Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  “Either help us or shut up!” Hagen said.

  “He says that a lot, you'll find,” Malvolio told the hologram.

  Eric closed his eyes and launched out another drone.

  He focused completely on moving fast and evasively, skimming just above the smog layer, hoping to draw a few wormfighters away from the ship.

  Only one fighter even bothered firing on Eric, though, and even that one quickly resumed circling the mining ship with the others. Clearly, none of the worms were taking him seriously.

  The wormfighters opened up on the ship with high-speed scrap guns. The Rex's tungsten-alloy hull didn't crumple under that assault like the drone had, but the scrap pitted and scarred the ship. It wouldn't hold up against such an attack forever.

  Other wormfighters spat balls of expanding plasma that threatened to eat through the tough hull.

  Eric felt weirdly dissociated, his consciousness here in the drone, his body up there in the mining ship. If there had been windows on the bridge, Eric could have flown past and looked in at himself.

  “Rowan! Fire!” Hagen's voice ordered, piped right into Eric's ear by the ship's system.

  Eric snapped out of it. He tilted into a steep upward climb and raked the underside of a wormfighter with plasma volleys.

  That got the one craft's attention, at least. The wormfighter peeled away from the assault on the mining ship and dove towards Eric's drone, while trailing smoke and fire. Eric's plasma had done some real damage.

  Eric spotted the fighter's scrap gun, a big rotating cylinder that made him think of a steel trash can turned on its side. He also identified the plasma launcher on the other side. Like the plasma artillery they'd seen on the worms underground, it was made of several pipes of different sizes, arranged in no obvious order at all, welded into a blob of rock.

  Eric cut sharply around the bulbous, shell-like front end of the fighter as it closed on him. He narrowly avoided a barrage of high-speed metal from the scrap gun.

  He came around the rear of the fighter with his plasma cannon facing the long, narrow, spiny fuselage that jutted out from the back of the bulbous shell. He didn't know a thing about alien engineering, but it seemed obvious that he'd have a better chance of damaging the narrow back end rather than the thick, wide front. Plus, he seemed to be out of range of the fighter's main weapons, since it couldn't shoot him here without shooting itself.

  Eric zeroed in on the long spine of the fuselage, ready to blast it in half.

  The wormfighter turned, even more sharply than Eric had, and the long, spiny body of the fighter swung toward Eric.

  He realized the spiny fuselage had loosened from a stiff, straight line into several flexible segments, like links in a chain. Or a chain whip, which the fuselage now closely resembled.

  Eric barely had time to grasp what was happening before the spiny fuselage lashed into him, sending him spinning dizzily away toward the horizon, the sky above and smog below spinning around and around him. He had to hold back a lurching feeling in his gut as the drone whirled.

  “Righten up out there.” Hagen's voice seemed to speak right into his ear though the man was across the room. “We don't get free refills on those drones.”

  “Yes, sir.” Eric concentrated, trying to pull the drone out of its spiral dive. Deep in the smog, it was hard to even tell which way was up and which was down.

  When Eric finally managed to straighten up and fly right, he directed the drone up toward the open sky again.

  He rose from the smog to see the burning wormfighter trolling around above the smog layer. The fighter looked damaged, but was obviously still operational.

  It was facing away from him, too, which gave him an opening to attack. Eric flew his shuddering, smoking little craft toward the wormfighter, this time focusing on the joint where the long tail of the fuselage met the bulging shell at the front end.

  Something small and black poked up from the smog, like a prairie dog's snout, then dropped back below right away. It was there and gone so fast that Eric might have taken it for an optical illusion, if the wormfighter's scrap gun hadn't opened fire right at the spot where the dark shape had been.

  Then he realized it was Carol's helicopter, flying by a combination of remote control and intelligent autopilot.

  “Is that your drone on approach, Rowan?” Carol asked in his ear, startling him. “Looks like something the dog dragged out of the campfire.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Mind shooting this cat away from my mousehole?” Carol's helicopter nosed up again, only to dodge away from another barrage of high-speed scrap.

  “That was my plan. Approaching the, uh, cat's collar now.” Eric rushed up behind the fighter and unleashed several plasma shots into its neck, where the fuselage connected to the front end.

  The head of the wormfighter ruptured open, spewing white fire from cracks all over its surface. The ugly horseshoe-crab craft sank out of sight through the smog, like a broken sea vessel swallowed up by the waves.

  “Got him!” Eric said. “The, uh, cat is on its way down to the, um, litter box—”

  “Understood.” Carol's helicopter blasted up from the smog and charged toward the wormfighters above.

  “I'm coming with you.” Eric tilted up to follow her. He felt like a character in a war cartoon from his childhood, maybe Captain Tiger or Army Andy—Eric was a talking drone armed with a big cannon, having a conversation with a sleek female helicopter as he chased her through the sky. She was a civilian chopper, unarmed but plucky and brave.

  A burned spiral toppled down from above, passing them on their way up.

  “That's right!” Bartley's voice shouted. It looked like he'd landed a shot with the mining ship's plasma weapon. “Who ordered the large curly fry?”

  “Two down,” Hagen's voice said, flat and cold. “Five remain.”

  “Mark it four, sir,” Carol said. Her helicopter continued its steep climb toward the mining ship and the wormfighters, it rear thrusters flaring until they trailed fire, moving at a speed that would be far too much if there were any human passengers. Easily more than a thousand kilometers an hour, Eric thought; the helicopter was a blur, a black comet with a fiery tail.

  It slammed into a fighter, crashing into the junction of long, spiny body and bulbous head. The impact severed the fighter into two pieces.

  The tail section spun off into the distance, whipping around like a decapitated worm—which was exactly what Eric saw when he glimpsed the interior, a blood tooth-lined throat with no head. The fighter was not so much a vehicle in which the worm rode; it was more of an armored flying suit that enclosed a big worm.

  The severed bulging front end of the wormfighter rotated at high speed, spewing flames as the heavy helicopter wreckage dragged it away into the smog below.

  “I'm down,” Carol announced.

  Eric continued his ascent, but the drone's jets were smoking and choking, and it was hard to gain speed. His plasma was running low, too; he could squeeze off one or two good bursts, if he got close enough before the worms shot him down.

  He focused on the wormfighter closest to the mining ship and prepared to fire the rest of his plasma. His viewpoint flashed red. Alarms sounded. His cannon had jammed, maybe cooked too hot from so many plasma bursts close together, maybe battered from getting lashed by the worm's tail.

  He couldn't shoot.

  “There is another option,” a voice said. It took Eric a moment to recognize the voice of Dr. Erasmus, or at least the engineer's AI construct that apparently inhabited the ship.

  It appeared in Eric's line of sight, a new option in a transparent menu of them.

  “Self-destruct?” Eric asked, and the text turned into a bowling ball with a lit fuse attached, the image flashing bright red.

  “Exactly,” Erasmus replied.

  Eric maneuvered the drone beneath two wormfighters that were close together, lashing the big mining ship with their scrap guns and plasma bursts. A transparent schematic app
eared off to one side, showing the plasma cannon turning red-hot as it intentionally overloaded.

  The drone flew in between the two fighters and blasted apart, hitting each of them with a wave of plasma and hot, melting shrapnel. He had no immediate way of judging how effective the explosion had been.

  For a moment, he floated in a pitch-black space, sensing nothing except a low electric hum in the deep background. He wondered if he'd died somehow, his mind blown apart along with the drone. If so, death wasn't what he'd been taught to expect in church back home; death was just a long, long emptiness.

  Then he abruptly found himself back on the bridge, looking out through his own eyes.

  Outside, the smoke was still clearing from his drone. Bartley fired one plasma burst after another into the spot where the two fighters had been. Naomi operated two railguns, which fired depleted-uranium slugs at supersonic speed, but each shot took several seconds to load.

  “I suppose I could take over the spare railguns,” the hologram of Dr. Erasmus said. “We're not exactly firing with a full crew here.” He made his fingers into a gun shape and pointed it at the two damaged wormfighters emerging from the smoke. “Pew pew pew.”

  One of the damaged wormfighters caught a barrage of fresh plasma, while the other was struck by multiple supersonic rounds. That one sagged and tumbled, its guns quiet, but as with Eric's drone, it had one last attack left in it.

  As it descended, trailing multiple streams of black smoke, it twisted and crashed into one of the big rocket boosters that were lifting the mining ship into the sky.

  The ship shuddered at the impact and began to list, threatening to go into a deadly spin.

  “Emergency! The ship is in danger!” Dr. Erasmus's ghost shouted from every speaker on the ship. “Adjusting attitude to compensate.”

  “Wish it was that easy to adjust your attitude,” Bartley muttered to Naomi beside him.

  “Wish you didn't have so much to compensate for,” she replied.

  “Jettisoning the damaged rocket,” the hologram said.

  “Can we still make it to orbit?” Hagen asked.

  “It should be...technically possible...” the hologram replied, sounding less than certain.

  “Where the hell are the other fighters?” Bartley asked.

  He had a point. While the mining ship slowed its already turtle-paced ascent, and the damaged rocket detached, everyone searched for the last two wormfighters. There was no sign of them nearby.

  “Maybe we scared them off,” Alanna said. She'd awoken at some point during the lift-off and ensuing battle.

  “I wouldn't bet on it,” Hagen told her.

  “There!” Malvolio took a heavy, clunking step toward the projection that gave them a view of the river, toward the ruins of Canyon City. “It appears they've found some friends, as well.”

  “Oh, no!” Naomi shook her head at the tiny, distant figures. A new squadron of seven worms was approaching, and the two remaining worms of the first squadron were flying over to join with them. Soon they'd have nine wormfighters on approach.

  “I'm not sure how much more damage the ship can take,” the ghostly engineer said. “And I'm the one programmed to brag about the ship's abilities.”

  “What about that rocket?” Hagen indicated the damaged booster, already veering far away from their path of ascent. It leaked a trail of concentrated plasma behind it, which turned to fire on exposure to the air. “Can we redirect it toward the worm squadron?”

  “I...could try?” the hologram replied, in a way that inspired confidence in no one. “But they'll see it coming and dodge. I can't guarantee it will detonate or any such useful thing.”

  “Hell, get it over there and we'll detonate the doodleberries out of it,” Bartley said.

  “Such harsh language,” Naomi said.

  The rocket tilted away much more steeply, as the AI construct redirected its guidance system. It turned almost horizontal as it whooshed toward the nine approaching wormfighters, leaving a fire-trail behind it.

  The wormfighters spread out in every direction. They had plenty of time to open a giant hole in their formation, big enough to let the rocket through.

  Then the asteroid-cutter's weapons unleashed a wave of rail-gun shots, followed by a huge blast of plasma.

  The rocket booster blew apart in a spectacular explosion, a cloud of fire that billowed out to engulf the entire wormfighter formation.

  Everyone watched the massive, still-growing cloud of flame and black smoke, waiting for the survivors to charge with guns blazing. They waited and watched, and the mining ship climbed up and up, through heavy rain clouds, moving slowly, but still moving.

  They rose up, toward black emptiness and starlight. Soon the outer curve of planet Caldera was visible off to their side. The red dwarf sun burned like a weak candle in the darkness.

  The ship drew away from the planet, toward the depths of outer space, out past the orbits of Caldera's two lumpy little moons.

  “Did we make it?” Alanna asked, after several minutes of tense silence.

  Nobody wanted to jinx the moment by answering. But no wormfighters pursued them up out of the atmosphere. The rocky, volcanic planet grew smaller and more distant.

  They shed the rocket boosters, all their fuel spent, and headed for the outer solar system. None of them knew what lay ahead, but for now, they seemed to have found a moment of peace.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The system in which Caldera orbited was relatively small. Far beyond Caldera lay the gas giant planet Valentine, around which the ancients had seen fit to place a wormhole gate in orbit. As in every system humans had explored so far, there were two such gates, each leading to only a few other systems. Every system was a small node in a galactic network.

  The more distant gate orbited the system's ice giant, planet Yeti. That was about twice as far away as their current destination, the stormy pink and red planet Valentine. The wormhole gate there was known, logically enough, as Valentine Gate.

  Also orbiting Valentine was a spaceport, a common arrangement. Typically, a gatekeeper was stationed at such orbital ports to operate the nearby wormhole gate, sending interstellar traffic wherever it needed to go. This port, also logically enough, was called Valentine Gate Station, after the wormhole gate it was built to service.

  Hagen attempted to make contact with them once it became clear that no wormfighters were pursuing them.

  “Hailing Valentine Station,” Hagen said. “This is, uh...” He paused, as if thinking things over.

  “The Omicron Rex, sir,” Malvolio told him, in the loudest whisper Eric had ever heard. Hagen gave the drama-bot an annoyed scowl.

  “This is an emergency,” Hagen continued. “Hostile...forces have attacked Caldera.” He'd apparently decided against raving about invading aliens, which was probably wise if he wanted his warning taken seriously. “Canyon City is destroyed. Be on alert. This is Frank Hagen...current acting manager of the XRD mining concern. I have a small crew of survivors coming your way aboard the asteroid-cutter Omicron Rex. We should arrive in...” He glanced at Iris.

  “About thirteen standard days,” Iris said, looking over from a hologram of the solar system on her console. She unlatched her seatbelt.

  Eric did the same, enjoying the lower-weight environment. The ship's artificial gravity made him weigh only three-quarters of what he had down on Caldera, a smallish planet, and about half what he weighed back home on the “grass giant” of Gideon.

  “Thirteen standards,” Hagen repeated into the microphone. “If you don't hear from us again, assume the hostiles got us. They are heavily armed with weapons like you've never seen, and they will fight on the ground, in the water, or in the air. I cannot overstate the danger. We await your response. Over.” He muted the channel. “Iris, how long until they get back to us?”

  “At our current distance from Valentine...about thirty minutes for the message to reach them, thirty minutes for their reply to come back. That's assuming
they don't take any time to think before they speak,” Iris said.

  “Safe assumption, most people don't.” Hagen looked over at the ghost of Nathaniel Erasmus. “How's the ship looking mechanically? It's not going to leave us in a ditch halfway through the asteroid belt, is it?”

  “It's doing remarkably well considering how recklessly you've handled it,” Erasmus replied.

  “We're alive,” Hagen said. “Should count for something. But the dead guy's got a point. Everybody, listen up. We're probably going to be stuck on this boat together for a few weeks. We could be attacked again. One thing I can tell you from experience is things will get messy without a clear chain of command. We've been jumping from emergency to emergency...and I took the command chair, partly because it's the most comfortable one in the room...but here we are. Some of us are veterans, but this isn't a military vessel. It's stolen; none of us are authorized to command it. That makes us pirates. And pirates make decisions democratically. So I suggest we vote on some basic questions.”

  “You are all here as employees of Exoplanet Resource Development, which means you work for me,” Alanna said. “I'm not sure I agree with the piracy parallel. I am still the ranking corporate officer here.”

  “That is so nice to hear,” Naomi said, rising up and out of her seat. “Because that would mean we're all still on the clock for overtime and hazard pay, starting yesterday, until whatever time we reach somewhere safe.”

  “She's right about that!” Bartley added, his face lighting up as he did the math. “Weeks of overtime and hazard pay!”

  “That fits my contract, too,” Eric said.

  “Let's go back to piracy,” Alanna said quickly.

  Hagen nodded. “For starters, who votes that we continue on course for Valentine Gate?”

  “Why wouldn't we?” Eric asked.

  “There's also Yeti Gate,” Hagen said. The system's second wormhole gate orbited the ice giant called Yeti, out at the edge of the solar system. “It's a longer haul, and there's no spaceport, no humans there at all.”