by G Aliaksei C
My timing could not have been worse. A Crawler, surrounded by a dozen Wolves, scaled the hill ridge, aiming twin barrels at my machine. The tank thumped, but the Class 2 weapon had no effect against the Crawler’s deflector. The plasma bolts, in turn, stopped my taxi dead, sending ripples through the machine’s shield.
I, however, kept going, through the forward deflector, through the fire and smoke. Managing a decent landing I began to jog, one hand supporting the device on my belt, the other free, hovering near the axe handle.
The Wolves rushed out first. I sidestepped the leader, grabbed him by the neck, and flung the animal at the Crawler. The next two plasma bolts hit the flying Beast, detonating too close to the deflector and knocking the Crawler back.
The other eleven Wolves took fifteen seconds. I finally managed to maintain decent composure, making no deviation from my chosen position. Every Wolf died failing to push me even a centimeter off my spot.
The longest part of killing the Crawler, I learned, was actually reaching it. It was backing away, firing bolt after bolt at me. As always the slow-tracking, telegraphed attacks kept missing, and I passed unarmed through the deflector bubble. I leaned into my attack, smashing the axe into the Beast’s upper head. The blade broke a very specific bit of technology - the primary capacitor for the Beast’s electrocution system. The capacitor discharged, sending a vast zap into the big bug’s brain. It sizzled, groaned, and collapsed.
“Jim, time.”
“Twenty-five seconds,” replied the radio on my collar.
For over twenty days I had fought and killed these creatures. The exercise did not go to waste.
“It’s very impressive Mr. Frost,” added someone else.
“Yeah, I only need to cut my time by twenty-four seconds to compete with you people!”
I unhooked the bomb and set it on the corpse. Attaching detonators I climbed off and ran for the tank, suddenly in a hurry to get home.
“So, what’s going on Mr. Frost?” asked someone as I joined the villagers on the walls. I unfolded a tripod and secured a sensor array atop, aiming it at the corpse in the distance.
Upon seeing me duck into cover the others quickly activated whatever additional defense measures they had and dove behind the wall with me. Only Rarus, too large to appreciate the wall cover, remained tall and standing. Pessi, in turn, used the massive Inson as cover.
“Fire in… no, that’s not right.” The observers looked at me in anger. “Oh fine. Fire on the hill!” I whooped and activated the detonator. In the distance, the detonator simply disabled the containment field, and the cooling anti-iron gas spread out, contacting the containment chamber around it. Antimatter and matter reacted, turning both masses into various forms of energy. For a moment everything went white beyond the comfort and safety of the wall.
In recognizable measurements, the explosion had an equivalent of forty tons of dynamite.
There was no mushroom cloud, sadly enough, but the point was made. The ground shook as the shockwave reached us, emphasizing the mesmerizing, burning dust cloud in the distance.
I got up, unconcerned by the radiation tan I was receiving, and maniacally laughed at the massive smoke cloud. The others realized their misguided attempts to bring binoculars was wasted - the fire and smoke now occupied a fourth of the view beyond the Comfort Dome.
“In that volume…” The educated Inna looked into empty air with wide, shifting eyes, as if drawing something in her mind. “Drake, was that antimatter?”
“Compressed Geneva Convention violation.” I patted Jim’s armored arm. “You want rifles that shoot that?”
“Mr. Frost, can you tone down the yield?” Rarus did not bother to duck, bathing in the flash and glory of the explosion, her armored skin unbothered by the potential tan.
“Of course. I plan on making munitions that fire needles with about a fortieth of the explosive power.”
“Then… maybe.”
I turned to the wide-eyed mechanic, David. “Can you come up with some more-or-less original design for a rifle? A large one for Jim and Rarus and smaller, Human-sized ones. Plan for about two-centimeter-long cylinders, five-millimeter diameter.” The man flashed open his Menu, looked something up, thought, and nodded his cooperation. I turned to the other villagers, standing somewhat to the side, and gave them a thumbs up. I was hoping the fireball behind me was making a good background to my grin.
I blew things up then, I blew up different things now.
Not much had changed.
“Drake?”
“Yes?” I turned to Inna. She was staring, eyes focused on the fireball in the distance. I tracked her stare, surveying the sight.
The incredible heat radiating from ground zero was making the smoke and dust around it glow. It was as if someone had kicked up a cloud of dust and lit up a lightbulb within. The glow illuminated the shifts of wind within the debris field.
Within the cloud, illuminated by the glow, I saw the ground rise.
Fractured by the explosion, as if freed from the ground, the massive chunks of stone and dirt drifted up. Three distinct rocks, molten and scorched, kept rising for fifty meters, almost revealing their bottoms, when all three finally stopped. The dust cleared with time, presenting a clear view of the cooling rock. I couldn’t help but wonder what held them down, keeping the land from drifting away.
“Was that intended?” Inna’s eyes were slightly glowing as she squinted as the strange sight.
“Absolutely not!” I snatched someone’s binoculars, scanning up and down the chunks with my eyes, trying to find some method of lift that could keep the multi-kilotonton masses of soil in the air. “That is never supposed to happen!”
Something flashed among the rocks. A string of light reached up from the crater, rising over the peaks of the floating masses. It shimmered, vibrated, and began to expand.
“What in the…”
“Fissure!” Inna was yelling into her Menu. “Fort, all weapons are to fire on the fissure, NOW!”
The RAM-Ds and smaller turrets around us swung around. The smaller weapons let loose instantly, a mix of beams and kinetics streaming off the walls, nearly striking the length of the thickening string of light in the distance. The RAM-Ds fired last, four of them exhaling their bolts of fire through the Comfort Dome, across the valley and into the light.
The string of light was starting to look like a diamond, glowing and widening with every second when the bolts struck. They seemed to partially pass through, disappearing into the light. The string cracked with energy, and accepting the attack, and fractured. It seemed to turn solid, collapsing like a pillar. A cracking, breaking sound reached the walls as the last of the chunks disappeared into the crater.
“Drake!”
“I don’t know either!”
“Drake, you almost opened a fissure!”
“Damn it Inna, it’s not my fault this place is so fucked up!”
“That could have killed all of us! We would need a Class 9 battalion to deal with an open fissure!”
I raised my hands. “I don’t even know what that was!”
Inna phased her armor out, still staring at the levitating mountains in the distance. “It’s bad, Drake. It’s like a miniature Hotzone, anything from Class 5 to Class 9. Beasts swarm to it like flies to light. We would get overwhelmed within a day, and there’s nothing I could do about it. Whatever you did, don’t do that again, ok?”
“Yeah, no, you don’t have to tell me!”
“Damn Drake, you weren’t kidding when you said it wouldn’t be boring here!”
I looked around the parapet. The villagers had weapons in their hands, their eyes scanning the point where the fissure had been with great worry.
“I’m going to sell it.”
All eyes turned to me with multiplied concern.
5 : Supplier’s Politics
Day 73
I almost ran myself into a financial hole.
With loans for fortress weapons, fabrication equ
ipment, materials, Gems and the Defender suit building up, I found myself in a state of near panic when a marketable format for antimatter was finished.
My plan to sell the new equipment to Raiders failed miserably. The curse that prevented them from using Gates and Gems was absolute. Testing revealed that small Gems maintaining the containment fields in the needles turned off in the hands of the Waste Ring natives, making for an unpleasant truth - I could not sell antimatter ammo to most Raiders.
So I resorted to selling a previous advancement, the armor-piercing shells, to them instead. Said shells did not need Gems to operate, relying instead on capacitors for the needed burst of power.
The Raiders had money, paying the unholy price I demanded for the ammo and gingerly moving crate after crate out of the fortress. I actually scrapped a plan to sell only minigun calibers of the deadly munitions, deciding it too malevolent even for my taste. Suddenly the locals were defending the perimeter like the soviets in preparation for the defense of Moscow - we had become a priceless strategic resource to them, and they were not about to leave us unguarded.
They were also warned not to try and do anything stupid. I made it clear that, were I to will it, the ammo fabricators would go up in flames before their eyes rather than fall into their grubby hands.
The Raiders, of course, did not get the full extent of my developments.
Once the munitions started selling among the Raiders I was able to make ends meet tails and calmed down, and finally finished the first version of Black Ammo - a combination of armor-piercing and antimatter shells that turned unshielded targets into mist.
These antimatter munitions had but one issue, aside from their immense price. When the first needle came out of the fabricator and was registered by the Ring mechanics, I noted a clear deficiency in the design description - even weak deflectors and shields would detonate the shells as they passed through. The core issue was the interference of the gravity shield with the gravity containment system in the ammo, an interference that set the antimatter-matter reaction off prematurely. That, however, was immaterial when compared to the destructive power of every shot.
I quietly distributed the specifications for the ammo among Jim and the villagers and asked for weapon designs. Within the day I had several very neat, detailed commissions for a variety of sidearms using Black Ammo. I picked the best one, a modular, interchangeable design, and built enough for everyone. The price to make them was vast, but I had material donations from almost everyone to rely on for production.
The unfortunate truth was that a Class 4 weapon, using the full battery of Class 4 technology, cost eight or more times its Class 1 equivalent. The power demands of the Class 4 gravity anchor, predictive and counter-predictive systems meant that basic parts, like the actual acceleration system for the ammo, had an abundance of energy.
Thankfully David was an incredibly capable designer. He knew how to make the best possible Class 4 sidearm imaginable, a form that would have taken me years of effort to approach.
Jim and the villagers now carried such sidearms. I had, somehow, convinced them that the antimatter strapped to their hips was not a threat to their health.
Rarus, the largest of us, carried the biggest cannon I had made so far. It was a terrifying rifle that could only look compact in the hands of the walking tank. Pessi, however, was unwilling to trade his fancy gun for one of my design, instead asking for a stack of compact antimatter grenades.
What mattered more than the gun was the ammunition. Internally distributed Black munitions had armor-piercing tips and an entire array of electronic warfare that ensured payload delivery. I invested a vast quantity of resources into the needles, but was still amazed with myself when my Menu identified them as Class 7.
I even knew the reason for such high Class. Antimatter containment systems demanded a lot of power, and I had reserved to using Class 7 Gems, an expensive but necessary luxury required of an effective payload. At that point it cost nothing to also add an entire battery of capabilities to each bullet - teleportation charges, anti-jamming fields, and even a small guidance computer.
With time to spare I worked on variants of standard bullets with antimatter charges, but without any of the custom advancements the villagers carried, branding them as the Black munitions type and shipping crates of them out along with the Firebolters. Such bullets were inefficient, holding a fraction of what their mass and volume could contain, but fitting in most existing firearms on the market. Our own custom sidearms could fire and hold many more compact, special munitions, with greater precision than a standard bullet could hope to accomplish.
It was an expensive and incredibly powerful ammunition that quickly began to fill my bank account. Not a single complaint came though when I started sneaking the ammo into Firebolter packages - the distributors were only happy to oblige for their percent of profit.
Jim approached me one morning as I looked outwards from the wall in a state of deep thought.
“Mr. Frost?”
“Mhmm.”
“The Raider ambassador notified us that there is a pair of travelers headed towards us from counter-orbitward, likely from the nearest Gate town. One wears the colors of Waste Ring Union, the other looks civilian.”
I rubbed my chin, then pointed in the distance. “Jim, tell me, was there always a forest there?”
Jim looked and shut up, equally perplexed.
A few seconds of such collective consideration later Inna jogged up the wall ramp.
“Hey Drake, did Jim tell you about…”
“Inna, I have a question for you.” She tilted her head and frowned at my quiet tone. “Was there always a forest over there?”
The three of us stared across kilometers of valley right-of-orbit from the fortress. The mountains flanking our valley were barren, but a sea of green growth was visible kilometers out.
“No…” She squinted like the rest of us idiots, taking in the new landscape feature. “No, that was definitely not there a few days ago.”
As we watched, a rumbling reached us. The sound resonated across the valley, growing louder with every second. For dozens of kilometers in every direction the land around Vazanklav seemed to crack. In a wave the cracks washed around our walls, a layer of dust following them from the forest in the distance.
We looked on, stunned, as scattered masses of rock began to rise out of the ground, freed by the network of cracks. Streams of loose soil slid off the flat tops of every rock, engulfing the rising chunks in dust. It was like watching entire mountains take flight, abandoning reason in an impossible effort.
They moved with a slow grace that seemed appropriate for such vast mass, rising a few meters every minute. Sometimes the rocks froze, as if held back by something. Minutes later they continued their rise, often taking with them several nearby fractures of the valley.
I had never seen anything as beautiful as that sight. The might of the rising mountains, the rumbling roar accompanying them, the sale of the event that seemed too vast to comprehend, it all worked together in a symphony of awe and grandeur.
“Inna,” I whispered. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, sounding just as stunned as me.
It was clear that the slow disaster wasn’t going to end soon. I turned to the Lady of War, trying to collect my thoughts. “We need to… figure out what that is…”
“Yeah… I’ve never seen anything like this…”
“Need to… ask the Raider ambassador about it.” I shook my head in an effort of concentration. “What were you saying about guests? When will they arrive?”
“In a few hours. At sunhide.”
“Our Defender should be arriving today, that’s probably him. Let them in.”
“Can they make it through… this?”
“They’ll have to. Jim, have you considered my offer?”
Jim was dazed, his focus anchored to the incredible sight unfolding around Vazanklav. “What offer?”
“My
offer of replacing your weapons with more capable ones.”
“Mr. Frost, I was going to refuse… but in the face of this…”
“Very well Jim. I will begin production.”
Inna looked up at me from her Menu. “No one knows what this is.”
The valley had become an ocean of dust. The distant mountains framing it were obscured by countless rising pillars of stone, each bringing with them the adjacent chunks. The sight of millions of tons of rock rising up all around us made the sixteen square kilometers of Vazanklav seem insignificant.
“Can we even do anything about… this?”
“Drake, I really have no idea. I have never heard of anything like this. We need to talk to the others.” She abruptly turned away from the merlon she was leading on and headed towards the stairs. Her example freed Jim and I from our awe, and we quickly followed towards the villager’s settlement. Despite the rumbling echoing throughout the base Inna started talking about setting up a small farm somewhere on the base, and Jim chimed in on what could be good as a farming product. Their obvious effort to distract each other from the chaos beyond our walls seemed effective. I, meanwhile, examined the town ahead.
The townsfolk from the old Gate town, having put up the bunkers when they moved in, were clearly ashamed of their initial lack of taste. Gray boxes of foam-concrete were being redesigned and decorated. Man had taken to chiseling out interesting patterns in the walls. Someone shipped in some wood-equivalent material, often inserting the planks or cutouts into the patterns. Stylish street lights hung on all the buildings. Different decorative plants were sprouting from freshly cultivated and watered soil between the main road and the buildings, some close enough to the bunkers that it was clear - the plants were meant to climb the walls as they grew.
I felt determination grow inside of me. Whatever was going on, I was not going to let it destroy the small haven these people had built within my walls.
Far away, a cannon thumped, warning off some wild wandering Beast.