The ringing of alarm bells going off throughout the complex of cobbled together drills, platforms, and engines lasted only a brief few seconds, but it felt like forever to Jill who had just returned from repairing one of the hothouse's water systems. Her family had left out some food for when she returned but the patch job she had just finished had left her beyond the point where she felt her hunger. Her bed had been hung above the reserve fuel tanks for her family's barge. The furnace lay only fifty feet from her, offering some heat and the roar of the engine was calming for her. Little did she know how weird that evening would be, or how much it would change her life.
xX elsewhere in the barge Xx
"Hey dad, sis never ate her dinner. Do you want me to put it back in the supply box?" a young boy asked.
"Leave it there for her for when she gets up this evening, we're all needed at the Hurlies hothouse to help with the harvest."
The door slammed behind them as Jill peeked over the edge of her bed. She hopped down and poured herself a glass of water from the sink. Something had been following their city cluster for a few months now. It had never gotten close enough to hurt anyone but it still kept her from sleeping properly.
A second alarm started going off as she set her glass in the drying rack and the other barges all around her started pulling away and tunneling through the ice. She could see her family through the window stuck on another barge as it pulled away from her.
The pilot's seat was on the other end of the barge and from the shaking the other barges were causing, it would be even harder to get away from whatever the sonars had picked up.
"Jill! If you can grab something, I can get us moving!" a voice shouted from the front.
"Matthew?! What are you doing on our barge?" The sound of the ice cracking around them caught her attention.
"Just grab onto something!" Matthew shouted back as the barge lurched forwards.
A door was knocked open by a loose barrel, allowing Jill to see what it was that everyone was in such a hurry to escape from. The shadow of some horrible monster shown down from on top as the ceiling of the ice tunnel started to give way.
The falling ice tore the wall away from the rest of the barge, allowing even more visibility of the humanoid creature nearly two stories tall and wrapped in metallic armor. Its red eyes locked with hers as it crashed through the floor of the cave and into the icy water below.
"Beautiful…" she whispered.
The sudden lurching of the barge threw Jill out of the barge violently as the rest of the floor started to give way beneath them. She fell for what felt like a lifetime before glimpsing a flash of black streak out of the water below her. The humanoid was reaching out to catch her. Her hand instinctively reached out for it's as she landed in the monster's palm.
Loyd looked down at the human in his palm for a moment before turning his attention to the boy aboard the strange ice boring machine he'd been tracking.
"Let her go demon!" the boy shouted, before firing his pistol at Loyd.
The bullet deflected off the hardened crystal plating that was coating Loyd as he crouched down, letting the girl step off onto a solid chunk of ice.
"That won't work against me," Loyd lectured. "And it won't stop the swarm when it finds you here. Allow me to assist with your escape."
"The demon speaks?! Jill, you have to get out of here! I'll try and hold this thing off!"
Loyd sighed, realizing he wouldn't be able to explain himself to the boy. "Then I won't bother with you."
Jill stared in horror as the monster lurched towards the platform, its jaw opening to reveal several rows of sharp serrated teeth that closed down around Matthew, reducing him to little more than his shoes and a splatter of blood.
Loyd shook his head in disgust, "Earthlings get so bland after you eat enough of them," he muttered, turning to the girl.
Her face showed curiosity rather than fear, which amused Loyd. "Perhaps I can get you to understand."
He knelt down in the water in front of her. "I came here from Mars in an attempt to both get away from the highly corrupt government and to attempt to reclaim the Earth. As it stands, I've removed the Martian government, two of the most highly respected men on the planet killed each other over a trivial matter, and I've lost a part of me that can never be returned. As for the Earth, I found that the humans abandoned during the evacuation managed to survive inside the polar ice flows and are nearly as bad as the government back on Mars."
"I thought you said you'd dealt with them?" the girl asked.
Loyd smiled, revealing the first row of his teeth. "That's right. I gave someone much like yourself the ability to get revenge on the men and women who sent a murderous rapist to deal with me and ended up killing both her parents after having his way with them. I ended him before I realized she existed, which is why I gave her the chance to kill them."
"So, they sent a bad guy to deal with an anarchist? That sounds sane and reasonable in the short term."
"Until you realize that I had gone out of my way to inform them of anything that would be considered hostile long before I did it to allow them to evacuate. I just wanted to get my people off-planet."
"Then what did you do that would make them send a gunman after you? Did you damage some major infrastructure? Cause mass-scale rioting? Damage that year's crop yield beyond recovery?"
"A little bit of all of that and I revealed a major conspiracy. Then I sided with an enemy race's head scientist. I also made vast leaps in CTAS construction and genetics."
"CTAS? What are those?"
Loyd sat down in the water; this was starting to be therapeutic. "A CTAS is what I'm piloting. Well, at least this is what they would've become if Mars had had another two to three hundred years before I was created. It turns out the swarm's hive-mind intelligence is spread thin when controlling a vast army but when concentrated allows a person to accomplish things only dreamt of. But I'm getting sidetracked. We've got to get you to the rest of your city before they get too far away."
The girl looked up at him confused. "How do you expect to catch up with them when they have such a massive head start? The tunnels fill in behind us as we dig."
"Yeah, so I noticed. But all this is snow really," Loyd said, standing and walking to one of the tunnels. One hand full at a time Loyd started digging through the slushy ice, getting faster as he went, until he was over a hundred feet into the tunnel. "Think you can keep up?!" he shouted back at the girl.
xX further down the tunnel Xx
"Sir, that thing's finished off your barge already and is coming this way. Your daughter's gone," an old man said to Jill's grieving father.
"Captain, the swarmling's starting to catch up with us!"
"Impossible! We're the fastest drilling barge in the city! How can a swarmling be catching up with us?!"
"Two hundred meters and closing!"
The old man wretched the boy off the radar and stared in horror as the blip got closer.
"One hundred… seventy-five… fifty… ten!" he looked to the back of the barge as a metal hand thrust through the final layer of ice and grabbed onto the barge. It was quickly followed by the rest of the humanoid body as Loyd pulled himself aboard this much larger vehicle. Jill jumped down from where she had had Loyd put her on his back and brushed off the snow from her clothes.
She looked up and smiled "Hi, dad! This is Loyd, and I think he's part swarmling."