“Making a collection?” Max said.
Gustov smiled self-consciously. “They seem like they would make good slingshot rounds…” he said.
“They do!” Max said, who'd fired many when younger.
Snow, showing her disgust with a crinkled nose, urged Max forward and together they walked up the small ramp into the ship's new cargo bay. Buckled to the walls were mining drones and a wide array of equipment, mostly to do with sample mining and ore recovery, but amongst it all was the body of an A16 combat android. It came with a L6 pulse beam rifle, which would have given him a morale boost if he wasn't already aware of its poor performance vs. the GE squids.
“Don't say I never give you anything,” Snow said.
They passed through the airlock and quickly through the living space. There were a couple of bunks, a bathroom, a small eating and sitting area with a couch like bench formed from the wall, across from a monitor that covered most of the opposite wall.
In the cockpit, Max sat on the left as he had during simulation. Snow slipped into the seat on the right.
“Captain Danger Legs returns—” There was a sharp intake of breath from the ship’s speakers. “Goodness gracious. I was Expecting Snow White, but the computer says you’re Warda Starborn…”
“Hello, ah … lady in the computer,” Snow said, “I go by Snow White now. Well…just Snow really.”
“Well, hello to you,” The lady in the computer said, and whistled a cat call. “Just look at them gams. He said you were pretty; he didn't mention you had legs for days…”
Doozer slipped in last and positioned himself awkwardly between the two seats, fitting his legs here and there, and somehow making it work.
“Wha…What is that?!” said the lady in the computer.
“Don't be alarmed—” Max said.
“Alarmed?” said the lady in the computer. “By that gorgeous creature? Look-at-all-those-leeeggs! Introduce me.”
“Ooookay … Doozer this is Linda C. Linda C. this is Doozer.”
“Lady in da Computer. That works,” Snow said.
“Hello, handsome,” Linda said to Doozer, “are you our new captain? Just kidding. With legs like that, you never need to work a day in your life.”
With the organic to AI introductions complete, and lift off clearance received, Max piloted the ship from the hanger and seated itself into the Longissima's new launch rails magazine. The rails fired four times before it was their turn.
They strapped in tight, first Doozer, and then themselves.
“Okay, Linda. It's all you,” Max said.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Linda said, and just like that, the Dee-Dub launched up through the thin atmosphere, up into the big black.
Chapter 13
Quin and friends weren't starving. They weren't cold. And they weren't in immediate danger of becoming squid food. But they weren't yet rescued either. After days of fighting, the city below had been cleared of the most aggressive squid. With the arrival of the space men, that part had come easy. The mechs stomped through the city, making a ruckus, the squid came out of the shade to eat them, the mechs and soldiers stomped on, smashed, or blasted them into flaccid lumps of goo.
But while the aggressive squid had certainly drawn everyone's attention, a sneakier, less reactive variety must have been there all along. These more observant, picker eaters made Quin question whether the city would ever be clear of the monsters. It would be an end to the days of shutter-less homes and a return to the old ways, if the city ever recovered at all.
The cliff tops however were as squid dense as ever. Maybe more so since even the bolder squids seemed to know that the lower city was no place for them now. The space men that had landed there had stomped down the street stair to help clear the city, where the vast proportion of the population lived. It was clear that the major habitat and source of the squid was further up the mountains amongst the numerous lakes there, large and small. It seemed to Quin that the focus should be on those lakes, but he didn't see how troops could get there safely. Not without those mechs. And he didn't see how those heavy machines could traverse the steep terrain. Until something was done about it, their best option was to stay indoors.
A noise outside drew Quin's attention. It was the first notable interruption during this watch in the tower. It was a clack, clack sound, followed by another sound, that of something being dragged. Quin peeked through the slits in the tower's shutters, scanning around from his position in the tower to find the source of the noise.
A spaceman was crawling along the street that lead to Quin's house. As it crawled, it dragged its loosely attached lower body. There was no sign of blood and the spaceman wasn't crying out in pain. Quin angled and focused the binos. The spaceman was neither a man nor a woman. At least not as Quin had to this point defined such things. The spaceman's spine was almost fully severed, leaving his torso hanging on by only a few wires. Quin picked up the familiar sound of tentacles slapping the ground, and it was getting louder. A reaper rounded between two tall slim block houses, half on the ground and half suctioned to the wall of a house. It saw its prey and slap sprinted to close the distance. The humorous movement of the creatures was lost on anyone that had seen what they could do when they reached their prey. In a flash it was on the spaceman. But the spaceman was not giving in. It grabbed hold of the small wood stair to the house and pulled its torso under. The squid grabbed its legs and stuffed them into its maw. Then it began dragging the spaceman out from under the stairs. The spaceman didn't let go. But neither did the squid. The pair tug-o’-warred, back and forth until the wires snapped. The top of the spaceman disappeared quickly under the stair. The bottom of the spaceman disappeared into the squid. Then it scrambled to grab hold of the rest of it, throwing its short tentacles under the steps. It tensed and dragged the spaceman out. The spaceman's steady strength seemed to have faded. It tried weakly to grab the stair, but the squid yanked it and it pulled away easily. Suddenly the squid shuddered and convulsed. It jittered about and flailed on the ground, letting the spaceman go. Then the squid rolled sideways and squeezed its shroud. The glistening shroud pulsed and undulated, pushing the spaceman's lower body out and sparking onto the ground with a clank. The squid's behavior was altered as it ambled off. Cautious and guarded. Did it feel violated? Quin hoped so. The spaceman very slowly dragged itself most of the way back under the step. Then it stopped, as though it couldn't go any further. A few wires trailed out from beneath the step revealing its location. Its lower body continued to spark every few seconds.
Now Quin had a dilemma. He could go out and try to rescue the alien. An alien that had been patrolling the area for the local peoples’ benefit, Quin, Cailin, and Jayleen included. Or he could do the safe thing. Stay inside. Stay alive. And continue to keep Cailin alive too.
“What was that noise?” Jayleen, like the rest of them, now walked with a casual stealth that no longer lead to frequent spikes in heart rate.
“Spaceman and squid fighting,” he said, misrepresenting the situation, he had made his decision. “Spaceman won. Sort of.”
“Where…” she followed the line of the binoculars to the steps, and saw the spaceman's lower body, extruding wires, and all. “It doesn't look like he won,” she said.
“Well…”
“Well what?”
“It dragged itself under the step.”
“The spacemen are robots?”
“I guess…”
“They must be Quin. Look at the wires coming out of it. Also, dragging your legless torso is definitely a robot thing.”
“Who's a robot?” Cailin said. He padded up the stairs less stealthily than Jayleen.
“The spacemen,” Jayleen said, “look…” She ushered him over to the binos.
“Sticky stones!” Cailin said. “We gotta help him!” It was exactly the reaction Quin expected. And feared.
“He's a robot, Cay,” Jayleen said. There was an implied “Duh” in her tone, and disappointment at his den
seness.
“Robots are people too,” Cailin said.
Quin agreed in principle. He had seen enough movies to think it possible that robots could be real people. He didn't know if it was the case here, but he couldn't delude himself into thinking he was abandoning a mere robot. He might be abandoning a person. But would he trade Cailin's safety for any person? Answer: no.
“We don't know that, Cay. But we do know it isn't safe out there,” Quin said.
“It isn't safe out there for him! We can't just leave him there. He wouldn't leave us out there, Quin.” Cailin was angry. Angrier than Quin had ever seen him.
“I'm sorry, Cay. This is just how it is,” Quin said.
Cailin glared hatred but said nothing more. He stormed down the stairs stomping each step on his way.
“You’re making the right decision,” Jayleen said. She patted him on the back.
“Ya,” Quin said. “He's right though. We should do something. It's just so far away…” The spaceman was over a hundred yards away. There were at least two supply pods closer than that. Supply pods they hadn't even considered going for. “Maybe with a rope. I could run out and place a loop around it then run back. Then we could drag it back from the safety of the house—”
There were a series of crashes and then a loud scraping noise. Cailin was opening the front door.
Quin leapt to his feet. Pushing Jayleen roughly aside he scrambled down the stairs. Coming around the last bend in the stairway he saw Cailin, pushing the sideboard the last few inches and squeezing between it to the outside.
“Stop Cay! Don't—” He stumbled on the stair and fell towards the floor. He half caught his balance, semi-controlling his hard crash into the sideboard. It slid forward, closing the door again. Though he broke no bones, he did knock the wind out of himself. He struggled to stand upright. His breath would not come to him. It was as though he had forgotten how to breathe. Through the narrow gap in the boarded windows he saw Cailin, kickball helmet strapped to his head, hockey stick in his hands, running towards the fallen robot. Precious seconds passed as Quin's lungs resisted his attempts to breathe. He tried to pull the sideboard away from the door, but his muscles had no strength. Slowly his lungs began to open. Tiny gulps of air were all he could manage at first but then he began to breathe properly. With oxygen back into his lungs he made another attempt at the sideboard. Jayleen was there, with the lance. She put it aside and helped Quin to move the rest of the door’s blockage. By now Cailin had almost reached the robot. With the door now open, Quin ran outside, feebly at first, but his lungs were now doing their job right. He could feel the strength slowly coming back. Cailin had reached the robot and, laying his hockey stick down, was dragging the robot out from under the step by its loose wires. It seemed to come free without battle or complaint.
Cailin was almost a quarter of the way back when Quin finally reached him. He wanted to shake Cay for disobeying him, for running off. But they were out here now. And for the moment they were still alive.
“Keep going as fast as you can, Cay,” he said. He scanned the area. Still nothing in sight. He sprinted to the robot’s sparking lower body and grabbed it by a leg. It wasn't as heavy as he'd expected. Less heavy than a person of the same size, and that size was on the small side to begin with. Cailin was almost halfway back. Quin carried the body with the hissing sparking wires pointed away from him and jogged the best he could. The robot was lighter than he expected, but still, it was a substantial weight to carry. He was gaining ground on Cailin. Quin was halfway back when Cailin stopped to catch his breath, still more than fifty feet from the door. The door was open, but Quin didn't see Jayleen. He kept jogging until he had almost caught up and then, breathing heavily, he began walking the last stretch.
A shadow, sliding over the bright, sunlit street, was their first warning of danger. Quin looked up to see a squid, spinning its way down on a cushion of air from the nearby rooftop, floating towards Cailin.
“Squid Cailin! Run, run!” Quin said.
But it was too late. The squid hit Cailin with only a grazing impact. But one of its tentacles grabbed his ankle and pulled him to its shroud even before it had fully landed. Quin desperately flung the half robot at the squid then he was running again. The robot projectile missed its target. But it was close enough that the squid staggered and dropped Cailin anyway. Then, out of nowhere, their narrow ceramic lance tip pierced the center of the squid and the shaft carried on through the squid to the other side before stopping. In the doorway to the house, Quin saw Jayleen recovering from the throw. She ran out towards Cailin and the squid. Skewered like market roasted bac-mat, the squid flailed. It reached and strained to grasp the lance, but the stubby tentacles were unable to reach it. Cailin sat frozen in place, his face on one side was badly scraped, having been dragged over the cobble street on the way to the squid's shroud.
“Run, Cay!” Jayleen was shouting, running towards him.
“Go, Cay, go!” Quin said. He caught up with the robot legs he'd thrown.
Cailin got up and, discarding the robot, began to run to Jayleen. The squid was drawn to the movement and seemed to forget about the lance. It lunged towards Cailin again.
Quin snapped. “No!” The word came out as a sort of growl.
He leapt onto the squid as it tried again to swallow Quin's little brother. He hammered the monster over and over again with the robot’s legs that he didn't remember picking up. The distraction worked. The squid forgot all about little Cailin and turned its attention to Quin. Cailin scrambled to his feet and without looking back, ran the rest of the way to Jayleen who grabbed him in her arms and carried him back to the house, slamming the door behind them.
Seeing Cailin get away, Quin's rage abated. He recognized the sparking half robot in his hands. Suddenly it felt heavier. He stumbled back from the squid. The sparking hissing from the robot sparked an idea in his mind, a way to get out of this. But the squid flicked a tentacle and the robot's lower half spiraled away from Quin's hands. He looked for something to fight with. He thought of the spear. The squid grabbed at his arm. Suddenly he hit his head on the ground. The last thing he saw, before everything went hot and dark, was the sky, filled with white fluffy parachutes. His shoulder impacted on something hard in the squid's shroud. The lance shaft snapped in two, shattering Quin's shoulder in the process. His arm, twisted around one side of the lance’s curtain rod shaft, was crushed and broken. Hot fire rolled along the whole of his left side. Quin opened his mouth to scream but the sound went nowhere. He was dead, he knew it. There was no escape. He grabbed the shaft of the other end of the broken lance. There was a chance, fifty-fifty, that it was the pointy end. He pulled it into the shroud, even as he felt the squid moving away. Again, he couldn't breathe, and was close to passing out. Using all of his strength, he drove the lance up towards the sky. The squid collapsed on him. Quin felt the pain of more bones breaking, but it was all a duller pain now. Then he felt no more.
Chapter 14
Horn stepped lightly on the street and kept his weapon at the ready. They'd traveled up the rock-carved stairway to the western clifftops. But then they had made a right turn towards the east away from the distant ocean view in the west, the direction Horn needed to go. But orders were orders.
The buildings on the clifftops were much older and less dense, but those lining this street were of the newer, cramped, row houses familiar from the city below. These homes had fared the worst. They all had one or more broken windows, though some seemed to have been secured with barricades of boards and household furniture blocking their entry points. Another sign of trouble on the street was the presence of untouched supply pods. Parachutes now flapped in the light breeze from their position, tangled in bushes and around the strange, short, thick tree trunks that sparsely lined the street. So far Horn had encountered no squid at all. He understood why it might be, they had perhaps been drawn off by the paratroopers or the mechanized forces in the area, but he was still surprised. In the city,
a small percentage of squids refused the bait of noise and bodies and chose to maintain vigil, watching over their long-stalked prey, as though they had an interest that stretched beyond a meal. Satisfaction at a job well done? Horn was sure there was a simpler explanation. A deeper focus on a prey once chosen, or a reluctance to move during daylight hours, even with sufficient sound to direct it.
Movement on the periphery of his vision alerted Horn that he might have been right. The rooftop to his right, sprouted a short thick tentacle. He could see no more than that. He knew the squid were near blind in the bright light of day. But Horn was shaded by the row houses under the squid. The field of view of the squid, when they had use of it, was all round. He wondered if they could see through their tentacles, and if so, could it see him, here in the shade of the building? The squid, possibly answering the question, ambled over the roof towards him. Horn stopped walking and raised his ceramic rifle, pointing it at the squid. He calculated its movement, but held his fire, waiting for the monster to rear its ugly head. A part of him objected to the description. The squid was in a way beautiful, said that part of him. Horn acknowledged the objection, and reminded that part of himself that the squid was the enemy and that therefore, a certain amount of name calling was appropriate. The arc of the squid's head came into view as it suddenly lobbed itself over the roof towards Horn. The freefall of the monster solidified virtually all variables in the equation. Horn squeezed the trigger of the old rifle. With two quick pulls on the lever he cycled a new charge and round into the receiver, and simultaneously updated and transmitted the log entry of the shot before the squid, with a wet slap-splat, had fallen to the street. Horn hooted in triumph. He stepped up to and kicked the squid. His glossy white boot against a glossy gray mass. The gray mass wobbled like jelly. A test of the monster’s life state, which came up zero. There was no malice in the kick. This squid had tried, but failed, to do him wrong. It was merely acting according to programming. Like an Earth rodent. Eat everything, always, and reproduce, also always.
Starship Invasion (Lost Colony Uprising Book 2) Page 11