“Rapax, tell me there’s a way out of these tunnels and off this twice-damned planet!”
Ogun’s huge weapon was on full auto, the coilgun pouring out rounds like a waterfall of molten steel, roaring as it sprayed grenade-sized slugs at the oncoming horde of worshippers. Chanting men and singing women, eyes glowing, driven mad by divine fervour, rushed in on all sides even as hundreds at a time were chewed up into a gory mist.
His blood-drenched visor was working at full capacity, his HUD showing countless measurements, readings and predictions as he fought his way past jutting stalagmites and piles of dead cultists.
But no matter how many piles he violently birthed, there were always more. Cultists streamed from the tunnels in their thousands, their chants reverberating throughout the chamber as they ecstatically leapt into his line of fire, gleefully trading their lives to delay him for just a millisecond. He’d already lost his shield, and the relentless assault wouldn’t allow him the time to regrow it.
Rivers of blood soaked through the hard-packed earth, the countless stepping feet churning up all the liquid and viscera into a crimson mulch. Endless, heedless, they came in their multitudes. Even as the magnetically propelled rounds bored gushing holes through their ranks, tearing up their choirs, and brutally silencing their harmonies. Heedless, endless, they came with song and smile.
With a thought, Ogun filtered out the overpowering stench of gore. A joyfully chanting woman slipped past his line of fire, reaching out towards him. He opened his palm at her and blasted her in the chest with high-power microwaves, igniting all the fat and boiling all the water in her upper body. She shrieked, going up like a bonfire as he swung his gun around, blowing her apart and ending her screams. It was a grim task, but he couldn’t allow them to touch him. He’d seen what their god’s corrupting essence could do.
While he loaded another x-mag cartridge into his weapon’s sideport, focused on the slaughter all around him, Rapax, his formidable combatAI, was simulating several different scenarios, mapping out all the possible movements of every single cultist it could sense with its instruments, picking out the escape plan with the highest probability of success. For the past frantic minutes, it had been attempting to make contact with their companion satellite. By now, the orbital deepscanners should have mapped the entire planet’s extensive subterranean network.
“The terminal uplink was unsuccessful. Next best course of action is controlled demolition. Bring the ceiling down and earn some time to search for a route up.”
“Can I not just blow it clean off? I should still have a couple of megaton nukes and failing that, one more charge on the sigil engine.”
“That would be ill-advised. We are over twenty kilometres beneath the surface.”
“Right. But if I can’t find a way up soon, eventually they’ll run out of fodder and Convergents with real power will find us. A cave-in won’t stop them.”
Ogun knew Rapax was taking that into account, as he glumly watched the probability of mission success in the corner of his HUD slowly enter the red. He just needed to know there was a win condition. His Lorica was too damaged right now to fight the real heavyweights.
A ping sounded as his suit mapped the cavern, inundated with bodies living and dead, identifying stress points in the walls. His GLaDius, the massive coilgun thunderously spitting out a deluge of metal at his side, was heating up fast as the oversized bullets screamed out of the barrel at Mach 20. Usually he would have time to vent heat into his suit or his Rana, but just like with his shield, these cultists were too numerous for him to stop, drowning him in their bodies. Ironically, he could only put faith in the craftsmanship and trust the barrel wouldn’t warp.
He’d be dead once that happened.
Linking up with his Rana, the squat, frog shaped companionbot received coordinates from Rapax, its eyes flashing. The machine’s mouth yawned open, far wider than seemed possible. A set of six missile tips poked up out of its jaw, primed themselves and shot off in six different directions.
Ogun turned and ran towards the spot Rapax indicated would be the freest of debris as the Rana leapt onto his back, its parts shifting and transforming to merge with the Lorica. He dove into place, bowling through dozens of cultists as the missiles all hit their targets behind him, his visual display throwing warnings in his face as a few of them touched the exterior of the armour.
With a series of consecutive explosions, the walls of the cavern shook and crumbled, bringing down a tsunami of rock from the ceiling.
BOOM
A great crash rattled the Legionary, the thousands of people thronging around him all getting crushed under the rubble.
The silence left in their wake rang in his ears.
He took a second to breathe.
“What a waste. I’ve never even heard of an infestation like this in the Archives.”
“This planet has been overrun. We know why now. Our only objective is to get this information back to Sol’raan Command, no matter the cost.”
Gods. Sol’raan Special Operations soldiers, Legionaries like him, had been hunting gods down all across the galaxy for hundreds of years, rooting out their influence, thinking they were protecting humanity. Truthfully, they had been, but no one could have guessed that all those planets destroyed, all those systems ruined, had been but a distraction. That the sole reason for their “divine” invasion was one unassuming planet in an insignificant system in a forgotten corner of the Empire.
If they succeeded, it wouldn’t even matter how many planets had been liberated. The entire galaxy would be doomed.
----------------------------------------
Khoza woke up in a cold sweat.
I’m alive? I’m alive!
He felt at his chest. Pain-free.
He cautiously got up to his knees. Pain-free.
He stood up off the ground. Still pain-free.
“Holy shit.”
“Indeed, sir.”
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His head whipped around. He was still in the cavern, but the light from the baton had gone out. Curiously, he could still see. At least well enough to confirm there was no one else in the area with him.
“Who said that?”
“It is I, the ship’s mind of the Jonah.”
What?
“Dag? You’re in my head? How?”
“An unknown technology harvested me from the ship’s mainframe, as well as consuming the ship’s remaining reactor cores. I am currently layered atop a much more powerful technological intelligence, in order to act as a bridge while the nanobots alter your physiology enough to integrate it fully into your brain.”
Khoza’s mind reeled at the influx of revelations.
“Wait wait, back up a bit. Alter my brain physiology? Nanobots inside me? Please explain.”
The voice in his head, Dag apparently, paused for a second.
“I have not been networked with this intelligence for long, so my databases are still updating. What I can tell you is the artefact you disturbed released a swarm of nanobots into your body, which are repairing the extensive radiation damage you have suffered and rewriting your DNA for integration.”
So it was radiation damage!
“Can you tell me what happened on the Jonah? Why are we underground? And why do I have radiation damage?”
Dag paused again.
“First, I would suggest taking a comfortable seated position and some deep, calming breaths.”
Khoza started hyperventilating.
Dag had been programmed to break distressing news as gently as possible and the crew had learned he had a script he followed to do so. Khoza knew he was about to hear something he didn’t want to.
“Just tell me, Dag.”
“As you wish. A rogue planet crossing our path perturbed our trajectory. In rectifying it, I was forced to chart a new route or risk overshooting the system altogether. Unfortunately, this new route added another fifty years to our journey, missing our calculated window for safe arrival. Once we entered the system, the volatile asteroid belt ejected a meteoroid, striking us and severely damaging the ship. Luckily, we crash-landed on our destination, planet G489-b, touching down in a largely inaccessible volcanic region. My memory only extends to shortly after the crash, at which point the main reactor must have gone critical and automatically shut down.”
He absorbed this information stone-faced. That answered some but not all of his questions.
That’s why everything was dark. No way could the backup reactors keep the entire ship running for long.
“So how did we end up underground? Why was I dying the moment I woke up?”
“The two answers are related I fear. Your internal radioactive components simply poisoned you over time.”
Khoza frowned.
“Internal radioactive components? The whole reason I’m here is that I don’t have anything like that installed! And how could I be poisoned when I was frozen?”
Dag paused again.
“Perhaps you would like to first take a comfortable, seate-”
“Dag, don’t give me that shit, tell me!”
With reluctant tones, the AI shook Khoza’s reality.
“All humans naturally have some weakly radioactive elements within them. Potassium-40, Carbon-14 and the like. Normally, they are harmless, with half-lives much too great to do any real damage within a normal human lifespan. Even an abnormal one. But for you… Cryogenic freezing halts all biological and chemical processes within the body, not atomic processes. Over a long enough period of time, those naturally-occurring radioactive elements will emit a fatal dose of radiation.”
Realisation dawned on the colonist’s face. His mostly-forgotten physics knowledge reared its ugly head. When he spoke, it was little more than a whisper in the dark.
“How long?”
“Just over three thousand years. Had you remained frozen much longer, you likely would not have even woken up. In that time, given the location we landed in, there have likely been geographical phenomena that buried us over time.”
Khoza remained silent for a long while.
Realistically, this changed nothing. Everyone he’d known was still dead. He was still alone on an alien world.
Hell of a silver lining.
The colonists who seemed to have made it out were probably long dead. Maybe they’d somehow succeeded. He’d been frozen long enough for another ark ship to arrive. Dozens even.
The skeletons around him were human-looking enough, maybe that’s where they came from.
The thought brought him back to his present situation. His body was currently being hijacked by something. The something that killed these guys.
“Dag, what am I being integrated with?”
“I am afraid I do not yet know, sir. From what I can read in the altered DNA and making several extrapolations from the physical modifications you have thus far, it seems you are to be linked up to a machine of some sort.”
Khoza’s heart leapt into his throat.
“A machine? What physical modifications do I have?”
“Extensive enhancements that will express themselves over the next few months. Increased muscle size, strength and density. Increased ligament and tendon toughness and elasticity. Increased bone density and strength, compressive and shear. Several new organs are growing within you; whose functions I cannot yet discern. You will likely grow another few feet in height. Your nervous system has been replaced with a network of superconducting biomimetic nanotubes in addition to profound upgrades to your sensory organs. Your brain is lanced through by another network of nanofibers, it is also extruding fleshy buds towards several ports on the inside of your skull.”
He looked down at his hands in horror. He could see the tiny sweat pores on his palms.
Fleshy buds?
It was… a violation. This was no longer his body. He’d seen back home what happened to people with too many modifications. You could only alter your genes so much. Your brain could only support so many implants. Anyone too far beyond the pale just started breaking down. Going insane. Dying.
The horrors of the Gene War replayed in his mind. He was much too young to have seen it, but every child learned about the system-spanning conflict and the consequences of augmentation gone wrong.
“Do you… Do you know what kind of machine I’m going to be hooked up to? I will kill myself before ending up as some mad scientist’s experiment.”
“I’m afraid I ca-”
Dag was abruptly cut off as text scrolled across Khoza’s viewfield.
Do not interrupt assimilation.
All is well.
Khoza stared.
He remained silent for a good minute.
“Well. That’s not ominous at all.”
“On the contrary, sir, I would say it is quite ominous.”
He couldn’t keep a smile from his face at that. At least he had Dag. For all the intelligence’s awkwardness, it was the only piece of home he had left. Even his body was new.
The stray thought put things in perspective. By all rights, he should be dead. Without the support system of the colony ship and everyone on it, he’d be dead in a few days anyway, a few weeks if he could find water.
What did he really have to lose?
“Well… is there any way I can speed this up, o mysterious writer of text?”
Hunt.
Consume.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. He hadn’t expected it to respond.
What can I even eat?
“Dag, do you know anything about this planet as it is now? The other guy seems to think there’s something to eat around here.”
This planet. We hadn’t even decided on a name for it yet.
Being from the Bantu Socialist Commonwealth, he’d jokingly nominated Nova Africa as a name. Only he and Jake had voted for it. He realised he was still oddly sour about that.
“No, sir, but the presence of human remains indicates some way to gain sustenance. There must be some edible biological matter around.”
“I’d prefer if the bar was a bit higher than just ‘edible’.”
Walking around the cavern, Khoza didn’t see anything especially strange. Bare rock looked the same on every planet. Further in, a sharp turn in the tunnel obstructed his view.
“I guess we’re going exploring.”
Picking up one of the bones, he made a chalky mark on the cave wall, and set off.