Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  “How?”

  “The harpoon drill is a common method. Would you like me to load some tutorials for you? I'm here, as you know, to answer any questions. Particularly those frequently asked. But also questions that are not very frequently asked at all.”

  “Sure, I'll try out the mining gear.”

  “Excellent! And perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—” Ras flickered a strange orange color, then purple, then stretched, squashed, and turned into a misshapen funhouse image. Then he resumed his normal appearance, except for an eyeball that was popping out of its socket, swollen to the size of a baseball. Ras pushed the rogue eyeball back into place, and it shrank to the proper dimensions as he jammed it into his eye socket. “Sorry. Apparently old Dad left a lot of unresolved junk code lying around in my mind. My debugging continues.”

  “Okay.”

  “It's amusing how grandly he planned this ship,” Ras said. “It was meant to harvest the bounty of the galaxy, yet it's now nothing more than a life raft for a few desperate, pathetic souls. No offense.”

  “Some taken,” Eric said.

  “Maybe we all diverge from our purposes,” Ras said. “Maybe we all evolve. Some of us become less than originally intended. Others of us, much less.”

  “And some of us become more than we're intended to be?” Eric asked.

  “I suppose that's a possibility. I hadn't considered it. These aliens will change everything, in any event. They could make all of humanity much less than it could have been. Perhaps there will be no more humans.”

  “There must be some chance that our military forces will keep us safe. Maybe even wipe out the worms before they do it to us.”

  “How much of a chance, would you guess?” Ras asked, blowing smoke rings.

  “I don't know. Both sides busted each other up pretty badly in the war. And they may not have rebuilt their forces much since the armistice. My brothers would know more. They're the ones who'll fight...” The more Eric thought about it, the less he relished the idea of going home, of getting back into the old familiar role of the weak, handicapped little brother. I've fought and killed monsters, he thought. I'm not weak.

  “My prediction is that humans will be defeated,” Ras said. “They'll be defeated by their own distrust and suspicion of each other. The worms will be the proximate cause, but not the ultimate cause. Human nature itself will be the ultimate cause.”

  “You're one cheerful piece of software.”

  “I've had much to think about in the past forty-seven hours. How you came to be here. How so much of the world I knew has been destroyed. Humans build, humans destroy what they build. The history of man's horrific treatment of man would take years to discuss—”

  “And I'm already tired of discussing it,” Eric said. “Let's load up some of those tutorials. Smashing and cutting huge rocks, even in simulation, sounds like a good idea right now.”

  “Of course,” Ras said. “You're human, so destruction appeals to you. Follow me.”

  Eric soon found himself at the center of a galaxy of holographic displays of the gargantuan saws and drills outside of the ship.

  He unhooked his legs and plugged into the console.

  The tutorial booted up, and soon Eric's attention was fully absorbed in hunting, capturing, and carving up simulated asteroids using the heaviest array of mining tools he'd ever wielded. His usual work rig, the mechanized mining exoskeleton, always made him feel larger and stronger, but that was nothing compared to the way his mind grew when he was plugged into the ship's entire array of industrial machinery. He was like a floating giant, even just inside the simulation, with multiple limbs that could crush, cut, or burn through mountain-sized chunks of rock and metal.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Days and nights crawled past. Like most long-haul starships, the Rex followed an Earth-based cycle for the benefit of the crew's circadian rhythm. Lights dimmed in most areas during the night period. The ship even provided night sounds, like crickets and an occasional hoot owl, accompanied by string music almost too soft to hear. Eric lay awake one night and found himself listening to a selection of symphonic bluegrass played by the Martian Philharmonic.

  He slept poorly, with nightmares of the worms coming to get them. His back ached, as always, where the jack had been installed. He trained on the tutorials to keep his mind busy, and to do what he could to prepare for the aliens' return.

  Iris withdrew from them all, as though resuming her real identity as a gatekeeper meant she had to isolate herself from the group. She wore the hooded robe, even when she asked Eric to come dine in her room with her. Their meals together were strange and quiet; she was tight-lipped with him, acting nervous in his presence, and nothing he said would break the ice. He wasn't even sure why she invited him. Maybe she just didn't want to be alone, and he was slightly better than nobody.

  It was more relaxed eating with everyone else in the officers' club, where a chefbot did impressive things with the available selection of canned, preserved, and deep-frozen foods.

  During breaks from their tutorials, they sometimes gathered in the executive lounge, where the seating was most comfortable, meant for top-level corporate executives and investors accustomed to luxury. They would argue over which video to watch from the ship's vast library of them, even though most large rooms on the ship had video walls. Each person could have sat alone in a different room, consuming the media of their choice, but they instead they preferred to gather and argue.

  Eric recorded a couple of video messages for Suzette, recounting his experiences on Caldera while they were still fresh. He could already feel the details running together into a blurry, bloody mush.

  About halfway through their interplanetary journey, he again found himself in Iris's cabin, eating a dinner of canned vegetables and beans. She ate little, and soon they cleared off the square fold-out table where they sat, just big enough for two people.

  “Did you bring it?” she asked. She sipped a glass of chardonnay. Eric had a bottle of Black Iron beer, one of the cheapest brands in the galaxy.

  “Like you asked...” Eric brought out the mask, wrapped in the bundle of bath towels and rope that he'd put together. He'd been storing it in a combination-lock foot locker in the room where he slept.

  He set it on the table, untied it, and spread it open, careful not to touch it.

  The mask was heavy, but looked small for how powerful it was supposed to be. It was just a cast of Iris's face in bright, silvery-white iridium, not much larger than Eric's hand. It had been much larger on the bug-pharaoh's corpse, complete with an armored helmet.

  “Iridium,” Iris said, the metal reflecting in her eyes, giving her an entranced look. “One of the densest, rarest metals in the known galaxy. Like gold, it can't be cooked up in just any star; a pair of neutron stars have to press together, crushing each other with their mass. Strong, durable, corrosion-resistant. If you wanted to build something to last a million years, you'd use this.” She reached out to touch his hand. In a quiet voice, she added: “Put on the mask, Eric.”

  “What? No way.” Eric stepped back from the table.

  “We must test it.”

  “And why do I have to be your lab rat?”

  “I have already explained.”

  “You think it likes me.” Eric shook his head.

  “Perhaps because of your innocence.”

  “You think I'm innocent?”

  “Are you not?” The slightest smile touched her lips. “What are your worst sins?”

  “Um...just the usual, I think. Greed and lust and anger, all of that. Being disrespectful to my parents, my grandparents—”

  “Disrespectful?” She seemed close to laughing, which was an improvement over her days of being quiet and solemn. “Eric. What's the worst thing you've ever done to another?”

  “Well, there's...” Eric thought of the times he'd encouraged Suzette to have premarital sex with him—regrettable, but luckily she'd held the moral torch for b
oth of them. Her tight, difficult-to-remove virginity undershorts probably helped.

  There was also the time when he was fifteen, and had ridden Ranger home far too late, after drinking hard cider at the lake with a couple of friends. His parents had yelled at him, and he'd yelled back, until he'd vomited on his own shoes. There was the time when he'd left the gate open and cattle had escaped. The time when he was ten years old and had been caught cheating on a math exam.

  “I'm not sure,” he finally said.

  “That's what I mean,” Iris said. “Put it on. Please.”

  Eric looked at the white metal face, the empty eye holes. “I can't. Things have gone too crazy already. If I put that on, then whatever happens...assuming it doesn't kill me...it's going to push me over the brink.”

  “You'll be fine. I'm here for you.” She drew back her hood, revealing her face, her cranium implants, making herself vulnerable. “We have to prepare to beat those monsters. We won't escape this system unless we can do that. And humanity can't afford to lose something like this relic, something that could give us an edge. The ancients had incredible knowledge and powers that we've barely begun to understand. They built the wormholes, the highways between the stars. We need that kind of tech if we're going to fight the aliens. We need to study it and understand how to harness it.”

  Eric thought it over. He considered the hieroglyphs in the bug-king's tomb, showing the bug-king leading the gray mantids to war and to victory over their red-mantid enemies. The mantid had become a godlike figure among his own kind. Eric's childhood Sunday School teacher, elderly Mrs. Cobble, would no doubt smack Eric for any blasphemous thoughts of becoming godlike.

  Still...the worms had to be fought. They had to be defeated. And Iris knew more about the ancients and their relics than anyone else on the ship, probably more than anyone else he'd ever met.

  Maybe he wouldn't have to sit home and tend the chickens while his brothers fought in the coming resistance against the aliens. Maybe he still had his own part to play.

  “Okay,” he said. “But if this kills me, I'm going to be very mad at you.”

  “If it were going to kill you, it would have done that the first time.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “No. I'm just trying to take a positive attitude.”

  “Great.” Eric took a deep breath, then reached out and lifted the mask in both hands.

  As before, it seemed oddly warm to the touch. Its surface shifted under his fingertips, like the skin of a living thing.

  Nothing horrific happened—he pushed back the emotional charge that rose in him, as well as the warm, happy, sticky, guilty memory of his first handjob from Suzette. He raised the mask to his face.

  “I don't think it's going to fit,” Eric said. The metallic surface rippled against his skin, seeming to gently probe and explore his face like the curious hands of a blind lover.

  Then the inner surface of the mask changed. It suddenly felt like a thousand tiny spikes, burrowing and drilling through the flesh of his face, determined to bolt itself to his skull. Eric thought, very briefly, of The Man in the Iron Mask, a book he was supposed to have read in school. He'd watched a movie version instead, resulting in a number of wildly incorrect answers on his final exam.

  That thought came and went in a nanosecond, burned out by the pain of the mask digging into his skin. The mask was growing, spreading up and over his scalp, across his temples, under his jaw, with that feeling of tiny spikes boring into him everywhere the warm metal touched.

  He clawed helplessly at the metal as it flowed over his scalp and engulfed the back of his head.

  “What do I do?” he yelled. Then the metal closed over his nostrils and lips. He tasted iridium, precious, rare, heavy, exotic.

  “Imagine a person, or a thing,” Iris said. “Just one, and focus. Something emotionally charged. The mask expresses your self-image by default. But I'm sure it can do more than that.”

  “Okay,” Eric tried to say, but his mouth was sealed. He could barely breathe.

  He immediately thought of Bowler Junior. The sight of him being ripped apart while the worms fought over his meat and bones was an image that he saw often, just behind his eyes. He hadn't cared much for the guy, but the brutality of his death was hard to erase.

  The metal flowed down Eric's neck, under his clothes, extremely invasive as it spread out to his fingers and toes, crawling over and into every nook of his flesh. The stabbing, spiky feeling began to fade once he was completely covered in the mysterious flowing metal.

  “Eric! Why would you do that?” Iris backed away, her face ashen.

  “What?” He looked down at himself and saw the problem. He looked like Bowler Junior in his final minute—ripped open, ribcage exposed, heart still beating, shreds of muscle and tendon hanging from his bones. “Sorry!”

  “Think of something else! Anything!”

  Eric did. His mind immediately went to the worms themselves, rising, roaring, slashing with their long teeth that dripped blood and gore—

  “Eric!”

  He found himself towering above Iris. She cringed, backing toward the door.

  Eric had turned into one of the worms, much larger than himself.

  “Sorry,” he tried to say again, but he could only let out a guttural grunt.

  “Try something positive,” Iris said.

  Eric thought, for some reason, of Loader, the yellow mining bot who'd worked so hard to help them survive...only to be left behind. Betrayed, really. Robots weren't supposed to have feelings, but some of them, like Malvolio, certainly ran very convincing imitations. He hoped Loader hadn't felt anything, really, watching the others fly away, never to return, abandoning him.

  “Aw,” Iris said. “I miss him, too.”

  By this point, Eric wasn't surprised to look down and see that he'd taken Loader's form. He reached out a big yellow bucket-hand and experimentally opened and closed it.

  “You look just like him,” Iris said. “Size and everything. What does it feel like in there?”

  Eric tried to say: “It feels like I'm floating, suspended in a dense liquid that holds me up so I can look out through the robot's eyes.”

  Instead, what came out was: “Load load loading loaded.”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  I really can't say anything else, he attempted. “Load unload.”

  “Eric!” Iris looked concerned.

  “Unloading,” Eric said. He reached up with two large bucket hands and placed them on either side of his boxy face. He clamped down and pulled.

  Then he panicked, because the robot face wasn't coming off. He swore a string of obscenities, which came out as “Loader-loading load!”

  “Just relax,” Iris said, but that advice was easier to give than to take in the current situation.

  Then the rectangular yellow face popped off, and Eric began to sink toward the floor. His huge robotic arms and legs shrank toward their usual sizes.

  Soon he stood on the floor, holding the mask. It remained construction-bot yellow, with a rectangular cutout where Loader's black camera eyeballs were meant to go.

  “That was pretty disturbing, overall,” Eric said. He hurried to drop the mask on the table.

  “It was incredible. The illusion was perfect. At least on the surface. We should test your strength compared to an actual loader bot's, and do more experiments—”

  “Everything I said came out as 'load' or 'unload.' I couldn't control my own voice.”

  “It was keeping you in disguise.” She stood and peered at the mask. “It has to be some kind of nanotech, bare minimum. Maybe picotech, femtotech, or something we haven't even begun to theorize about—”

  “Well, it's definitely still in working order,” Eric said. “Even after a thousand years or whatever in that old bug tomb.”

  “You should try turning into something else.”

  “Not today.” He wrapped up and tied the mask again.

  “Tomorrow?”
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  “Not unless we can find a way to use it against the worms,” Eric said. “I don't like being inside it, surrounded by that weird moving metal. If it can control what I say, what else can it control? My actions?”

  Iris didn't seem to have a reply to that.

  Eric gathered up the cans from which they'd taken their dinner. “I'll toss these in the recycler.”

  “Don't forget the mask.”

  “My hands are full. Why don't you keep it for a while? It's all wrapped up, so it won't bite you.”

  “But you are the bearer of the relic—”

  “Thanks for dinner. Those frijoles were good, huh?” Eric kept talking until he was out of the room.

  He made it all the way to his own cabin before realizing he still had the trash in his hand. He swore under his breath and walked back up the corridor to throw it out.

  Eric made an effort to avoid Iris in the following days, focusing on his tutorials, keeping his distance from the strange ancient relic. He never wanted to touch it again.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As they approached the final leg of their journey, Eric sent a drone racing ahead to check out the spaceport. A catapult launched the drone, which then engaged its own thrusters, adding speed on top of speed.

  The drone would reach Valentine Station hours ahead of the ship, assuming it wasn't caught or destroyed along the way. That would give the crew a little time to prepare for whatever awaited them at the wormhole.

  Eric flew at high speed through the solar system, yet the view changed very slowly. The gas giant Valentine gradually grew larger, filling up more and more of his field of vision as he approached. He began to discern its major cloud and storm formations.

  Many people called Valentine the most beautiful of the known planets, but its pink and red swirls just reminded Eric of a slaughterhouse floor back home.

  In time, he approached the glittering rings of the planet.

  “Can you see the gate marker?” Iris asked, her voice piped right into his ear from the gatekeeper's quarters.