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

by James David Victor

  A cheer sounded from everyone around me, and the wall suddenly exploded outward. The moment there was an opening, we surged forward so fast, the back of my helmeted head smacked against the wall.

  I could feel that the hovercraft was going faster than it was ever meant to, the engines whining behind us, but just as suddenly as it started, it stopped, and I nearly flew out of my seat.

  “Go, go, go!”

  The door slammed open, a wave of dust and ash shooting up, and then we were all running into the fray.

  What had once been a massive wall crumbled behind us, and in front of us was the smoldering remains of what looked like it might have been a high-security entrance. I didn’t need Gonzales yelling in my ear to run that way, so I did, gun at the ready.

  I wasn’t alone either. The other hovercraft was unloading at the same time, and the thirty of us stormed the place like we were professionals—which I guessed several of us were.

  Everything was chaos all around us. Obviously, there were competent soldiers running to find cover or laying down fire to try to hold us off, but between the explosions and others running for cover, there was only so much they could do. It wouldn’t be so easy once we got down into the lower levels, where security was bound to be tighter, so I figured I might as well be grateful while it lasted.

  Ahead of me, I saw a soldier crouching behind a pile of rubble, aiming for Gonzales as she sprinted forward. That wouldn’t do at all, so I rushed as fast as I could, vaulting over the rubble and landing right over his back.

  I dropped my gun, choosing instead to get my arms around his neck in a chokehold. If I could just make him pass out instead of ending his life, I would be pretty happy with that. He reared back the moment he knew what was happening, kicking and writhing, but I held on until he stilled.

  When I let him go, I checked his pulse. Yes, he was still alive. That was one thing to be grateful for.

  “Higgens!”

  I heard someone cry my name and whipped toward the sound only to see the barrel of an ion rifle aimed right at me in my peripheral vision. Instantly, I collapsed to the ground, pressing myself flat as a beam of energy shot across my chest, scoring the armor there.

  I rolled onto my belly, trying to find an escape route and realizing that I had lost my gun in the process, only for Eske to dive-tackle the soldier about twenty feet from me.

  I scrambled to my feet and rushed over to help her, but by the time I reached them, she had already slammed the butt of her own gun into his head and ended the scuffle quite quickly.

  “Here,” she said, handing me his rifle. “Don’t lose this one, okay?”

  “I’ll try not to,” I answered. It still felt uncomfortable in my grip. I much preferred when we were fighting aliens who didn’t look, sound, or smell like us.

  “They’re trying to shut down the elevators!” I heard someone cry over the comms. Aja maybe? Or Lim. It was hard to tell over the maelstrom of noise around us.

  “We need those up and running!” Leader-man yelled back.

  “Oh, really? I thought it wasn’t important. That’s why I’d just casually announce it in the middle of a battle.”

  “I don’t think this is the proper time for sarcasm,” Bahn said, crouching back to back in a doorway with Ciangi, shooting at something that I couldn’t see.

  “Fine! They’ll be working when you get there.”

  “They better.”

  The voice on the other end let out a string of curses then cut off abruptly. We kept pressing forward, making our way to our destination.

  There was so much heat and noise around us. I could hear screams and cries for medics. I didn’t like it, it ate at my nerves and made me nauseous, but I kept on running and firing.

  Finally, after what seemed like an age, we reached the stairwells and lifts down to the lower levels. Gonzales and a couple of others were already there, loading things from their packs into the elevators.

  They worked swiftly, their moves incredibly efficient, until all of their packs were empty, then they slammed the buttons to send them downward.

  “The big presents are about to be delivered. Anyone who can hear me, stay away from the lifts. For everyone else, let’s race.”

  She gave me a wink then dashed off to the staircase, barreling through the door and already firing her gun.

  “Hey, I hope you’ve got our signatures scrambled, brains, otherwise this is going to be a very short descent.”

  A voice came over the comms. “You should be good to go. I have most of your vitals coming from the elevators or gathering supplies over at the ruined entrance. It won’t fool them for long, and we’re screwed if they reboot, but it should do you for at least a couple floors.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  Some of us were already following Gonzales, while others had split to one of the three alternate cases in the same hall. I wasn’t sure which floor we were supposed to stop at, but I figured once Gonzales halted, then I would too.

  We made it maybe a floor and a half before our comms came to life again.

  “Get ready for a boom.”

  I didn’t have time to figure out who was speaking before a clap of thunder sounded below me. It was so loud that it felt like my ears popped, and several of us lost our footing on the steps, toppling downwards.

  “Whoa there,” Avery said, pulling me up with one arm. “You okay?”

  I nodded, but that just made my ears ache more. I didn’t have much time to recover, however, as we were running down the stairs again.

  “Second Wave Group B has reached our floor. Securing and distracting now.”

  “Roger,” Gonzales said, panting as we continued to sprint.

  “Second Wave Group C has reached our floor. There’s heavy resistance here. We’ll hold it as long as we can.”

  “Heard. Group D?”

  “Almost there. We’ve run into a group on one of the turns that’s holding their stairwell pretty dang well.”

  “Lim, can you get them some sort of emergency hatch like the last place?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” There was a series of beeps and negative-sounding alarms before she let out a triumphant cry. “Got it! Sending the path to Group D’s leader now.”

  “Received. We’ll be at our floor in less than three minutes.”

  “Good, because we’re almost to the administrative floor,” Gonzales said. “Are you sure the targets are here?”

  “Uh…about that…” Babel answered, sounding a bit sheepish.

  “Even I know that tone isn’t good,” Mimi murmured, just loud enough for us to hear.

  “What?” Gonzales hissed icily.

  “One of the generals was apparently in the facility when our attack happened. She managed to get to the hangar bay and I don’t think we’ll be able to stop her in time, but everyone else is currently on lockdown within their oh-so-special bunker.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way. And our path there is clear?”

  “Not a single soldier in sight. Honestly, most are probably within the bunker. The turrets on the outside have been successfully hacked.”

  “Good. Now we just need—”

  “Second Wave Group D is securing our floor.”

  “That’s our cue,” Gonzales said, turning toward us. Our group had certainly gotten smaller. We were now just us, plus Avery and someone else who I didn’t know at all. “Everyone ready for the fourth wave of our plan?”

  “Fourth wave? What happened to the third wave?”

  “The second and third took place simultaneously. All the stuff our hackers are doing to guide us now that we’re in, and them constantly injecting the network to stay in even when they reboot or run a systems cleanse is the third wave.”

  I couldn’t help it, I let out a long sigh and gave her a serious look. “Is the first part of the fourth wave you telling us what it actually is before we go running in guns first?”

  “Huh…” Gonzales rubbed her chin. “I probably should
have had you around for more briefings.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Well, it’s not like it matters. We’ve always flown by the seat of our pants. But the fourth wave is where we blow our way into the generals’ bunker, take one or more prisoners so we can secure a confession, and then escape with our air support.”

  “You know, that sounds more like a fifth wave,” Avery remarked casually.

  “Who cares what number it is! Let’s just go end this thing, alright?”

  I nodded—beyond ready myself—and with that, we charged out of the last door.

  13

  The Final Wave

  We burst into the new room, and I was suddenly aware of several things at once.

  One was that the layout of the floor we were on was very different from any other I had been in before. It was almost like a hangar bay, but only a dozen or so feet in front of us was a looming, metallic wall with no doors, windows, or other discernable openings.

  Second was a line of maybe fifty or so soldiers, twenty-five of them kneeling in a line spanning the hall, and twenty standing behind them. All of them had guns ready and waiting.

  “Oh, shi—”

  I heard the first muzzle discharge, and I was sure it was the end. Some of us dove to the side, some fell to the ground, and some of us just stood there, knowing there was nothing that could be done to dodge an entire hallway worth of fire.

  Then, just as suddenly as we were faced with our fate, the world winked out of existence and there was only black.

  Was this…death?

  It didn’t seem like it. I couldn’t see anything or hear anything beside the panicked breaths of my friends, but I could still feel, and inhale.

  Surprisingly, it was Eske who spoke first. “Second Brain, can you tell me if you have control of the cameras down here?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Just send the feed to our leader’s datalog now.”

  “Alright, give me ten seconds. What, are you having a hard time finding the bunker? It’s huge! You sh— Oh… That’s not supposed to be happening.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  A small section of the darkness illuminated as Gonzales pulled out the tech, and I got a glance of the utter darkness around us. Once the light hit the surface, I recognized the inky, oily textured blackness instantly.

  “Mimi,” I gasped.

  “Oh, it’s your girl Mimi alright,” Gonzales breathed. “And she’s doing something I didn’t even know was possible.”

  I quickly crossed over to look at the datapad, my mouth dropping as I took in what was happening.

  The back end of Mimi had shot out like a mirror to the chrome wall in front of us, forming a shield against us and the onslaught.

  But the front end… That was something else entirely.

  She had stretched herself out into what looked like two separate creatures joined at the base by a single thick, gyrating stump connected to the black wall protecting us. One half had a mouth as long as a hover vehicle, with several rows of serrated teeth and a long, black tongue, while the other was all long limbs ending in massive claws. While one was all greens and grays, which gave the impression of poison and other vile things, the other was brilliantly colored like some sort of bird of paradise. It was a cacophony to the eyes, and there was far too much to watch to keep track of it all.

  The fifty soldiers didn’t have a chance, and neither did the wall behind it. She flung people left and right, maiming them, but as far as I could tell, trying not to kill. The wall, however, she was much less kind to, attacking with full force.

  It was an artful display of violence, and I almost would have admired it if it wasn’t so nauseating. But she didn’t stop, and I could feel the anger pouring from her, until finally no one was left standing.

  The wall in front of us slowly shrank, and the two separate bodies joined into one disgusting amalgamation of a creature before receding entirely. A minute or so later, we were all staring at a breathless Mimi.

  I wanted to say something to her, but before my mind could even supply the words, she wobbled and started to fall. Of course, I was over to her side in an instant, catching her as we both sank to the ground.

  “Hey, hey,” Gonzales said, rushing over. “Is she alright?!”

  Eske and Ciangi joined us, with Bahn not far behind.

  “What the hell did I just see?” Avery asked, staring in shock at the blood and groaning men all around us.

  “I’m fine,” Mimi said. “I just need to breathe for a second.”

  “Thank you,” I said, stroking her hair from her face. “You saved our lives.”

  She grinned cheekily up at me and I swore I saw a flash of the old Mimi, the one before her betrayal by Mari. “At this point, isn’t it old hat by now?”

  “I don’t think I could ever consider anything like that old hat.”

  “I hate to interrupt this moment,” Lim buzzed over the comms. “But I’m getting a lot of readings flooding in from that floor all of a sudden, and all of them involve the generals making a break for it.”

  “Crap!” Gonzales said, offering Mimi a hand. “We gotta go!”

  She hauled the alien up to her feet and I swore that when they were both upright, they shared a look that I didn’t understand.

  I didn’t ask, however, because then we were running again.

  We lurched over the utterly destroyed wall and into what did indeed look exactly like a bunker. We could hear footsteps rushing off in the distance, and we quickly closed in on them.

  “Uh…guys?”

  “What is it, Lim? We’re a little busy.”

  “Well, I just thought you might like to know that three life signs just suddenly winked out on my feed.”

  “Our men?”

  “No, I mean in the bunker with you. Something is killing the generals.”

  “Wait, what?!”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but you better hurry.”

  It didn’t seem possible, but we rushed forward even faster, kicking down doors that stood in our way rather than opening them. Well, Avery kicked them down. The rest of us made do with blasting them off their hinges.

  After a minute or so, we reached a set of double-doors that looked like they were wired to high heaven.

  “Um, Lim, I’m going to need some of that fancy hacking of yours.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?” Gonzales spat back.

  “Oh, I’m seeing it, but I also have a lot of readings telling me about things you can’t see, and one of those things is that the door in front of you is unlocked.”

  “Unlocked?”

  Who was I to question Lim? She hadn’t led us wrong before, so I walked forward and pushed the door.

  Sure enough, it swung open, revealing what looked like a command center, complete with a round table and plenty of holo-projectors displaying all the carnage we were laying out on the coup.

  There were a dozen or so chairs around the table, and it looks like several of them had once held generals in the middle of a meal. But now there were only bodies, most of them with blaster-burns in the center of their heads.

  “My God,” Ciangi gasped, her hand going to her mouth.

  “No god would do this,” Eske murmured. “This was execution.”

  “This was a surrender.”

  All our heads snapped toward the voice, where I saw none other than the original general who had tormented us in prison. He was sitting calmly, his hands folded and his gun still smoking slightly.

  “What have you done, man?” Gonzales asked, cautiously walking round and removing the gun from beside him. He made no move to take it, and instead continued to lock eyes with Mimi, hardly even blinking.

  “We never thought that you would ever have the numbers or resources to break into our most heavily-guarded facility, so we grew lax. All of our generals were meeting here to discuss our attack on your home planet when you blew the doors off
this place and effectively trapped us here.”

  There was the tiniest flux of expression on his face, but otherwise, he remained just as stony as before.

  “All the knowledge of our entire movement, all the connection, all the planning gathered in this one spot… I knew, once you were here, that you would make your way down to us. The others, they thought their little soldier surprise, or the wall, would foil you long enough for reinforcements to arrive, but I knew better. I also knew that out of all of my compatriots in this room, I was the one you held the largest vendetta against. If it came down to it, it would be very easy to exact revenge on me, then use the rest of our fold to give you the information you need.

  “So, I took them out of the equation. I am the last of the generals you will find here. Those who are to step up to replace us are stationed all over the world for our protection. If you want to kill what we are, really and truly, you have to let me live so I can expose everything.”

  “Why you—” Gonzales surged forward and grabbed the man’s collar, pulling him up to her snarl. But he had almost no reaction, looking borderline pleased instead of uncomfortable. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us? How much we’ve suffered? How much we’ve lost?! And now you’d kill your own allies just to make sure you get to rot in prison for the rest of your life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine then! You want to live so bad to tell all the secrets, then you’ll do it right now.”

  “Gonzales,” I murmured, taking a step forward.

  But she was already a whirling dervish of motion, grabbing datalogs and holo-projectors alike.

  “Lim, you see all this tech in here? I want you to make it send out a global broadcast. Everyone who has a way to receive a signal is gonna see this.”

  “Um, I can do that, but it’s gonna take time. The system you’re in is completely different from the one that runs the rest of the place, which is why I didn’t see the soldiers or the vital-obscuring program.”

  “Don’t worry about that, because our good ol’ friend here is going to tell you the password, aren’t you, friend?”