Mimas was little more than a dirty snowball, sailing through space around Saturn at about a mile a second. It had no valuable resources to speak of, and was, like most of Saturn’s satellites, notoriously tricky to get to, as it required circumnavigation of the billions of chunks of rock, ice and dust that constituted the gas giant’s ring system. It wasn’t terribly difficult work, as the rings moved predictably and relatively slowly, but it was tedious, demanding many hours, sometimes days, of minor course adjustments wherein one mistake could easily spell doom.
Nevertheless, the denizens of the Drift had, over time, found reasons to fight over the petrified ice ball. Mimas was one of the innermost of Saturn’s inhabited moons, and during one of humanity’s many, many wars with the Peregrine, some particularly bright person had come up with the idea of carving an airlocked base into the ice to serve as a fallback location if the Saurian Vanguard managed to take all the other moons in the Cronian System. Not surprisingly, this never came to pass, as the Cronian had never fallen during any of the wars, its myriad bases and tricky-to-navigate ice rings proving more than a match for the Peregrine.
A select few held that he possessed an illogical and incurable fear of the planet, something primordial from deep within it that permeated the moons and protected them from the ancient alien’s wrath. Others pointed out that this made no sense, as he had thoroughly and successfully invaded Titan in one of the first battles of the Last Peregrine War, decimating its population in a horrifying and indiscriminate slaughter that the world was still recovering from, nine and one-half years later.
Whatever one’s position on the matter, skeptic or mystic, it was difficult to deny that the presence of Saturn was nothing short of overwhelming, especially when viewed from the surface of Mimas, a scant one hundred and sixteen thousand miles from the seventy-five-thousand-mile-wide globe of hydrogen, helium and nitrogen. Its sandy, shadowy murk of clouds reflected more than enough sunlight to bathe Mimas and its sisters in a mesmerizing ochre hue strong enough to cast stark shadows on their surface.
But the eighty Glyphid Drones trundling over Mimas’s surface took no notice of the gas giant. Recently emerged from a slick, organic-looking flitter since abandoned to the elements, they shuffled determinedly forward toward the entrance of Fallout Base, their insect exoskeletons impervious to the cruel cold. Not once did any of them glance up at Saturn, marvel at its greatness or ponder their place in the universe, as many of the Drift’s races are apt to do. Not once.
Reaching the obsidian airlock, the lead two scouts took covering positions on either side of the door and unslung their weapons. They waited ninety seconds for the first soldiers of the column proper to reach firing range of the door, and waited for another fifteen seconds as a purpose-specific Drone hastened to the doorway. Latching a three-fingered hand onto the door control, the Drone broadcast a wide range of frequencies, most of them inaudible to the human range.
When a specific frequency was hit, the vibrations of the simple lock-and-slip mechanism keeping the door in place became strong enough for the insect to reach an obvious conclusion. A simple message was transmitted to his hive-brothers, and within a hundredth of a second, they were all humming at that same frequency, increasing in volume until the deadbolt vibrated backwards on the lock. The breech slipped, and after that it was a simple matter of gaining purchase on the moon’s surface and pushing.
Fallout was currently within the domain of Sa’Til, a human warlord who had once been Terat. Ironically enough, Sa’Til had deemed the base best defended by Glyphid soldiers of his own, twenty-three enslaved members of the Soldier caste. Soldiers were, ordinarily, huge and powerful warriors with genetically engineered nodes on their back capable of spewing huge amounts of evaporated plasma at the Hive’s enemies.
These Soldiers, on the other hand, were malnourished slave soldiers. Away from the hive and its nutrients, their plasma nodes had atrophied and deteriorated into useless sacs, and their stature reduced from the hulking twelve-foot monsters that roamed Pluto into growth-stunted six-footers. Sa’Til had armed them with any weapon large enough for their clumsy hands to wield: human antipersonnel projectile weapons like miniguns and shotguns, as well as radioactive flare guns, Umbrielian Inflator Rifles and Executor-made grenade launchers intended for mounting on bull lizard saddles and assault robots.
Once the Glyphid Drones had breached the door, they found themselves in a carved foyer with three slave Soldiers, armed, respectively, with two shotguns and an Inflator. They were slow to respond, and two went down instantly in the opening plasma barrage. The last one got off two rounds from his shotgun, catching a Drone in the torso, before going down in a hail of plasma.
The Drones left two of their number on rearguard as they progressed into the base. The altercation in the airlock had put the Soldiers on high alert, and the narrow corridor which connected four of the compartments in the west half of the base suddenly became a firestorm of Inflator charges, bullets, grenades, plasma and buckshot as the Drones were pummeled from the west armories and the night watchman’s post, which two Soldiers had been sleeping in.
Eight Drones went down in the subsequent firefight; six to gunfire, one to shrapnel, and one exploding spectacularly when a plasma bolt from one of its rifles hit a hi-ex grenade less than two feet from its face. The senior Drone made a tactical decision, sacrificing one member of his team by sending him charging into the armory while four others made use of the distraction and stormed the watch post.
Instead of going straight in, however, the four of them slathered the booth and surrounding corridor with napalm gel, which they then set alight with chalk-seal detonators. The two Soldiers in the booth burned, screaming, as the Drones continued north up the corridor, under cover of orange flame and black smoke.
The Drones burst into the supply hangar and immediately came under fire from minigun emplacements on the windowsill of the quartermaster’s office in the northeast corner of the hangar. Finding the office shielded, the Drones whitewashed the shield with low-power plasma barrages while another purpose-specific drone crept around the hangar, hiding behind crates of nutrient paste and flitter construction kits when his brethren needed to change clips.
Eventually he found himself directly under the office window. He unsheathed a wicked-looking six-bladed Glyphid thrown weapon known affectionately among human soldiers who were lucky enough to appropriate them (or not-so-affectionately by those who had survived being on the wrong side of one) as a Boomerang. The Drone depressed a stud on the Boomerang’s center, and sent it flying into the window with a perfectly curved throw. There was a bracing whuppa-whuppa sound, followed by a series of disgustingly wet shlicks, and then more whuppas as the Boomerang returned, dripping with ichor, to the Drone’s hand. The quartermaster's office fell silent; the button was pressed again, and the weapon tucked away.
Very soon, the base was down to three defenders and their commander, a surly Ophion known as Ravage, locked away in a briefing room in the eastern sprawl of the base. The two weapons he had left were a human 60 Cal and a Peregrine-made Freeze Gun; he regarded both, and tossed them away, disgusted. The Drones chose to simply blow up the door this time. Ravage raised his hands. The Soldiers put up no fight, but were shot anyway.
The senior Drone had been killed in the fight for the east armory, succumbing to a shotgun wound as his brothers ignored him. His immediate second had been splattered across the ceiling of a service corridor by a Soldier’s Inflator Rifle shortly after that, so it was the third eldest Drone who led eighteen of the fifty-one survivors of the assault into the briefing room.
Ravage’s echolocation told him that the being was small, slim and light, but the smell of ichor and plasma-scorched iron wafting in with it made him very aware of the instant death the insect could dish out. Ravage was quite nervous.
“{I surrender,}” Ravage said. It was common knowledge Glyphids were capable telepaths, so Ravage spoke his native tongue.
That is obvious, Ravage heard a cold voice say in his head. Your Soldiers are slain, and now you will accompany us as we seek greatness on behalf of the Hive.
“{You’re… taking me prisoner? That’s not very Glyphid of you.}” Ravage had been expecting the Drone to send him to Sa’Til with some kind of ultimatum, or at least an explanation. The Glyphid hive was on Pluto; they’d hardly make their way this far into the Expanse unless they had a very specific reason for it, and they certainly couldn’t be interested in Mimas. Ravage was, or rather had been, the ruler of the moon, and he’d hated every inch of it.
We require you. We require you to find the Device.
“{The Device?}”
Yes. We know that you have seen it. It has nestled in the bowels of your home for eons, and three of your people have come across it. You are one, and you will help us find one other.
Ah. The Device. So that’s what they were calling it. Evidently, the Glyphids wanted it for something, but Ravage could not for the life of him think what. It was useless, a millennia-old compass for pointing the way toward the five Energy Pyres, and everyone knew where they were.
Or was it really useless? Was there something more to it? The Ancients were, after all, powerful indeed.
“{Oh yes. So, you’ve learned the truth, have you? Well,}” Ravage bluffed. The Glyphids either thought the “device” was powerful, or they had discovered it really was. One way or the other, the bugs had knowledge Ravage needed to survive.
It is imperative you assist us. You know the being we seek?
There were only two options, and choosing between an aging weaponsmith with no real reason to leave Triton and a cunning, secretive mercenary with a distinctly modern concept of the words “loyalty” and “common good” was not really a choice at all.
“{Guardian. Shouldn’t be much of a challenge. I’ve tracked the infidel before, you know.}”
Oh, we know. We know.
And for a time Ravage felt there was more the Glyphids knew, or thought they knew, and that whatever it was did not bode well for the Drift.
No comments:
Post a Comment