by Ember Lane
“He’ll need food when he wakes.”
Pog laid a scorp out flat and then went back to Faulk’s tool bag, taking out a saw, a mallet, and a chisel. Attacking the scorp’s pincers, he cracked one down the middle and then prized it open. He pulled out a fat slab of white meat with a faint, fading, luminous green tinge. He repeated the same with the other pincer.
“You wanted food?” he said, his happiness clearly tempered by Faulk’s perilous state. He looked over at his friend before rounding on its tail and slitting it down the middle and pealing it back like some ghoulish sausage. Mezzerain and Sutech joined in, and soon we had a good couple of meals worth of scorpion meat. Pog stashed it away in his bag of holding then stared down at Faulk who was still sleeping away, his worry coming to the fore now he’d completed his task.
“What do we do now?” he asked, downcast.
“Carry on,” said Sutech. “You okay to carry him?” he asked Mezzerain.
“If it’ll move us along a bit.”
I grabbed my glowsphere, setting it in front of Billy, and we headed off without another word.
Charlotte soon caught up with me and ended that.
“I need to learn how to fight,” she told me.
“Now?” I asked, knowing I was being unfair, but seeing the state of Faulk had put a downer on us all. “Sorry,” I quickly said and fished in my inventory for something, anything, coming up with my fiberstone staff. “Try this.”
“How does it work?”
“You grab hold of its end, think of something that makes you so angry you could scream, and then bash your attackers.”
She took hold of it, nodding while she sized it up. “I can work with that. Thanks.”
Charlotte flitted off to Billy’s side, whispered something in his ear while pointing to the staff, and then vanished forward laughing. Billy turned and glared at me. I had a fair idea what she’d said to him.
We trod on.
I kicked myself.
I’d become consumed in the journey and forgotten about my manas and my own awareness. I sank into myself for a moment and double-checked they were cycling. Satisfied that it was as good as it gets, I spread my awareness out until it sensed fifty yards in front and behind and then pushed it out until it hugged all the walls.
It felt better knowing that our path was clear. Charlotte was a little flighty for my liking, yet I’d relied on her. I began to scan around, my vision sensitive to all. The Nexus Fault was devoid of life, at first. As we passed through it, I saw the small passageway the scorpions had exited from. There seemed to be a pulse of something coming from it. My heart quickened.
“Pog?”
“Yes.”
I nodded in the direction of the gap. “There’s something in there.”
Mezzerain gave it a cursory inspection. “Best walk swiftly past it. Faulk’s too bashed up for another fight. He’ll be an easy target.”
“And leave whatever’s lurking to sneak up on us?” Pog asked. “No way. We don’t do that.”
Pog had a good point.
“I agree. Sutech?” I asked.
Sutech paused, looking down the alley. “Probably best. We’ll take up a position on the opposite wall.” He pointed to a small hollow in the cubes. “Take your time; we’ll try and feed Faulk some biscuits or whatever we’ve got.”
Pog gave them a couple of Grandma Lumin’s emergency biscuits, and we waited for them to get into position. As soon as they were, Pog pulled me over. We stood on either side of the break in the wall. “I’ll go first,” he told me. “I’ll use my invisibility. You follow thirty seconds later.”
He vanished.
I counted and followed.
The walls of the alleyway were a cube’s breadth apart as if one whole block had been mined away. As I edged down it, I noticed the gaps between the cubes had the same faint, green glow to them as the scorps, but here it was like a thin layer of luminous mortar between the blocks themselves. Farther down, these became more pronounced, fatter, but only as they spilled out, like moss encroaching on a rock’s surface.
“This way!” Pog’s floated whisper kissed my ears.
The alley was straight. I really had no other way to go. The glow at its end was more intense. I hurried along. Pog’s arm grabbed me, scaring the life out of me. I stifled my gasp as he pulled me beside him and materialized.
“Have a look,” he said, sliding behind me.
I was still confused but then realized that the next set of cubes was missing and another alley branched off. Quickly looking down it, I saw what my senses had detected.
It wasn’t the luminous moss-type substance.
Prowling up and down, passing in and out of sight, a huge scorpion appeared to be patrolling up and down another hollowed-out corridor. It definitely gave me the impression it was on some form of guard duty.
“What do you think?” I asked Pog, knowing exactly what he’d think.
“We want whatever it’s protecting,” he replied.
I had to agree.
“Plan?”
“It’s me and you, Alexa. We don’t need a plan.” He beamed up at me before vanishing.
“No magic unless you have to,” Pog warned. “We don’t want to damage anything.”
I equipped my scarletite axes. It was time to have some fun.
A wisp of a breeze touched me as Pog moved past. Counting to ten, I moved out, knowing Pog would be in position. No finesse, just brute force, I ran for the beast, timing it to perfection, and arriving just as it turned to face a now visible Pog.
After my mistake with Faulk, I attacked its stinger first, hacking at it with my favorite axes, glad to unleash a bit of true aggression. The beast was double the size of the others, but once I’d neutralized the stinger, and Pog had stabbed out its two main eyes, it was clear the scorp was no match for us. We set to work demolishing the unfortunate beast.
Pog skipped up onto its cephalothorax shield, raking his knives under its edge and blinding it further. I snuck up on the nearest claw, hacking away with my axes until it fell like an open hinge, its white meat spilling out. Pog had the beast completely blinded by now and was concentrating on stabbing into the soft tissue around its mouth, hanging on like a bad rodeo rider. I set to work on the second pincer, but the scorp fell before I’d landed more than a couple of strokes.
We crouched, took a breath, and I reinforced my awareness, making sure the others were still okay. Pog smiled up at me. He might have become close to Faulk, but when it came to a fighting team, there was only us.
“So what was it guarding?” he asked.
“Couldn’t it just be a monster?”
He scoffed a laugh at my naïveté. I laughed too, glad of the release.
The chamber the scorpion had been guarding was a forty-by-twenty rectangle. Almost all the rock faces were dripping in the luminous mosslike substance. A sole door stood at one end, midway along its shorter wall.
“That?” I began walking toward it.
Pog’s hand shot out. “Just in case,” he said as he produced his trusty wooden pole and proceeded to prod around looking for traps. He found none and set about inspecting the door.
“Just when I could do with Faulk,” he muttered, bringing out some picklocks and pressing his ear close.
“Thought you were the thief,” I pointed out.
“Humph! He’s so much better than me when it comes to this stuff.” The lock clicked. “Well, a bit better. He’d have had it done in half the time.”
The door swung open. It revealed a long, thin room, shelved on either side, and stacked with row upon row of vials. The light from the luminous moss bled in giving it an eerie, mad-scientist-type glow.
“Glowsphere?” Pog asked.
I conjured another, sending it in. Pog tested the floor and ceiling with his pole and declared the room all clear. We edged in, inspecting the shelves, noting rows of vials were all arranged by subtle differences of color. Each had an etched identifier on it.
&n
bsp; “They’re antidotes,” Pog whispered. “Let me see.” He walked down farther, stopping at a mauve section. “Seems there’s about a dozen types of scorpions.” He picked a vial out. “This is the one that got Faulk. I’ll be back.” He darted out.
I looked along the shelves. The potions started out clear but by the end of the room they were black. The entire color spectrum appeared to be present. There were antidotes for everything but more chillingly, not just beasts. The black section seemed to be cures for bacterial or viral infections, their identification similar to vague names I recognized: H1N1, CM4, plus numerous other combinations of letters and numbers were all present as well as the usual suspects like meningitis, tuberculosis, things that surely shouldn’t exist in even a simulation traveling to another planet—traveling to a fresh planet. My gut swirled with renewed fear. Had we really brought all this with us?
It was then that I turned around. The shelves I now faced mirrored the antidotes, except the vials appeared to be thicker, the tops far more secure. A creeping feeling of doom spread over me. This was the poison shelf. This was the virus shelf. This was doom itself.
Had we transported our death sentence with us?
My knees gave way. I gasped for some air hoping it would clear my head. The new implications were too horrific for me to process. I slumped onto the floor, my breaths evading me. I needed a distraction, anything, something. It was then I noticed the door at the room’s end. I’d been staring straight through it for the last few minutes.
Pushing myself up, desperate to do something, I edged it open, not even waiting for Pog and his trusty stick. It was a cupboard, no more than that, and hanging in it was a kind of suit of armor. Black as obsidian, the word armor perhaps detracted from its actual look. Padded, black pants, a similar jacket, and a helmet with a clear, plastic visor sitting on a shelf above. A pair of gauntlets lay by the helmet. A pair of shin-length boots stood by the hanging pants.
Armor? It looked more suited to handling the vials behind me, and I guessed that was what its intent was. I felt the cloth: it was abrasive, hard. It would offer great protection.
“That looks like it might fit, Faulk,” Pog said, frightening the living daylights out of me.
“Have you seen?” I said, turning and holding my heart.
“Seen what?” he asked.
“They brought everything they needed to kill us all again.”
I held up one of the black vials. My hands were shaking.
“Did you really think they wanted us to have a paradise?” Pog replied.
He understood them.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Nexus Rod
While I felt devastated, desolate, like I was at my wits' end, Pog collected a few of each antidote as if nothing much had happened. He told me to grab the suit, helmet, gauntlets, and boots from the cupboard and then lock the vial room door after we left. He stopped, and I knew that pause well. When Pog had an important thought, it was like it took over his whole body and held him rigid while he processed its meaning.
“It does throw up an obscure possibility that we might want to think about,” he said.
“What?”
“Well, we all assumed that Ruse self-destructed. I think Lincoln told me that Joan thought the rogue code had sent everyone mad and that they’d probably destroyed the ship. Remember? That was why she supposedly fenced off Mandrake in the first place—to prevent us going loopy. We sort of know that’s wrong or at least not the complete story. What if this was the reason Ruse was destroyed? What if it was what Ruse was and not what it had become?”
“Why would they bring it all in the first place?” I still couldn’t believe it. I was empty. It was the only thought that could occupy my mind.
Pog shrugged. “Think about it. You’re first to a new planet. It’s full of aliens—potentially. What better way to eradicate them than a virus? You kill the lot of them and inherit a nice, shiny, empty planet which you can seed as you wish.”
“Who would think like that?”
“Military—top brass. This was the settling ship. It had to deal with whatever they found on Celeron—friend or foe. It’s in their nature to assume foe. Their soldiers come first, above all, apart from the mission. They probably thought the vials guaranteed them a win.”
“Harmony?” I snapped. “We could all live in harmony.”
Pog scoffed, “Oh, Alexa, who’s the child now? When have we ever done that?”
I checked myself, trying to snap out of my futile melancholy. He was right, of course. I had to accept that. Like him, nothing should shock me. We were in Ruse. We were bound to find monsters in its closet. We’d merely found the big one. Well, hopefully there wouldn’t be any bigger.
Had Joan been right, though? Had something escaped and sent them all mad? Maybe it was one of their potions, not Barakdor.
We stripped the large scorp of its flesh and then returned to the Nexus Fault. Faulk, thank God, looked like he’d completely recovered. Pog grabbed the boots and pants off me, running over and urging his friend to try them on. He was soon dressed in the complete suit and looked more like a space ranger than a trapmaster from a medieval fantasy land. Pog tried stabbing him a couple of times, but the suit merely turned his blade.
Faulk was visibly relieved.
Sutech decided that we should press on for an hour or so and then find a protected spot to eat some lunch. We made good time and encountered nothing in the Nexus, eventually finding another hollowed-out couple of cubes that we could use as a sort of base. Faulk set up his cooking gear, and I set a glowsphere under it, superheating it until he could use its emitted light to cook.
I thought the food was disgraceful, but the others seemed to enjoy it. I forced it down anyhow. Once my stomach had a bit of food inside it, it craved more. Billy told us there were plenty of edible fungi up top as well as some curious plants that drew their sustenance from the shadowmana blanket. Apparently, we’d be able to make some weird stew. Sutech sewed his sleeve up, soon looking his usual dapper self, and after some small talk we set off.
Once more, we were a little more confident of getting through Ruse’s trials than when we’d started out. We encountered a few bands of roaming scorpions, but with Faulk now fully protected, Charlotte on board whacking away with my fiberstone staff, and Billy helping too, we made short work of them. I even got some decent XP from the battles, not enough to level up, but everything helped. My agility was good now; it helped no end with my attack, allowing me to twist, turn, somersault. It would be priceless in the end. I wondered whether to carry on or start dumping points into strength. It was a conundrum, but at that point, I could only see magic and its delivery as a way forward.
Our brief battles did result in a slight variation on our formation, which we improved as we progressed. They all walked the center of the Nexus Fault, while I hugged its sides—alone again! But it was a better shape, enabling me to react faster. At the first sign of danger, I was to find an elevated position and reign down my fire from there. It all worked much better and once perfected, we sustained nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises.
But our luck couldn’t hold out forever.
It was our trusty scout that tipped us off.
Charlotte reappeared a little way ahead. She looked revolted. “There’s some, eaargh, coming this time.”
Just her tone alone told us that it was infinitely worse than when we’d encountered the ewearghhh. I tried to push my senses further, but could detect nothing.
“How far?” I asked.
“A long way,” she replied, nodding furiously.
I rolled my eyes and ended up staring at Pog. “Shall we?”
“Yup.”
“What?” Sutech asked.
“We’ll have a little scout up there—see exactly what we’re up against. If we can pick some off, we will; if not, we’ll come back here.”
“Not sure I like the idea of splitting up,” Mezzerain said.
“Better than sit
ting and waiting,” Pog pointed out.
Sutech addressed the pair of us.
“Fast, in and out. We’ll find a defensive position. Don’t stray so far as to lose us from your awareness.” It was an order. There was no doubt about it.
Pog didn’t waste any time. He darted off. I followed in his wake. We hugged the sides of the Nexus Fault. After a few minutes, the first of the monsters entered my range. I pulled Pog back and waited as they marched in. When my notifications came, they did little to lift my spirits.
Bladed Mantis
No further information available
Firespit Mantis
No further information available
Mageborn Mantis
No further information available
Soldier Mantis
No further information available
“It’s an army,” I told Pog, and quickly relayed what was coming.
“How many of each?”
“Ten soldiers: one mage, five of the firespit ones, and fifteen bladed.”
“So we’ll have no chance in our little horseshoe. We need to thin the herd.”
“Mage first?” I asked.
“Mage first,” he agreed.
They appeared to be in formation. The mageborn was in a type of pocket, surrounded on three sides by the razor mantises. The soldiers were spread out in a line in front, and the firespit were marching just behind the rest in a little division of their own.
“I’m going with ranged for the firespit ones. Their name suggests some form of fire magic,” Pog said.
I had to agree.
We formed a new plan slightly more detailed than mage first.
Pog vanished. I switched sides, moving to the same side of the Nexus Fault as the advancing firespit mantises. I found cover a couple of cubes up and waited for them to come into view.
Each wore a uniform. This surprised me. I was already used to my monsters just being monsters. The soldiers led the way, pale-green cloaks flashed back over their ridged thorax to reveal a sword hanging from each side. Their heads were pale blue, deeply furrowed with intent, each compound eye as black as the surrounding walls. They marched on their hind legs, but their gait was awkward, lurching, like a bug army from my nightmares. The front legs, complete with metallic arm guards, were primed over their swords, ready, claws waiting to draw their weapons.