by Max Carver
A metal spear clanged into Eric's exoskeleton as he ran. On impact, its shaft transformed into a flailing, segmented tail. It coiled around his exoskeleton's upper arm, anchoring itself into place. The robotic drill-bit head spun and stabbed at Eric's face in a way that was far too familiar.
“Not this time, Spinny.” Eric grabbed the drill-snake from below with one of his suit's smaller arms. With the other, he activated the cutting laser. It burned slowly through the robotic worm, like a cold knife through a frozen block of butter, but he eventually managed to lop the thing's head off. It was a very minor victory, but at least he hadn't gotten drilled in this face this time.
He dropped the metallic severed head and the writhing, sparking robotic snake-body into the river as he hopped over to the bow to join the others.
Eric stood there with Bartley, Malvolio, and Loader, watching the worms close in on them. Malvolio launched the last few explosives, blowing back some of the worms, hopefully inflicting serious wounds.
“And that's it.” Bartley turned Naomi's empty backpack upside down and shook it, as if a few extra crumbs of plastique would come out, then he dropped it to the deck of the sinking ship. He raised his fists. “From here on, we do it the old-fashioned way. Mano-a-wormo....a-robo, too. May the best species win. Loader, remember those combos!”
The big yellow bot raised his fists. “Loaded,” he said.
The worms swam in close around them, their tooth-ringed maws jutting from the water.
“Why don't they just kill us already?” Bartley muttered. “They got explosives, they got plasma...”
“Maybe they're hungry,” Eric said, thinking of how the worms had fought with each other while eating Bowler Junior. “Those things must have huge appetites, and there's not a lot of meat on this planet.”
“Yeah, plasma rifles don't leave much meat behind,” Bartley said. “I made that mistake on a hunting trip once.”
One worm rose cobra-fashion, spreading its teeth and ready to attack.
Then another, much larger worm rose behind it and bellowed. The first one ducked and cowed before it. The larger one had webs of skin stretching between its outer ring of tusk-sized teeth, as well as visible gill slits on every segment. Many of its small tentacles were wide and flat, like fins. The giant worm seemed adapted for life underwater, and it seemed to have declared itself king of the river, even among its own kind.
“Looks like that's the one who gets to eat us,” Eric said.
“Not if I eat him first,” Bartley replied, but his bravado was habitual and hollow at this point. They could go down fighting, punching, kicking and screaming, but they would go down before this monster and the others waiting behind it.
The high whine of the compound helicopter approached, its double rack of rotors more welcome than the sound of angel's wings.
It hovered directly above them, parking well above the giant worm's head. Then the pilot descended on a chain ladder that unspooled as she dropped, like a spider on a dragline.
The pilot had a heavy machine gun strapped around her shoulders and waist, and she unleashed it on fully automatic as she descended. Explosive rounds chipped a couple of the giant worm's teeth and then tore into its exposed underbelly as she dropped down along it, pumping fire into its internal organs...hopefully. It was hard for Eric to see how effective the shots were.
“I think I just met my new girlfriend,” Bartley said, looking up in awe at the young woman in the black flight suit as she burned a stripe of death down the monster's length. “Red hair,” he whispered, checking out her bob as she landed beside him.
“Get climbing!” she shouted into Bartley's face, wasting no time.
“You want to get married after this?” he asked her.
“No!” She unleashed another burst of incendiaries, grimacing, her boots planted firmly on the sloped, sinking bow, while Bartley began to climb.
The giant worm toppled back, crashing into the river and soaking them all with a wave of polluted water, garbage, and steaming alien worm blood.
“Thanks. Great shooting there...” Eric started toward the ladder, but she blocked his path.
“Lose the exosuit,” she said. “Too much weight.”
“Seriously?” Eric frowned, hesitating.
“Or you can sink with it.” She looked upriver and unleashed another wave of fire at the mass of other worms, who seemed to be drawing closer again, growing bolder now that the big guy was out of their way.
Eric didn't see much choice. He stepped alongside the ladder and detached himself from the top-of-the-line Arenson Dragonfly, his sense of self shrinking down to his own weak body again. He moved the cable to his much less cool and useful leg braces, then climbed out of the exoskeleton and onto the ladder, his legs moving as stiffly and clumsily as ever.
He stopped to remove the relic from its compartment, wrapped in his jacket. He slipped it inside his coveralls, against his sweat-soaked t-shirt.
As he climbed the ladder, he could see by the helicopter's array of lights that even more worms were approaching, surrounding the sinking bow of the mostly-sunken barge.
Carol sprayed them with more incendiary rounds, but her ammunition had to be mostly depleted by now.
Loader drove one back with a jab, another with a solid hook.
“Wait!” Bartley shouted. He'd stopped halfway up the ladder. “How are we gonna fit Loader into this helicopter?”
“The loader?” Carol cast a confused glance at the big yellow robot fighting alongside her. “Forget it. I couldn't take that thing if I had zero passengers and zero other cargo.”
“So...we're leaving Loader behind?” Bartley asked.
“Unloading?” The robot bashed aside yet another worm trying to make a name for itself, then turned to look up at Bartley.
“We can't just leave him,” Eric said. “You have to come back for him.”
“That's impossible!” Carol shouted back. “Both of you, get into that chopper if you want to live. Or get the hell out of the way so I can.”
“Loader, old buddy,” Bartley said, shaking his head. “I'm going to miss you, bro. I didn't want it to end like this. You'll always be my favorite model load-haul-dumper from now on.”
“Unloading.” Loader raised one hand as if waving. “Load! Load!”
Bartley nodded and continued climbing. Eric thought he heard the guy sniffle.
“I'm sorry, Loader,” Eric added, and meant it.
“Until the next great rebooting of the universal operating system, dear friend, compatriot, brother-in-arms,” Malvolio saluted, then hastily scurried up the chain ladder behind Eric, as if worried Carol would remember he was a robot and decide to leave him behind, too.
“You guys sure have a thing for this mining bot. Is it your girlfriend or something?” Carol grabbed on the chain ladder with one hand, and it began to reel itself back up into the helicopter. She sprayed her last rounds as cover fire for their retreat.
In the helicopter, Bartley had picked the co-pilot seat up front for himself. Eric and Malvolio hurried to the rear passenger area and buckled themselves in. The interior was well-appointed, as might be expected in a craft transporting a Li heiress: the seating and walls were thick and purple, the softness and fuzziness incongruent with the harsh, smoky world outside. Liquor and wine were available. Eric made sure not to mention that to Bartley, who couldn't see the little bar nook from up front.
Carol shook her head and frowned a little when she saw she'd be sitting next to Bartley, but there was no time to play musical chairs. It wasn't as if her other options were any better; everyone was covered in fresh, wet layers of filth clinging to older, dried-out layers of filth.
Below, the worms swarmed over Loader as the trash barge's bow sank below the surface. Half a dozen robo-snakes attached to the big yellow bot and drilled into him, sending up showers of sparks.
“Load!” Loader seized the two closest worms and dragged them under the surface, taking as many of the enemy as he coul
d down with him.
Then the robot was gone, out of sight in the dark water, torn apart by the aliens and their devices.
The helicopter door shut, and they went into a steep turn to face downriver.
“Engaging rear thrusters,” Carol said.
“So that means we're about to haul some serious poon—” Bartley began, and then the helicopter launched forward through the canyon at several hundred kilometers per hour. Banks and columns of rock flickered past on either side, at a speed that seemed beyond reckless to Eric. He wasn't about to ask the pilot to slow down, though, partly out of fear that distracting her for even half a second would plunge them all into an instant death against the canyon walls, like flies splatting into a windshield.
He held on tight while they rocketed ahead along the course of the river, keeping below the volcanic smog layer, heading toward the radioactive wasteland of Money City.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The helicopter slowed to a saner-feeling speed at they approached the ruins. They were past the deep canyons and mountains now, above lower hills approaching the ocean beyond.
Eric and Bartley remained quiet, the mood somber after losing Loader. The sight of the bombed-out city ahead didn't do much to lift their spirits. Money City had been nuked from orbit, and it definitely looked that way.
The bare, twisted remnants of skyscrapers loomed above the wreckage like the skeletons of giants. Fields of rubble lay below. There were also large dirt squares, relatively rubble-free, with patchy shrubs and weeds growing in them. Those might have been parks when the city was alive, Eric thought.
He took the spotty green growth as some reason to hope they wouldn't all be doomed to die from lingering fallout. But he was no expert, and at the moment, an expert opinion wouldn't have stopped him. Their single faint hope of escaping this planet lay somewhere below, an old mining ship that might or might not be in a condition to fly, or that might not even be there at all.
“This is the spot the drama-bot indicated,” Carol said, dropping into one of the desolate dirt squares.
They stepped out. A low depression sat at the center of the park, perhaps a former pond or fountain, now filled with broken masonry and sludge. Statues had decorated the park; most of them were now coated in a dark layer of ash streaked by acid rain, their heads and limbs broken or missing.
“I also indicated they should seek the old underground train station.” Malvolio stepped toward one of the wide boulevards flanking the park. Lamp posts drooped like dead flowers up and down the street.
Across the boulevard lay a cave-like opening in the rubble, surrounded by shattered heaps of brick, concrete, and steel. Malvolio led the way there, stopping to look both ways before crossing the long-deserted street.
Alanna emerged from the dark entrance to the subway station, looking grim.
“I hope you're right about all this, drama-bot. This place is...not right.” She gestured around at the nuclear-bombed city. “You can almost hear the ghosts in the wind.”
“Is the ship here or not?” Bartley asked.
“We need Malvolio to help us get inside,” Alanna said. “And Hagen's awake. He's not in a great mood.”
“If he was, that'd be a red flag that something was wrong with him,” Bartley said.
They followed Alanna inside, even Carol, who cast a reluctant look back at the helicopter, as though worried someone would steal it. Eric doubted there was another human soul anywhere in the city, though. Maybe not even on the planet, at this point.
They headed down a long escalator with wide steps; judging by the dust and cobwebs, it hadn't budged in years. Faded murals covered the walls, depicting a forest scene in soft pastels—trees and wildflowers, birds and rabbits, waterfalls and meadows. The soft, gentle images inspired homesickness for the green prairies and bamboo forests of Gideon. He supposed it would have that effect on anyone who'd traded a verdant home for rocky, smoky Caldera.
Vertical cracks ran down the wall, which had shifted so that the broken pieces of mural didn't quite line up.
They eventually reached the bottom, where Naomi and Iris waited with Hagen, who shook his head at the shattered underground station around them. Large chunks of the roof had fallen in, crushing vendors' carts and stalls that had once sold food and drinks to passengers. Boulder-sized chunks of concrete and thick dust had buried much of the rails where the trains had traveled, making them impassible.
“Amazing what people will do to each other,” Hagen said.
“It was your side that did this,” Bartley said. “Earth wanted this to happen.”
“I know. But they were trying to bring the war to an end.”
“Instead, Earth invited retaliation like they never saw coming, and ended up having to beg for an armistice—” Bartley said.
“Can we save the political arguments for later?” Eric said. “I want to see whether there's a ship down here or not. Malvolio?”
“Right this way, sir.” Malvolio hopped up, extruded and unfolded his unicycle, and wheeled through the wreckage of the train station. It seemed to Eric like a somewhat disrespectful way to traverse a place that had seen so much death, especially once he started to glimpse broken bones and skulls where people had been crushed under the falling roof rubble.
The train station had a high ceiling, supported by stone columns sculpted to look like young women dressed in bracelets, skirts, and not much else, their hands upholding the ceiling above. Aside from being several meters tall, they looked perfectly lifelike, every muscle and tendon rendered with care by the artist.
Eric diverted his eyes and couldn't help blushing a little, thinking what his mother would say about the décor. Big Timers—those who lived in the ultra-prosperous age between the discovery of the first wormhole gate at Saturn and the Interstellar War over who would control all the new systems—were known to be lavishly materialistic. Theirs had been a culture of reckless, impious pleasure-seekers, overly impressed with their own achievements and sense of ego, failing to cultivate critical virtues like humility and honesty. No wonder their civilization had collapsed into war; impressive as they were, they'd had no internal structure of principles to hold themselves together. That was the history Eric had learned at his little church school back on Gideon.
Iris fell into step beside him, and he remembered how she'd described how he'd looked when he touched the mask—innocent to the point of naivety, childlike. Maybe he was the immature, uncultured one here, blushing at statues in a subway station.
“Glad you made it,” she whispered. “I was worried.”
“I'm pretty glad about it, too,” he said.
“Where's Loader?” Naomi asked, climbing over a pile of fallen ceiling debris ahead.
“He didn't make it,” Bartley said. “Too heavy for the chopper.”
“That's terrible!” she said.
“You people sure loved that piece of mining equipment,” Carol grumbled behind them, shaking her head. She carried a laser pistol now. She'd loaned the heavy machine gun to Bartley, but so far the city was dead silent. Eric wondered whether the worms would follow them here or keep out of the radioactive city ruins.
Malvolio led them to an AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY door and opened the electronic lock with a wave of his hand. There must have still been some power in the old station.
They passed through a small warren of back rooms—storage and office space, mostly—and down a few flights of stairs.
“I'm getting tired of riding in this robot's arms all the time,” Hagen mumbled, but there wasn't much anyone could do about it at the moment.
“Why are we under a train station, anyway?” Alanna asked, while Malvolio worked at a secure steel door at the bottom of the stairs, trying to get it to respond.
“Dr. Erasmus built the underground hangar at the same time the underground trainway was under construction,” Malvolio said. “The construction of one helped to hide the construction of the other. Ah, here we are. For a moment, I was afraid the
system had forgotten me.”
The steel door opened onto a pitch-black, stale-smelling space beyond.
A moment later, lights clunked on automatically, one after the other, fluorescents in the ceiling casting their harsh glares to illuminate a long tunnel that slanted downward. The floor was a black conveyor belt, a moving sidewalk that stuttered and squeaked to life as the lights switched on.
They began the long ride down.
“I feel like a piece of meat on the grocery conveyor belt,” Bartley said.
“You look like one, too,” Naomi said.
Bartley looked back at her with an eyebrow lifted, seeming puzzled how to take that. They were all pretty punchy, well past exhausted, starved and thirsty, stressed by hour after hour of horror and fear. Eric wouldn't be surprised if a fight broke out among them. They could use the last of their energy tearing each other apart, the way humans in general had done during the war.
The moving sidewalk conveyed them toward a big circular door at the far end of the long, long tunnel, ringed with groups of brightly colored light bulbs, as if they would be stepping from the gray underground tunnel into a zany amusement park or casino.
The big circular door rolled aside.
They entered a suite of huge rooms decorated with beaded rugs, light fixtures that looked like tropical birds, zebra-striped couches and overstuffed wingback chairs with sculpted wooden lion heads. Music played automatically; it sounded like electric banjos and steel drums, with fast and unfamiliar lyrics Eric couldn't follow.
Most impressive were the aquariums, huge saltwater monstrosities kept clean and functional by little floating robots. Squids, sharks, and giant fish swam among them, occasionally crossing from one big wall-mounted tank to the other via giant clear tubes across the ceiling.
“Are we sure this a hangar?” Hagen asked.
“Yes, indeed!” Malvolio said. “These are simply the support rooms—Dr. Erasmus designed them for rest and relaxation for the mechanics and crew. The ship is through here...”