“I feel like I’m missing a very vital piece of information,” Eske rasped as she winced away from the injector.
“You—”
“Thirty seconds now until we have reached the nuclear-critical point,” Bahn reminded.
“And two minutes until atmospheric entry by the mothership.”
“It’ll be fine. I promise,” I said, eyes flicking to the door. “Have faith.”
“Faith in what, though?” Gonzales countered.
Before I could answer, a resounding shriek cut through the door. For a tiniest of moments, we all stilled as thunderous footsteps rammed down the hall, and then something erupted into our room, blasting the door off its hinges.
“Mimi!” I cried, jumping up. “There’s an overflow of nuclear runoff. I hope you’re hungry!”
The massive blue creature before me nodded, and their form rapidly crumbled and rebuilt itself as it launched over the jury-rigged engines and rushed the nuclear runoff measures.
“Ten seconds until overload.”
By the time she reached it, she was black, spikey, and the size of a small car. Without a second’s hesitance, she found the emergency release grate and surged up into it.
“Nuclear discharge levels are going down!” Bahn yelled, holding his hand up for Gonzales to high-five. But the woman’s eyes were on the screen in front of Ciangi. “Almost a minute until those guys break atmosphere.”
“Cranking the charge speed up to two hundred percent. I hope Mimic is ready for the biggest feast of her life.”
“I…I don’t know if that’s safe.” I countered, looking to where Mimic had disappeared into the runoff equipment.
“Not like we have much of a choice,” Gonzales countered. “You’re just gonna have to—”
Before she could finish the sentence, we heard more chittering and the pitter-patter of pointed footsteps. I turned to the door just in time to see a horde of mimics surging in, all of them making a beeline after Mimic.
“Oh God,” I breathed, looking at the rapidly moving procession in wonder. “They’re all going to eat.”
Sure enough, one by one, they launched themselves after their leader, disappearing faster than I thought possible.
“Change it to four hundred!” I cried, jumping to my feet.
Bahn nodded, and I saw him punch codes into the datalog in his hands. Gonzales picked up one of the guns and stalked to the door, laying down fire at something I couldn’t see. And Ciangi, well, her eyes were still glued to her holo-screens.
“Thirty seconds until they enter the atmosphere!” she cried.
“The cannon is charged! Firing now!”
Everything seemed to happen at once. The entire building shook, and we were all knocked off our feet. Ciangi’s screens all flashed brilliant green, and once more, dozens of alarms were going off at once. An explosion sounded outside of the door, and Gonzales was thrown all the way back to Eske, her front smoking, while nearly a dozen aliens poured in.
Time seemed to suspend itself for a moment, as if everything in existence had come to a stand-still. But then, the screens all cleared and what sounded like the loudest peel of thunder cracked in the sky above us.
“We have a direct hit!” Ciangi cried. “With just a little repositioning of the magnets, I should be able to cut the ship in two!”
“Too bad we’ve got company,” I shot back, grabbing both my gun and Eske to pull them both back to cover.
“Wait, what—” She turned just in time for one of the aliens to charge her, and she barely jumped out of the way. Both Gonzales and I fired, the weapons engineer apparently having recovered somewhere behind me, and that one went down, but that left us with the other eleven or so converging on us.
I was sure this was the end. We were bringing down their mothership, but there were still too many killers on the ground. But before a single one of them could lower their guns, a dark force shot over from the other side of the room, expanding rapidly until the aliens were completely blocked from our view.
“Oh…my…God,” I breathed.
There were no words for what I was seeing. A spikey, obsidian form stood in front of us, one that almost would have been familiar if its legs weren’t longer than my entire body and the top of its barbed back didn’t hit the ceiling. It was Mimi, alright, there was no doubt. But instead of her normal, completely noir skin, I saw green-blue rivulets of pure energy rushing through the cracks in her now-massive surface.
The aliens didn’t have a chance. She set on them like a force of nature, flinging some while stomping others. It was clear that they were in a bit of shock at the sudden transformation, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel pity for them.
It was all over within a second, and I could only stare in wonder at the giant creature who was also my best friend.
“The mothership is pulling away! It’s retreating!” Somehow, during the fray, Ciangi had posted herself right back in her seat and was looking at her screen once more. “The crafts on the ground are leaving too!” She let out a sound that was somewhere between a cry and a laugh. “We did it, you guys! We won!”
We stood there a moment, shell-shocked by the idea, but true to her word, there was no more sounds of gunfire, no more cries of battle. In fact, there was a real, true calm over the building for the first time since the first alarm had sounded.
Slowly, the gargantuan form in front of us shrunk and receded, until only Mimic was standing there.
“We did it,” I breathed, extending my arms to her.
“We did,” she answered, rushing to me and pressing her head against my chest. “It’s finally over.”
It was. We had all lived to see another day.
And what a day it was going to be.
12
Recovery
War is a lot like a hurricane. Ruthless in its destruction, often devastating, and going hand in hand with a lot of cleanup. Even as the days passed after our battle, little aftershocks would occasionally rock us to our cores, leaving us feeling like we were right back in the fray.
And none of us came out unscathed. In that last hit Gonzales had taken, she’d gotten a ton of shrapnel to one side of her body. While the automated systems in the battlecruiser’s medbay took care of most of it, she permanently lost her right eye. She seemed to be adapting well enough, but it was clear she had a very long road to recovery.
Eske didn’t fare much better. Her open wound had been taken care of by making a skin-graft combining her DNA and a mimic sample, but her goggles had been damaged beyond repair. Sure, the coin twins could make her a new pair, but that was pretty low on the list of priorities.
Bahn and Ciangi were relatively fine, with only minor burns and nicks from the aftermath, and Mimic was…different. She was still herself, still kind and a great leader, but I could tell that she was brimming with the new energy and abilities that came from the massive amount of nuclear runoff she had eaten.
There were also an insane number of mimics that could now take human shape, and were just as advanced as Mimic had been before she took her nuclear bath. It was strange, having the number of friendly faces to learn suddenly triple, but I wasn’t complaining.
As for me, well, I lost a grand total of two fingers on my burned hand. Maybe they would had been salvageable if I hadn’t kept using them to fire and drag Eske around, but to me, it was the tiniest of sacrifices I could have made.
We survived. All of us.
It seemed an impossibility. You couldn’t have a war without casualties, and yet here we were. Sure, plenty of us had been irreparably hurt, irreparably changed, but we were alive, and we had hope for the future.
We had defeated an enemy with more resources than we could ever have. We had escaped the grasp of corrupt Earth Gov Officials. Everything that had been thrown at us, we destroyed.
But still, there was so much left to do.
We all knew that Earth Gov could assemble more ships and try to come and take back what we stole. We also knew the a
liens could return in even bigger forces. But now, we had time to prepare. There would be no more slapdash Hail Marys. Goodness knows we relied on them far too often.
And that was what left me standing at the foot of the battlecruiser’s ramp, looking up at Gonzales’s bandaged face.
“Are you sure you’re ready to go?” I asked, shifting from foot to foot.
“Hey, someone’s gotta get our family and resources. Besides, I’ll be back in a month or two, depending on just how stealthy I gotta be.”
“Or you could just not go at all.”
She gave me a look with her good eye, and it was just as withering surrounded by bruises and scabs. “You know I need to. We need more supplies. Eske needs to get her family out of harm’s way. The coin twins miss their girlfriend-lady-pers…whatever she is. I also need to get the word out of what the coup is trying to do.”
“But it seems wrong for you to go alone.”
She patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. A little space will do me good. Besides, you have plenty to do around here.”
She gestured to the others standing just behind me—Eske, Mimic, and the Twins. Even some of the mimics that weren’t going with her showed up to give her a sendoff.
“Y’all better hold this place down while I’m off, you hear?”
“We will,” I said with a dry, scratchy throat. I offered her a hug, and she gladly took it before parting.
Mimic was next, and although they shared a handshake instead of an embrace, there was no lack of respect there. “You have done so much for my people. Return to us with the proper equipment, and I will make sure you get a new eye to replace what you lost.”
“I’m sure you will, Mimic. You’re a woman of your word.” She gripped the shapeshifter’s hand tighter and pulled her forward a bit. “So promise me that you’ll take care of him.”
Mimic nodded, a soft smile spreading across her face. “I will.”
“Good.” Gonzales took a step back and gave a cheeky little wave. “I’d do the whole personal good-bye things with all of y’all, but that sounds boring and I gotta go. So I’ll see ya on the flip side, nerds.”
There was a chorus of good-byes and waves, then the ramp was rising, then the ship was lifting off, and then she was gone.
“You’re worried about her,” Mimic said, stepping up to me and wrapping an arm around my waist.
“Yeah. The last time we were separated for a long period, it didn’t go so well.”
“Do not worry. She is strong, and smart. She will do what is best for all of us.”
“I know.” I sighed and looked back to the city just over the hill. There was still debris everywhere, and many of the buildings had been partially destroyed. We had such a long to-do list, I probably wouldn’t even have time to take a breather before Gonzales was back with supplies, friends, and information.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” Ciangi asked, coming up alongside us, her hand wrapped in Bahn’s.
“It is,” I answered, looking over the horizon. “But nothing crazier than what we’ve already done.”
“No, certainly not,” Eske agreed with a slight nod.
Mimic squeezed my waist slightly, then slowly walked us forward. “It will be a long road, but we’ve come this far together, so the rest of the road can’t be all bad.” She stood on tiptoes to press a gentle kiss to my cheek, and I smiled.
“No, not bad at all.”
Mimic Betrayed
1
From the Ground Up
I woke up slowly, my dreams trying to keep ahold of me. I could hear the keening of the byabos outside, which meant that it was long past dawn.
I let my eyes open slowly and wasn’t surprised to feel the bed empty next to me. Even after six months of rebuilding, Mimi—my nickname for her, especially now that we were dealing with so many mimics these days—rarely rested for more than a few hours at a time. Often, she would stay with me while I fell asleep, either in my arms as a human, or by my back in her spikey, true form, only to get up once I was truly out and go about her duties.
I’d tried lecturing her several times on giving herself a break, but she would just smile and assure me that she’d try to do better, even though we both knew she wouldn’t.
In her defense, there was still so much to do. After the last fight with the alien race, and the mimics’ Hail Mary of absorbing the nuclear waste of the mega-gun we had stolen, we had ended up with nearly a thousand suddenly adult Mimics who went through the most turbo-charged puberty anyone could imagine. As if that wasn’t enough, there were even more that were in a sort of adolescent stage, not too different from Mimi when she was beginning to understand me but not able to take another organic’s form.
Out of nowhere, we went from dealing with maybe a hundred or so mimics that were capable of speech and more complicated shifting to ten times that. We needed more food, more shelter, and most importantly, more education.
Technically, Mimi had only moved beyond her child form a little over a year ago now. I knew that she was still learning things about herself and her people. It helped that she was a next-level genius who sometimes even made the coin twins feel unintelligent, but even with all that going for her, there was so much she didn’t know, and the new mimics had so many questions.
Speaking of which, I needed to get down to the lecture circle in town to see if I was needed for anything.
I exited my room, heading to the bathroom to start my morning routine. With the synthesizers of our stolen ship online, and a whole lot of pilfered parts from the alien fighters that had been shot down, we had a working sewage and water system to about a quarter of the structures we’d built. Maybe it was silly to be so proud of such a meager accomplishment compared to all that we still had to do, but I couldn’t help myself.
I finished up in the bathroom and headed downstairs to our kitchen. It was still fairly primitive, with a machine that used a heating coil to cook food that was raw, and a cold-storage unit instead of an on-premise food synthesizer, but it got the job done. If I wanted something special, I could always make the trek to our stolen warship. The supplies on that ship were meant to support nearly two thousand workers for four-year missions, so we were going to be just fine for a while.
“Hey there, sleepyhead. It’s unusual to see you up so late.”
I looked down the stairs to see Eske sitting at the table in the central room, a large bowl of fufu, with what smelled like peanut sauce, in front of her. Either she had snuck some seeds from Earth into the communal garden or had taken a trip to the ship while I was sleeping.
“What time is it?”
“Just a little past ten. Not a big deal, but I know how much you like your routine.”
She wasn’t wrong. Ever since doomsday stopped being right over our heads like a malevolent storm cloud, I’d started developing a structure for my day. I found that, with so much else going on, it helped me keep calm against the flood of stimulation always flowing past me.
“Huh, guess I was tired.”
“I’m not surprised, considering we tilled an entirely new section of the city for planting yesterday.” She finished up her food and sat back, sighing contentedly. “I’m gonna see who I can round up in a couple of hours for a hand-to-hand lesson. What are you up to?”
“I was about to head to the circle and see if anyone wanted to sit down for a lesson on Earth culture and how to interact with humans.”
She nodded. “I see that. But are you preparing for the hope that one day we’ll be at peace with our home planet, or preparing for war with them?”
“I’d prefer the former, to be honest, but I wouldn’t put the latter past them. I’d like to think that we slowed them down by all the trouble we’ve caused, but not by much. That coup is coming and none of the messages that we’ve sent to Earth Gov to warn them of the usurpers have gone through.” I sighed. “I just hope Gonzales is doing well. Have we heard from her?”
It was subtle, but the corners of Eske’s lips
went down slightly. “No. Not since she said she couldn’t find any of my family.”
Ouch. In my just-waking-up mind, I had forgotten that Eske’s family was missing. Gonzales had returned once since she left, bringing the coin twins’ girlfriend—I still had no idea who was dating who in their tightknit triad—and her family, plus a few other contacts. None of Gonzales’s own, I noticed, but even I knew better than to ask.
She had left immediately, not even spending the night, citing that she hadn’t been able to get a hold of Eske’s family and was going to do some on the ground investigation.
I missed her. Our family was growing, and Mimi’s people were thriving, but it wasn’t the same without our wisecracking weapons expert. I had figured out after she and I had finally talked that she had feelings for me, though I couldn’t say how deep they ran. I didn’t know if maybe it was something more. Maybe she was afraid of being…replaced.
Although she and I weren’t close before my first contact with Mimi, she had been one of the only people that I had talked to on a regular basis. She had been nice when most people weren’t, and she knew my name. I really valued her, and I wanted us to be close friends again… I just didn’t know how to fix it.
After six more months rebuilding her people’s lives, Mimi and I had grown even closer. We were each other’s confidants and havens. I didn’t know what I would do without her.
Granted, without her, I’d still be a nobody on a ship with an abusive boss, but that was neither here nor there. I had mostly gotten over discrediting myself and telling myself that I was just some useless janitor, but I still had flareups every now and then. Thankfully, I rarely had time to indulge in those thoughts, but such was the life of a…whatever the heck I was.
I went to the fridge and grabbed a couple of the compressed protein bars that Eske liked to make in bulk for the week and headed out. Mimi’s house was no longer the central location of the commune, which had expanded to encompass all of the battlefield and slightly into the forest. Apparently more than a few mimics liked to live in the trees and had built some pretty elaborate treehouses for themselves. While those weren’t decked out with all the electrical and plumbing that the main buildings were, they didn’t seem to mind. I supposed everything was an upgrade to perpetual slavery and forced eternal mindlessness by an amorphous alien.
Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 41