Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  “Defeating this invasion is all the amends you need,” Tovy told me, but I disagreed.

  Down there, innocent people were hurting, and we were standing by. Granted, it was for the greater good, but it still wasn’t right. Down there, children were losing their parents, wives, their husbands, parents their little ones. Down there, amidst the buildings, a little bit of Hell had escaped and was crawling through the colony at breakneck speed.

  I wrapped my hands around a clump of grass in front of me, suppressing the urge to run down the hill and blow every motherfucking spider all to Hell. There were too many—and we had to clear another piece of Hell from the skies above. A vespis antenna touched my forearm, followed by a vespis hand, and Tovy wriggled closer. It wasn’t close enough for our bodies to touch, but I could feel he was there. He wasn’t human, but it helped.

  “Now,” Tek said, and the line of vespis rose.

  Tovy wrapped his hand under my arm, and steadied me as I got to my feet—and then we slipped over the crest, and moved as swiftly as we could down the slope to the drop-ship. We drew together as we descended, moving so that the drop-ship’s bulk was between us and the colony. Sure, it meant we wouldn’t be able to see any arach returning to the ship, but it also meant they were less likely to see us—and that was more important.

  We didn’t have to move around to the open ramp to get aboard, either. Three meters from the drop-ship’s side, Tek signaled a halt, and we all dropped into a crouch, waiting for his order.

  “Open the ramps,” Tek told me, indicating the hatches on this side of the transport.

  I sank back into the ship’s systems, and found the controls for the doors. At first, I wanted to pull the door closed on the other side, but that might have given us away, so I decided to wait until we were on board. Tek made no comment, but he must have pulled the thought from my head, because the first two vespis on board, crossed straight over to the open hatch, and positioned themselves on either side of it.

  “Up ramp.”

  Tek gave the order as soon as we were all on-board. I ‘upped’ the ramps and secured the hatches, not liking the taste of the air. It reminded me of bitterness and fur, of wet dog and cat urine. It was like all of that combined with something quietly rotting in the corner.

  “Arach,” Tovy explained. “Their scent is distinctive.”

  And I realized it must be worse for the vespis than it was for me.

  “Not all of us smell this way.”

  That was Askavor. He’d scrunched himself in a corner, and looked just as uncomfortable as the rest of us. Tovy chattered something back that he didn’t bother translating, and Askavor hissed. Tek turned his head, looking from one to the other, and they both subsided. Well, I guess he told them.

  “Get us to the ship,” Tek told me, and I suddenly realized I was the pilot.

  “It is why you are needed,” Tovy informed me. “That, and to ensure your Mack does not kill us when we find him.”

  I hustled to the cockpit. My Mack? He wasn’t my Mack. He was entirely his own Mack. Not my responsibility.

  “And yet, here you are.”

  I wanted to tell Tovy to shut the fuck up, but I was busy. Buckling the safety harness was second nature, but I only had a vague idea of the controls. Shuttles we’d covered in Basics… just enough to get us off a ship or station, and out of danger. Drop-ships? Not so much.

  I took the cheat’s way out, and hooked into the operating system. Used the nav-com to get the return path back to the ship, and told the drop-ship to haul ass. It wasn’t elegant, and there was no way the arach were going to miss the launch. I sure as shit hoped the queen had her jammers in place, or we were going to be ambushed in the shuttle hangar.

  And that reminded me… Since when did Mack have drop-ships? I’d only ever see inside of the Shady Marie’s shuttle, and this weren’t it. I turned to ask Askavor where he’d thought the shuttle had come from, but he was out of sight. Instead, I watched as Tek lowered an antenna to the side of his jaw.

  “Your Majesty, we are clear,” and I realized we had comms—as in normal mission comms, like humans used.

  And I’d thought these bugs were psi.

  “You keep calling us that, and someone is going to sting you.”

  Well, like that wasn’t an incentive to remember the proper term. A needle was still a needle, even if it was attached to somebody’s butt. Fine, vespis then.

  “Much better.”

  I turned back to the controls, and hunted through the system for a user’s manual. It was never too late to learn, right? Besides, if someone started shooting at us, I wanted to be able to dodge, and the auto-pilot wasn’t going to be so good at that. Landing might be a problem, too. Fuck.

  I dug into the manual, and tried to work out a quicker way to get the skills I needed, in what was looking like a really short flight, and then I stopped. There was no point in trying to learn how to land this thing, if I got our asses shot off in the meantime. What I really needed was for a way for us not to get shot at, at all.

  Better yet, I needed a way to sneak up on the ship, and that meant not being seen. Yeah, not being seen would be best.

  “Shut up and make it so.”

  Man, these commander types really were sent to the same school. It didn’t matter what species they came from. Tek sounded exactly like Mack, and both of them reminded me of the instructors I’d had in Basics. Assholes, the lot of them.

  But I knew how to make the drop-ship invisible—at least to Mack’s ship—because the arach were assholes, too, and they’d made the ship invisible to the colony’s satellites. All I had to do was make Mack’s ship just as oblivious to the drop-ship.

  To do that, though, I was going to have to get into the ship’s systems, which might be harder than it sounded. Who knew what the arach had done to it. I wondered if Askavor had any idea. He might not want to talk about it, but I was pretty sure the spider-man knew more about arach code than he was admitting.

  “You need to be fast,” Tek said, and I wondered if I might already be too late.

  I decided not to try going into the ship along my link to Tens. Chances were the arach had already locked him out. Mack would probably be just as dicey. Rohan? I thought—and, just like that, the boy was inside my head.

  “Cutter?”

  I didn’t have time to explain—or wonder how he’d gotten there so fast. Little shit had probably had another link hidden in the implant. Whatevs. I had more important stuff to worry about. Sneaky link stuff could wait for later.

  “Can you get into the ship’s scan-ware?”

  “I can try, but it’s a bit nasty in there.”

  “Can you get me in, instead?”

  “Sure.”

  “I might be bringing someone in. His name is Askavor. You are not to fry him. He is a friend.”

  I could sense Rohan’s puzzlement, but it vanished when Askavor arrived.

  “Arach!”

  “No, Rohan,” I told him. “Weaver. Native to this world. Prey like the rest of us.”

  Until I’d said it, I hadn’t known it was true. Askavor’s reaction was revealing. He hunched, and then uncurled, and then we both became aware of a fourth presence.

  “Who the fuck is that?” I demanded, glaring at Rohan—no easy thing in the digital realm.

  “Cascade,” Rohan said, like I should have known. “My puppy.”

  Oh…that was a puppy. That was that puppy? The one he’d rescued from the Ghoul’s complex? Against Mack’s orders? And mine?

  “Yup.” The boy sounded quite proud of himself. “His name is Cascade.”

  Cascade looked at us, his presence taking on a happy tone, when he saw me—and that was all the warning I got. I hadn’t realized you could be bowled over in your own mind, but Cascade showed me a whole new realm of possibilities. Apparently, you could be licked, as well.

  Askavor, he wasn’t so sure of, but he looked to me, and then back at the weaver
’s presence, the question obvious in his code: Pack? Friend? Foe?

  “Friend,” I told him.

  “Spider friend?”

  “Friend,” and this time I was firm. “Guard me?”

  Wuff.

  “Guard him.”

  Grumble.

  Fine, whatever. Last thing I needed was a teen-brat dog to match the teen-brat human I’d added him to. Damnit. The whole exchange had taken seconds, but we still didn’t have a lot of time.

  “Go that way,” Rohan said. “I’ll hold the link.”

  What I heard next was his very tightly focused reassurance: “I’ll hold your back.”

  He was still unsure of Askavor, but that was fine. Mack’s ship might have been home, but, right now, it was someone else’s home, and we had to take it back. Having someone like Rohan guarding my way into and out of it was a very good thing, even if he was still just a kid.

  “I turn fifteen, next month.”

  Well, f… damn!

  Askavor shifted uneasily. Spider had a point. We needed to go and do whatever it was fast. Given how many arach were hitting the settlement, I could only hope they weren’t so on-the-ball in the control center. I wondered if they slept after they fed.

  “Sometimes,” Askavor said, as we threaded the code and slid into the part of the system that controlled the doors.

  “Do you think there will be any crew in the hangars?”

  Rohan answered before Askavor had a chance.

  “Nope. All crew have been secured in their quarters or in pods. The only things likely to be in the hangars are the spiders.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “Give me two shakes.”

  “Two shakes of what?” he asked, and I realized I might be the only one who said that.

  It sent an unexpected pang of homesickness through me, and I paused to brush it away.

  “Thirty seconds,” I explained. “I meant thirty seconds.”

  “Okay. Thirty seconds, it is,” and I knew I could hold him to that.

  I dived further into the system, not happy to see strings of foreign code woven through the code that used to be so familiar. Fuck this. I wound around it, working my way to the operations center for the hangar bay doors.

  There was still plenty of foreign code, here—and it looked as spiky as Hell… and sticky. Why the fuck would it look sticky? I mean how the fuck was it doing that? And what would it mean if I touched it?

  I rippled round it, brushing far closer than I’d calculated, and that was when I realized the arach code was moving. In fact, it was more than moving, it was… Was that a tendril?

  Fuck!

  I dodged the first clumsy strike, and forgot about being subtle.

  “They know we’re in the system!” I yelled, alerting both Rohan and Askavor to the fact, “… and they’re not friendly!”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Rohan snapped back, and I heard what might have been a distant wuff. “Cascade!”

  Cascade, huh? I thought, dodging another tendril and grabbing hold of the hangar bay door controls—ALL the hangar bay door controls.

  Suck. On. This!

  And I tweaked them all at once. I thought about ripping the code to shreds so the doors would stay open, but decided against it. None of the wasps were wearing suits, and I hadn’t seen any on board for humans. My mind might be in the system, but my very vulnerable fleshy bits were on the drop-ship… which… I had to get into the hangar and safely landed.

  Oh, crap.

  I’d have to get clear of this mess, in order to do that. Mental presence, or not, it wasn’t like I could switch instantaneously between systems. It’s not like they were inside my head. I mean, the code was located physically somewhere I had to get to, in order to tweak it.

  “Ten seconds, Cutter,” Tek said. “Ten seconds and then you smear us all over the deck or the side of the ship….”

  Well, fuck it.

  Using Tek’s timing, I added another ten seconds, and set a timer for the system to close the hangar doors—all at once—and then I punched out of there as hard and fast as I could. From somewhere down the link, I thought I could hear Cascade barking, and Rohan yelling for him to come back. I wondered where the two of them had stashed their bodies, and if Cascade had its own little nanite swarm to augment its own attempts at security.

  “Focus!” Rohan shouted, “and hurry up. That shit is live!”

  I hurried. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to access a link, and then get back through. Your conscious is kinda in two places… and that’s only if you’re like Tens or Delight. If you’re more like me, then you pretty much send most of your head, your soul, if you like, into the machine – you take your brain for a walk. Some of you might remain with your body, but I can’t be sure. There have been days when I’ve been so lost in the code that I needed a map to get back… just don’t tell Tens that, okay?

  “Don’t tell Tens what?” and that’s when I realized Tens had beaten his way into my implant, and found the link I’d made into the ship—his ship, because he was as protective as Hell of the security systems. “What the fuck?”

  “Get out of here, Tens!” and I rolled under his presence, and dived towards the entrance to my implant, all too aware of the shadow coming towards me from the other end—the three shadows.

  “Tens!” Rohan shouted. “Just grab her and get. Let the spider deal with it. Cascade: Fetch!”

  Well, that was something new. I’ve never been fetched, before—grabbed by code, and shaken about, yes, but never grabbed and pulled up the data-stream to where I wanted to be. Since when had the pup gotten so big?

  “Since he was engineered that way,” Rohan said, and I heard pride in his voice, before he turned away to praise his pet. “Good boy, Cascade. Good boy!”

  But Cascade wasn’t waiting to be praised. He was back down the link, on Askavor’s trail, and I remembered what I’d told him. Damn.

  “Cascade!” I called. “Come!”

  I watched the code wriggle to a stop.

  “Come!”

  “Five.” Tek’s voice was not a welcome intrusion.

  “Askavor, you’re needed!” and I slipped back into my implant, and into the drop-ship’s CPU.

  Tek got to three, before I had the ship touching down in the bay, not quite as lightly as a feather, but light enough that it could fly, again. I even remembered to leave enough room beside it for the second shuttle to land—if the queen got this far.

  Right now, though, it looked like we were on our own.

  And we had some arach butt to kick.

  10—The Battle for the Shady Marie

  I still hadn’t worked out where the drop-ships had come from, but it didn’t matter. Tovy was already carrying what looked like a heavy set of saddle bags.

  “Med kits, blood replacement, emergency nans,” he said, as he draped four Blazers over my shoulders, handed me a pouch of energy clips and solids, and then passed me two long blades and two short.

  “In case they get close.”

  I figured that, if they got close enough for me to use the blades, I was in trouble I probably wouldn’t get out of.

  “Your Mack will need arming.”

  Well, that explained the extra weaponry.

  “And your Tens.”

  There was no way in Hell Tens was getting a blade.

  “Hey!”

  As I ran down the loading ramp with Askavor beside me, and Tovy hovering at my back, I realized I didn’t have a clue where to find Mack’s cabin. Damnit! I was going to have to go back into the system, again—and, this time, the arach code was bound to be waiting.

  Askavor’s voice in my head was a welcome distraction.

  “He is here,” the spider told me, pulling up the ship’s schematics, and highlighting a path to the right cabin. “Tek and the others will clear a path, but you must enter first.”

  I had to enter first? Couldn’t any of the vespis change to huma
n form?

  “What do you think your Mack is going to do to the first humanoid form he doesn’t recognize?”

  Ah. Bug had a point—which earned me a slap upside the head… from four sets of hands.

  Goddamnit!

  “What was that for?”

  “Our allies are called vespis, although they will tolerate ‘wasp’. Bugs are a non-sentient, sap-sucking pestilence that must be destroyed wherever they are found.”

  Well, at least Askavor could be bothered explaining.

  “Should not have had to. You need to show more respect.”

  “Shut up, Rohan.”

  Honestly, the last thing I needed was a fourteen-year-old telling me off.

  “Fifteen!”

  ‘Not yet, you aren’t.”

  We hit the edge of the hangar, and Tovy grabbed me by the back of the collar to stop me charging out into the corridor.

  “Let Askavor check, first.”

  Oh, sure. Let the spider check for the other spiders.

  “Shut it!” and that was a chorus of Tovy, Rohan, and Tens—Tens who, I realized, was sounding a lot stronger than the last time we spoke.

  “No arach around.”

  “Don’t the three of you have something better to do?”

  “Not until you come cut me loose.”

  “Mack first.”

  “Yeah, I get that, just don’t be too long, okay?”

  It was as vulnerable as I’d ever heard him.

  “That’s a given.”

  I got the impression he’d settled back into my implant—and that if someone had given him a bag of peanuts, he might have enjoyed the show. Typical.

  “Don’t write me off, yet. I’ve got a whole ship to recode.” He paused. “What’s with the spider, anyway?”

  And I knew he’d spotted what Askavor was, wondered why he hadn’t run screaming for the stars, or tried to take him out.

  “We can’t all be you, Cutter. Besides, I trust your judgement. If he ain’t dead yet, you got a reason.”

  Well, that was sweet of him. I was just about to reply, when Tovy grabbed my shirt collar, and guided me out into the hall. It made me envious of everyone who could do the implant thing, and still remain aware of what was going on around them.