Prometheus Base
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.3.13 Interstellar
Janus hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he’d expected something. “Helmets on!” he said over the team channel. “The dome has been breached!”
Depressurization alarms sounded in the corridor only seconds later, although the damage to the armor-plas dome had occurred in the hub, not their sector.
A rumbling groaned through the floors and walls, like all of Prometheus Base was shaking itself apart, and the biomass surged like water coming to boil.
“Run!” Janus said to Lira and Syn. “Get to the hangar!”
They took off without hesitating, sprinting down the hallway without looking back. Janus had the station monitor as a thumbnail in the upper right corner of his vision, but even at that small size, he could see that the triliths were seething up through the same passages they dug to feed on Prometheus Base’s guts. Whatever had come crashing through the roof was calling the horde to itself, but that didn’t mean Janus and the others wouldn’t get swept away by the tide.
The first attack came as they left the commercial section that had contained the hidden lab. With no warning, two juvenile triliths exploded out of a storefront and swerved in their direction.
Lira didn’t blink. She raised the shatter-gun Ava had given her and fired twice, breaking the two triliths into pieces.
More boiled up from below, spilling from the broken windows until a mature bull jammed the entrance and roared as it thrashed and lunged.
Janus had never heard a trilith roar. It rooted him in place.
“Come on!” Lira said, pulling him away from the berserk creature. “They’re not after us! We just need to get out of the way!”
“Where’s Syn?” Janus asked, looking around wildly as Lira led them southwest.
“I don’t know!” Lira answered. “I lost track of her when those things started coming out of the ground!”
Janus nodded. “Hopefully she had the same idea as you and we’ll find her ahead!”
The two of them sprinted ahead, taking full advantage of their suit’s artificial muscles. The dome was bucking and shaking like they were going through an earthquake, and twice they had to divert to a side passage, shooting to keep the more predatory creatures at bay while another troupe charged past.
“Uh, boss?” Mick said on the comm. “What’s going on?”
“I think the cult is letting its displeasure be known. Are we ready to leave?”
“It’s still daylight!” Mick said.
“We may not have a choice in the matter!” Janus answered.
Another large adult trilith came into view. It was so big, it blocked the entire passageway, scraping the walls and ceiling as it dragged itself forward, maw snapping.
“This way!” Lira said.
The next ten minutes were a mad rush to reach the hangar, fighting when they had to, avoiding all they could. They didn’t find Syn, and her locator no longer showed up on the station’s sensors. Either she’d been caught and eaten, or she had blanked herself out.
Janus hoped it was the latter.
Lira’s shatter-gun was almost out of charges by the time they reached the hangar. They stumbled in over a knee-deep pile of rock and debris that used to be triliths.
“About time!” Ava said, lowering her weapon. “We thought you weren’t going to make it.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Don’t jinx it, Ava!” Raul said, firing some sort of tripod-mounted shatter-gun as a dozen triliths burst out of the passageway Janus and Lira had just come from.
The groaning and rumbling stopped.
“Was that it?” Lira asked. “Is it over?”
She and Janus joined the others. The far end of the hangar was open, an oblong of bright light, facing west. The hangar itself was in a relatively good state, with buggies, crawlers, and cycles parked in rows or hanging from cranes.
Mick, Ava, and Raul had prepared four of the Hunter-style buggies for departure, but it looked like whatever the cult had done was over.
Then a tremor shook the ground, almost knocking Janus off his feet.
“I thought you said it was over!” Ava said.
Janus pulled up the maintenance overview one last time, and his mouth went dry. “It’s time to go!”
“It’d still daylight, mate,” Raul said.
“That’s not going to matter with what’s coming out of the ground for us!” Janus said. He jumped onto one of the buggies, and Mick and Lira did the same.
Ava swore and got on her buggy, with Raul jumping on behind her, scatter-gun ready.
Janus cranked the accelerator, and they still almost didn’t make it. A flood of triliths of every size spilled into the far end of the hangar as the team sped away, the massive creatures charging over each other to get at the fleeing humans, or perhaps to get away. The ground heaved, lifting Janus’s rear wheels as he shot out into the blinding sun and his visor fully polarized. Some of the triliths followed them into the sunlight, stumbling and falling under Raul and Mick’s shots, then two entire sectors of Prometheus Base broke and collapsed as the thing Janus had seen on the readouts emerged from the ground.
Representing nearly a quarter of the biomass from under the stricken dome, the creature could hardly be called a trilith anymore. It pulled itself from the rubble ten stories at a time, until its massive head rose even with the top of the broken dome.
It turned to look at the fleeing vehicles.
“Don’t slow down!” Ava yelled, and Janus turned his attention back to the brilliantly lit landscape. Alarms sounded from both his buggy and his suit, letting him know they would suffer for this later—even more so if they couldn’t get access to a rad repair tank like the one he’d used at Councilor Bennin’s apartment.
They were all focused on the wrong thing.
They didn’t expect the creature to be fast.
With haste made all the more terrifying by its massive size, the megalith scuttled forward in a blur of limbs. It had six legs and two striking claws, and it closed the distance they’d driven in a matter of seconds.
Janus didn’t even have time to react. One moment they were going to make it, the next he was in the thing’s shadow, about to die.
Then Ava lit a flare.
The megalith swerved toward the two Hunters as they veered off to the right. Raul fired, breaking boulders off the creature without slowing it down, and then the megalith’s right striking claw crushed the two of them into the dust.
Janus, Lira, and Mick passed the mass accelerator towers, safe from the creature and its horde, or so they thought.
The megalith resumed the chase, barely slowing as it passed the line of towers, kicking one of them into dust with one of its massive legs. Janus was going flat out, accelerating through 150 kilometers per hour, but the thing’s strides were just so long it was still closing on the surviving members of the team, and then a flash of light as bright as the sun lit the sky.
The megalith stumbled, turning to face the heavens and roar.
Another strike from the orbiting frigate smashed it into the dust as Janus, Lira, and Mick ran for their lives, never looking back.
***
SSFG-04 Survivor’s Voice
Orbit of Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.3.13 Interstellar
Architect Donnika ground her teeth as the image of Architect Nikandros floated in front of her.
“Oh, well done!” Nikandros said as another particle beam volley obliterated the megalith. “My compliments to your gunnery officer, Donnika. She really knows her work!”
“I’ll make sure to pass that on,” she said. “Are we done? I have a site to cleanse.”
“You mean Prometheus Base?” Nikandros said dismissively. “By all means, sister. Your faction’s mistake, only right you should clean it up.”
“This doesn’t change anything,” Donnika said. “He’s an outlier among millions. The Survivor still favors us.”
“I’ll see you at the award ceremony, sister,” Nikandros said, cutting off the connection and leaving Donnika to seethe.
It was too bad. Another few seconds and Nikandros’s champion would have died. Unfortunately, the opposition’s architect must have been paying close attention, and the use of the seismic charge in combination with the presence of the oversized trilith was deemed to qualify as “interference” by the committee.
“Your orders, ma’am?” the captain of the Survivor’s Voice asked, and Donnika became aware of how many eyes, ears, and other sensors were pretending not to be turned her way.
“Do we know what happened to the Betan engineer?” she asked.
“Her suit is still inside the dome, ma’am. We’re having trouble getting a clear signal. Should we send a team to pick her up?”
Donnika replaced her rage at being outmaneuvered with a mask of calm, clasping her hands loosely behind her. “Shift targeting to Prometheus Base, Captain,” she said. “Full broadside. Next time someone goes digging for secrets in that pit, I want them to find nothing but cold glass.”