You can't fix stupid, but you can flash-weld it. That's what Gad used to tell me. Fill that void where common sense is s'posed to be with something like wary superstition and you get about the same result as somebody with half a brain. Course that's how Gad saw people, nothing more than machines with squishy parts and motors that burn out early if you flood em with too much fuel. I saw people different, but I always thought Gad's way of looking at the world had a certain crude poetry to it. A kinda folk wisdom.
But yeah, that flash-welding? That superstition standing in place of common sense? That’s probably what got me into this whole mess and probably what put both Gad and Elenor in the ground soon after. Truth is–we made a lot of mistakes before that too. Hell, maybe the real damage was done in the years leading up, and the weld from all my past mistakes–our past mistakes–just couldn't hold it all together anymore.
BOOK 1
Anyways. We were halfway through a run past the Howling City, giving that shithole a wide berth, ruminating on the ways in which people were like machines (As usual, the conversation was 90% Gad and Elenor, with the final 10% provided in the form of affirmative grunts by yours truly). I was on the harpoon, a wicked piece of barbed steel and wood meant for flipping other scrappers, when I caught sight of four lumps moving across the dunes, nothing but black specks in a sea of deep, rusty red. I gave Gad a slap on his weird oblong helmet and pointed off his left shoulder. With a nod, he adjusted course, and I tightened my harness.
From afar, we must have looked like some lean desert predator on the hunt, a wide rooster tail of soot kicked up behind us. That’s cause we were. Our specks–Our quarry–got bigger by the second. They were gravelbacks, great big bugs with stony hides and a fin-like mandible. They were quicker than liquid shit down a leg...so long as they were on sand. On each thorax was a lanky, bipedal mantis creature, the Kreen we called them. Green and yellow, nearly naked (though there wasn't much to hide, I suppose), and slinging hot lead since the minute they saw us. We cut around some sandblasted spires to head them off, Gad's scrapper ramping out of a depression and coming down hard on two wheels. My head snapped and my teeth clacked with a THOCK that was audible over the Blackstone engine. I'd check for cracked molars later, maybe after I beat Gad's head in with a wrench or something.
Elenor shot out of her seat like a piston once we had all four wheels on the ground, her scaly head and horns blocking my shot. Probably on purpose. She was looking down at something in the shotgun seat and holding a silver rod in her right hand, no doubt trying to conjure something long range enough to give us an edge. She'd pick something restrictive. Non-lethal. Something that would let her do the messy part of this job up close. You see, on the Frontier, there are two main camps of people. The white hat cleric types, coming here to save the people from the horrors of an unforgiving wasteland of famine and despair. Then there was the horrors themselves, born either out of necessity or pure goddamn malice, who ate the white hat cleric types for breakfast. Folk who spent enough time out here staring into that sickly green eastern sky usually picked one or the other. That's where Elenor sat, squarely in horror territory and making a home for herself.
Maybe she had her brains cooked by too many days on the plateau. Maybe her "egg rolled out the clutch" like some of her kin liked to say (but never close enough for her to hear). Or hell, maybe she just really liked to cut on people. I never got in the way and I never asked. So long as she kept the pointy end towards the Kreen, we was clean as new cogs.
The silver rod in Elenor's hand flared and a viscous, sticky net dropped over the front Kreen more than a hundred feet away and stuck to the ground. The first two gravelbacks ran through clean, off into the wild orange yonder. But the two bringing up the rear got caught in the quagmire, flinging their riders clear of the webbing and into the dirt in two big dramatic POOFS of desert sand. Gad pulled the scrapper around and it lurched to a halt so I could harpoon the gravvies quick and clean, leaving the messy nature of bounty collecting to Elenor and her specific skillset.
After spearing the second gravvie something leaning off the side of the big bug caught my eye. Something glowing warm and orange. Light through amber. Something not supposed to be there. I looked east. No Kreen. All run off, not so much as an attempt to gather their precious cargo. I leaned hard over the roll cage between me and El and wrenched her hood back, breaking line of sight from the same slice of horizon. Her slitted pupils met my visor and I drew a hard line with my hand across my brow. Cut it. Something is wrong.
With a hissing curse I assume was meant for me, El dropped her incantation and the webbing vanished while I dismounted and grabbed my rifle and blade. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I’d be damned if I died unarmed. Plus Gad might get spooked and drive off, along with my only shot at defending myself. I slung the blade belt over my shoulder and leveled my rifle at the gravelback with the satchel and crossed maybe half the distance between me and the bug, cresting a dune high enough for vantage. From here the glow was diminished, somehow brighter from afar and looking much more…mundane I guess as I got closer. The creature the satchel was attached to was a mound of knobby chitin and stone, laid to rest by the harpoon just a bit ago. Always felt bad putting down the gravvies. Big lugs were just doing their jobs. Couldnt be blamed for who rode them—
I took the first bullet in the leg, I think. Hard to tell, cause it wasn’t the leg shot that knocked me into the sand. It was the hit I took in the chest, stopped by two inches of drakescale, that dropped me on my ass. The scales were cooked but they did their job, cracked and blackened and falling off the breastplate in chunks. I managed to wheeze “CASTER” before rolling further down the dune, and hoped that Gad had the engine low enough to hear. There was that distinct piff sound of bullets hitting sand that kept me rolling further down the dune like a godsdamned fuckin log, looking dumb as hell but staying alive. My leg was screaming but I crab-crawled my way to the gravvie’s flank and hunkered down while more shots peppered the dead creature’s hide, sending chips like stone raining down on me.
I somehow kept ahold of the blade but lost the gun when I fell. I could see the dark impression poking from the red sand about 20 feet up the slope, in the middle of a human-sized depression surrounded by little craters from gunfire. With a curse I chanced to poke my head up over the stony back of the gravvie I was using for cover and spotted the two Kreen El had missed from earlier, still mounted, both holding rifles in their main hands and loading shells with their smaller secondary arms. Neither one was the caster responsible for the smoking hole in my armor. Fuck.
I ducked down and pulled the blade from the sheath, white-knuckling the hilt. I felt like an idiot, sitting there with my old militia shortsword in a gunfight, waiting to die with a body full of holes and an asscrack full of sand. Two Kreen, mounted. Two dismounted, but gone. I thought back to the impact. El dropped a web. They got thrown from their mounts and hit the sand…obscured by the plumes…I saw them run off, didn’t I?
Didn’t I?
There was movement off my right side, something rising from the ground, covered in blood red dirt and sand. Rising, rising, too tall, looming over me like a beast of angry elemental earth. A shimmer ran across the creature’s body, and I could see the mottled green and yellow of the carapace beneath. I gripped the shortsword tighter, snapped my arm forward, and dropped into stance. The Kreen had reach, but I had steel. I knew if I could get inside the first set of arms I could do some damage before the mandibles bit down.
Time moved like molasses in the moment between me and the Kreen making any moves. I waited for any kind of tell — an antenna twitch. A mandible click. It eventually came in the form of the Kreen’s weird, mid-torso arms drawing back, signaling a strike from the main set of arms. I ducked and the swing went wide, way overhead. Heartbeat in my ears, drowning out the sound around me. More stone chunks and chitin exploded around me. More gunshots? I stepped inside the creature’s reach, the shortsword, worn smooth on the sides by years of care, slid easily up between the plates on the kreen’s flank, plunging to the hilt and sticking. The small set of arms grasped at me, too weak to do anything but scratch at my plate as I tried to wrench the blade free. Those main arms? Not quite as weak.
A claw grabbed the back of my head, another the front of my face, wrenching like it was trying to twist my head off like a top. With a face full of chitin and my neck screaming, I couldn’t get enough leverage to pull the blade free for another plunge. My hand abandoned the shortsword and found purchase on the forearm of the Kreen, trying to wedge itself between the claw and my face, pushing against the torsion of a far stronger force. The arms lifted. My feet left the ground. My legs kicked against immovable chitin, tough as stone. I was losing. Gods be fucked, I was losing to a fucking Kreen.
My left hand dug into my duster, searching for the stone. Just a little chunk of petrified something, not sure what. A gift from someone long before. I put my hands on it, slurring the incantation through a face crushed by furious claws…nothing. Too distorted. I couldn't even curse. My right hand snaked in between my face and the claw, wrenching my head even further to the right. It was agony, but it was enough. My scream of pain became the Words, and the stone warmed in my hand. I pulled it from my pocket, pushing the petrified lump into the creature’s mandibles, only in reach because of my torturous ascent, dangling by my head. The stone lit up, and everything went white.
An invisible hand punched me in the chest, knocking the wind and damn near my soul out of my body, throwing me backward at an impossible speed. My head cracked against something. Probably the body of the gravelback. Nothing I could hear but a dull ringing, stuck in a world of silence, watching the Kreen double and triple in front of me, stepping forward on drunken, aimless legs. It hadn’t been thrown clear of the thunderclap like I had been. Instead, the blast had removed the top third of its body, and what shambled towards me now was a mess of shell and tendon, leaking white foam. It dropped unceremoniously, the hungry sand gobbling up that meager bit of moisture like a man too long in the Wastes.
The ringing persisted as I struggled to pull breath. On the cusp of the dune, another form rose from the sand, breaking camouflage. Long strips of leather hung from its shoulders like a tattered robe. The back of its head too long. An emissary. A smart one. It looked down at the corpse, then up at me, giant compound eyes reflecting a kaleidoscope of red and orange, inscrutable and alien. Was it mad? Did the Kreen grieve? Its four arms lifted and swirled, pulling a mote of fire from the ether. Even as my vision swam and my head rang I knew what was coming. Desperately, I tried to scramble away. The world spun, and my stomach churned. I was gonna retch, and then die, a charred stack of bones in the center of a ten-foot-wide scorch of earth. Fuckin hells. The mote left the Kreen’s grip and soared across the open air, almost lazily, like it knew it had all the time in the world to end my life. My head was split. I couldn't stand. I extended my right arm, middle finger out. A final act of defiance. I closed my eyes.
Another thunderclap split the sky in front of me, followed by a haunted radiating hum. I fought my heavy eyes, and willed them open, needing to see what kept me from my meeting with the Allmaker. I was met with a shower of purple embers, suspended between the Kreen and the patch of sand I thought to be my grave. The image of the Kreen still split and coalesced, my eyes and head still struggling to agree on what was real and what was head trauma. It fuzzed and moved, becoming twin silhouettes. I crawled backward, watching both, right side scraping along the gravelback. If I could get around the backside of the creature…put something between myself and the caster…
A third blast. One of the silhouettes engulfed in flame, the crackle of a shell bursting from the heat and pressure. Something pushed into my head, vibrating, distressed. I swore I could feel fear and panic, emotions not my own, forcing their way in and then dissipating like wind-blown smoke. Gone as quickly as they came.
I passed out.
