Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  Each one slid an arm between my back and the door, and walked me forward. I was fine, until one bent and brushed a pedipalp across my cheek. And that was it, I curled up, still standing, but hunched in on myself as I screamed.

  Mack was in front of me in an instant, bending to put his face close to mine, his grip firm on my shoulders. His words whiplash sharp against my mind.

  “Snap out of it!”

  It took a long moment for his presence to register, but gradually his warmth seeped through. When I straightened up, and looked at him, again, he reached for my hand, and pulled me out of the bodyguards’ grasp.

  “She is mine,” he said, glaring at both of them, and turning a defiant gaze on their leader.

  The leader, for his part, looked amused.

  “For now,” he said. “For as long as she’s useful, I’ll let you keep her.”

  Useful for what, I didn’t want to ask. Mack had said he needed me, the arach leader was going to let me live. What more could a girl ask for, while recovering from being almost bled dry?

  I kept my hand in Mack’s. His grip was firm, and I wondered how the rest of the crew were doing, but the arach had no time for that.

  “There is no time for rest,” he said.

  I wanted to argue, but didn’t. Mack’s grip was suddenly tight. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he wanted me to be quiet. Usually, this was all the signal I needed to say something outrageous. Hell, it was almost mandatory. No wonder Mack was holding his breath.

  He was lucky I was so tired. I didn’t argue with the arach. I just leant into Mack’s side, instead. It seemed to satisfy the spider.

  “Good. Your gear and instructions are at the drop site.”

  Drop site?

  Mack’s grip tightened, but it didn’t help either of us. Whoever the spiders had on their teleports, they were good. Well, apart from the fact they dropped me in the middle of a security team, and apart from the fact there was no gear in sight. Yeah, apart from all that.

  I don’t know how I wasn’t shot the minute I materialized. Or torn apart by what came after. Because the operator must have tried to reverse the teleport straight away. I felt molecules tug apart, and then snap back together, and then I was okay.

  Apart from all the guns pointed at me. Yeah. Apart from all the guns leveled point-blank in my direction, I was just dandy.

  “Who are you?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Was that your gear we found?”

  They’d found my gear?

  They asked the questions so fast I didn’t have time to answer. I’d open my mouth, and the next question would come sailing in. From another direction. I’d turn my head, and guns would be raised. Finally, they got it, and one man stepped forward.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Not one word,” rang through the comm net, and I gasped.

  I did not like the arach being in my head. There was no telling what he would do. I felt my face grow cold, as I went pale with fear. The man in front of me looked over his shoulder. He saw nothing, so he scanned the surrounds. Again, nothing.

  When he turned back to me, he didn’t look very impressed.

  I felt the arach in my head. It wasn’t very impressed, either.

  “What did you do?” it asked, and I scowled.

  “I’m not the one with the teleport!” I snapped back. “You tell me what went wrong!”

  Took me a minute to realize I’d spoken out loud. The leader of the security team was staring at me, mouth open.

  “Who are you talking to?” he asked, and the arach was gone.

  “You’re on your own, until I say otherwise.”

  “Fantastic,” I muttered, and realized the guy in front of me was staring.

  “I’m on my own,” I said, not bothering to hide just how not pleased I felt about that.

  “You are?”

  “Am now.”

  “So you were sent.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him.

  “Now might be a good time to take that rest the doc was recommending,” Mack’s voice suggested, inside my head.

  I hadn’t intended to obey it, but he tweaked something in the implant, and I was out before I hit the pavement.

  “…lost a lot of blood,” had a familiar ring to it, when I woke up again.

  “Two bite marks. No wonder she stinks of spider,” did not.

  To my surprise, I was still at the drop point, only horizontal. And on a stretcher. With my hands cuffed together, and then cuffed to the stretcher half-way down. Fantastic.

  And I was tired. I don’t know about a lot of blood, but I sure felt tired. Maybe Mack had a point. I tried to reach him through the implant, and all I got was static—vicious, curling static, that raked the inside of my skull. I whimpered, and the medic crouched nearest looked down.

  “When did you get bitten?”

  “I… what?”

  “Bitten. When did you get bitten?”

  I frowned, decided to ignore the question.

  “My implant doesn’t work.”

  He frowned at the unexpected answer, and then glanced up at the nearest security type.

  “You fry an implant?” he asked, and the security type shook his head.

  “Temporarily disabled it,” he said, and the medic turned his attention back to me.

  “The bite,” he said.

  “Not sure,” and then I smiled, figuring with the implant out I could at least tell some of the truth. “They boarded our ship, and I doused one in tea. It took blood in return.”

  I tried to make it sound light-hearted, but my voice caught, when I mentioned the blood, and I felt my skin go cold. From the look on his face, it wasn’t helpful, so I tried again.

  “I got topped up in med-bay, and then sent back to my quarters, and then ported down here.”

  Now, I had their attention.

  “You got ported.”

  I nodded, trying to keep my eyes wide and innocent, which is a lot harder than it looks when all you want to do is sleep. I remembered Mack repeating the doctor’s orders for rest, and stopped fighting to stay awake.

  4—The Custody Game

  Next time, I woke, I was in a med-box. Oh. Oh, good… I thought, and then I realized I probably wasn’t getting out on my own. I tried the implant, but it wasn’t in the mood for working, so I guessed I was still on my own. I wondered just how far south the arach deal with Mack had flown.

  And then I wondered if they still considered me ‘useful’. That thought gave me pause. And I figured it was time for me to get out of the box. A cell would be an improvement—at least on my chances of escape. What it might mean for the mission was another matter.

  I realized I was still in cuffs, when I went to knock on the lid of the box.

  “Well, star-sucking turdlets,” I said—loudly, because it made me feel better.

  When I got out of this, I was going to go a few rounds with Mack… That thought stopped me cold. Mack. Where in all the stars and suns was he? And that was when I remembered that there were supposed to have been instructions dropped with my gear.

  “Oh, crap,” at which point, the lid to the med box swung open.

  Mack’s was not the face I expected to see, which doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy it was there. I stared up at that face, and then looked past him, searching for the other face—the one I was terrified of seeing. My movement sent the heart monitors soaring, as I tried to climb out of the box—and that was without me seeing the arach. I kept staring, and he still didn’t appear. Which was good.

  Very good. I remembered how to breathe, and let myself settle back in the box. Mack watched, waiting until I started to relax.

  “You done?” he asked.

  “Done?” I managed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe. Depends on what happens next.”


  “Well,” he said, letting down the sides of the box, undoing the cuffs, and helping me out, “now, I take you out of here to the holding cells, where you’ll be tried for treason, and sentenced…”

  My heart plummeted, and my mind went into freefall. Tried? Treason? Sentenced?

  “…to death.”

  I felt like he’d tipped a bucket of iced water over my head.

  “What?”

  At least, that’s what I was trying to say. I opened my mouth, and no sound came out, so I closed my mouth, swallowed, and tried again.

  “Tried?”

  Mack nodded, pursing his lips.

  “For treason. The instructions in the gear bag were pretty specific.”

  “What gear bag?” I asked, and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.

  “Are you saying you didn’t have a gear bag with you?”

  “No…”

  He frowned.

  “So there was a gear bag,” he said, and that was when I finally got it.

  “There was a gear bag?”

  “Are you telling me you were ported without a gear bag?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was definitely ported without a gear bag.”

  “From a ship overtaken by arach.”

  “Yes,” I said, again. “Ported from a ship overtaken by arach, without a gear bag.”

  “And where is that ship now?”

  “In orbit?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “There is no ship in orbit.”

  Again, my heart went into freefall. No ship? No… I pushed myself off the med box, and tried to stand up.

  “No ship?” I asked, and I didn’t have to pretend to be shocked.

  I grabbed Mack by the arm.

  “But where’s the ship? It’s supposed to be there. It can’t be gone.”

  I made to walk past him, and he grabbed me by the arm, and turned me to face him.

  “There is. no. ship.”

  “I ca.. I can’t be here,” I said, my heart going into freefall. “There has to be a ship.”

  “There was a gear bag.”

  “There was?”

  “There was.”

  “But I didn’t have a gear bag.”

  “Are you saying the gear bag wasn’t yours?”

  I vaguely remembered something about there being a gear bag at the drop site, but there had been a security patrol at the drop site. There couldn’t have been a bag. My head started to spin, and my knees gave way. Or it had been the wrong site, and the bag wasn’t mine… I was so confused. Mack caught me, let me settle on the floor.

  “The bag,” he insisted, crouching down in front of me.

  “There was no bag,” I said.

  “It’s not yours?”

  “It’s not mine.”

  Mack got to his feet. He left me sitting on the floor, as he looked across the room.

  “You need to keep looking,” he said. “She isn’t the one you’re after.”

  I drew my knees up to my chest, and rested my chin on them.

  I wasn’t?

  “The best you can charge her with is illegal immigration.”

  I… what? I stared up at him, hugging my knees tight, as I felt my eyes grow to what felt like the size of small moons.

  Mack let the silence drag out for a bit longer, and then nudged me with the toe of his boot.

  “Or I could take her off your hands.”

  I just hugged my knees tighter, and closed my eyes, feeling sick to the stomach. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said he didn’t really want to take me… but that couldn’t be true, could it?

  “We should check her implant,” said a voice, through the speakers.

  Mack nodded, even though I knew them checking my implant would be about the last thing he wanted them to do… unless it wasn’t Mack. The spiders could change shape. What if this one had changed to look like Mack? What if he was just bartering to get me out of the authorities’ hands?

  It was not a thought I needed, but, then, neither was the idea that his current behavior was anywhere near normal.

  “You could. How long is this disablement going to last?”

  “A week.”

  “I could bring her back in eight days. Start the conditioning process early…”

  “How much were you willing to pay to take her off our hands?”

  And I started to breathe again. We’d ended up on a world where corruption held sway. I tucked my relief away, out of sight. Made a show of looking up, then around for the door, and carefully inching back from him. Mack named a figure that made me gasp. He even let me get a bum’s width back, before side-swiping me with his boot, knocking me sideways, and then planting his boot on my chest, and using it to pin me to the floor.

  There was silence, as the voice considered.

  “And you’re sure the gear bag isn’t hers?”

  This time, Mack rolled his eyes.

  “Well, you heard her. She didn’t get ported with a bag.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there waiting for her.”

  “I don’t think there’s a judge in town who’d believe that,” Mack said, and there were undercurrents of warning in his words that I was pretty sure gave his opinion weight.

  The voice on the other end of the intercom sighed.

  “Fine, Mosh Carrack. You can take the ‘illegal immigrant’.”

  He could? Wait! Didn’t I get a say in this? What if I didn’t want to go with the crazy man that might only look like Mack? And why was he being called Mosh Carrack? Who the fuck was Mosh Carrack?

  These questions tumbled through my mind, but stopped abruptly, when Mack reached down, and looped my hair around his hand.

  “Up you get,” he said, sounding more than pleased with himself. “You get to come home with me, now.”

  I followed the draw of his hand. Felt like the damned man was going to try and lift my head off if I didn’t. I, uh, got to go home with him, did I? And I got to do it, now? Hmmm. I glared at him, and felt him shift his grip to include the collar of my ship’s suit.

  Like that, was it? I glared harder and kicked him in the shins—which was when I discovered some wise acre had nicked my sodding boots. Easy fix. I grabbed his shirt, spun myself into him, and kneed him in the groin just as hard as I could. I did not get the reaction I was expecting. Well, not exactly.

  Firstly, because my knee impacted on hard shell, and not soft, vulnerable human flesh. Secondly, because Mack grabbed the front of my ship’s suit, and lifted me clear of the floor, raising me high enough that I could see into his mouth when he smiled, high enough that I could see the very non-human mandibles that quivered behind his human-like skin.

  I screamed, and lashed out a second time, my bare foot striking a chest that was harder than flesh, my fists bruising against the contours of a face that did not match what I saw. The Mack-shaped creature shook me, until my head rattled, and set my feet back on the floor.

  “Come,” echoed inside my head, but I back-pedaled across the cell.

  I was so thoroughly sick of things not being what they seemed.

  “She doesn’t look real keen to go with you, Mosh,” came the voice over the intercom. “Are you sure you want to take the risk?”

  “They all come in the end,” the creature reassured him, in Mack’s brusque tones. “This one will, too.”

  Why? I wondered, backing myself into a corner.

  “Because if you don’t come with me, I’ll crush your mind,” was also a silent communication that only the two of us shared.

  “You and whose army, Mi—” and just like that I felt his hand inside my head, his fingers digging into my brain, the pressure as he started to squeeze.

  I drew a short sharp breath, and doubled over, the world going grey with pain—and, then, his hand was gone, and I was standing with my hands on my knees, panting with fear. Like that, was it? I forced myself to take a long, deep breath, and l
et it out slowly, and then I raised my head, and eyed him carefully.

  “So, where did you want to go?”

  5—Of Spiders and Wasps

  I followed Mr. So-Not-Mack out of the security center. My head was divided between feeling bruised, and spinning with a strange sense of unreality. I walked behind him, and kept glimpsing wings, and flashes of yellow and black. At least that was better than seeing arach grey.

  “Keep walking,” he said, his mind-voice sounding a lot less like than Mack than before. “I cannot hold the illusion for much longer.”

  I wondered how much trouble he’d be in, if he shed his disguise while he was in the security center.

  “Not as much as you’re in without me.”

  I walked a little faster, as he lengthened his stride, and soon we were a block from the drop point and the security center, and reaching a set of plassteel gates set in a wall made of sheer, white stone. So-Not-Mack placed his palm against a section of stone, worn smooth by similar gestures, and I stared as the gates opened in response.

  “We are almost safe,” he said, leading me through the newly opened gate.

  Now, that sounded almost feminine.

  “There’s a reason for that,” and this time I was sure I heard her voice in my ears, not so sure why I heard the buzz of insect wings.

  We stepped through the gate, and So-Not-Mack walked further along a smooth stone path, as the gates swung shut behind us. I followed cautiously, preparing to run, because there was something subtly different about my ‘rescuer’, now that the wall lay behind us. I watched as his shape began to shudder in an all too familiar way, and then bolted back the way we had come.

  “Stop!” The command rang in my ears, and through my skull, and I shook it away.

  Stop? No freaking way! I was not about to become some…thing’s private picnic. The gate was a no-go, but there had to be a tree I could climb, one that overhung the wall, another way out of here that didn’t involve flying, or jumping a ridiculous height.

  The arach that dropped down in front of me had obviously found one.

  Arach?

  I skidded to a halt, and back-pedaled, as it made a grab for me with two overly long, front legs. Well, that was a new version of spider! I was really beginning to not like new. There had been waaay too much new in the last few days. New threat, new world, whole new set of means I could be fucked six ways to Sunday, and all before breakfast. Nope. New was definitely not my most favorite thing, right now.