The Brutal Builder
Read Part 1: The Lost Builder
“It’s not too far now!” shouted the green-haired woman, gesturing wildly across the plain as the wind whipped through her hair. Her eyes were watering in the constant wind.
“You can’t half move!”
I strode across the landscape, the green-haired woman tucked neatly in the crook of my arm. The orange desert sands shifted beneath my feet, but I knew how every grain of sand was going to move before I got to it, so I remained steady. Carrying the woman’s small, frail form posed no great challenge. The pace I wanted to set would be far too fast for her, given that I was over three times her height.
“There!” she shouted excitedly “See the bonegrass fields? We live just inside there!”
I could indeed see fields of yellow-white grass, extending far into the distance. The grass would come up to my waist, so it was more than deep enough to completely swallow the girl, a perfect place to hide if you were trying to hang on to a living. As I looked closer I could see the pollen spreading through the air, the tiny insects scratching out an existence by the base of the plants, and a curiously large number of skeletons nestled just within the edges of the grass, where the growth was newest.
“The offworlders brought it decades ago. It’s been spreading ever since.” She looked down and started to fumble in her satchel, somehow managing to hold onto her staff in the process.
“Grampa says it’s because they want their farms to be the only place anything grows around here, but we managed to work out a way to live there!”
She flourished triumphantly, holding aloft a scrap of deep ochre material. I could smell complex hydrocarbons, ammonia, traces of methane and various other chemicals. More than enough to identify what it was, at least in general.
“Crimson Pheasant droppings!” crowed the woman, popping the hardened nugget of faeces into her mouth. “Thaar nathurly reshishan to th burngrath, y’thee?”. She started to chew slowly and deliberately as I neared the field. While I had no doubt there were very good reasons for her chewing dung I didn’t want to know more, so I carried on running.
I didn’t slow as the grass whipped around my legs, so I wasn’t surprised when a thick cloud of pollen and insects flurried into the air around me. I was slightly more surprised by the large, bright red birds that frantically hammered their way into the air once I was more than a few meters in, rising like a wave towards the sky. The thing that truly surprised me though was when, after sixteen minutes of pointed directions, I entered a clearing almost five hundred meters across. And fell into a ditch.
The green-haired woman went flying, tumbling through my arms and onto the dust beyond the ditch. I, on the other hand, ended up with my legs half a meter deep in an unidentifiable sludge. My torso slammed into the ground on the other side, triggering a wave of tiny seismic bursts that I could only assume were subterranean creatures of some kind. Before I even moved the woman rolled with a strange grace, her staff twirling slowly through the air above her. As I raised my head, absorbing the details of the house and farm in the centre of the clearing, her outstretched hand grabbed the falling length of wood and she bounced straight into an excited run.
‘Grampa!’ she yelled excitedly ‘Grampa!!’
I pulled myself out of the ditch, the sludge and dust flowing off my surface. The farm was still, other than the slight subterranean shuddering and the hammering footsteps of the woman. There were orderly fields of green and yellow, a scattering of metallic hexagonal buildings that looked like prefab shelters. They were aged almost beyond use but clearly well maintained even so. Tracks of a heavy vehicle and thousands of crushed blades of grass were conspicuous not too far around the circle from where we were, and the damaged embankment of the ditch and disturbed dust told of both an unexpected visit and a subsequent struggle.
“Grampa?” came another shout, questioning this time. I waved a hand to get her attention as she moved from one shelter to another. She didn’t notice, scurrying quickly into another dusty metal dome, so I moved over to the tracks. The creatures under the ground were clustered around the damage to the ditch, probing it as though they were trying to escape. Here and there I could see tiny white rimmed flowers of flesh popping out of the dirt, touching the liquid in the ditch and then recoiling. There was something wrong there, but I couldn’t place it. Suddenly all the creatures disappeared, the pink and white dots in the mud vanishing with surprising speed. As I felt the vibrations of them moving back from the ditch I also felt the thing they were running from, a deep, regular thrumming through the dirt. A quarter of a second later I’d pinpointed the noise that matched the vibration, picking out an engine, deep throated, roaring, and getting closer alarmingly quickly.
I turned and strode towards the farm. The girl burst out of the door at the same time, brandishing a silver and black cylinder in her free hand. Tears were pouring down her face.
“They took my Grampa!” she howled “This is offworlder tech! They took my Grampa!!”
I estimated another ten seconds before the engine reached the house, and now the woman was screaming what I could only assume were particularly foul expletives. As we met by a field of thick green stalks I held out my hands, but she stormed past me towards the gap in the field of bonegrass with an expression halfway between fury and grief etched on her face in every line, then with a crash the vehicle that had been approaching thundered through the bonegrass and over the ditch.
Even without turning around I felt how odd it was. It warped the magnetic field lines that subtly flowed through and around the metal poles in the farm prefabs. It sat like an indomitable ball in the path of the barely perceptible electrical currents shivering their way out of a thousand different places in the grass, yet I could feel absolutely nothing coming from inside it. As I turned my suspicions were confirmed. The vehicle had four wheels on hydraulic armatures that extended from a dangerous-looking black, shielded hull. Below these were two caterpillar tracks that were even now tearing through the meticulous rows of what I assumed were bean plants. Atop the menacing carapace of this sleek, beetle-like machine was a weapon of some kind, glowing with an eerie silver light. Flat faces and angular lines lent the entire construction a strange air, simultaneously linear but at the same time beautifully curved, and while I couldn’t see through the armour in any spectrum it seemed to not only absorb light but to suck it out of the world around it.
As the vehicle slewed to a stop I felt the carapace open. Plates slid aside, and though I couldn’t see the entrance at the back I felt eight pairs of boots hit the ground. The subterranean creatures were still now, cowed by the thundering vibrations above them, and even the green-haired woman was faltering. She took a step back towards me and I took a step forwards, putting my leg between her and the still-hidden soldiers. Even though I had only just met her I felt a strong urge to keep her alive. After all, she had found me, and she was going to help me find a way off the planet. The soldiers didn’t stay hidden behind their vehicle for long. Their armour was the same, all matte black plates and disquieting curves. The doors of their transport closed. Their rifles were raised.
‘May Suthers. You are to come with us.”
It was impossible to pinpoint which of the soldiers spoke. Their oddly lensed helmets all made the same noise. The green-haired woman, May, shouted from behind my leg. She was still defiant, full of rage, but now there was a modulation to her voice that spoke of fear.
“Where is my Grampa, you lasius bastards!?’
“You are being charged with illegal artefact excavation. Your grandfather is already in jail.”
The soldiers advanced, forming a partial arc.
“Deactivate the artefact and come with us.”
Behind me I could feel May tensing. She placed her hand on my leg to help give her a boost away from the soldiers when she chose to run.
“I don’t know how!” she shouted.
“Unacceptable”
“I don’t know how!” A slight shift in weight, the grinding of the soil under her boot.
“Shut it down now!’
At that moment three things happened at once. The soldier on the furthest left of the arc pulled the trigger down on his rifle, May tried to push off my leg, and I dropped to one knee, putting my full weight onto it and pulling my leg away from May. As the first bullet ricocheted off of my stomach and May stumbled my knee crashed to the ground, powering through the surface layer and into the tunnels below, letting me form a solid blockade with my torso. Soon all the soldiers were firing, leaving smears of metal on my outer layers as the bullets bounced away or shattered. May screamed, trapped in the relative safety of the lee of my body. One of the soldiers paused firing long enough to raise a gauntleted fist, then aimed his rifle at me. I felt a tiny point of infrared light, and I wondered what that was meant to do when even their bullets clearly weren’t going to hurt me.
The turret on top of the vehicle sprang to life, starting to charge with an ominous thrumming sound. It raised itself up from its mountings on hydraulic arms and took aim directly at the dot of light, and then I realised that unlike the mere kinetic weapons of the soldiers this weapon was something else, and given the strange bubbly feeling that space was taking on it was not something good.
I slowed down. Bullets stopped being mere streaks of displaced air and turned into fast-moving chunks of metal, then slow-moving chunks of metal. The sand and dirt around my leg went from vibrating furiously with the hum of the vehicle’s engine to merely tapping against my thigh every so often. Every sense, every thought, every reaction was running as fast as I could make it. I had to do something before that turret fired.
So I reached forward with both hands; linked my skin to the magnetic flux shimmering through the air and twisted.
It took just over a tenth of a microsecond for the wave of bent and warped electromagnetic force to reach the soldiers, and as it passed each of the bullets that was creeping towards me they went from solid slugs to molten balls. Particles of sand suddenly crackled and arced up from the ground, impurities in the silicate crystals being shockingly inducted into life. It slammed into the soldiers, and while their armour didn’t let the magnetic fields penetrate it certainly reacted when the distortion hit, heating up as it tried to dissipate the huge dose of energy I had just poured into it. The black-clad soldiers were flung to the sides, some being hurled up and to one side, others battered down into the floor by the immense forces swirling around them. Their rifles wrenched away oddly, clearly cracking bone in some cases, others luckily having the rifles torn from their grasp.
As the effects of my action were just starting to make themselves felt on the soldiers the warping reached the vehicle, literally picking it up and twisting it in midair like a beetle caught in a gust of wind. The wheel armatures splayed outwards and the turret almost tore itself off its bearings as whatever workings were inside it were caught in an electromagnetic storm that even I was surprised I could create. Microseconds after I had taken action I felt the bubbly feeling of the space around me quiet. Then the turret exploded.
A green-blue cloud of plasma rolled out from where the turret had once been, fragments of twisted metal riding ahead of the blast wave. I couldn’t see exactly what happened to the vehicle itself or to the soldiers in the superheated air as I was already turning to wrap myself around May, twisting furiously as the microseconds dragged to milliseconds dragged to what seemed like an eternity. As I wrapped my arms around the frail woman who was curled up on the floor screaming I felt the warm wave of the turret’s destruction roll over my back. It was barely ten seconds after the first shot was fired.
I stayed still for almost a minute after the destruction had passed. There was no more vibration. No more sound of boots on the ground. All I could see or hear was the green-haired woman as she tried to calm herself. When she finally looked up at my face I stood (though it took some time for me to reorient myself and free my legs from the impromptu foxhole I seemed to have dug).
The bonegrass was on fire, as were some of the green crops. The metal pre-fabs were warped and bent, clearly affected by some unpredictable eddy of the magnetic hell I had unleashed. In a splayed-out circle around where a twisted wreck that barely resembled the vehicle sat, the once sandy soil was glowing a dull red. There was no recognisable sign of the soldiers. I turned to May and tried to look as apologetic as my monolithic face would let me. She simply stared, dull eyed, her staff held weakly by her side. After a long moment she breathed in deeply.
“Well. So much for leaving peacefully.” Her voice was subdued now. The rage was gone. The tremor of fear remained; joined now by a slight crack, but underneath the brittle overtones lay a core of defiance that I doubted would ever be lost.
“You wait here while I grab a few things, then we’re going to get my Grampa and we’re going to get out of here.” She pointed up over the horizon formed by the smouldering bonegrass to where a descending point of light was visible even through the smoke.
“That ship should be here long enough for us to hitch a lift if I can convince them to buy you.”
She turned and smiled up at me, the tremble in her lip barely noticeable.
“Not that I expect you have any intention of remaining sold, you know…”
