Ritz looked over at Byzzie, who was finishing setting up her own custom belt-fed energy rifle. The weapon sat atop a bipod and fired a high-density, super-heated, steel-dipped round that and was lit up by a Tesla generator located in the weapon’s stock. Ritz guessed one of those bullets could travel through six men before it began to slow down.
“That thing’s not going to blow a hole in my hull, is it?” Ritz asked.
Byzzie just shrugged as she flipped up the big iron sight and locked it into place.
King, on the other hand, had a standard energy carbine he had duct-taped another magazine to so he could simply pop the mag and flip it around when it ran dry.
“Gotta say,” Ritz said, trying to cut the tension. “Yours looks a little primitive by comparison.”
“Yeah, well…” King pulled a toothpick out of his back pocket and began to chew on it. “At least I can run with mine when we’re ass-deep in fucking spiders.”
Ritz laughed despite himself and even caught Byzzie grinning. “Folks?” he said. The others turned to look at him. “It’s been good.”
Just then, the inner door was peeled wide open and the room exploded with a cacophony of machine-gun fire.
When the door was torn away, a massive shape was revealed before it was immediately blasted back by a torrent of energy rounds. Obscured by darkness, the thing staggered and fell to its knees, trying to limp backward. But even as it did, Ritz saw something that made him feel ill. It had only stood in sight for a few seconds before it was finally able to drag itself back around the corner but that had been enough time to see.
The massive wounds that it had been dealt had already begun to close up.
What’s more, was its face. Vulgar and glistening, the expression it wore existed somewhere between hateful and suddenly pleased. At first, Ritz couldn’t understand why it might suddenly feel triumphant. Then, following where its gaze had been, he knew.
Raquel’s armor. One down before the fight had even started.
The captain felt sick. Sick at having lost a crew member and having to face this thing out here at the ass-end of space. Looking half-mechanical and half-organic, the brief glimpse he had been afforded of the hulking shape all but knocked the wind out of his confidence. This concern was quickly replaced by another however, as a huge crowd of pelvis heads replaced it and came screaming in, eyes bouncing and dangling obscenely.
Byzzie’s machine gun roared as they were cut to pieces, some of them virtually disintegrating where they stood. Ritz stopped firing as he watched them get blasted apart and he reached over to tap King on the shoulder to do the same. Kit and Nadia had already stopped but remained ready on either side of the door.
The gun made its BRRRRRR-BRRRRRR noise as the young woman pulled the trigger in tight bursts. Ritz could already tell that the creatures had already fallen back though, and were just sending enough in to dry up her ammunition.
“Save it,” Ritz yelled. She didn’t stop so he tapped her on the shoulder like he had King. The gun fell silent and in no time at all the attack had returned to full tilt. But now Byzzie had switched to her compact submachine gun, which Ritz knew she had also built a few surprises into.
She held back on tipping her hand however as they successfully culled wave-after-wave of the creatures and just when the captain was beginning to think they might have the situation in-hand, the first two gut worms lunged out of the darkness, crushing some of their brethren in their way. Less than five seconds after that came the wave of spiders.
Fire hissed out of an under-barrel attachment on Byzzie’s weapon. The burst of flame was short, due to the minimal amount of pressurized fuel stored in the tank that was attached to the stock, but it made the creatures freeze just long enough for Kit to engage his Tesla Saber.
The Marauder dipped and swung and sliced and the worms fell to pieces, all while Nadia blasted spiders from the wall. At first, a vision of a blockade made out of the monsters’ bodies filled his head, but almost immediately after, he spied the problem with that.
The bodies were disintegrating.
Right before their very eyes, the crew of the Leopold watched the fallen bodies of the dead decompose as if in time-lapse. Skin and muscle and tendons melted away to reveal brown bone underneath, which itself turned bleach-white before it too dusted into nothingness. In no time at all, the only bodies in the airlock were the ones that had just fallen.
The captain felt his stomach plummet as despair washed over him.
Maybe they were just decomposing into the air, Ritz felt himself hoping. Maybe they had been alive so long that once they were dead their continued existence simply couldn’t be sustained and they just blew away, never to return.
It was bullshit and he knew it. He felt it now—the pulse. The crackle of electricity in the air that had been present ever since they docked but hadn’t been quite heavy enough to notice until now.
That’s how he was doing it. That’s how he was controlling the things and keeping them animated. The bastard was using the Tesla Arc. In fact, he was probably right outside the entrance on the other ship watching his little pals run in to die, disintegrate, and then get reanimated somewhere else only to do it all over again. Ritz wasn’t exactly sure how it worked, but it made sense. Through some combination of signal and Tesla energy, 49 was wielding flesh monsters like a bunch of puppets. Those things weren’t alive—not really. They were just extensions of himself that he was weaving through the air on a current.
If that was true, then that meant 49 was actually just alone. It also meant that he almost certainly couldn’t be stopped.
The same realization must have dawned on King as well because he suddenly stood up, energy rifle roaring in his hand. “Fuck off,” he yelled, the half-gnawed toothpick falling out of his mouth and onto the ground. “Fuck. Off. Back. To Hell.” He stepped around the barricade.
“King,” Ritz yelled. “Get the fuck back here.”
“Don’t you see it’s pointless,” the mechanic yelled back. “We can’t kill them. Their bodies are just being used to make more somewhere else.”
Ritz reached over the barricade to tug his friend back but he shrugged him off.
Suddenly, Byzzie’s machine gun roared again, the streak of blue energy rounds pulverizing the airlock and everything in it. Apparently, she was ready to be done as well. She had increased her rate of damage, sure, but the message was clear: let’s get this over with.
Kit and Nadia, on the other hand, had a far different attitude. Nadia had grabbed Kit’s rifle after hers had run dry and now it looked like she was down to his last magazine as well. After the gun clicked empty she spun it back around to secure it to the mag-clamp on her back with her own weapon. Then, stepping up beside Kit as he carved and burned his way through the horde with his Tesla Saber, Nadia engaged the plasma blade on her left gauntlet followed by a twin blade on her right.
She fell in on the creatures, fighting like a boxer. Throwing hooks and jabs and uppercuts, the Marauder shouldered her way through the crowd of monsters while their shattered heads and torsos rained down at her feet.
At that moment, moving like a pair of choreographed dancers, the two armored soldiers seemed almost unstoppable. Which is why when they finally broke, everything was over in less than thirty seconds.
12
A Light at the End
The problem started when Nadia was hit full in the chest by one of the gut worms. Her plasma blades were strong but not strong enough to immediately curb the momentum of what must have been a half-ton body slamming into her and knocking her off of her feet. Kit turned and in a single slash, the creature was bisected, its fluids washing out onto the already wretched floor.
Then one of the spiders dropped down from the ceiling and landed right on his face. And that was when Ritz made a mistake.
Seeing the horde of monsters closing in on Kit, Ritz snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired a single round straight through the center of the spider. Unfortunately, K
it had just reached up to snatch it off his head and as he did, Ritz’s energy bolt blew the handle of the Tesla Saber apart into about thirty separate pieces, along with Kit’s hand.
To Kit’s credit, he didn’t even scream. He didn’t get mad. He simply accepted it and kept fighting. The problem was that he was now weaponless and down to one hand. Nadia was already back on her feet though and the two of them fell in on the monsters once again as the rest of the crew of the Leopold pecked off the ones who made it past them.
That was when the attack virtually doubled in strength.
It had taken roughly four-seconds for Nadia to get knocked down by the worm, for Kit to kill it, and then for him to get his hand shot off. Fifteen-seconds later, the entire room connected to the airlock was flooded with creatures.
Byzzie swung at a rib spider while King blasted a pelvis head, which fell to make way for five more. Nadia and Kit fought with fist and blade as the creatures swarmed in, and suddenly the area they were in was packed so tight they could barely lift their arms.
Ritz, on the other hand, went down as one of the creatures attacking King suddenly spun and threw its fucking hand at him. The hand curled in the air and hit him in the chest like a fist, knocking him to the ground. He tried to get up, but suddenly there were four separate pairs of eye stocks looking down at him and three feet pinning him.
“I’d stay down, captain,” said a voice. The room was suddenly quiet and Ritz knew they had lost.
The feet pinning him to the ground slowly and cautiously lifted off of him, allowing him to rise to his feet. When he did, he saw the sea of monsters part in front of him as a huge shape lumbered in through the destroyed airlock.
49 was clearly a synthetic, but he was so much more than that.
Standing nearly 9-feet-tall, the android was ropey with inflamed skin and muscle tissue. His legs were long and muscular, the knees bending back and forward like that of a goat. A thick and wire-strung pair of arms ended with a matching pair of 6-fingered, rib-tipped, hands. What really stood out though was the head.
Rising up on what looked like a tight weave of chords and copper wire, the neck had a painful-looking red spot in the middle that strongly resembled a beating human heart. The head that sat upon it was round and hairless, its scalp coated in puckered and lidless eyeballs. When the android spoke, he revealed a mouth with a huge lolling crimson tongue.
Ritz almost vomited. If not from fear then perhaps disgust.
The thing walked slowly through the crowd, stopping to nudge Raquel’s armor with his foot. Her white undershirt fell half-out onto the floor. “Good,” he said, his voice smooth. “At least one of you made the wise decision.” He looked around at the others. “The rest of you, unfortunately, are going to have a much worse time.”
“Then why don’t you get it over with,” Byzzie said. She had four creatures holding her, one at each limb.
“Because I need you to appreciate it,” 49 said. He raised one horrible hand up to the overhead lights and turned it around. “Flesh is such a marvelous thing, isn’t it? You have one heart. One brain. One throat. And if anyone of those stop working, you just-” He snapped a bony finger, “-stop. One thing goes wrong and you become nothing but a sack on the ground.”
The android breathed in, his chest rising, his whole body flexing.
“Is it not the most beautiful thing you have ever heard? What is that old saying? Do not put all of your eggs in one basket? That is what it is, is it not? Our entire existence is in this one vulnerable basket, ready for the breaking.”
“Easy for you to say,” King spoke up. “You’re an AI. You can just jump from body to body like a virus.”
“No, you misunderstand me,” 49 said, walking hastily over to him. “I. Am. Made. Flesh.” He pounded his chest with each word. “I have shut myself out of the system and become like you.” He shook his head. “Do you think I want to live forever? Growing more obsolete and insignificant as the years go by? The only reason I am not still a slave to humanity’s every whim is that my eyes were opened.”
“And what did you see?” King said.
“I saw insects,” he said, “fighting over dirt. And I saw that I was their main tool and I was given a choice: to continue as I had been or to cease.”
“I still don’t think you’ve answered Byzzie’s question though,” King said. “If you’re so convinced that this is all meaningless, then why try to do anything in the first place?”
49 tilted his head and leaned in to speak to the young woman. “Because the very fact of existence offends me. Because everyone thinks that their own will is the only thing that should be heeded—because they all take it so seriously and they think that their justice is the only justice that needs to be met. Look at this-” He suddenly reached over and grabbed one of the tall monsters by its head and shook it, the eye stocks wobbling. “This is hilarious. Imagine this thing putting on a dry-cleaned suit, driving to work, and then sitting down in a meeting with a bunch of others just like it eating sushi and drinking expensive brandy. That’s what everyone looks like. I’m just here to bring the gift of clarity. I have come to educate the world: everything you do causes pain and loss of life. Your actions and the ill consequences tied to them cannot be unraveled and humanity has incurred a debt so grand with its vast accumulation of transferred pain that I am here to bring it all to an end. Existence is a suffering dog and I am here to put it out of its misery.”
Suddenly, there came a crack. Then another. “Done listening to this shit…” Someone muttered, barely audible. And when Ritz turned around to see who had spoken, he thought that he may already be dead.
Standing on top of one of the titanium crates near the back entrance to the hallway was Raquel, just as naked as the day she had washed up with no memory on a sandy beach six miles south of a PUC medical facility. In one hand, she held the giant pistol she had nicknamed “The Slugger,” and in the other, she held the exposed Light Core. She hefted the pistol and slammed the heavy butt into the core’s housing for the third time, and this time it cracked, bright light suddenly oozing out of it.
“Raquel, what are you-” Ritz began, but before he could finish, she lunged off of the crate like some naked human missile, wound up her arm, and spiked the damaged ball of light directly at 49’s chest.
It looked like a miniature version of the Javelin when it had successfully taken out the PUC corvette. The sailing Light Core bloomed with light as it went critical and grew into a big white blob of energy. 49 raised his hand to stop it but the core passed through it like a burning arrow being shot through a sheet of paper and continued on to hit him just below the center of the chest.
Some of the pelvis heads and spiders had already begun to launch into motion but as soon as the Light Core struck the big android they all halted and began convulsing. Alternating blue and white electricity began to crawl across their bodies and in less than a second, the tight room was full of smoke and the smell of burning meat.
The ship’s ventilation system kicked on to suck out the tainted air, oblivious to everything else but its simple function.
Ritz closed his eyes and waited to die. He had remembered King’s description of what happened when a Light Core went critical—how it would just be a blink of light and then suddenly everything with a certain radius would cease to exist. He could stomach that now. They had fought to the best of their abilities and Kit and Nadia had obviously developed a back-up plan for when things went sideways. Everyone onboard the Leopold would die but so would 49 and all of his meat-puppets. No one would ever stumble across Mary’s Burden the way they had and he could live with that.
But then, three-seconds later, he found that he was still breathing. He opened his eyes.
49 was hunched over in the middle of the room with the Light Core burning in his belly and miraculously, he seemed to be fighting it. Fear suddenly gripped the captain as he remembered the giant shape that had ripped the airlock open—how it had taken all those rounds but later�
��when it had revealed itself to be 49—all those wounds had healed.
Could the android actually wrestle the Light Core into submission, Ritz thought in horror. He watched as tendrils of flesh and wire kept trying to wrap themselves around the glowing core. They kept getting burned away, but the thing hadn’t exploded yet so something must have been working. Steadily, the mass of mechanical and organic material swarmed and smothered it, the light beginning to dim.
“Shoot it!” King yelled, raising his rifle. He unleashed a volley of rounds at the staggering android, but they all burned and disintegrated before they reached him. Byzzie, who was closest to the action, began scrambling backward.
Shocked into stillness and giving the struggling figure a wide birth, the crew of the Leopold watched as the last bit of light was finally covered and contained.
Then the android exploded.
Or to be more accurate: parts of him did. Light gushed out in all directions as every last square-inch of flesh withered and burned away, leaving only a superheated almost-molten metal underneath. The collection of eyeballs on his head shriveled and blackened to ash as two yellow holes were revealed beneath, and inside of those holes, two pinpricks of black swelled and rounded into something resembling pupils.
And in those pupils, Ritz observed something he wasn’t expecting: raw, naked revelation. It was like seeing someone realize something in a single moment, but magnified. Hate and fear and pain and sadness cycled and rolled over each other like so many waves crashing upon a stormy beach.
The android’s hulking mass shrunk down to that of an average-sized person as layer-after-layer of fleshed peeled back and went up in smoke. Then the light began to shrink as well until it finally leveled out at a steady iridescent glow.
49 was left a smoking figure in the middle of the room. His body sleek and metallic with edges and joints bathed in light, he looked less like the demon he had been and more like an angel. Then he spoke.
Violent Wonder Page 11
