Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  On top of the plated worm, Bartley drew a long knuckle knife from his boot and sliced through the tentacle that was plugged into the back of the laser cannon.

  The laser beam vanished. The plated worm twisted its head around, roaring and lunging at Bartley with its ring of outward-pointing teeth.

  “This way!” Naomi shouted. Eric glanced back and saw her holding up the little marshmallow of plastic explosive with the pin-sized detonator stuck inside. She just needed the worm's big mouth to turn in her direction.

  Something else rattled its way forward along the track on the worm's back. Long, thin, and automatically hammering while spinning at high speed, the device was plainly a rock drill, not wildly different from the one Eric used every day.

  Like the laser cannon, the drill was built artlessly, asymmetrical, mounted in careless blobs of concrete and rock.

  The worm's drill rattled along the track toward Bartley, while the laser cannon moved out of the way, back along a kind of switch track.

  “Bartley, get behind me!” Eric shouted. Eric's exoskeleton might have been on its last legs, but Bartley's was already destroyed, leaving him completely unprotected.

  “On my way!” Bartley leaped out of the path of the oncoming drill, landed on the floor, and dodged behind Eric's rig.

  The worm charged down at Eric, curving its body to attack him from two sides. The thundering, spinning drill came at him from one side, while the worm's roaring, tooth-ringed mouth came at him from the other.

  Eric lifted his clamp-hand and managed to block the worm's drill for the moment. The tip of the drill burned into Eric's clamp, sending showers of sparks and violent shudders through the barely functioning exoskeleton. The clamp arm wasn't going to hold up long.

  The worm's open maw came at him over the wreckage of the roadheader. The exoskeleton's arm on that side had been sheared into nothing but a sharply angled, laser-cut stump, glowing red along the edge.

  Eric could smell the breath from the worm's approaching mouth. Like the other worm, it smelled like rotten meat, like roadkill bloated on a highway in the summer sun, crawling with maggots.

  The worm's head was too low and too close to Eric; there was no way for Naomi to lob the plastic explosive at the worm because Eric and his exoskeleton blocked the way. He needed to move the worm somehow.

  Eric spotted the one blackened, damaged armor plate where he'd burned through with the roadheader, making brief but clearly painful contact with the wormflesh beneath. He had one opening, and he took it.

  He jabbed the sharp stump of his exoskeleton arm forward like a hot poker drawn from the fireplace. If he missed his mark, hit the worm anywhere except the exact spot where he'd already done some damage, he was dead. The worm's teeth were rushing toward him, ready to eat his face.

  The sharp, red-hot tip of the arm gouged through the blackened armor plate. Eric felt it sink into thick flesh beyond, heard it sizzling, smelled the frying blood.

  The worm drew back and rose up, its maw flaring wide in a long howl that echoed off the walls. It looked like it was preparing to swoop down and chomp Eric's head off.

  Bartley hacked off one of the slain worm's tentacles with his knife. He raised a long robotic tentacle-extender in triumph. Then he howled as he ran toward the remaining worm with it and whipped it forward.

  The long robotic tentacle avoided striking the plated worm, and instead coiled back around Bartley and bound his arms to his sides like a straitjacket.

  “Aw, damn it,” Bartley said. “This thing's all tangled somehow.”

  “I think you set off a security program!” Iris shouted at Bartley. She and Hagen had dashed over to the loader and were trying to disentangle it from the dead worm's grasping robotic tentacle-extenders.

  “Naw, these worms aren't smart enough for that,” Bartley said. “You're giving 'em too much credit. It's just randomly slapping around.”

  The tip of the tentacle coiled around Bartley's ankles and snapped his feet out from under him, sending him crashing into the worm entrails that coated the floor from the worm he'd sliced open.

  At the same time, something shot over Eric's head at high speed, a blurry white streak that flew into the roaring worm's flared mouth.

  Eric looked back to see Naomi holding a detonator remote in her hand. Beside her, Malvolio stood frozen in an exaggerated baseball pitcher's pose, one arm far forward, one foot way back. Naomi had used the robot as a targeting-and-launch device to hit the rapidly moving worm.

  The recorded sound of thousands of people applauding, cheering, and whistling erupted from Malvolio. “That's what we call a real ham-dinger, folks,” proclaimed a very nasal old-timey announcer's voice. “Hold on to your fedoras.”

  “Fire in the hole!” Naomi shouted. Then she clicked the button.

  The worm's head exploded. As the monster was rampant, towering above Eric, this meant Eric was immediately bathed in a shower of bright red blood, shark-sized teeth, and mixed gray and white gore, probably the worm's brain. The worm certainly did have a lot of brains, Eric thought, as the milky ruins of them came pouring down all over him.

  Eric, coated in the innards of more than one giant worm, had finally had enough. He detached his back jack from the wrecked exoskeleton—it was fizzling out now, anyway, all its systems offline, every part of it damaged, ready for the scrapyard.

  He stumbled down out of the seat, leaned against the exoskeleton, and unceremoniously said good-bye to his rig by vomiting on it. Fortunately, he hadn't eaten in hours, so there wasn't much. The machine was dripping in guts, anyway; adding a few of his own made no real difference.

  “Is that it?” Alanna stepped from behind the dump truck, where she'd taken cover. “Is it over?”

  “At this point, we should assume these tunnels are completely infested with man-eating worms packing major weaponry,” Hagen said. He wiped a black splatter of what might have been worm gizzard off his face.

  “Tools,” Eric said. “The drill, the cutter laser. The tentacles. Those were mining tools. We haven't seen their actual weapons yet.”

  “Yeah, it came after me with a drill.” Bartley lay on the sticky floor, struggling to escape the robotic tentacle. “Anyone want to give me a hand here? Naomi?”

  “Gotcha.” Naomi squatted beside him to help. She was acting calmer now, focused on the tasks at hand. Blowing up the big worm seemed to have improved her mood.

  “I certainly don't want to wait around and find out what their actual weapons can do,” Alanna said.

  “Everyone, load up,” Hagen said. “Triple-time, before their friends show up and want revenge.”

  They left in a hurry, expecting another attack any moment.

  With Malvolio in the lead to watch for danger and obstructions, they drove up the tunnel that would take them close to the highly developed Caffey Industries mining operation, where there would be hundreds of people.

  The dump truck followed, with the loader bot in its usual place up front, steering the truck through the tunnel. Alanna and Iris rode in the cab.

  With the cement mixer and exoskeletons destroyed, Eric, Bartley, and Hagen had to ride in the dumping bed of the dump truck, together with lots of rock dust and the dangerous, bundled-up relic. Naomi followed close behind, her scouter battered by some rocks Bartley had carved out of the ceiling, but still in working order.

  They looked like war refugees, filthy and bloody, bounced and jostled in the back of a truck rolling through darkness. They didn't speak, wishing to stay as quiet as possible to avoid more attention from the worms. They kept their lights dim and minimal.

  The surface waited somewhere ahead. Eric was exhausted, but fear kept him awake, kept him watching the dim shadows of the tunnel, waiting for more horrors.

  Far behind them, the large chamber with its secrets of a lost civilization lay in ruins, the statues carved up by the worm's laser or crushed under fallen rocks. The treasure room and the bug-pharaoh's sarcophagus chamber were buried under their collapsed ce
iling, turned to rubble by someone blasting their way down. And it now appeared that it might not be Caffey Industries at all, but the worms themselves who'd been blasting and digging above them this whole time.

  He wondered where the worms had come from and why they were here. Maybe, like the humans on Caldera, there were gathering up heavy metals like gold and platinum, raw material for their wormy electronics and wormy industries.

  Or maybe, like the gatekeepers, they knew about the lost relics of the ancients, and they were searching for the one that was here in the dump truck with them, about a meter away from where he sat, pushed into a corner and pinned there with volcanic rock fragments. If so, the worms would probably be back, as soon as they figured out the humans had taken the relic.

  Somewhere ahead, Eric told himself, waited human civilization. Soon they would emerge onto the surface and leave this hellish nightmare underworld behind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “What the hell happened here?” Bartley murmured, looking over the wall of the dump truck's bed. They'd had a long, bumpy, extremely unpleasant ride up. Eric, Bartley, and Hagen had spent most of the time getting slammed around. A layer of rock dust clung to the layer of worm blood that coated Eric, and all of it slowly mixed into a dark, foul sludge.

  They'd made it out of the old mantid complex alive. A huge round tunnel that looked freshly bored had let them up to the cavernous workspace of the Caffey Industries operation.

  While their mine was little more than a series of early-development exploratory tunnels, the Caffey operation was far more established, with conveyor belts running to and from rock crushers and other machines that broke down the raw rock, separating out much of the slag before the more valuable materials were sent to the refineries downriver. The dump trucks here were the size of apartment blocks, with hulking Goliath-sized loader bots attached on the rear. The mining exoskeletons were not as bulky and aged as those Eric and Bartley had used.

  It was a massive operation.

  And it had been completely destroyed.

  Most of the regular lights were out, but a number of dim red emergency lights still glowed, independently powered by their own batteries.

  By this hellish red light, they could see the destruction of the trucks and all the other equipment. It looked as though a fiery hurricane had swept through, torching and throwing everything.

  “Where is everybody?” Eric asked.

  “If they were smart, they ran out of here as fast as they could,” Hagen said.

  They rode through the devastation. Walls were blown out and portions of the ceiling had collapsed. Severed wires and cables lay strewn across the floor. Had there been any power, the wires would have been sparking and hissing, creating a major electrocution hazard.

  The dump truck couldn't move very fast, navigating through so much devastation. It slowed to a crawl as it approached the wreckage of what had been an area with offices and a small cafeteria or break room. The shattered remnants of Penguin Soda and Quickie-Burger vending machines lay among the debris.

  Here, the dump truck braked completely.

  “Why are we stopping?” Bartley asked. “We shouldn't be stopping until there's open sky overhead. And I don't see any happy smog-filled clouds around here.”

  The cab door of the dump truck opened, and Alanna and Iris both stepped out.

  “What's the problem?” Naomi asked. She pulled around from the back of the truck and braked near Alanna. “I don't see anything blocking the way.”

  “Just a quick stop,” Alanna said.

  “The porcupine will explain,” Iris said. The little robot, recharged after the long drive up but still badly in need of repairs, poked its head up in the cab window like a dog on a road trip, snout sensors twitching. “Play the video you showed us, and zoom in on the part we pinpointed.”

  The porcupine opened its mouth, or at least a small hatch on the underside of the snout that looked like a mouth. A cone of intense bright light projected from it, illuminating the area with white light, much brighter than the dull red emergency strips.

  “The blood,” Naomi whispered. “It's everywhere.”

  Eric could see it—under the white light, it was clear that red streaks and smears were all over the damaged, burnt wreckage all around them. It wasn't just a scene of fire and destruction; it had been a massacre.

  “Where are all the bodies?” Bartley asked.

  “Eaten,” Eric said, glancing at the shattered walls. “Eaten by worms.”

  “There must be a hundred of the bastards,” Bartley said. “I say we go up top, grab a couple of plasma cannons, then come back down and do some worm hunting.”

  “Come back? Are you crazy?” Naomi asked.

  “These worms are crazy if they think they're going to get away with this!” Bartley said.

  “Loader, over here.” Alanna snapped her fingers and pointed at a heap of rubble where the offices had been. “Start digging.”

  “Loading.” The robot detached from the dump truck and shambled over to join her. He scooped up double fistfuls of broken ceiling tiles and fragments of flimsy particle-plastic tables, then turned to drop them into the dumping bed, where Eric still stood with Bartley and Hagen. “Unloading.”

  “Hey, not here!” Eric shouted, holding up his hands to protect his head against the debris heaped in the loader's bucket hands.

  “Unloading?” the robot asked.

  “I don't know.” Eric pointed to the burned-out husk of a Caffey dump truck nearby. “Unload into that truck instead. Just not on top of us.”

  The robot turned to cooperate.

  “Uh...are you guys watching this?” Naomi asked.

  Eric turned his attention back to the porcupine's projection. It was a big hologram, floating above the ground, about a few meters on each side, showing data the little roving drone had collected while it was apart from them.

  It showed the same room in which they now stood, but in a very different condition; scores of workers in orange mining helmets and red jumpsuits with the Caffey Industries logo crowded the area, while rocky ore poured in from multiple directions to be crushed and processed. It was likely the lowest level of the Caffey operation; workers at higher levels would drop raw rock down shafts to be processed, saving the energy cost of transporting dead slag to the surface.

  The walls began to rupture, and armor-plated worms burst into the room from the walls. One worm even crashed down through the ceiling, raining rocks onto the miners below.

  The viewpoint shifted; apparently the porcupine-bot had turned its head. The spot where Eric and the others had just emerged came into view, but it was a solid wall in the hologram, with a rack of tools standing against it.

  There was a crash and the tool rack toppled over as the wall ruptured behind it.

  Then something emerged that looked like the biggest, craziest roadheader Eric had ever seen. Dozens of spirals of metallic cutting teeth spun on every side of it at once, the cutting drums arranged over a long, cylindrical shape.

  It took Eric a moment to realize that that the cylindrical shape wasn't a mechanical frame at all. As the head of it emerged from the perfectly circular tunnel it had just carved through the rock, he realized it was another giant worm, its front end completely covered in rows of drums, each drum with scores of whirling metal cutting teeth. It opened its jaws and roared, as if to announce its arrival or the completion of its tunnel, revealing rings of sharky teeth lining its muscular red throat.

  The immense roadheader-worm swayed its head from side to side, then withdrew into the tunnel and out of sight.

  Less than a minute later, a dozen more armor-plated worms, nearly as big as the last two they'd faced, came boiling up out of the new tunnel.

  The mine workers ran and screamed as the monsters slithered out. Some of the big worms began chomping and tearing into the people, as if they'd been starving and just stumbled into a buffet.

  Other worms raised metallic, rock-encrusted tubes on their bac
ks and fired balls of glowing plasma, igniting the heavy machinery, burning people alive.

  “Fast forward to the pinpointed part,” Alanna said, glancing over her shoulder. The loader bot had almost cleared the wreckage from the mine's offices and cafeteria.

  The holographic recording zipped forward in time and zoomed in on a smarmy-looking twentyish man in a tailored suit. He ran inside a solid mahogany door at the end of the row of offices—all the other offices had clear glass doors, so this was the only office offering privacy, a sure sign of high rank among executive types. He slammed the door just as the ceiling crashed down in a heap of burning debris, trapping him inside.

  In the real, non-recorded world, the loader bot backed up with a series of warning beeps, hauling out double fistfuls of hardwood flooring and paneling, high-end materials not found in the rest of the mine. The cafeteria had been flimsy plastic tables and ceiling tiles that looked like styrofoam; the young man's office was full of broken Tiffany lamps and gold-leaf fixtures, all of it now headed for the scrapyard.

  “Did somebody hide a luxury hotel suite down here?” Hagen asked, lifting an eyebrow at this new flavor of wreckage. He climbed out of the dump truck.

  “This is Bowler Caffey Junior's office,” Alanna said. “Which probably includes a private marble bathroom with a hydrospa and massage table. And probably a separate bedroom for screwing assorted female employees.”

  “You seem to know a lot about his office layouts,” Naomi said.

  “We know all about the Caffey family,” Alanna told her. “Probably more than they know about each other, because they don't have a team of private investigators watching each other round the clock. If they did, our team of investigators would know about it. That family has a walk-in closet crammed full of skeletons. Hell, a whole storage facility full of them.”

  “Unloading,” the loader bot announced, clearing away the last remnants of an entire wall. What lay beyond looked like some kind of gentleman's club, dark wood paneling and gold leaf fixtures under broken chandeliers, picture-window frames surrounding cracked screens. There was even a wet bar in one corner, all of its bottles and crystalware shattered into sparkling heaps.