Tremors

Maria

Delithita was so mad she didn't know what to do, which was unlike her. She was not sure if she wanted to tear down the massive stone walls with her bare hands or run through the colony gleefully murdering everyone she came across. So she stood there and stared.

The day before, an Apocalypse had stood there, underneath a crane that had lifted fresh Shrike launchers to its shoulders, in between a pair of small cargo pallets that had brought new components to it.

No one had dared go near it. Even Ko'ah, always wanting to take Tycho's Basilisk out, made no move to claim the now ownerless Apocalypse.

It was Maria's. And anyone caught messing with it would be killed. Del had made that plain enough.

But now it was gone. An unauthorized opening of the main tunnel entrance had alerted Del, the Ghost on duty in Ops at the time. It had taken her awhile to repair the security cameras that had been efficiently sabotaged, and by that time, the vehicle had disappeared.

"Someone is going to die," she vowed in a fierce whisper.

"Ko'ah to Del," her communicator interrupted her murderous musings.

"What." Translation: Talk fast and give me a really good reason not to come up there and kill you.

Ko'ah apparently understood. "Sorry to disturb you, but I'm picking up some interesting things on the satellite."

"Such as?"

"Well, the Cybrids on the opposite side of the plain are starting to act funny... patrol patterns are shifting, like they're under attack from the west... a very big attack."

"Shift the focus of the satellite then," Del said irritably.

"Tried. We aren't picking anything up... except some residual energy traces from destroyed Cybrid vehicles."

"Hmm. Alright. Can you locate Maria's Apoc?"

"Locate it?"

"It is missing."

There was silence for a moment. "When I find out who did that I'll shred him," Ko'ah muttered. "Searching... what's the transponder frequency?"

"Sixteen point two one gigahertz," Del said, recalling what that radio frequency had once done to Maria.

"Searching... got it. It's about three hundred kilometers west of here, moving northwest at... hmm... two hundred klicks. Turbine boost?"

"Not last I knew..."

"I'll track it. Who the hell would steal the thing anyway?"

"I'm about to find out," she said, and boarded the lift to return to Ops, and then go to the Banshee bay...

-----

Icey closed his eyes as a transmission came in on his personal frequency. So she had replied. This was not something he wanted to deal with. Thank God at least the distance between Mercury and Earth prohibited real-time conversation.

He stared at the spinning Knight's icon, poked the control with one finger to play the message.

"Thank you for informing me, Icey," Maria's sister said softly. She was sitting at her desk in a Knight's command center, in Madrid judging by the level of damage visible through the window behind her. Rosa shook her head. "But then I knew the instant it happened. To answer your question, no, I do not know where Jocelyn is; she's gone undercover on a mission to Titan, I believe. And unfortunately, John was killed several days ago in Herc action breaking the siege of San Diego."

Icey slammed his fist on the stone desk, rattling the monitor. He had known John; an able pilot, a brave fighter, a good man. He had looked forward to fighting alongside him again but apparently that was not going to happen. The only good thing about it was that Maria never knew.

"Thanks again for the call. I will do my best to get to Mercury one of these days... as soon as this war allows me." With a sad shake of her head, she closed the transmission.

-----

"Immortal Brotherhood," Xenogears said. "That's what IB stands for. I searched a Cybrid database we captured a few months ago and came up with the reference from Cybrid records of the Fire."

"Yeah, but who are they?" Icey muttered.

"They are a group of Immortals, the originals, in fact. Before and during the Fire, they were responsible for most of the Empire's covert operations against the Cybrids. The records I have are out of date, unfortunately, and if the Brotherhood still exists today, I doubt I will be able to find out anything more about them from here."

"Rosa could help us I'm sure..."

"Possibly. But you must know that the Empire monitors all communications between Earth and Mercury. No one is supposed to be here but the TDF and the AMG, remember?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, logic dictates that Maria was once a member of the IB. How else would she have known about them? She was active during the Fire, you know."

Icey hadn't thought about that. "Have you managed to retrieve any of her family records, from the Antipode Imperial Garrison records?"

"Very little, and nothing that far back. The earliest record I have for her is an Imperial Navy roster from 2797, when she was in command of a torchship exploring Neptunian space."

Icey blinked. "Say what?"

"She was in the Navy, it appears, for about ten years, although by her rapid rank advancements, I would assume she had been previously employed by the Navy under different identities to conceal her immortality."

Icey grunted. "I see."

"And she joined the Knights in 2800, under the same name, Maria Perez, though she attempted to claim she was a new recruit at the time. She rose in rank the normal way until her retirement in 2820."

"Whereupon she intended to disappear for fifty years then come back as someone else, eh?"

"That could very well be."

Icey shook his head. "Any word on the Apoc?"

"Del's chasing it down in the Banshee."

"Right, right... keep an eye on those strange glitch movements. Something bad is up, I think..."

"I cannot describe the destruction of Cybrids as a bad thing."

Icey smirked. "Who says whatever's destroying them likes us any better?"

-----

"Ooh, now that was a quake!" Ajax muttered, as Razorback and Altas grabbed his legs to maintain their balance. "What was that, a five point five?"

"Xenogears to Colony residents: we have suffered an outgas quake of five point six on the Mercurian Modified Richter; please sweep your areas and report any damage discovered to Ops immediately." The speaker grill on the ceiling crackled once and shut off.

"Biggest I've felt since we got here," Razor said. "Reminds me of Olympus Mons. One blew nicely there awhile back, and flooded a few towns with pyroclastic..."

His voice trailed away.

"Five point six from outgassing is impossible," Altas said, as if reading Razor's thoughts. "You can't even get a two from outgassing, except on Io or Titan."

"Perhaps our dear Xeno has had her brain scrambled by recent events," Gyl put in from their left. "Much as I have by getting basalt dust lodged in my access ports. Are you sure this is really necessary?"

"It is," Razor said flatly. "Maria ordered it, and we are certainly not going against her orders now."

Gyl did not respond. She was rather irritated at Maria's insistence that all vehicles be covered with a coating of rock powder, to mask their spectral signature, but she was not about to go against the order, especially not now.

-----

"Altas here," the Cybrid said as he ascended the small staircase to the main level of Ops.

"Razor here," Razorback said a moment later. Icey and Ko'ah had already reached Ops and were standing beside Xeno who was gazing at her console with an unreadable expression. "What is it?" Razor asked her.

She frowned slightly and studied the screen again. "Something interesting has turned up, about that last quake. Our sensors indicate it was centered directly below the Antipode."

"No surprise there," Altas said. "The region was created by a massive shockwave ripping through the planet from the Caloris impact. Even now there are bound to be a few large unstable regions."

"Thank you for the rundown on Mercury's natural history," Xenogears said irritably. "But that was no crustal settling. For one thing, the epicenter was on the interface between the core and the crust, about a thousand kilometers deep. And do not tell me 'impossible' because I know it as well as you."

"What could possibly cause a quake that deep? The upper core is solid iron sulfide. There can be no shifting." The heavy, iron-rich core granted Mercury both its amazing density and its faint magnetic field; it was only liquid in the center, much like Mars's core.

"Reading of the shockwaves has painted us a very odd picture of the way of things down there. Both the P and S wave readings from our quake indicate that the core is, as we already know, displaced significantly toward the opposite side of the planet. However, the space so created is not filled with rock. It appears to be hollow."

"A cavern system?" Ko'ah said. He was intrigued: his home planet had been rife with underground dwellings inside the limestone cliffs that formed most of the planet's coastlines.

"Not exactly. More a vast open crack in the planet's structure, about a hundred kilometers in width and ten kilometers in height."

"Well, that's fascinating, but what does that have to do with us?" Icey asked.

Xenogears merely lifted an eyebrow at him. "I trained some neutrino sensors on the spot and found distinctive energy signatures."

"There's someone down there?" Razor demanded.

"So it appears. And with a massive space like that down there, there could be millions."

-----

The Banshee slipped around a cliff and over a small crater, and finally the Apocalypse was in sight, a small white dot on the horizon. Del glared at it, and pushed the Banshee's engines into overdrive, or, more accurately, overoverdrive, since they had been maxxed out already. At least Maria wasn't around anymore to complain about overstressing the flyer's engines. At the thought, Del fought off her grief and focused on her rage, directed at whoever was piloting the vehicle.

She did not hail the vehicle; that would have been a very unwise move. A flyer had to keep quiet or Cybrids would eat it for breakfast like the flying pie it resembled. She settled for dipping even closer to the ground that flashed by too quickly to see, and locked her vehicle on autopilot following the Apoc's transponder.

Sensors cried out in alarm, and she looked out the window. To the south, a fleet of HERCs was climbing up the slight slope. She tracked their courses, and noted that they were on a direct heading for Fantasma. She was about to radio the colony despite the danger, when the shapes of the vehicles caught her eye.

They were blocky and sturdily built, not like the bulbous hulls and graceful legs of Cybrid vehicles. They were human: a force of Apocalypses, Gorgons, Disrupter tanks, and Minotaurs.

They were painted with strange patterns of black and yellow, and as Del zoomed in on the lead Gorgon, her eyes caught the IB icon that had so alarmed Maria in her last battle.

Del shut down the Banshee's systems and let the flyer settle to the ground, hoping her ECM and low profile would hide her until they passed by.

-----

"Sir, we have an Apocalypse coming in."

The Immortal Brotherhood's CIC of Mercury Ops grunted, turned his Gorgon to the flashing point on his console. "That's the white one I've been hearing about from the Mercury survivors. The Ghost Apocalypse." He snickered. "Target it and blast it apart."

"Aye sir."

The CIC grunted again. The Immortal was tired of all the crap he'd been getting from the residents and visitors to this forsaken planet. Ghost Apocalypses, Cybrids and AMG alike being slaughtered by elite forces on a planet with practically no human presence, and the like.

He had to admit, though, it would have been just like Maria, if the Maria mentioned in the transmission had been the Maria he knew.

"I can't get a target lock; the vehicle has climbed behind a ridge and is hiding."

"Circle around and get it! Do I have to do everything myself?" he snapped. Why had the Emperor given him this lot, the least competent of the Brotherhood? Why had he been sent to Mercury?

It didn't take an organomech brain to figure that out: he had disobeyed the Emperor once, and let a fellow Brotherhood member live after quitting the organization.

Very possibly, the same Brotherhood member who had been causing so much trouble on Mercury.

"We have it, sir," the first officer said. "Engaging now."

Suddenly the ground shook like a boat in a hurricane, and the commander felt his Gorgon's skeleton shrieking as it was whipped from side to side. "What's happening?" He looked ahead, and saw the Apocalypse again, retreating this time, firing its weapons at--

The ground?

Before he could process that, the ground itself opened up beneath the IB force: a huge crack appeared in the ground and ripped through the force, neatly bisecting it. As he watched, the opposite side of the crack slipped downward, and underneath the ridge that was pushed up. Explosions, screams over the comm system, and static from destroyed reactors assaulted his ears.

The Apocalypse fired one last shot at the group of vehicles, and then turned away, walking away to the north.

"Report!" he called out.

"The Apocalypse fired at an unstable patch of ground. We were right on top of it and the explosions ripped it up and caused a slip."

"How many gone?"

"Half our force."

The commander shuddered, and glanced northward at the retreating vehicle. He would never forget who he had seen in the cockpit as its weapons cut his squad in two...

No one.

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