Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 46: The Rain (Patreon)

Among the dozens of fiery streaks slashing diagonally across the sky, only one had no tail. It simply grew, swelling with white heat at its very centre and shedding orange tatters at its edges.

"Everyone see it?" I asked, checking the precise trajectory in my interface against the data from command.

A ragged chorus answered me.

"We move one kilometre south-east, keep low, don't bunch up," I said, setting the pace and direction.

The fireball took on clearer shapes. Inside the flames was something elongated and irregular, with sharp angles. It had no single axis and tumbled chaotically, flinging red-hot chunks in every direction.

While I was tracking it, I only noticed at the last moment a smaller piece of metal that shot like a bullet a few centimetres past the nose of my jetboard. That could have been embarrassing.

I didn't bother reminding the team to watch out for the small stuff. The fireball had visibly shrunk, trading fire for smoke, which meant impact was close.

"Down!" I commanded, and we all dropped to the ground as one and stowed our boards, while Voss raised a small, slanted mound of earth that we could all shelter behind, hunched on all fours.

The ground shuddered under my palms before I heard the explosion.

Then it hit my ears, dull and heavy, as though someone had dropped a mountain. Voss's mound trembled, and grit trickled down its crest. A wave of hot dust rolled over our heads right after, full of small fragments that whistled through the air like bullets.

The sky above us was so choked with dust that the world sank into twilight, and even the glow of the burning debris barely forced its way down to the surface.

I got up, and the rest of the team followed without waiting for an order.

"Boards," I said. "We fly low, in a line, and don't lose sight of the ground or each other."

For the first few hundred metres, visibility was extremely limited; after that, things got, if not brighter, then at least sharper. A dense cloud of dust surrounded us, carried outward from the crater by the blast wave and the heat.

The crater turned out not to be gigantic, but respectable: ten metres deep and five times that across, its slopes covered in grey, molten streaks. At its centre lay a dull red mass of metal. The heat was spread unevenly through it, as though different parts took it differently. It had obviously once been part of a ship, but now the layers of composite alloys had fused, baked, and flattened on impact like overcooked pasta on a plate.

"Well," Mardal said cheerfully, hovering on his jetboard over the edge of the crater, "I'll bet a hundred we won't find any survivors."

I agreed, but we still had to tick the box.

"We scan," I told him. "Voss, cover."

This time, instead of raising a mound, Voss dug a pit beyond the crater's edge, and the team jumped down.

Mardal and I took out our scanners, big things that looked like oversized cartoon pistols, and circled the mass, pointing their flared muzzles at the metal.

"There's biomass inside," Zola said, reading the scanner data.

"Living biomass?" I asked warily.

"No," she replied uncertainly. "Living biomass can't be at such a high temperature. The density's too high, and the shape is… undefined.

"But there's a lot of it. Enough for several bodies at least, maybe a dozen. In the centre, it looks like the density is lower.

"I'm picking up spatial displacements. Most likely pockets."

"Pockets that survived a crash like that?" I asked, doubtful.

Pockets that had survived that kind of catastrophe couldn't be cheap mass-market junk. Durability meant quality, which meant there could be valuable stuff inside too: armour with formations, weapons, elixirs, and materials…

Of course, the pockets might be empty. The demons might have stocked them to the brim once they got here, but even on their own, they were worth something.

Greed stirred inside me.

"The metal's still hot," Voss hinted, logically.

Hot and pliable. In an hour or two, it would cool, and then cutting would get harder.

"Kon!" I called the swordswoman.

She eagerly jumped out from behind cover and approached the fused heap with her sword at the ready. The rest of the team followed her.

"Where exactly do I need to cut through?"

I'd already opened my mouth to hand the initiative over to Zola when my interface notified me of new objects appearing in our zone of responsibility. One had a green marker and was labelled an escape pod.

A standard pod from our fleet, for rank-and-file and technical personnel. It held ten people. Because the sky was oversaturated with objects, the telemetry came through in fragments, but the pod itself was braking normally. Its estimated landing point lay two and a half kilometres to the east, touchdown in a minute and a bit. The 'bit' kept melting away, but as the object slowed and the telemetry jerked, the system kept tacking it back on.

After fifty-nine seconds, it came out as 1 min 03 s again.

The second object was worse, but more predictable. It was definitely bigger and was falling uncontrolled. It wasn't braking; its impact point was twice as far away, almost at the edge of our zone, with impact in about two minutes.

If the pod kept braking, the gap between their landings would be negligible.

Of course, I could hope that everyone in there would be dead too, but the wormhole was now under demon control. All it would take was one surviving horned bastard with a portal in his pocket, one quiet corner on the surface of Verdis or Earth, and it wouldn't be beaten-up demons crawling through from the other side anymore, but elite assault troops. Maybe nobody living was even needed, just one intact portal.

The urge to grab some loot hadn't gone anywhere, but the battle wouldn't wait. Everyone's survival was at stake. No trophy was worth lives. I placed a marker on the map in my interface and dropped my jetboard at my feet.

"Time's up. Next target…"

For a moment, I considered splitting the team. Zola and Kon to the pod: a medic and a cutting tool, just in case. Me, Hale, Mardal, and Voss to the unidentified object.

"…the escape pod," I decided.

The pod was coming down closer, and even if it kept braking, we wouldn't have to sit out the impact.

The pod, then the unidentified object.

We were in position before the pod landed and the other object hit.

A grey, angular droplet the size of a delivery van descended slowly through the dusty haze, a barely visible, shimmering fan of braking formations spread above and below it. The formations quivered and glitched, so the droplet swayed and lurched, but it landed reasonably well, barely tilting.

The hatch on the side of the pod clicked open and fell to the ground as a ramp. Two soldiers in standard blue fleet armour leapt out, ready for a fight. One held his sword; the other raised his palms.

"Friendly!" I barked, and Monkeyed to the right, away from the golden palm projection flying at my face. "Stand down! We're here to evacuate you!"

"Sorry, sir, my mistake. It's the colour, sir," he gabbled, pointing at my armour.

They were used to blue in the fleet. Anything that wasn't blue was hostile.

"Is everyone in one piece?" I asked, ignoring his blunder.

"No, sir," the same fleet soldier replied.

"Don't swat the medic!" I ordered sternly. "Zola, you're up. Voss, a wall," I requested, watching a wreck roughly one and a half times bigger than the previous one closing in on the horizon.

As Voss raised a rampart behind the pod, another pair of battered, singed soldiers in combat armour came out. A pair of technicians in light armoured suits carried out an unconscious, heavily armoured soldier with a foam-sealed stump in place of his right arm.

"Everyone sit down!" Zola ordered, in a voice that made even me want to sit. Still, I had to correct her command. The second object had hit the surface.

"Incoming! Everyone lie down!"

My team obeyed without a word. Only one of the technicians, clearly shell-shocked, hesitated, and the shockwave of dust leapt over the fresh rampart, rocked the pod, and knocked the technician flat, adding to his concussion.

The whole business with the dust and darkness repeated itself.

We waited out the blast, pressed to the ground. Then we started getting up.

Zola asked for help at the pod, and I sent Kon over, but nothing needed cutting. Two bodies needed carrying out. Both without armour: one missing its legs, the other baked into a crust where the jumpsuit's synthetic material and skin had fused.

This lot had clearly been through their own hell in orbit.

The shell-shocked technician got to his feet. "Bob!" he called, and tried to climb back into the pod, but Zola caught his arm.

"Bob didn't make it," she said.

"Bob? No! Bob?!" The technician tried to break free, but Zola pulled an injector from her spatial pocket and jabbed a dose of sedative into his neck.

The technician dropped to one knee, then slumped face first into the dust.

"Get me a mass scan," Zola ordered.

Mardal and I took out our scanners and swept them over the rescued.

Zola checked the data in her interface.

"You, you, and you," she said, pointing at two sets of shiny armour and one sooty one. "You're fine."

"I'm OK!" another sooty one put in.

"Concussion, two broken ribs, and internal bleeding!" Zola barked at him, already emptying disposable injectors into the other wounded.

"Kon, get the shell off this one for me," she asked, pointing at the one-armed soldier in armour. "Voss, a light shock to the heart for this lady," she said, pointing at the charred figure who now looked grotesquely gender-neutral.

Kon cut the armour away, and Voss delivered a jolt that made the body twitch. Zola gave them both injections, and then, pulling out two portable scanners, scanned both bodies at once, one in each hand. The work was clearly backed by a boost from her mental techniques and split attention.

"Dead," she stated of the one-armed man, even though he was in better shape than the burnt one.

"Can you handle it on your own?" I asked. "We need to check that wreck."

"Almost done," Zola said flatly. "Get the portals ready."

I took out mine and told Hale to get out the spare.

"I'll dial the hospital; you dial the evac point. The ones in one piece go to evac," I explained to the trio Zola had singled out first. "No dawdling."

"Dead," Zola stated of the burnt person.

And so we had three uninjured, four wounded split between two addresses, and my interface was already warning me about two more unidentified objects crashing to the surface.

"Time! Pick them up!" I scooped up the nearest wounded man myself. He tried to object, but I waited for my people to do the same and come over to the ring I'd thrown on the ground.

I activated my portal without looking to see how Hale was managing the uninjured soldiers. The black film of the passage stretched out before me on a technical platform, like a large maintenance hole, and I tipped my wounded man into it like a sack of rubbish.

Forty-nine seconds no longer seemed like much time.

As soon as all four had vanished into the film, I shut the portal down to save time. Hale, with the healthy soldiers, took a whole second longer.

"Save time!" I barked at her, displeased, scooped the portal into my pocket, dropped my jetboard at my feet, and rose into the air. "Catch up!"

One way or another, I'd soon have to split the team to be everywhere at once. So…

"Hale's in charge! Proceed to the next calculated impact site. I'll check this impact myself," I ordered, and removed the board from under my feet.

God's Stroll combined with the Mad Monkey of the East was faster than a jetboard. Nobody in my team, not even Voss, could match that speed. I left them behind in an instant.