Tark 5: Chapter 2

The climb to the surface was uneventful. Mariv’s lumbering chrome form obscured my view, but I wasn’t looking ahead anyway. The dirt this far into Tark 5 was apparently pretty loose and insubstantial, so i constantly had to check my footing or risk sliding back down the entry cave.

I’m not entirely sure what was keeping the whole cave from collapsing on us, but i knew it had something to do with the planetfall technology. Developed in the early years of the war by necessity, it had remained largely unchanged. With a smirk I realized that it could actually be considered ancient technology. The phrase applied a great deal of mystery and intrigue to something as mundane as entry tech.

It took us about ten minutes to make it to the cave entrance, which was when the swearing began. Like all ancient technology, the entry tech could do amazing things but had flaws and was unreliable at the most inconvenient times. This was one of those times. The entrance had partially caved in. We could see rays of light peeking through gaps at the top of the pile of dirt and rocks in our way, but there was no way we could squeeze through. Not even Karen, who was five foot nothing and wearing that liquid suit that could be adapted to slip through tight spaces if necessary; one of its many capabilities.

Exploding the obstruction would almost certainly collapse the cave. Even if we survived that, Minks would be buried. The personnel transport was capable of burrowing through the ground and taking off again, but it would mean we wouldn’t be able to fall back to it if things went badly. So, there was nothing to do but dig. For that hour we were very happy to have Mariv on the mission. His massive hands and tireless body did most of the work, and before long we had an opening to the surface large enough for all of us to fit.

I exited first to scout. At first glance i thought we had landed on a death planet, for all around me was scorched earth and high ridges of stone, but i quickly realized that Minks had used the entry tech to create an impact crater with defensive ejecta formations, another handy feature of the entry tech. It created a defensible position around the entry cave out of rock reformed in the heat of impact.

Renaldo came out after me, hoisting his AP cannon and running to lay against the natural walls of the crater, weapon pointing out into the land beyond. I watched him closely so I saw when his body stiffened.

"Report Renaldo."

"They’re all around us...oh god."

The words sent a chill down my spine but I was sprinting to get to Renaldo. He was too unstable - The heavy whine of his AP cannon charging rang in the thin air of Tark 5.

"Contact in sights. Permission to fire!"

"Denied! Do not-"

Day turned to night and back to day again as Renaldo let loose with the AP cannon on his unseen target. Detonations and shrieks from inhuman throats echoed back to us and I cringed in shock. What had he done?

With only the telltale whistle we had all been trained to listen for in basic as warning, Renaldo’s head was expertly bisected by a concentrated beam of energy from behind. As his head became a fountain of gore I spun around to look for the sniper. To my dismay there was a high ridge overlooking our entry crater. About eighty percent of the crater was visible from the sniper’s position.

"Back to the cave entrance!" I screamed and Karen snapped out of her horror at Renaldo's fate just in time to avoid another scything beam of concentrated flame. She slipped behind Mariv, who had taken up a defensive posture at the cave entrance. His chrome exterior now shined with shifting colors from every part of the visible spectrum. His exterior would now deflect energy based weaponry. For a time.

I was still far from the entrance but in full sprint. A third flash of energy shot out from the ridge above, boring a hole through the muscles of my thigh. The pain was shocking and I skidded into the dirt a few feet away from Mariv. He quickly extended his metal arm to grab me by the shirt and pulled me out of the line of fire as if I weighed nothing at all.

Lances of energy began to rain down on the crater floor in front of us, slowly turning the hardened rock floor back into molten slag. I could hear them impacting on the rock face that shielded us from the snipers as well. The pain in my leg was horrific, but i had taken a wound like that before. The intense heat of the weapon had cauterized the wound, so bleeding out wasn’t a problem, but walking was out of the question.

I heard a metallic snap and a short whine. I looked over at Karen, dread filling me, and with good reason. She had detached a small cylindrical device from her battle suit and was fidgeting with the knobs on it. My eyes shot wide open.

"How the fuck will that help us?" I screamed. Mariv turned to look at her as well.

"Nothing will help us. Renaldo had our only weapon. We need to take as many of them with us as possible." she replied tensely.

"You think that kind of shit actually matters? Did you just get out of basic yesterday?" Her face set stubbornly as I spoke the words, and I knew she wasn’t thinking clearly.

"Mariv." I said, and the Mason wheeled his mechanical body in one swift motion, plucking the device from her hands faster than she could react. Her mouth opened to issue an angry protest, but before she could even get a word out a series of wires and tools fanned out from Mariv’s wrists like a Swiss army knife and went to work on the cylindrical device.

"Careful." I stressed, but Mariv ignored me. The mason didn’t need a reminder. As he worked successive metal casings of the device were stripped away, and the circuitry disabled. After a moment the disassembled pieces were clinking loosely in his hand like change, and he casually threw them out into the exposed crater. Energy blasts from the snipers above hammered down on the fragments.

"That was stupid!" Karen snapped.

"Oh sure. Much more stupid than traveling to a planet on a critical diplomatic mission and turning a quarter of it into a sea of radioactive fire within a half hour of arriving. Why the fuck did you even bring that thing?"

"Because of shit like this!" she yelled back, sweeping her hand out to the exposed crater floor still being hammered by weapons fire.

I opened my mouth to respond, but at that moment the weapons fire ceased and a device the size of a soccer ball rolled down the crater walls, stopping a few feet from us. My heart leapt into my throat as my eyes fixed on the automaton. Mariv was moving, but even he wouldn’t be fast enough. As we watched helplessly the mechanical device unfurled, revealing its array of anti-personnel weaponry. Shocks and blasts of light bombarded our bodies as the thing delivered its horrific payload. A wave of detonative force lifted me up and threw me against the stone cave wall. I felt an impact and heard something in my torso give. Pain flooded into my mind, and consciousness fled.