Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  They reached the waste-loading area by the river, where more piles of trash were heaped. Local birds with hooked, warty beaks picked among the waste, as did flying bugs roughly the size and shape of steak knives. Metallic scrap had been separated onto a platform nearby for resale and reuse, though that would probably never happen now that just about everyone on the planet seemed to be dead.

  “Load,” Loader said, gesturing out at the trash barge chained to the steel dock. Small mountains of rotting, bug-infested refuse waited to be floated off and dumped into the ocean.

  “Our glorious craft awaits!” Malvolio announced, with a grand sweep of his arm. “A junk of junk, fit for an emperor...one who has been cast out of power, and must slink away under cover of night, but nonetheless—”

  “It's disgusting,” Bowler Junior said. “I can't travel like this.”

  “It does have some of that sitting-duck problem,” Bartley said. “We gotta take this right through town, right past Worm Central...then on past the refineries all the way downriver. The worms will have plenty of time to get us while we float past slower than a drunken snail.”

  “Maybe we could hide.” Eric pointed to a sizable metal dumpster.

  “The accommodations grow worse by the moment,” Alanna said.

  “Finally, a voice of reason—” Bowler Junior began.

  “—but we don't have much choice,” Alanna added.

  “The dumpster will give us a little shielding if they attack, too,” Bartley said. “Not much, but I like it better than just hanging my ass out like a big target.” He looked into an open panel of the dumpster and wrinkled his nose. “It's full of crap. Loader, come give me a hand, pal.”

  “Unloading!” The big yellow robot raised the dumpster high.

  “Quietly,” Eric hurried to add.

  “Unloading,” the robot repeated, at low-whisper volume. Then it turned the dumpster upside down. Cans, bottles, rusty nails and screws, mingled with rotten bits of food, came crashing out all over the ground.

  “I meant...never mind.” Eric shook his head. “Let's get going before that noise attracts the worms.”

  One by one, they stepped out onto the barge, over a gap through which they could see the dark river water below. Malvolio passed Hagen's unconscious form over to Eric, who carefully accepted him with his two longest arms.

  Loader set the dumpster down in the middle of the barge, with heaps of trash all around. A narrow door in one side of the dumpster offered easy access. They spread out the thin fire blanket from the first-aid box and lay Hagen atop it.

  Though the dumpster was empty, a thick layer of garbage residue coated the interior, and the odor was intensely foul. All the conscious people hesitated to step inside.

  “I can drive watercraft,” Alanna said, stepping toward the cramped, grimy pillbox of the pilot's cabin. It was far too small to fit all of them.

  “The engine will make too much noise,” Naomi said.

  “Money City is downriver,” Iris said. “Maybe it would be best to just float quietly.”

  “I hate the idea of moving slow, all hunkered down like a scared turtle,” Bartley said.

  “But giant turtles can live for more than a century,” Iris said. “There's some wisdom there.”

  “Who wants to live for a century with no risk? No excitement? That's barely living,” Bartley said.

  “I'll sign up for a long life with no risk,” Bowler Junior said. “Starting now.”

  “You would,” Bartley grumbled.

  They disconnected the rusty chains binding the barge to the dock. Loader and Eric used their long robotic arms to nudge the hefty craft away from the dock. The current of the deep river lugged them forward so sluggishly that it was difficult to tell whether they were moving at all.

  “It'll be tomorrow afternoon before we reach Money City at this rate,” Bartley grumbled. “We'll be exposed in plain daylight for hours.”

  “I'm not sure the darkness of night really gives us much cover against the worms,” Iris said. “They don't seem particularly visual to me.”

  “Their tech looks like it was created by blind designers,” Alanna said. “So ugly. Nothing we'd sell at any of our retailers, not even the damaged-goods outlets.”

  “I haven't seen any eyes on them,” Naomi said.

  “Most worms depend on touch at their primary sense,” Iris said. “Vibrations. Sound.”

  “You know a lot about worms,” Bowler Junior said.

  “I spent some time studying them after...well, after I heard about those giant worms on the swamp planet.”

  “If they're all about sound, then we should keep our mouths shut.” Alanna shot a look at Bowler Junior as she said that. Then she stepped into the small pilot's cabin surrounded by grimy windows and sat down on the floor. “I'm staying here. If the worms come, I'll be ready to drive.”

  “I'll stay here, too—” Bowler Junior began.

  “Like hell,” Alanna said. “Go keep an eye on your patient.”

  “I'd rather keep an eye on you,” he told Alanna. “Like I did on that old couch in my frat-house basement—”

  “Go!” Alanna shouted, pointing to the dumpster. Then she touched Naomi's arm. “She can stay with me. The marine, too.” She looked at Bartley, who shrugged and nodded. “Malvolio, you go hide in the dumpster since you don't mind it as much.”

  “Don't mind it!” Malvolio clapped his hand to his chest as though he'd been wounded. “Madam, I can perform more than seven thousand of the finest arias—”

  “Do you have a sense of smell?” Alanna asked.

  “Oh.” Malvolio's face fell. “I see what you're getting at.” The drama-bot trudged away, hanging his head.

  Loader folded up behind a trash heap, trying to look like scrap, maybe an old yellow refrigerator. Bowler Junior pinched his nose and reluctantly joined Hagen on the fire blanket in the dumpster.

  “Over here,” Iris said to Eric. She stepped behind the dumpster, to the side of the barge facing sheer cliffs across the river from town.

  Eric stopped to look up at the wreckage of Canyon City. So many of the buildings seemed to have simply imploded, swallowed up into their own cellars. Small fires crackled here and there. Bars, casinos, video arcades, banks, weapons shops, tattoo parlors, fried-meat stands, drug dens, brothels—all had been wiped out, one way or another. Eric's apartment building had been erased by an apparent landslide; nothing but dirt and stones remained.

  The population of Canyon City was generally well-armed, and there were also a couple of organized security outfits like Maverick Emergency Systems. But the worms had struck hard and fast, a sneak attack in the deepest hours of a smoke-shrouded night. The population of Canyon City hadn't been huge, maybe ten or twenty thousand highly transient souls. Perhaps many had survived and fled. Perhaps many were still in hiding, gripping their weapons and waiting for the worms to find them, waiting to make their last stand.

  Or maybe everybody was dead.

  A worm's dragon-sized head rose from the wreckage of a butcher shop, its long red teeth dripping red meat and bits of bone. It turned its maw in Eric's direction, though it was more than a hundred meters away and couldn't possibly see him. Maybe it heard the barge sloshing its way down the river.

  The worm lowered its head, hopefully losing interest in them and turning its attention toward another case of meat.

  Eric stepped behind the dumpster and hunkered down in its shadow as much as his exoskeleton would allow. Iris stood beside him and leaned on his rig, avoiding contact with the sticky, trashy barge around them.

  They remained silent for a long while, still tense and expecting an attack from the city above. The barge's progress was painfully slow, but kicking on the engines could attract every one of those alien beasts. And they were down to a couple of plasma bolts and whatever explosives remained in Naomi's backpack.

  Shrieks and bellows arose in the night air, echoing up and down the canyon.

  “The worms,” Iris whispered.
“They're communicating.”

  “I hope they aren't communicating about us.” Eric rose to peer over the top of the dumpster, standing on the tips of his new rig's impressively well-balanced foot platforms.

  He saw a couple of large worms flailing in the street. They slithered for cover inside ruined buildings and large holes where buildings had once stood.

  The reason for their agitation was clear, too. Hot ashes and burning red embers sprinkled down from the sky like a hellish snowfall.

  “Ash rain,” Eric whispered, lowering himself again. It was a common but dangerous weather pattern on Caldera, raw superheated material ejected from distant volcanoes and then carried on the planet's hot, dry wind. No wooden buildings could be erected in Canyon City. This wasn't exactly a law—there wasn't much in the way of organized law on the planet—but it was a physical reality. “The worms are going underground to avoid it. We should get shelter, too.”

  “The dumpster?” Iris frowned and looked around for other options, but none of the piles of rotting trash seemed particularly inviting, full of animal bones, waste paper, syringes, and other items nobody wanted to roll around in.

  “I could probably shield you with the suit, but you'd have to get close,” he said.

  “The suit smells better.” Iris moved right back into the spot where she'd been while unconscious. He stacked his exoskeleton's four arms to create barriers around both of them. Since the Arenson was a mining model, it had solid overhead protection built in, steel plated with tungsten in case of cave-ins and other underground disasters.

  The hot ash rain came down at an angle, so the dumpster helped shield them, too. The embers drifted lazily down, like a swarm of sleepy fireflies, their reflections glowing dim and red in the river below, like constellations of dying stars. One by one, tens of thousands of embers met their reflections on the river surface and hissed out into darkness, a gentle rain of fire into water.

  Iris's face was close to his. He looked into her eyes, then at the array of round metal plates in her head.

  “Can you...tell me what these really are?” he asked. “I know all gatekeepers have them.”

  “They're a silver-palladium alloy, mostly. They let us interface quickly and maintain a strong contact more easily.”

  “With the wormhole gates?”

  “Yes. They're intelligent, you know. Artificially. Their programming is etched in gold and other noble metals, especially iridium. Meant to last forever.”

  “How old are the gates?” Eric asked. “And what were the ancients like? Were they, you know...good guys or bad guys?”

  Iris laughed and shook her head.

  “What?”

  “Nobody knows. As far as we can tell—and even this is debated among those in the Society who spend their lives studying the subject—the last possible sign of any activity by the ancients dates to about eighty-eight thousand years ago. But it could be even further back; we could be looking at relics of later civilizations who tried to imitate the original ancients, reverse-engineer their tech. The original ancients might have vanished more than a million years ago. Like I said, there's debate.

  “And there could be signs of more recent activity, in some of those billions of star systems we have yet to explore. And sometimes I think...maybe they're still alive.” She looked up toward the dim, ash-filled sky.

  “The ancients?”

  “Some of us think they came out from other spiral arms of the galaxy. That's where the big civilizations must be—because they certainly aren't out here, on this minor spiral arm halfway to the galactic rim. Some people think the ancients were here with a grand plan to foster life, intelligence, and civilization. Others think the wormhole gates were never more than minor outposts of the ancients. Like trade posts or old missions in cowboy movies. They just poked their heads into a lot of solar systems, but didn't find anybody worth trading with out here.”

  “Or converting,” Eric said. “If they were missionaries.”

  “Right.” She smiled. “Anyway...maybe we were just too primitive for them to bother with. The same reason humans don't form diplomatic relationships with lemurs and squirrels. We're just primitive animals, you know. Driven by instinct.” She looked closely at him. “Do you have anyone back home?”

  “Sure. Family. Everybody.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. She's rooming with...”

  “What's that?”

  “She's in college. I'm not sure what's going on with her. She's kind of moving in a different...a very different direction...but we haven't broken up. We're still together, so I must remain loyal.”

  “You 'must'?” Iris looked amused.

  “We believe in loyalty,” Eric said. “In my community, we value honesty, trust, and faith. We keep our commitments to each other.”

  “Okay. But you might want to be careful about the 'trust' part there. Trust isn't something you want to give away freely. It's something you want to hoard. Trust me.” Iris winked. “Now, tell me: do you trust me?”

  “No.”

  “That's my boy.”

  “Why didn't you tell us you were a gatekeeper?” he asked.

  “I'm undercover,” she said. “Just not doing a good job of it lately. My wig burned off, so...”

  “I didn't know gatekeepers did things like that. Secret-agent stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah. We're very cloak and dagger, at least where it relates to hyper-advanced alien technology that will probably reshape human history.”

  “And I thought you just opened and closed wormhole gates,” he said. “Like...elevator operators.”

  “We're in a unique position to study the lost history of the galaxy. And chart a course for the future. And influence the influencers. Military fleets, commercial fleets, and the planetary governments who depend on them can't afford to ignore us. Gatekeepers control all the chokepoints of the galaxy.”

  “But now there are two societies of gatekeepers.”

  “There are at least two of every major human institution, thanks to the war splitting us in half,” Iris said. “I hope we can bring ourselves back together in time to face this new menace.”

  “Do you think the worms will invade other human worlds?” Eric shuddered at the thought of the giant monsters burrowing through the prairie on Gideon, destroying his town, his home, his family...tearing Suzette to pieces with their long teeth. Destroying the capital city, Lightpoint, founded as a beacon of morality, virtue, and faith for all humankind, just as the worms had destroyed the whorehouses and gambling dens of Canyon City.

  “They've wiped out all the humans they've encountered so far,” Iris said. “If there are more of them...and advanced tech like theirs doesn't arise without some kind of advanced civilization...then it's just a matter of time before they come for all of us. They can't even share a planet as big and desolate as Caldera with us. They exterminate us on sight.”

  “Then we have to warn everyone!” Eric said. “The Colonial League Inner Command. And even the Earth Alliance. Nobody knows the worms are coming. Do they?”

  “No,” Iris said softly. “Before tonight, there was only a single reported sighting of the worms. An aberration, an event leaving no material evidence behind—not even the bodies of the worms that the reclamation crew killed. They could have been eaten by the swamp creatures, I suppose, but what about the worms' gear? Their tech? Nothing remained. Maybe other worms came back, collected the evidence. Salvaged any materials that were left. Took the bodies. Maybe ate them, for all I know. The point is...all the Society had was the word of a sole survivor. She was a gatekeeper, but some in the Society called her crazy. Even some on the Council called her that.” Iris's face flushed dark red, her eyes turned down toward the water below.

  “Was it you?” Eric asked, and her eyes snapped back to him. “That one gatekeeper?”

  She looked at him a long moment before whispering, so softly it could have been the wind down the canyon: “Yes. I was there. I was the...the only surviv
or.” Her eyes shifted away as she said this. “I'm ashamed of how I acted. I was a coward.”

  “But you survived.”

  “Yes, I certainly did that.”

  “How do we stop them?” Eric asked. “If they come back, we have no way to fight them. Any ideas about how to survive this time?”

  “Maybe the relic. If we could understand its power...but there's no time to study it, certainly no equipment here, unless somebody stashed a laboratory under that rack of sand-lizard ribs over there.” She nodded at a heap of trash.

  “So what if we just give the relic to Naomi, let her transform into purple demon form and attack the worms? If they come back?”

  “That would be reckless when we don't understand what we're doing. We don't know what we might unleash.”

  “Something fatal to the worms, hopefully. I mean, if it's okay with Naomi, obviously.”

  “I doubt it would be. What did you experience, Eric? When you touched the relic?”

  Eric blushed, remembering the hot rush of feelings and memories, the gold band around Suzette's wrist as she touched him. “It's personal,” he said.

  “It sure looks personal. But you have to tell me, Eric. Sorry, I don't mean to pry, but it's important.”

  “It was just me and Suzette. The first time we, well...”

  “Oh.” Iris smiled. “First time you had sex?”

  “No! We never—we're not married.”

  “You're a virgin?” Now Iris looked perplexed.

  “You say 'virgin' like it's sinful.”

  “Oh...no. It's definitely not that.”

  “What about you?” Eric asked, ready to move away from talking about his own scrambled personal life back home. “You have someone?”

  “I did, years ago. Not anymore. The Society demands all.”

  A couple of refineries came into view, perched on ridges above them. All kinds of chemical waste flowed from their pipes directly into the river, including tons of cyanide used to leach the precious metals. The minerals had to be stripped chemically, down to just the precious ores, before the expensive process of shuttling them up and off-planet to the interstellar freighters. Not much lived in the river anymore. Nobody saw Caldera as a permanent home; it was a place where people came to make their fortunes before returning to civilization.