Risen: Shatterverse

Chapter 12: And Now for My Next Trick ...

So, yeah. Here I was. Five kilometers underground.

- T'sang inside, are you reading any traces of my people? - I asked even as my suit's sensor sweep came up empty. Which, in these twisted little pockets of fuck you, didn't mean alot.

- I am not, dead man, - came the quick reply. - This pocket dimension, for lack of a better term, is a dead end. -

Heh. Nice. You can't say t'sang aren't witty, even if it was a bit dry.

I looked down at my wrist even as I willed the t'sang interface to reappear. If there weren't any Risen down here, then there wasn't a reason to stay.

The door appeared as a glowing rectangle in the dark pretty much where I wanted it to after I shifted my fingers through the interface's mobius loop in what was becoming a practiced motion. Then, rifle up, I was darting through and across the threshold.

This time, in a strange twist on what had become usual for crossing from one pocket to another, I didn't hang in interdimensional space. Nor did a vision of the past, present, future, and any alternative takes on the three, appear in my mind.

Instead, from one second to the next, I was across and stepping into a blasted landscape lit by a watery sun. A blasted landscape that looked eerily familiar.

"What the fuck, soldier?" a hard voice asked in tautly accented English almost in my ear. Jerking with surprise, I looked over and saw the grizzled features of a hard-faced human non-com glaring at me from out of his own open visor from a pace or two away, his armor similar enough to mine that it was hard to pick out the differences.

"You forget what to do? We under fucking attack!" he snarled. He gestured to the chaos all around us.

"Pick a fucking target!!" Then he flipped his visor back down and he and his squad of eleven or twelve armored soldiers sprinted past me, weapons up and firing at shapes vaguely seen through billowing clouds of smoke and dust.

I was still blinking in stunned shock as I stared at their disappearing backs when the first one hit me, buzzing in like an angry hornet to slam into my personal shield with an impact that actually made me take a step back to absorb it. The next handful then came in a flurry, each one sending ripples across the phased energy field protecting me as they struck. What the actual fuck?? Was something out there firing an old school slug thrower at me?

- Alert, - my suit's AI without warning chimed into my mind. - Shield integrity at fifty-five percent and falling! -

Wut? I looked down with a frown. Slug throwers wouldn't have been able to do that! And felt a chill sweep through me to see several thumb-sized cylinders embedded in the outer layers of my shielding. Cylinders that were visibly wiggling in an attempt to burrow deeper in.

I quickly reached down and took hold of the closest. Then, after considerable resistance on its part, I pulled it out of my shield with a flare of light and held it up as it continued to squirm between my fingertips.

One look was all I needed. 'Larval form k'ethik,' I grimly thought as two beady eyes glared back at me from an end that abruptly opened into a tiny jagged-toothed mouth. Turned into projectiles and fired from some sort of weapon to begin the conversion process on impact. The ultimate in smart munitions.

A convulsive squeeze with neo-shell strength shattered the one between my fingers with a sharp squeal and a spray of miniature sparks. Then a thought sent an omni-field flex slicing up along my shield to shear the rest of them in half, the larval forms dying with audible squawks of dismay and flashes of light.

- Shield integrity restored, - the suit AI announced as the larval form halves tumbled heavily to the ground to join the one I had crushed. - Initializing a restoration cycle. Confirm. -