The Dry Earth (Book 2): The Nexus

by Orion, W. J.

  “How big a boom?” Yaz asked.

  “Unsure. Safe to assume that the explosion would mimic the amount of incoming energy the shield had absorbed. It would be a less than desirable outcome. Get ready. We will push down the service corridors then down the central boulevard using the stores and retaining walls for cover.”

  “Can we shoot through your shields? Do they block bullets?” Michelle asked.

  “Physical projectiles can pass through but their trajectory might be altered,” Dwen said. “It is best to shoot around the edge of the shields unless you are very close to your target.”

  The Galon removed their discharging plugs from the podium and moved back to their positions around the humans and lone Mulgorod. As the two lead aliens got back to the front, the elevator ceased moving and Yasmine could see onto the floor they would be exiting at.

  The secretive staff elevator didn’t open into a public space. Just like the other floors they’d passed and the spaces they’d already traversed, they would be exiting into a battle in a corridor away from innocents. The wreckage of numerous black and purple crab chassis littered the floor. She saw three more of the Galon–two dead, killed by giant smoking blast holes caused by the plasma cannons of the crabs, and the third wounded but still alive. The wounded Galon fired his twin pistols at a corner ten yards distant as it leaned against the wall near to them and tried to keep its energy shield up. The synthetic material of the wall chipped and shattered with each round, removing the cover inch by inch.

  “Strike fast,” Dwen said, and they did.

  The two Galon pushed into the corridor past their wounded comrade, shooting a steady, hammering stream of suppressing fire at the corner where a crab threatened. Behind the red energy shields, the humans, Trader Joe and the Mulgorod judge followed. Tactical and calm, the Galon security team rounded the corner in their strange, circular walk under cover of their shields, and as soon as they showed any kind of target to the threat beyond, their shields exploded in a shower of flashes.

  Yasmine winced and flinched from the sound of the terrible weapons firing in the closed space, but she kept at the ready, gun in hand and aimed. At her side, Caleb pressed the angles, trying to find a space to let his machine gun do some talking, but the Galon guards had the entire hallway shielded and used the little space at the edges near the walls and ceiling to fire their weapons. Caleb grunted as he tried to get shots off.

  He’s getting pissed. “Uncle, let them shoot,” she shouted at him. “Save your ammo.”

  “I didn’t fly this far into space to watch other people kill crabs, damn it,” he yelled.

  “There are going to be plenty,” she yelled back. As she spoke, she saw one of the Galon’s shots hit a crab chassis front and center.

  The projectile’s impact drove the bigger armored threat backwards, then caused it to explode with a reverberating thump. All of the mechanical tentacles tore off the underside of the crab chassis, exposing a fist-sized hole. The same Galon fired again and threaded its shot right into the void of the armor. The resulting explosion ruptured the armored vehicle and triggered the additional self-destruct device inside, incinerating the crabs within and dropping the chassis to the debris-covered floor with a hollow clang.

  Every foot they pressed into the corridor they fought for, but they were winning.

  The crabs are backing up, slowing us down. We kill one, and another shows up down the way. Why aren’t they rushing us? What’s their game? Yasmine searched for a shot she could take, but the Galon shields protecting them from the barrage of plasma cannon fire blocked all opportunities. Nonetheless, she aimed and remained ready.

  The crabs are working to delay us, Trader Joe replied.

  Are we linked again?

  Yes, he said to her from a crouch several feet away. You’re doing it once more. Incredible, really.

  I don’t know how I’m doing it, she thought back to him as a shot almost made itself available. She had to close her eyes as four plasma cannon impacts smashed against the shield closest to her. The light blinded and the crackling sound dared to deafen her. The crab shooting in her direction was trying to hit her. The shots were too precise. The Galon returned fire, damaging the armor and forcing it to back away.

  Can you sense the energy all around us? Trader Joe asked her. Use my perception. See and feel the electricity and heat. You can see the little squid bodies inside the chassis and feel the batteries of the Galon shields filling fatter and fatter with each hit they absorb. See reality how I sense it.

  As Trader Joe spoke, she could feel his senses spring to the surface of her awareness, like someone had flicked a light switch on in a closet she’d lived in her whole life.

  Energy appeared to her. Hidden behind translucent forms of matter, she could see the nebulous, pulsating presence of a thousand kinds of power moving and flowing in the space around her. As Trader Joe said, she could see the oval shield generators throbbing with the absorbed and transformed power from the incoming plasma attacks. They looked to her like hearts beating in chests and with each beat, each shot defended, they grew fatter and the thumping came faster. She saw the little squids swimming inside the armored crab chassis, filling the rectangular fish tank cockpits in the belly of their beasts. They pulsated with their own frenetic flashes as they fed their machines power to operate.

  Inside her friends she could see their stored power as well. Their entire nervous systems and brains glowed in her mind’s eye as if they were animated skeletons made of neon lights from a pre-war big city. She could see the surges in their brains as they thought and reacted to the world. And outside of it all, beyond the battle, she could feel the megalithic grid of energy that the Nexus ran on surrounding them. The spider web of conduits, lights, heating vents and more grew into the sky, down below her feet, and stretched to the horizon in all directions.

  And she could feel it. Like warm water she could put her hands in, the energy was there, just beneath it all, coursing, surging.

  My word….

  This is how I see the world, Trader Joe said. And now you may as well, when we are connected like this.

  She shifted her perception back to the physical, mundane world. What do I do with this? She asked as the group pressed around another corner and engaged another crab falling back to cover.

  You can see things others cannot. Secrets of power. In time, perhaps you’ll find a way to access the power and use it. Some of my kind can do such things.

  Like drain batteries?

  Or cause them to explode, or bend light, or diffuse heat, or alter frequencies, et cetera.

  By now the movement forward down the hallway was rote. The shields of the Galon guards were proving to be impregnable, and their overlapping tactics with the shields felt like their group had nothing to fear.

  “Ahh, come on, man,” her uncle yelled, swaying his machine gun back and forth. “Let me shoot something.”

  “We are almost in the market. Your weapon will be of use there,” Dwen said.

  Yasmine looked at Michelle and Knox and Bernie as they walked behind the energy wall. They were a mixture of impatience and fear, all tempered by that now-familiar hardness they wore to get anything done in the reality they lived in. It wasn’t faked, the hardness; it was a mask, just as real as the weapons in their hand.

  The last crab in the corridor exploded in a shower of broken armor and blue-white sparks. The Galon warriors let their shields dematerialize as the group reached the wide oval double door that would let them enter the supposedly massive market. They were breathing heavy at the center of their pyramidal bodies, each of their three facets breathing out of three separate lungs.

  “We will create a shield dome as best we can,” Dwen explained, “but we won’t be able to fight back in all directions effectively. Humans–you must assist us with your weapons.”

  “Ready to rock,” Knox said, lifting her shotgun as best she could while still managing her crutches.

  “Why don’t you let my
SAW do the barking?” her uncle said, patting his machine gun with sincere affection. “Cover the ground approaches if anything gets sneaky.”

  “Yeah, sure, Boss,” she said, then sighed.

  “Your apparent body makeup seems similar to the Mulgorod or a base mammal,” Dwen said to Knox. “The Nexus has numerous cybernetic surgeons and tissue manufacturers who can grow you a new leg or replace it with something mechanical.”

  “Like the Terminator?” she asked. “I could be a cyborg?”

  “I don’t have context for those words yet, but you could recover the life you had before your injury. Which, by the way, I am impressed that you are able to do so much after, having lost a limb. Most races would’ve died. Humans are a tough lot.”

  “We’re damn tough. And you know what? If you’re offered the choice to be a cyborg or not to be a cyborg, you always go full cyborg,” she said, then sprouted a giant grin. “And you’re damn right we’re tough. Tough as it comes, no joke.”

  “Show me,” Dwen said, then signaled to his associates to open the door into the market.

  Here we go.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Today’s Deal of the Day is Two-For-One Plasma Rain

  Three triangular wedges of doorway pulled apart with a janky, grinding hitch, and bright light spilled through into their faces.

  Warm, like sun? Yaz thought. Out of instinct she let her shared senses see the energy of the light coming through and read the streaming waves of it like how she’d judge the direction of wind based on how the sand flew. That’s not real sunlight, but it’s close.

  The Nexus is the collective peak of technological innovation from a hundred species. Synthetic sunlight in large spaces alleviates the negative side effects many species suffer because of the dark void of space, Trader Joe explained. Sunlight is life.

  As Trader Joe spoke, her eyes adjusted and she saw a piece of the grand market. She had to assess the space on the move as the Galon surged forward, brandishing their shields in a red three-part dome that covered the sky and most of the area around them.

  “Move!” Dwen barked, and they did.

  The exit they departed through opened into what could’ve been a modern day, pre-war Western city side street, were it not for the bright neon and holographic signs on the storefronts that spelled out advertisements in a hundred languages that had never appeared in a book or movie on Earth.

  In the narrow alley, with buildings going upward for ten stories (just like the canyon description Trey had given earlier), they had no threats to defend against, and they made their way to the central boulevard that led from left to right. They walked past several bodies of alien creatures that bore the devastating wounds of plasma weaponry. It didn’t matter to Yaz what species the fallen belonged to; she still felt sadness at the sight of war. They went past holes blasted in walls, and as they walked, a bizarre parade of frightened aliens ran by the end of their alley, heading away from something to their right.

  Tall and short, wide and thin, slimy and scaled, for nearly as many creatures as she saw, Yasmine saw a different kind of life; all ran with the reckless haste brought on from fear. As they reached the main street, lined ten stories tall with floor after floor of glass-fronted shops, the sound of distant plasma fire grew. The noise came from the right.

  “Head right, stay close to the retaining walls and trees for cover,” Dwen said. “Humans, fire your weapons at them if you safely can. Crab friend, I trust that laser you carry isn’t just for show.”

  “How many left to kill?” Her uncle asked.

  “We faced eleven and have seen what I judge to have been six destroyed chassis,” Dwen said. “But I have been wrong before.”

  Five left. Five crabs to make this station safe again. Well, this part of the station, at least.

  They moved forward, in their rose-shield colored world, and entered the main street of the Nexus market.

  Yasmine felt the blasts moving through the air at them before they smashed into the Galon shields. She closed her eyes to protect them as the energy bolts collided with the transparent fields that protected them. Others barked out in fear as the storm of incoming fire obliterated their ability to see, but she stayed quiet and felt the energy move and flow with Trader Joe’s help.

  “Keep moving,” she said. “The shields are holding.” With her free hand she gently ushered a slightly terrified Michelle forward.

  The Galon steered them into the right hand side of a wide street. The thoroughfare was divided by a hip-high stone wall topped in luminous, vivid flora that didn’t come from Earth. The security team masterfully aligned their shields with the wall, giving them even more cover as they fought against the onslaught of incoming plasma fire. Yasmine could feel the transfer of power from the shots as they smashed into the Galon field and were broken down and siphoned into the batteries. She aimed her pistol up at the upper levels, where two of the crab attackers had taken elevated positions, and felt a sudden rush of heat on her face. Her skin felt like it sizzled in a blast furnace. She looked to the source of the sensation, and in her new senses, she saw the new threat.

  The two Galon in front of her were dangerously close to exceeding the capacity of their shield.

  “We’re taking too much fire. You’re gonna blow!” she hollered at them.

  The closest Galon guard holstered a pistol and grabbed the oval device that projected the field. One alarmed eye shot up to Dwen.

  “The human is right,” the guard said. “Our shields will fail long before we reach the central meadow, let alone the power lifts. Collective Elite plasma weapons must be more powerful than frontline crab weapons.”

  “Monsters in the mire,” Dwen barked as another fusillade of incoming plasma threatened to burn them to a crisp. It thought for a second as the barrage of plasma fire continued to rain down. “Closest discharge outlets are too far away.”

  Yasmine heard Dwen make the statement and in the back of her mind her worldview exploded into a three-dimensional map, as if she were looking down on the deep canyons and wide fields of the gargantuan marketplace with a drone’s eye view. An actual out-of-body experience. The grid of power under the surface of it all shone through as bright lines crisscrossing everything. Ley lines in space.

  Whoa.

  Far ahead, where the tall structures of stores ended, a wide swath of transplanted forest hugged the shores of a manufactured pond. In that dense copse of woods, she saw a node of thick power conduits built into a fake tree. This was the discharge station they needed to reach to purge the shield batteries.

  They had a quarter mile to cover, and the incoming fire was punishing.

  “We’ll never make it,” she said. “We need to vent that juice now.”

  “There is no way,” Dwen said. “We must take cover in a storefront and throw the shields away. Reinforcements will come.”

  “No, I think I can help,” she muttered, looking at the invisible electrical currents inside her arms, running down to her fingertips. I just need a place to put the power. She heard the familiar buzzing snap from Trey’s mining laser shake her eardrums as he returned fire at a crab that poked its tendrils over a railing to try and shoot at them. Bingo. “Trey, do you have some kind of power plug? A port you can accept auxiliary juice through?” she yelled to him.

  “Um,” he replied, pausing his return laser fire to think, “Yes. This chassis has a two-way port on the hip.” He turned his armored vehicle to the side slightly, and an access hatch the size of Yaz’s palm opened. A clear white crystal protruded from the depths of the machine’s innards; it flickered with a soft white light.

  She could smell the power in the quartz-looking receptacle, and everything came together for her. Without any hesitation she leapt forward and holstered her pistol. With her now-free hand she grabbed the oval device on the closest Galon’s hip (at her shoulder level) and grabbed the end of the discharge cable on it. Thunderous explosions rained down as the crabs continued to push the shields to their b
reaking point. Sparks flew in every direction as she pulled the cable out and hurried the few steps to Trey.

  “This might backfire terribly,” she said. “If it does, I’m sorry I killed us all. Trey, get ready to dump some serious juice with that blaster of yours.” Yaz put her other palm over the end of the crystal in the small hatch, completing the circuit she hoped to make with her body.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Trader Joe said, but it was already too late.

  Call it audacity, call it insanity, call it power of will: Yasmine used her new, borrowed senses to extend her tangible reach in the universe beyond matter and into the realm of energy. More than just waving steam off a boiling pot on the fire or fanning heat away from her face in the desert afternoon, Yasmine reached into the latticework reality of the lines of power and, using the arterial network of nerves and power inside her own body, she pulled the pure potential energy from the Galon’s battery and let it slide over her physical body, just a fraction of a millimeter away from her actual flesh, and down into the core of Trey’s alien systems.

  Pure sensory overload coursed through Yasmine’s body and mind as she experienced the transfer of unimaginable power through her being. Her hair stood on end as her nervous system was tantalized by a thousand years of stimulus. It was half pain, half ecstasy, and all indescribable. The process finished in a terrifying second and when the power was transferred, Yasmine was spent. She let go of the cable and it retracted back into the oval on the Galon’s hip. She sat down hard on legs filled with pinpricks the size of knitting needles. The pulsating core of energy inside the shield’s battery had disappeared, though it grew brighter with each incoming round that splashed off the recharged field. She panted as her whole body struggled to reel itself back together.