But what I did notice in lieu of a mattress was a pile of material on the floor. Looking it over, I realized it was Mimic’s jumper that we had left her in, an envirosuit, and a blanket from the old ship. They were huddled into a pile in the center of the room, and looked strangely out of place.
“Do you want me to pick these up?” I asked uncertainly.
Mimic looked to where I was pointing to, and if she was capable of blushing, I was sure she would have then. “Oh, no, it’s fine for now.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine and I didn’t think I had ever seen her so flustered. “That’s where I like to rest, when I need a break from everything going on around me. It…it smells like all of you. It helps me feel less alone.”
What else could I do when my friend said something like that? I crossed the distance between us and pulled her into a hug. “Well, you don’t have to be alone anymore. We’re going to beat these guys that are coming, and then we’ll deal with Earth’s little problem.”
“And then you’ll go home.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shot back. “We tried the whole diplomat thing and it didn’t work. As far as I’m concerned, you’re stuck with me for a good, long while. You know, provided we don’t all die a terrible death.”
“Yes, that is a rather important variable.”
We shared a quiet laugh, then separated. “Alright,” I said, “let’s go grab the mattress and some other things so we can get this resistance started.”
“Yes,” she replied with a soft smile. “Let’s.”
6
Close Only Counts in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
“So why is your hair like this?”
I looked up from the box of weapons I was hauling to see a young man hanging from a tree branch. Well, he was mostly a young man. He also had a third arm and a tail, as well as only one eye in the center of his forehead, but hey, I understood that our form was particularly hard to take on and then maintain.
“Like what?” I asked.
“So different from fur. It’s stringy, and so long! But hers is so bounce-bounce, and then hers is thicker, like rope. You’re all human, but you’re all different.”
Before I could answer, Eske was replying, a broad grin across her striking features. “You know those critters running around with the four legs, the big ol’ ears, and the long tails?”
“You mean the Baylsx?”
“Um, yes. That. They’re all a bunch of different colors, and some have long fur and some have short fur, right?”
“Yeah!”
“Well, we’re just like that. We’re all humans, but we’re all a little different.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” The boy seemed to concentrate hard, and in a rather grotesque rippling of his face, took on a second eye and long, long, carefully coiffed locks like Eske. “How do I look?”
“Not bad, little one.” She reached up to pat his rounded cheek. “But I like your regular form alright too.”
He let out a noise that I couldn’t quite make out, then fell to the ground with a splat. However, his form changed as he did, and he landed as a mid-sized, black and spiky mass.
“There you are!” Eske said. “Now that’s a handsome fellow.”
It let out a chittering sound, and then four large spikes grew from its back. It squawked several times before I realized what it wanted.
“You wanna help us carry a crate? How polite.” I nodded to Ciangi and she gratefully set the box she was lugging on his back.
“Whew,” Ciangi panted. “Thanks. Even with the hover-dollies, we still are looking at manually hauling a lot of these things. I don’t know if you all were aware of this, but I’m not much of one for physical labor.”
“No, really?” Gonzales said with mock astonishment. “I would have never known.”
“To be fair,” Bahn said calmly, “none of us are particularly physically adept.”
“Speak for yourself,” Eske said, grinning brightly as she carried a crate in each arm. “Higgens and I have that constant maintenance physique. Nothing will beef you up more than constantly cleaning and patching up other people’s messes!”
“She has a point,” I said, continuing on with my own crate. As much as I would have liked to double-haul like Eske, I had spent too long on Earth with nothing to do but attend my classes and various interviews. I wasn’t quite what you’d call flabby, but I had certainly lost a lot of my physique. “But let’s get going. We have a whole lot more to do if we’re going to get these people ready for war.”
We dug in and pushed forward, making our way to the training ground that Mimic had fashioned.
I had to admit, she had really outdone herself. There was a weapons warehouse that had multiple areas lifted off the ground to avoid water damage to our supplies, and plenty of insulation from the environment. There was also a wide, roped-off yard that was cleared of any dark blue grass or weeds. I guessed that it was a sort of fighting practice area, judging by what was clearly a shooting range on the other side.
But as we spent our afternoon hauling box, after box, after box, I began to realize something.
There was no way what we had brought would be enough. Sure, we did ten full trips on the hover lifts, flat floating beds that followed along behind us while carrying about twenty crates, and we manually moved about twenty or so on our own. While that sounded like a lot, we were going up against an incredibly advanced alien species coming to get vengeance for the death of their brethren. We needed every mimic that could fight to fight, which meant they needed to be armed.
“Hey, I have a thought,” Eske said on our last trip, Mimic and another pair of mimics having joined us to drag along even more supplies.
“What’s that?” I asked, setting down my crate on a shelf inside the warehouse and trying not to breathe hard.
“These are all weapons to use if they come down onto the ground to fight us.”
“Yeah.”
“But what if they…don’t?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they’re really advanced, right? And we don’t know how far they’ve come since the technology on the ship that crashed here all those years ago. So what if they have some sort of powerful weapon that they can fire from space and eliminate us all?”
My stomach dropped and I stared at her with wide eyes. “I, well, that would have to be a really big laser.”
“But, like, it could be a thing, right? We have no way of knowing. And if it is, then isn’t all of this kinda moot anyway?”
“Not quite,” Mimic said, reverting to her human form and setting her crates onto a platform next to some others that were similarly colored. “Since we are done with the relocation of our supplies, I will show you. I hope you all don’t mind a bit of a hike.”
“Honestly,” Ciangi panted, “I would normally ask for a bit of a break, but I don’t think we have time for one.”
“Correct. This way.”
So without any other complaints, we trudged along after her, all of our arms sore and our backs not faring much better. The only one who didn’t seem utterly exhausted was Eske, who was still turning her head this way and that in wild-eyed wonder.
Huh. When had I lost that?
I remember once being chronically amazed by everything that happened around me. From Mimic, to running from giant monsters, to seeing Mimic’s people on their home planet for the first time. But now, I mostly took everything in stride.
It was almost…refreshing, to see her so enraptured by everything surrounding us. It reminded me of how incredibly lucky I was. If I hadn’t been in the right place, at the right time, I would still be listening to Giomatti’s abuse while I tried to keep that rickety old mining ship in top condition.
I broke from my musings when I began to recognize where we were. It had changed slightly, with more vibrant vegetation along the path, and signs of actual animal life, but I would never forget the path. Sure enough, I looked up and saw none other than the dilapidated, crashed ship stic
king out of the small mountain.
“Wow,” Eske breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s exactly like you said it was.”
“Not really,” Gonzales said, rubbing her chin as she looked it over. “You’ve been scrapping things from it, haven’t you?”
Mimic nodded. “Not to mention the food stores that we were able to recover from its fuel synthesis machine. Enough to last us another couple of years, should we live that long.”
“And what about after that?”
“After that, provided that we no longer have to worry about planetary scale war, we will have to mine for what we need. Possible, just not when we need to defend our existence from an extra-dimensional onslaught.”
“Boy, you’ve really been working on those complex sentences, haven’t you?” Ciangi remarked lightly.
“Yes, I have. Thank you for noticing.” With that, she strode forward, leading us up toward the ship.
It was a bizarre exercise in nostalgia as we soon reached the entrance of the tunnel, and then continued down into the belly of the ship. Just like Mimic had said, the area where the mini-mimics had once dumped all of their harvested minerals was completely disassembled, leaving only an empty room that had once been so terrifying.
From there, we went down another corridor that we hadn’t traversed before, until we came out in a massive, technology-laden room that I guessed might have once been this ship’s version of an engine room.
But it wasn’t an engine in the center. No, not at all.
Instead, it was a mass of wires, coils, metal chunks, and goodness knows what else. I could almost feel the polarity changing around it, and the hum in the air made my teeth buzz slightly.
“Is…is this a shield generator?” Bahn asked, walking forward like he had just seen the most beautiful person in existence. “Tell me that you didn’t jimmy rig a shield for this entire planet.”
“I do not know who Jimmy is, but he did not have anything to do with our repairs,” Mimic said, joining the excited engineer. “Of course, the ship already had its own shielding system in place for radiation, fights, and what have you. We just made some…additions based on the manuals you left me to be able to expand this to most of the planet.”
“But, the amount of power necessary to do that—”
“Is extraordinary, yes. Thankfully, since this ship doesn’t need to fly, or even maintain a life support system, we were able to reroute all power of the core to operating this. We estimate we’ll get maybe two, three days of shielding before the system burns out. Naturally, we are working to increase that number, but progress is slow as we can’t risk ruining what we’ve already worked so hard to create.”
“I’ve found it,” Bahn said with a deliberate nod.
“Found what?”
“The thing I’m going to do to help you. I don’t know much about battle, or fighting, or anything like that really. But I know machines, and how to improve them.” He pulled his hair from his ponytail, then rearranged it into a tight bun atop his head. “Have Ciangi run and get my toolkit from our room. I’m going to really get to know this thing.”
“Well, alright,” I said, chuckling slightly. “Try to remember to come back to eat sometime.”
“What? Oh, yes. Of course.” He was already beginning to circle the machine, his mind racing off a million miles away.
“So, should they try to fight this fight from space alone, they will not be able to,” Mimic said, turning back to us and leading the remaining members of our party out. Although I am not opposed to fighting the first part of this war in space. I have several of my brethren who I believe will be capable of flying any of the ships that you have brought.”
We walked down the mountain, and I found my worry coming back to me. “About that…”
Mimic stiffened as she strode ahead of me. “I may not be human, but I know that I do not like that tone.”
“Yeah, well, the ship wasn’t exactly fully loaded when we took it. Unfortunately, I think there are only about six or so single-man fighters on there, enough for us, but not for the other mimics that you trust.”
“That is…unfortunate.”
“It’s too bad that there aren’t any ships around here,” Eske remarked idly. “You guys seem to have a knack for hoisting them, so I’m sure you could just roll in and out with what you need.”
Her words stirred something within me, a faint sort of memory from the colony, specifically from after the explosion.
“Wait,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “I…I think I have an idea.”
“I hope it’s a good one,” Gonzales said, coming up beside me and throwing her arm over my shoulders. “Because I’m not feeling so great about our situation.”
“There’s a colony not too far from here. It’s a day and a half at max speed, maybe two. It’s been mostly abandoned for the better part of a decade, but still has a science team there to study the soil.”
“Okay,” Gonzales humored me slowly. “And how is that relevant to this situation?”
“Easy. We go to their colony, take over the communication array, and then send an SOS that we’re under attack from a single ship. From there, we’ll steal the ships that respond to the call, and bring them back here just in time for the coming battle.”
“Oh, is that all?” Ciangi said with only a slight amount of sarcasm in her tone. “Just take over a colony and steal a bunch of ships? Why not?”
“Actually, I think that would work,” Mimic said, her expression brightening. “However, I do not think we can do it with just the six of us. And that’s if we pull Bahn away from his work on our shielding—which is something that I am loathe to do at this point.”
“Alright then,” I said, determination rushing through me like it hadn’t in so long. “Looks like we’re going to need to make a team of mimics to train specifically for this mission. Consider them your special ops of sorts.”
“Ho boy,” Gonzales breathed, removing her arm from me to stride forward. “Just one more thing we gotta do before this big fight goes down. You sure we can properly teach a group of essentially teenagers how to raid a colony?”
“Why not?” I asked with a shrug. “No one taught us how to steal our first ship.”
Ciangi laughed at that, picking up the pace to move forward once again. “Good point. Let’s hope we can get lightning to strike twice then.”
7
Teaching New Dogs New Tricks
“Watch out!”
I ducked to the side automatically, narrowly missing a bed-sized mass of obsidian spikes as it sailed past where I had just been standing. The form slammed into the ground, sending dirt flying everywhere, and I shielded my eyes from the onslaught.
Once the noise died down, I looked to the now considerably smaller body on the ground. “You okay?” I asked.
“Sorry!” a strange voice called from across the yard. I followed the sound to see a mimic that had taken an incredibly jacked form that looked like it belonged to a super soldier rather than a young alien. “Still getting used to these joints.”
“It’s alright, Astaroth,” Mimic said, coming up behind him. “That was very good. Now you just need to focus on aim, and control.”
“Astaroth?” I asked. “Like the demon?”
Mimic shrugged, no doubt a gesture she had learned from Gonzales. “He liked one of the books you left behind on demonology, so the name stuck.”
“Huh,” I said. “Interesting.”
“Thanks,” the mimic said, sending me a grin that was lacking quite a few teeth. Right, I imagined they didn’t have many accurate representations of the interior of a human mouth.
“Actually,” Eske said, coming up alongside the two of them. “You’re working against your body and making it harder for yourself. Here, lemme show you.”
Without any warning, she gripped the man around his arm, stepped in front of him, and bent forward, forcing him over her back in a single smooth motion.
He collided with th
e ground, unable to stop himself, and I let out a whistle.
“How did you know to do that?” I asked, leaving the mimic still laying on the ground, wheezing, to join them.
“Riiight, I never mentioned that. I got through college on a fighting scholarship. I was supposed to make it professionally, but I took a really bad blow to the head and damaged my optic nerve. I went through a lot of therapy and surgeries to keep my vision, but it’s still not good enough to pass requirements to get into the league.”
Eske adjusted her goggles as she explained, and it clicked as to why she always wore them. I had never thought that they might be for vision correction. I remember reading once about how ancient society often had to rely on spectacles for improving their vision if their eyesight wasn’t 20/20, but those had been phased out long ago. I had assumed that they were for vanity purposes, and I was very happy that I had never said anything about it.
“But yeah, if you guys want a little tutelage in the ways of martial arts, I’m more than happy to lend a hand, or a couple.” Ekse stood straight and you could see the pride in her eyes.
“Yeah, that would be fantastic!” What a stroke of luck. I couldn’t believe that Eske had just fallen into our laps. It was almost like fate had a vested interest in our success, and it filled me with a lot more confidence than I had had just earlier that day.
“Alright, Astaroth, you go with Eske then. And, Mimic, grab anyone else who you think would be more toward the physical side of things.”
“They don’t just have to be brutes like ol’ Ashy here. Small folk who are fast or wiry are prime candidates too.”
“Good to know,” Mimic said with a nod. “I will do so. And I take it you will continue to help with Gonzales’s weapon training?”
“If by helping, you mean learning alongside the mimics, then yes. You are correct.”
“Right, well, you should get back to learning then,” she said with a wink. Not exactly the best time for one, but I had to give her credit for trying. For not being around any humans for a year, she certainly had progressed a long way.
Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 27