunks of rock rained down in the wake of the laser while Bartley swept it onward.
He brought it lower after passing the archway where the group huddled. He inadvertently cut the huge bat from its roost, sending it crashing to the floor and shattering.
Finally, he reached his target, the tentacled worm that had just ripped up his exoskeleton. He dropped the beam right through it, completely severing the worm's head.
The worm's front segment rolled away, trailing blood, its robotic tentacles whipping madly in every direction. Its head whipped from side to side, outward-pointing teeth threatening to skewer anyone who came too close, dangerous even in its death throes.
At the same time, the worm's headless body rose, bleeding, a gory cross-section of the creature revealed. Eric saw pulsing organs that might have been a heart and a lung among the viscera.