12 Miles Below

I remembered the last time I was carried in arm by the family armor.

The clan had grown too cramped for our current habitat, but the scouts had discovered an empty fortress a few hundred miles away, far across the permafrost expanse. Maybe a month or two’s worth of travel in the airspeeders, an expensive journey for the clan.

Sometimes fortresses and habitats appeared, pushed from the underground. Sites that seemed almost tailor made to withhold against the air and protect a population from the surface. Empty relic armors and weapons might even be found on the inside, assuming others hadn’t stumbled upon it first. Our scouts had spotted one such fortress.

This fortress had signs of having been lived in, perhaps another clan at some point. Brick buildings on the inside to separate halls, writing etched in walls, and other signs of a different people.

That was the nature of things up here. We lived like hermit crabs, something the undersiders were quick to use as insults. Each time a clan grew too big, it would either find another home or fragment into smaller allied tribes. But splitting into smaller tribes came with dangers, and no one wanted to split if they could help it.

That’s why we’d be willing to live packed in tiny places that were made only to house hundreds, not thousands. But we could only stretch the infrastructure so far.

Eventually, it was simple math that drove us out of our homes.

Finding a new and larger fortress was a blessing from the gods, especially one that could hold thousands. This was a massive fortress habitat, and whichever clan had occupied it previously must have surely grown strong enough for a migration into the underground next, becoming a seedling city. They might have done so more than a decade ago.

The clan spent a year preparing for our own migration to this new habitat. Most of the focus was on stocking food supplies for the long journey. Getting to know the local mechas, neighbors and political situation that awaited us there. A small detachment of Retainers to stake and hold our claim and Reachers to slowly repair the construction back to its former glory.

Years of neglect had allowed the frost to slowly infiltrate through the cracks and broken pipes. The engineers did not have an easy task ahead of them. The repair work for that alone was said to have been a brutal affair, costing the lives of several who’d hit on unlucky accidents while outside.

Eventually, step by step, the fortress was brought back to life, and the clan ready for migration. All the alliances and new trade routes secured. We packed the non-combatants and other civilians into one massive expedition led by Lord Atius, and left our old habitat fortress for good, leaving it ready for the next clan to occupy. However many decades that could take.

The journey was treacherous. Airspeeders would often break down after such extended uses, and salvage expeditions were sent out to recover the necessary scrap and materials to keep the convoy alive.

You’d think it’d be during one of those small foraging expeditions that the raiders would attack, but they were after softer targets. Scrappers were hardy folk who didn’t make good slaves. No, the real target was the civilians, the tradesmen and children. The cooks, the servants, and the engineers. The people who couldn’t fight back.

And the only place to find those were among the main convoy, which would not make for an easy target. But months of travel was a long time, and they only needed a few minutes of weakness. The slavers must have been stalking quietly behind us for weeks, waiting for that inevitable chink in the armor.

House Winterscar, House Eventide and a smaller part of House Salvos had been trailing in the back of the convoy that day when the chink in the armor appeared. A blizzard wall hit. Visibility went down to nothing, while the airspeeders all continued somberly through the storm. Hours into the numbing blindness, the raiders picked their moment.

The last few trailing airspeeders stalled and collapsed into the permafrost, their mass shoving away snow as they each skidded to a stop. The comms had gone down at the same time, mere seconds after our last check in. The rest of the convoy continued forward, oblivious to the loss of comms. The storm covered the crime. And the conspirators within our midst covered the rest of the sabotage.

They’d known House Salvos’s two relic knights were in the airspeeder just slightly ahead - the airspeeder that conveniently hadn’t been disabled and continued forward, oblivious to the danger that had swallowed everyone behind.

House Eventide was a Reacher caste house, filled with engineers and civilians. They wouldn’t offer up any resistance. And so the only danger to the raiders would come from House Winterscar. The plan had been calculated down to the details.

Father could handle a fight against two other relic users at the same time, even drunk as he was that day. But the slavers had planned for that. They’d brought four relic armors among their numbers.

I remember everyone frantically reaching for weapons, preparing for the fight. I was thirteen back then, with a rifle shoved into my hands. A ten year old next to me was given a pistol. Whatever happened next, the raiders were not getting away without being bloodied.

The airspeeder doors opened wide, and men charged out, improvised metal sheets as shields. They set up a quick trenchline up ahead, digging the sheets of metal into the snow. The rest of us would file out once the bulwark was set up. Children too young or elderly would hunker down deeper into the airspeeder.

Father staggered into our airspeeder a moment later, before Kidra and I were due to charge out. Drunk and tipsy as usual, but still lucid enough to function.

The rest of the crew cried out for him to save them, begging in between the rifle shots and screaming in the background.

He ignored all of them, shoving through like a sledgehammer against concrete. Someone's jaw was broken as he swept people away. His armored boot stomped over a terrified boy's leg and crushed it. I could see the suit tear open, the blood instantly freezing.

Then his hand reached for both my sister and I, lifting us out of the airspeeder.

And then he ran.

Ran right past the disabled airspeeders of House Eventide, which we were sworn to protect. Ran away as the rest of the infamous Winterscars stood their ground to protect the Reachers. Ran away with just my sister and I clutched to his sides. He didn't say a word, only the sounds of his straining breaths in our comms.

The family armor made his sprint something utterly inhuman. In seconds the howling snow was all we could see as the blizzard wall hid everything. Father still ran, completely blind. Whatever he’d drunk threatened to trip him multiple times. He held on.

Airspeeders were quick, but the speed was still set deliberately slow. A lot of Reachers had calculated exactly what the optimal speed to fuel to food ratio could be used. The result was a fast airspeeder; just not quite as fast as a harrowed out relic knight with a purpose.

Father made it to House Salvos’s functioning airspeeder, appearing out of the blizzard like a ghost. It had been about fifteen minutes at his full sprint.

The scavengers that dotted the ship’s hull all glanced at the sudden appearance of a relic user from the wall of the snowstorm. Then they frantically pointed at him once they realized this shouldn’t be happening at all. The speeder immediately slowed to a stop as Father leapt into the open interior compartment, dropping both of us inside.

“What’s the meaning of this Winterscar? Run out of booze?” A voice came from within, one of the relic knights from House Salvos walked into view.

Father told them. Only one single word, but instantly the entire convoy took action.

Slavers

In seconds, the airspeeder had turned and shot off at full breakneck speed. Some of House Salvos’s scavengers on the hull seats would have been thrown off the ship if the comms-wide warning hadn’t sounded off. The pilot’s rage could be felt through her voice with such clarity even I reflexively clutched to anything in range, though I was safe on the interior. The rest of the convoy was close on our heels following the comms chatter, including a furious Deathless.

The raiders had brought four relic wielders to counter Father, but they’d stand absolutely no chance against the powers Lord Atius wielded.

In mere minutes the speeder crossed the distance Father had sprinted through, a fraction of the time it took him.

It hadn’t been enough. What we found wasn’t a fight, but the end of one.

Only a few members of House Salvos’s were left shooting from their downed airspeeder while the raiders had completely emptied the four others that dotted the landscape. Behind them, a huddle of Reachers from Eventide had managed to run out of their doomed speeders to safety. House Winterscar was gone, save for the bodies that were quickly getting buried in snow, their airspeeders among the claimed ground. They’d all been either taken, or killed while buying those Reachers time to fall back.

Ironic that at the very end, in the face of death, the House Winterscar had honored their oaths. They'd heard the call and stood their ground.

All except for Father.

The raiders were mere minutes away from claiming the last airspeeder and seizing the whole of House Eventide, until they saw the incoming cavalry. They instantly turned and ran. A few unlucky raiders were gunned down from a distance, but most managed to flee into the underground cracks, executing or dragging down whatever prey was left in arms reach.

Soon we were left with nothing but dead bodies and the snow.

The airspeeders had been damaged in the fight. It would take hours to repair them. Our entire route and plan had to be recalculated from scratch. But the clan would continue forward, one house less.

We couldn’t chase them underground, we hadn’t prepared for an expedition of that scale. There was no other choice but to leave.

Lord Atius executed three men that week, after sniffing out the treachery. When he led a team to the base of operations he'd extracted from the traitors, he only found an empty staging ground. The slavers were long gone.

Everyone said Father had made the only logical choice. To fight off four relic knights was to guarantee death - and worse - his armor would absolutely be stolen. They’d kill Father, carry his dead body away and be glad to trade any amount of potential slaves for it. If he’d not warned the convoy, they’d never have returned in the first place until the snowstorm ended. I'm not sure that's what had gone through his mind at all.

What I am sure of is that he never touched another bottle after that day.

The entire migration, he spent the rest of it on a sickbed. A month of fevers, shaking and delirium as he refused anything besides water. And once he paid off his dues to his former addiction, he stepped out of that bed and started training the two of us night and day like there was a deadline to keep. It was miserable, grueling, filled with blood and bruises. Nine goddamn years of that. Father was a savant when it came to combat. Only Kidra seemed to intuitively understand his lessons.

Eachlesson would start like training and eventually devolve to a beatdown as he grew frustrated at being unable to teach me as quickly as my sister. Broken bones, black eyes, screaming, it felt like he was so desperate to make sure I knew at least something about how to fight at his level, and now I understood why.

But I wouldn't ever be as good as my sister. She was favored by Tsuya, and I... I simply wasn't good at fighting.

I thought back on the automaton, how I’d still failed every lesson, every drill, all those years of training. I still froze up like a coward when the moment came to make use of it all. I'd been prepared to fight against other humans or any of the typical dangers above on the surface. Somehow, that single automaton scared me more than any raider ever could.

Why was I saved from that raid if this was how it was going to end up? I'd asked myself that question time and time again, but this time it really struck home. There were so many others he could have picked up and carried to safety, men and women of amazing talent - but only my sister and I were picked. She was worthy of it at least. I absolutely wasn’t.

And now he carried me once again, this time deep underground. He should just drop me and leave. It would be easy. There were hundreds of excuses. Say I'd been killed by an automaton, or that the fall snapped my neck.

Father remained silent, giving no answer to my unasked questions. We were swiftly approaching the next rooftop, he’d need to jump soon.

The old armor flexed under his control, alive in a way I hadn’t been able to appreciate back when I was thirteen. But gripping on his back, I’d gotten a much closer look at that armor in the last hour than I’d had in the last few years put together.

It was amazing how it showed no hint of the combat damage sustained an hour before. The spirit of the armor had fixed it all. The only cost was time, two power cells and the leftovers of my environmental suit system, cannibalized for the greater good.

With our haul of power cells, Father’s body was the weak link that would give out first. There was no point to hoarding the suit’s energy.

The legs bent, power thrumming through, and he sailed forward through the air, landing with a heavy crack across the gap. The first few times had terrified me but I’d gotten the hang of it by now.

Maybe having nothing to do other than hold onto his back had given me some introspective time to sort out what had happened. I still had the bruises on my throat as a reminder. And the shame.

Mostly the shame.

At our speed we were approaching the end of the mite's map and would reach the outskirts within ten minutes or less. We’d have to figure out where to go from there. I was hoping our luck would hold when it came to the machines, but of course, that wasn’t going to be the case.

“We’ve been spotted.” Father said over comms.

“One of their patrol paths?”

“No, they’ve sent another hunter after me. It’s caught up.”

I saw it from the corner of my eye at first. A single violet white machine. It looked very different from the previous ones. A long segmented snakelike body, four legs and massive spine blades jutting across the links.

Like a skeletal lizard. It jumped over roofs like we were, barrelling down with single minded intent.

The clan habitat had its own micro ecosystem of creatures, one of which was a predatory lizard that hunted down insects and roaches that lurked inside the pipe system. Those tiny lizards had crushing jaws and faster strikes.

The maw of this thing looked like a giant cousin of those pipe lizards, filled with artificial teeth that I could see in detail even from this distance. And like the previous automaton, violet lights and white ceramic armor with a skull-like face. An inhuman elongated skull this time.

I’d watched unsuspecting insects get chased down in a flash and swallowed up, attacked from the dark reaches those insects had thought safe.

Now, we were the insects.

Next chapter - Maw of the Drake

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