Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 47: Fallout (Patreon)

God's Stroll had been made for grandeur, for a stride beneath which space itself obediently bends, but in this chaos the warped space kept catching red-hot metal debris that whined past me like jet-powered mosquitoes. And I swatted them away like mosquitoes too. Because of the distortion around me, my protective formations didn't always recognise that some projectile was hurtling towards me.

The sky over Verdis was slashed with smoky scars. They stretched diagonally from the horizon down to the surface, vanishing above it into dust clouds. In the thin air, the smoke trails didn't disperse, but hung there like smears of dirty paint on glass. Where the sun broke through them, the smoke glowed rust-red, while the dust clouds kicked up by the crashes and impacts took on a sickly, coppery tint. Columns of smoke rose on every side, in every neighbouring zone of responsibility. But I had my own to worry about.

The first 'meteorite' had left one such column, but we'd already checked it. I was hurrying to the second. The dust around it hadn't had time to settle yet. It hung in the air like a heavy grey curtain, and visibility inside dropped to a few dozen metres. I slowed down, abandoned the Stroll for the Monkey, and moved on more carefully.

My interface gave a short beep, warning me of a radiation hazard. I shot through the cloud and entered the zone of a gigantic crater, visually clear, though still shadowed by the cloud above.

This time the crater was different. Not a bowl, but a long, torn furrow. The broken ship, or part of it, had struck the wasteland at an angle and ploughed across it for several hundred metres, falling apart as it went and scattering its innards in a wide fan.

The roentgens climbed as I approached. This time the radiation hadn't come down from above as a wave; it was coming off the wreckage. The wreckage also partly lit up everything around it. The worst-preserved and most scattered side of what had once been a spaceship glowed with radioactive heat.

It looked as though that side had taken a spike torpedo, or a warp bug, though I couldn't sense any spatial distortions. Maybe I'd have to get closer to tell, but I didn't much want to, despite the fourth stage's resilience and the fact that my Federation armour had better radiation protection than anything made on and above Earth.

It was safe to assume nobody had survived here either, but I didn't want to leave anything to chance.

All it would take was one surviving portal in the more or less intact part.

The ship hadn't baked into a solid lump like that first chunk. Its frame and shields had proved sturdier, or the impact would have landed differently. It had split like a pumpkin: the hot part into tiny shards, while the cold part had cracked along its seams, at the joins between sections, but was still holding together as one piece.

Plenty of theoretical ways in, but I wasn't in any hurry to climb inside. If anyone in there was alive, they ought to have an extremely strong desire to get out of that radioactive trap. I wasn't Zola, of course, but I could read data on the movement of living matter, so I took out my scanner pistol and my jetboard. Jerky jumps could smear the data.

The board carried me smoothly, without jolts, but now I had an instinctive reluctance to shove irradiated items back into my spatial pocket. In theory, radiation leakage inside a pocket ought to be minimal and shouldn't affect the other things stored there. Real heat was more dangerous, but radiation still frightened me.

And it interfered with the scanner. For a few seconds, it showed nothing but a mush of heat spots and echoes, as though the whole wreck were alive. Then the picture began to clear: the frame, the decks, the hollows of compartments, a jumble of debris, and biomass. It showed up on the feed as green patches scattered through the compartments with no pattern at all, and in no shapes that matched humanoid bodies.

The biomass wasn't moving and, as Zola would say, was at a temperature and form incompatible with life.

I made a full circle around the crash site, then did it again, noting the smaller patches of biomass closer to the red-hot section. One of those patches turned out to be a dark, twisted lump of metal stuffed with God-knows-what…

It was the bloated torso of demonic armour, without a head, arms, or legs. The filling, biomass mixed with metals and qi-saturated substances, had burst it from within. Two blackened blades jutted from the stomach, points first. In that position, their hilts would have to be inside.

I actually flinched when I realised what had happened.

This demon had had a bad spatial pocket. When it gave way, the folded space had unfolded, and things had spilt out of the pendant, but inside the armour. Rations, elixirs, and spare weapons had cleared room for themselves by shoving the body aside. The internal pressure had torn off the head and limbs.

If he'd been alive, it would have been a horrific death, but I suspected he'd already been dead by then.

There you have it, the less obvious advantage of a ring pocket. If it bursts, you only lose a finger. Then again, rings were less durable than pendants.

"Boss," Hale's ragged voice, barely getting through the radiation interference, pulled me out of my thoughts. "We're at the point.

"Voss has raised cover; we're ready for impact."

I tilted the board almost vertically upwards and squeezed maximum power out of the engines, pulling away from the irradiated junk. I needed to prepare for the next shockwave too, but I didn't want to hug the ground next to radioactive metal.

"Boss!" Hale repeated, surprised. "An object has separated from the wreck, and it's breaking!"

I glanced at the command menu. The system couldn't see this data. Evidently it was something Hale and the team were watching with their own eyes.

"Is there a beacon?" I asked, already knowing the answer. If it had been one of ours, the system would have picked up the signal unless their signalling was in as much of a mess as their evacuation.

"It's not a pod. It's some shuttle. Doesn't look like ours."

I turned the board towards where the next chunk of metal would come down. It was almost the same size as the one I'd just been examining. I didn't bother torturing the engines, threw the board into my pocket, and switched to the Stroll.

"Keep an eye on it. If it lands and anyone climbs out, don't let them deploy anything. Friend or foe, doesn't matter! The moment you see any tech even remotely like a portal, take it out. The tech I mean."

"Understood!"

"I'm on my way."

Space bent springily beneath my foot, and I added the Monkey's ragged rhythm to it, tearing forward along a crooked trajectory.

I couldn't see the shuttle; too much fire, dust, and flying debris filled the air. But I could see the main object coming down. A chunk of an enemy ship, a fireball that had already faded and traded flame for smoke, trailing a thick black plume behind it. Because of its sheer size, it touched down on the wasteland almost slowly. But it threw up a fountain of grey dust, and the object drowned in it, crumpling like a tin can under a boot.

A wave of dust, expanding aggressively, rolled forward straight at me.

I took one last step with the Monkey, without the Stroll, then braced both feet against the air in front of me and sprang back, matching my movement to the shockwave.

A dull, muffled roar pressed down on my chest. Verdis's thin air ate half its force, but what was left hit me like an open palm. A dense, hot wind caught me up and carried me along, together with chunks of red-hot metal that had overtaken the dust cloud.

I monkeyed forward, into the cloud. It shut the world away from me, leaving only grey noise beyond my helmet visor and the scratch of sand against my armour. I kept monkeying until the cloud had swept past and thinned by half. First, dirty rust-red light showed through, then the outline of the ground beneath my feet, and I added God's Stroll to the mix to pop out almost at the centre of the disaster, above a big heap of scrap metal.

There was no radiation warning. And this chunk of metal wasn't glowing either, but farther off to the left, a bright red beam struck. Almost at the same moment, Hale reported, "Fucking demons, boss!"

I tore off towards where the beam had struck. It was outside the crater. A red shuttle with short, spiked wings lay on its side. The landing clearly hadn't gone to plan and, judging by how close it was to the crater, the blast wave had caused it.

Next to the open hatch, a thick portable portal ring was smoking. At the spot where the thickest smoke was pouring out, one point was glowing red-hot, burnt clean through by Hale's sniper shot.

But now the demons knew about my team, and the fight had already begun.

There were two of them. At least, two that I could see from the air.

The first, with a straight sword, stood knee-deep in sand that dragged him under: Voss's work, as he darted around, cowered in lightning.

The second was fending off Kon and Mardal at once with a curved sword. Purple protective formations flickered and blazed under Kon’s spikes and Mardal’s palm projections.

Both demons wore red armour and had enormously thick, metal-cowered horns.

I activated my mental techniques and released six standard discs into the air.

"Hale, beam at the knee of the one in the trap. Voss, get ready to bury him."

Hale fired at the knee and hit a purple formation, but the attack distracted the demon and made him jerk to the right. All my discs slammed into his formations, then into his left horn, one after another, knocking him onto his side, where the sand eagerly swallowed him.

The other demon tried to save his comrade. He thrust his sword forward and pulled himself along with telekinesis, meaning to grab his partner with his free hand and drag him out of the trap.

His formations held up surprisingly well against palms and spikes, but with his focus on the ground, he forgot about the sky. The moment he reached the sand trap, I brought two powerful Hooks down on him, cutting off his dash technique and slamming him into the trap on top of his comrade.

"Kon, ready your Blade ultimate. Mardal, circle the trap, one hundred and eighty."

"I can't hold both!" Voss wheezed with strain. His lightning was circling the trap noticeably slower now.

"Don't hold the top one!" I ordered, and dropped to the ground.

Voss let go, and the upper demon sprang into the air, pushing off from the partner he'd been trying to rescue a moment before. Instead, he trampled him deeper.

Mardal and I dumped a pile of quick projections on the airborne demon, purely to distract him.

"Ready!" Kon said, and I monkeyed towards the demon as he fell to the ground outside the trap.

He met me with a furious sword stroke, but I covered myself with a shield, knocked his next swing aside with a Cutting Hook, and kicked him straight at Kon, adding the Monkey's force to the kick.

Kon brought her sword down diagonally, from top to bottom. It went through half of his purple formations and stuck at the level of the demon's heart.

Kon kicked him away, freeing her sword, and when he fell, she stepped on his back and drove the sword into his neck, severing the spine.

"Repeat," Voss asked, strained, and the sand trap hardened into a single chunk of dirty quartz, but a hollow appeared in it, where a piece of armour was visible. The solid trap immediately began to crack, as the demon had no wish to remain a prisoner. "Faster!"

Kon leapt over, dropped to her knees, and drove her sword into the hollow so deep that even the hilt almost disappeared.

The trap stopped cracking.

"Phew!" Voss exhaled. "That wasn't easy."

As he spoke, the ground shook, and another gust of wind came from the right, followed by the thunder of another large object crashing down.

"Nothing's over yet!" I said.