Arbelos Chapter 3: Reverberation
By Max Brooke
“‘And there are monsters,’ he said. I didn’t know what Tahl had seen on his last trip in The Serpent’s Maw, and he didn’t elaborate that day. I thought he was trying to rattle me. Maybe he was. And maybe it should have rattled me more.”
-Excerpt from In the Serpent’s Maw: The Secret Conflict on the Icano Peninsula
The convoy followed the growing stream of shimmering liquid deeper into the gloom, and Auglez struggled to keep the hauler straight along the cracked ground. More and more rivulets were flowing from great rents in the earth to join the burgeoning river. Water isn’t supposed to shine green in the dark. Auglez thought to herself. Darkness above, this place carries such a curse! This is why I swore never to take another job so far from the crater’s edge. Silt sprayed up behind the hauler, obscuring sight of their pursuers, but Auglez was sure they were still back there. She listened to the engine’s regular thrum for any sign of impertinence, counting the cycles.
“Who’s chasing us?” Riston’s question interrupted her counting. Her eyes cut over to him, sweeping over his haggard face and rough beard of speckled grey. He was afraid too, but he wore his fear casually, like a broken-in polysynth suit. Though maybe a suit that had fitted him better in years past...
Auglez wondered how she should answer, and her eyes retreated to the road ahead. The two M-Traks were plowing forward on their treads some meters ahead, plumes of white silt behind them. In the distance beyond, violet energy crackled through ever-darkening clouds. As the burst of light illuminated the fog, a massive silhouette seemed to lurch from the inky patch before vanishing. Auglez returned to the question. She decided to do some probing of her own.
“Those traks are definitely Oberect-made.”
She saw Riston nod in the corner of her eye. “I could tell that. And the legs on the one the convoy took down looked like the amphibious type. So they’re probably leftovers from the Oberect incursion into Sepina in ‘31, right? When the Oberect League tried to grab those coastal islands after the split. I remember reading that some of them found their way into the hands of Varallen rebels a few years back.”
Auglez shrugged. “I didn’t fight in Sepina.” Riston looked on expectantly, and after a moment, she continued. “The Varallen government was a mess when Sepina and Keyos declared themselves independent. I was still trying to get my back pay from the Shroud War days, so I wasn’t going to jump into the fire again. But I did some logistics for the United Varallen forces, since they said they couldn’t pay me until the country was secure. Never did get—”
The conversation was cut off suddenly by a warning whine. Auglez’s eyes flitted across the dash of her hauler from dial to dial. The accelerometer was flicking wildly. Strange notes chimed from the radio, shifting seamlessly into words in a language she did not understand. She looked to Riston, who was also watching intently. He looked surprised. And then slowly, the dials returned to normal values.
“What was that?” Riston asked.
Is this surprise for my benefit? Or does he truly not know? Auglez wondered. Then she spoke. “It’s the Drop. This far from the edge of the crater, sometimes there’s… interference.”
Riston reached back into the cab and grabbed the liaison’s charts, turning them with an air of confusion. He seemed to be trying to read them, but Auglez doubted he was having much success. “Borread did say something about ‘deep probability zones,’ I think. Is this where we are?” He pointed to a spot on the map marked with a pencil line.
Auglez shrugged. “I’m following Hazha.”
She noticed the two M-Traks had stopped now in the shadow of a twisted metal pylon. She slowed the hauler and observed the column, its pocked surface scoured by blowing sand. Its metallic surface called something from misty memory: the shells of beetles arriving with the summer, or a slick of oil in the bright sun. It was perhaps four meters wide, its end high above a jagged point. Around its base, the streaming liquid pooled before vanishing from sight down a steep incline. Auglez pressed the button for the radio. “Hazha, what’s the holdup?”
A voice crackled back. “We’ve reached the edge of this plateau, and the descent is steep. M1 sustained some damage in the engagement, and the tread seems to be slipping. We need to assess it before we descend. Send Lodi. Tahl will cover our rear.”
The engineers were already filing out of the hauler, and Auglez watched as Tahl’s M-trak lurched to a standing position and then stomped off to stand some fifty meters to the rear.
A moment later, Lodi the engineer limped up to wave her on, and she pulled the hauler up close to the M-Trak. Engaging the control grip for the utility arm, she gently reached out and secured the hauler’s arm to the damaged track. Lodi gestured upward and Auglez pushed the grip up a few centimeters. Metal groaned in protest, but the hauler gradually winched up the tread so the engineer could duck beneath.
“That’s some deft handling. You got the arm to secure in one go. Usually getting a precise grip like that took me a few tries.”
Auglez shrugged. “Been at it a long time.”
“Well, I’m impressed. The manipulators on that V-series utility arm are really finicky."
“You really did see some action, didn’t you, cameraman?” Auglez asked.
“Too much. I was on the eastern Dominance front, where the Herunock resistance was as thick as the smoke. But I bet it was bad here, too.” Auglez scanned Riston again as he spun the pen with a forced playfulness and tapped it on his notebook. His eyes were attentive and his ears were open.
Auglez let the silence sit. Riston kept watching. He didn’t break the silence with meaningless chatter, as some might have. She decided to test him.
“Do you want some tragic yarn of how we Varallens bled for years under the Herunock boot while the Astiagens waited to enter the war? Or one about how when you did arrive, it was just to blast a hole in our country so deep that, well…” She gestured out into the abyss.
Riston didn’t shy from her gaze. He answered. “What about the one where we backed up the Kost Regime’s exile of Eson? Before the election results could be counted, of course.”
Auglez let out a choking laugh, all bitter bemusement. “Who are you, cameraman?”
“Just someone who wants the truth.”
They sat for a bit, the cab silent except for the muffled sound of clanking and Lodi’s curses. Then Riston spoke again.
“So, after the war, you fought in the Unified Varallen forces, then? During the unification?”
Auglez considered. “For a little while, and I wasn’t really fighting. Not like in the War. They had me running supplies in this hauler. I got shot at sometimes, but I didn’t usually have to shoot back. Somehow, even once the UV was on top, they still couldn’t find the money to pay me the full amount from the Shroud War. So they let me keep my hauler.” She thumped her fist on the side of the vehicle. “Been a courier since.”
“And who hires a courier this far from-”
The radio crackled with Tahl’s voice calling out coordinates, fear edging into the young soldier’s voice.
“The truth must rest a bit longer,” Auglez said abruptly. “Survival does not wait its turn.”
Tahl’s voice came across the radio, slightly twisted by static. “Hazhlet…er…M1, I hate to rush you, but we’ve got incoming.”
Through the back camera’s grainy feed, Auglez could see them now, too. Three plumes of silt crossing the plateau alongside the same river they’d followed. Soon, they’d be in shooting range.
Hazhlet’s voice crackled out the loudspeakers. “Lodi, patch up what you can immediately. Then get clear.”
The stream of curses from under the tread intensified. Lodi emerged, oilstained and angry. He looked to the horizon, swore again, and gingerly slid back under.
The first rounds hit the metal pylon to the right of the hauler, showering blue sparks down on the vehicle from several meters above. The hauler was only armed with an anti-personnel weapon, but Auglez swiveled the vehicle on its treads, taking care to keep the arm stable as it gripped the M-Trak’s damaged tread.
“Can you still shoot, cameraman?” Auglez asked Riston. To her surprise, he seemed taken aback.
“I’m not much of a shot anymore. You want me to hold the arm in place?”
Auglez didn’t have time to wonder about his reticence. She shook her head, locked the arm, and targeted the weapon. It wouldn’t do much to heavy armor at this range. But even all these years later, she couldn’t embarrass her first sergeant from the war by dying with bullets in the chamber. She squeezed off a few rounds from the machine gun, and plumes of sand shot up around the oncoming traks.
Tahl was already backpedaling his M-Trak, firing at the oncoming foes. They had slowed their approach, circling warily now.
Riston reached over to press the radio button. “M2, they’re trying to flank you. That outcropping to your left will give you some cover and force them to approach head-on, one at a time. Divert 45 degrees and back in.” Auglez glared up at his arm intruding into the cockpit, and Riston shrank sheepishly back into the seat. “Sorry, hard to kick the habit.”
Tahl wheeled and slid back against the grey outcropping, which Auglez suspected was the shell of a building, concrete deformed under some unthinkable force. One of the three pursuers gave chase, but the other two split off toward the rest of the convoy.
“Well, shit. I suppose that’s my fault.” Riston’s words fell hollowly, and Auglez grunted in irritation. More shots rang off the pitted pylon, the buzz setting a chatter in Auglez’s teeth. Reflexively, she flexed her jaw as she squeezed off a salvo at the closest target, the stream of bullets deflecting off the thick, crablike head. It was closing the gap, and…
The ground beneath the enemy erupted in a hiss, sand thrown in every direction and illuminated by a crimson beam. The blistering light writhed, snakelike, and slashed over the forelegs of the trak. Where the beam passed, armor panels flaked to rust in an instant and swirled away, swept into a darkening thread at the center of the beam. The trak’s frame screamed as it broke apart, suddenly unable to bear its own weight. It slammed into the ground, gunfire stopping suddenly as the impact crushed it. The beam dissipated as it had arrived, retreating back into the sand. It ate through the metal, Auglez thought to herself.
A harsh, static crackle exploded across the plateau, echoing in the hauler’s cabin and forcing its occupants to cover their ears. Auglez turned to look at the column of corroded metal, and was shocked to see the top of the pylon had split into a taloned hand. The viridescent liquid spiraled up around the arm, settling in its palm and catching fire there. Shimmering motes burst forth from vents along the arm, searing her eyes with the same crimson light she’d seen a moment before. Then the hand plunged deep into the sand and seized something, dredging it up from the layers of silt. Two eyes glowered red in a mask five meters across, cradled in the talons. Is it holding… a head?
As Auglez tried to make sense of the scene before her eyes, another burst of metallic noise rang out. A great silhouette righted itself, pulled to a standing position like a puppet on strings. As it rose, it cast off the ground in which it had been buried.
“What in…”
The earth groaned and the giant stood, breaking apart the edge of the plateau with its waking. Auglez saw the mechanic scrabble for cover, vanishing into a cloud of dust. Tahl’s M-trak and the remaining hostile traks had all turned their fire on the titanic figure. Its legs now mostly free, it towered nearly 20 meters. Its cylindrical shoulders had flaring vents from which spilled countless points of crimson. One arm dangled useless at its side, and the other was contorted to hold its head somewhere near the broken remains of its neck. Crimson-limned cables snaked from the torso to secure the head, pulling it to sit at a canted angle.
Then gravity took its toll, and Hazhlet’s M-Trak and the hauler, bound together by the grip of the utility arm, pitched down the crumbling incline into the ravine.
---
The taste of iron and ash pulled Auglez though a ragged dark. For a moment, she wondered what she could possibly have been drinking the night before. But she hadn’t had a sip in years…
“Stop shaking me. I’m awake.” The hand released her shoulder.
“Are you all right?” The cameraman was alive, it seemed.
Auglez took stock of herself and her surroundings. The hauler was on its side, the slit window looking directly into the sand. Her hair was wet and matted, and her vision unsteady. Blood had been trickling into her mouth.
“How long was I out?”
“Maybe a minute. They’re still fighting up there.” Riston pointed to the rear camera and Auglez could see a grainy feed, displayed sideways, of Tahl’s M-trak dancing back along the bluff. Its eye focused down for a moment, then it snapped back to something else as he fired a burst at an unseen target.
The hauler groaned under some unseen weight, and Riston spat out some unfamiliar Astiagen idiom, almost certainly profane. Then sand poured away from the slit window, and the two could see Hazhlet’s M-Trak backing away from the righted hauler. The radio crackled to life.
“Status, hauler?”
Riston moved into the cockpit, shifting Auglez to the side. Normally she would protest, but instead she simply dragged herself over the barrier to slump painfully in the seat.
“Auglez is alive but injured. Looks like this thing is operational, although I don’t like the noise the engine is making,” Riston said, “but we can drive.”
From the top of the bluff came a wrenching crash as two machines collided. A second later, one of their pursuers’ traks came into view as it plummeted into the canyon, landing on its back with a resounding crunch. Red sparks seethed away from its limbs and flew back over the lip of the chasm, rejoining the cloud of fire around the strange giant. As the sparks burrowed out of the metal of the Oberect trak, panels fell off in rusty chunks. Auglez looked to the cockpit, in the torso behind the head, then winced. The inner frame was exposed, and where there should have been fresh, bloody corpses from the impact, only skeletal husks and bits of cloth remained. It’s not just breaking down metal, she thought. A hundred images of bodies dissolving from biophagic weapons tried to resurface in her mind at the sight, and she pushed them down with weary practice.
Auglez couldn’t see the battle, but she could hear a 60mm cannon sounding again and again, each shot ringing painfully off the metal. And the thump of a colossal footstep, followed by another, and another. An uneven, inexorable gait that shook the hauler. Then, Riston swore and the hauler lurched under his guidance. Out the hauler’s rear window, Auglez could see up the ridgeline once again.
Atop it stood the giant, facing away from them. The cloak of light flowed up the incline like a crimson waterfall running in reverse, dark lines of something flowing into the intakes on its shoulders. A sense of dread gripped Auglez instinctively, but her thoughts were muddled by injury and fatigue. For some reason, she remembered a whale she had once seen as a child, when such creatures still swam up the deepest rivers of the delta. Her mother had told her that it ate by straining tiny creatures from the water with massive sieves in its mouth. Is this thing also… feeding?
She heard and felt Hazhlet’s M-Trak unload a salvo from nearby. The first bullet punched into the metal of the giant’s shoulder, sending up blue sparks and shards of shrieking metal. But then the cloak of light flared behind it, and the next two rounds vanished in midair, transfigured into a shower of molten iron. The arm reached up to adjust the teetering head slightly, and the giant’s burning eyes peered down into the canyon. The fresh gash in its shoulder flowed like clay and vanished, the metal once again pristine.
Over the radio, Auglez was dimly aware of Tahl’s voice. “Hazhlet! I’m going to draw it away. I have room to maneuver up here, and I can keep it chasing me. It tore those Scuttlers apart up close. Get the hauler out and then-”
“Negative, M2. I’ll…”
Auglez could tell Hazhlet was searching for an answer that made sense. But the incline was too steep for an M-Trak to go either direction now, and looping around would take who knows how long. Tahl was on his own.
Tahl’s voice rang out over the radio, anger driven by fear. “Come on, I’m up here with you!” Then it was drowned out by another salvo, and the torso spun toward the fleeing M-Trak. The giant put one unsteady foot forward, burning mantle coalescing in front of it, and then it lumbered off.
In the cab of the hauler, the radio crackled. “Status, M2?” Gunfire echoed in response. “Status, Tahl!” A final shot rang out, and the crash of one great weight hitting another shook sand loose from the crumbled bluff.
Auglez pressed the radio. “Hazha, we need to…” Auglez’s head swam, and nausea threatened to overwhelm her. She looked up at Riston, one survivor to another, and he nodded and took the microphone.
“Hazhlet, we need to get out of here. Auglez needs medical attention, and we need you to lead us out. I don’t know how far the hauler’s going to go before we have to strip the engine.”
The radio crackled, and Auglez thought she heard hesitance in Hazhlet’s voice. “Recovering M2 is the…”
Riston spoke again, taught. “There’s no way back up that incline now. Whether Tahl and Lodi are alive up there or not, we can’t help them from here. We have to focus on the people whose lives we can save for certain.”
Static held for a long moment, and Auglez imagined Hazhlet in the cockpit. Was she too striking the metal walls of her machine? Then Hazhlet spoke again, voice ragged. “Acknowledged. Hauler, follow me.”
Hazhlet’s M-trak ground forward through the chasm, and Auglez watched Riston push the hauler’s controls to fall into a column. The engine sputtered and spat its protest, but did not stall.
As the chasm wound on, Auglez noticed black spines pushing through the sandy walls. The further the chasm wound, the larger these spines became. Like volcanic glass, the spines shimmered as if cutting the light itself. The weaving path grew hypnotic, and Auglez felt herself slip from consciousness.
---
Auglez jolted back to nauseating wakefulness. Looking out the slit window, she saw that the sandy bluffs were gone. The ground over which the hauler drove them was solid and grey, likely volcanic. Its surface was pocked, the remnants of air bubbles eons ago. And the obsidian spires now carved the sky above, vanishing from sight into inky mists. Around their thorny branches, crackles of lightning played.
What really caught her eye, though, was what she saw in the shadow of the nearest pillar. It sat at a canted angle, and it was somewhat worse for wear than when she’d seen it at the edge of the crater, but the prefabricated silhouette was unmistakable. A day of bad decisions and awful luck, and yet we might be saved by pure chance. Darkness above, what a place this is…
“Is that… a Coalition Prefabricated Field Base from the war?” Riston’s surprise was a bit gratifying.
Auglez nodded. “Set to this frequency, then open the line.” Riston dialed the radio as she recited the frequency, and a light on the base in the distance blinked twice. Auglez gave a passphrase. It was no doubt too old, but she hoped it wouldn’t matter.
The radio buzzed to life, and a voice “Welcome to Forward Research Base One, courier. We thought you’d sworn off delivers this far from home.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when we get patched up. Courier out.”
Riston released the button and gave Auglez a long look of surprise.
“I didn’t say I’d tell you all about it, cameraman. Just be glad I’m about to vouch for you.”
Riston snorted, and pushed the controls forward, urging the hauler on the last few meters to the base.