- CHAPTER THREE -
Red grass waved in the slight breeze beside the milky white river that tumbled over rocks and off a cliff. On the riverbank, a lone figure lay in wait, crouched within the spherical ruin of a dead Vex construct.
A skiff decloaked over the field of red grass and white soil. An automated hovering mining drill descended from the ship, its bright blue laser boring into the ground. The skiff also deposited a full squad of Fallen to safeguard the collection device, which was a very shiny chrome machine sitting on the ground.
They were here to extract glimmer – shiny blue cubes once used as a Golden Age power source, but now hoarded as universal currency among all the sentient races inhabiting this solar system. If there was one thing that united the warring races, it was money. Glimmer was the good stuff.
A half-second after Fallen feet hit the ground, a solitary glowing purple arrow flew from the shadows. It missed all of them, piercing the empty ground. Then a maw of darkness opened up where the arrow struck. The gaping mouth of the Void, full of distant stars and strange constellations, reached out to each Fallen soldier with a gravity tentacle, ensnaring them all in a huge ghastly purple web.
Paralysed by the gravitational pull, unable to lift their leaden limbs far less their weapons, all the Fallen could do was die. A single gunshot rang out, a single head exploded, but then all at once the entire squad perished, sharing the fate of their headless teammate. Such was the insidious power of the Void, which devoured all and turned away none.
A lone figure slinked out of the shade into the sunlight, pistol barrel still smoking. Her eyes glowed inhuman orange, the colour of starfire. Her skin and mohawk hairstyle were an alien shade of violet, and her lips were the colour of full-bodied wine. She stepped over alien corpses to slap a demolition charge onto the glimmer receptacle. A second skiff decloaked and deposited a second squad of Fallen almost on top of her. Before their feet hit the ground, however, a shining purple bow appeared in her hands and shot another arrow into the soil. Another Void mouth opened, full of grasping tentacles and paralytic horror punctuated by a single gunshot and mass death. The Void was insatiable, feeding on their destruction yet leaving her miraculously unharmed. The Void knew the hand that fed it, and it was pleased with her offerings.
When the shiny chrome machine burst open, spilling its glimmer guts everywhere, the drill sucked up all spilt glimmer, shut down and returned to the waiting skiff above. The skiffs retreated at maximum speed over the horizon to look for a safer mining spot, but nowhere was safe. The grim reaper rode a Sparrow over hill and vale. The Void would feed. They would all die.
The lone figure performed this grisly process three times in total, each time killing two full squads of Fallen. So much death, so much glimmer. After the sixth squad croaked and the third receptacle burst, the mining drill exploded, unable to contain the triple volume of glimmer. Fallen greed was its undoing. The huge pile of glimmer crashed into a shallow lake of real water.
The lone figure stood upon the pile, claiming it as her own. She opened her hand and with a flash of light, a small black diamond-shaped machine appeared on her palm. Its sole white eye flicked between her and the pretty little blue cubes beneath her feet.
"TRANSMAT?"
"You know the drill, Tac."
"PUN," the little machine groaned, setting about its work of preparing the huge quantity of money for teleportation directly to her jumpship. No sharing. A new squad of Fallen dropped from a skiff about a hundred metres away, but their leader was very tall and very strong, flexing all six of his thick arms: a ketch Captain, commander of an enormous ship capable of pillaging an entire planet. He sucked the finest and largest volumes of Ether, unlike the smaller skiff Captains, Vandals and Dregs that peeked out nervously from behind his huge legs.
"A challenge," the lone figure said with a smile curling her lovely lips.
"CALLISTO!" the small robot rebuked her.
"Yeah, yeah, I've got your back."
Callisto loosed yet another Void arrow at the ketch Captain. Learning from the mistakes of his many recently deceased subordinates, he teleported out of harm's way in a large puff of blue Ether. While his personal honour guard did their jobs of dying in his place, he leveled his massive shrapnel launcher at the humanoid avatar of entropy.
Blasts of burning dross glanced off her personal forcefield while she leveled her own big weapon: a cyberpunk rocket launcher that materialised with a flash of light, just as the tiny talking robot had. Unlike the sleek chrome masterworks of the City foundries, this weapon had exposed wires and rusty metal plates supporting a fat bulbous head, whose myriad launch tubes formed a honeycomb pattern. This dubious device spewed a noisy swarm of tiny seeker missiles.
The ketch Captain's big body betrayed him, and took the full brunt of the assault. Small but rapid explosions propelled him into the air. He splashed down in a lake of milky white liquid – Vex radiolarian fluid, the lifeblood of pesky time-traveling machines. With his personal forcefield destroyed, the Vex mind fluid began to eat him alive.
Some scholars theorise that this disgusting white ooze is actually a liquid species whose individuals are too small for the eye to see. Some scholars assert that the evil red-eyed Vex are merely robot bodies that these microscopic creatures use to interact with our macro world, much the same way the City built robot bodies for their AI servants. Whatever the truth is, the ketch Captain died horribly, drowning and burning simultaneously.
Callisto stowed her weapon, then danced a victory jig on the glimmer pile until Tac finished transmatting it.
"MESSAGE," the little machine announced.
Callisto listened to Yi Yi's voice. She nodded. "Was getting bored of this place anyway."