The little mimics had been busy while we were gone, managing to construct enough enclosures to house the eighteen animals that we had captured. There was even a couple of food piles ready and waiting.
Of course, then came the matter of actually getting the animals off Vik’s back and into their appropriate new homes. But just as Eske and I braced ourselves for all the shenanigans that were sure to come from such an endeavor, mini-mimics swarmed their larger sibling and started getting to work, leaving Eske and I with nothing to do but meet back up with the rest of our friends.
“I dunno, I almost feel guilty making them do all this themselves,” Eske murmured, joining me at the edge of the water, the only place where we wouldn’t get in the way of the rushing mimics.
“I know what you mean,” I said with a shrug. “But what could we possibly do? It seems like these little guys got it handled.”
“Yeah, I guess they do.” She nodded affirmatively, seemingly more to herself than me, before placing her hands on her hips. “You ready to go join up with the others and give our mission debriefing?”
“Mission debriefing? You make it sound so fancy. But sure, let’s head home.”
“Home, huh? Is that how you think of it?”
I blushed slightly as we strolled along through the woods. “I guess I’ve felt like I belong here more than I ever have anywhere else.”
“You know that’s pretty terrible considering we’ve been on this planet less than a week and we’re facing the possibility of total annihilation, right?”
“I am aware.”
“Well, as long as you’re aware of it, I guess.”
She shook her head, but thankfully, we had reached the training area, which was more crowded than ever.
“Geez, has it only been one day? Because I see at least twenty more kinda-human bodies out there.”
“A day and a half,” I corrected. “Technically, two full days since we decided to do this expedition at all.”
“Point still stands, these mimics are really growing.”
“Goes to show what wonders having access to the appropriate amount of food plus free thought can do to a stunted population.”
We strode around and across, reaching the middle where, sure enough, Gonzales was shouting instructions at a large group of mimics. I thought I spotted Astaroth and Pyjik at the other end, helping more of the younger mimics, but I couldn’t say for sure.
“Hey, you’re back,” Gonzales said, although she didn’t turn away from her pupils. “I was certain you’d be dead as soon as night passed, and you didn’t come back.”
“We were supposed to stay out overnight,” Eske corrected, sounding a little irritated. “You knew that.”
“Yeah…but I also knew how often things tend to go wrong, so I half-expected you to come limping back just as the sun set.”
“Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“You’re welcome.” Gonzalez turned and flashed us a flat look.
She turned back to face her students and shouted six more drills before walking to actually join us. “We should go meet up with the boss lady and the others then, shouldn’t we?”
I couldn’t quite figure out her behavior or strange tone, so I let it go. “Yeah, that sound like a good idea.”
“I think Mimic’s at the ships with the twins. Let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we just call them on the comms?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Comms are down right now. Side effect of the twins’ experiments with making a system that can communicate to the ships. Should be up by late tonight or tomorrow, but you know how these things are.”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
Eske said nothing, and I had the feeling that Gonzales had irritated the maintenance woman with her earlier comments. I didn’t know quite what to say either, so I chose to keep quiet while we strolled back to our stolen ships.
Man, what was with Gonzales? I knew she had been through a lot, but her changes didn’t really seem to have to do with the trauma she had survived during our imprisonment.…or maybe they were. It was hard to say. I certainly wasn’t enough of an expert on human psychology to know.
The weight of the unspoken words pressed down on me, though, and I felt discomfort grow in my middle. I missed talking to her, and the wise-cracking quips she would belt out in rapid succession.
I missed my friend.
We had almost reached the ships when finally, Gonzales spoke again.
“I am starting to feel better,” she said simply, without facing either of us. And neither Eske nor I needed to ask what she meant by that.
“Oh, good,” I answered honestly. “I’m glad.”
And that was that. She didn’t say any more, and we didn’t ask, but it did help me feel a little less hopeless about the entire situation.
Then, we finally were at the ships and Bahn spotted us almost immediately.
“Hey! They’re back!”
In a surprising show of athleticism, he nearly vaulted from the cockpit of the ship that he was working on. The next thing I knew, he was bounding toward us and throwing his arms around me in a hug. While Bahn had never been cold, he had never quite been so physically affectionate either.
“I was worried, you know. Bad things seem to happen when we split up, so I’d prefer we don’t do that anymore. At least not for more than a few hours.”
Ciangi clicked her tongue as she approached us. “You should have been here; he’s been bungling experiment after experiment because he’s so worried.”
“Can you blame me?” Bahn shot back, releasing me just to pull Eske and Gonzales into a hug. “Splitting up has, in no particular order, brought us face to face with a military faction that wants to overthrow our government, gotten us imprisoned, and…did whatever it was you guys did on your journey to get all the animals.”
“Hah, I guess that’s true. Well, we’re here. How goes your repairs?”
“Still working on our communication array. I probably just need another day for that.”
“Good,” Mimic murmured, coming along behind them. “Because we have two days, maybe three max, before they’re here.”
“Three?” I asked. “Do we have enough set up?”
“No, not nearly,” Mimic said with a sigh. “Food is almost to the appropriate levels, but water is at only about half of what we’ll need if they try to poison the natural rivers. And if this goes to ground, then we don’t have nearly enough defenses. Not to mention that Gonzales is still upgrading and improving weapons, and most of my siblings are still only in the beginning phases of self-defense.”
My stomach twisted painfully. I had hoped that when we returned, we would have tons of good news and just be ready to roll right into our final stage of preparation. But there was still so much to do, it seemed impossible to ever be able to complete enough of our work to stand a chance.
“A lot of your little ones are taking care of the animals. Once that is done, perhaps we can start to try to build some barricades along the outside of the capital? Maybe some walls, and battlements, or something?”
“Yeah, but can we do that in just two days?” Gonzales asked.
“Possibly?” Mimic said, running a hand through her hair. “If I was able to get all of the younglings on it, there’s a chance we could get at least a bit of protection up.”
“Actually,” Bahn said, “there are a lot of different parts of the crashed ship you could cannibalize to help with the defenses.”
“You’re right. Good idea. Can you get the comm relay back so that I can send a message to my sub-leaders?” Mimic asked.
“Uh, sure. Gimme about an hour or so.” He stretched and pulled a ration bar from his pocket, and I was reminded of how hungry I was. “Anything else ya need?”
“That should be all for the moment. For now, I will just go to them directly.” Mimic looked in my direction, giving me a firm nod before her human form melted away and she shifted into the body of a great bird. With a coup
le flaps of her wings, she was off, leaving me to wonder at the curious welcome.
I knew that she had a lot on her plate, but I couldn’t help but think about her reaction. She hadn’t congratulated us, or even thanked us. That seemed entirely unlike her. It was probably the stress…but I couldn’t help but feel like maybe she was becoming overwhelmed by all of the planning and mounting stress.
Maybe, if we had time, I could talk to her about it. For now, it looked like I had a new job: creating barricades to survive the coming war. No pressure, right?
It looked like I needed to do some research. Pulling my datalog from my pack, I searched through the database to see if there was anything already saved to the device. Goodness knew there was no way I was going to be able to access the net so far from Earth or any government-financed ships.
Thankfully, I saw a whole folder on war, covering from ancient times to modern day. I was sure that I would find something useful, and began reading immediately. With any luck, I would do Mimic proud and give us a fighting chance to survive if this went to ground.
It turned out that building battlements wasn’t that hard, especially with a horde of mimics to help that seemed able to break down materials with their own saliva. They would bring me supplies in waves, and I would just mark out where I needed them, show them a diagram, and they would hop to it.
Obviously, none of them could actually communicate with me, but Mimic had assigned one of her junior officers to help me and she translated any queries they had that she couldn’t answer herself.
I hadn’t quite caught her name, but she had the form of a small, redheaded woman with blueish-pale skin and nearly colorless hair. Her features were nondescript and watered down, as if someone had sculpted them out of clay and then erased half of their work. I guessed that she was still learning how to hold human form, but it was a bit unnerving, so I tried not to look at her directly.
I was sure that it would have been much harder if the little ones weren’t doing about ninety percent of the physical labor, but I still was pretty busy catching things, helping right things, and even occasionally stopping the erected partitions from falling over before they were fully secure.
By the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted and aching. We went on and on well after dark-fall, and I guessed that there were only a handful of hours before sunrise. I stumbled through the door of Mimic’s place and found it lightless and quiet, everyone else having gone to bed.
I made my way to the kinda-bathroom Mimic had designed for us and filled the sink with water from a pitcher on a stool, then washed my face and pits. From there, I grabbed a jagged piece of cloth hanging over a bar on the wall and wiped myself down.
By the time all of that was done, I was even more exhausted than I thought possible, and I felt like I would collapse before I reached my mattress.
Somehow, I did make it, and I was surprised to see Mimic laying there, her hands folded neatly on her middle.
“Hey there,” I murmured, setting myself down next to her.
“Hello,” she said just as quietly.
“I’m a bit shocked that you’re not out all night like usual.”
“I…I needed a break,” she whispered. “I don’t have time for one, but I needed one nonetheless.”
“Hey, you’ve been going and going and going,” I said. “Even you need a chance to breathe.”
“I can breathe after all of this is said and done.” She rolled over to face me, and I saw weariness etched across her features. “I have to protect my people.”
I reached out and pulled her to my chest, willing my warmth into her. “I know, I know. But you can’t protect them if you don’t take care of yourself.”
She sighed and buried her face against me. “Not too long ago, my entire life was just finding food and chittering with my family on the asteroid. We didn’t know or care about anything beyond our little rock, and we didn’t have a concept of the future. It was just…the present and that was it.
“I get that now it’s because we all had so little nutrients on that rock, but at the time, I didn’t know and that seemed like enough of an existence. But now…now I have the weight of all of our futures on me, and I wonder if I was the one who was meant to survive your ship at all.” She drew in a shuddering breath and I felt a little bit of damp against my shirt. Was…was she crying?!
“There were others on that asteroid, smarter, stronger, better than me. If they had been the ones to live, this whole war probably could have been avoided outright.”
“You can’t think that,” I said, pushing her hair back. “You were the one to survive because you were meant to. No one else was meant to walk this path but you. And if you wanna argue about people not deserving things, how about we talk about a freakin’ janitor making first contact?”
She sighed lightly, and I thought I felt her tears ebb. “You may have a point, I suppose.”
“Exactly. So, no more of this self-deprecation, and more self-celebration.”
“Sure, but you first.”
I chuckled slightly. “Alright, you and me both may have a habit of chronically downplaying and doubting ourselves. In fact, Eske lectured me on it recently.”
“Did she? She certainly seems to have deciphered the dynamics of the group rather quickly. I suppose we’re lucky that it was her, out of anyone, that just happened to fall asleep in the ship.”
“Huh, yeah. I just keep worrying that one day that luck will run out.”
We fell quiet after that, and I just listened to my heart beat against her head. She still hadn’t quite figured out that particular human trait, but I didn’t mind.
“Higgens?”
“Yes?” I answered.
“What are we doing?”
“Well, right now, we’re lying down.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. We kissed. We have…feelings for each other. What does that mean? What do we do?”
“Oh, um…” Here it was, the question that I had been asking myself over and over and over again. And now I needed to answer it, but I was no closer to the resolution than I was before. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nope. I don’t. But we’ve figured everything else out on our own, so we might as well do the same for this.”
“I… Just… This seems different. I’ve tried looking up romance in the files we have and the reports I found were…conflicting, at best. Some describe it as purely a hormonal reaction, but I feel these same things when I am in my own body and don’t have any of the same hormones that I have in this form.
“Some describe it as this physical interaction with interlocking parts, but I—”
“Yeah, you can ignore those. The, uh, physical part isn’t always necessary. Sometimes it is important, but never mandatory.”
“I see. And what you say makes sense, but what doesn’t is the dozens and dozens of different definitions these things have. I just don’t understand what the protocol is, or what we’re supposed to do.”
I shook my head slightly. “Who would have thought that the little spikey thing that I found in the hold of a mining ship would turn out to be such an overthinker.”
“Perhaps I wouldn’t have to overthink if our paths weren’t so complicated.”
“Fair.” I pulled her tighter to my chest, knowing that I couldn’t really hurt her. “Complicated or not, I’m happy as long as you’re here, and I’ll fight as hard as I can to make sure we’re never separated again.”
“If I didn’t know better, I would say that you’re making a promise.”
I pressed a singular, soft kiss against her forehead. “I am. I may not get how this interspecies thing is supposed to work, or what these feelings mean we’re supposed to do, but what I do know is that I’m never leaving you again. No matter what these aliens bring, you’ve got me.”
“And you have me,” she said with a long, contented sigh. “You should probably get some sleep.”
“Sure,
but only if you promise to be here in the morning,” I countered.
“I really should get to work…”
I set my chin on her head, letting out a very un-masculine whine. “Please? We have so few nights left together.”
“That’s awfully pessimistic of you.”
I shrugged. “You know that’s a possibility. A strong possibility.”
“And you’re still here. You could just hop into your spaceship and fly away.”
“That would defeat the purpose of me stealing them for you, wouldn’t it?”
“That is very true.”
I felt her relax in her arms and her skin grow warm and steely. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that she was melting into her original form. I didn’t mind at all, of course. Mimic was Mimic, no matter what form she took.
And like that, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
5
Touch the Sky
I looked nervously at the controls below me. I could hear Bahn and Ciangi arguing over the comms and it was enough to tie me down to reality before my mind went off into a terrible scenario of horrible space crashes or spiraling through the atmosphere in a fire tornado.
After a whole lot of explanation and showing us what was what, it was finally time for some pilot training. We were all going to have assistance from the various software that Bahn and Ciangi had integrated, but there was still plenty that we would have to do on our own.
“Is everyone ready?” Ciangi asked through the speaker.
“Yeah,” Gonzales’s voice answered her. “Just wondering how you ended up with the good luck of staying on the ground while all of us are risking our lives in space.”
“Hey, someone’s gotta stay on the ground and run this thing,” Ciangi said with almost sing-songy sweetness. “And last time I checked, that weapons engineering degree didn’t exactly come with a programming aspect, so…”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Just know that if I end up getting blown up in the great void, you better be the one throwing me one heck of a funeral.”
Mimic Goes to War (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 5) Page 3