Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  “Tens? Mack with you?”

  “Nope, he should be down with you.”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “Let me check.”

  But he didn’t need to. The skin was melting away from Mack’s face as his form began to ripple and shudder, and the arach leader I’d last seen speaking to Delight took his place before me.

  Tens! was a scream that didn’t get past my implant, as he reached into my head, and broke the connection I’d been using, which was pretty much all the time he needed to reach out and grab me by the arm.

  “Some of us take memories when we feed,” he said, “and I’ve been tapped into your implant for the last hour. Your Mack is rarely accompanied when he watches you revive. His devotion is touching.”

  Devotion, well, that was one word for it. I had others… stalker, possessive bastard, straight-up bastard, complete and utter bastard, voyeur, voyeuristic bastard… There were more, but I didn’t have the time.

  I tried to shake the arach loose, but only succeeded in getting him to tighten his grip. I wondered what he was going to do, now, given I bet the shuttles were locked down tight, and the arach didn’t have teleports.

  “I’m going to use you as a passport,” he said.

  “They’ll never give you a shuttle.”

  “I won’t be asking.”

  “Then what am I going to be a passport to?”

  In answer, he pushed me up against the wall, and pulled the suit’s helmet up over my head.

  “The airlock,” and he pinned me until I worked out I wasn’t going to be able to break free.

  Arach strength mirrored that of their smaller counter-parts, only on a larger scale. He used two sets of legs to pin me in place, while he used the other two to make sure the suit was secured properly.

  “Don’t struggle,” he whispered into the implant, “or your air won’t last long enough for us to be picked up.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted it to last that long, but I was pretty sure I wanted it to last long enough for Tens to teleport me back into the ship, or for Delight or Mack to come and get me. I took the arach’s point, and stopped trying to break his grip. All the time, I was aware of activity outside the links to the implant—probably Tens trying to break through.

  Or Mack.

  “What did you do to Mack?”

  “I took what I needed.”

  “Did you… Did—”

  “The queen has forbidden it. He will make a good, strong host for her young. To harm him is to bring the same sentence on myself.”

  “And me?”

  “All this crew will be hosts for my queen’s children—and, unlike the courtesy done by the wasps, you will be aware of them as they feed.”

  I froze, and he shook me.

  “Time to move. Your crewmates come.”

  I wanted to tell him, he was dead as soon as he stepped out the door, but I figured he wouldn’t believe me. I guessed it was just one of those things he was going to have to find out for himself.

  Or not, I thought, as we stepped into the corridor, and found it to be empty.

  “Where are they?”

  I shrugged.

  “You know why Mack comes to watch me wake up?” I asked, as he looked up and down the empty hall.

  “Why?” and he began walking, keeping me with him by hooking one arm through mine, and keeping a grip on my bicep with a second.

  “Because I keep trying to leave.”

  That much had been true for the first few months aboard the ship, but I wasn’t so sure it was true, now. I hadn’t tried to walk off the ship for… I couldn’t remember how long. A bit, anyway. I didn’t know why Mack still came to watch me when I came out of recovery. I just needed something to say, because the empty corridor was bothering me.

  We’d almost reached the intersection we needed, in order to reach one of the maintenance hatches, and fear was starting to twist and coil through my gut. I really didn’t like airlocks—and I mean that in almost the same way I meant it when I said I didn’t like needles. Usually, the mention of one was enough to send me running in the opposite direction… which was pretty much what I wanted to do, now.

  “Hang in there, Cutter.” Tens’ voice was a solitary whisper in a tiny corner of the implant. “Don’t look, just hold on.”

  I badly wanted to offer to help, but I had nothing to do that with. I had no weapons, nothing. Hell, I couldn’t even break the critter’s grip.

  “You don’t need to. Just hang in there.”

  I was hanging, but not by very much, as we turned the corner, and walked the short length of interconnecting hall that linked the two corridors. I baulked when we reached the end. This corridor. This corridor was where the maintenance hatch was.

  “Move,” the arach commanded, its voice echoing in the implant, and I wondered how.

  “My link by-passes the program jamming your colleagues,” it said, and I suddenly realized how…

  “How what?” it asked, as I shut that line of thought away.

  To stop it from trying to find the answer to that, I stepped into the cross corridor, and hoped Tens and Delight would get to me before we reached the airlock. Last time someone had made me go into an airlock I hadn’t wanted to, I’d had nightmares for months. I didn’t want those nightmares to come back.

  “It wouldn’t be for long,” the arach assured me, and I remembered the fate that had been assigned the crew.

  Oh, Hell, no!

  I took two more steps, and then dropped to the floor. No, no, no, no, and no. I was not going another step further. The damn spider wanted me in the airlock? It was going to have to drag me there.

  “As you wish,” and he shifted his grip from my arm, to the hood of my suit, pulling me forward by the scruff of my neck, and letting me drag behind him.

  Cool!

  I reached out and wrapped my hands around his ankles. He tripped, but recovered, pulling one leg free of my grip, and then the other, before continuing towards the airlock.

  “Nice try.”

  Yeah, but had I earned myself a time-out?

  “It can be arranged.”

  I just bet it could. Fortunately, Delight and Tens didn’t mess around. Someone should have told the spider that the best way to transport your hostage was to drape it over your vital bits so people thought twice before shooting you. Guess he hadn’t had anyone shooting at him for way too long… or, not long enough; it would depend on who you asked.

  Tens and Delight had the Blazer 54s on full auto, and they weren’t worrying about hitting each other. Some would have called it crazy, or straight out suicidal, but I knew these guys. They were just really, really pissed. That, and they and knew the range at which their combat armor could take it. Man, I hoped they didn’t screw it up.

  On the other hand, I figured they hadn’t calculated the distance for me, so I just kept myself flat to the floor, and let little bits of spider shower down around me. By the time the shooting stopped, I was lying in a puddle of spider goo, and wishing they’d get over it already. What the fuck had happened to Mack?

  I was about to ask Delight, when she turned away, speaking rapidly into her comms. I picked myself up off the floor, and looked at Tens, but he was looking off into the distance, like he was eavesdropping on a very private conversation. I kept the helmet on, but cracked the faceplate, so I could breathe, and then I just rolled slowly to my feet and stood there.

  There was no point in tracking ichor and intestines all over the ship. That would just make Doc mad. I figured there would be a decontamination team arriving shortly. I was waiting for Tens to finish listening in to whatever conversation he was tracking, when Delight suddenly raised her voice.

  “I don’t care what humans are on board. It can’t leave the system!”

  She paused briefly, and I turned towards her, jumping when she shouted, again.

  “Just blow that motherfucking bitch to Hell!”

  She
waited, and the look on her face was enough to freeze the dead.

  “Now. Captain!” and she froze, her eyes watching something I couldn’t see.

  It made me wish my implant hadn’t been locked down by the arach lying in pieces on the floor… and on me… and on the walls. I looked up. Oh, Stars. I closed my eyes and swallowed bile, refusing throw up. Thinking of the showers in Medical, and the fact the decontamination team would be here, soon, helped.

  When Delight spoke, again, I opened my eyes. Her voice was calmer, although it didn’t remain that way. I listened while I waited for someone to come and clean the corridor. It helped me ignore exactly what I was standing in.

  “Nicely done, captain.”

  She paused, then replied to a comment I couldn’t hear. “Yes. I’m sorry, too, but we couldn’t save them, not when we have a whole world depending on us.”

  Another pause, and then in a voice firm but full of regret, “Yes, captain. Tell the cruiser to take that transport down. We can’t afford to let them get a toehold on the planet.”

  A moment of quiet followed, and when she spoke next, her voice was hard. “Captain, tell them to tell HQ that we’ve already had one crew member mind-raped, on a ship where the crew were nearly bled dry, and that these bastards can take on the form of specific people and exfiltrate their heads, right down to the correct colloquial and emotional responses. Tell them, they come in swarms. And then tell them to consult with the lizardine, if they still have any doubts. Now, get the fuck off the line, and take them out!”

  It took her a moment to come back to the corridor, and I guessed that she spent it monitoring the actions of the Odyssey ships that were in the system. Once she was done, she focused on me, and her face twisted in disgust.

  “Man, Cutter, you need a shower!”

  Well, for once, we agreed.

  16—Mack, Needles and the Psi

  “We are sorry, Cutter,” the vespis queen said, later, when she learned what had happened. “We could have saved you much trouble if we had thought.”

  If they had thought what? It was hardly their fault the arach had managed to disguise himself as human and then bitten Mack and gotten into his head, and taken on his form.

  “We should have thought they would send at least one infiltrator.”

  I swallowed.

  “It’s okay, your Majesty. It was a hard battle, and you had more important matters to worry about.”

  “This should have been the one foremost in my mind,” she said.

  She turned to Delight.

  “I will have my teams search the ship for any more.”

  “How will you know?” Delight asked.

  “They smell different.”

  Oh. Well, of course, they did, but the queen was not finished. She turned back to me.

  “How is your Mack?”

  My Mack? Why did all the bu…everyone think that? Rather than give her a chance to answer that, I changed the subject.

  “How come it was speaking Galbas?”

  “Who?”

  “The arach. How come it could speak Galbas? On the ship, it needed an interpreter.”

  “It was using the interpreters to make three points. The first was that you were not significant enough for it to speak to in your language. The second was that it had humans on board. The third was to emphasize that you were just cattle to them.”

  “And are we?” I asked, shivering against a cold that wasn’t there.

  The queen cocked her head, observing the reaction.

  “Yes. All non-arach are. It is why the weavers are so divided.”

  I didn’t get that. If the arach considered the weavers cattle, then how could the weavers be divided?

  “Some hope for their value to be seen, and their race accepted as an equal part in the arach whole.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Delight said.

  She’d been lounging against a nearby wall, and watching the conversation. I’d come up to the bridge to answer the questions posed by Odyssey’s commander, as he struggled to come to grips with murdering however many humans had been on board the transport and cruiser. He was still struggling, even after sharing memories of the fate that awaited us.

  When the line had gone dead, the queen had given a very vespis shrug.

  “He will understand only when they take his ship,” she said, and everyone in the command center had turned to her.

  “When?”

  “More will come, if we do not find their infiltrators,” which was when she had apologized for not thinking of them sooner.

  I jumped, as Delight slapped a hand on my shoulder.

  “Come on, kiddo. Your Mack is going to be a much better patient, if you’re sitting next to him, when he wakes up.”

  Talk about your role reversal. I wanted to disagree, but I had an idea she was right. The arach had taken Mack out while he was waiting for me to wake up from the tank. We’d all be a lot better off, if Mack saw I was all right when he came round.

  I let Delight steer me out of the command center, but I didn’t miss the way she glanced over at the vespis queen just before she left—and I didn’t miss the subtle twitch of the queen’s antenna in response. Something was afoot, and, if I was right, I’d need my Mack on his feet to have any chance of getting through it in one piece.

  “We all do,” Delight said, and I rolled my eyes.

  So, we were back to that, were we?

  “What? Me in your head. You being a recalcitrant pain-in-the-ass and getting the job done? Hell, yes, we are!”

  Mack was already up, when we hit the medical center, and Doc was doing his damnedest to get him back into bed. I caught sight of the needle in Doc’s hand, and almost left them to it, but Delight had wrapped her arm around my shoulders for a reason. And it wasn’t because she liked me.

  “I like you plenty, Cutter,” she said, giving me a shove that propelled me forward. “I’ll like you more, if you can talk the big guy down.”

  Hint taken.

  “Mack,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious, but he was too busy locking eyes with the doc to notice. I figured they were having a conversation link-to-link. “Mack!”

  Both he and Doc turned towards me.

  Doc still had the needle in his hand.

  Delight caught me before I quite reached the door, and turned me back around. This time, Doc had taken a step to the side, and there wasn’t a needle in sight.

  “Cutter,” and there was a world of worry and relief in Mack’s voice. I ignored it, the best way I knew how.

  “You causing trouble, boss?”

  He’d taken two steps towards me, and looked, for all the world, like he was going to give me a hug. I was almost disappointed when he stopped, frowned, then straightened himself up, and walked right past me, giving me a firm pat on the shoulder as he went.

  “So,” he said, as he strode past Delight, “what’s Odyssey want me to do, this time?”

  Doc pushed himself off the wall, and walked over.

  “Sit,” he said, pointing to the chair beside Mack’s bed. “You’re overdue for a check-up.”

  I took a step back, and he frowned.

  “Don’t make me ask Mack to bring you back.”

  Well, the man sure knew the right things to say. I was still puzzling over why I felt so relieved, and yet so upset by Mack walking out the door, the way he had.

  “Fine,” and I went and took a seat.

  Doc rolled through the check-up, poking at where K’Tina had skewered me with her claws, and then making sure I was well in general. I was not ready for Mack and Tens to come back through the door, but I got why they were there.

  “Seriously?” I asked, as Mack stopped in front of me, and crooked his finger, signaling me onto my feet.

  I thought about trying to get round him, but Tens was blocking the only viable path to the door. Doc just sat and watched the show. Me? I was just so bloody sick of my body trying to run e
very time Doc had to give me a shot, or take some blood, or whatever. It was embarrassing!

  I stood up, and stepped forward, pressing my forehead into Mack’s chest. Well, I suppose this was one way of getting a hug. I tried to ignore the fact Mack was laughing as he wrapped his arms around me.

  “Hold still, Cutter.”

  I held. It helped a lot that Mack was in my head when Doc took my arm, and that Mack took me on a trip through the external scans to inspect the space debris left behind by arach ships.

  “What’s that?” I asked, focusing on a particularly solid chunk, and Mack swore.

  “You done, yet, Doc?”

  “Not yet,” Doc replied, and I became aware of the pinch at my elbow.

  “Looks like a survival pod,” Mack said, pulling me back into the scan.

  “It’s too big for a human,” I noted.

  “Delight?” Mack called, reaching out to the Odyssey agent.

  She was either learning some tact, or she was busy. Either way, it was a refreshing change to find her not riding my mind, along with the boss… which was a thought I regretted having, as soon as it emerged. To my surprise, Mack said nothing, even if I thought I saw some smart-ass remark rise to the surface, and then get dragged back out of sight before I could work out what it was. Something about potential…

  “Do you really want to know?” the vespis queen asked, and I realized that Mack, Delight and Tens weren’t the only ones who could dip into my thoughts.

  Damnit! Why did my implant have to be their bloody conference center?

  “It is because you are central to so many,” the queen said, and this time, I was sure I caught a flash of alarm from Mack’s direction.

  Again, I didn’t quite catch the why of it, and, again, the queen asked, “Do you really want to know?”

  And I shook my head.

  “Not right, now,” I told her, and Mack’s body relaxed.

  Well, if that wasn’t just downright strange. I’d almost changed my mind about not knowing, when the doc spoke.

  “Done,” and he applied pressure at the point where he’d drawn blood, and taped it down.

  As soon as he’d stopped speaking, and before Mack could release me, the vespis queen spoke, again.