The world stank of old metal, the kind of place where your tongue felt like it was rusting inside your mouth. Captain Ironbelly had smelled warzones, garbage boats, and one memorable pit stop on Charon VI where the entire biosphere was a wet compost heap, but this rock had a special flavor to it: the tang of corporate waste.

  Brindle Scar, the AAX-9 reclamation world, had been left to rot even before the war ended. Now it was a graveyard with a sunburn.

  Ironbelly's boots hit the ground hard, the new grav-sled whining under the weight of himself, Nash, Vaeris, Karn, and the sloshing meat-thing that the rest of the crew insisted on calling Chime.

  He didn't get the joke, but figured it was a play on "chimera," which was just about the laziest naming he'd expect from Thimble. Still, better than "it," which is what he'd been calling the morphing horror.

  They'd touched down on the only flat spot within a kilometer, a pocked slab of ferrocrete that might've been a landing pad or a missile silo lid. The air was gritty, flavored with powdered rock and the faint corpse-gas of industrial solvents.

  Ironbelly checked his commlink. The heads-up flickered green: Thimble was online, floating somewhere above the planet in the Drifting Ember, her voice a dry tickle in his ear. "You got a bogey at three, Cap. Looks like one of the local bots."

  Ironbelly squinted against the murky daylight. A sphere of metal floated over the rim of a dead slag heap, its paint stripped to bare composite, red lenses glowing. It hesitated, then spat out a puff of dust and shuttled directly toward their position.

  "Contact left," he said, but Karn was already moving, the big minotaur drawing one of his hefty mana revolvers and punched two bright holes through it. It made a sad, dying beep before falling and going silent. Karn was a blunt tool. A damn good one.

  Nash, right behind, rolled off the sled and landed in a crouch, rifle up, looking for a second threat. His helmet visor giving him readings. "It's just a scout," he said. "Not even armored. Want me to go poke the hornet's nest?"

  Ironbelly grunted. "Negative. Let's get to the pod first. Thimble, eyes on?"

  "Pod's still cold, Cap. No movement, but the black box is live."

  Vaeris slid off the sled next, moving with that practiced elven grace that always put Ironbelly's teeth on edge. She wore her hair in a tight braid, silver against the matte black of her combat robes. Her eyes flicked to the dead bot, then to the horizon, then back to Ironbelly. "There's more. I can feel the mana signatures. They're clustered to the west.”

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  Ironbelly grunted again.

  “I'm also showing a large structure to the east,” Thimble relayed. “On the other side of the mobile beacon's last ping.”

  The satellite dish was obvious, canted at a bad angle, parts of its support structure eaten away by whatever ailed this place.

  Ironbelly snapped a hand at Nash and Karn. "Double-time people. Thimble, the terrain is too much for the sled. Send it back to shuttle. Nash, take point. Karn, rear. Vaeris, with me. Chime, don't eat anything unless it's a attacking us. Move it.”

  The grav-sled purred as it sped away. Chime trilled as it reshaped into a horned quadruped. The thing had started to pick up on orders. It actually seemed bored, which unsettled Ironbelly more than when it was hungry.

  The crash pod was half-melted, the impact scar still glassy around the edges. As expected, it was empty.

  “Keep going,” the captain ordered. Why didn't the damn fool stay put?

  It didn't take them long to enter the dead expanse of trees. It surrounded them like skeletal sentinels when the first of the segmented horrors burst from beneath the rotting undergrowth.

  “Of course there's monsters here. Why wouldn't there be?” Vaeris complained.

  Chime sniffed the air, shimmered, melted into its malleable form, then flowed forward in a boneless dash, trailing black mucous. The worms boiled up as if sensing a challenge, a writhing carpet of pale, slimy bodies.

  Stunned into stillness, the group hung back as Chime confronted the initial onslaught. Its form rippled, then stretched into a gaping maw—obsidian-slick and lined with concentric circles of fangs—before it plunged into the mass of writhing worms with predatory efficiency.

  It ate, and ate, and ate. The more it ate, the bigger it got, until it was the spitting image of one of the hellworms, only blacker, meaner, and glittering with the wet sheen of a nightmare.

  Two minutes later, Chime stretched its worm body, towering over four meters tall as it unleashed a bone-chilling screech. The surviving wormlings vanished instantly, burrowing back down into the strange, pulsating earth.

  “Well, that was terrifying,” Vaeris commented.

  They passed through the rest of the dead land without further attacks. As they finally left the woods, everyone blew a breath of relief. It felt good to be off that spongy ground.

  Between their position and the dish stretched an unsettling landscape. Footpaths crisscrossed the ground like old scars, while fissures split the earth's surface. Most disturbing were the scattered boulders—each bearing what looked like massive teeth marks.

  Chime's head tilted, as if listening. Then it pointed its antennae —an unmistakably human gesture—toward the ruined satellite dish. “Big… says… there…”

  Ironbelly looked at the others. Nash shrugged, Vaeris just arched an eyebrow. Karn snorted and topped off his revolver.

  "Let's move," Ironbelly said. "If Ben's alive, he's either at the relay, or inside one of those worms."

  Chime slithering alongside them like a domesticated death god. Ironbelly had seen weirder rescue missions, but not by much.