Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  Eric felt useless. His new exoskeleton didn't come with any major projectile or directed-energy capabilities. There was a small cutting laser on one of the lower arms, but it wouldn't be useful until the attackers were closer.

  This was how life was back home, too. His oldest brother, Abel, tall and with a permanent haughty look, would drop details about his exploits as a starfighter pilot. Samuel, second oldest, always loud and romping around with a pack of friends, was also a decorated mechanized infantry officer. Their father had commanded a land destroyer, the largest breed of armored land vehicle. Eric, meanwhile, hadn't managed to do much more than stay home, slop pigs, and herd cattle.

  The sound of crashing, falling rocks grew closer, like an avalanche.

  “Here they come,” Bowler Junior whispered. He was pale and squatted on the floor by the console now, as though the worms wouldn't be able to find him there.

  The elevator platform had risen by almost a full story, so Eric had a sweeping view when the worms arrived, six of them in plated armor with heavy weaponry mounted on the back. They came in from all sides, as though determined to make sure nobody escaped the room alive.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Hold your fire,” Hagen whispered to Bartley, holding up a hand. “Wait until they're close.”

  The worms seemed to sniff around the wreckage at first. The clanging of the slow-moving elevator platform quickly drew one's attention. It raised its head in their direction, flipped its ring of long teeth outward, and bellowed to the others.

  All the plated worms turned and raced toward the elevator, their hundreds of tiny rat-tail tentacles apparently adding up to an impressive speed for such huge beasts, even as they maneuvered among burned-out machinery and heaps of fallen rock.

  “Naomi, go ahead,” Hagen said. He was tracking the worms' approach with his rifle, but still conserving his nine shots for maximum impact.

  “Malvolio, hit the worm that's in the lead,” Naomi said.

  “Aim for the head,” Hagen added.

  “Yes, ma'am and sir!” Malvolio saluted with one hand while launching a golf-ball-sized plastic explosive with the other.

  “Fire in the hole!” Naomi shouted, clicking her remote.

  “The wormhole, as it were,” Malvolio added.

  The worm's mouth was closed with its armor drawn in around it when the explosive arrived, so the creature didn't erupt from the inside like the previous worm had done. Still, the deafening explosion threw the armored worm up and back with concussive force.

  “Looks like we missed that worm's hole,” Naomi grumbled.

  Eric caught a glimpse of the worm's underside as it was blown up and back. There was more than just the array of little tentacles behind the worms' speed. Sets of metal rollers were spaced at irregular intervals along the underside of the worm armor, some with just three rollers, some with as many as eleven, following the worm's apparent distaste for symmetry and balance in anything they built. The rollers spun at high speed to propel the worms across the floor like freight trains.

  The worm that had been hit slammed to the ground on its back. A second worm roared, flared its teeth, and turned around, apparently to check on the first.

  The other four armored worms accelerated and moved more evasively, snaking in and out of the rubble so they were hard to keep watch on, even from the rising elevator platform.

  “That one.” Naomi pointed, and Malvolio targeted and launched another small but powerful ball of explosive. It struck another worm in the side and sent it rolling.

  At the same time, Hagen fired a bolt of plasma at a worm approaching his side of the platform. White fire smacked into the front end of the worm and expanded, engulfing its head.

  Two more worms kept coming. Bartley didn't wait for Hagen's order, but went ahead and pulled the trigger on the rock bolter.

  A meter-long steel bolt launched downward from the bolter's mouth. The bolter wasn't designed to launch projectiles at all, but to drive the long bolts deep into underground rock, particularly along tunnel roofs to strengthen the native rock and discourage cave-ins.

  While the bolt was large and was ejected at high velocity, it bounced off a worm's armor rather than driving into it. The worm paused to raise its head and hiss at Bartley, as if it knew just who had tried to shoot it.

  Eric tried to hit the next closest worm with his small rock-cutting laser, but it didn't have the power to penetrate the armor, at least not at this distance.

  “Looks like all you guys can do is annoy them,” Naomi said.

  “Then I'll annoy them until they can't take it and commit suicide. They'll blow out their tiny worm brains just to get away from me,” Bartley said, while the bolter loaded up his next projectile.

  A volley of return fire from the alien worms erupted from behind the rubble and wreckage where the worms were taking cover, through the haze of dust kicked up by Naomi's explosives. White balls of plasma, small but quickly expanding, whooshed toward the elevator platform.

  “Incoming!” Bartley shouted, then dove away from his bolter and covered his head.

  Hagen, Naomi, and Malvolio dropped. Eric couldn't see Bowler Junior, still hiding behind the dump truck, near the control console at the back of the platform. Iris and Alanna were still in the truck's cab.

  Eric didn't have nearly enough time to detach from his exoskeleton, reconnect his legs, and leap to the floor, so he just hunkered down as much as the suit would allow and hoped for the best.

  A plasma ball struck the bolter head-on, flash-frying it into a fiery, molten heap.

  Another glowing white ball sliced through the truck's dumping bed, melting down the walls on either side.

  “Iris!” Eric jumped over to the cab of the burning truck, his leap made huge by boosters on the new exoskeleton's back. The elevator platform shuddered as the rig landed on its enormous feet by the truck.

  Eric ripped the door off the truck cab with one robotic arm. With the other, he picked up Iris as she emerged from the cab, and he set her gently on the floor well away from the truck fire.

  “Don't grab me,” Alanna said quickly, as she stepped out and jumped down.

  “Are you okay?” Eric asked Iris.

  “I couldn't imagine being better,” Iris replied, looking out over the smoke-filled battle scene, the worms still advancing below.

  The loader bot had unfolded from the front of the truck and now watched it burn. “Unloading,” it said softly, as if sad to see the dump truck to which it belonged get destroyed.

  Hagen returned fire with his plasma rifle, while Naomi and Malvolio prepared to launch more explosives.

  Eric couldn't take up Bartley's previous front-corner position, since it was currently occupied by a burning mass of metal where the rock bolter had been. He hurried to Hagen's side instead, and readied his small cutting laser.

  Down below, at least four of the worms still approached. Some of their armor was dented and scorched, but that didn't slow them down. Eric could see the plasma launchers on their back now. They looked like arrays of pipes of different lengths mounted in lumps of rock; the design looked misshapen and artless, but the tech inside it was clearly effective.

  Dust and rock began to spill all along the walls of the room. More big worms, easily eight or ten of them, slithered in from the walls. Some had the kinds of tools Eric had seen already—drills, cutting lasers, robotic tentacle-extenders. Others carried more of the big plasma launchers mounted like artillery pieces on their backs.

  “There's too many,” Hagen grunted. “And I'm almost out.” He slapped the digital meter on the side of the rifle, which showed he had only two shots left.

  Eric continued to fire his laser cutter, but it just wasn't designed to work at a distance. He might have burned a pinhole in the armor of one worm, but he couldn't be sure from so far above.

  Naomi and Malvolio pitched larger, softball-sized lumps of plastic explosive now. One detonated at a worm's side, sending it rolling away. Another blew up i
n the face of a worm, and the creature fell still, flesh smoking, possibly dead.

  “Good one, girlfriend!” Bartley shouted.

  “Don't call me that!” Naomi shouted back.

  “Eric, go see if you can get this platform moving faster,” Hagen said.

  Eric nodded and hurried to the control console. Bowler Junior huddled under it now, knees to his chin, arms around his knees. He was pale and shaking. Alanna stood near him, also looking pale but holding it together a little better.

  “I kinda told myself it was just a dream, before,” Bowler Junior said. “A nightmare. Maybe I took too many dreamies, started to see Kozma. You know? But it's real. And those worms are going to eat us, just like...just like everyone else.” He swallowed. “Nobody got out of here alive, as far as I saw. We're dead, we're all dead...”

  Eric did his best to ignore him and focused on finding the console's dataport—he planned to accelerate the platform faster than the standard controls would allow. As he reached to unplug his spinal cable from the exoskeleton, he asked Alanna, “Where's Iris?”

  “She went to get the relic out of the back of the truck,” Alanna said.

  “But the truck's on fire...” Eric swiveled to see Iris climbing over the top of the cab, approaching the dumping bed from the front. Given her options, it was the safest approach, avoiding the sheared-off sides with their molten red edges. There were also handholds down the center-front of the bed, leading down to the deepest, more forward area of it, which wasn't far from where they'd lodged the relic.

  Iris saw him looking and waved at him before she dropped out of sight behind the cab.

  “She's crazy,” Eric said, and then the floor lurched beneath them.

  With the sound of wrenching, groaning metal, the entire elevator platform tilted forward, sloping steeply away from the wall and toward the horde of attacking worms below. One or more of the worms' plasma shots must have damaged the support structure under the freight elevator platform.

  Hagen toppled forward and caught his balance on the safety railing, which blocked him from a long drop to the waiting monsters below.

  Alanna and Bowler Junior managed to grab onto the back railing, near the control console. The loader bot grabbed on, too, clamping onto a safety railing with one blocky yellow hand and a support beam of the elevator's infrastructure with the other, helping to hold the platform together.

  Eric couldn't see what was happening with the others in their group because the truck blocked his view. He leaped up on top of the cab, the booster pack on the suit's back putting a major spring in his step. His landing cratered the cab roof and shattered all its windows.

  The dump truck was sliding backwards now, the tailgate rushing toward the safety railing...toward the exact spot where Naomi and Malvolio stood.

  As he'd done with Hagen, Malvolio scooped up Naomi in his arms while leaping into the air. His unicycle wheel unfolded from its storage area inside his lower leg.

  By the time Malvolio landed on the steeply sloped platform again, his unicycle wheel was already accelerating. It squealed and smoked, then the drama-bot zoomed off with Naomi in his arms. They just barely dodged the back end of the dump truck before it slammed into the railing.

  The metal railing shrieked and bent sharply at the impact site, and bolts and screws flew up from the railing like popcorn. The railing held for the moment, but continued to creak and moan as the full weight of the truck pressed against it.

  In the dumping bed, which was as steeply sloped as the platform, Iris chased after the relic, still wrapped in Hagen's jacket, as it slid down toward the back end of the truck. The back gate had swung open as the truck tilted, leaving a wide open path straight toward the drop-off to the monstrous worms waiting below.

  Heedless of the danger, Iris pursued the sliding relic down the steep bed and grabbed it, lifting Hagen's jacket by the sleeve...and the mask tumbled free, spinning out over the elevator's safety railing and into the empty space beyond.

  Iris howled with fury—Eric couldn't have imagined such a huge sound from such a small woman—and leaped after it, reaching for the relic as it sailed away through the air, her body three or four stories above a rock floor. Even if she caught it, death was waiting for her below.

  “Iris, don't!” Eric called as she leaped, but it was too late to stop her, even if he could have convinced her to stop.

  The only thing he could do was jump after her. The Dragonfly suit couldn't actually fly, only jump, but that would have to be good enough.

  He jumped out over empty space, looking down at the horde of armored worms below.

  Humans had finally met another intelligent lifeform—not extinct, not long-gone with only a few relics left behind, like the ancients or even the mantids—but one that was still very much alive and kicking.

  And they were monsters, ruthless killers with zero interest in making new friends.

  The armored worms below fired yet another volley, including more burning white balls of plasma, and also long, spinning spikes like steel spears. One narrowly missed Eric and struck the roof of the cavernous room just above him, shattering the pinned rock into a cloud of pebbles and dust.

  Behind him, a scream rang out as the worms' attack took someone down.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Eric's robotic hand, extended as far as it would reach, closed around Iris's hips. He reached the suit's other large arm up toward the roof. The mechanical fingers scraped down dust and debris while he searched for a spot strong enough to hold them.

  Worms roared beneath them, opening their mouths and spreading their teeth as if Eric and Iris were treats about to drop into their gullets.

  Iris seized the tumbling masked helmet with both hands, just as Eric reeled her in close to him. He transferred her to the exoskeleton's lower, smaller arms, then reached out the bigger one again, trying to grab onto the roof before they fell to the certain death waiting for them below.

  He managed to grab the head of a steel bolt that Caffey Industries had used to secure the roof, possibly using the same bolter that Bartley had found. The other big arm grabbed the dense metal mesh around the bolt's head, there to protect against small pebbles and loose debris that might otherwise trickle down on miners' heads while they worked.

  Eric hung from the two long arms of his suit like a monkey in a jungle, his heart pounding. Iris smiled at him, her face not far from his.

  “Eric—” she began, and then her expression shifted from delight to horror. An eerie white light illuminated her face from below.

  The mask had changed shape again. Now it was made of a glowing white metal, like some kind of enchanted platinum, and looked just like Iris's face, mimicking her current horrified look, as if mocking her.

  Brilliant white arcs of lightning shot out from the mask. They curled up and back to strike Iris all over her head, as though she'd incurred the wrath of some primitive god.

  Eric shouted her name, watching in shock as her dark hair ignited and flames engulfed her head.

  The wild surge of energy seemed to overwhelm his exoskeleton, too, because he could feel it locking up all over. He was still able to move his own flesh-and-blood arms, though, so he removed his jacket and wrapped it around Iris's head, smothering the flames, leaving only her nose and mouth exposed.

  Something shifted in the room, and there was a weird silence, a sudden stillness among the worms below. The barrage of plasma, lasers, and steel spears ceased.

  Eric looked down to see the worms rising up, apparently no longer interested in hiding among wreckage and rubble. All over the room, they seemed to incline toward the place where Eric and Iris hung like a bizarre Christmas ornament, the mask glowing like a beacon in Iris's hands.

  The worms' heads turned from side to side, in a way that reminded him of birds studying a shiny object. Maybe they did have some sort of crude eyes embedded somewhere in their tough hides.

  The worms rose higher, in unison, all of them opening their huge maws as if gapin
g at the relic. They resembled a colony of gigantic coral in the ocean, earth-colored vertical tubes, their open mouths facing upward to catch what they could.

  “Please say the relic gives us control of the worms,” Eric whispered. He looked back at Iris and discovered, almost unbelievably, that he could feel even more terror.

  His jacket still covered most of her head, yet he could see her eyes right through it, because they were glowing an impossibly intense bright white, just like the mask.

  She changed in his arms. The fire-smothering jacket and tan mine-worker coveralls vanished. Her head was bare now, all her hair burned away. Metallic circles were inset all over her cranium. He'd seen images of that before—gatekeepers had those implants. They used them to interface with their special-built devices when they operated a wormhole gate.

  Her hands seemed stained a bloody red.

  In place of her coveralls, a flowing purple cloak formed around her. The hood of it rose up to cover the hardware inset into her cranium, and then to shadow her face. The hooded purple robe was the typical garb of a rebel gatekeeper, a full member of the Antikytheran Society.

  Her eyes continued to glow eerie white, so bright the pupils weren't even visible.

  The worms began to bellow, a new kind of sound unlike all the threatening roars Eric had heard so far. It was more like whalesong, deep and throaty tones, the horde of upward-looking open-mouthed worms forming a kind of grotesque organic pipe organ, studded with sharp teeth bulging from red, swollen gums.

  The entire underground world shuddered around them.

  More worms poured into the room from every side, more than Eric could even attempt to count, as if every last member of the giant-worm species had been called together.

  The ground ruptured open, and the most massive worm Eric had seen yet emerged from below. He'd glimpsed it on the hologram, but hadn't really grasped the scale of it. It was even bigger than the first worm they'd encountered.

  The titanic worm rose vertically, its vast red pit of a mouth roaring. It flipped out a ring of teeth as big as elephant tusks. Dozens more lined the beast's throat, ready to rip and crush.