by R H Nolan
That was the catch. Those ships were a different kind of perilous, nothing but jagged metal traps waiting to swallow up the next victim.
But Max and desperation knew each other well, and he really didn’t have any other options.
His options decreased dramatically when he reached the wrecked starship. The top—or at least what still remained aboveground—had been ripped away completely, leaving little shelter at all inside. The arch of what had been an open bay door still rose above the desert, the top of it reaching with jagged edges into the sky.
But Max slowed and stepped through the doorway anyway. Most of what he found in here was covered with piles of sand, glittering in the sunlight without any roof. The hiss of spraying sand cut the silence behind him, and Max went to the least buried part of the cabin, hoping to find a hatch or at least a compartment in which he could hide.
Before he’d moved halfway across the starship’s cargo bay, the sand beneath him gave way in one instant, massive sinkhole. It pulled Max down with it, raining sand down all around him like a dry, gritty flood. Thankfully, he landed on a pile of sand below him, too, so it didn’t hurt nearly as much as it could have.
It was a lot darker down here. The only light came from where the cabin floor had given way. He sat in the middle of a pool of sunlight, and he really couldn’t see a thing with his goggles on. Before he could pull them down around his neck again, a spiteful chuckle drifted down from the desert surface. Max glanced up to see two of the guards who’d pursued him standing at the edge of the sinkhole.
“Looks like you did our job for us, Scavenger,” one of them called out. The other just laughed.
Their gaze moved from Max into the darkness, and they seemed to be looking at something he couldn’t see.
As soon as he jerked the goggles down from his eyes and dropped them around his neck, he understood.
The cargo bay sinkhole had dumped him into a Sandwalker Den.
Half a dozen vaguely human forms gazed at him from the darkness. Even in the low light, Max saw their bluish-gray skin, the sickly yellow eyes bulging from their mottled faces. This was what the Bug radiation had done to so many people—an evolutionary decline into monstrous, mindless horror.
Faint blue lights flickered above each of their heads until Max’s implant picked up all six of their stats, too. Except all it showed him was their overall Health. He scanned them from left to right—67%, 84%, 75%, 78%, 81%, and 72%.
A high, short shriek burst from the gaping mouth of the Sandwalker with the highest Health, and the others shuffled forward toward Max and the pool of sunlight around him.
Max thought he could take the two with the lowest health, but not all of them. And his implant wouldn’t even tell him what their max Health score even was. If it was lower than his, great. If not, maybe even the one at 67% was more than he could handle.
Above him, the guards laughed again. “I bet he goes down before he kills even one of ‘em.”
Max barely heard the guards as he stared at the Sandwalkers. They were maybe ten feet away, and they moved slowly enough to spare him a few seconds of brainstorming. He glanced around the chamber and now saw he was sitting inside the ship’s giant engine chamber. Of course, the engine was dead now, the four large metal energy columns standing in a ring to his left completely dark and empty.
But he’d been inside an engine chamber before with his dad, back before they left Neo Angeles. His father had been a huge starship buff, and had pointed out a hundred little details. Max could only recall some of them, but he’d always remembered about the engine because his dad said it was like the ships each had a tiny star in that room that powered everything—and if the star overheated, the ship could jettison it into space. Actually, a single man could jettison the star just by pulling a special lever.
That had always fascinated Max, and every derelict starship wreck he’d ever been in, he’d always looked for the manual release in the engine room.
He was hoping the ship could jettison him somewhere other than here.
The ship he had seen with his father had been smaller, and each class of Earth’s starships were all a little different—but if he could find the manual control mechanism, he should be able to get into another compartment of the ship.
Forcing himself not to panic, Max scanned the walls of the engine chamber until he finally saw a large box on the far wall. It had to be the control box. If it wasn’t, he was as good as dead.
He fired up his skates and darted between two Sandwalkers, who swiped at him but missed.
He reached the box and tugged at the handle over what should have been a smooth surface but was now covered in layers of caked sand. He leaned back and kicked at the panel, and was rewarded by a shower of grit and rust.
One of the Sandwalkers screeched again, and he turned briefly to see they’d all changed direction. The closest was less than fifteen feet away.
Max kicked at the box twice more until the panel popped open with a groan. He lurched forward to wrap his hand around the massive handle inside the box, praying to whatever might hear him that this worked the same way as the mechanism his dad had shown him so long ago.
Max pulled on the handle until the cylinder popped out and turned it as far as he could.
The engine chamber shuddered in a fresh wave of dust and sand…
But nothing else happened.
“Nice try, Scavenger,” one of the guards called from above. “You’re Walker meat, now.”
Max turned to face the mutated humans closing in on him. Sunlight reflected on a long string of thick, yellow drool oozing from the closest Sandwalker’s open mouth.
Suddenly a series of explosive charges fired along seams in the floor. Sand blew up in clouds across the room, and light flashed in the darkness as a yawning chasm appeared in the floor at Max’s feet.
For a second he thought that maybe he’d escaped certain death. All the Sandwalkers were on the other side of the gap—he was safe!
But then the ground gave way beneath his feet.
He was pulled by the collapsing sands into the darkness, and fell for what seemed like forever. Then he landed hard on his left arm, which jolted with an electric surge of agony as sand sprayed over his face.
Then he blacked out.
5
Max woke up to throbbing pain. His left wrist felt like it had been beaten to a pulp, it hurt so bad.
He was also in complete darkness. Either he’d been knocked out for the rest of the day and the sun had already set, or the breach he’d opened in the engine chamber had somehow closed above him again. For a minute he just listened, remembering the nest of Sandwalkers above him and hoping the door had actually closed. He couldn’t hear a thing—not even a muted sound anywhere above.
Convinced he was safe, he tried to sit up and had to muffle a cry when his wrist burst into a new flare of excruciating pain. Max focused on his stats in the upper right corner of his vision.
HEALTH: 701/1000 (70%)
Core: 458/500
Secondary: 43/300
The numbers definitely looked like a broken bone. His Core Health—which reflected the integrity of internal organs and bones—had taken a nasty dip. His Secondary Health, which reflected things like momentary impacts or small electrical shocks, was down significantly, too. The problem was that Secondary Health took minutes to an hour to regain. Damage to Core Health could take weeks to heal.
Despite the pain, he gently touched around his arm and his hand, not feeling anything poking through his skin, at least.
But he definitely couldn’t move his wrist without blinding pain, and it even hurt to move his fingers.
He used his right hand to pull two glow sticks from the back pocket of his pants. One of them had already cracked a little, the soft white-blue glow rising from its center. He’d probably landed on it. The other didn’t give off any light at all. Max gripped one end between his teeth and pulled at the other with his right hand. The glow stick crunched, and t
hen he had light.
First he put the unused stick back in his pocket, then examined his left wrist. As far as he could tell with this low light, his wrist and forearm were already starting to turn purple with what looked like one massive bruise. There wasn’t any blood, though, and the rest of him felt fine, as long as he ignored the pain. Which wasn’t very easy.
Max stood slowly and lifted the glowstick above his head to check out where he’d landed. Hopefully he wouldn’t find himself facing off another pack of Sandwalkers, but it seemed pretty unlikely that there would be two nests of them living one right on top of the other. Not that he was an expert on Sandwalkers. But at least he couldn’t see or hear any.
He took a few tentative steps forward and lifted the glowstick again. This was definitely the Earth starship’s hull. The door he’d opened from the engine chamber was so high above him, his light didn’t even reach it, so he really had no choice but to keep moving and try to find another way out.
The worst part of it was trying not to think about what might happen if he didn’t.
The ship wasn’t completely empty, which meant no one had managed to ever go beyond the engine chamber. There was very little sand here amid the damaged control panels, the delicately preserved seats, and the cables and wiring hanging sideways from nearly every part of the ship.
The bottom of Max’s skate scuffed up against something that sounded a lot like crunching leaves—which was an odd sound to remember, because he hadn’t seen dry leaves in years. When he lowered his glowstick to see what it was, he leapt back and fought to swallow.
It was a body—a human body, mostly preserved but pretty much mummified by the dry, dark emptiness down here so far underground. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but the body was still strapped to a chair lying on its side, most likely pulled from its mount when the starship crashed.
His skate had left a crumbling hole in the side of the dead person’s face, and brittle-looking teeth grinned at Max in the faint light. It felt like the dead person was laughing at him.
He moved on, stepping over more dead wiring and under a collapsed console before realizing he’d just passed through the starship’s bridge. Now he stood at the edge of the Earth ship’s wreckage, the stern blown apart by the impact and opening up not into more sand beneath the desert but into something Max had never seen.
In fact, he never thought he would see something like this, no matter how long he lived.
It seemed the tip of this particular battleship of Earth had smashed into another ship, either upon impact or before. He couldn’t pretend to know what it was like when all the starships of both races plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere. But the human vessel had pierced the hull of another ship, the jagged edges of its ripped-open metal nose leading into a ship that definitely wasn’t from Earth. Its dark surfaces looked organic, not metallic, and there were no straight edges, only curves.
A Bug ship.
They were so rare as to be nonexistent. As far as Max knew, all of them had been plundered by the Dwellers decades ago, their technology stripped and taken back to the cities.
Except he was now apparently looking at one.
Despite being incredibly excited to have discovered a Bug starship, Max had to move slowly with his broken wrist. He climbed carefully down from the opening and dropped maybe five feet to the floor. It might have been the ceiling or the walls, for all he knew. This wasn’t like any kind of ship he’d ever seen before.
Honestly, it looked like he was walking down the inside of some massive animal’s ribcage. Every surface was a mix of organic material and machine, like he was walking through the belly of something half built and half grown in a lab somewhere.
A few dust-covered cables hung loose from where the Earth starship had split through the Bug craft’s interior. Max considered touching them, but they glistened in a little in the white-blue light of his glowstick, and he thought better of it. When he walked, though, the soles of his skates still clacked against the inside of the ship. At least it wouldn’t be swallowing him up.
He hoped.
Nothing moved here, nothing made a sound but Max and his skates clomping down the black, intestinal-looking corridor. All he could do was follow where it led him, around a bend.
Then he stumbled into a massive chamber. The ridged lines of the ship’s wall extended incredibly high overhead. He lifted his glowstick again and wasn’t able to see much until he caught his own reflection in something that looked like glass.
Max jumped back, startled, then chuckled at himself. He brought the glowlight closer to the glass and saw that it was a large cylinder, probably four feet in diameter, sunken halfway inside the biomechanical wall. The cylinder’s base extended from a swollen, fleshy mound on the ground to another tumescent bulge in the ceiling six feet above him.
The top half of the cylinder was broken, its jagged edges like a bottle cracked into two halves. Curious to get a look inside, Max stood on his tiptoes and placed his right hand against the wall for balance—
But he must have touched a button or triggered some sort of sensor, because a harsh click echoed through this chamber, then a bright light flared to life overhead.
Max scrambled backwards in terror, convinced he was about to be descended upon by Bugs or Sandwalkers or God knows what—
But nothing happened. There was just silence… and a lot more light.
Max looked around in awe.
He figured the room was some kind of… storage facility, maybe? It was filled with tubes just like the cracked one next to him. All around him, dozens of them dully reflected the overhead lights. All of them were broken or completely shattered, probably destroyed in the crash.
But glass tubes weren’t the only thing in the room.
The floor was littered with dry, withered corpses, each ten feet long.
Bug bodies.
Max shouted in terror and stumbled backwards, ready to run—but when nothing in the room moved, curiosity got the better of him. After his thudding heart slowed down a bit, he slowly approached the bodies to get a closer look.
They were insect-like exoskeletons—humanoid carapaces with two legs and four arms and an abdomen that made Max think of desert ants. Except the bodies were at least ten feet long from head to tail.
Four-inch wide half-spheres bulged from their heads like the eyes of dune flies. There were no pupils, just an unbroken, smooth surface.
Instead of mouths, the Bugs had insect mandibles, tiny feelers that jutted from the ends of their skulls. Their hands and fingers were segmented like the interlocking parts of an insect’s body. They wore what looked like body armor, though their bodies had long ago withered to mere straws inside the black shells of the suits. The eyes were dusty and cracked, and the mandibles looked like they would snap off at the slightest touch.
It was incredible. He had heard about Bugs his entire life. Back when he lived in Neo Angeles, he had seen videos of space battles filmed during the war. There was even footage of a couple of Bugs that had been caught and placed in captivity, though they had died shortly thereafter.
But for the first time, he was actually confronted with them in the flesh.
Or what remained of their flesh, anyway.
The creatures that had come from the stars to destroy the Earth now lay at his feet like so many dead cockroaches.
There were dozens of them. Most lay strewn across the floor. Some hung halfway out of cracked cylinders, their heads still attached to long, black tubes.
Another loud click pulled his attention away from the dead Bug exoskeletons.
He followed the source of the sound to a glass cylinder at the far end of the room. Unlike the others, this tube didn’t look cracked.
On closer inspection, he realized it wasn’t empty, either.
A soft yellow glow came from inside the cylinder. Max walked over to it, nervously wiped away the thick coating of dust on the surface—
And saw a long, ten-foot-tall shap
e floating in thick, yellow-tinted fluid.
Max scrambled backwards, and his entire body began to shake.
What this an actual, living Bug?
One of the things that had nearly wiped out all humankind?
It was like a nightmare had come out of the dream world and into reality.
And then the nightmare became even realer.
There was a loud hum, and the glass tube retracted sideways into itself like a curved door, spilling thick, clear goo in a wave across the floor.
The creature inside lurched out of the tube, its four segmented hands grasping the walls to support itself. From its waving mandibles came a sound somewhere between a gasp and a sheet of metal expanding and groaning under the sun. “Xchrtkkclt… vrtlikllt…”
Max screamed as he slipped and stumbled backwards through the slimy goo on the floor, and stared in wide-eyed terror at the ten-foot Bug moving right in front of him.
Unlike its dead cousins, though, this one was very much alive.
It walked on two legs like a man. Two of its four arms protruded from what would have been the shoulder blades on a human’s back, and hung forward beside its massive head. Most of the thing’s body was covered in a black, reflective suit that looked almost as hard as the living shell that formed its skin.
The Bug stopped moving and just stared at Max… maybe. It didn’t have any pupils in those huge, shining black eyes, so it was impossible to tell for sure—although its entire head was aimed in Max’s direction.
Max’s implant suddenly pulled up the alien’s stats, and a glowing string appeared above its head.
HEALTH: 372sx2gs2
The numbers were just bewildering. He’d never seen stats like that, and he found himself trying to work out their meaning—
And then a heaving grunt escaped the Bug, and Max forgot all about the strange numbers.
But the alien didn’t stalk toward him and try to bash his skull in, like Max had expected. Instead, it turned and rocked on unsteady legs toward a biomechanical control panel. Now that the chamber had been reactivated—maybe by Max’s presence, maybe by nothing more than awful timing—dozens of glistening lights blinked in strings across those ribbed cables forming the walls of the ship. It occurred to Max that the Bug might be gearing up to start firing weapons at him, or bring out some kind of monstrous alien technology.
