“Ranger six! Ranger six, do you copy!?”
Silence.
Ranger one cursed and shook his head. His metallic jaw worked at his worry like a physical thing. There was a stereotype that Vegadroids were emotionless golems, bereft of anything but cold, calculating logic.
That was untrue. It wasn’t the Vegadroids fault they couldn’t cry. They simply hadn’t been built with any tears to shed.
“Ranger two, do you have eyes on six?” He asked, glancing at the readout on his pod’s display that showed Ranger two approaching the area that Ranger six had sent just moments before going quiet for the last time.
“Negative.” Ranger two was a Laeid, but his usual airy tone sounded neutral through the interference of the translation chip. “Sorry boss.”
Ranger one shuttered his eyes closed and took a long intake of the stale, churned air in his pod. When his eyes opened they were sharp and clear, yet when he spoke next there was a stilted manner to the words, as though they were physically hard to say.
“Consider Ranger six lost. Continue with the mission. Go reclaim the explosives in his pod and return to your search.” His metallic hands danced across the floating, holographic keyboard as he typed out the usual posthumous message for his Rangers, to be brought personally to the next of kin after the mission.
Ranger one suddenly stopped writing.
There is no next of kin. He realized.
He shoved the holographic keyboard away and tore the piece of himself that mourned Ranger six into tiny bits of code. It was shredded like paper scrap in the vault of scintillating data that served as Ranger one’s heart and mind.
Vegadroids had emotions, despite what other races said. They could mourn and feel joy like any other creature. But there was a reason for this callous rumor, in the end.
Ranger one clenched his jaw hard enough that the bolts shuddered. His memory banks flashed as he remembered Ranger six - thats not his name - as he remembered Gaux, the crazy demolitionist who so often was the final spark they needed to complete their missions.
They had liberated tens of planets together from cosmic despots and xenomorphic invasions. They had been in this squad before it was even considered an idea to attack the Biter from within. They had both signed up for this mission for the same reason.
And he is gone now. Ranger one lamented. So I suppose I may as well give you all of him, you rot-fucked bastard.
Ranger one - real name Axiom - glared up at the ceiling of the Mouth as his eyes flashed with red letters and numbers. Memories of Gaux were deleted with a blip of sound and a flash in his eyes. Axiom selected a hundred - a thousand - moments of precious, golden reverie and atomized them as he sent his processing core into overdrive.
Axiom opened his eyes and let the wash of pure analytic fire tremble and sing between his synthetic synapses.
Axiom the Vegadroid went Synthetic, and decided then and there to show the Biter why it was the Vegadroids were feared. He turned off his compassion. He flicked the switch on his empathy. His remorse guttered out like a light and he stared with deadly eyes at the readout on his pod.
He was close enough now to see the hanging wreck that Ranger six had piloted. Pirates swarmed it like rats in the brig of a ship.
Axiom felt nothing at the sight. His only thoughts were how kind it was for them to cluster together. His only feeling was a vague sense of gratefulness for making their deaths so easy.
“Rescind last order, Ranger two. I have visual on the wreck and will move to retrieve. Return to your search.”
Ranger two’s pod veered away without complaint. Axiom was silent as he flipped a switch and pressed a button and sent seven whistling nuggets of black metal out in looping trails.
The pirates only heard the faintest buzz before their skulls were cracked by the force of the impact all at once. Their brains were scrambled and spewed out into the open air. They no longer had heads.
The pirates along the steel cable leading into the rooftop hideout attempted to scramble their way back up. Axiom could see the fear in the way they shoved at eachother. In the shocked gazes that goggled at seven headless bodies.
The pirates scrambled for safety as quickly as they could. They were far too slow. A trajectory had already been established as Axiom finished tapping his keyboard. The auto targeting didn’t work inside the Biter in the same way communication seemed scrambled from the outside. All firearms were on manual.
Axiom fired a javelin of plasma from a small turret on the top of the egg. It opened a pirate’s stomach up to the air and dumped his guts out towards the ground. The javelin veered in the air and returned to vaporize the head of another pirate before spinning and blending apart the last pirate still climbing the cable. It evaporated into vibrant purple smoke that steamed with palpable heat.
Axiom watched their remains tumble and fall without even a tremor in his hands. Creatures with wide, leathery wings descended from hidden perches in the ceiling and collected the remains before any of them hit the ground.
Axiom urged his pod forwards and began inputting the calculations for his next barrage. A seismic grenade lobbed into the pirate hideout. A flechette radial explosive to be detonated right after. A bouncing slammer to distract from his approach.
And an IX78 Blaster Pistol to put down whatever dogs were left that needed euthanizing.
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Axiom had neutered his humanity, but the old rage still pulsed like an overheated engine in his chest. He could not say he would enjoy this slaughter, though he was most certainly looking forward to it.
——
Corma missed the first barrage that beheaded those seven unfortunate pirates. He turned when he heard the screaming and saw a burning lance of purple plasma roar through the air and tear the rest apart. They looked like meat scraps afterwards.
“Holy shit!” He laughed from deep in his belly, cheeks flushed with a bubbling joy. “There’s another one of those ship things, Peri! Look what it’s doing to those bastards! It’s slaughtering them!”
Peri paused to watch as the egg-ship floated up towards the entrance, now clear of any living being. Compartments with no visible seams popped out from the sides of the egg and fired three things he couldn’t identify into the pirate’s hideout.
He heard three explosions. Agonized screaming. The pilot stepped out of his pod, which remained floating in place, and ascended silently into the hideout. His movements were as precise and smooth as oiled clockwork.
There were more screams and several blaster shots.
Everything went quiet.
Only a moment later, the man slid down the steel cable and rooted around in the wrecked ship before clambering out and returning to his own functional ship.
“Did- did he just kill that entire hideout?” Corma’s eyes glittered with awe. “There has to be like a few dozen of them in there, right? Wow… It doesn’t look like he’s got even a scratch on him. That’s so badass.”
Peri thought it was more terrifying than badass, but he was forced to admit that he was a bit starstruck too.
It took that guy ten seconds to eradicate them. Is that impressive or the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen?
Once inside his own ship, the suited man did not fly away. Which was worrisome. What was more worrisome was the ten other egg pods that arrived and hovered over towards the now defunct pirate base. At this point, Peri was more than certain that something odd was going on.
One or two of those distinctive ships could make sense, but there are twelve or more of them, and they’re all in perfect condition.
Nothing was in perfect condition inside the Mouth. Nothing.
The egg pod that had killed all the pirates fired a bright red beam at the ceiling and drilled open the entrance to allow the eggs to fit inside. And one by one they all squeezed their way in like a chicken laying eggs in reverse.
“What do you think they’re doing in there?” Corma asked. “Who are they? Do you think they’re from some secret commando group in the Underbelly?”
“I don’t think there’s any commandos in the Underbelly. Just grime and a million horrible ways to die.” Corma frowned as his daydreams were crushed. “Besides, those ships are way too clean. I’m starting to think they’re from outside.”
“Outside!?” Corma belly laughed. “Now who’s talking crazy.”
Peri ignored Corma and resumed his climb. His friend had brightened up considerably after watching the pirates be systematically demolished. Corma managed to keep calling Peri crazy and climb at the same time without sounding out of breath, which was impressive enough to not be annoying.
Peri was just glad the ships were out of sight now. The cones of light they dragged across the roof as they flew seemed similar to the scanners used to find valuable tech in the remains of the Teeth. If it was anything like that, then their aluminum-camo blankets wouldn’t amount to much of anything.
Negotiation didn’t seem to be in those guys playbooks. It would be best to avoid them.
It didn’t take much longer to reach the roof of the Mouth, but that just meant the east part was over. Now came the tricky portion.
Peri needed to latch several barbed anchors into the roof and thread a climbing rope through them so they could latch themselves onto it and harvest the dangling, glowing ooze with both hands free.
He had done it several times before, but there was something daunting about not having any place to put your feet. If you looked down while latched onto the rope, you would see your toes dangling over a vast, cavernous abyss that wanted nothing more than to swallow you up. Monsters roamed far below, but without any place to stand it didn’t feel far enough.
Corma was kind enough to stop gushing about how those pirates had gotten what they deserved while Peri wedged his feet into the meat wall and started hammering the first of many anchors. His heart beat in his ears as he dangled from one arm and hammered awkwardly with the other.
He wished he could just put an anchor in the wall, but he didn’t have any way to hammer it in that would stay anchored. The roof of the mouth was a softer palate than the tough flesh of the cheeks. He had to get it deep enough that the barbs wouldn’t budge.
Peri swung his hammer, praying that he didn’t knock the anchor loose and lose it. I only have so many.
The world trembled and Peri suddenly realized that these egg guys had a lot more bombs with them. They must have been blowing their way into the nasal cavities from inside the pirate’s hideout. An act for which Peri would normally offer up his condolences for those who would inevitably be subsumed by an endless wave of Nasal Goblins, but in the current moment he only offered up a yell and a curse as the world shaking tremor knocked his climbing pick loose.
The world tumbled as he started to fall. While his panic rose, he only dropped. The world was very suddenly upside down and he flailed as he tried to latch onto something with his pick.
Corma snagged him by his bib, which threatened to rise up over his head with every passing moment.
“Grab my hand!” Peri heard Corma and reached out in the direction of his voice, unable to see as he was smothered by his storage bib. “Drop the hammer!”
Peri did so, surprised he had managed to keep a hold of it. He felt a rough hand in his own as he shook his bib out of his face and managed to orient himself enough to find the wall and slam his pick home.
He immediately pulled out his knife and stabbed that into the wall as well. Corma had both knife and pick in the wall already, which was probably the reason he hadn’t gone tumbling too.
Peri thanked as many gods as he could remember for Corma’s perfect climbing etiquette, as well as a few gods he made up on the spot. He hugged the wall with his entire body as another rumbling explosion passed through the flesh of the world.
With panicked eyes, Peri glanced over at Corma and screamed over the sound of repeated waves of explosions. Each subsequent boom sounded slightly more distant. They were blowing their way upwards.
“We need to run!” His voice barely carried over the sound.
“Should we not just wait them out!? They can’t last more than another ten minutes once they break into the Nasal Goblin tunnels!” Corma glanced back towards the wreckage of the egg, which was sent swinging with every explosion above. “Not to mention if they make the damned thing sneeze! They’ll be paste, and their bombs will be too!”
Peri shook his head. “I’m not worried about any of that!”
“You’re not?”
“No!” Peri said. “I’m worried about the Gaxax that are coming now that they’ve rung the dinner bell!”
Corma’s eyes widened and his mouth worked in silent terror. His jaws clicked shut and he swallowed his spit. He nodded his head rapidly and looked around for any ledges in the wall that would help them descend rapidly.
His head stopped moving all of a sudden. “Oh…” he said, very small.
“What is it?” Peri asked, following his friends gaze down towards the ground. “Oh…” His shoulders slumped. “That’s just…” A deep sigh that carried an oppressive, invisible weight. “That’s just great.”
TThe Gaxax were visible as nothing more than an abstract shape of writhing limbs centered around a fleshy blob with a single, terrible eye of tortured red flesh in the center. The eye was creased and surrounded by the press of bloated flesh. It vibrated with malice, pupil constricted to a wrathful point that seemed to bore into the soul of anything in sight.
Peri met its gaze and bit his tongue to stop from screaming.
It sees me… The thing’s pupil seemed, impossibly, to constrict further. A singular point of malicious black in the puffy red eye of the Gaxax. It’s looking at me.
The other two Gaxax behind the lead leveled their eyes in the same direction and easily found him. His camo-foil had fallen off when he lost his grip. He might as well have been naked for the way those three eyes stripped the flesh from his bones and relished in the terrified thumping of his panicked heart.
“Run.” He didn’t even mean to say the word, but his body was already in motion as he grabbed an anchor from his bib and hammered it into the ceiling with the hilt of his knife.
More tremors came, but they were much smaller, or perhaps just more distant, as the odd group of egg driving people burrowed further into the Biter. Either way, Peri was able to get the first anchor in this time, and he wasn’t afraid at all of slipping and falling.
I’d much rather go splat than be here when the Gaxax arrive.
Thinking about the terrible fate that awaited him should he linger, and using that panic as fuel, Peri shoved the rope into the anchor, latched himself to it, and started hammering the next one before he could stop to think about where he was going.
It was obvious. There was only one place that wasn’t just empty air filled with sticky globs of ooze and hidden screechers.
He looked at the dangling egg ship, swaying peacefully back and forth like the uvula of a giant whale. He looked above it at the scorched entrance to the cleared out pirate hideout.
There was nowhere else to go. Beneath them, the three Gaxax ascended at speed without even touching the wall itself. They hovered just inches away from it, almost as if magnetized. They were approaching fast.