“Reel it in,” Briilip ordered. To the end of each missile a heavy length of chain was attached, connecting Tyrant to Number 649. As the chains were drawn back, the monster tried to pull itself free. The martian cyborg responded by sending electrical pulses sizzling along the chains to shock its prisoner.
Tyrant writhed in pain. It emitted its own pulse of æmber energy in an attempt to end the shocks lashing it along the chains. Though smoke rose from the cables, their coating of crystallized titanium endured the assault.
“Faster,” Briilip prompted their cyborg. “Draw Tyrant down to you.”
The chains accelerated Tyrant’s descent. The monster flapped its wings in a desperate effort to stay in the air, but it was unable to defy the pull of its captor. Drawn closer to the ground, it produced another blast of energy. The chains continued to hold, but now Number 649 was within the radius of the destructive pulse. The gelid epidermis steamed away in columns of greasy smoke. The cyborg’s camouflage was gone, and it stood exposed before Tyrant’s vicious gaze.
Number 649 conformed in general dimensions to Number 647. A long, low body supported by ten clawed legs on each side. A blunt head with a wide mouth and shifting clusters of sensory arrays. Its tail, however, was a single long tube that, as the camouflage burned away, was quickly raised to arc up over the warbeast’s back.
Tyrant’s jaws opened wide and from its throat a stream of energy seared down at the cyborg. The regurgitated æmber billowed across Number 649’s armor. Deflectors built within the carapace defused much of the intensity, diverting it in shimmering waves that rippled through the desert air.
“You’re mistaken if you think it’ll be that easy.” Briilip smiled. “This time you’re finished.”
The chains holding Tyrant now brought the monster crashing to the ground. A huge cloud of dust erupted from the impact, momentarily blocking Briilip’s view of the fight. When the saucer’s display filtered the obstruction, it revealed Number 649 gripped by Tyrant’s crushing coils. The enemy rushed the cyborg while it was hidden by the dust and tried to gain advantage over it.
Briilip’s fist tightened as they sensed triumph was near. “Now I’ll use your own tricks against you.”
The coils winding around Number 649 brought obscene pressure to bear against the cyborg, but Briilip’s design was equal to the struggle. The cobalt armor and the alloy skeleton at the core of the warbeast’s organic structure could exceed the highest evaluations the Elder was able to extrapolate from the earlier battles. More, the creation had been engineered to exploit Tyrant’s tactics.
The cobalt armor quickly began to grow hot. Number 649 was channeling its bio-energy to the metal shell that encased it. The plates shifted from a dull blue to a fiery red in a matter of heartbeats. Now it was Tyrant’s time to burn. The serpentine monster howled in agony as the super-heated hull cooked its coils. Swiftly it unwound itself from its intended victim. Blood streamed from its seared body and broad patches of scales peeled away from its flesh, melted to the cyborg’s armor.
One side effect of the attack was that the chains attaching Tyrant to Number 649 were at last compromised. They snapped as the monster climbed back into the sky, freeing the creature to maximize its ascent.
“Don’t let it get away,” Briilip commanded their creation. The order caused Number 649 to shift its tail. A green light grew inside the hollow tube. In a few moments a blinding beam stabbed up at Tyrant. A magnified ray cannon many times the intensity of the armaments affixed to martian saucers, the beam lanced through Tyrant’s body and brought the hulking monster crashing to the ground once more.
Briilip grinned. They turned to observe the saucer’s crew and assure themselves the soldiers were expressing a suitable amount of excitement. This was a stupendous triumph! The Elder’s theories were proven. The Prime Director would have to admit that Briilip had created the perfect organism, the supreme addition to the arsenal of Mars.
Tyrant reared up, its body coiling around itself in a slithering spiral. The monster’s bifurcated tail was outstretched, its tips shaking from side to side. A deafening whine screamed through the saucer before the exterior sensors reduced the volume they were relaying to the martians. Several of the soldiers were doubled over in pain. Briilip themselves staggered, a trickle of green blood falling from their nasal openings. The Elder recognized the effect as that of a sonic attack. Doubt crawled into their hearts as they focused again on the holographic display.
Number 649 bore the brunt of Tyrant’s assault. The casing around the ray cannon mounted in its tail was shattered, exploded by the sonic vibrations. The destructive waves continued to pound the cyborg. One after another the cobalt plates of its shell were rupturing.
“Quick! Destroy Tyrant’s tail!” Briilip ordered their warbeast, desperation in their voice. Number 649 scurried forwards, but it did so with far less speed than its predecessors. The weight of its mechanical components was now showing its negative aspect. The cyborg wasn’t as agile as a purely biological design. The barrage of vibrations continued to ravage it as it trudged through the red sand. Ruptured plates opened like ghastly flowers all across its body.
With its main ray cannon destroyed, Number 649 opened up with the smaller batteries scattered across its hull. A fusillade of energy beams rippled across Tyrant, trying to distract the monster and stop the devastating sonic attack. The serpentine hulk, its thick hide compromised by the cyborg’s assault, burned as the rays struck it. It soon drew upon its forcefield to shield it from the barrage. In doing so, it was forced to cease the vibrations of its tail.
Briilip felt renewed confidence when the sonic attack faltered. Tyrant couldn’t block Number 649’s barrage and maintain its own simultaneously. That gave the cyborg an opening. A chance to close with the enemy and bring its other weaponry into play. When the warbeast lunged at Tyrant and sank its claws into the bleeding flesh, the Elder was certain victory was only a matter of moments.
Tyrant undulated its body under the slashing talons of its foe. The long tail whipped against Number 649 with the fury of an avalanche. Had the cyborg’s armor been intact it should have withstood the blow, but with its plates ruptured the strike buckled the damaged metal and sent its jagged edges stabbing inwards to skewer the warbeast’s biomass.
Devoid of any sense of pain or fear, Number 649 fought on, oblivious to the havoc each blow from Tyrant was visiting on its internal constituents. The cyborg’s metal jaws clamped down on the side of the monster’s body and began to grind through the thick scales. At the same time a strike from the ophidian tail crumpled the plates behind Number 649’s tail.
Dread returned to Briilip as they saw Tyrant squirm its body and arc its jaws down towards the now exposed neck. The combatants were in a race now, a contest to see which could pierce the other’s defenses to reach a vital area. The Elder didn’t know enough about the biology of the enemy to determine if the cyborg would hit a lethal area, but they were well aware of what Tyrant’s fangs were within reach of.
“Impossible!” Briilip groaned. “Why won’t it die?!”
Blood and chunks of meat sprayed from Tyrant’s body as Number 649 ripped away at its foe. The monster wasn’t distracted from its own goal. The rows of fangs tore through the remaining layers of plates and the softer biomass within. Buried in that biomass was the cluster of nerve nodes and computation relays that served as the cyborg’s brain. A bright plume of fire erupted from the warbeast’s neck when Tyrant bit into that brain. It reared back, nerves and wires hanging off the biomechanical mass locked in its jaws. Coolant and cerebral fluid dripped from the monster’s fangs as it crunched away at its prize.
The removal of its brain caused Number 649 to immediately shut down. So complex and vital was the control system, that Briilip was incapable of providing their creation with a redundant backup. The Elder could only watch in despair as their creation froze in place, as immobile as a statue. When Tyrant spat out what was left of the brain, a flick of its tail knocked Number 649
onto its side. Vengefully the monster battered the lifeless hulk, smashing it into a scrapheap of mangled metal and pulverized biomass.
“Commander, what should we do now?” one of the martian crew asked Briilip.
The Elder weighed their options. Number 649 had damaged Tyrant more than any other attack trained upon the brute since its arrival at Anomaly Epsilon 54. It was visibly weak and wounded, but given its ability to harness æmber to regenerate, that condition wouldn’t persist long. Against this, Briilip weighed the fact they had but a single saucer at their command. The ray guns and weapons aboard wouldn’t amount to even the force of a single barrage from the armaments of Number 649. To try to attack Tyrant on their own, even in its weakened state, was a losing prospect.
There was something else for the Elder to consider. How this latest failure would be received by the Prime Director. The prospect of reprimand and reeducation was enough to sour Briilip’s digestive tract. Death in battle with Tyrant might be preferable, though doing so would mean squandering even more valuable resources.
“Our duty to Mars is to return to Central Drome with this saucer and its assets,” Briilip told the crew. “Even in defeat, Mars Lives On.”
As the saucer flew away from Anomaly Epsilon 54, Briilip consoled themselves with the thought that Ghireen might again intercede with the Prime Director and allow the Elder to try again to design a creature capable of destroying Tyrant.
Ghireen watched as Tyrant finished smashing Briilip’s latest creation into a pile of junk. The cyborg inflicted an immense amount of damage on the monster, but in the end it wasn’t enough. Now the creature was slithering back into its crevasse to draw in the revitalizing æmber and heal its injuries. Judging by its wounds, Ghireen thought the thing would be in fighting shape within a few solar cycles. Regeneration was one of the principal strengths of its genetic design.
The Elder’s saucer was hidden under the sand at the edge of Anomaly Epsilon 54. Near enough to observe, but not near enough to be caught in any of the fighting. Ghireen was too prudent to make reckless requests for cavorite from the Prime Director. Such things were bound to draw the curiosity of ambitious scientists and make them wonder why the scientist needed the precious resource. Much better to keep a low profile so that their experiments could be conducted with a modicum of secrecy.
“The other saucer has disengaged its stealth field,” a martian soldier reported. “They’re leaving the area. Course prediction postulates Central Drome as their most likely destination.”
Ghireen nodded. “Briilip has failed and is returning to their laboratory to try again. I don’t believe they can improve on this last design, however. I think anything they create now will simply be derivative and motivated more by desperation than innovation. A pity. I’ve profited greatly from Briilip’s efforts. Yet I can in no good conscience allow resources to be wasted. That would be to the detriment of Mars.”
The bifurcated tail of Tyrant vanished into the darkness of the crevasse, leaving only the shattered debris of Number 649 on the desert floor. Ghireen studied the wreckage for a moment, their mind analyzing the details and adding them into the Elder’s calculations.
“Briilip’s utility is over,” Ghireen decided. “I will suggest the reeducation pods to the Prime Director.” They shifted their attention back to the crevasse and thought of the vanished Tyrant.
“It is to be regretted Briilip will never appreciate the service they have provided for Mars,” Ghireen mused. “Their flawed creations have helped enormously to demonstrate the genius of my own design.
“Tyrant has proven itself to be the perfect organism.”
Wibble And Pplimz,
Investigators For Hire
M Darusha Wehm
The sign on the door was written in an alien sigil I didn’t understand, but before I could get my pocket translator on the job, some piece of technology or arcane spell must have recognized my species because the shapes shifted and words began to cycle through several human languages.
Wibble and Pplimz, Investigators for Hire, it read.
I reached out to touch the door, but before I could make contact, it slid open with a deeply disturbing organic slurp that I tried immediately to forget. I hesitated, then a mechanical voice came from inside the dimly lit room.
“Habla español? Français, Have you aember?”
“Versal,” I called back.
“Enter, human, or close the door!” the voice responded.
I stepped over the threshold, briefly concerned that I would step into a puddle of sapient goo or be sucked into some fifth dimensional vortex, but I entered a room that wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in one of the human enclaves on the east side of Hub City where I lived. There was a large desk with a holo screen, a couple of chairs facing the desk, and a large humanoid robot seated on the other side. Some kind of iridescent bulbous light fixture floated in the corner, but that was the strangest thing in the small place. I felt the breath leak out of my body as I relaxed.
A voice came from the direction of the stock-still robot behind the desk. “Have you need of investigation?” It must be some kind of receptionbot, I thought. What I could see of it was nominally humanoid, with a thin torso between two arms, its “head” a thin rectangular screen. The screen illuminated and a vaguely human-like face appeared. The mouth didn’t quite move along with the words and the eyes didn’t blink entirely in unison, but it was close enough.
“Yes. I’d like to meet with Wibble. Or Pplimz. Or…” It occurred to me that Wibble and Pplimz might be a joint construct, and I’d just insulted them. There were no species or house affiliations evident in the office, so I had no idea who – or what – to expect. All I knew was that Wibble and Pplimz were who you went to when the authorities couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help you. Which was exactly where I found myself.
“Please sit,” the robot said. “Do you require hydration?”
“No, thank you,” I said and perched on the chair. As soon as I’d seated myself a series of whirring noises came from across the desk and the robot seemed to come to life. The screen face took on an even more animated appearance as its arm-like limbs sprang from its body and began fiddling with items on the desk. A note tablet and stylus appeared at the ends of its appendages and the entire body leaned in toward me. That’s when I noticed that it – that they – were not a robot at all.
Organic matter peeked between the edges of dark metal, silicon, and polymer. I couldn’t tell whether they were an organic being who had been profoundly technologically augmented or a machine that had been built with organic components. Either way, it was none of my business and would have been inappropriate to ask. Especially since I was pretty sure this was…
“Pplimz,” they said, sticking a “hand” across the table to shake. “At your service.”
I shook hands with the cyborg, and pulled a holochip from my inside coat pocket. I set it on the desk and the image of a dark-haired, smirking woman was projected into the space between us, slightly illuminating the room.
“This is my sister, Kristina Shallas. She is missing, and I hope you can help me find her.”
The floating light fixture in the corner strobed a pale blue pattern and a series of low, mournful sounds emanated from its general area.
“I agree,” Pplimz said, looking up toward the object. It must have been some kind of communication device. I tapped my earpiece to make sure it was on, then flipped open my translator to see if it could make sense of the noises.
“Well, have you?” Pplimz asked, as if I’d understood the message. The screen on my translator unhelpfully flashed Language Pack Not Found.
“Uh…” I looked from the cyborg to the glowing light and back again. With an unexpected pop the tiny blimp moved of what appeared to be its own accord to hover unnervingly close to my right elbow. It pulsed slowly, the color of its aura shifting through the pastel spectrum. I didn’t even have time to wonder what was going on when it extruded part of its casing and e
nveloped my translator.
I opened my mouth to say… something, just as Pplimz said, “Wibble! What are you doing? Give this human back her material object this instant. You have no idea where it has been.”
I stared blankly as the pulsing blob squeezed my translator back out on to the desk.
A series of low sounds came from beside me, but my translator had obviously been updated, as I also heard a kindly voice say, “I’m sorry, this just seemed like the easiest solution.” The creature waggled its tail and floated over to hang near Pplimz. “I asked if you’d gone to the local authorities,” it said.
“Uh…” I took a moment to reassess the situation. I lost count a long time ago of the number of alien species I’d met on the Crucible, but I’d never encountered anything like Wibble. They were shaped most like a whale, translucent like a jellyfish, and bobbed about like a helium-filled balloon.
“Please forgive my partner,” Pplimz said to me, their screen face shooting Wibble an exasperated look, “she can be somewhat excitable.”
“Oh, no, it’s not a problem,” I said. “Thank you for the language pack.” Wibble dipped her front end in what I guessed was a gesture of acknowledgment.
“Well?” she said, her voice impatient in my ear and her body flashing between pink and yellow. “The authorities? Which have you informed?”
“Ah,” I said. “None of them.”
Wibble made a noise that I didn’t need the translator to tell me meant that she was unimpressed. I tapped a keystroke on my handheld and the hologram on the desk went dark, then the holochip projected a low-res two-dimensional video message onto the desktop.
Tales From the Crucible Page 21