Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 66: Family (Patreon)

“Not yet,” Novak said.

He didn’t even glance at Kaluya. His eyes were fixed on the window showing the portal hall, where the black membrane still stood in the ring like a puddle of tar.

“Vaclav!” Kaluya’s voice dropped to a growl. “That’s bloody Trazgul, the head’s son, the commander of the fleet!”

His deep cherry-red armour shone like a mirror, trimmed with gold at every joint, as if it were made for a parade rather than war. His golden horns swept back, then rose aggressively upwards again with the same distinctive curve as his father’s.

“The commander of a fleet that’s almost been wiped out,” the Great One said. “It’s far from certain that killing him would do us as much good as keeping him alive. So far, he’s shown extraordinarily useful incompetence.”

“He’s a Seven!” Kaluya reasonably pointed out. “One way or another, he’s dangerous!”

“The question is, what’s he doing here?” Adam spoke up.

“Proving to Daddy that he’s no worse than his cousin,” Lina said.

“Unlike his cousin, he didn’t go first,” I remarked.

“Which won’t stop him declaring victory,” Novak said, and finally reassured Kaluya. “Don’t worry, I’ve got my finger on the pulse. The moment he gets ready to leave, I shut down the portal and blow up the base. Right now there’s a chance someone else will visit the base…”

The demon they were talking about stepped forward, and Novak tensed while Kaluya froze. The demon looked around and, ignoring the fighters on their knees, walked to the panoramic window. Evidently, even the horned ones weren’t indifferent to nature's majesty.

“Greed never ends well!” Kaluya said. “It’s like trying to win a few more chips when you’ve already got the jackpot in your hands!”

Novak didn’t answer. His hand lay on the table, but his index finger hovered slightly raised. He kept watching the windows, focusing on the two main ones: the portal hall and the workshop.

In every window, the demons who weren’t busy kneeling kept searching. The pair in the corridor reached the end and turned back. The pair in the study gave up on the empty bar and moved on to the shelves of decorative souvenirs.

The portal was still open, and nobody was going to close it, but nobody else came out of it either.

Kaluya clearly hadn’t come to terms with Novak’s position, but he decided not to say anything more and just sniffed angrily.

In the workshop, the demons walked around the overturned table, looked over the shelves, and reached the cabinet with the surprise. One of them carefully took hold of the doors, as if he expected a trap. He even positioned himself slightly to the side of the doors, then pulled them open.

Novak’s finger twitched. All the windows went black at once.

“Queen,” Novak said. “External view.”

The onboard cameras' view replaced the dark rectangles, and I squinted, even though the windows were fake and Queen dimmed the picture.

Beyond the ridge, a second sun rose.

For an instant, the ridge became a black silhouette against the white light, two-dimensional, as if cut out of paper. Then depth returned along with the colours, mostly yellow. From behind the peaks, a ball of fire crawled up slowly and reluctantly, turning inside out, whitening, and dimming as it went.

“The shock wave will arrive in eight seconds,” the Queen said.

The air above the ridge suddenly became visible: a transparent wall that bent light like heat haze over tarmac, moving toward us and sweeping the snow cornices off the crest. They flew into the sky like white flags, then crumbled into dust. For some reason, it wasn’t white but grey.

The Queen turned her sharp bow into the wave, and for the first time since we’d taken off, we rocked, as if we’d hit a high wave.

“No structural damage,” the Queen reported. “A brief burst of gamma and neutron radiation has been recorded. Radioactive fallout is expected in twenty to thirty minutes, downwind. I recommend we don’t linger on the leeward side, sir, or at least don’t leave the ship.”

A mushroom cloud was rising above the ridge. Its stem was a dirty grey, thick and billowing, and its cap spread out sideways like ink in water. From below, it was still lit by red heat, but within a few seconds it had turned grey, and against the deep mountain sky it looked like a gigantic, dirty cauliflower.

And then the mountains began to move.

At first, only the crests moved: debris poured off them, as if someone had shaken out a tablecloth. Then the cornices broke away, whole slabs the size of a football pitch, and slowly, very slowly, crept downwards. And then the whole slope began to move.

The snow didn’t fall. It flowed. White rivers spilt out of every couloir, merged, swallowed one another, and rolled down into the valley, raising clouds of snow dust ahead of them that grew faster than the avalanche itself. These clouds rose to meet the mushroom, as though the mountains were answering the blow with their own explosion.

And that was on our side, where the shock wave had only reached over the pass. On the other side, it must have been far worse.

I glanced at Lina, remembering the resort somewhere in these mountains.

Kaluya breathed out. Long and slow, like a man who still couldn’t believe we’d made it in time.

“Jackpot?” he asked.

Novak nodded uncertainly.

“We need to check. Queen,” he said, “lower the ramp.”

“You’re going to fly over there?” I asked.

“No,” my master said. “For all our personal strength and willingness, there are only two of us. That’s what drones are for.”

The ramp crept down, and cold burst into the airlock. Not the fresh mountain cold that nips at your nose, but a heavy one, with a taste of metal and something burnt. The Queen immediately raised a thin film of force field across the entrance, and the draught died down.

The ring on the ramp filled with an active membrane. Novak waved his hand in the air, giving a command through his interface to someone I couldn’t see, and drones began flying out of the membrane from the side facing away from us.

These weren’t the cheap plastic spheres we’d launched from the ‘tin can’ on Verdis. These were flat, the size double of a dinner plate, matt grey, with a serious cluster of lenses underneath.

“I take it,” I said, remembering the spheres’ problems, “these aren’t afraid of radiation?”

“Not entirely, but they handle it far better than the mass-market product,” Novak confirmed. “Queen, take over control. Priority: the epicentre, then the slopes within a three-kilometre radius. Take us closer, but stay below the peaks.”

The hall windows broke into dozens of small pictures.

The first drones crossed the ridge within a minute, and snow followed. Not fluffy flakes, but fine, dry grains, like grey sand. Until the Queen raised the ramp, we could hear the grains rustling against the hull.

My interface beeped, warning of elevated background radiation, then fell silent as the portal went dark and the ramp rose.

The yacht flew as close to the epicentre as possible, staying behind the crest, as Novak had said, that hid our black silhouette from anyone on the other side who might still be watching. But the drones showed us almost everything.

Where the residence had stood, no summit remained. In its place, a glistening crater with ragged edges was smoking, one edge raised far higher than the other. The mushroom’s stem still stood over the crater, no longer fiery but whitish grey and billowing, with wisps of steam rising from the bottom. The snow around the epicentre hadn’t just melted; it had vanished. For hundreds of metres around the crater, the rocks were bare and black, with a strange glassy sheen, as if they’d been varnished. Further out, dirty slush covered the slopes, and grey streams of meltwater, stones, and debris crept down them, mixed with what was left of the residence.

The drones dived into the grey curtain above the bowl. Whatever Novak had said about improved shielding, the radiation still broke up the signal. And there was nothing at the epicentre anyway except rock baked into glass. Everything that could be blown away had been. Not even traces of biomass were left.

The drones circling combed the slopes and began finding debris. First, molten metal structures, then something more recognisable. Something that looked like a baked body without arms or a head, clearer fragments of armour…

It was simply impossible to confirm which demon they had belonged to.

But then, far beyond the radius of even the smallest debris, the Queen found our jackpot.

“Sir, a faint biological signature. The neighbouring mountain, eastern slope. Distance from the epicentre: two thousand one hundred metres.”

Nobody doubted it was bloody Trazgul. It simply couldn’t have been anyone else. Some sixth sense had warned him of the blast, or his formations had held long enough for him to activate a dash technique that threw him away from the epicentre, and the blast carried him further.

The slope was steep, covered in fresh grey grains, and Trazgul lay in the furrow he’d ploughed himself. Nothing was left of the parade-ground shine: the cherry armour had turned black, the gold on the joints had run and set in droplets, and the helmet had cracked along the line of the visor. Grey grains were falling straight onto him, hissing and vaporising on the hot armour. His right leg was twisted at an impossible angle, and his right arm was missing entirely below the elbow, but he was alive.

Trazgul stirred.

“Let’s finish the bastard off!” Kaluya said, jolting into action, but Novak grabbed his arm.

Trazgul gathered his strength and flung out his left arm, a desperate move given his condition. A portal rose beside him. It was the same as the one his cousin had pulled from his spatial pocket after capturing the rehabilitation centre. It activated automatically.

“He’s getting away!” Kaluya wrenched his arm out of Novak’s fingers.

“We won’t make it in time,” Novak said. “And we might not be able to handle whoever comes for him. We need an orbital strike!”

“That should’ve been bloody planned!” Kaluya snapped. “We haven’t got that many ships, and they don’t hang around idle over empty mountains!” That didn’t stop him, though. “Queen, get me fleet headquarters!” he said.

And then another demon shot out of the membrane like a rocket. His sword was ablaze.

He froze and looked around for enemies, but his gaze fell on his relative below.

The Queen labelled him a Seven without being asked, but we’d already seen that red armour and that flaming sword. It was the loser’s cousin.

“Queen,” Novak said quickly. “Engage drone camouflage. Carefully land four drones, keeping the picture. Drop the rest!”

“Executing, sir.”

On dozens of pictures, the world suddenly began to spin. The drones’ cameras flashed through sky, slope, sky again, then went dark one after another in the snow, among the stones, in the dirty slush at the bottom of the valley. Hundreds of grey plates fell onto the mountains, and among the grey grains, among the debris still raining from the sky after the blast, they really did look like just another piece of rubbish. Another fragment of the residence that had landed on the slope.

Vezhkar raised his eyes and cautiously looked around, scanning the mountains.

“This is General Kaluya,” Kaluya said, pronouncing every word clearly and backing it up with finger commands in his interface. “Confirmation code in the message. Orbital strike on the coordinates, immediately! We’ve got two Sevens in our sights!” The general fell silent, drew in a breath and shouted, “I don’t give a damn about your bloody queue, son! These are two fucking Sevens! Do you understand what that means, for fuck’s sake? The nearest ship, here, now!”

The pause dragged on, and Vezhkar was still scanning the mountains. Then he looked up at the sky, paying his cousin no attention at all.

“What the hell is he waiting for?” Adam asked, voicing my thoughts.

Vezhkar could have slung his cousin over his shoulder and jumped into the portal a hundred times over by now.

At first, Trazgul watched Vezhkar, then gave that up and crawled towards the portal. That finally helped Vezhkar make a decision he hadn’t dared before.

The big bad’s Nephew walked over to the Son and kicked him away from the portal.