I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (37 page)

Or land on the surface.

The plant-monster’s ship threw out a pulse of acceleration, closing so quickly with the invader’s ship that it splattered onto that nearly invisible black surface, plastering it with pinkish-brown goo—a suicide mission that didn’t even seem to knock the larger ship off course.

The plant-monster began reforming itself into blister-like shapes, partially shielded by some of the remaining metal plates. The vacuum of space didn’t affect it at all, as near as Pax could tell.

The purple field between the large black plates on the invader’s ship rippled and began to dissolve. One of the wings twisted and bent until it jutted out at a crazy angle.

The plant-monster was disrupting the ship.

Pax threw a bubble around both of them and tethered it to the moon with a thick blue cord. The invader’s ship’s momentum carried it around, swinging it toward the moon in a short, fast arc.

Pax popped the bubble, and the ship slammed into the moon, right along the sunrise line. He couldn’t remember whether they were on the side of the moon visible from the Earth.

I fucking hope not.
Otherwise half the amateur astronomers’ telescopes on the planet would be watching him right now, and he could just imagine the panic that would set off. The ship’s solid plates rebounded off the surface; Pax tracked them down and tossed them into another bubble.

When Pax had captured all the pieces large enough to be tracked by radar (he hoped), he looked back toward the rift, watching it for a few long seconds. He couldn’t see anything else coming through. That didn’t mean others hadn’t already, though.

He pulled himself toward the crash site and landed carefully next to the largest mass of the ship, setting the broken pieces down next to him.

A blob of armored sludge was dragging itself across a massive obsidian plate in front of him. Root-like appendages crept out from a small bubble of water, protected by what looked like part of a refrigerator door. Behind it was a thin line cut into the obsidian. Pax put his hand on the plate of obsidian: it vibrated as the plant-monster cut through it, probably breaking it up to make a better ship of its own. The cut wasn’t perfectly straight, but it went all the way through the twenty-centimeter wing plate, and it was moving pretty fast. Puffs of dust disbursed into the near vacuum.

The ship wasn’t large, at least as far as evil outer space alien invader ships went, maybe five times as tall as Pax’s approximately human-sized form, and the whole thing seemed to be made of something midway between astral material and obsidian. Some of the bigger chunks of the wings had split into smaller, curved pieces. Pax pulled them out of his way. He wanted to get at the hull of the ship.

See what was in there.

And, if possible, kill it.

Pieces of the ship collapsed onto the moon’s surface as the plant-monster tore them apart. But some of the wart-like mini-plant-monsters were dragging themselves toward the hull, just as Pax was.

First I was killing it, now I’m helping it.
Pax shook his head.
My life is way, way too weird.

He dragged aside parts of the collapsed wing sections, being careful not to crush the mini-monsters, until he reached the hull of the ship. It was a stretched teardrop-shape that was nearly ten meters across at its widest point. Not huge or anything. More like a fighter jet than a warship.

The hull had cracked in a dozen places, exposing an inner structure that was completely packed with solid, octagonal chunks of smoked-quartz crystals. A couple of the crystals had broken open, leaking dark fluid out from the hull onto the surface of the moon in thick pools, making the surface of the moon look like a blood-spattered crime scene as it boiled away.

Nothing seemed to be moving inside the ship.

Pax found a split in the hull wide enough to allow him entry. He lifted one of the plant-monsters out of the way, setting it carefully on another part of the hull. The hull was about forty-five centimeters thick, sharp as hell, and was made of the same obsidian material all the way through.

Balanced on his stomach, halfway inside the ship, Pax pulled thick shards of broken crystal out of the way. The obsidian hull soaked up the sunlight shining on the surface—
probably to help shield it from detection,
Pax thought. Even after adjusting his eyesight, Pax could hardly see. The inside of the ship was pitch black.

Cold, dark fluid leaked out over his hands and onto his chest. The pieces of crystal ground together like broken glass as he dug at them.

He pulled out a handful of shards and flicked a chunk of crystal off his fingertips. The liquid inside the hull had started to boil right in front of his face, making visibility even worse.

He reached in again, sticking his fingers through the steaming fog into the black ooze, and his hand scraped something solid under the crystal shards.

He pushed on it. A hard plate of something gave slightly under his fingers.

It slid away and something wormlike touched Pax’s fingers.

And bit down.

Fuck
. The word came out silently in the near vacuum. Pax jerked his hand back and felt about a hundred sharp things dragging over his fingers. At first they skidded over the astral material…

But then they bit in.

Pax jerked his hand again, but it was stuck. Something smacked on the inside of the crystal octagon when he yanked his hand. He made a fist and pulled even harder, trying to knock the fuck out of whatever was biting him.

The wormlike things crawled over the back of his hand, trying to find an opening. He jerked harder, pulling whatever was inside as far forward as possible, grabbed at one of the wormlike things with his other hand, wrapped it around two fingers, and then ripped it free.

Whatever was inside the crystal let his hand go. He brought up a pinprick shield and floated it toward the mist.

A black angular shape thrust out of the fog.

It had an insectile face, eyeless. Twisting black threads that almost looked like negative energy tentacles surrounded its mouth. One of them was limp and oozing greenish-black gunk.

It bared long, silver-stained dagger-like teeth at him.

Pax jerked back, slamming his head against the hull and swore. Loudly.

He swore again. Because he realized that he’d
heard
himself swear. The purple field had come up again, covering a small space under several of the plates. It had filled with air—close enough to Earth-normal atmospheric pressure that his voice sounded normal as he swore steadily:
shit, shit, shit.

The triangular bug-head was heaving its way toward him. Gouts of the black fluid were oozing out from the crystal, splashing over the edge of the hull. It was trying to climb out.

Pax started crawling backward out of the hull and dropped to the moon’s surface.

The shape coming out of the octagonal crystal looked like an elongated beetle. Its longer limbs were pinned by the narrow quartz, but the shorter claws up and down its sides were able to heave it forward slowly. Shoulder-like lumps thrust back and forth as the creature struggled. Black fluid splashed on Pax’s face. He wiped it off with the back of his hand,
and it stung.

The wounds on his hand were pulling inward in deep dimples. His fingers were getting stiff.

The first two of the alien’s long legs slipped out of the crystal. At first Pax thought they were holding canisters. Then he realized what he was seeing was part of the legs, made of dripping black exoskeleton. With a wet slurping noise, the alien slid out of the crack in the hull. Gray moon dust puffed up and stuck to its shell.

It had an abdomen that looked more like a centipede’s than a beetle’s, but with dozens of claw-tipped, wormy legs running up and down its sides. It had wings, too, three pairs of sharp ones that looked more like weapons than like something that would help it fly. It buzzed them and black fluid splattered everywhere.

The back of Pax’s hand was burning now. The dents had become pinprick holes—all the way through his hand. He still had the wormlike mouthpart wrapped around his fingers. He dropped it.

The monster hissed at him, its mouthparts spreading to show its teeth.

The holes in Pax’s hand were wide enough to put a finger through now.

Pax pinched the fingers of his other hand around his wrist, weakened the astral material inside the wrist, and pinched it off. He tossed the hand onto the moon’s surface. The holes stretched until the astral material appeared to pop and then collapsed into black sludge.

He grew another hand.

The monster shook its wings one more time and raised the two arms with canisters on the ends. Like they were guns.

Pax pushed a hand against the purple field and punched it with a fist. It didn’t budge.

The canisters started to glow purple. Pax threw up a shield.

The first shot dissolved the shield. The second slammed into his chest, knocking him on his ass under an overhanging plate.

Fuck
.

The surface was already pulling inward.

The alien was walking toward him on black, chicken-like feet.

Pax kicked backward, pushing himself farther under the overhanging plate, until his back was jammed between it and the moon’s surface. He grabbed for the bottom edge of the purple field—

Please don’t be a sphere. Please don’t be a sphere.

—and slipped a hand under.

The alien seemed to ooze under the overhang, its centipede belly flopping forward and easily changing the monster from two main weight-bearing legs to four, with the front two still pointing the canisters at him. The alien roared at him, stretching its mouthparts wide. This close, Pax could see the teeth weren’t teeth—they were saw-edged beaks that opened onto tubes of black ooze. Digestive material.

He was being shot with stomach acid.
Great. Just great.

He threw a pinprick force field into the alien’s open mouth.

The alien snapped its mouth shut and covered it with a plate. Pax set the field to bounce around on the inside of the alien’s shell. The small, wormy tentacles around the plate scrabbled at its skin. Had the alien had eyes, they would have gone wide.

In about a second it fell over, stirring up dust. It thrashed its legs. Its canisters went off again but only hit the obsidian panels. In a couple of minutes, it would be dead.

Pax had other problems.

He shoved his hand under the purple shield as far as he could—about an inch past the wrist.

Then he melted his arm.

I’m not human anymore. I’m
really
not human anymore.

He said it over and over, like it was a prayer. The arm melted into a silver puddle that disturbingly reminded him of Scarlett’s pool of negative energy.
Doesn’t matter.
He let the fluid drain out of the rest of his body, sluicing around his dissolving chest, until just his head and the big, white, metallic ring of his chest were left.

Then he bent his head against the last thread of his arm, dropped it off his neck, and let it melt under the force field. His eyes seemed to drift everywhere, seeing everything, without the ability to focus.

He hated every second of it.

I’m not human anymore.

It didn’t help.

It was still the most horrifying thing he had ever done, and once outside the shield, Pax reformed himself as quickly as possible. He was shorter, skinnier—he’d lost a lot of mass. He started absorbing sunlight. He was pretty sure he could figure out how to convert energy to mass, but probably not in the next two minutes. On the other side of the purple shield, the alien was still thrashing around on the ground.

The inside of the ship is packed with the crystal octagons
—
crammed with these things, all of them with weapons that could dissolve astral material.

It boggled the mind. Worse, for all he knew, a thousand ships had come through the rift and were already hiding out in the galaxy.

He looked up, trying to spot the rift, but he couldn’t
. It must be on the other side of the moon.

Gray moon-hills ringed the horizon, and the sky was a black field of stars, ending abruptly at the edge of the hills. Until he’d been in space, Pax had never really paid attention to the night sky, not really. Plus, he’d basically grown up in a hospital bed in Manhattan. It wasn’t like there were a lot of stars to see in the first place.

From the moon, space looked a lot less friendly.

The plant-monster bits were still digging through the obsidian plates. The purple field flickered and went out again.

The alien lay still on the moon’s surface, leaking black fluid. Pax bent over and dragged a finger through the liquid. It didn’t eat through him as quickly as the stuff from the canisters, but it still chewed through the tip of his finger by the time he straightened up. He pulled off the finger and tossed it away.

One of the plant-monsters dropped off a plate and landed next to the alien centipede—it crawled right through the black gunk and started eating the invader. It steamed a little when it touched the gunk, but the plant-monster quickly neutralized the material and began absorbing it.

Some of the other plant-monster fragments had already ditched their tin, steel, and fiberglass shell materials and were plating themselves with cut panels of obsidian.

One thing was clear: he should be helping the plant-monster, not killing it.

Fucking Terry. He could have just
said
something.

He pulled a couple of the plant-monsters off the obsidian plates and fed them through the big split in the hole, being careful not to step in too much gunk. He ducked out of the shadows into the bright sunlight. The surface was getting hot, too hot. He peeled off the bottoms of his feet and left the plant-monsters to their work.

Time to go.

Pax pushed off the moon gently, getting far enough away from the surface that he could see the rift. The moon’s gravity tugged on him, but he resisted it easily.

He didn’t bother with the hamster ball this time.

He wasn’t human. He didn’t need it.

He’d known it, but he hadn’t really believed it until he’d oozed under the purple force field. He didn’t
need
protection from space. And he didn’t
need
to use the balls for propulsion if he didn’t want to.

Not anymore.

He jetted a thin stream of superheated, ionized gas out of his feet as bright blue plasma, aiming himself toward the rift.

When he looked back, he saw the plates of the ship had been mostly destroyed, and the plant-monsters were crawling all over the hull, pulling out chunks of crystal and dead aliens.

Fucking Terry.

He hadn’t come to Earth to save Pax or be his mentor. Terry had come to Earth to turn Pax into the perfect tool for saving the universe, even admitting it. But, again, it wasn’t something Pax had been able to believe until now.