Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 48: The Tin Can (Patreon)

"Hale, Zola, over here!" I barked, dropping to one knee and bracing a hand against the ground to wait out the gust. "Kon, the spatial pockets from both corpses. Just don't damage them."

"Anyone wounded?" Zola asked.

Her voice sounded as though she wished someone were, so she could show she mattered. And she was supposed to have access to our data! Still, I didn't voice my irritation, letting the team answer in a ragged chorus that they were fine.

Just then, the pressure of the dust gust eased, and I monkeyed off towards the shuttle.

The demons' portal ring lay in my path. Hale's shot had most likely already put it out of action, but a double-check never hurt. The most reliable and simplest thing was to cut the ring…

My discs!

Without slowing down, I fired a Cutting Hook at the part of the ring opposite the hole. The silver blade projection sliced clean through it, then detonated. The detonation forced the once-joined metal pieces apart. The inner part next to the hole Hale had burnt cracked, while the outer part bent, acting like a hinge. The newly formed segment didn't break off completely; it froze almost vertically, its severed end pointing at the sky.

Now there was no need to wonder about the ring.

"And collect my discs!" I ordered. "Six of them; they should've scattered around the trap!"

I threw a couple of Chain Punches at the shuttle to charge my shield, then jumped into the hatch.

The emergency lighting flickered a dim red, like an arrhythmic heartbeat. The shuttle lay on its side, so the floor and the ceiling had become walls.

The demons built their shuttles with their horns in mind. With overall dimensions fairly similar to ours, the horns made them taller, so the ceiling, now a wall, was higher than a human one would be, but the seats, which now jutted horizontally from the walls, were almost the same. In one of the upper seats, an armoured body was strapped in.

I got ready to dodge, but the body didn't move. Its arms, legs, and horns hung limply down in the safety harness. Blood dripped steadily from one leg onto the opposite seat.

Still suspecting a trap, I monkeyed closer, grabbed the demon by a horn with my right hand, and held his head with my left. I dematerialised, tore off the horn's metal plating, and while it was still immaterial, pushed that piece of armour into the demon's temple and let it solidify.

Only then did I notice the huge hole in the demon's right side.

Let it be. Better safe than sorry. I touched his chest plate, trying to sense a spatial anomaly beneath it. There wasn't one, so I reached for his hands. The pocket was under the armour, on his left ring finger.

Stripping the armour off his finger the same way I'd done with the horn was risky. I could damage the spatial ring, so I pulled a knife out of my pocket and cut off the finger the good old-fashioned way, then tossed it into my pocket.

The sense of space in my pendant halved. The ring was stuffed with goods. I hoped it wasn't field rations.

I jumped back outside, where Kon was just cutting a finger off the demon they'd hauled out of the trap.

"Your discs, boss," Hale said, showing me two pairs.

"Found another one!" Zola reported, pointing at a spot lit up by her big scanner.

I monkeyed over to Hale, then to where Zola was pointing. The disc was already buried under dust. There was so much dust that the sky above us had vanished. It was as if it had been covered by clouds lit from within by flashes of lightning. Only instead of clouds, there was rust-coloured murk, and the 'lightning' was red and yellow.

The horizon had dissolved too, and visibility had dropped to fifty metres. The ground beneath our feet now trembled constantly, like a frightened animal. The tremors overlapped, and I could no longer tell where one ended and the next began. The wind was just as bad. It blew, gusted, and changed direction, though not strongly enough to knock anyone off their feet.

I opened the tactical map of our zone.

When it wasn't freezing, new markers were pouring in by the hundred; they blinked, vanished, reappeared, and overlapped one another. Trajectories, estimated impact times, all of it tangled into one solid web.

At the bottom of the map, a red message flashed: Detection system overload. Data may be incomplete.

May be. Right.

The part of the orbital meat grinder I'd watched had lasted twenty minutes, no more. It felt like an eternity had passed since then, but if the clock was to be believed, it had been less than half an hour. Half an hour, and we were only now entering the peak of the 'rain'. Right now, Verdis was being showered with the wreckage of whatever had been closer and moving faster. Everything that had scattered at lower speeds or along wider arcs hadn't arrived yet. And until it did, the rain wouldn't let up. Which meant the peak would last another half-hour to an hour. Then it would start to taper off, but it wouldn't stop for several days, maybe weeks.

We could carry on, but now we'd be stumbling blindly across the wasteland, in the dust, under a rain of debris that neither we nor the system could see. And any fireball could land right on our heads, and we'd only find out from the shockwave.

We could evacuate, but then the zone would be left unwatched. If the next shuttle landed successfully, they could set up a ring, if they survived this chaos.

I could order Voss to dig us in and build a temporary shelter, but if an enemy destroyer landed on us, no pit would save us.

The chance was small, of course, but not zero.

The next dirty orange smear that cut through the rust-coloured murk above the horizon helped me decide. It was too close and too fast.

"Get down!" I barked, just as the ground violently threw me off like a trampoline.

Right after the jolt, the sound and the blast wave arrived together, sending us rolling across the ground like tumbleweeds. Metal screeched on every side. Something small drummed against my armour, and something bigger hit my shoulder. The dust and debris were so thick that the protective formations didn't trigger.

When everything had died down, even the demon shuttle was no longer on its side. The wave had flipped it belly up. Only Voss had stayed where he was, rooted to the ground by his hands and feet.

Enough.

"Evacuation!" I said, getting up.

To hell with my last disc, to hell with these demons and their portals. The broken portal, by the way, had been swept away by the wave too…

We'd focused on the shuttle, because it had clearly been piloted, but it had separated from the wreck that had crumpled like a tin can half a kilometre away. There had been survivors on board who'd got into the shuttle… Could anyone else have been left behind? Could anyone have survived?

We hadn't even scanned it.

"Quick scan of that tin can, then we evacuate!" I ordered, pulling my big scanner out of my spatial pocket.

The tin can actually had the fairly recognisable, if heavily flattened, shape of a spaceship. The layers of hull plating had crumpled into folds and split into ragged cracks, like wet paper.

We had to get back on our boards and spread out in an arc to scan. We immediately picked up large 'deposits' of biomass. Both smeared and with proper outlines.

"I can see a big lake of biomass… There are bodies in it!" Zola declared confidently.

"How many?" I asked.

"Five," Zola said. "I'm not seeing any movement…" she added, leaving the decision to me.

"No temperature incompatible with life?" I asked hopefully.

"I'm not picking up any clear signs of life, but that's all I can say," she said, refusing to make my job easier.

"Fuck!" I couldn't help myself. Maybe that wasn't the best behaviour for a leader, but I was angry. I wanted to get out from under the 'rain'. "Keep scanning! Hale, Kon, get us a way in."

"Boss, this isn't personal armour, it's a bloody warship!" Hale reminded me.

"Then we'd better start cutting now, before another one like it lands on top."

"That would settle the question of what's underneath," Mardal joked.

Was the lunatic actually enjoying this?

"Mardal, pair up with Kon and soften the metal for her. Widen the existing cracks!" I ordered. "Start here," I said, pointing at a crack several metres long.

A ship wasn't a collapsed building that could keep falling apart under our feet or on our heads. A heavy metal structure had frozen in this deformed state, and it would take far more force to damage it further. Of course, something like that could still come down on top of us, but it was safer than hanging around outside, where smaller pieces of debris could get us. So I wanted to shelter inside for a while. Only until we'd dealt with the 'biomass'.

Unfortunately, the crack was no wider than a palm, so cutting through took a few minutes, and during that time the 'rain' turned into a hellish storm. None of my people said so, but the constant gusts made it hard for the team to stay steady on their boards and on the sloping metal of the wreck.

Once Kon finished the outer hull, the internal bulkheads came more easily, and I ordered everyone to take cover inside.

First, we found ourselves in a corridor crushed into a sharp diamond shape in cross-section. Avoiding the central beams, we cut our way into some technical station, then a new corridor, and only from there into our target. It had been a relatively large compartment before it was flattened.

There were far more than five bodies. Five of them were in armour and had kept their shape; the rest had been turned into mince, crushed, scattered, and smeared across the walls, but all of that 'lake of biomass', as Zola had called it earlier, had drained down to the lowest point of the room after first coating the walls in blood.

The centrepiece of the compartment was a portal. It had been flattened too. The ceiling had pressed down on the ring and bent it into an oval, cracking its arcs. Given its shape, the portal didn't need finishing off.

The evacuation had clearly not gone to plan.

"Zola, check the vital signs of the armoured ones. Mardal, scan the compartment for pockets," I ordered, letting my own senses spread out and scanning the compartment for spatial distortions.

There was more than one distortion, but none of them were clean; they were more like residue. Besides that, the biomass gave off more than one kind of qi. Clearly some of the pockets hadn't held and had fallen apart. Still, the clearest echo of Space I sensed came from the demonic portal's batteries. They were alive.

"Hale, with me," I ordered.

The portal stood on a raised platform, so we could lay our evac portal on it, but without anchoring it would roll off into the lake of flesh, so I made Hale weld it to the platform while I set up an adapter from the demonic batteries to turn the portal from single-use emergency into reusable. We'd be able to come back to this exact point later.

"Um…" Mardal said uncertainly, drawing my attention, and pointed at the lake of meat and guts. "I've found a pocket…"

"Good, pick it up," I ordered.

"I have to get in there?" Mardal asked, with unexpected squeamishness.

"I can," Kon said for him. "We still have the armoured ones to cut up."

"We're not cutting them up," I said. "We're taking them with us. Zola, they're dead, aren't they?"

"You won't believe it," she said. "One of them seems to be alive."

We all tensed.

"But he's actively dying."

I nodded and went back to work.

"Keep an eye on him.

"I'm sure command will have plenty of material to study without our contribution, but I don't want to evacuate empty-handed. Nor do I want to hand everything over. So we'll drop the half-alive one at the prisoner address, and take the dead ones with us as they are. The earlier ones, and any pockets you find in this mess, we keep for ourselves. We'll split them later, agreed?

"Oh, and I definitely sense that several pockets fell apart during the crash, so there might be other interesting bits in this mess, like materials and weapons, if they survived."

That gave Mardal a bit more enthusiasm. He sighed and started climbing into the 'lake', but Kon beat him to it.