by Morgan Cole
The inner airlock door opened at my touch and I stepped through, my drones following closely. I could hear a hiss as hidden vents sucked the breathable atmosphere of the outpost away, replacing it with vacuum. The hard vacuum light on my HUD lit up for a heartbeat before the outer airlock door opened and the outside air rushed in to fill the space. The atmosphere indicator changed from hard vacuum to "hostile/toxic atmosphere."
I stepped out into the weird blue light onto the rocky surface of an alien world.
Chapter Two: To the Spike
THE SCENE I WAS LOOKING at was one I'd seen only on album covers. I was high on the side of a mountain, looking down at a valley far below, filled with the shattered towers of an alien city. In the center of the city a shining needle stretched out of a deep black crater, dwarfing the buildings in the city around it. It sparkled in the light of the sun peeking over the horizon. Tiny specks seemed to float aimlessly around it, or flitted away into the distance. The Spike. What looked like wide, meandering silver rivers of metal stretched out of the city to the right and left.
The sky was a deep purplish-black, pinpricks of stars barely visible through the haze of the toxic atmosphere. On the horizon a harsh blue sun was either rising or setting—I wasn't clear on the local time—and casting deep shadows.
The airlock I'd just exited closed behind me. It was set into a sheer rock face, the dark grey stone looking just like the mountains on Earth did. Jutting out above the airlock door was a turret the size of a small car, a single, thick barrel two meters long. The Interface labeled it for me.
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Heavy Plasma Turret Mk.V: Often used for defense on dangerous worlds, this plasma turret is capable of dealing with most Feral threats in and out of atmosphere as it uses a vacuum tunnel to deliver the plasma through atmosphere at a range of up to five kilometers.
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I had looked back toward the city when there was a blinding flash above me. A thick bar of white-hot plasma incinerated a distant, flying Feral that had strayed too close. A thunderous crack filled the air as the vacuum tunnel collapsed. Burning pieces of Feral rained down in the distance.
"What are you doing, sightseeing? Get a move on. The First needs us," Metra said. The plasma turret rotated down to point at me, an unsubtle hint.
"Fine, I'm going!" I yelled, dashing down the mountainside toward the city below.
With a thought I ordered my scout drone up high to mark threats while the two armed drones stayed close by. More and more threat markers appeared as the upgraded passive sensors on the scout drone combined with its great vantage. Most weren't close by, thankfully. Hundreds more threat markers appeared up to ten kilometers away.
"There are a ton of threats out here," I said. "It's going to be rough getting through the city to that tower in the middle. Regar said they're halfway up it. So what, I'm going to have to fight through the city and then up the tower?"
"It's an Infested planet. What did you expect?” Metra said. "Anyway, why aren't you flying? I didn't do all that work for nothing."
I wondered if I was the first person ever given a suit of flying powered armor without the manual. It was lucky for me the Interface made things like this somewhat easier than normal. Metra was a consummate engineer—way better at it than I was—so I knew that whatever she'd done to the suit, it would be fully Interface integrated.
Pelting down the steep, rocky mountainside at a run I willed myself up.
I shot into the air, tumbling head over heels. The whole world spun around me. If it hadn't been for the magic of Transcendent Flesh I was sure I would have filled my helmet with vomit.
"What in the stars are you doing, Jake?" Metra asked, her voice annoyed. Maybe I should have gone farther away from the plasma turret's sensors before I tried this.
"Trying to fly," I yelled back. I tried to find something to stabilize my flight, but nothing was working.
"How did you even do that? I knew I should have made you that skill implant."
The ground rushed up and I hit hard. I'd commanded my armor down, trying to tell it to be nice about it, but it hadn't listened. I rolled to a stop, standing. The armor was undamaged. Nothing as soft as a mountain was going to hurt me, at least not at that speed. Everything was still attached and undamaged.
"You're not in an elevator. The grav plates are in the core, the feet and the hands. You need to visualize what you want their relative power levels to be. Remember, they're not the same as the propulsion units in the palms and on the soles of the boots. Those are for general maneuverability as well as movement in vacuum."
I looked at the palms of my hands and triggered my Component Flow Visualization. The Krigar Assault Armor was a lot more complex than it had been. There were propulsion units in the palms of my armor as she had described. They were plain circles about the size of the bottom of a beer can. I could see the power runs snaking through the armor up my arms to the new power generation unit I couldn't see but assumed was on the back.
On the back of my hands was another assembly, which the Interface labeled as a variable gravity plate. It was connected to the same power runs.
The very surface of the armor had changed. The Assault Armor had been pretty low-tech, before. It was a basic set of powered armor for a heavily armored soldier. The material it had been made out of was a tier 3 metal, but other than that the actual armor wasn't anything fancy. Now, there was a whole complex assembly just under the surface. I recognized most of the individual components, but couldn't immediately work out what they did.
Now that I knew the various propulsion and gravity plates were there, I could almost feel them in my mind. Each of them was intruding slightly on my subconscious, somehow. I had no idea if this was just my imagination helping me with visualization or not, but it did help.
I put my arms and legs in a neutral posture and tried to visualize the power levels of five different gravity plates at the same time. I was going to start with very low values and try to keep myself stable.
It was surprising just how easily this clicked, and I started rising off the uneven surface of the mountainside—slowly at first and then faster. I experimented with the power levels of the ones in my hands and feet, adjusting my position in the air. With a few minutes’ experimentation I could hover, standing, in the air using only the core grav plate with some stabilization from the boot plates. The pull of gravity against me had been completely neutralized.
Without the momentum from my run downhill, however, I was just hovering in place above the mountain. I tried to angle my boots to push at an angle, but that only altered my position in the air. The plates would either push or pull directly against the force of gravity, but not at an angle. Obviously, that was what she'd added the propulsion plates for.
"Well, here goes nothing," I muttered, and added more to my visualization.
I shot into the gradually lightening sky as both of my boot thrusters pushed hard against my weightless form. I used my boot plates to pitch down toward the city below and poured on the power.
"Woo!" I yelled. The experience was amazing. Hovering in the air was one thing. I'd almost gotten used to that with the drop shaft in the Habitat complex. I was flying. This is superhero shit, right here.
My drones kept pace with me easily enough, although I suspected I could outrun them if I really wanted to.
The city approached quickly, the Spike and the dots circling it filling more and more of my vision. A handful of those dots broke off and were tagged with threat markers as they rapidly flew to attack me. They seemed to dart through the air toward me, like a school of deadly fish.
My vision Augment zoomed in and I got a good look at the horrors coming at me in the distance. Each of them was swimming through the air, a tetrahedral head of shining silver metal in front of dozens of thin black tentacles moving in waves to drive the things forward. It looked like a chrome, four-sided die had sprouted tentacles and was flying at me. The Interface labeled it for me
.
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Tetrahedric Darter, Threat Level: 6
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My beam drone engaged on my mental order, the particle beam flashing out and digging deep into the metal of the lead horror. It immediately splayed its tentacles behind it in a fan and stopped dead in the air, causing more than half of the beam's pulse to miss. Thick arcs of electricity popped between the tentacles.
I pulled the Gazer free from my chest and activated the targeting link with a thought. Flying like a superhero and firing a rifle was a lot harder than I thought it would be. For a split second I got the orange dot on target and fired. The particle beam lashed out and clipped a few black tentacles off the back of one before the Squid moved out of the way.
I realized too late that I was going to fly right into the middle of them. I used the grav plates to adjust my pitch but it was too late, my momentum too great. Two of them angled to intercept me, three sides of their four-sided heads yawning open, exposing rows of shining metal teeth all the way around.
The first hit me hard, the impact sending us both tumbling through the air. I tried to push it away with my left arm and it clamped down, the teeth scraping on the solid armor there and making a horrible noise.
"Goddamn it!" I yelled, bringing the Gazer up at point-blank range to burn the thing off me. Then the second one latched on.
Tentacles partially blocked my vision as the second one enveloped me. I had been just about to push the trigger stud on the Gazer when every joint in my armor locked up. The HUD flashed at me.
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Warning: Electrical Attack, power assist malfunctioning.
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I snarled, mentally ordering the drones to clear this trash off me. I got an acknowledgment from them, but knew it wouldn't be that simple. The rest of the school, or flock, or whatever you call a group of flying squid horror things, was making things difficult for them.
"Screw it," I said, and with a grunt forced my finger down.
I knew that I had been just about on target, if not fully. I strained against my armor and moved my left arm out of the way, waving around the Gazer with my right. The grinding noise of teeth on my left arm stopped. Tentacles fell away and my vision returned. Both squids were gone, and I was tumbling wildly through the air.
The electrical warning had disappeared and with a quick mental effort I stabilized, standing upright and looking around. Two pieces of flying squid-monster were falling to the ground below me, while another one was coming back toward me, seeming to be missing a lot of tentacles and moving slowly. The other three squids were chasing my drones around fruitlessly a few hundred meters away.
I raised the Gazer and drilled the attacking squid monster right in the center of its pyramid head. The bright white beam slashed through the metal and with a flick of my wrist I cut the thing into two pieces. As it fell, I turned my attention to the other three.
The drones were doing well, running circles around the squids and firing when they could. They were working together, the needler drone would use a burst of needles to amputate some tentacles while the beam drone tried to get a kill shot. I had just turned to face them when a particle beam speared through a slowed squid and killed it.
Seconds later the other two were dead as well, the Gazer making short work of them. I checked its status.
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Cyklopean Systems GZR-LE "Gazer" Particle Beam Rifle
16% Charge
Ready
Control(s) Available: Engage safety
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I reattached it to my chest. There were spare magazines in one of the armor's pouches, but the weapon would be fully recharged in two minutes, so there was no need to swap magazines. My armor was intact as well, the squids not able to do much to it.
Twisting in the air, I continued to fly toward the Spike in the distance.
"Brick, what is this thing anyway? I don't know what a Spike is. Or a Shard. Clue me in."
"A Shard is a weapon used by the AIs in the war. They were dropped from orbit onto inhabited planets in great numbers, mostly onto cities. The destruction on impact was immense. Worse than the impact itself was that each Shard was an autonomous, self-reproducing factory. They were capable of flooding a city with combat units and turning the materials of the city that it had landed in against the inhabitants. They were very effective."
"Right, so that's what made the crater. What's the Spike, then?"
"Once a Shard had secured its local area, it would begin to build upward and outward. The Spike is in essence a launch system, a railgun. The Shard would build units suited to travel through space and launch them into orbit."
"And outward is those weird river-looking things. What are those for?"
"They were used to connect Shards together in a resource and information-sharing network."
"You keep saying were, Brick. It's still there, and there are still Ferals everywhere."
"You misunderstand. The Shard didn't produce Ferals. The Shards are from the time before Connahr and the Ahrimani delivered the quantum disruption bombs. The Shards produced combat units, not Ferals. After the disruption, the Shards were greatly crippled. Even still, they remain very dangerous for adventurers."
The shattered shells of tall buildings began to pass by below me as I contemplated what Brick had told me. Having Ferals just sort of appear out of nowhere was bad enough, but having AIs convert your cities into killer robot factories seemed worse somehow. My Augmented vision made out countless Ferals roaming the ruins, crawling up the sides of buildings and in the darkness between them far below.
The Spike came closer and closer, the sheer scale of it pretty mind-boggling. It made the several hundred story towers surrounding it seem like the grass surrounding a grand old tree. I couldn't even come up with an estimate of how big it was. It wasn't thin either. It was easily a thousand feet wide, if not wider.
"I am adding a marker to your Interface. This is the position the First is relaying to me. You will have to find a way into the Spike."
A round blue marker appeared in my vision, directly ahead. It was labeled “Regar.” I resolved to ask Brick what that whole thing with the First was about when I had more time.
Threat markers lit up all over the Spike as I got close enough. They moved slowly in random patterns, and I used my Augment to zoom in on one. It was a four-legged spider bot about the size of a truck tire. The body was a round metallic ball. Sprouting from the top of that body was what was obviously a weapon. As I got a bit closer, I saw it move to track me.
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Mobile Defense Turret, Threat Level: 8
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"Oh, shit," I said, and jinked hard to the right, using the propulsion units in my hands to turn sharply.
Pulses of purple light flashed out, raking through the space where I'd just been. More and more of the mobile turrets opened up, tracking and hitting me despite my speed and desperate maneuvers.
"Drones, take them out!" I ordered, and dodged again. Something new appeared in my HUD.
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Countermeasures: Laser—active.
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I laughed as the hail of laser bolts hit me, and did exactly nothing. Each time one landed, that portion of the armor would turn exactly the same color as the beam for just long enough. For a moment I was tempted to sit there and let them shoot at me, before I remembered all the stuff stuck to me that might not be able to take the same kind of punishment. These things had to die. I swooped in toward the Spike.
Spider turrets exploded in rapid succession as my two drones targeted one after the other. The particle beam was overkill against the lightly armored spiders, with even the needler able to make short work of them. These defenses were all about quantity.
I flew close over the surface of the Spike and smashed a turret with an armored fist. It flew apart and fell away.
I pulled away just before smashing into a slight bulge in the side of the Spike and flew in a tight circle, surveying the carnage. The display was still full of threat markers, but the ones nearby were mostly gone. The turrets above and below moved in our direction, but wouldn't be here for a minute or two.
"That was awesome. I owe you big time, Metra."
"I'm glad you like it. Don't rely on those countermeasures always saving your ass. If the laser is too powerful it will burn right through. Now stop screwing around and get the First out of there."
"Yes, ma'am."
My drones finished the last targets before resuming station. The needler drone was down to about 25% of its magazine. I'd have to refill it. The particle beam drone was dry, but its magazine was slowly refilling from its onboard power source and I hoped I wouldn't need it for a few minutes.
I scanned the surface of the Spike in front of me, looking for a way in. It was a lot less regular than it looked from a few miles away. Odd bulges and crevices were everywhere. It was far from the perfect smooth cylinder I'd thought it was. There was so much to look at that it took a good thirty seconds of detailed scanning before I found something. A barely visible rectangle that might be a hatch. It wasn't large, but I'd fit through it. If it even was a hatch.
With a clunk I landed beside the hatch, anchoring myself to the Spike with the gecko pads in my armor. I was glad that whatever else Metra had done, she hadn't removed that.
After activating my Flow Component Visualization I still wasn't sure what this rectangle was. Just under the surface of the Spike was a plethora of components, but most of them my Interface didn't label. I brought up the salvage interface and selected a tiny slice through a promising looking section of components at the edge of the rectangle.
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Salvage: Metals, tier 3
Cost: 15 Nanite Clusters
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"Fine," I said, and pressed the Salvage button with a thought.