My terror evaporated in an instant. Those weren’t my thoughts. Someone was speaking in my head. “Barbas?” I ventured and instantly regretted it. The ice in front of my face was torn away in a shower of shards and vapor, and I was staring into the face of death. The mandibles were spread wide, the serrated jaws dripping with acid. Some of it spattered on the quartz of my faceplate and immediately began sizzling, though it did not seem to be damaging the plate itself. Through the vapor, I could see the inside of the creature’s throat, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. Dozens of tiny appendages worked mindlessly inside that gaping maw, little legs doubtlessly gripped whatever prey that the burug had found and forced it down toward digestion, alive or not. I fumbled for my gun, but it was no use. The monstrous mandibles closed around me and began to squeeze. I could hear my armor creaking, feel the horrendous pressure all about me, and I knew it was over. Done. My life ended here, just like this.
An idea struck me, even then, in just moments from death. It was a terrible, horrible, idiotic idea. It was the best I had. I was the tigress, and the tigress didn’t die. I brought up the control screen for my fabricator. The holographic projection sprang to life in front of me and I quickly cycled through the menus with flicks of my fingers. The squealing of metal filled my ears, and I all of a sudden I felt a shaft of unbelievable cold slice into my neck. The suit was breached, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I keyed in my commands hurriedly, biting back panic and making sure the programming was sound. I was wrenched into the air, ice falling away all around me. Keep going… Another spike of horrid cold touched my side, quickly followed by another at my back. Alarms were going off in my helmet, but I paid them no attention. They couldn’t help me now. I finished the program with the execute command and squeezed my eyes shut; praying to whichever deities could hear me. Just one word. “Please!” The crushing weight bearing down on my body abruptly vanished. I fell for a second and then hit the ground, hard enough to stun me, but only for a few heartbeats. Then I was scrambling back, wiping pulped ice and steaming acid from my faceplate, and staring up at what I had wrought.
It was a magnificent and revolting sight. The burug reared, its long, segmented body flexing into a grotesque ‘S’ shape, all of its legs writhing spasmodically as it tried to escape an enemy it couldn’t even see. The fabricator nanites clung to it, a barely visible, nearly insubstantial cloud that refracted my suit’s headlamp into tiny bursts of prismatic spectra. The microscopic robots zipped back and forth, through the alien monster’s armor, each movement too small to follow individually. En masse, however, the effect of what I had done was like watching ice sublimate. It was like watching a time-lapse video of a cow carcass being devoured by ants, only the victim was alive, and it was happening in front of me. I huddled in shattered ice, staying away from the burug’s futile thrashings and watching it all happen in a trance of hideous fascination. The monster quickly shrank before my eyes, shriveling down from twice the size of a city bus. It became a quivering lump of pale, ichor-soaked flesh, then a tattered chitinous endoskeleton, and then nothing but a smear of smoldering, liquefied goop on the ice.
I stood, slowly, surveying the mess I had made. All I felt upon seeing the final result was a kind of grim satisfaction. The monster had come to kill me, and I had done unto it first. It was the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. But wait… What is that? I took a hesitant step forward, avoiding the tendrils of viscous muck that seemed to slither from the puddle that used to be a burug. At the center of the puddle of rapidly freezing gunk, there lay an object, roughly the size of both of my fists- my actual fists- balled and held together. I bent and picked it up, against my better judgment, and I was shocked to realize that I recognized the general shape of the thing. I lifted it as I straightened up, and held it up before my headlamp so I could look at it more closely. Black ooze dripped from it, and I shook it until it was relatively clean, so I could see it more clearly. I gasped. It was shaped like a human heart.
The heart was smooth but for whorls of faintly glowing patterns, a delicate tracery of inset symbols that reminded me of fingerprints. It was heavier than it should have been, and I was pretty sure that the only reason I wasn’t bent double with the weight of the strangely dense artifact was that my power armor was thoroughly augmenting my own physical strength. As I held it, I felt a strange, hypnotic rhythm pulsing from it in regular intervals, and it emitted a buzzing sound so low that I felt it rather than heard it. I heard distant thunder in the shape of words I couldn’t understand. Vast impossible syllables that grew somewhere behind my ears and crashed down over my mind like a tidal wave. I dropped the heart, quickly, and the voices stopped. I backed away a few steps, very fast, adrenaline spiking through my body again. What in the hell-
“Joanna?” Barbas’ voice came in too softly, muffled as if behind a thick wall. “Joanna, the gun- I’m in the gun.” At least he was loud enough that I didn’t mistake his voice for my own thoughts again.
Gun? I thought. What gun? I looked around wildly, realizing for the first time that I seemed to have fallen into another pocket of wreckage that had collected within the glacier. Parts of my tower lay scattered in random ruin, wedged into chunks of ice and scattered all around the little pocket cavern I had fallen into. Perched high up in a tangle of cables and girders was the familiar shape of the gauss rifle turret I had put in the tower for self-defense. Too bad I hadn’t planned for a “massive native invasion, with wizards” when I had put that thing up. “I see you,” I called, not sure if Barbas could actually hear me. If he wasn’t in my head, then he might not be able to hear my thoughts. Hell, he had probably only been able to see me through the targeting sensors on the gun itself. I guessed that he was transmitting messages at me wide-band, and hoping that I would hear them.
I scrambled up the ramshackle pile of rubble, using my armor’s superhuman strength to make leaps and gaps I would never have managed without it. The rubble shifted unevenly beneath my weight, but I rode out the tremors and kept climbing, pulling myself up through a bird’s nest of cables and wires until I reached the gun. I popped open the control box quickly, not even bothering with the latch, just tearing the little hatch off of the back of the weapon to reveal the switches and ports hidden within. I took a quick look at them, frowning, then spotted the loose connection inside it and plugged it in. The gun powered up completely, and then began displaying a low battery warning. We didn’t have a lot of time. “Barbas?” I called, urgently. “Barbas! Can you hear me?”
There was a sensation of someone reading over my shoulder, a sort of itch on the back of my head. And then I felt his presence in my mind, so warm, so comforting. I had started to take the feeling for granted, and just that short time without my Qarin in my head had been one of the loneliest times in my life. It was strange what you could get used to. “I’m… here…” Barbas said, slowly, his voice strangely toneless, without any emotion at all. “You already… uploaded…”
“Are you okay?” This didn’t sound like my Barbas at all. He seemed… lesser, somehow. “Barbas, are you alright?” A creeping prickle of dread ran its way up my spine. Could Barbas be somehow crippled?
“Not… quite.” He managed a chuckle, though it sounded tinny, as though it had been processed through a primitive soundboard. “I was… busy… when the Tower… fell. There… are pieces…” He faded out suddenly, his voice dipping low, as if someone was playing with the sound quality. Before I could say anything, though, he was back, and a bit more humanity crept back into his voice. “There are pieces of me scattered all about…” his voice turned to an incomprehensible babble, before returning to Pan Standard. “I’m scattered to all of the machines I was controlling when we were attacked.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure what that means, ‘Bas. Are you saying you’re… damaged somehow?”
“Yes. No. Not damaged… not whole. I need you… need you to find the parts of me and… connect so that I can collect them… return to myself again.” Some of th
e humanity leaked out of his words again, turning them tinny and modulated.
“What were you networked to? Do you remember?”
“No,” he replied, returning to himself a little bit, a little warmth coming back into his voice. “Transmit… transmitting on wide-band. Probably. Find signal… find me.”
“I can do that, ‘Bas,” I whispered. “You already saved me. It’s time for me to save you.” Barbas didn’t answer. I disconnected from the railgun, partially wishing I could find a way to take the heavy weapon with me as insurance against any other burug. I jumped down from the gun, landing amidst the ice and the burug goop in a shattering crash. I realized all of a sudden that the suit alarms were beeping at me again, and I brought up the status screen for my power armor. The breaches. Right. I keyed the fabricator to repair my suit, and then found myself a shadowy spot beneath some scrap metal to sit down while the little buggers worked. It had been a long, shitty day, I needed some sleep. Chances were, tomorrow would be even worse.
...
Chapter Nine: The Secrets Beneath
Volistad
Down I climbed- down into darkness. My arms ached, my chest burned, my back was a mass of sore cramps and my neck had developed a kink in it that I couldn’t have knocked out of it with a mallet. And still I climbed down, one ax after another, down the strange, curiously regular shaft in the ice that had once been Joanna’s mighty tower. I couldn’t even see the top of the shaft anymore, though that may have had more to do with the lack of light down here than anything else. The skies above Ravanur were murky at best, black as the hearts of the fallen gods at the worst. So I descended, each ax set carefully, the ornate claws set into my new armored boots wedged into any toehold I could find. Descending was harder than climbing- since I was no longer fighting Ravanur’s call. The intention was for me to descend, and she wanted me to descend. But if I fell the way she wanted, I would die in one sudden, violent moment. I had to control it- and the effort of doing so, had begun to hurt before I was even seven strikes down the icy wall. At strike number three-hundred, the pain had become an old, fast friend, and I had grown used to it. It didn’t make the movements I kept repeating any easier, but I didn’t let go of the axes and fall to my death either.
The walls of the shaft were slick and smooth, the glossy freshness of ice formed right after a sudden melt. I wondered what could be so hot as to burn this far down through a glacier, but the fact that such a thing existed hardly surprised me. After all, before Joanna, I had never seen anyone but a Stormcaller bring the winds and the lightning, and she had made a storm few of their kind could match- with no sign of the usual madness that typically accompanied those powers. Wedged into the ice at occasional intervals were shards of metal, most of them smaller than my hand, but a few of them large enough for several rangers to sit shoulder to shoulder. It was on one such fragment of wreckage that I stopped to rest, lying down flat on the metal, breathing hard, my shoulders afire. My axes slipped from nerveless fingers to clatter onto the broad, jagged edged plate of divine steel, and for a time I just lay on my back and breathed, letting the burning, stabbing tension of continuous exercise leak out of my muscles.
After a few moments, when my heartbeat and breathing became slower and steadier, I secured my axes at my belt and turned over onto my hands and knees, then crawled forward to peer over the edge of my broken metal perch. All I could see below me was more endless darkness, as well as the vague suggestion of icy walls in the occasional glimmer of some dim gloaming on fresh slickness. Returning to a sitting position, I dug a glowstone out of my pack and cracked it hard against the metal, causing the fragments to burst into greenish-white light. Working quickly, I cut a chunk of ice from the wall behind me, and then shoved the brightest chunk of glowstone into it. I returned to the edge of the metal and dropped the shining chunk of ice into the darkness. The glow fell, shining on smooth, freshly frozen walls until… there. For a moment I could see it, the bottom of the shaft, splitting into dozens of irregular openings, some of them narrow and jagged, some of them rounded and wide. It was as I had suspected. The shaft had hit a nexus of other passages through the upper layers of the glacier. The tower Joanna had built was enormous, and unless it had turned to smoke like something out of the old stories, its fall should have meant an incredible amount of rubble and wreckage. Every inch of the structure had been made of hard steel, like the scrap of it I was currently sitting on- but there was a relatively little of it on the surface. Though there was enough scrap on the surface for my people to begin scavenging it, there wasn’t nearly enough to fit the great monolith I had seen rising into the sky, the heart of its own great storm. This meant most of it had to be below.
I picked another bright piece of glowstone and flicked it down towards one of the openings I had seen in the nexus of tunnels, natural or otherwise. For a moment I saw it, an open tunnel mouth, round and wide. The surface of the tunnel floor was mostly smooth, except for twin lines of seemingly random scratches and gouges that flanked a smooth trail of ice down into the blackness. It was a burug tunnel, which was strange because to produce a shaft like that, the burug would have had to be coming straight up at Joanna’s camp. There was no sign of it now, but the first thing that crossed my mind was Joanna’s “goss reyfel”, and the burug she had so casually killed while I had been staying with her. What if something about the tower had drawn the burug toward her? What if the one she had shot hadn’t been there by coincidence? Could Joanna kill an adult burug herself, without her goss reyfel? Not much could stop an adult burug, save for an expertly targeted and timed surprise attack from above. I thought about what one of those monsters could do to a person Joanna’s size and shuddered. I remembered seeing just that when I was a boy, when the grim rangers had returned what was left of my mother and father wrapped up together in a single, soaked cloak so that Nissi and I could do our duty as children and give them to the fire. Joanna might be armored and unbelievably strong, but she could die, just the same as me. Everyone died, even gods.
I rose and my blood was suddenly surging with energy. It was time to move. I still had a long way to go. I made my way off of my temporary respite, setting my axes carefully and finding toeholds with my clawed boots. I descended again, this time, more quickly, energized by old memories of pain and rage, and before long, I found myself perched on the edge of one of the rounder, wider tunnels, looking down along its gentle, slick slopes. I took a long breath, checking for the telltale whiff of the pungent burug stink. Instead of the strange, heady flavor of burug musk, I smelled death. Corpses, frozen and still fresh. They smelled metallic, like the taste of copper wires held under the tongue. Blood, still frozen, not dried or eaten by scavengers. People had died in the tower’s fall, I knew that, but smelling it here was somehow worse. The smell assaulted my nose, my eyes, and instead of just knowing with my mind, now I knew that some of my comrades had died in a more personal way. I knew it in my heart, in my stomach, in the bile at the back of my throat. All of them dead to the Elders’ misguided crusade. I tried to remind myself that they had been tainted by the fallen Dark Ones, that their minds were not their own, but the lingering ache in my chest and the sick taste in the back of my mouth told me otherwise. Whatever the reason, the Elders had betrayed the Erin-Vulur, and when I found Joanna, we would make sure they answered for what they had done. Starting with Elder Lot. Maybe I would drive a spear through his back, see how he liked it, the treacherous-
“H-help.” A voice echoed in the darkness, barely strong enough for me to hear. Immediately I snapped back to the present, to where I was, to who I was, and I was ashamed. I was a ranger first, even if I had been cast out, and one of the things that a ranger did was search for the wounded in times of disaster. I was here for Joanna, but I couldn’t forget who I was. If I had been paying closer attention instead of imagining eviscerating the Elders, I might have smelled the faint tang of sweat and fresh vomit, which would have told me that there was at least one living survivor. I grimaced and s
niffed again, letting my hunter’s instincts tell me where the stink was coming from. There. To my right. I turned and prowled the nexus of tunnels, stopping at each strange shaft until I found the one from which the smell came most strongly. As if to confirm I was in the right place, the survivor managed to wheeze, “help” again, this time accompanied by a rattling breath that sounded like it was being drawn through lungs half full of water. There was no time to lose.
I twisted and dropped off the edge of the ice and into the tunnel, driving in both of my axes halfway, so that instead of stopping me short, they merely slowed me. I ground twin trails into the ice all the way down, and as I reached the bottom, I freed one ax and cast the remainder of the glowstone gravel out away from me in an arc. The scene was lit in stark detail, everything standing out and emphasized by the sharp shadows cast by the greenish-white light. I was standing at the bottom of another curiously smooth tunnel, this one strange and angular. I realized the reason for that shape almost immediately. A warped, scored sheet of metal that fit the exact dimensions of the passage filled the nominal “floor”. Piled atop it was a mess of fused, tangled scrap from Joanna’s tower, and leaning against it.... A man surrounded by smears of blood and flanked by two other crumpled forms. I stowed my axes and crossed over to him quickly, the smell of blood and vomit was thick in my nostrils.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 43
