CHAPTER 6 : ELDRITCH EXPLORATION
As suspected the pilots weren't exactly social creatures so Riona gave up on trying to chat them up. They didn't know anything beyond the implanted knowledge yet but seemed to understand complex orders. She had them try out the Kamakillers, Cannosers, and Zaladon. Riona had also made a heavy armour for testing, along with some simple anti-air and anti-tank handheld heavy weapons. Perhaps those could be wielded by pilots afloat on the relatively cheap and stable hover platforms. The winged backpack probably wasn't as useful in that regard.
While it was possible to reach the surface via the sinkhole shaft above the pool, it was strangely deep and ragged and not much light would even reach down. Perhaps ZU had sat closer under the surface at one point and wiggled downwards absorbing the rock, unconscious.
As the Groundmauler was still recovering, the two Kamakillers worked to dig a convenient ramp up to the surface, their sharp mantis blades slicing through rock like butter. The ramp ran up diagonally from the edge of the pool bowl. The sinkhole shaft might need to be covered up later as someone nasty might drop a bomb down.
The surface was just a barren stretch of wasteland with yellowed rock and dirt. Aside from a few rock outcroppings there was nothing interesting in sight, apart from the sinkhole that is – another reason to cover it up.
Riona deployed the armoured Zaladon and Kamakillers near the entry, burrowed like predators. Then she went against ZU's council again and piloted one of the Cannosers herself, feeling confident she could handle it with her simulator hours. A1 would join her on the test flight so they could both return if Riona's proficiency was overstated and she inadvertently kissed the ground in the middle of nowhere.
The bird-like Cannoser perhaps got its name from the large buster cannon slung under its pointy nose. Another variant instead had two smaller guns at the top of the nose. While on the ground the Cannosers could fold up in a way which made them easy to enter.
They needed no runway – the Cannoser just took off at 5G, which would probably have caused old Riona to black out but now it was just a rush. It must be how fighter pilots feel using those hangar ship catapults, except this was probably faster. It took mere moments to break the sound barrier. She settled on a cruising speed of mach 1.2 with A1 settling on on her left flank, seemingly in excellent control of the flight Zoid. The jet drive just made a loud shushing sound from what she could hear inside. It was a good thing they had the force fields protecting the open pilot seats or they would probably have been blown off like ragdolls.
From the air much more of the landscape could be seen but they had to fly pretty low in case the Neo-Dreghs had ground radar coverage around here. Some of the larger Zoids had countermeasures for that, but it was a later issue.
The command map was quickly filling out in a spiral pattern as the powerful Zoid sensors took in the surroundings.
Within 30 minutes they had already spotted a few interesting things and landed near what looked like the site of an old battle with tank wrecks and sun-bleached skeletal remains strewn about. Riona moved around the find, still seated in the Cannoser which moved with a wobble but was ready to take off at the first sight of danger.
The tanks had a plain boxy hull with a cylindrical tower and stubby cannon. They looked like something from the 1930s but could possibly be more advanced. Judging by the remains of their markings they had all been from the same faction. A few burned out trucks and civilian vehicles sat encircled by the tanks. It reminded Riona of a wild-west wagon fort and it led her to believe this could have been an expedition of some sort.
The tanks had been torn up in a way which didn't seem like projectile damage. That, along with the widely scattered bones – some familiar, some very strange – made her conclude that the entourage must have fallen prey to something other than an opposing human force.
As if on cue, she got a report from the Zoids at the base that a horde of strange creatures had appeared on their sensors, rapidly approaching on foot at 80km/h. Had they already been discovered? Riona hooked into the sensor feed and saw a hazy tele-zoom view of some sort of unholy precambrian monstrosities. Perhaps they were just friendly aliens though?
Riona and A1 immediately took off and accelerated to the maximum speed of Mach 1.5, quickly leaving the remains of the doomed expedition behind. She made a mental not to try and salvage the metals later, perhaps towing the tank wrecks home.
She arrived back in minutes, breaking hard just as the small monster horde was about to come into melee range. The Zaladon had already fired and detonated a warning missile above their heads with a big boom but no reaction, then one in front, but the horde just flowed around the mushroom cloud.
Riona banked in flight and saw that the monsters below were a mass of oily silvery armoured plates, teeth, spikey legs and tendrils. There were a few types of them, some as large as cars, but they all looked related in terms of morphology.
This wouldn't be the first time Riona fought in battle. The local Riona had killed a few Neo-Dregh goons with a Lennmann-90 sniper rifle. She had never fought anything like these monsters though – only heard vague stories about something being out here in the wasteland of the ancients. Earth Riona's experience with base defence went as far as her family having lived in a bad neighbourhood with home-invasion-prone crackheads and landlords.
Riona abandoned further parley attempts and ordered A1 to A9 to engage. In addition, the Zoids below the surface had been ordered up to defend the entry if needed.
It was a slaughter. The Zaladon took out a sizeable chunk of the horde with its remaining missile before retreating to a distance, easily outpacing the horde but posturing with its jagged snapjaw just in case. The Kamakillers then sliced up the rest, moving like lightning and fury. The two Cannosers in the air didn't have much to do and only managed to pick off a few peripheral stragglers with the buster cannons – disintegrating them in a spray of meat. None of the monsters fled or surrendered.
–– "Huh.", Riona voiced after the dust settled.
None of the other pilots or Zoids had even had the opportunity to engage. Even so, perhaps she could have managed the situation better. The Zaladon would need to regrow its missiles and couldn't waste them like that. The deadly mantis Zoids had cleaned house, but friendly fire had been an issue so few shots had been fired.
Piles and piles of biomatter littered the surroundings. Riona expected to hear a congratulatory remark from ZU but instead it just made a slightly creepy sounding demand.
–– "Feed me."
The corpses added up to 1250 Zels and apparently weren't all organic – the hard armour plates containing traces of metal. She could see these creatures giving a modern day army on Earth some trouble but the Zoids had proved to be far in advance.
Even so, Riona immediately spent the Zels, ordering up a Garius – her first larger Zoid, as well as a few cylindrical mushroom looking turrets for static base defence. It was going to be hard to remain inconspicuous it seemed.
–o–
A few days after the one-sided battle they made a second spiral sweep with the Cannosers to check for monster activity, but instead they came upon the ruins of a lone stone cabin some 60km out in the wasteland.
Riona and A1 landed to investigate, exiting their Cannosers which were put into autonomous mode and stood guard. The ruin was not livable and didn't even have a roof, but they still entered with drawn beam pistols. Inside they discovered traces of collapsed furniture in the dirt, but not much else. The ruin might be hundreds of years old. Riona relaxed and holstered the beam pistol, then crouched down to unearth the metal braces of what might have been a nice bed or sofa.
She closed her eyes. An old but delightful and vivid memory of her girlfriend and a rented trail cabin had suddenly surfaced. It must have been in 1985, maybe three months before Riona had to move to her job instead of going to university. They had just been friends then, friends who went on a totally normal summer hike.
The friend had of course gone with her usual punk get-up for the hike. The pair of high boots with buckles had not been made for walking. The ragged jeans with chains at least had some ventilation, but there was also the short black leather jacket which was probably heavy as it was quite liberally studded and decked out.
After they had settled into the cabin, briefly chilling and lounging in a pair of sunken sofas, the friend had begun to awkwardly drop her topwear in a way which – initially at least – could have been due to the summer heat. But once the top came off and the tits came out, if it wasn't already obvious to Riona what was happening then, it was made even clearer when the slouching, leg spreading misfit grinned and flipped the leather jacket on its back, revealing the "BITE ME" scrawled in stark white.
She had the constitution of an extra in some post-apocalyptic movie, pale and thin-bodied, and probably just a-cup, but she flaunted it with an attractive sort of cheeky unconcern, feigned or not. Her naturally black hair had been cut really short, leaving a one and a half inch tall neon-green centurion mohawk.
She just looked so incredibly cute right then.
So Riona had darted in and wrangled off the pants, but then almost ruined the whole thing with a wild surprised cackle. Her pants had hidden not only a pair of absurdly neon-green bikini panties perfectly matching the dyed hair, but they also had been the see-through sort, and underneath in her natural black stretched a two finger wide landing strip matching the mohawk. That had actually been the first time Riona had seen anything like it.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She initially thought the whole thing had been premeditated given the sexy panty but soon learned that it was just par course for the quirky deviant.
Riona and Nina dated for a few months, but Riona never heard back from Nina after the move, and her heart still ached a little for her first and last.
The clatter of metal brought her out of her reverie. She spun and jumped to her feet, catching the sight of A1 wrestling with a human armoured skeleton which had fallen out of a corner. It wasn't actually alive but must've been kept standing by the webbing plastered all over it and on the wall... well, until disturbed by A1's prodding. It fell to the ground. A1 still pointed her weapon at it but hadn't fired or said a peep. The corpse's mouth was wide open in horror, just like in a movie.
Riona hoped that whatever did this was long gone and just forgot its dinner. The armour was very rusty and looked like the clunky type used in World War 1 or perhaps the Wild West. It apparently hadn't helped as there was a fist sized puncture going right through the pitted breastplate.
Slightly spooked Riona decided it was time to leave, but she halted on the way out, her eye catching the glint of something on the partially windswept stone floor. She dusted it off and turned it in her hands. It was a small obsidian statue with golden inlays, but it was hard to tell what it looked like. In fact, just looking at it gave her a headache, and the thing was humming too. She threw it hard 150 meters off into the wasteland, then bent over to rub her temples. What the heck was that?
It was the same kind of headache she had felt when arriving here and it went away just as quickly. She had thought then that it was a lingering effect of integrating with the local Riona, but maybe...
A1 suddenly nudged her and pointed with her beam pistol out toward the wasteland where a truck-sized black creature stood, no more than 300 meters away. It had somehow snuck up on them, and the Cannosers' sensors apparently hadn't picked it up either. Now the two Zoids were requesting permission to open fire though, feeding Riona's helmet detailed images of the creature over the command interface.
The creature had many small stubby legs but most of it was a bulbous head with a smattering of yellow eyes, blinking in asynchrony. Riona got the strong feeling of being scrutinised, yet somehow didn't feel any hostility from the creature, so she lowered A1's outreached beam pistol with a slow defusing gesture.
The creature just stood there looking at them as they took off into the air at great speed.
–o–
Coming in over the base, Riona could see the caravan of Gools, the Silverkong and a Kamakiller arriving as well. She had sent them out to quickly retrieve the tank wrecks. Unfortunately there was no way to push or tow the wrecks home without leaving a 35km long track. And besides, ZU couldn't make tow cables and the ones on the wrecks were in bad condition. So, Riona had a Kamakiller slice 'em and dice 'em, then the Gools could haul the metals home in trips of less than an hour.
–o–
Riona had been back for a few days now, floating naked in the comfort of the pool while overseeing operations. The Gools and Silverkong had resumed excavation of the spiral tunnel. At one point the creepy eye creature showed up near the base, just observing it for a while before leaving. Unsettling. Fortunately she'd get reinforcements soon.
The Garius had taken just 7 days to grow and would perhaps become her main ground troop type for now. ZU needed to specifically reconfigure for mass production of any of the other larger Zoids or they would take 10 days or more to grow and cost a little more. The smaller Zoids didn't have this problem.
Another advantage of Garius was that it was humanoid and had manipulator claws, which could make it a good general purpose resource. It was a very well thought out design which had probably stood the test of time.
Reaching a height of 7.8 meters, the Garius would tower over people on the ground. A flexible tail cable with what might be a bludgeon weapon at the end could be used to bring the pilot up to the cockpit when the Zoid wasn't crouching. Its body was mainly gray and black, with thigh plates and caps in a darker blue, and some feet accents in orange.
In rugged terrain it could easily run at speeds in excess of 140km/h. However, the orange toes and heels could fold up and expose wheels enabling a top movement speed of 270km/h on flat ground.
The chest held a Pike Ray Shot wide swivel orb, flanked by a pair of 35mm Maxter Beam Cannon arms jutting out from the rib area. The hip balls featured supplementary close-proximity grenade launchers loaded with various anti-infantry measures.
One shoulder carried the optional ablative shield, protecting one flank. The bone white shield was emblazoned with the Helic symbol in red.
Unlike most Zoids which were limited to their mounted armament, Garius could use its manipulator claws to carry a number of weapons, such as a 5 meter long broad sword – presumably quite extraordinary – or a heavy rifle. These Riona could not afford at the moment though, and she suspected they'd hinder marching speed when not using the wheels.
The bone white head with the smoke yellow cockpit window was very recognisable to Riona since all Helic Zoids had it in the toyline. It could be produced as a separate component and four attachment points on its undercarriage could be used to turn it into a wheeled car or flyer. By default four small legs came attached, folded away neatly. If the Zoid's main body was destroyed the head and enclosed pilot could perhaps make an escape, sort of like an ejection seat of a fighter jet.
Lastly, the head had two fixed weapon attachment points on the sides just under some Helic markings in red. Larger weapons attached to these points would have to be powered by the main body of the Zoid however. Also, without an articulated neck and body attached, these fixed weapons could only be aimed by using the legs to tilt the entire head.
Riona noticed that some of the turret weapons would fit in these fixtures. and that a crewed turret variant used the head as a component, tucked behind ablative armour.
–o–
Riona had gotten some simulator practice handling the Garius but would perhaps let one of the pilots use it while she remained down below managing the forces, which now included a few turrets encircling the sinkhole.
A rather large horde of the silvery precambrian things had amassed on the horizon. Riona guessed they were of a different faction and breed than the black eye-thing, unless the eye-thing had been some form of specialised scout.
A few larger monstrous figures were delineated in the silhouette of the opposing force. One enormous central figure stood out in particular – the upper half of it was a mass off tapering tentacles which dangled upwards as if gravity had reversed. It stood on radially arranged thin long legs which probably wouldn't be able to carry its mass, but nothing about the 35 meter tall monstrosity was realistic, and the space seemed to bulge and distort around it. It might be the commander.
As it drew its entourage of horrors closer, Riona could sense reality tremble and her mind was subjected to brief incomprehensible visions which became increasingly disturbing. What's worse, the pilots all seemed to have fainted. Riona quickly took control of the Zoids and turrets on the surface via the command interface, and had them fire everything at the gestalt. The shots bent around it. She panicked a bit, fired again with the same effect. The shots just went wild, though some of them veered off into the horde, taking out chunks of it.
With her mind deteriorating rapidly, she gave her forces orders to fire at will on the smaller monsters, now just some 2km distant. Meanwhile she let the Garius's Pike Ray Shot charge up, or rather, overcharge. Riona could sense ZU trying to say something but her dazed mind could no longer parse the language.
Just as Riona was about to black out, the Pike Ray Shot blasted out a bright lance which instantly reached its target. As the Garius staggered back, chest smoking, so did its target. Riona came back to it as if startled awake by a nightmare. Gaining clarity, she took stock of the situation and noticed the pilots coming out of unconsciousness as well. For whatever reason the feeble minds of the Zoids and turret systems had been unaffected by the mental attack.
The enemy commander was still standing however, it's tentacles flailing agitated. Riona prepared to give the enormous commander another salvo when an equally large white chubby centipede sausage thing appeared out of nowhere, it's many little legs driving it forward and into a tackle. The two monsters clashed but the wounded black one was now at a disadvantage. The smaller silver monsters had scattered in the face of the titanic fight and presence. Riona felt the familiar headache rising for a third time.
Somehow to her relief, the chubby white centipede won the fight after a savage struggle, mostly hidden as it were by spacial distortions and weird light phenomena. Then it turned to directly face the base. And waited. Riona got the sense that it urgently wanted to talk face to face, so she had her forces stand down. She exited the pool and hastily threw on the underclothes, wiggling the panties up the rest of the way as she ran up the ramp to the surface.
When she looked at the white centipede the distance between them somehow shrunk to nothing, and she floated in the air before its hulking prancing form. They were suddenly in an empty grey void which felt vaguely familiar.
–– "Ylt thar khnett Thuruchc-Khuun iälaan iälaan z'gh aminum zuöndr~", it spoke into her mind.
Riona only got a nebulous idea of what that meant. It meant something along the lines of "Gratitude for helping [self name] with [the mind thing] long bothersome.". Its name was Thuruchc-Khuun perhaps?
–– "Nunamnahaar ba'eoloth ee'e-uihron plät! Fuh~fuh! Zu'chronhähar!"
–– "Yaseth, chronoth koen'aar Nina-ja-ja ölhayth'hzam-od~ "
–– "Ylt å chronoth xianzu erohen thun, fuh~fuh!"
–– "Xzelzoth!"
Riona rubbed her temples still feeling that headache. It seemed to be saying "The unexpected [integrity weapon] from [lowly one]! [pointed laugh]! [Great opportunity]! Also-anyways, [time/fate] is [strange/ending/death] with... [Nina???]. Will send you in at [good point], [pointed laugh]! [Fortune wish]!
Wait- what? Nina was in trouble? Riona didn't think she'd ever meet Nina again, but if her girlfriend – ex or not – was in trouble it would really bother her just knowing it.
Before she could enquire she was somewhere else again.
She was on a strange alien world, thankfully with a breathable – if thin – atmosphere. She couldn't tell if she was in a building or forest. It was a mess of arches in prismatic wood and she found herself standing precariously on a branch-like structure. Some ten meters away was a- a couple. The beings looked like blue sea stars but with extra stuff.
They were engaged in some sort of activity. One was putting a strangely cut fabric onto the other. Then the other one spoke, and Riona could understand it clear as day.
–– "Aah yeah, that's the guffoywup right there, thats the- the-!"
It squirted black oil from a cluster of antennas. Riona turned her face away even though she didn't know what was actually happening. She then spent over half an hour sitting turned away while it went on like that. When some a strange magical looking portal circle appeared Riona took it as a way to escape the situation and entered. She found herself back with Thuruchc-Khuun in the gray space.
–– "Ghalahaz... Trubhu vuhwr – Xhnu'neihla zhen. Gugugu~"
Huh? "[Regrets]... right [criteria] – completely wrong place. [Inverse laughter]"
Then she was brought somewhere else. There were strange ferns and palm trees, and a dog-like dinosaur laying sprawled on its back, legs up against a rock, rolling a bit as if scratching its back. It was actually one of those pre-dinosaur creatures – she recognised it from the permian pages of her dinosaur book. A synapsid? It looked like a well muscled, sabretoothed lizard-canine and she didn't want to catch its attention. She vaguely remembered that permian creatures didn't have proper ears and used their jaws to listen for vibrations or something, so she just kept still for half an hour. Then the portal appeared and she returned to the grey space, again.
–– "Ghalahaz... Trubhu zhen – Neihla chronotha. Gugugu~"
Riona took that as "right place – wrong time".
Next she found herself at the back of a filming studio. On stage in front of the cameras and lights were a couple of aerobics women in fashionable leg warmers and colourful high cut tangas. They were on their backs doing some sort of leg swooshing in sync with the pumping music. Riona didn't want to be seen and quickly squatted behind some equipment crates.
–– "Woo! Yes, GO! Now one. And two. And three. And four. Woo, good – here we go! Everyone keep it up – you can do it!"
After returning she heard the familiar eldritch voice.
–– "Guhu~gugugu~"
She sighed.
–– "Chrowiiii~theneth, my'ylt zamzahar..."
Riona frowned, closed fists on hip. "Await in [patience], it [probably] [approaches]." ...as in "Hold on, I think I'm getting there?", Riona sure hoped so.