Even Buzz was unmoving for a long second. They were soldiers -- they were trained to handle every kind of shitshow and fuck up that could possibly be imagined. But all of those situations involved them having their weapons. Their weapons were part of them, almost a physical extension. They knew every ding and scratch and quirk. To be without them, it was just… unthinkable.
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ Meathead said, his eyes wide, not quite able to believe what he was seeing.
‘Fall back!’ Buzz roared, regaining control almost immediately. ‘Fall back to the trees!’
The wave of bug-things was almost upon them. The rest of the team reacted instantly to Buzz’s order, firing their sidearms as they turned and ran, the screams of the bugs overpoweringly loud. But Neb stared into the case as if in a trance, not quite able to believe what he was seeing.
‘God fucking dammit Doc, move!’ Meathead yelled, grabbing Neb and yanking him away with his overpowering strength. Neb almost fell, then he turned and the two of them sprinted for cover. Neb’s mind was churning.
He looked to the ruins.
Ruins. Something about the word.
Ruins.
Runes.
A connection finally clicked into place.
‘Oh fuck!’ Neb gasped. ‘Meathead -- we need to go to the ruins. We’re going the wrong way! MEATHEAD!’
But Meathead was not listening. He turned and fired his pistol, which was about twice the size of the one Neb carried but still tragically ineffective against the bugs. ‘My godddam fucking weapons,’ Meathead was muttering as he fired. ‘You goddam fucking pricks.’
Neb tugged at his arm. ‘Meathead,’ he gasped. ‘We need to go to the ruins. Right now. I know what they are, there’s --’
‘Fall back!’ Buzz bellowed. ‘Fall back!’ They were amongst a little copse of trees, which was at least making the terrain difficult for the bugs. One of the green-shining ones lurched at Gray and Anna, who were firing at it from behind a tree, pistoning its huge head forward hard enough to snap the trunk and send the soldiers scrambling as the tree crashed down on top of them.
Buzz saw at once that the trees were useless for cover. ‘THE RUINS!’ he roared, ‘Get to the ruins!’
Neb had no time to react or be thankful for the coincidence. He just joined the others in a mad sprint up the hill, his legs pumping, heart pounding. Behind them the bugs crashed into or through the trees, knocking some, swerving around others, keening and screaming with their horrible sound, snapping their huge jaws together, the sharp claws at the end of their huge legs digging deep into the soft ground.
Fear gave the humans speed. They reached the ruins in one long sprint for survival, and dived into the building over the low wall of what had once been a tall window. Anna was the last through and the red-colored bug tried to slam its jaws down on her as she jumped. But the bug succeeded only in getting its head wedged so firmly into the window space that it could not move forward or back. Its screaming wail rose to an almost intolerable volume as it scrabbled and thrashed against the blackend stone, its legs gouging chunks from the wall, its mouth opening wide and slamming shut. The soldiers fired their sidearms into it at point blank range but they may as well have been throwing rocks. The bugs were just too big for the sidearms to be more than a nuisance.
Neb felt deep fear that should have been paralyzing, but it was not. His gaze swept over the trapped bug, the other humans taking defensive positions at the door and the windows, more other bugs outside. No-one was paying the slightest bit of attention to him. Buzz was screaming orders, but the sound was distant. Gunshots seemed to echo and reverberate, coming from far away.
He knew now what he had been trying to see in the ruins. Ruins and runes. That had been the key. He knew whose house this was, or at least what scholars called him: the Banker. No-one knew for sure that he really was a banker, of course -- all they knew was that he was a male-identifying Main and had some sort of role in the Main world of trade and exchange. This house -- the real version of this house -- existed on a planet designated R-176. Neb knew they were not actually on that planet because it was barely more than a rock, with gravity much lower than Earth. But this house was a perfect replica of the one that had been found there. And there was one key thing that xeno-archaeologists had learned about the Banker’s house that made Neb’s heart rate spike now, standing in the replica: It had a secret room.
‘Fall back!’ Meathead was screaming. ‘Fall back!’ But there was nowhere to fall back too. The back part of the house had completely collapsed. The huge creatures were pushing their way in the windows and the broad door, slashing and swiping with their claws, gnashing with their huge teeth, keening and screaming and slamming their jaws together. The humans had only seconds before they would be completely overwhelmed.
Information about the house came flooding back to Neb. He could even remember the exact lecture where he had learned about the Banker’s house. He even remembered the time of day, a cold January morning. The planet had been terraformed extensively but then abandoned at least a million years before humanity found it. There were very few dwellings on it, and most Main scholars thought the Banker owned the whole thing, that R-176 was a private planet. When it had been discovered the xeno-archaeologists had found an information message from the Main, one of the earliest known examples, and it had contained a few sample Main runes with their translations. Runes. That was how he had made the connection with the Game house.
In the real house, the secret room was a small space that opened in the wall beside the fireplace. Even the most cutting-edge of Main buildings had an old-fashioned fireplace -- it was an instrumental part of their culture in ways that were not understood. Sometimes Main fireplaces were huge, whole rooms or even dedicated buildings. But in the Banker’s house there was a smaller fireplace, set at the center of one wall. And Neb was looking right at the Game world replica of it.
He was dragged back to the present by a terrible scream of pain behind him, a human sound that cut through the din. Gray was pinned down by one of the creatures, a black monstrosity looming over her. The sharp claw of its front left arm was passing through her shoulder, and Gray was writhing in pain, slamming her hands against it. Meathead had found a huge tree branch and was bracing it against the bug’s head, trying to stop it from delivering the killing blow. Mallory fired round after round into the thing’s head to no obvious effect.
Neb wanted to run to Gray and do anything to help her, no matter how small. But he made himself keep his focus on the fireplace and run to it. It was his only chance to do something meaningful for the team. He might have thought this whole theory of the Banker and his house was ridiculously farfetched, but for one thing: When Buzz had opened the crate and Neb had looked into it, it was not truly empty. At the bottom there was a faint but beautiful drawing in the complex intertwining patterns of Main symbology. It had not been there before. And everyone on Earth who studied the Main knew this particular symbol: It was for the Banker.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Gray’s screams landed like scratches on his body, but Neb did not look back. The secret room in the real Banker’s house opened with a small brass release set into the back corner of the fireplace itself. That meant it could not be used when the fire was burning, or at least not easily used, which scholars thought was related to the overall symbology. Neb got down on his knees and clambered forward, and there in front of him was the release just as in the real house -- a small knob not much bigger than the top of his thumb, easy to spot when you knew to look for it. He pushed it and it clicked solidly. He scrambled back out of the fireplace, opening his mouth to yell to the others, but a huge impact knocked him sprawling across the floor.
Neb groaned in pain, his chest aching. He tried jaggedly to take a breath and it was pure torture. Above him he could see the huge head of one of the bugs, and it lashed downwards.
But it smacked into the floor. It was not aiming at Neb -- it was aiming for Meathead, who dived out of the way and then crashed the huge log down on the thing’s head, hard enough to make it screech in rage. Neb heaved for breath again painfully, forcing himself to crawl forward. He had been knocked by friendly fire, he realized -- Meathead had hit him with the log and had not even noticed.
He got to his feet and staggered forward, holding his side. There were more human screams behind him but he did not turn to look. The hidden door had opened out from the wall beside the fireplace just as at the real house. In the original secret room there had been some digital records and not much else. But here, when Neb pulled back the door, his eyes opened wide.
He was looking at racks and racks of heavy weapons. They were mounted neatly around each wall in the space. Below were some smaller artifacts on a thin shelf. In other circumstances this would have been one of the greatest Main discoveries of all time. Neb would have been famous in xeno circles, speaking at the best universities and institutions. Despite the terrible events happening around him he reached out his hand slowly and picked up a light gray pistol-shaped weapon from the shelf. Who was the last entity to touch it before him? It felt heavy and solid. On the handle were three small dials that protruded slightly and were faintly marked with Main runes. But strangely, the gun -- if it even was a gun -- had no trigger. Neb wanted more than anything to just stay there and examine it, to let himself fall deeply into yet another of the mysteries that the Main seemed to enjoy leaving behind. But a human scream dragged him back to reality.
‘Meathead!’ he roared, turning back to the team. ‘Mallory! Buzz!’
But no one answered. Each of the others was trapped in their own hell, fighting desperately against the bugs. Neb looked back to the Main weapons. Of all the strange things about them, the strangest was how familiar they seemed. It was an open secret that much of the technology in use across the Cluster was reverse-engineered from Main originals, including human tech. The weapons he was looking at were obviously of the same family as those that Meathead and Mallory used, and yet far more advanced than the human variants. They did not seem to be made of multiple individual pieces that had been manufactured and assembled together, but rather seemed to have been grown somehow, naturally formed from whatever advanced substances they were made of.
Neb lifted down a plasma cannon that was very like the one Meathead used. It was heavy but he could just about wield it, at least for a short time. On the top of the weapon were various switches and settings that seemed almost etched into the surface. Neb had received some basic heavy weapons training on their Earth weapons, but he didn’t know what any of these controls meant. He felt a surge of panic.
The bug creatures were swarming at the door. The trapped red-tinged bug still struggled and thrashed at the window where it had trapped itself.
‘Meathead!’ Neb roared. ‘MEATHEAD GODDAMMIT! MALLORY!’
But no-one so much as glanced at him. They could not hear him over the screaming of the bugs, and even if they could have, they were far too deep in the fight to listen. Mallory and Meathead and Jasper were all using tree branches now, bracing against the lunges of the creatures while Anna and Grey fired round after round from their pistols, aiming for the eyes.
Neb looked down at the weapon. What did any of these fucking settings mean? There was only one thing for it.
He aimed the weapon at the bug attacking Grey, and pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened.
‘Oh fuck,’ he yelled in frustration. Meathead was still swinging the huge branch around, delivering blow after blow to the bugs, jabbing it forward then dancing back out of the path of the furious snapping jaws.
Neb staggered over to him, the weapon feeling heavier and heavier. He had to duck under the swinging follow-through of the branch to get close to Meathead.
‘MEATHEAD!’ he yelled. ‘MEATHEAD! LOOK AT ME GODDAMMIT!’
But the big man was in a soldier's world of pure focus and violence. Nothing else existed to him.
So Neb took one hand off the weapon, reached up, and punched Meathead hard in the side of his head.
Finally he had his attention. Meathead turned to him with a look of rage, violence in his narrowed eyes. Then his expression changed abruptly when he saw what Neb was holding out to him. His eyes opened wide. Instinct kicked in. He took the weapon from Neb gently. It seemed light and maneuverable in his hands. His fingers danced over the controls like a violinist with their favorite instrument. Two lines on either side of the weapon began to glow white. Meathead aimed at the bug which was pinning Gray down, and fired.
The slamming, rocket-like force of the weapon’s energy beam streaked across the room, and it made Neb think for an instant of the Gate. The bug’s head exploded in a wave of flame and goop that spattered over the humans. Its body fell sideways and the spike of its leg was yanked out of Gray’s shoulder by the momentum, causing her to scream in pain and grab the wound. Her upper body was soaked in blood.
There was a moment of stillness where every eye, human and monster, turned to Meathead. He was standing there with the still-smoking cannon, arms bulging, legs set, a deadly gleam in his eye.
Every human dived to the floor as Meathead lit up the room, lacerating the attacking wave of bugs. The air was filled with a churning cloud of greenish liquid and solid lumps of bug parts. The mixture fell like rain, all of it shot through with the bright lines of the plasma cannon. Chunks of stone leaped from the walls as the beam pierced the monsters and scored the walls behind, scattering rock and rubble down on the carnage.
Neb scrambled backwards and almost fell into the fireplace as the shooting started. Bug after bug fell, screaming and dying in pieces. The bugs didn’t seem to have any intelligence -- instead of abandoning the assault and running away at this sudden change in their fortunes, they just lunged forward over the bodies of their companions until they too were cut down, their bodies piling up on each other.
All of the bugs were green colored except the red one still stuck in the window, Neb suddenly noticed. Now that Neb looked at it properly, it was quite different from the others -- a bigger snout and neck, more teeth, bigger claws, and eyes which seemed somehow to have more awareness, more consciousness than the others. And it was glowing, harder and more intensely than any of the others, not a phosphoric glimmer but a bright light, almost as if inside it was --
‘OH FUCK MEATHEAD DON’T SHOOT THE ONE AT THE WIN --’ he started to scream. But it was too late. Meathead turned the weapon onto the red-glowing creature, and pulled the trigger.
A massive explosion rocked the ruins, and the whole building wobbled crazily. Meathead was flung backwards into the rear wall and he slid down unconscious, the weapon falling from his hand. Chunks of the building fell and landed heavily in splashes of blood and viscera. The other humans and the bodies of the bugs were tossed around the space like leaves on a breeze.
Neb was slammed back into the fireplace. He avoided the worst of the explosion but his right arm was badly burned, the neo-polymer sleeve of his combat uniform scorched away. The right side of his face felt like it was on fire and he didn’t dare touch it, afraid of what his fingers might find there. He groaned in pain, holding his injured arm, finding himself rather unexpectedly in a sitting position up against the inside wall of the fireplace.
All was suddenly silent and still. He could feel his heart beating. And he could hear the breeze again, whispering through the windows gently, as if there had never been a battle. He was certain the other humans were dead. Nothing could have survived that blast.
He groaned again, feeling blood trickle down his back. Then he froze.
Standing amongst the carnage was a human-looking man. He had a neat gray beard and wore a well-cut suit. He was looking right at Neb, and he was smiling.