My feeling now was not much different.
We took stealthy steps through deep gloom, keeping our eyes off the ancient corpses. Blest kicked at some moldered bones. “Are these for real?” A clattering echo rebounded through the dimness. I waved him to silence. We threaded our way among the hulking shapes of the weird mechnobots, robots of some savage origin, some as high as a second story apartment with pincers for arms and strange metallic outerbodies and turret-like heads. Others materialized in the gloom, as short as midgets only knee high, human, animal, a mixture of the two. The cavernous ceiling rose more stories above than I cared to guess and seemed to exude a maroon-purplish glow from somewhere high above, almost phosphorescent. Whatever these hulking shapes were, they constituted an intimidating rack of armory, scaring the crap out of us all in the eerie light that filtered through the opaque dome.
Chapter 12
I felt a shudder pass along my spine as I threaded by those inert goliaths looming in the eerie darkness. They’d been spawned in a day when technology far outmatched our current science. Now only shadowy hints lingered of the dark age humankind had lapsed into since the last alien war centuries ago. I swallowed the lump in my throat, wondering about that violent, bio-mechanical heritage we’d evolved out of, and of which we remembered little.
Cyber Corp had been messing with robotic experiments, prototypes of weird and wonderful kinds. Aggressive ones, judging from the weapons and guns, the flamethrowers and ray sprayers mounted on the turrets, also the size of those dinosaur shapes and the quality of their armor.
So many mysteries and relics of the forgotten past...The only common thread, invariably, was war and its cruel aftermath—the glue holding it all together.
Here a garden sprawled, as if a horticulture or greenhouse experiment of loose soil and potted plants, there a shattered glass bin of shriveled ferns, long browned with striped leaves and stigmas of curled proboscises. I couldn’t help but shiver, almost forgetting our Skug menace.
I tapped on the glass of a certain rectangular glass lab cage, eighteen feet long. Inside was what looked like withered ferns clinging to chunks of dry soil. It appeared as if the vessel had been hurled from a distance; from one of the labs spread along the side walls. Uncannily, the tempered-glass had not shattered.
I tapped on the glass again. Nothing…And yet, I detected a small flutter of movement within.
I gave a hollow laugh. Impossible, Rusco, you’re a lunatic. I breathed through my mask. I chuckled, attributing my imagination to the Myscol I’d tongued.
Yet that primitive awareness that lurks at the back the mind and knows something is watching it, tingled my spine. I knew it was something not quite arguably human. So did the others. We all watched in a kind of glazed horror as a monstrous hulk, some twenty-foot-high half-armored ape and scorpion, came to sudden life, a bluish-grey pilot light beaming from its turret-like head. Ridiculous, of course. Not even possible to hallucinate such a thing, but we were the fools striding through a forsaken, molder-ridden mausoleum of the haunted past, and evidently a living vessel for things that should have been left alone.
No time to ponder the chilling horrors of the past. The first gunfire came at us in green energy beams from the wings where we had come. I hissed out a curse and beckoned Follee forward who hunched behind a shoulder-high, four-legged mechnobot with a hideous oversized head and downturned sloping back.
We slunk like panthers to a place where three giant mechnos stood poised on human-like legs, poised in the violet gloom like grim guardians of a tortured past. We hunkered down behind them, taking up ambush positions.
Figures moved in the murk. They came upon us like wildfire, flanking us in a wide semicircle. A small army of horned heads, mummy-wrapped figures with tusked noses came lumbering like stalkers out of screaming nightmare. So, the tales of Skugs were true.
Their sawed off R6s spat blue fire at us.
Fire flare was all around, shredding glass cases, sending bright streaks off the tough armor of the standing mechnobots.
The Skugs grunted through their nosepieces like wild hogs. I saw bits of plant and earth flying up as their fire flares shredded the aquarium next to me. Were those plants moving, or hissing? No, a stupid trick of the mind, amid the sudden carnage and chaos.
I dove for deeper cover, missing a spray that would have ended me.
I gained my feet and stood back to back with Wren emptying fire into moving shapes. Noss and Blest worked in a similar manner. I didn’t know where the fuck Follee had gone. Had he fled? Was he dead?
These mutants were going to flank us and take us down in minutes. My head struggled to make sense of it. A flurry of thoughts coursed through my mind. Primitive cannibals these headhunting Skugs, drinking blood from carved goblets of skulls. Up to this point, I’d assumed these freaks were just raiders seeking plunder, not the bloodthirsty savages of local legends passed down through the ages.
That illusion was shattered with the rush of a seven-foot giant from my right. He bowled me over, snorting like a bison, and reached out a deformed paw to hurl me against the mechnobot to my left. I let out a wild grunt. My
