Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9)

by James David Victor

  I could tell she grated on the nerves of others in the same way that Gonzales did. It was clear that she didn’t care about ranks or labels or any of that and talked to most everyone as if they were her assistant. I appreciated the candor, but it was quite obvious that others did not.

  “Hey, you, buzz-head, come ‘ere.”

  It took me a second to realize that Aja was talking to me. I was so used to having my long ponytail that I still forgot my head had been shaved just a couple of weeks earlier. While Ciangi’s crown was already covered with little blond ringlets, and another rebellion soldier had given Eske a wig, both Bahn and I were looking particularly short-haired. I supposed I would get used to it eventually, but by then, it would probably be long enough to put right back into a ponytail.

  “You needed me?”

  She nodded and headed toward the door. “Walk with me, I wanna have a talk.”

  I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly need to speak with me for, but I complied anyway.

  We walked in silence for a while, heading to a lower level of the ship that was hardly used. It was mostly supposed to be storage for a year’s worth of supplies for an entire crew, but considering we had less than fifty people and no way to gather said supplies, the space was mostly empty.

  “So, tell me about all these folks here who are hustling around like they’ve got a fire under their behinds.”

  “I don’t know most of their names, actually, but Gonzales you’ve met—”

  She shook her head, cutting me off. “That’s not what I mean. Every person out there isn’t like you or me, with maybe the exception of that tall black woman who looks like she might be secret nobility, an ancient warrior or both.

  “Their genetics were all fiddle-faddled with to fit into a society that looks at us like we’re something to be cured. People like that tend to treat people like us different, so I’m asking, what kind of people are they?”

  “Well, Gonzales, Bahn, and Ciangi have always been kind. Even before we all got wrapped up with Mimi. They were the few people on the ship who bothered to learn my name, and they never treated me differently or looked down on me for working maintenance.”

  “Uh-huh, who else?”

  “Well, Babel and Lim seem alright, but I have to admit to you, I’ve only known most of these people a week longer than you have. And, um, I’m not always the best judge of character.”

  “Nonsense! I don’t believe that for a second.” She reached up to sling her arm around my shoulders, which effectively made me nearly double over to meet her gaze. “In order for you to have survived this long, you’ve gotta have a certain ability to read people. Sure, maybe a folk or two slipped through your radar, but I bet in general, if you’re real uncomfy with someone, you’ve got a reason why.”

  She nodded and let me go. “Like I can tell you’re a good kid. I almost feel bad about stabbing you.”

  “Only almost?”

  She winked at me, and I cracked a smile. “Well, it wasn’t my fault you jumped out of the sky and startled me half to death. Honestly, what did you expect at that point?”

  “You’re right. Next time I’m chasing after a fugitive, I’ll make sure to announce myself first.”

  “There ya are! Now, that we’ve had our little convo outside of where all those prying ears like to overhear, how about we go do another test run?”

  “Really? We fixed the bugs of the last one?”

  She nodded, her eyes twinkling. “Aye, and I really think this is gonna be it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Didn’t really want to start a war with a group of villains and all.”

  “That’s fair,” I said, my lips curling. I really did like this Aja. I hoped she stuck around after all of this was said and done. “Except we’re not starting a war. We’re finishing it.”

  “Set energy influx to forty percent,” Aja ordered, standing atop the catwalk that looked down on the field generator we had all built together.

  “Setting energy influx to forty percent.”

  “Reverse the ion field by twenty percent!”

  “Reversing the ion field by twenty percent.”

  Everyone had gathered to see if this really was the moment we would be successful. I could feel the tension in the air, and even Mimi leaned over the rail beside me, curiously taking it all in.

  She had been…different, lately. At first, I thought that maybe it was just her time in the tank that was causing such a stark difference, but I was beginning to understand that wasn’t it at all. Every night, she held onto me, as if afraid I would disappear, and often I found her roaming the halls in her original form, apparently needing a break from her human one.

  It was clear that all the war, all the constant fighting, was weighing heavily on her. Exhaustion was definitely settling in, and she needed to have peace soon.

  If this all worked out, hopefully, she would have it soon. It all depended on how this test run went…

  “Alright, take down the last of the firewalls to integrate it into the systems.”

  “Are you sure?” Ciangi called up from where she was working with the other engineers. “If it overloads, well, I don’t have to explain how that would be bad.”

  “Oh, don’t worry your little curly head. I’m well aware of what that could do. Now drop the firewalls.”

  They all flurried into action and suddenly, the chamber began to fill with a low hum. The little generator began to glow green, and all of our hair began to stand on end. Well, those of us that had hair.

  The tension built in the air, and I could sense that most of us were holding our breath. Then, as suddenly as it had all started, the thing burst to life. The wave of energy washed over all of us, not quite knocking us backward, but definitely pressing along our bodies.

  “It works!” Aja cried. “What d’ya know it works! Somebody run a scan before my heart explodes!”

  “I’m on it,” Babel cried, already pulling up some sort of mechanism that I didn’t recognize.

  “I’ll do it too,” Lim added. “You never can be too sure.”

  “I will scan as well.” I was surprised to hear Bahn speak again. He had been fairly taciturn since his hair was stolen from him, and I didn’t blame him. “It would be good to know if the shielding would work against even unorthodox scanners.”

  “You make that yourself?” another one of the engineers asked him.

  “That I did. Seemingly a lifetime ago.”

  The rest of us fell quiet as we waited for the trio to affirm whether we were successful or not.

  It was Lim who spoke first. “I can’t believe it. I’m picking up serials from about a dozen different manufacturers, and none of them are on the red-list!”

  Babel was close after her. “Same on mine. We’re clean.”

  We all looked to Bahn, waiting for our final confirmation. He sure milked it, pressing several inputs on his datalog before nodding gravely. “I can confirm that as well. We are in the clear.”

  A raucous cry sounded from all of us, and I hugged Mimi happily. We had done it! One more hurdle down.

  “Well, you did it, old lady,” Gonzales said, clapping Aja on the back. “I hope everyone’s ready to go home and get some recruiting done. It’s time to kick this rebellion into gear.”

  8

  Duping the Bouncer

  “Approaching the defense grid in T-minus five minutes.”

  I sat in the very back of the bridge, watching out the front as our tiny blue planet came into view. This was it, the moment that we found out if Aja’s experimental invention would work against the real deal.

  “Good. Make sure to have evasive maneuvers and a scrambling field ready in case this goes belly up,” Gonzales said. “If we get so much as a hint of something wrong, I want us pulling out fast enough to get whiplash, you got me?”

  The pilots nodded. For the first time in our entire journey together, we actually had trained pilots flying a ship we were in. It was a strange change, but not entirely unwelcome
.

  We approached the Earth far too quickly, or at least that was what my heart told me, pitter-pattering away inside of my chest. But everyone else was acting like nothing was wrong, so I just focused on my breathing and made myself not panic.

  “Boot up the generator.” Aja said, her voice crackling over the comm.

  “Isn’t it a little soon for that?” the leader-man asked.

  “We don’t want them reading a random surge of energy right before we approach the grid. Best to play it safe.”

  “Pardon me if I’m wrong,” I heard Ciangi’s voice come over the line as well. “But didn’t you say that sustained use of the scramble-generator could possibly cause an overload in the electronic systems that would force a reboot of all of our…well, everything?”

  “I might have mentioned that, yes.”

  “Oh…well…I— Carry on then, I guess.”

  “Thanks for your permission.”

  “Hailing Earth now for permission to land,” Lim said from the navigation console. “The scan should start any moment now.”

  I was probably making a habit of holding my breath way too often, but I wasn’t sure how else to keep myself as still and silent as I felt I needed to be. It certainly didn’t help that Mimi didn’t necessarily need to breathe next to me and would occasionally forget to do so during tense moments.

  The minutes seemed to drag on, taking forever and ever until finally, a beep sounded from the console.

  “Yes! We’ve done it! We have permission to enter orbit!”

  “You heard the girl, punch it and get to the far side of the planet so we can drop our scrambler before everything melts down.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  Abruptly, the ship picked up speed, and I felt my body press into the seat as the environmental supports tried to compensate for the sudden switch in inertia.

  “Dropping the scrambler now,” Aja said. There was a slight pause, then the lights of the entire bridge flickered before shining more brightly than they had before.

  “Um, that was a good thing, right?” Eske asked.

  “I think so…” I murmured.

  “Now,” Gonzales said, completely oblivious to our conversation. “Let’s hope they don’t track where we land. I worry that—with being on high alert and all—they might be individually investigating every single ship that docks, no matter where it does.”

  “Oh, they won’t be able to do that,” Aja said, and I could hear her smile through the comms.

  “Really? And why’s that?”

  “Do you really think I put nearly a week into building a generator that was only for scrambling serials? Child, please.” She cackled, and I saw several people wince, but I liked the sound. “I made sure that we could land in peace.”

  “Did…did you make a cloaking device, old woman?”

  “You watch your tongue, you gun-happy ball of vinegar,” Aja shot back. “And I guess you could say that. If a cloaking device can shield you from their readings while installing a virus into their system that inputs the same readings as the last commercial flight that went through its logs.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Hardly. I wouldn’t trust any of you young ones to know good humor if it bit you.”

  “My goodness, if you were up here, I could kiss you!”

  “Take me to dinner first. Now finish out your landing. When we hit ground, there’s some things I need to take care of.”

  The comm clicked off, and the feeling on the bridge totally changed. Before it had been hopeful, but quite tense. Now, it was like a weight had been pulled from us, and we were now streaking through the atmosphere unfettered. For better or for worse, we were back on Earth.

  Hopefully this time, I’d manage to stay out from behind prison bars.

  “We’ve reached the coordinates you wanted,” one of the pilots said. “Initiating landing sequence now.”

  “It is night, just like we were hoping,” Lim said.

  “We weren’t hoping,” I heard Ciangi say over the comms. “We very carefully calculated it, thank you very much.”

  “Easy there, blondie,” Gonzales said with a chuckle. “Don’t get your engineering britches into a twist.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re trying to do this cool, rebellious sort of humor thing, but I’m not a super fan of it.”

  “And landing sequence has been completed. Welcome back home.”

  “This was never my home,” I said, unbuckling. “But let’s save it anyway.”

  En masse, we headed toward the door. The engineers from below, Aja, all of us on the bridge, everyone. We stood in front of the exit, waiting for the ramp to lower, wondering if we were fools to think that we could get away.

  I wasn’t quite sure where we were, but I was aware it was at a landing area used only by those on the wrong side of the law. Nothing could quite prepare me for what I saw when the ramp did finally lower.

  It was a city, a huge, complex city, rising high above us in peaks of chrome and neon. It just dripped with seediness, with tattered flags and banners hanging every dozen or so feet. The whole city felt like it was crawling with activity that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite company, and I was almost surprised when my boots didn’t stick to the ground as I took my first steps onto it.

  “What is this place?” I asked breathlessly. In all my life, I’d never heard of a spot on Earth looking so decrepit, ramshackle and obviously ne’er-do-well.

  “Every city needs a bad part of town,” the demolition man said, stepping forward and taking a deep breath of the foggy, sludgy air. “And since the whole world’s pretty much connected nowadays, consider this the bad part of the planet.”

  “You humans are dramatic, aren’t you?” Mimi said, looking out at the expanse.

  “Girl, you’ve been living with them for two years and you didn’t know that already?” Aja said, coming up from behind us.

  “I had my suspicions, but I thought perhaps I just happened to make contact with a few particularly…flamboyant characters.”

  “Did you just call me flamboyant?” Gonzales shot back. “I prefer to think of myself as charmingly over-the-top.”

  Aja laughed. “Use whatever words you want, I’m not the one who has her bionic eye set to glow when I am absolutely sure I put a biological mask over it so you couldn’t tell anything was amiss.”

  “I, uh… Well, that’s—”

  “Come on, everyone,” Aja interrupted. “I’m sure you’ve got a long list of people you’ve gotta find, and I betcha that I’m not the only one you’re gonna have to save from a sticky wicket.”

  “What the heck is a sticky wicket?”

  “I guess you’ll find out when we get going, won’t you?”

  “Ugh, is this how you guys feel when talking to me?” Gonzales asked the other rebels.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” the leader-man answered before following after our scammer. We went too, and I felt my nerves building right back up again. I just hoped that this didn’t end up as an out of the frying pan into the fire sort of thing.

  9

  Party Invitations

  “So where are we even going?” Eske asked as we moved along.

  “We’re getting to the main road, where we’ll then split up and go find the people we’re gonna find,” Gonzales replied.

  “And are we equipped for that?” I asked. “I don’t even know who we’re looking for, let alone how to get them to come with us.”

  “Oh, no, no, no. You guys misunderstand. Everyone else is going to go do some serious recruiting. All of you will be coming with me to pick up some supplies then march right back to the ship.”

  “Wait, what?” Ciangi protested. “We’re getting sidelined?”

  Gonzales raised her eyebrow. “Since when were you Miss Action Hero? I would have thought you’d be happy to be able to sit out of trouble for once.”

  “You got me wrong. I like being out of trouble when there’s no trouble to be had. W
hat I don’t like is being out of trouble when trouble is clearly happening all around me and I’m just considered too useless to do anything about it.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just walk those insecurities back a minute there. We’re on the sideline because, whether you like it or not, we’ve kinda become the figureheads of this whole mini-movement. We’ve gotta stay alive as best we can, and we can’t risk our lives needlessly. It may seem unfair, but the rest of them? They’re expendable. Us? We have to sit nice and tidy until it’s time to take this fight to the bigwigs.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, surprised by that line of thought. I had figured I would just be in the way and stick out as way too much of a goody-goody, but apparently, there was more to it than that. “I don’t think anyone’s expendable.”

  “Aw, that’s a cute way to think, but let’s face it, we’ve been incredibly lucky that we’ve never lost a person, just various limbs and appendages. That might change soon, and we have to take inventory of whose death would hurt us the most. So, for now, all of us sit out.”

  “I, for one, agree with her,” Mimi said quietly. “And although we may have started this fight, it’s clear it’s gone beyond all of us. So, if Gonzales thinks that’s the best, I’m inclined to believe her. We’ve done some amazing, incredible things, but those were on our own playing fields where we were making up all of the rules. Now, we’re in their game, and they know the rules much better than us.”

  “Wow, uh, thanks, Mimi. That was surprisingly eloquent.”

  Mimi tilted her head slightly. “Oh, really? Why is that surprising?”

  “I, uh—”

  “Looks like we’re here,” Aja said, interrupting whatever Gonzales had been about to say. “I assume all of y’all have your orders, so I’ll be seeing you tomorrow. Laters!”

  Before I could so much as manage a good-bye, she was hurrying off and slipping down a back alley. With various nods and short grunts, everyone broke off into different groups until only the core of us were left.