by Max Carver
“Already connected, sir!” Malvolio saluted, slapping himself so hard that he tipped backward on his unicycle, but stopped just before landing flat on his back. He sprang back upright. Clearly the whole thing had been a vaudevillian performance—a slide whistle sound effect even played from somewhere on the drama-bot's person. “Otherwise we couldn't have entered at all. Fortunately, the system remembered me, and its fondness for my access codes did not grow cold in my long absence—”
“Patrol the perimeter on foot, too,” Hagen said. “Or...wheel. Whatever.”
“Yes, sir! Though I am but a lone sentry, I shall not derelict my duty, nor let my fellows down. Yea, honor shall be my watchword, loyalty the only coin for which I shall fight—”
“Shut up,” Hagen said, and the drama-bot whisked away.
Eric picked an unoccupied console and plugged into the data port.
The ship's systems suddenly engulfed him. He was like a flea blindly navigating through a convoluted steam engine, with absolutely no idea what he was seeing or where he was going, only that there were millions of moving parts and seemingly random flashes of light.
Eric was definitely no computer hacker.
Drones, he tried to communicate to the unfamiliar system. This was nothing like farming or mining machinery, meant to do a clear and simple job. He was clueless. Combat drone tutorial.
He thought he felt a faint response somewhere deep in the vast, city-like sprawl of information architecture that seemed to reach forever in all directions. He moved toward it, still not at all sure of what he was doing.
Then he saw them, the drone schematics popping up in three-dimensional grids, with sharp, raked-back wings and a plasma launcher mounted front and center like the beak of a predatory bird, ready to spit fiery death.
“Okay,” he whispered to himself. “No problem.”
He searched for the tutorial program, hoping he didn't inadvertently launch a real drone or shoot up the starship in which they sat.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eric piloted the drone through a cartoon city and shot plasma bursts at pop-up target characters. Sometimes he managed to hit one—a big three-eyed reptilian monster, or a villain in a tuxedo twirling his giant mustache, or a pirate with a hook hand and a cutlass. Horned demons occasionally popped out of sewer drains and manhole covers. He also had to avoid hitting overly innocent pedestrians—a gaggle of uniformed schoolgirls holding puppies, a grandmother carrying a stack of presents and cakes, Santa Claus and some elves.
“I need air-to-air tutorials,” Eric said. “Planes or starfighters.”
The cartoon city below flickered...and then a wooden galleon rose from the streets, its sails puffed full of wind. A crew of silly cartoon pirates manned the ship. A parrot wearing an eyepatch perched on the crow's nest, and the bird opened fire on Eric with two giant pepperbox pistols. Cannons mounted along the side of the ship launched cannonballs at him.
“Oh, come on,” Eric muttered, annoyed with the training module. He flew in a wide curve around the ship to avoid the ridiculous cannonballs, then he unleashed a rapid-fire burst of small plasma bolts no bigger than his thumb.
The masts and sails of the galleon ignited, the fire spreading quickly. The cartoon pirates hurried to douse it with barrels of whiskey, which only made it flare up. A monkey with a pegleg, wearing a tricorn hat, leaped overboard and swam away through midair, abandoning ship, clutching a treasure map in one hand.
“This is stupid,” Eric grumbled. “Fighters! How hard is that?” He visualized starfighters as hard as he could, hoping to make his intent clear to the system.
He finally managed to pull up a menu of tutorial options. He could choose to fly the simulated drone in combat against either Alliance or Colonial fighters. Eric immediately chose to fight the Alliance, as his brothers and father had done in the real war.
A formation of four Allied starfighters appeared in the sky; he knew them right away by their sleeker, curved bodies. Rebel fighters, like those his brother Abel flew, had a sharper, more angular look.
The starfighters opened up with high-speed railguns firing depleted-uranium rounds.
Eric's drone was torn to shreds before he could even begin to respond.
“Okay,” he whispered. “That's a little more realistic.”
He restarted the simulation and was instantly shot down again. The cartoon city spun around and around him until his bullet-riddled craft shattered into the blacktop.
Eric was gunned down, roasted with a plasma rocket, pursued until he crashed into the surrounding buildings. The tutorial software made suggestions that gradually taught him some basic evasion and targeting maneuvers.
At long last, after countless attempts, Eric managed to damage a starfighter's wing with a controlled burst of plasma before the squadron took him down. The enemy craft spun out of control and crashed into an orange skyscraper labeled CLOWN TOYS, INC.
As Eric started over yet again, cruising low through the alleys of the city, Malvolio's disembodied head appeared in midair, floating alongside him.
“What are you doing?” Eric asked.
“I apologize for sticking my nose in where it may be unwelcome,” Malvolio said. “However, the perimeter sensors have detected something shaking and blasting its way through the rock, on a direct course towards us.”
“Worms?”
“One would surmise as much, yes. My physical body is en route to engage—ah, correction.” Malvolio sounded relieved. “Hagen has ordered me to join the rest of you on the ship. Apparently this new information moves up our launch timeframe considerably.”
“Okay, thanks for the heads up,” Eric said.
Malvolio's head tipped toward him, as if nodding, and then vanished.
Eric opened his eyes, but kept himself plugged into the ship's system. Everyone had strapped into their seats. Most of the workstations had multiple empty seats, meant for properly trained teams instead of one clueless person each.
Holographic projections filled the curved walls and ceiling, showing the area outside and above the ship as if the bridge were surrounded by huge glass windows, though in reality layers of decks and bulkheads lay between them and the ship's hull.
Eric could see the hangar all around them. Cables and supports shrank back and away from the ship in every direction, as if all the hardware in the hangar was cringing in anticipation of their upcoming amateur-hour takeoff.
“Mr. Hagen, the aliens continue to approach at an alarming speed,” Malvolio announced. The drama-bot was the only one still standing instead of strapped into a seat for liftoff. He stood by a wall projection, gazing with apparent worry as thick metal partition walls came down. The partitions shielded the hangar tools and the little warren of rooms beyond from damage during the ship's blast-off. Hopefully they would slow the aliens' approach, too.
“Then we don't have much choice. Open the hangar doors,” Hagen commanded.
Malvolio spun around twice, then dramatically swept his hand toward the ceiling, like a Viking hero in an opera hurling at hammer at the sky. Hagen grunted as if annoyed.
The entire ceiling rumbled, then split open in a straight line right down the middle. A mass of dirt and rocks crashed down from above the ceiling, burying the upper part of the ship and blocking their view of whatever might be happening above them.
“Got windshield wipers on this thing?” Bartley asked.
“There's no windshield up there,” Hagen said. “Just a solid hull painted with thousands of microscopic sensors.”
“Yeah, whatever. Can you at least try the wipers?”
“I hope the crazy engineers who built this place knew what they were doing, or else we're all going to get buried alive down here,” Carol said.
Everyone waited in silence as the incredibly large pair of overhead doors opened, driven by rumbling machinery deep within the walls.
In the old days, Eric thought, people had done things in a big, big way, when they put their minds to it. Sometim
es they seemed to do them just to prove they could. Like this hangar. It was far from an efficient design. Instead, it was a show of power and daring, man's imagination prevailing over the forces of nature to accomplish the seemingly impossible. It had been a grander age, a time of optimism and invention for which he sometimes felt an odd nostalgia, considering it had been long over by the time he was born. He'd heard of it from elders in his community—who often spoke with disdain of the Big Timers' lavish lifestyles and reckless hedonism—and also learned about it from books and videos.
“Rowan, send up a drone for a better view,” Hagen said. Dirt was cascading down like waterfalls all around the ship, flooding the hangar floor. “I feel like we're getting buried at the bottom of an hourglass here.”
“I...think I can do that,” Eric said.
He closed his eyes.
The drone launched from a concealed rack in the outer hull. Eric flew it straight up toward the ceiling, hoping the hangar doors had opened enough that he could slip out. He didn't have much choice, anyway; keeping the drone low risked crashing it into the walls, the floor, or the ship itself. Eric wasn't good enough to fly slow, or in a compact area.
He raced upward alongside the massive asteroid-cutter ship, then past it. The huge doors were continuing to open, he saw, leaving him plenty of room to slip on out.
He flew a circle around the outside, watching as the doors dumped what had to be tons of dirt and rock off to either side instead of down into the hangar.
“We actually look pretty clear for takeoff,” Eric said. “Doors are open, space above is empty...”
Eric flew higher, having a look around. They were in a rocky area, farther away from the Money City ruins than he'd expected; the moving sidewalk must have been longer and faster than he'd realized.
Then he saw something that turned him cold. The rocky land around the underground cracked and split. Earthquake-sized fissures opened, swallowing boulders and dirt.
“They're almost here,” Eric said. “The worms.”
He opened his eyes to make sure the others had heard him.
“Looks like we are go for takeoff,” Hagen said. “Since the alternative is sitting here and embracing sweet death. Initiating...”
Alarms sounded and red warning lights flashed all over the bridge.
“Countdown to lift-off,” said an automated male voice, sounding as bored as a teenage fast-food clerk announcing yet another hamburger order. “Twenty...nineteen...”
“Warning!” a different announcement cut in. “Liftoff has not been authorized by all departments and committees—”
“Warning!” another one added. “Secure all personnel for liftoff.”
“Warning! Pre-launch scans incomplete!”
“Alert!”
“Danger!”
Hagen touched a button and all the voices went silent.
“You couldn't possibly have fixed all those problems by pushing one button,” Naomi said to Hagen.
“I did,” Hagen replied. “It was the mute button.”
Huge, glowing red numbers floated in the air over every workstation. 6...5...4...
Outside, the partition walls began to shift. Portions of them dented inward, as though hammered by a powerful force on the other side. Then glowing red spots appeared, scattered across the walls, as the worms began to melt their way through.
Between the blasting and excavating of the worms, and the immense energy building up in the rockets and main engine, the entire mining ship shuddered and hummed. Eric's teeth rattled together.
...2...1...
They rose from the launch pad, filling the sealed-up hangar with blinding white light. Maybe some of the worms would crash through in time to get deep-fried by the booster rocket exhaust.
The takeoff seemed painfully slow to Eric, the immense mining ship moving upward at a pace that might have given a shopping-mall elevator a run for its money, but seemed far too slow for escaping a horde of aliens that were armed to their long, sharp teeth.
Still, they were rising, the G-forces pressing them all down into their seats, which were soft and adjusted to accommodate them. The ship's inertia dampeners protected them from the full brunt of it, but Eric and the others were definitely feeling heavier than usual.
The ship rumbled, climbing and clawing its way up, centimeter by centimeter, fighting against gravity and air.
Below, the worms blasted the hangar apart with flashes of concentrated plasma. The partition walls came tumbling down, half-melted.
The huge asteroid-cutter continued its ascent, up through the volcanic smog layer of the atmosphere, seeking the open sky above.
Eric closed his eyes and returned his focus to the drone, which he'd left climbing in a slow, wide spiral. It was in the smog layer, and he couldn't see much but ash and smoke. He urged the drone upward, steeper and faster now that he was back in control.
He broke through into the red-tinged morning light of Caldera. Morning had arrived while they were down inside the hangar.
Seven aircraft were on approach. They were just as Carol had described: weirdly organic, with a bulging, shell-like front compartment and a long, spiny fuselage trailing behind, reminiscent of some undersea creature. Their formation was lopsided and uneven, with no common altitude, no standard distance between the craft.
Two wormfighters broke formation and dove toward Eric. One opened fire, and Eric managed to dodge aside...but that put him right in the path of the second wormfighter, opening up a barrage of its own. Eric had been herded like a sheep into that line of fire.
Ten or eleven shots hit the drone, and he saw the ammo the worms were firing—twisted chunks of metal the size of his hand, with no particular shape. They looked like bits of scrap swept up from the ground in a junkyard. They seemed too heavy to use as ammunition, and definitely not aerodynamic, but the worms simply compensated with brute force, firing them at extremely high speed.
The drone tumbled from the sky, smoking, and dropped down into the smog layer. He passed the Omicron Rex rising from the hangar doors, the bottoms of its booster rockets glowing white.
Then the drone slammed into the floor of the hangar, giving him a quick glimpse of worms exploring the place before he lost connection.
Eric was instantly back on the bridge, back in his body, pressed down by the growing g-forces that the inertia dampeners couldn't quite cancel.
“Wormfighters are...already up there,” Eric said, his speech a little labored along with his breathing. “Waiting for us.”
“And we'll...be waiting...for them.” Bartley said. He and Naomi were both reclined in seats at the weapons station, looking up at holograms that floated above them, their heavy hands crawling toward their controls.
“The helicopter's in a...holding pattern now. Hidden in smog,” Carol said, her pocket screen on her lap.
“Good. Everyone prepare for battle,” Hagen said. “Things are about to get very serious—”
“Mazel cheers!” A semi-transparent hologram of a man with close-cropped magenta hair and golden designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge. He wore a black monogrammed bathrobe over a matching tie and high-collared shirt. His feet were clad in black leather slippers. Eric recalled that ultra-high-end bath and bed wear had been a fashion among the wealthy elite before the war—they'd even worn them to formal occasions and business meetings.
Champagne spewed from a bottle in the hologram's hand; his other hand held a glass that caught a very small amount of the gushing bubbly. The rest of the champagne vanished as it hit the floor. The man's big, cheerful smile faded quickly.
“What's all this?” he asked. “Where's the Board? Or the smorgasbord, for that matter? Where's the brass band and the girls waving sparklers?”
Nobody answered, or appeared to know what he was talking about.
“Are you thieves?” he asked. “Industrial spies? Saboteurs?”
Everyone continued to look at him blankly.
“Something's gone terribly wrong
, hasn't it?” The man sighed, his shoulders slumping.
“Who are you?” Naomi asked.
“I suppose I could answer that,” Malvolio said. “Ladies and gentry, I present to you Dr. Nathaniel Erasmus, chief designer of the very asteroid-cutter starship in which we currently converse. And my former owner. Or at least an artificially intelligent construct of him, to some degree.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I'm confused,” said the ghostly astronautical engineer with the still-overflowing bottle of digital champagne. “Dr. Erasmus—the real, flesh-and-blood version—kept us in a strict data silo down here, to avoid espionage from other major corporations, and later as security against the war, which had metastasized across fourteens star systems by then, Earth trying to control its rebelling colonies—”
“We're flying into a squad of hostile alien fighters,” Hagen said. “Feel free to help with the reactor, rockets, or ship defense—”
“Hostile aliens! So much has changed in the past two decades.” Erasmus sipped his holographic champagne. “Are they humanoid? How do they communicate? From where do they originate? They must have fascinating technology, and a fascinating culture—”
“They're barbaric monsters and they're trying to kill us all,” Iris said.
“How disappointing. I'm also noticing this ship was not thoroughly prepped for take-off, which is also disappointing. Nobody inspected the compressed-plasma fuel in the rockets? After it sat for so many years? You're lucky this ship wasn't reduced to an ashtray.”
“We'll take more care next time, pal,” Bartley said.
The ship rose free of the smog layer, and the seven wormfighters closed in around it.
“Fire at will!” Hagen shouted, and Bartley and Naomi went to work. “Rowan, get another drone out there. Distract all the squirmers you can. Pull them away from us.”
“Those are, by far, the ugliest machines I've ever seen.” The hologram of Nathaniel Erasmus looked at the images of the approaching fighters. “Do you think they find that bulbous asymmetry to be...aesthetically pleasing, somehow? Surely no advanced, civilized life form—”