FOUR - Surface

Letho snapped back to consciousness, and pain like iron barbs clawed at his body. He surveyed his surroundings.

The inner hold of the ship was remarkably intact. Deacon was unconscious in his chair, and momentary panic filled Letho as he scanned his friend for wounds. Surprisingly, Deacon’s only injury appeared to be a large knot on his forehead.

Must’ve banged his head on the console.

He found that he himself was not so fortunate. Part of the ship’s hull had collapsed on him, pinning his chest.

Out of the corner of his eye, Letho saw a figure moving among the black smoke and embers that wreathed the crash site. Impossible. He had seen no signs of life on the planet’s barren face before the ship’s awful tumble.

Then he heard a strange chittering, a low form of communication that caused his skin to go prickly.

This is not the way I die. Not on my back, not trapped like an animal.

Letho summoned every bit of his strength and pushed on the girder. It moved, but only slightly. And then Bayorn and Maka were there, gripping the girder with their massive laborers’ hands. Letho pushed with them, and the girder squealed and groaned as it submitted to their combined strength.

Letho sat bolt upright, causing his head to swim. He gripped Saladin’s pommel and pulled it free, surveying the blade. Though he had fallen upon it, the blade had not bent or cracked. The presence of his hand on the pommel brought Saladin to life, and the AI immediately began to feed a flurry of information into his mind. The nano-machines that swam in his bloodstream sent updates on his physical condition.

“There is good news: I have located a comm point and am currently downloading a critical firmware update. Would you like me to upgrade?”

“Not now, Saladin. Tell me about them.”

More shapes moved through the smoke that surrounded Letho and the crash site.

“Very well, but first let me just deploy this upgrade package. It will only take a moment.”

“Saladin, wait!”

But Saladin didn’t wait. Letho’s brain spasmed as new data flooded it. He thought he could feel the nanobots in his system realigning and reconfiguring. The software’s new features began to scroll across his mind’s eye.

He saw satellite maps of a Eursus that had been reshaped by the fall of man, every crevice and crater rendered in spectacular high-definition 3D. He saw flashes of the information he had always longed for as news stories and videos of world leaders shouting flew past, too fast to take it all in at once. Finally he would know. He would see the Fulcrum stations appearing on the outer reaches of his star system. See them hovering there. He would know how the relationship between Tarsi and Eursan had been forged. How they had come to work together to launch each Fulcrum station in the name of the great mission.

A mission that had failed spectacularly.

The upgrade process occurred in the span of only a few heartbeats. Centuries of data flooded his mind in the time it takes for someone to clap their hands twice. But it would take some time yet before his mind could sort it all out for recall.

The remaining Tarsi had begun to form a ring around Letho, and Thresha moved to stand directly to his left. He sought her out with his eyes, and saw her staring at the shapes that were beginning to materialize out of the dust.

The ship had crashed in the middle of what had once been a residential area. They stood now in the great gash the fallen ship had raked across a shattered blacktop street, surrounded by burning flotsam. The remnants of houses, most of them eroded frames that refused to succumb, stood all around them in carefully arranged rows like tombstones. The creatures began to appear from behind these walls and from underneath leaning and fallen rooftops.

They were vaguely human in shape, but everything else was all wrong. Their skin was blackened, mangy, and some of theirs limbs ended in distorted flippers, while others ended in hands with too many or not enough digits. All of them were tipped in claws that looked as though they could at once rend flesh and inflict necrosis. The things began to hiss and threaten with swipes of their claws.

One of them, larger than the others, a creature whose malformed head throbbed with pustulant sores and an extra set of eyes, began to screech in ragged syllables. He pointed directly at Letho with a finger extended from a massive fist.

“We come in peace?” Letho said hesitantly, eyebrows raised.

The larger creature responded with a terse bark deep from within a chest covered in deformed knots of muscle tissue.

“What are they?” Thresha asked.

“I don’t know. But it looks like they want to kill us. Don’t think diplomacy is going to work here,” Letho muttered.

The creatures began to tumble forward. The chaotic nature of their charge indicated a pitiful lack of intelligence, and for a moment Letho felt sorry for them. But their fate had already been decided. Letho let the rage fill his limbs like hot lead, his face taking on the appearance of a snarling samurai mask. He could have held back the anger, allowed his conscious mind to maintain control. But he thought of the wrecked ship, of his friend Deacon, still lolling helplessly in his flight chair. These creatures were at no way at fault for Letho and his comrades’ plight, but they would pay the price and feel his wrath.

The Tarsi roared and charged, but Letho slipped out in front of them, the smoke swirling around him as he moved with oily quickness to the fore. Two of the creatures squared off, circling him and hunkering down low, hissing, tongues flicking between rotten teeth.

Sir, the firmware update has added the blade actuation feature. Would you like to use it now? Saladin said inside Letho’s mind.

But of course.

Saladin lashed out, seemingly of his own accord, moving fast and heavy, cleaving the air above one of the creatures. Letho reveled in the new power as the nanobots in his arms worked in perfect synchronicity with the sword’s grav-assist actuators, allowing him to execute a perfect and devastating sword swipe. The speed and sheer force of the attack was beautiful, god-like. The creature’s body slumped, its severed head spinning as it followed the body to the dust below, its heart pumping life-blood onto the ground in savage gouts. The fear that Letho had been looking for, hoping for, at last appeared in the other creatures’ eyes; they turned to scrabble away. But this retreat was as futile as an insect’s scramble beneath the shadow of a crushing boot. Saladin bit again, and another creature tumbled as it legs were cut away below the kneecap.

Sir, a killing stroke was readily available. Possible trajectory error? Perhaps systems require recalibration?

More of the creatures found themselves in Letho’s path, and they gave up their ghosts just as readily as the first two. The Tarsi were also doing their share of killing. Letho grinned at Bayorn, who had just executed one of the creatures with a mighty swipe of his claws, a grimace on his face. When their eyes met, Bayorn did not return the grin. He looked at Letho like he didn’t recognize him.

Letho felt a wave of dizziness overcome him, and he almost fell. He placed the tip of his sword in the dirt, leaning into it like a walking stick as he waited for the blur in his mind to pass. His body needed water. Food. His vision choked in a sea of black dots that were growing ever larger. But there was one more creature that had to pay the price for daring to attack. The last remaining creature, the one who had pointed at him at the beginning of the attack, fled as fast as his deformed legs could carry him.

You came here to dance, so let’s dance.