by Max Carver
Then he launched two more harpoon-tipped cables, getting two extra holds. He didn't leave much slack in the cables, either. If the worm ship was going to move, it would have to pull all the mass of the Rex along with it.
New holes opened in scattered spots all over the surface of the big rock-coral ship. Scrap-guns and cutting lasers returned the Rex's fire.
A volley of the long metallic spears launched from one tunnel mouth. These turned into long, snakelike robots with cutting tools at their heads. They attached to the Rex's hull like lampreys. Showers of sparks erupted as they began to burrow into the ship's armored skin.
“I need a volunteer to go out and clear the hull!” Hagen shouted.
“That's me,” Bartley said, jumping to his feet and running. He slapped the unusually quiet drama-bot as he ran past. “And Malvolio!”
“Sir, I really don't think it's the best use of my abilities,” Malvolio said. “Perhaps a rousing speech, or a patriotic anthem—Colonial or Allied, that's the awkward question in such mixed company—”
“Shut up and go with him,” Hagen said.
“Aye aye, Captain!”
Naomi and Alanna kept on with the railguns, blasting apart the last two worms that had been towing their ship. Carol had resumed her piloting duties, now that the research shuttle was destroyed and the Rex was looking alive again.
Eric kept watch on a peripheral camera feed as Bartley and Malvolio emerged from the airlock onto the hull, dressed in armored spacesuits. Each suit had a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an adjustable underslung frame, the spacesuit designed to absorb the recoil. They each had a grenade launcher mounted on the opposite hip, too. All that gear had been set up by the airlock. They'd encountered the robot-worms down in the mines before—Eric had a scar to show for it—and on the river, so they'd prepared those suits and weapons in case a swarm of the bots attacked the ship's hull.
Bartley and Malvolio went to work shooting incendiary rounds at the long, narrow robots. Malvolio sang Frank Sinatra's “Summer Wind” as he blasted one robo-snake after another, until Bartley told him to cut it out.
Eric saw one of the space worms approaching Bartley and Malvolio while firing up a huge, blue-flamed cutting torch. Eric activated a giant rock saw and lunged out with it, splitting the worm lengthwise. Spheres of blood flew everywhere in the zero-gravity environment.
“Hey!” Bartley shouted over his headset, as worm guts splattered him. “Use a napkin up there!”
“Focus on your job, Rowan,” Hagen said.
“Okay...” Eric extended a drill as tall as a country radio tower, its shaft bigger around than he was.
The meters-long bit bored into the hull of the coral-ship, until it hit some kind of impenetrable obstacle. It slammed to a rattling stop that made the entire Rex shudder.
“Everything okay over there?” Hagen asked.
“Couldn't be better.” Eric retracted the drill bit and found the tip mangled. He'd managed to make it about two meters into the hull.
The battle raged all around him, too much happening at once. The worms' scrap-guns cut into the Rex's hull. The Rex replied with volleys of railgun fire, some hitting loose worms in the space around them, some smashing the still-retracting tubes and conveyor belts of the big worm ship, some slamming into its hull and drawing hairline cracks there.
A few of the open rocky mouths on the coral-ship's surface began to glow with an ominous white light.
“Plasma!” Hagen said. “They're either planning to shoot us or put on some major speed. Rowan, status?”
“On it!” Eric said. “Armor up!”
“Armor up!” Hagen shouted. The railgun and missile launchers retracted, their ports sealing tight. Most of the exterior tools did the same.
With a long crane arm, Eric inserted a nozzle into the hole he'd drilled and pumped it full of high-explosive chemical slurry, designed to blast open asteroids so the ship could access the mineral goodies inside.
When the hole was filled, he added the detonator, then he sealed it in with a heavy screw that expanded after insertion. This stopped up the liquid explosive so it didn't leak back out of the hole, but also helped seal the force of the blast inside the rock to do maximum damage.
“Fire in the hole,” Eric said.
Then he detonated it.
The entire coral-ship bounced and shook on the harpoon cables, swinging wildly as the explosive forces within ricocheted against each other.
The rocky hull spiderwebbed like glass, smoke and fire weeping out through all the fresh cracks.
“Ready to dig in, sir,” Eric said.
“Foster, bring us forward,” Hagen said. “Weapons...just keep it up.”
Eric used a giant industrial hammer—a long cylinder of tungsten—to smash through the shattered hull of the coral-ship. Boulder-sized pieces of rock flew out like drops in a rainstorm, leaving sizable gaps all over the worms' hull.
“Oh, man, this thing has a hammer?” Bartley asked from his position on the hull. “I should be doing that.”
“You've got plenty to do out there, Flynn,” Hagen said.
“Hell yeah, I do. We're knee-deep in worm shit. And here comes some more.” Bartley blasted an approaching worm with a grenade, and a thick splatter of worm guts all over his space suit was his reward. A small windshield wiper cleared gore from his faceplate.
While Eric's hammer retracted, he reached into the worm's ship with an excavator arm and pulled out loose chunks of rock, turning several sizable holes into a single huge one.
The asteroid-cutter nudged forward, and Eric went to work with everything he had, cutting the worm's mothership apart with rock saws and high-powered cutting lasers, destroying it the way the worms had destroyed Valentine Station and Canyon City.
He felt a kind of righteous fury rising in him as he tore into it. He thought of everyone he'd known who'd died. Some of them were just casual acquaintances—Doris, the waitress at the coffee stall where he sometimes bought breakfast, if he had time; mottled old Mister Cormey, who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes outside the cinderblock convenience store near his apartment. The nameless kids who played soccer in the street, day and night, as if school just wasn't an issue for them. Eric wasn't sure he'd ever seen any kind of school on Caldera.
Thousands and thousands of people had been killed. Slaughtered. And there was nobody else around to stand up to the monsters, nobody but Eric and his friends to bring any kind of justice to the situation.
He dug in deep, ready to kill them all.
The interior of the worm ship reminded him of a gigantic ant or termite mound crossed with a hellish Industrial Revolution factory. The basic structure was rock tunnels with loose-soil floors, reinforced by metal braces at irregular intervals. The tunnels and rooms followed no regular layout; it was all just chaos. There were also huge metal wheels, billows of fire, conveyor belts lined with spikes like teeth, crushers pounding ore.
Burning worms slithered blindly through the tunnels, disoriented by all the explosions.
“Gunners, aim for infrastructure,” Hagen said. “Anything that could be weapons or propulsion.”
“It all looks the same to me,” Alanna said. “I'll just shoot anything that looks expensive.”
“Flynn, you ready to come inside?” Hagen asked.
“Hell yes, sir, but it's still crawling with robo-worms out here, so I guess we'll be a minute,” Bartley said.
Eric continued cutting their way forward. He opened up a cavernous chamber near the center of the worms' ship. It was half-filled with thick black soil. Scattered all over the soil, some of them half-buried, were human bodies, dozens of fresh corpses, probably just recently taken from Valentine Station.
There were other, older carcasses, too, rotten meat in an advanced, slimy state of decay, hanging from large ribs and strange skulls that Eric couldn't identify, some kind of large alien creatures.
Ripping open the room and exposing it to empty space disturbed the surface of the soil.
Beneath it, a mass of fat, short, pale grubs sucked rotten meat from old broken bones. They ignored the fresh kills above, seeming to prefer meat that had putrified to the point of being almost liquid. It was probably easier for them to suck and digest that way. No need to chew.
Eric's stomach lurched.
“It's a worm nursery,” Naomi said quietly.
“Kill it with fire!” Alanna shouted. “Please!”
“I'm on it.” Eric sprayed the grub-infested soil with the explosive slurry. The pale grubs waddled and splashed in it.
“Go ahead, Naomi,” Hagen said. “Just a micropulse of plasma to ignite it.”
“Me?” Naomi hesitated. “You want me to incinerate the alien babies?”
“Before the oxygen's all gone, preferably,” he said.
“They're just worms, Naomi,” Alanna said. As Naomi continued to hesitate, Alanna rolled her eyes and reached over. “I'll kill them myself—”
“No. I got it.” Naomi slapped the control.
A tiny bolt of plasma, no larger than a golfball, spat out of the starboard plasma cannon. It struck the explosive-drenched worm nursery below, and fire swept across it, flash-frying the pale grubs.
The fire whooshed out quickly as the interior of the worm ship depressurized.
Eric continued onward, first hitting the next big compartment wall to weaken it.
Then he raised the mining ship's colossal roadheader tool. Plates covered in spirals of spikes rotated at the end of it, large enough to punch a highway-sized hole in a mountainside. It was big enough to enable the mining ship to tunnel deep into the largest asteroids, or even dwarf planets, in search of valuable metals.
At the moment, though, it was helping the asteroid-cutter carve a path of destruction through the much larger worm ship.
Eric knocked down another wall—and found himself staring into searing white light. He was approaching a vast plasma reservoir, a fuel source for the ship's weapons and propulsion.
“Reverse!” Hagen said.
Then a new horror dropped into view.
It was the largest worm of all. It had to be. It made Eric think of a picture he'd once seen of a tree so big they'd built a road through it. Its body was chunky with wires and machinery, some of it so old that skin had grown over top of it. Dull red lights flashed here and there along the worm's body.
The worm's head was abnormal, too. Like the huge worm in the river, it had a huge maw ringed with teeth the size of elephant tusks. Unlike any of the other worms, it had a crest of long spikes on its head, like a primitive crown of bones.
It also had eyes, big black bubbles like a spider's, three on one side of its head, four on the other. The great horned worm twisted its head from side to side, regarding them with one patch of black pumpkin-sized eyes, then the other.
Then it started toward them, swimming through empty space, propelled by thrusters on its armored hide.
“In the land of the blind worms, the seven-eyed worm is king,” Naomi murmured.
“Full power reverse!” Hagen said. “Don't hold anything back.”
“Yes, sir,” Carol said.
The Rex was heavy and strong, but far from nimble and fast. A complete course reversal was no easy task, but fortunately they'd been creeping along slowly in the first place. Now the ship was just barely beginning to ease backward.
Eric lashed out at the massive horned worm with his drill, hoping to punch a hole between some of the old armor plates. The worm's hide looked tough as gravel, too, and studded with bony spikes, many of which had been capped with sharp steel. Robotic limbs extended from several of its tentacles, thicker and clunkier than the tentacle-extenders Eric had seen before, as if the horned worm had been outfitted with the cybernetics long ago, during an earlier generation of worm technology.
The worm opened its mouth, flipping its front ring of teeth outward into a deadly ring of weapons. These, too, were capped with steel points.
The lack of gravity and rapidly depleting air supply didn't seem to bother the giant horned worm at all. Maybe it had its own tanks somewhere among its cybernetic implants, or maybe it only needed to breathe occasionally, like a whale.
“Hit that thing!” Hagen said. “And don't stop.”
Alanna and Naomi shot four supersonic rounds simultaneously.
The horned worm twisted and managed to dodge two of them, which sailed onward and punched extra holes in the sides of Valentine Station.
The two other rounds hit the horned worm, sending it recoiling and snapping angrily in protest. It seemed stung and annoyed, but not badly injured.
The worm raised several dented, dirty metal cylinders the size of aircraft engines mounted along its back. No two of them were the same size. They began to rotate, all at different speeds, one shuddering so hard it seemed like it would break loose.
A blinding eruption of metal scrap fired from the worm's guns, a great deal of it slamming into the Rex's hull. At first, Eric thought it was just another scattershot wave of scrap-gun fire.
Then they began to explode, one after the other, burning holes in the Rex's hull.
“Full reverse!” Hagen said.
“You already said that!” Carol replied. “We're leaving as fast as we can.”
Eric tapped into a rear camera and saw they were backing their way toward the huge rupture at the bottom floor of the space station, exactly where they'd entered.
The horned worm advanced on them, firing more explosive shrapnel. Eric raised a rock saw and roadheader, its multiple spiked faces spinning fast enough to carve granite. The worm seemed to hesitate, slowing its approach.
“Flynn, status?” Hagen asked.
“Couldn't be happier, boss,” Bartley replied over the radio. He was still on the hull, taking potshots at worms that tried to approach, while Malvolio worked to clear the robotic ones that had already landed.
“You and the bot should head to the airlock.”
“Soon as we're out of ammo, boss.” Bartley plugged an approaching worm with a grenade, turning away as its burning guts erupted.
Ahead, the big horned worm lunged at the Rex, only to be battered back by more railgun rounds, these hurtling at nearly a hundred times the speed of sound. Eric lunged forward with the rock saw, slicing through the worm's thick, mottled skin but only scratching the ingrown armor beneath.
Then, at last, the Rex backed out of the ruptured station into open space.
“Missiles!” Hagen shouted.
Six of them launched from the Rex, swerving over, under, and around the huge horned worm. The worm was distracted for a moment, trying to twist aside, clearly thinking that it was the intended target.
One missile slammed into one of the worm's coils anyway, and it erupted in a huge flash, flinging the worm bodily against the inner hull of the ravaged space station. The worm's jaws spread open as if roaring into the vacuum of space...and then the worm began to advance on them yet again, reaching the rupture through which they'd exited.
“Unbelievable,” Hagen said. “That thing's unbelievably tough. I wonder how old it is. Looks like it's been through a few wars.”
“And never stopped eating and growing the whole time,” Alanna said.
The five other missiles continued on past the horned worm and continued on to their real target—the plasma reservoir at the core of the ship.
The missiles struck.
The entire infrastructure of the space station, all the loose debris of the worms' carved-up starship and of the station itself, every broken bit of asteroid rock, every bolt and rivet holding the station together, every worm that was flailing for purchase or floating listlessly because it was already scorched and dead—everything inside the space station turned glowing white when the plasma core detonated. Eric's entire field of vision turned searing white, as though the space station above were a star going nova.
He instinctively covered his eyes, though they were actually closed already. He was watching through video sensors in the hull, the info
rmation flowing up through his spine rather than in through his retinas.
Plasma gushed out through the exposed ribs and supports of the space station, all of which glowed blue-hot. Nothing else remained. If the space station had been a badly picked-over roasted turkey when they'd arrived, it was now nothing but a skeleton, the bones starting to burn away.
“Holy mother of—” Hagen began.
Then the horned worm came hurtling at them, impossibly fast, riding the forward wave of the rapidly expanding plasma out of the bottom of the space station...right toward their ship.
It loomed larger and larger like a hellish serpent, its entire body superheated and glowing, its armor melting. White plasma billowed from its eye sockets and its open maw.
The horned worm had been torched by the plasma, but it was still, in its death, managing one final attack.
“Evade!” Hagen shouted.
“On it, but this isn't exactly a racecraft—” Carol began.
The horned worm slammed into the Rex at high speed. The impact knocked all of them off their feet and sent the ship into a rapid spin.
Eric had seen the moment of impact—the giant burning worm had landed directly on top of Bartley and Malvolio, burying them under its mass.
Then the worm slid along the hull, trailing plasma, and it was hard not to imagine Bartley getting crushed and then smeared like sizzling jelly underneath the worm.
“I'm going out there,” Eric said. Though the ship was spinning out of control, he unhooked from his console.
“Me, too,” Naomi said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
“Nobody get up! I'm still trying to kill the spin!” Carol shouted.
“Looks like you're having a few grams of trouble here.” The hologram of Res appeared next to the pilot's console. He wore a purple bathrobe and matching tie. The martini glass in his hand contained a blue drink with a tiny rubber duck floating on the surface. “Perhaps I could offer some assistance.”
“Yeah, that would be a nice change!” Carol snapped at the apparition.