Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 51: After the Rain (Patreon)

Sergeant Strom poured the last of the bourbon into the cups. That bottle would have been too little for six mortals in good physical shape, let alone for cultivators. Still, we had to finish it quickly. Zola's interface and mine pinged at the same moment with urgent messages.

I knocked back my last portion while already getting up from my chair.

"We've been called in," I explained, activating the map marker.

"Good luck!" the boarders wished us.

"Be safe!" Bao said.

"See you around," I said, aware that it was a rather optimistic claim.

Zola and I reached the right portal at the same time as Mardal and Voss. Kon and Hale were less than a minute behind.

More people were in the portal hall overall. When we arrived, traffic was sparse and one-way: people stepping out of the portals. They were still coming through, more of them than before, but now groups in full combat gear were standing by several of the platforms. Technicians in greenish-yellow overalls ran between them with tablets and containers on antigrav trolleys.

The biggest crowd had gathered by our platform, number eleven. About fifty people, and not all of them in armour. Some wore combat suits, while others had the baggy greenish-yellow overalls of the technicians rather than bright green close-fitting combat jumpsuits.

I didn't recognise any of the technicians, but several of the fighters in combat suits, and one girl with her visor up, were from Black Lotus. I'd even fought one of them in the arena.

"Hi, Okoro!" I waved cheerfully.

"Well, look who it is!" he replied, holding out his hand.

"All the group leaders are here, so let's begin," a lieutenant in an immaculately pressed Ground Forces uniform cut short any further pleasantries.

He reeked of headquarters, and my interface showed he was only at the second stage, not much use in a fight. I immediately remembered the lieutenant I'd clashed with on Tarassa, though this one wasn't as insolent.

"I know you've all just come back from Verdis, but unfortunately there'll be no rest. The peak of the fall on Verdis has passed. Debris is still coming down, but the intensity has dropped roughly sixfold and keeps falling. There'll still be large objects. For a few hours at least, some for up to a few days. But you won't see anything like what you saw at the peak."

While he spoke, one of the technicians wheeled over a portable board. A black one: it worked as a screen for the information that had just landed in our interfaces. The lieutenant entered a command on his personal tablet, and the board displayed an image of Verdis with small white dots hanging above it, scattered across the orbit rather unevenly.

"This is what's left of our surveillance system above Verdis. Before the battle, a network of 380 low-orbit satellites was operating here. Now seventy are working."

A murmur ran through the groups.

"The dust hasn't fully settled yet, and we have large gaps in our mapping. We're certain that at least two enemy shuttles landed successfully. Teams of fifth-stage cultivators led by sixth-stage ones are already working those coordinates. We're more interested in what's escaped our notice."

He gave us a few seconds to take that in.

"What we're doing about it…" the lieutenant said, and the silhouettes of three clumsy transports appeared above Verdis's orbit. "We're ready to deploy replacement satellites, but the situation in the moon's orbit is still too complicated to navigate so that it won't be quick. The first batch will come online in roughly a few hours — full coverage in a day.

"Orbit is a rubbish tip right now. The fleet is working on disposing of the large debris, but that only means there'll be more small debris. Some of the new satellites will be lost in the very first hours. That's exactly why we can't wait for them to start working."

He swiped across his tablet again, and the board-screen showed a spherical drone with several lenses moving beneath the transparent plastic of its outer shell.

"While the satellites are getting into orbit, we're looking from below. Command has decided to fill the void with autonomous drones. They're cheap and not very manoeuvrable, but they can link up into a single network and act as relays.

"As of now, it's mainly the schools and large military bases that have survived on Verdis. Outside them, only eighteen stationary points are responding. One of them, by the way, was set up by Sullivan's group, who are here right now."

Those who knew immediately turned toward me. Okoro held out his fist, and I bumped it.

"They improvised, using our portal and demon batteries. So your list of tasks is being expanded to include searching for alien batteries we could connect our portals to, and for sheltered locations.

"Sullivan's group set up a portal on a crushed destroyer. The technicians are going with you; they'll widen the exit, deploy the equipment and turn the portal into a drone launch point. Your task in the first phase is cover. Technicians aren't fighters. If anything happens to them, there'll be no drones. If there are no drones, we're blind again."

I raised my hand, interrupting the lieutenant.

"Has anyone told you there's literally a lake of dead flesh in the portal room? I don't know exactly what happened there, what physical forces or what kind of qi were involved; the demons were clearly trying to evacuate, but right now it's just shredded corpses mixed with water and field rations."

The lieutenant hadn't known that, but he didn't change command's plans.

"All I have is radiation level data," he said. "Is anyone too sensitive to the sight of death? Technicians, I'm talking to you."

The technicians didn't answer.

"Excellent. Phase two. Once the drones are in the air, you'll receive a map of the sector. As accurate as possible. After that, we work to the old plan. Groups split up into their zones of responsibility. If you find a place where a new transit and launch point can be deployed, report it.

"Last but not least! If you detect large concentrations of the enemy, you don't throw yourselves into battle; you report and pass on the coordinates. More than one ship is hanging over Verdis right now. They may be busy, but they'll break off for a precision strike.

"Don't be greedy. It'll cost you your lives."

"Then why not just hit everything that moves?" someone asked.

"Because there are pods of ours lying all over the wasteland that we can't see. Because your own group might end up in the neighbouring square. Because every strike costs energy and munitions, which are also needed to break up the large debris heading for Verdis and Earth," the lieutenant answered, as if he'd been expecting exactly that question.

He lowered his tablet and looked us all over once more.

"Any more questions?" A second of silence. "Then good luck," the lieutenant said, and waved to the technicians to start up the portal.

The portal had been modified, by the way. A ring the size of an evacuation one had been raised several metres on two rigid metal columns. Those same columns doubled as guide rails for a lift platform that carried passengers up to the other side.

The portal clouded over with the black film of a transit, and a drone was sent through first to check how things stood.

After that, the fighters went through, and only then did the technicians go, wearing oxygen masks. Fortunately, none of them threw up.

The compartment had barely changed since we'd left it, except that it had set. Over two-plus hours, the blood, the water from the ruptured supplies and the numerous medical preparations had reacted strangely, turning the ‘lake’ into aspic.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much space free of aspic, and people kept arriving, so my team and I headed straight outside.

Beyond the second bulkhead there was already dust, and in front of the gash in the outer hull lay a whole drift of it. I monkeyed over and stopped on the sloping hull outside. The sand didn't stay on it, but it had managed to work on the soot, scouring it down to bare metal.

Just as the wreck's look had changed, so had Verdis itself. It no longer resembled the wasteland where we'd begun our watch; that had been much flatter and had shown signs of life in the form of sparse vegetation.

No trace of vegetation remained, but the wasteland was no longer flat. Craters and wreckage crowded on top of one another like spots on a teenager's forehead at the height of puberty. And everything that didn't rise a few metres out of the ground was covered with a thick layer of dust. Where the hottest debris had fallen, patches of fused glass showed through the dust, dark, with a greenish and brownish sheen. Some still faintly glowed with heat.

Overhead, the sky was the colour of old copper. The sun hung in it as a dim, blurred disc you could look at without squinting, and its light was yellow and sickly, casting no shadows. Dust still hung in the upper layers of the thin atmosphere, and because of it, the sky seemed low, like the ceiling of a poorly lit room.

Along the horizon, on every side, stood columns of smoke. Dozens of them. Some had already blurred, bent under the wind and turned into dirty streaks stretching across half the sky. Others were fresh, dense, black at the base. In the thin air, the smoke didn't disperse; it hung there and slowly spread, like ink in water.

I tried to find familiar landmarks and found none. This was completely new terrain, and I'd have to explore it from scratch.

Verdis had been my home for longer than anywhere else in this world. My school was here, my first dormitory, my nook, my flat with a window onto a little park. Looking at this grey, pockmarked wasteland, I wondered how it was doing. Did my flat still exist, the building it was in? How was the park, how was the school?

Did Black Lotus still exist?

The lieutenant had said the stationery points in the schools were still working…

More of us gathered by the gash, and everyone fell silent, stunned by the devastation. Only one person muttered, "Picturesque."

While we were admiring the view, the technicians wasted no time and set about cutting metal in every direction from the skewed portal room. Their senior quickly roped our Blades and Fingers into widening the internal passages.

They decided not to widen the way out for safety reasons. A smaller entrance was easier to guard. Within fifteen minutes, the technicians had set up a working platform for themselves one deck higher in the flattened ship. The hall there had a lower ceiling, and because of the deformation, they had to sit or stoop, but the aspic bodies were completely out of sight, and they were ready to launch the drones.

The first drone launched for reconnaissance recorded the route from the ring to the outside. The portal activated again, and the spherical drones popped out as if off a conveyor belt, scattering in all directions over the cluttered wasteland.

The first drone was shot down four minutes after launch. It didn't see the shooter, but the nearest couple immediately corrected their flight paths. The second was shot down seconds later, but the third caught the shooter on camera: a lone, one-armed demon hurling small spikes. He could barely stay on his feet.

"Shall we try to take him alive?" Okoro suggested.

"The bastard survived the 'rain'," I said. "He's either tougher than nails or insanely lucky. I don't want to take any chances. Can I borrow your Finger?" I asked. "Let them work in a pair with Hale. If he survives that, we'll consider taking him prisoner."