Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  “You say the worms can't be trusted with the relics,” Eric said. “But how do you know humans can?”

  “I don't,” Iris said. “But humans are all we've got. So...the mask. It showed us what Naomi thinks of herself...something she wanted to keep hidden. And it showed who I am...something I was keeping hidden.”

  “But it didn't change me.”

  “Oh, it did. It wasn't such a dramatic change—maybe because you're male, or maybe because you don't have as much to hide as the rest of us.”

  “I didn't notice anything.”

  “You looked younger,” she said. “Young and almost ridiculously innocent. Small. Your hair was like spun gold.”

  “So I looked like a little kid?”

  “Not exactly. The way Naomi's self-hatred was magnified into something monstrous...you looked like an aw-shucks kid who just stepped off the farm and into a casino full of sharks. What you want to hide is your innocence. Your vulnerability. Naivety, even.”

  “I don't think me changing into a dumb kid is going to be helpful against those giant worms,” Eric said, embarrassed by the conversation. Ever since arriving on Caldera, he'd done his best to put up a front, to be strong and silent like his father or his oldest brother Abel. Eric had nothing like Samuel's garrulous, hard-drinking and hard-socializing nature—Bartley reminded him quite a bit of Samuel, actually—and he couldn't hope to fake that. But he could keep cool and distant.

  It bothered him that the relic had made him look soft, weak, and stupid, ripe to be beaten up or manipulated. It bothered him more and more the longer he considered it.

  “I don't think revealing the worms' deep, dark secrets is going to help us very much, either,” Iris said. “They seem pretty happy with their mass-murdering ways. Not a lot of guilt going on there.”

  They fell quiet again, watching the ash rain hiss out in the water. The volcanic rain grew thinner, only occasional red embers now.

  The trash barge wound its way through the canyon, quiet and nearly invisible in the dark and smoky night, occasionally bumping against reefs of rock. In time, they were well downriver from the town and the refineries, and there was nothing ahead but empty canyon that gradually flattened out as it approached the river's mouth and the ocean beyond.

  Bowler Junior staggered out of the dumpster for the relatively fresh air of the rotten trash heaps and the dead river. Naomi climbed up on top of the pilot's cabin for a slightly better view of the river ahead, plus slightly better air.

  Bartley paced for a while, bored and agitated, until finally he decided to make good on his earlier promise to teach Loader how to fight. They stood among the garbage heaps, the big yellow robot imitating Bartley's movements.

  “See, you just jab...jab...no, that's a cross, keep that back hand near your jaw...your mouth-speaker, whatever...now watch me...”

  Soon, everyone watched as Bartley taught the robot a series of combinations—jabs, hooks, uppercuts. The loader was a fast learner, at least when it came to simple and repetitive movements.

  Then, without warning, the barge's engines rumbled to life, turbines churning the water around the craft. Alanna had remained inside the pilot's cabin, and apparently decided to make faster time now that they were out of sight of the city. The sound of the motor echoed off the canyon walls.

  “What is she doing?” Iris gasped and began to run toward the pilot's cabin. “We have to stay quiet!”

  “Fine by me,” Bowler Junior said. “I'm sick of sitting around breathing in trash fumes.”

  “Stupid spoiled rich brats,” Bartley grumbled. “Never learned any patience. Loader, get ready to fight, brother, because every worm in this canyon knows where to find us now.”

  The robot raised his excavator-bucket hands to his chin area, ready to go. “Loaded.”

  Eric followed after Iris, while Naomi leaped down from the roof of the cabin. She opened her backpack, reaching for her remaining explosives.

  “What are you doing?” Iris asked, sliding open the door to the cabin, where Alanna sat at the controls.

  “I got in touch with my pilot.” Alanna held up her pocket screen. “She's still alive.”

  “So we're going to rescue her?” Eric asked.

  “No, she still has her helicopter.”

  “This engine noise will attract the aliens,” Iris said. “If it's not an emergency—”

  “It is. Carol says they're emerging again now that the ash rain has passed. Some of them are entering the river. They're coming after us.”

  “Bartley!” Naomi shouted. “They're coming!”

  Bartley nodded. He and the loader bot already stood at the barge's stern, ready for an attack from behind. Bartley raised the rifle's sight and looked upriver through it.

  Naomi joined them, readying the last of her explosives. She called Malvolio over to stand with her.

  “Reduced to little more than a slingshot,” Malvolio lamented, shaking his head. “Truly, we have seen the death of high culture, the coming of the Philistines, the degradation of the civilized into the barbaric—”

  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Bartley said. Then he fired a bolt of plasma, the burning-white sphere momentarily illuminating the canyon like a spotlight.

  It struck the front of a worm that was churning through the water toward them. The beast managed a roar as fire spread along its back, illuminating turbines affixed to its sides, enabling it to move as fast as a ship. Along the worm's armored back were metal pipes stuck in crude-looking lumps of rock, similar to the plasma artillery but longer, and with just one metal tube per rock-lump. Eric didn't want to find out what these weapons did.

  The burning worm dove into the water, hopefully mortally wounded, but Eric wasn't holding his breath.

  Just before it vanished, Eric saw two more of the long segmented worms, one on either side, continuing to jet forward through the water.

  “We're so screwed!” Bowler shrieked from behind them. “Maybe we should just surrender.”

  “They don't want us to surrender,” Iris said. “They want us to die.”

  Eric took up a position near the stern, his upper robotic arms raised and ready to grapple, the cutting tools on his lower arms ready to burn and slice if the monsters got close enough.

  The huge serpentine shapes charged toward them, their bulky alien turbines much faster than the barge's coughing engines. There would be no escape.

  Eric lined up with Bartley, Naomi, Malvolio, and Loader, preparing for one last fight. He was ready to fall over from exhaustion, like everyone else.

  This was it. Life or death, for all of them.

  The monsters rushed closer through the water.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Bartley was on one knee, taking aim at one of the worms. “I'll take Pancho if you get Lefty,” he said to Naomi.

  “The worm on the left,” Naomi said as she placed a wad of plastic explosive in Malvolio's hand. The drama-bot reluctantly targeted and launched, his computer-brain carrying out the calculation and execution perfectly despite his obvious disappointment at being used in such a way.

  The plasma bolt struck one worm as the plastic explosive struck the other. The twin bursts of fire engulfed the worms they'd targeted; together they lit up the canyon and river like daylight.

  “God the King,” Eric whispered.

  More worms followed behind, easily a dozen of them, all accelerated by turbines.

  They launched a volley of weaponry, some rushing under the surface of the water like torpedoes, churning the water and leaving a foamy wake behind them. Others whistled through the air—spinning spears like the one that had struck Hagen.

  Then the light faded.

  “Hit the deck!” Bartley shouted, in case anyone had missed the impending attack.

  Eric folded toward the floor as best he could. Long spears crashed into the garbage all around them. The spears sprang to life on impact—their heads turned into drills, and their shafts turned flexible and whipped like robotic ten
tacles. They immediately began drilling into the floor of the barge, clearly aiming to make the vessel sink.

  At the same time, torpedoes struck the barge and exploded, lifting the stern out of the water and shattering it into chunks.

  Everyone ran, rolled, or was thrown by the impact and the sudden steep tilt of the craft. Eric managed to leap back and away, boosted by his rig, landing on his suit's heavy metal ass halfway across the ship. The impact shattered the floor where he landed.

  The scene was chaos. The dumpster had fallen over on its side. Bowler Junior and still-unconscious Hagen had landed in separate spots among the heaps of trash.

  Bartley was helping Alanna out of the damaged pilot's cabin, which was partly crushed and on fire. Alanna limped, leaning heavily on him.

  Naomi and Malvolio had been blown off their feet, too, but Naomi was still conscious and already struggling to get another explosive from her backpack.

  We're dead, Eric thought. We're all dead.

  Then a whooshing, whining sound approached. A helicopter hovered above them, washing the barge in bright lights.

  “That's our ride.” Alanna coughed.

  The helicopter lowered until it was a couple of steps above the ruptured surface of the barge, blasting them with high-speed wind.

  “Carol!” Alanna waved while Bartley accompanied her to the helicopter.

  The door slid open. The pilot was a woman with short red hair, headphones clamped around her head. Her last name, FOSTER, was displayed on a chest patch on her black flight suit. XRD—for Exoplanet Resource Development—was on her shoulder.

  “They're coming,” the pilot said, her voice amplified by speakers so she could be heard over the helicopter's double set of rotors. “I can move you three at a time. Who's coming first? Miss Li-Whitward?”

  Alanna was dazed, maybe in shock; she'd been nearly killed inside the pilot's cabin. She might have been temporarily deafened by the explosion, too, since she seemed unaware everyone was waiting for her answer.

  The trash barge shuddered as more of the torpedoes struck it. The deck ruptured and water flowed up through the cracks. More of the drill-headed snake-bots attached to the hull, chewing it open. Chunks of the barge broke away and sank into the river, clogging the surface with heaps of refuse, which would only provide more cover for the attacking worms. Not that the worms really needed it; they clearly had the advantage in arms here, and probably numbers, too.

  “We're running out of floor space!” Eric shouted.

  “Injured first!” Bartley shouted, while lifting Alanna into the seat next to the pilot.

  “Two more!” the pilot said. “Maybe three if you really like each other.”

  They lifted Hagen inside, then Naomi, over her protests. She frowned and tossed Bartley her backpack with its remaining explosives.

  Eric lifted Iris with his robotic arms.

  “I'm not injured!” she shouted.

  “You know anything about starships?” Eric asked. “Like how to turn them on and launch them?”

  “No—well, maybe a little—”

  “In you go!” Bartley shouted, and Iris relented and allowed Eric to place her inside. As a gatekeeper, she could act as a navigation officer on any interstellar vessel. If something had happened to the orbital station near the system's wormhole gate, they would also need her to open the wormhole gate for them. Otherwise they'd be trapped in this star system, with nowhere to go. Iris was critical to their escape.

  She squeezed in alongside Naomi and unconscious Hagen on a seat that could barely fit two people.

  “I'll upload the coordinates for the underground hangar to this helicopter's navigation system,” Malvolio said, waving at the chopper as if greeting a friend across a room. “There.”

  “What about me?” Bowler Junior ran forward. “If Iris doesn't want to go, I'll take her spot!”

  “Forget it.” Eric nudged him back with a robotic elbow to his chest.

  “I don't want to die down here with you...you dirt diggers!” Bowler Junior whined.

  “Yikes, bro,” Bartley said, ducking away from the helicopter door as it slammed shut. “You know people can hear you, right?”

  The chopper ascended and tilted sharply as it turned a hundred and eighty degrees to face downriver.

  A worm's head rose through a water-filled fissure in the barge, lumps of garbage clinging to its face. Its mouth spread open, its ring of sharp teeth protruding outward. It was clearly angling itself to chomp Bowler Junior, who ran along the broken edge of the craft, pursuing the helicopter.

  “Wait for me!” Bowler Junior cried, running up a tall heap of trash. The worm extended its head further out of the water, its open mouth approaching Bowler Junior from behind.

  Bartley sighed and fired the rifle's last bolt of plasma into the hungry worm's maw. The shot went in like a perfect basketball throw swishing through a net, the burning white blob not touching the worm's lip on the way in, but instead rushing away down the red, tooth-lined throat.

  The worm dived underwater, as if the plasma had slid down as smooth as top-shelf whiskey, not bothering the giant creature at all.

  “Pilot!” Bowler Junior screamed, reaching toward one of the helicopter's landing skids, seemingly oblivious to how close he'd just come to being eaten. “Whatever Alanna's paying you, I'll double it! Triple! Come back down!”

  The pilot probably couldn't hear him, and if she did, she gave no sign of it, continuing her steep, sharp bank to change directions in the narrow canyon pass.

  Bowler reached the top of the trash pile and jumped. He grabbed onto the very end of one skid.

  Already at a delicate angle and overloaded with passengers, the ultralight scouting helicopter didn't respond well to the extra weight on one side. It jerked and twisted erratically, dipping dangerously close to the alien-infested water below.

  “Let go!” the pilot's voice boomed over the speakers. “Let go!”

  “I can't! I'll die!” Bowler shrieked as worms approached below like hungry sharks smelling blood.

  Eric turned his exoskeleton toward the helicopter and readied himself to leap over and knock Bowler Junior off of it—maybe even save him from the worms below, too, if that happened to be convenient.

  Eric wasn't nearly fast enough, though. Before he could even begin his jump, a worm surged up from the water and chomped down on Bowler Junior's leg, sinking its teeth in a ring around his upper thigh, severing the whole limb.

  Bowler Junior screamed and covered his eyes with both hands. This meant releasing the helicopter skid, so he dropped straight down onto the worm's face.

  A second worm popped out of the water and sank its teeth into Bowler Junior's back. The two worms growled as they bit and pulled at him like a couple of starving dogs fighting over a raw tenderloin.

  They ripped him to shreds, snapping at each other, their blood-smeared teeth repeatedly cracking together as they fought over every last morsel of Bowler Junior's flesh and bones.

  “You ham-headed brat!” Bartley shouted. “I wasted my last plasma bolt saving your massively overpriced life, and you go and pull some brain-dead move like that—”

  Bartley's rant was cut short when the worm he'd shot rose from the steaming water, its front end dripping fiery white plasma like a dragon that had accidentally sneezed its own head off.

  The worm's entire lashing, writhing body rushed up out of the water, easily ten meters long, with turbine-driven propellers and bands of metallic worm armor attached to its segments. The marine worms were not as heavily armored as the tank-like worms down in the mines, but they weren't completely bare-skinned, either.

  The propellers roared at high speed when exposed to open air, their enormous blades spinning, large enough hack a person apart on contact.

  A couple of those propellers spun on the near side of the worm, swinging toward Eric and Bartley as the beast writhed and flung itself around in pain, the plasma burning it from the inside out.

  “Loader!” Bartley
shouted. “Jab, cross!”

  Loader approached the swinging, serpentine bulk of burning worm with his big yellow hands high. He slammed his forward bucket-fist into the side of the approaching worm, in between two armored rings to catch it right in the skin and muscle. The robot's calculation was exact; one of his shoulders missed the cutting edge of a spinning propeller by only a few centimeters.

  The robot's initial jab slowed the worm's approach, but also put a noticeable dent into Loader's fist.

  The posterior half of the worm's body continued scraping forward over the broken pieces of barge, almost as if the worm's dying intent was to rip Eric, Bartley, and Malvolio to pieces while it burned to death.

  Eric stepped forward with his larger pair of robotic arms spread as wide as they could go. He slammed them into the side of the worm, helping to arrest its approach.

  At the same time, Loader landed a powerful cross, burying its fist in the worm's side, with enough force to finally bring the sliding monster to a stop.

  The front end of the worm was still ablaze with plasma, though, and sharp propeller blades still spun, spaced at irregular intervals along its sides.

  “We got more wormy pals coming right up our back door,” Bartley said, pointing the empty rifle's flashlight upriver. “How about we set out a nice welcome mat for 'em?”

  Eric nodded. He and Loader turned the worm horizontally across the river, like they meant to dam it up, before hurling the beast at the oncoming worms.

  The burning worm blocked them for a moment. One worm dove underwater to avoid the burning-plasma end. Another was struck by a set of propeller blades. Eric didn't see it happen, because the mass of the first worm was blocking his view, but he heard the alien shrieks and the spluttering turbine motor, then saw foamy blood churned up in the water.

  “This way!” Bartley shouted, moving over broken chunks of trash-strewn barge toward the wide, flat bow, which was the largest remaining piece of the boat and sat higher in the water than any of the others.