Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 3.4

The police robots opened the fire. Their gunfire pearled off of the serpent robot's shields like dust hitting a wall. Every time they fired, the snake's nanoclouds gathered into a forcefield to take the hit.

When the monolith shot, the snake robot dove into the ground as if it had been made of water. The monolith's robotic minions spread out to predict the serpent's next strike. Was it planning to come back at all?

If I recall correctly, the snake robot fought for the Starsnatchers. Let's hope it was on my side and strong enough for the enemies.

The monolith waited. I remained where I was, curled up in a fetal position next to an intact building.

The wannabe HAL 9000 could still see me, but it was nice to maintain the delusion of security. Would it start moving if I took the first step? Or was it waiting for anything in particular?

My ears still hurt. It took me a shower of debris to realize that the ground had been torn open.

The serpentine robot towered behind me. It opened its maw and spat a stream of foam that washed over me like an avalanche. My vision had already been blurred from the flaming explosions, but by now, the outside world looked like through the lens of thousands of soap bubbles.

I couldn't move a muscle. The foam hardened like armor. Was this to protect me or to prevent me from protecting myself?

I fell through the ground. My best guess was that the robot took me to the lower floors. Even though the foam dampened sounds, I heard the explosions above. Like pebbles echoing against cave walls.

I could still distinguish black and white. I knew we were moving away from the sunlight, further into the ground. And I felt the impact of us stopping at the bottom.

The metallic Leviathan shivered. It dropped me like a raw egg before I rolled down a slope.

The impact didn't hit nearly as hard as subsequent nausea. It was like being trapped in a man-sized gummy ball. The analogy was appropriate, as I could move my limbs inside this foam, but not break through it.

I reached the end of the slope, lying prone.

Standing up was impossible. Moving in the foam felt like trying to swim in honey.

Suddenly, the foam lost viscosity and became more like water. Then, it poured off of my helmet and my suit. A creamy, yellow-white puddle akin to shaving cream surrounded me. Its glint reflected the floodlight that loomed above.

The room I found myself in was, above all else, enormous. I could see one of its walls, but only because I stood close. All the other three were too dim from my vantage point, although my field of view encompassed a football field.

I was in one of the bottommost floors of the arcology. With its lack of windows, it was more than likely beneath the earth. How large were the rooms here? As large as megacities?

For all its expansion, this floor was amazingly empty. The only elevation was a squat, two-story building a few dozen feet beside me. I hadn't even noticed it due to how its coloration blended in with the surrounding ground. That was even though it could have accommodated a nuclear family and I practically stood on its lawn. How many buildings were there here? Did the bottom floor contain an entire city camouflaged by nano-magic?

There was a trail of junk at the building's corner. Behind it lay the serpent robot that had brought me here.

It retained its serpentine outline, but that was it. Its walls were stacked on top of each other with the structural strength of a deflated balloon. Horizontal to the floor were rods splayed out like the limbs of a dead animal.