But then, she melted into my touch and wrapped her arms around my waist.
In that moment, it was like the entire universe changed with just a simple action. There would, for the rest of my life, be a before the kiss, and an after.
My head swam, my heart swirled, and my face grew hot. A million thoughts flew through my head before being shoved out by peace. And quiet. And safety.
I was protected here, with Mimic’s mouth pressed against mine, and no one could ever take away the solace I felt in that moment.
When I pulled away, Mimic’s face was bright red and her eyes were half-lidded.
“Does this mean you love me?” she murmured breathlessly.
“Yes,” I answered, finally willing to admit the truth aloud.
“Good,” she said. “Because I think I love you too.”
I thought I’d known happiness before, but nothing compared to the feeling that flooded me at those words. I let out a weak sort of laugh and tipped my forehead to rest against hers. I could have stayed in that moment forever, if only ju—
“Mimic! Mimic!”
Both of our heads jerked in the direction of one of the young mimics that she had left in charge of the preparation and training. It was clear by both their tone and the strained expression on their half-formed face that whatever they were running for was most urgent.
They practically collided with their leader, and she caught them deftly, taking a step away from me to do so.
“What is wrong, child? Are you alright?”
They shook their head emphatically and all of those butterflies that had just been flying in my stomach sank rather rapidly.
“All of our satellites farther than three clicks away have gone dead,” they gasped. “The enemy will be here within days. We have less than a week!”
The look on Mimic’s face grew grim and she reached out to me, never letting go of the small Mimic as she rose.
“Very well then,” she murmured before raising her voice to address the rest of us. “It seems that our unwelcome guests have nearly arrived.” Goodness, I would never understand how she kept so calm. “The battle is close. Prepare yourselves.”
And with that, she walked back toward her village, and I had no choice but to follow her. It figured, I had just had the happiest moment of my life interrupted by the greatest threat to us all.
I never had been very good at timing. Hopefully, if we survived this guerrilla war we were about to try, I would get better at in in the future. Only time would tell, I supposed.
Time, and a whole lot of luck.
Mimic Goes to War
1
Hedging the Storm
I looked out the window of Mimic’s room—now mine too, I guessed—and watched the insane hustle on the ground below me. Mimic hadn’t come back to sleep last night, which made sense given that she didn’t technically need to sleep like we humans did, and she couldn’t waste time just relaxing alongside me for hours.
With war looming on the horizon, there was precious little time for anything but frantic preparation. All the mimics developed enough to understand spent every waking moment gathering supplies, building defenses, and training their little spikey butts off.
Of course, given this furor of activity, Mimic and I hadn’t exactly had time to talk things out since our kiss. Had I messed everything up? Had I misinterpreted the feelings she had for me? Or even my own?
I didn’t think so, but I had been wrong plenty of times before in my life and it wasn’t like there was a manual that went along with it. ‘How to Understand Your Feelings Toward the Genderless Alien that you Discovered.’ If there was, I would have read it from cover to cover and upside-down and backward. Anything to make sense of the confusing emotions and thoughts whipping through me.
Oh well. It wasn’t like I should worry. It wasn’t like Mimic and I could have any sort of future together if I was solidly dead after the aliens invaded and won the war on the mimic planet. So, I supposed I should stop staring melancholily out the window and actually get to work.
I left the house and made my way to the training area. Everyone else’s doors were open, which meant they had most likely woken up at the crack of dawn and were doing actually useful things. I really was slacking, but of all the members on my team, I felt the most useless.
Eske was even more amazing at hand-to-hand than she said, and was able to use the mimics’ shapeshifting ability to enhance the drills she taught them. Gonzales was teaching both marksmanship and modifying every weapon she could get her hands on as fast as she could. In fact, she rarely did anything else. She didn’t speak to us, and she rarely ate. I had the feeling that something was bothering her, deeply in fact, but every time I approached her in the day and a half since we landed, she asked for privacy and I respected that.
Bahn and Ciangi were all over the place. Between repairing the ships and creating a useful AI that could help in battle for all of us inexperienced pilots, upgrading other systems, and improving the shielding that Bahn had stayed behind to work on, they had their hands full.
But me? What could I do? They had plenty of little mimics now to hand them tools and do their grunt work, and all of the current tasks were far beyond my knowledge. So here I was, on the precipice of a great war, and all I felt like I could do was just watch while everyone around me fought with everything they had to make sure we were ready for what was to come.
I reached the bottom of the stairs to see Bahn and Ciangi sitting together at the rough-hewn table and chairs dominating the lower floor. They had a mass of wires and tools in front of them, but I couldn’t fathom what they possibly could be doing.
“Oh hey, Higgens. There you are!” Bahn said, grinning broadly.
Ever since we arrived yesterday, just after dawn, Bahn had been elated to see all of us. It was like the impending doom didn’t even phase him now that we were all together in one place. Him and Ciangi were glued at the hip even more than usual, to the point where it almost felt wrong to ever interrupt their alone time as they busily worked on their projects.
“Yup. Here I am,” I answered, pasting a smile on my face as well.
“I think Mimic wanted to talk to us. Wanna walk with us to the training area?” Ciangi asked.
“Yeah, sure. Let me just grab my pack.”
“No problem.”
They waited until I was done and we all headed out together. Despite the bright expression on the taller coin twin’s face, tension was thick in the air. It weighed down my body and almost made it hard to breathe, like the air itself was more liquid than gas. Maybe it was all in my head, but a quick glance at Ciangi told me she was feeling the same.
We reached the training grounds and it was even more populated than when we had left. It seemed that the mimics were beginning to develop at an exponential rate, with more of them to hold human or even greater forms every hour. Of course, that also meant that there were more students to teach, but the older mimics were helping with disseminating whatever Eske or Gonzales taught them.
It was actually kind of amazing how they were already developing a sense of community. The mimics had spent at least a hundred years, maybe more, as mindless slaves of someone who starved them to keep them stunted. They had known nothing but the alien voice in their heads ordering them to meet its every need.
And now they were thriving. They had personalities and desires, and they were discovering things like art. I was pretty sure I had even heard one humming! It was like watching the birth of a species on fast forward, and if there wasn’t a cataclysmic fight looming on the horizon, I would have taken a lot more time to observe the phenomenon.
“Hey there, guys!” Eske called, breaking away from the mimic she was helping then jogging over. She was covered in a shiny layer of sweat, but instead of looking gross, or unkempt, it kind of just made her look more dangerous and capable of crushing a person’s head between her muscled thighs. “I think Mimic wanted to talk to all of us.”
“Yeah, we k
now,” Ciangi said. “We’ve got the same comms in our scanners that you do.”
“Oh, right. Of course.” She let out a laugh and pulled her goggles from where they clicked in behind her ears, wiping sweat from the lenses. “Forgive me. I didn’t eat breakfast and I’ve been staging mock combat all morning. My brain’s a little foggy.”
“It’s alright,” I said. “Let’s grab Gonzales, then go find Mimic. You know where she is, right?”
The tall woman pointed off into the woods far at the opposite edge of the training area. “I think she wandered off there with some building supplies.”
“Awesome.” I started to take a step toward the marksman half the field away when Eske caught my arm. “What’s up?” I asked, giving her a curious look.
“Oh, uh. Maybe you should let me go get Gonzales while you guys go ahead.”
“Why?”
“Do you really not—” She turned her head and put her goggles back into place, so she could observe me. “Huh, yeah. I guess you wouldn’t. Well, she’s been through some stuff and I think she just needs a little time to recover and figure out how she feels. You know, it happens sometimes.”
“Yeah, she’s been through a lot. But I’ve always been able to help her before. Maybe if we just talked…”
But Eske’s grip on my arm remained tight. “Just trust me on this, friend. Give her space.”
I wanted to argue, but one look at all my friends’ faces told me that I needed to listen. I was tempted to ask them what they all knew that I didn’t, but perhaps if I didn’t know—and Gonzales had yet to tell me—the weapons engineer might not want me in the loop. And, as much as it twisted my insides, I needed to respect her wishes.
I just hoped that she would be okay.
“Alright, fair enough. You go grab her and catch up to us by the tree line.”
“Roger-roger. Catch you in a flash.”
She sprinted off, her long legs taking her over large stretches of land. Ciangi whistled appreciatively at the athleticism, and then we were heading off toward the woods.
“Hey, Bahn, if we survive all this, we should start working out.”
“That’s what you said after we defeated the first alien.”
“Yeah, well, I got sidetracked. It wasn’t like we didn’t have a ton on our plate, you know, revealing that we had discovered new life and all that.”
“And don’t forget getting betrayed and locked in prison for months,” I added.
“I don’t think that’s something any of us could ever forget,” she shot right back, grimacing. I couldn’t help but mirror her perspective.
Sure, I liked to joke about terrible things to make myself feel better about them, but it seemed that we hadn’t reached that point yet. Who knew, maybe we wouldn’t survive long enough to be over it.
That was a terrible thought. I needed to stop being so pessimistic.
We reached the woods, Eske and Gonzales reaching us a bit later. The weapons engineer was wearing a strained expression while the maintenance woman just looked a bit worried.
“Should we call Mimic over the comms and tell her we’re all here?”
Our scanners all crackled at once. “I can hear you. Keep walking east. You’ll find me by a river.”
“Anyone else creeped out by that, or just me?” Ciangi asked.
“Only a little,” Eske murmured. “I guess her senses are more developed than ours?”
“I think she can shapeshift to enhance them. The more she learns about human anatomy, the more she can manipulate it,” I answered.
“That’s…an awful lot of possibilities you’re opening up there. So, basically, she could do almost anything once she understands a living creature’s structure?”
“I don’t know about anything,” I said with a shrug. “But certainly, a whole lot.”
Eske let out a long breath. “Huh. Now I feel a whole lot less worried about this war coming.”
“I wouldn’t be,” Bahn said. “It’s unlikely that this is going to be a ground fight. With the technology we found on that old, crashed ship, they’ll try to stay attacking us from space.”
“But if we could force their hand so they have to come to us on the ground, then things will be looking up,” Ciangi finished for her twin.
“Well, we stole all of those ships. Hopefully, that won’t be for nothing and we’ll be able to get these invading folks to leave their mothership.”
I felt like Eske might have kept talking if we hadn’t stepped into a small clearing where we found Mimic standing by the running waterway, building something that looked like a…an animal pen? That was curious. Last I knew, she had never been much into animal husbandry.
“You wanted to speak to us?” I asked, sending her an uncertain smile.
Mimic let down the post she was placing and turned to us, her face flushing slightly red. I didn’t know when she had learned to blush as we humans did, but it made me feel a bit proud that I could bring out such a reaction in her.
“Yes. I…I have a theory.”
“Oh? Care to enlighten us?”
“Perhaps. But first, Bahn, can you walk us through all of the improvements you’ve made since we’ve been gone? I know you gave us a loose update, but I want a thorough walkthrough.”
“I mean, sure, but the ship is on the completely opposite side of your capital. It would have been better to meet at your place and go from there.” Ciangi elbowed him and he just shrugged. “What? This is just a bit inefficient.”
“I don’t mean a literal walkthrough,” Mimic said, picking the post back up and placing it into a hole she must have dug before we arrived. “Use your words.”
“Oh. Right. I suppose that is a thing I can do.” He cleared his throat, the intense expression across his face making it look as if he was building a mental checklist.
“So, as I said before, I did manage to increase the power supply to the shield generator while reducing its power needs. There was an entire backup system of engines that were only partially damaged that I was able to work into the circuit. I would say, after running a whole bunch of tests on it, it should last as long as a year. Probably.”
“A year?”
“Should?”
“Probably?”
Ciangi, Eske and I looked to each other, clearly the three of us having found different parts of that sentence to latch onto.
“Yes. It’s hard to say for certain, of course. It’s not like I often have the chance to build something meant to protect an entire city. But the best that I can tell, yes, around a year.”
“That…that changes things,” Mimic murmured. “I didn’t realize when you said you improved it, that you improved it that much.”
“Well, it wasn’t like there was a lot of time. Almost as soon as you all landed, you went straight into ordering everyone what to do and sending the younglings to get food.”
“Yes, I suppose we did.” Mimic’s fingers rubbed her temples, such a decidedly human trait that I wondered which of us she had picked it up from.
“But this means, should we manage a surprise assault via space, we might be able to drive them to attack us on the ground,” I said hopefully.
“Yes, possibly. But we must also consider that they will just try to wait out our shield.”
“So…you’re talking about a siege then?”
“Yes. Which is even worse than I had surmised.” She let out a long sigh again, and I could see the tension of her position weighing on her. Poor girl. She had just learned about the entire world outside of her asteroid less than two years ago, and now she seemed to have the responsibility of saving it. “Food, we’ll have plenty of, but I had a thought, and that was when my theory was that we would only have a week or two of power.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Let’s say we do survive, and drive these invaders away. What of our planet? Of the wildlife we saved from the menagerie within the ship? What if we win only to have a planet full of destruction and fire wrou
ght from space?”
“Oh…” I hadn’t thought of that. But it was true that we had no idea what these aliens would do. What if they did blast the entire crust of the planet? There was so much we would need. A constant water source for one. And enough materials for repairs. And an escape system if the planet grew too inhospitable after a hostile assault.
“Exactly,” Mimic murmured. “So, although it seems impossible and silly to worry about such a little thing, I was wondering if we would be able to round up as many creatures as possible and house them within the boundary of the shielding.
“Uh, I understand where you’re coming from, but I honestly do not know if we’re gonna have the time,” Ciangi admitted. “Bahn and I are still working on the ships and a lot of other things.”
“And I’m not even halfway through your weapons. There’s a lot of repairs and upgrades to be made if we’re looking at a man-to-man fight down here.”
“I, um, guess I could teach faster? Your younglings do learn very quickly, and there are more of them each day.”
“I can do it,” I said. Everyone looked at me, a bit surprised, but I kept on. “I’m next to useless right now. I can’t really help much with the fighting, I’m not good enough at engineering yet, and I don’t know weapons. I’ve hardly ever even fired a weapon.
“But rounding up some animals and maybe some very particular flora? That I can do. Give me a list, and maybe a couple of mimics to help me, and I’ll make sure at least some of the creatures survive.”
“Thank you,” Mimic said with a relieved smile. “It’s not the most glamourous work, but I think that preparing for the aftermath of our possible victory will also help morale.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
She nodded and returned to the pen she was creating. “I will finish this, then you and some younglings will need to make other sorts of cages. I will provide you a list of creatures, where to find them, and other relevant information after a bit. For now, I recommend packing a day or so worth of provisions. You don’t want to be caught out in the wilds without supplies.”
Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 33