Chapter Seventy-Eight - M21

“Now that we’ve seen everything these aliens can throw at us, I’m certain our brave soldiers can handle them!”

--General Legstronger, USMC, 2026.

***

“Wait, there’s another bunch of them here,” Gomorrah said.

I sighted down the length of my Icarus, then nodded. “Burn away.”

We were some hundred metres down that last tunnel, and I was beginning to suspect that the hive was bigger than I’d thought. Sure, there were plenty of dead plants in that last big room, but the tunnel had dozens of roots crossing the floor, some of them splitting off and rejoining others seemingly at random.

We kept finding dead bodies at first, burnt Antithesis, but that stopped after a while.

The marks across the floor, as if bodies had been dragged off, weren’t reassuring at all.

Gomorrah stepped up to a crack in the wall, one the roots were using to hang on and where a bunch of small seed-pods were starting to grow. The aliens within weren’t any bigger than a fetus and they wouldn’t get any bigger as Gomorrah sprayed them with a shower of liquid fire. “That’s that,” she said.

I nodded. “Let’s keep moving,” I said.

A couple of my mecha cats leapt ahead, scouting out the mine before we reached it, in case some Model Nine was pretending to be a rock or some piece of root or something.

“The roots are getting thicker,” Gomorrah said.

I looked at them, then nodded. They’d started off no thicker than my wrist. Now they were around thigh-sized. “Yeah. I think maybe that hive I burned wasn’t the main thing after all.”

“If it wasn’t, then the Antithesis learned how to excavate. The maps show that most of the rest of the mine is all tight passages. Though... there is an intersection coming up—should be a bit wider.”

“Great,” I said.

“It looks like Cause Player is down one of the other tunnels; a good distance away, but still coming closer. If he’s killing everything there, then we’ll only have a very short mineshaft left to explore, and it ends after about fifty metres.”

So, that was it. If we cleared out this last bit of tunnel, assuming we didn’t miss anything, then everything in the mine would be cleared.

One of the mecha cats rumbled, a low growl that had my hackles rising and my breath catching. I squinted ahead, and my sight zoomed in on... something.

The last intersection was wide enough to let one of the mining trucks turn without too much trouble, and they were big trucks.

Something was filling the intersection almost entirely, and it wasn’t until we were a little closer that I realized that it was another hive, but one that was different.

Instead of a sort of sparse jungle with dozens of wide trees rising up and holding onto seed pods, this one was more like a massive lump on the ground. One covered in flowers, with a few thicker roots poking out of it that seemed to be gestating new models even as we approached, but still, just a big lump.

“Funky,” I said.

“Should we burn it?” Gomorrah asked.

“What kind of question is that?” I asked.

“Well, not burning it might make it easier to check out the last tunnel.”

That was a fair point. We hadn’t stopped walking, and were within a dozen metres of the edge of the room when our conversation was interrupted.

“Careful.”

I stopped dead, hands tightening over my Icarus and eyes scanning everything, ceiling included. “What is it?” I asked. Myalis rarely warned me about stuff. She was more of a ‘let her figure it out when it hurts her’ kind of person.

“That’s the egg incubator for a Model Twenty-One.”

It felt as if my mouth went dry all of a sudden. “The bigger the number, the more fucky the alien, right?”

“As a general rule, yes. Model Twenty-Ones are a stealth model.”

“How big are we talking about here?” I asked. I was scanning the rocks and ground, looking for anything that stood out, anything that could be a Model Nine but worse.

Approximately two metres long, one tall. Six legged, with each limb having a gripping hand. They have segmented plates over their body that are made of a heavy iron-rich compound. Six hearts, two brains. Relatively heavy, but also very fast. Favours close-quarters combat.”

“Cat,” Gomorrah said. Something in her tone had me looking out the same way she was.

I couldn’t see it at first. It was just a small haze in the air, barely visibly against the rest. Maybe in full daylight, when I wasn’t looking through the colour-shifted night vision of my mask.

As it was, I only saw the thing when it started charging at us. “Shit!” I screamed as I raised my Icarus. I fired at it, then cursed again when the first shots went wide and exploded in the plants and muck behind what had to be the Model Twenty-One.

Gomorrah set her legs and sprayed a jet of fire ahead of us, only to have to juke it to the side as the alien jumped to the wall, then it faded from there and we both stopped firing.

“Where is it?” I asked.

I had seen it hit the wall; there were some marks left from the impact, and then, nothing. “Teleport?”

“Model Twenty-Ones cannot teleport.”

“That’s some worrying fucking phrasing there, Myalis,” I hissed.

“Neither of you are ready to face off against any Antithesis model above twenty. I would suggest a retreat, but the Model Twenty-One is aware of you. It seems small, recently-birthed. It will be relatively weak.”

“Can they bur--”

I felt something shift behind me, and I spun just in time to see Gomorrah being flung back, bending almost double in mid-air as she flew. Her flamethrower hovered in the air for a moment, partially distorted before something crushed it as if it was little more than a soda can.

I spun while firing and backed up.

I only just saw the blur of a large limb swiping out at me and batting my gun aside. A claw scraped across my cybernetic arm.

Stumbling back, I tried to make room to bring my launcher up. Being in the AOE be damned, I wanted the fucker dead. He’d hurt Gomorrah!

Another swipe, and this time my Icarus was launched across the tunnel.

I saw dark eyes. Bored, placid eyes, like a cow in one of those anti-vegan commercials, not the eyes of a predator trying to kill me—not that it mattered at all.

It launched itself at me, mouth wide and filled with serrated teeth.

Then one of my mecha cats chomped down over its neck and dragged it aside, enough that I was only tossed aside when it struck out with one of its rear limbs.

I landed in a roll and got back to my feet. All three mecha cats were on it, two of them chomping and clawing at the monster even as they fired into it from point blank. The third was further back, guns rattling and poking little holes into the Model Twenty-One’s sides that didn’t seem to be nearly as deep as I wanted.

Climbing to one knee, I let my back-mounted guns deploy even as I turned my invisibility back on. Leaving it off to make Gomorrah comfortable had been something of a mistake.

My railgun fired.

I stared, flummoxed, as the ceiling exploded. There was a vague slice cut into the air, tracing the path the round had taken. It struck the alien on one of its broad shoulder plates, then went up and hit the ceiling where stone was crumbling down.

The fucker was tough enough to make railgun rounds bounce?

The Model Twenty-One grabbed one of my mecha from off of its shoulder and threw it to the ground, then it pinned the mech down with a clawed hand, grabbed it by the middle with its jaw, and pulled.

I winced as the mecha was torn in half. Its guns never stopped firing into the monster, not until it stomped them down.

Two sputtering hoses of fire hissed through the air and covered the Model Twenty-One from top to bottom. “That... that hurt,” Gomorrah said.

I laughed, relieved, but I had to focus.

The Model turned towards Gomorrah, evidently pissed, and its muscles bunched to jump.

I yanked my Claw out, aimed at its rear leg, and fired.

The Model Twenty-One launched itself at Gomorrah, but it was a weak, abortive jump, and the nun rolled aside.

It was starting to look worse for wear, and I was more than pleased to help it along, firing every last round from my Claw into its flank.

Its skin peeled off, and it shook itself, moulting in the space of a few seconds and revealing skin so dark it was hard to tell where the monster ended and the tunnel behind started.

I swore.

I didn’t know what kind of bullshit this monster in particular was up to, but in my book, anything that had been shot that much should have lain down and died already.

“Myalis, I need a bomb.”

***