Sydney dropped Karnage like a dead weight, panting. The room was dark. Angry tentacles of green light lashed at her feet. She desperately searched for any glimmer of white.
A dull grey sphere pulsed high above her in the middle of the room. As she ran towards it, the sphere slowly lowered down to the floor. It was larger than her, its innards oblong and mechanical. She saw a giant nozzle press against its side. She recognized it instantly, and grinned from ear to ear.
It was the barrel of a Sudsy tanker.
She pulled out her stun stick and smashed an opening in the sphere’s surface. She crawled through, coughing in the thick yellow haze as she pulled Karnage through after her. Mist poured out of the sphere, and she could see the Sudsy tanker in detail. Sydney opened the tanker’s hatch and dragged Karnage inside. She locked the hatch behind her.
“Lucky for you I got my start on the force in riot control.” She strapped the unconscious Karnage into the co-pilot seat. “Might not be quite as good as, say, a plasma cannon, but it’s a good start, right?” She lifted Karnage’s inert face and gently slapped his cheek. “Now you just sit back and enjoy the ride, okay, mate?”
She strapped herself into her seat and flicked on the console. It hummed to life, the controls vibrating under her fingers. She was thrilled to see the tanker’s Sudsy vats were full. She put the machine into gear and crashed it through the remnants of the sphere. She swung it around so it faced the glowing green door. The door spiralled open, revealing the angry sawtooth maw of the horned worm.
Sydney took a breath. “Right, here we go.”
The worm shot forward, and Sydney hit the guns. Sudsy sprayed across the floor. She backed the tanker up out of the path of the worm. The worm tried to bank, but its bulk hit the Sudsy and it slid across the floor, missing the tanker completely. It spun wildly as it disappeared into the black, screeching horribly. Its screeches faded to nothing.
A flash of white light appeared on the floor, and shot across the cavernous room into the darkness. Sydney steered the Sudsy tanker towards it and followed at full speed.
She checked her rear monitors. A pair of worms chased after her. Squidbugs rode atop each worm, their clawed hands holding the horns. They were catching up quickly. Sydney sprayed Sudsy behind her across the floor. The worms moved to twist out of the way. One of them made it, but the other caught the tail end of the Sudsy. The sudden loss of traction on its rear end caused the worm to flip violently. The squidbugs were thrown from its back and crushed as the worm rolled across the floor.
The streaking white light in front of the tanker was obliterated by a sudden ferocious flash of green. Sydney kept going, hoping she was still moving in the right direction. She pushed the engines as hard as she could, their gauges quivering at maximum.
A squidbug riding on the worm behind her levelled its staff. A ball of energy collected on its end, and buzzed towards the tanker. Sydney yanked on the controls, trying to dodge the blow. There was a loud sizzle, and she smelled burning plastic as she felt her hair stand on end. Warning lights on the console flashed. She wasn’t sure at first what had happened. The engines were still going strong. But then she noticed the Sudsy vats were emptying fast.
Oh no.
Sudsy was pouring out over the outside of the tanker. It coated the exterior monitors with a greasy smear. The tanker suddenly bucked and spun as the Sudsy hit one of the treads. It soon soaked the other and the tanker slid out of control. The monitors showed brief flashing blurs of the worm behind her also spinning wildly, squidbugs desperately clinging to its back. There was nothing left for Sydney to do but brace for impact.
The impact never came. She caught a white blur in her monitors and saw a grate on the floor open in front of the tanker. The tanker dropped through.
Sydney was jarred as the tanker collided with the wall of the chute. The tanker slid down the pipe toward a T-junction. White light collected in a ring around one of the openings and it slammed shut. The tanker bounced off its cover grate and slid down the other corridor.
Sydney shut her eyes. She felt like she was riding a tilt-a-whirl careening down a rocky mountainside. The tanker was being rocked and buffeted through the innards of the ship. She felt a huge lurch, and wasn’t sure whether it was the tanker or the ship that tilted down.
She opened her eyes again. Where she expected the salvific white light, instead, she saw flashes of blue at the end of the black tunnel. These turned to blue and beige as the tanker flew out of the belly of the ship and plummeted towards the desert floor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Karnage came to, he was hanging upside down in a mangled cockpit. Sydney stood beside him on the ceiling, right side up. “What happened?” Karnage asked.
“We escaped from the alien ship.”
“How?”
Sydney frowned. “It’s… kind of complicated.”
“Try me.”
“I think we had help.”
“Why can’t I move?” he asked, tentatively testing out his frozen muscles.
“That was me.” Sydney rubbed her throat. “You sorta… tried to kill me back there.”
“Oh.” The memories of what happened came flooding back to him: his fist squeezing her trachea. The shocked, terrified look in her eyes. The explosions, the smoke, and the flames, and then…
Karnage looked away, ashamed. “I lost it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” Sydney answered. “You did.”
“I’m… I’m not always right in the head.”
“Apparently,” she snorted. “So how are you feeling now?”
“A little better.”
“Only a little?”
“A lot.”
“Okay.” Sydney gave him a suspicious look. “But the next time you try something like that, I might not go so easy on you.” Sydney pressed a finger against Karnage’s earlobe. He felt the warmth flow back into his tingling limbs. She unstrapped him from his seat, and helped him drop down to the ceiling. His legs felt like rubber.
“Where are we?”
Sydney jerked a thumb to the mangled hatch that hung open in the wall. “I think you should see for yourself.”
They were resting in the bottom of a smooth crater. Just visible above the edges of the crater were the mile-high walls of the WTF.
“What the fuck?” Karnage said.
“My thoughts exactly,” Sydney replied with a smirk.
“How did we end up exactly where we started?”
“Like I said before. I think we had help.”
Karnage climbed out of the hatch and immediately set to work scaling the walls of the crater. “But who? Who would have helped us?” As he reached the top, he looked up into the sky, squinting into the blue. There was no sign of the aliens. It was as if they had never been there. Except for the smoking crater, and that lingering feeling….
“We’re with you, Major. Every one of us. We’re with you….”
He whipped around. “Cookie! It must have been!”
“Who’s Cookie?”
“One of my troopers. Former Communications engineer. He was already interceptin’ the alien communications before they struck. Maybe he finally cracked ’em! Maybe he hacked into the alien ship. Maybe that’s what he meant when he said they were with us. Like the French resistance! Maybe—”
An invisible fist smashed into the back of Karnage’s shoulder, spinning him back around. He heard the echo of the gunshot seconds later.
Karnage stumbled forward. Blood welled from his shoulder. He turned back to see Sydney charging up the crater’s wall.