Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (33 page)

Claire jogged beside Niko near the front of a column. He’d donned his wing pack but had elected to remain on the ground with Sarah. Claire didn’t talk or think—not about Frances, not about Adam, not about Tracy or her people back at base. She drifted along with the shouted orders, the pounding boots, the wind that still blew, and the deep rumbling buzz that underlay it all.

“We shouldn’t be far from Ship,” Niko estimated, picking up the pace. “Where is it?”

As Shiplink, Nikolas required no array, no technology, to be in contact with his Ship. But his mental meld was defunct. Sarah had given him medications to postpone the withdrawals Shiplinks endured when being involuntarily parted from their other halves.

“It adjusted course for minimal impact, ser.” Raniya was keeping up with them. To Claire she seemed as anxious as Niko for the first sight of the vessel, though she was growing winded. She and Cullin bore packs of equipment, as did several soldiers assigned to the science team. “Ship retained enough control to bring itself down in an uninhabited area at an angle that would do less permanent damage.”

“You confirmed that?” Niko asked sharply. “Does that mean Ship’s alive?”

“This is all guesswork,” she admitted. “I’ve had no official contact. I would have informed you, General.”

Naveen swooped down to fly above them. “Leviathan dead ahead!”

They swerved up the ridge, scrambling through raw dirt and debris. The black, shuddering mound of the leviathan inside the giant furrow came into view as they reached the top.

Niko stared. His head tilted and his array lit up as he scanned.

“Ship’s not there,” he assessed, his voice breaking. “It’s just gone.”

Inside the end of the impact crater, it was black. All black. It wasn’t like shades—not roiling, not oozing toward them. It was gelatinous and solid, as if the shades had coagulated. Instead of the eye-sucking blackness of shades, the leviathan sparkled faintly in the light that managed to make it through the dust cloud.

So, that was a leviathan. It was easily as big as Ship.

It was almost exactly the same profile as Ship.

Claire had seen Ship numerous times from underneath, approaching for a shuttle landing. The leviathan wasn’t only the same size as Ship, it was the same triangular shape—as if it had slimed itself over Ship’s exterior.

“I’m going to kill that thing,” Niko declared hoarsely. “If Ship’s already gone, we don’t have to worry about the munitions. Bring out the—”

Claire grabbed Niko’s arm before he could give the order. “Don’t. I think Ship’s still inside. Look at the shape.”

“She’s right.” Sarah clambered up the slope to stand beside her husband. She took his other arm as if reinforcing Claire’s foresight in holding him back. “The leviathan has taken on Ship’s form because Ship’s still inside—encased.”

“We’re ready,” Raniya called as Cullin hooked up the last monitor.

Sarah continued to urge Niko, her soft voice coaxing and determined. “Stick with the plan. The scientists are in position.”

Jaw tense, dark eyes glittering, Niko shook them both off.

“Aerial, move in,” he commanded. “Watch your proximity to the leviathan. One hundred foot clearance until we see what this thing can do.”

Shipborn soldiers streaked across the sky, a flock of white wings and tactanium armor dimmed by the dust particles in the air. Soon laser beams streaked across the sky as well.

White light stabbed all over the leviathan’s surface. Each strike produced a tiny ripple that was absorbed as if nothing had happened. When the leviathan didn’t react to the mobile aerial units after several rounds of fire, Niko ordered the ground troops to advance in waves. They planned to surround the thing, nose to ass.

Many of the ground teams carried rifles, larger weapons with a broader scope. They’d also dragged along some laser cannons, but they took several men to carry and had fallen behind.

And, of course, the demolition teams prowled in the background, awaiting their turn.

If the demolition teams advanced, the rest of them had to run.

Part of the rear guard, Claire sidestepped down the crumbling ridge into the trench. All of this weight on the unstable dirt could send them avalanching into the monster. She headed for the bottom of the skid, where the footing was more solid. Though the ridge walls would trap the rear guard in the channel—which didn’t seem like much of a trap, since it was a half-mile wide—if the leviathan decided to come after them, she doubted they could outrun it anyway.

Jagged tree branches and trunks jutted through the dirt, stabilizing it but making the downward skid a lot stabbier. She and the rear teams finally reached the bottom and advanced. On the other side of the channel, more soldiers were doing the same.

Her boots sank into the soft, churned soil. Rocks of all sizes littered it, obstacles that would make mobility treacherous. Everything was a blur of tension now. Over her array, she received the proximity signal. She’d reached the predetermined point of attack.

Everyone halted, readying themselves. The leviathan didn’t respond to their presence.

The first time she raised her fist and sent a fat laser blast at the leviathan, it felt like revenge.

The second time it felt like hate.

The third time it felt like all of them screaming, “Die, fucker, die!” at the same time.

The eighth, the twenty-seventh, the hundredth, began to feel like stubbornness.

At least until the leviathan retaliated.

Then it felt like terror.

Leviathans had tentacles.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Adam stabbed at the massive tree trunk with a sharp piece of Ship’s hull that he’d found after the crash. Dirt trickled down in cascades every time he gored it. Even if he succeeded in breaking the trunk apart, he wasn’t sure how he was going to push through all that soil—but he had to try.

The rough landing seemed to have buried Ship in the ground. Several anterior areas were filled with dirt, rocks, and detritus, as if it had been forced into Ship’s corridors like ground meat into a sausage casing. After his first glimpse of the detritus that gridlocked the crack in the docking bay doors, he’d checked for an easier way out.

No luck.

The upper levels had been treacherous—sparks flew and shimmered, barely visible wires draped out of the ceiling like deadly vines. Funky, chemical smells hung in the air, making it hard to breathe. Not a great place for exploring when you had no idea where you were going, anyway.

Nope, the docking bay was the closest exit, so he’d returned there. Guess he should have brushed on up Ship blueprints when he’d had a chance, instead of recent events and entity science.

He took a quick break from splintering the tree trunk, removed a glove, and ran his bare fingers along the exterior doors and wall. On one side, the exterior wall was relatively featureless. On the other, there was a door with words he couldn’t read scribbled across it. Hell, maybe it was a garbage chute, though the big flashing light at the top with a depiction of bodies flying into space seemed like a giveaway that it might be an emergency exit. What kind of emergency? It had no handle, no button, and no way to open it.

The prickling in his skin caused by the leviathan, the horrific pressure, increased or decreased depending on where he ventured in Ship. The discomfort was strongest near this door, so he assumed the leviathan was right outside, without as much dirt between them.

Doing whatever it did to Ships. Though, for all he knew, Ship was already dead.

If Ship was alive and screaming, he couldn’t hear it. He couldn’t hear anything. No explosions, no groaning metal, no crackling wires. Occasionally Ship vibrated, as if being struck by comets. Or boulders. Or the leviathan. His ears were completely useless, and his array was gone, scraped out of his head at some point. His physique, aside from the aches and pains of being tossed around, seemed to be intact. The space suit had probably saved his life.

He’d left it on. It might not be tactanium armor, but it was all he had.

Frustrated, conscious of the passage of time, he searched the docking bay to see what was left to bust him out. He didn’t have a blaster band or a multipurp. Couldn’t shoot his way out, though—a laser was as likely to ricochet as it was to do any good. Was there a truck he could smash into the doors? A backhoe? A tunnel digger?

Nothing but a few boxes and abandoned supplies remained, the few things that hadn’t been sucked out of the docking bay when the doors had opened. He didn’t remember anything from the hallways, either, besides broken wires and wreckage.

Gloves back on to protect his hands, he heaved aside a large grey crate trapped by netting. Behind it, a bright yellow crate, vaguely familiar, was wedged between the beam that had thrust through the window and another grey crate.

Where had he seen bright yellow crates before?

That was right—Claire’s quarters. She’d said they were munitions. Bombs. Something the Shipborn had left behind, superfluous in the battle against the leviathan they assumed they’d be facing.

He inspected the yellow crate, conscious of the trembling floor beneath his feet. A low juddering vibrated through him. If he hadn’t gone deaf, would he be hearing something right about now? Ship’s screaming? The groan of overstressed metal about to cave in around him? The hissing of shades?

The bomb crate was about a foot square. He pried at the latch with his gloved fingers, before recognizing the shape of its indention. Fingerprint or tentacle tip lock. The Shipborn tended to favor those. When his fingerprint didn’t work, he retrieved the metal fragment he’d been using to dig at the tree trunk, pressing the sharpest tip against the seam of the crate.

If he guessed wrong and jabbed the bomb with his makeshift crowbar, would it explode?

Just in case, he relocated the bomb crate to the emergency hatch. If it was going to blow him up by accident, it might as well be the most fortuitous accident possible. He also found another spacesuit helmet—one without vomit—and sealed his gloves to the suit.

It had protected him against the leviathan, the void of outer space, and a massive crash landing. Worth a shot.

Adjusting the tip of his makeshift digger against the hinges in the back of the box, he pushed down. Hard. Harder. The digger won.

The hinge canted halfway off, so he yanked it the rest of the way. Superstrength was super handy. A combination of wiggling, shoving, and prying finally nipped off the other hinge and opened the crate.

Resting on his haunches, he inspected his prize. The bomb, or whatever it was, wasn’t very interesting. A tennis ball sized silver cube with the ubiquitous finger-shaped indention was nestled in a soft, foamy substance. Shipborn writing covered a paper inside the crate.

Was this one of those life-sucking bombs that would kill all the living organisms in the vicinity? Or was this an exploding bomb? He really needed this to be an exploding bomb if he was going to blast through Ship’s hull.

Gingerly, he plucked the cube out of the crate. It didn’t start ticking.

So far, so good.

Now what? No sign of wires or remote detonators—just the cube. The left door out of the docking bay led to the part of Ship that had the least dirt, rocks, sparking wires, and cave-ins. If he had the opportunity, that was the way he’d run.

With a shrug, he removed a glove and pushed the indention.

It clicked. The square began to shine. He set it down and ran for the exit as if all the daemons in the world were on his heels.

…

An explosion took out the attackers closest to the back of the leviathan, whether ground or aerial.

Bodies, dirt, rocks—all of it rushed outward, a massive spray of destruction. The concussive boom nearly deafened Claire, several hundred yards back, where she’d been recharging her band.

She tackled a blue Shipborn manning the recharging station, pressing it to the ground behind the bulk of the machine. The masssian wailed as the shockwave blew over them.

“The hell was that?” Claire yelled into her array. “It wasn’t time for bombs.”

She rolled off the masssian, whose tendrils coiled in pain. Noises affected them intensely, and it released an odor that reminded her of antiseptic.

Cleared her sinuses, though. She inhaled, counted to three, and leaped up to see the results of the bomb on the leviathan.

The fucker was just as big, dark, glittery, and evil as before. Tentacles lashed out, a hell of a lot more lethal than the soft strands on a masssian. The beast didn’t seem to have been harmed by the bomb—not like the humanoid bodies she could see sprawled across the rough ground.

But there was one difference.

A cavity had been blasted out of the back of the monster, and she could see into Ship’s innards. Destruction ruled the interior. Smoke poured out of the vessel. Her throat ached at the sight of the wounded corridors, though they’d already given the AI up as a lost cause.

“Report,” Claire demanded over her array. “Was that your doing, Niko?”

Dazed soldiers climbed to their feet around her, some wounded, some stunned. The damage had been concentrated on one side of the trough, and the forces on the other were already resuming battle formation.

Back into the breach. Back to tangle with the leviathan’s lightning-quick tentacles, which could be as thin as a snake or as thick as a sequoia.

Its tentacles became anything, any shape it wanted, but it was solid—the worst of shades and daemons combined. It consumed, and it attacked. Thank God it didn’t seem to be that mobile on the ground. Perhaps the only thing it could do was fly.

Niko’s crackly voice finally responded to Claire’s repeated demands for an update. “Concussive bomb, minor payload. We didn’t set it.”

Claire remained with the masssian until they evaluated the changed terrain. The blast, Niko said, had come from inside Ship—inside, where Adam might be.

Did that mean Adam had set it, or that it had killed him? Already the leviathan was starting to seep into the cavity that had blown itself into existence. A fresh tentacle shot toward the left ridge, and laser beams blasted it from all directions.

“We’re hurting it,” Cullin announced over the main command line. He, Raniya, and the scientists were set up out of tentacle range to analyze the intel and recommend improvements in their assault pattern. “It has more solidity but less bulk. It isn’t the same as it was.”

The masssian Claire had protected dragged itself erect and leaned against the charging station. A soft blue tentacle brushed Claire’s arm. “Claire Lawssson. Movement inssside Ship in the injured area.”

“What?” Claire focused her eyes and picked out something near the bottom that wasn’t sparks, smoke, and collapsing ceilings. A piece of debris popped straight out of the wreckage. It was like something was behind the rubbish, trying to get out.

“If that bomb ripped off one of the tentacles and it’s coming after us like a fucking severed hand, I’m going to be seriously pissed,” she declared over the command line. “Movement in the bottom center quadrant. Anybody else see that?”

“I’m picking it up,” Niko confirmed.

“My team is relocating closer to the wounded,” Sarah announced through the array. Medics started clambering down a ridge. On her order, soldiers with wing packs converged, landing near injured comrades and transporting them to safety. “We can confirm the injury and fatality tally soon. We’ll stay out of tentacle range.”

“Let’s find out what’s moving around in there,” Claire announced. First, though, she’d need to stop the leviathan from closing up on it.

Doubling up her beams, she sizzled the edges of the leviathan where they were trying to encase the gaping hole in Ship. Unlike before, when she was shooting tentacles or the vast bulk of the monster, the edges—perhaps because they were thin—shuddered when she hit.

Others noticed and began laying down fire in the same area.

The closer she walked, the more she could see the leviathan twitch. As if in response, another piece of wreckage from the spot where there might be a severed tentacle flew forward and skidded across the dirt.

She contemplated shooting it. “Do we have an update on the bottom quadrant yet? Is it a piece of tentacle?”

“Not registering anything but entity, ser,” a voice responded.

Claire inched forward, shooting. Five steps. Ten. Should she stop? The blisters on her arms burned like fire. Most of the ground troops halted, checking one another, remaining in a rough line.

A tentacle lashed toward them and smacked a Shipborn soldier to Claire’s right. Not enough time to drain him, but he arced high in the air, shouting with fear.

“Shit,” Claire said. “Fall back.”

Before the soldier kissed the ground, an aerial combatant lunged across the sky and caught him. Silver glinted on the soldier’s wings and arm in the dusty light—was that Hurst? He spiraled toward the location Sarah and her medics were setting up farther down the crude channel.

The ground troops scuttled back twenty feet.

On impulse, Claire redirected her bands to the uncovered, broken section of Ship. Satisfying eruptions of light and sparks flared as she dragged the beams from side to side. The leviathan lashed at several soldiers on the ground, including Claire, but missed.

The leviathan began to glitter along Ship’s backside. It…burbled. Waves undulated beneath its surface. A deep rumble filled the air before another tentacle tested the distance between the leviathan and its tormentors.

Closer. Shit. It had shifted positions. That was new. The leviathan really must not want them destroying the innards of Ship. It hastened to cover the area, wrapping tentacles over it in a giant lattice.

“Niko, have the scientists check the rear, see what’s going on. Something’s up. The leviathan wiggled or some shit, and if it becomes mobile, Sarah and the wounded are down here. Ground team six, seven, eight, aim toward that breach,” she ordered.

Raniya’s voice broke over the comm line. “Don’t shoot there. You’re too close to the matrix. We don’t want that exploding.”

“This section of Ship is near the matrix?” Claire couldn’t tell what area of the vessel it was. It just looked like a cross section of twisted metal and destruction to her.

Raniya spoke again, more animated. “The longer the leviathan has been on the ground, the more dense its structure has become. If it’s protecting the matrix, it may not be finished consuming Ship. Our sensors only read entity, but Ship could still be alive.”

“After this long? There’s no way.” But Claire whipped up her fist to halt the nearby teams, and they ceased fire.

In the brief lull, the edges of the leviathan thinned so much as it attempted to wrap the exposed section of Ship that the back end of the monster became translucent. The lattice of tentacles widened. The area at the bottom where Claire had seen motion ruptured outward.

A figure staggered through the debris of Ship. A humanoid figure in a tattered Shipborn suit used for space walks.

It wrenched off the busted helmet, chest heaving. Golden hair glinted on his head.

Her heart stopped. She couldn’t breathe. But she could yell, by God. “Adam!”

The leviathan had almost closed the final gap, and Adam was going to be imprisoned inside it.

Without thought, Claire sprinted across the uneven ground—straight into a tentacle that flung her into the sky.

…

Claire’s body launched into the air as if shot from a cannon. She was the first thing Adam had seen when he stumbled out of the wreckage—and in seconds, she was going to die.

He’d never make it to her in time. Her body twisted in midair, still rising—she was conscious, trying to position herself to take the fall.