by Isaac Hooke
“It sounded good to me at the time...” Bender said. “You know, cause I got so much pussy in my university days... basically wallowing in it.”
“Yeah man you’re so cool, you got lots of pussy,” Fret said. “What else did you get, chlamydia? Herpes?”
“The words of a jealous hater,” Bender said. “You know there are cures for those, right? Bet you wish you got as much pussy as I did... I’d enter a bar and women would basically come up to me and pull down their panties. Wallowing in pussy. Ah, those were the days. Anyway, I couldn’t call myself the Pussywallow now, could I? That would have been bragging too much. So I went with willow.”
“Pussywillow!” Manic was rolling on the ground, seeming unable to breath from all his hoarse laughter.
“You know he’s never going to let you live that down, right?” Fret said. “Actually, none of us will. Run for your lives! The dreaded Pussywillow has joined the chat room!”
“Ah shut up, bitch,” Bender said. He went to sit beside Tahoe, who pretended he wasn’t interested in the conversation. “Some days I wonder why I bother to watch their backs. I should just let the aliens devour them. They take a perfectly good alias and ruin it. I was a frickin’ awesome Pussywillow.”
“I’m sure you were.” Tahoe patted Bender on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” Bender said. “At least someone appreciates the effort I put into the name.”
“Not really,” Tahoe said. It sounded like he was holding back a laugh himself.
“Argonauts,” Rade said, finishing an energy bar he had found in one of the cupboards. “Tighten the range of your Implants and jumpsuit comm nodes. I don’t want any of our signals passing outside this kitchen.”
He decreased his own range, then pulled up the signal spectrum histogram on his HUD and watched as it halved in size, indicating the reduction he had asked for.
“I’m setting my alarm for five hours from now,” Rade continued. “Which coincides with the time of the dome’s simulated nightfall. Rest until then. Centurions, you’re on watch. Guard the two entrances to this room.”
“Do you want us to patrol the perimeter of the entire office?” Unit A asked.
“No,” Rade said. “If the spiders come, I want to hide, not fight. Remember, we don’t want to alert the swarm that we’re here.”
“So the Centurions are on watch,” Lui said. “But what about the rest of us?”
“Those of you that feel like racking out, do so,” Rade said.
It was too early for Rade to rack out himself. He didn’t feel sleepy at all. Nor did he entirely feel like caving out. His mind was completely in the present moment. Active, alert, wary of an attack. How could he relax when he was in the middle of a colony that was falling to alien invaders?
Rade sat next to Shaw, who was seated close to Batindo, Kato and the nurse.
“Earlier, you mentioned something about a long road from the wild savannas where you were born to here,” Shaw was telling Batindo. “I take it you were born on Earth?”
“Yes,” Batindo said. “I’m an Earther. But ever since I was a child, I’d always dreamed of making my way into space. When I graduated university, I took the first space-based job available to me: a diplomat posting on the moon. From there, I worked myself into a consular position, and was transferred to Talan Station. Been there every since.”
“Was Talon Station everything you dreamed of?” Shaw asked.
“No,” Batindo said. “I wanted to explore the stars. It seemed so romantic to me. Instead I was stuck on that station. I can’t tell you how excited I was to journey with you. But now I’ve realized I may have been over-romanticizing it. Traveling the stars isn’t as enjoyable as I thought. In fact, it’s downright terrifying.”
“Space can be a terrible place,” Rade agreed. “But it can also be... eye-opening. Whenever I journey to a new system, I can’t help but feel a sense of wonder. I ask myself how these planets got here. Who inhabits them, if they’re colonized. What kind of native species we might find, if the planets host alien life. And in a system like this, when I see an uncharted Slipstream that has no Gate built in front of it, I wonder, what resides on the other side of that Slipstream? Are there aliens? And if so, are they friendly, or are they hostile?”
“Well, in this case we’ve learned they are the latter,” Tahoe said.
“Not so fast,” Lui said. “This Phant may have convinced them we were aggressors in some way. Told them we were colonizing this planet as a stepping stone to conquering the neighboring system.”
“Or maybe the Phant offered them a weapon, in exchange for assistance,” Surus said. “The Phant would have sensed me when I arrived. He would have known I was hunting him. And he became desperate, wanting a way out.”
“Why not just wait until the mercenary vessels arrived?” Lui said. “Then the Phant could have taken a shuttle to one of their ships, and escaped.”
“Perhaps the Phant decided he did not have time,” Surus said. “The mercenaries were still a few days away. Meanwhile, these aliens were apparently hiding closer at hand. Behind one of the four stars, maybe, confirming my theory that the Phant was in contact with these aliens for some time. When I arrived, the Phant may have panicked, and told the aliens they needed to accelerate their plans if they wanted to get their hands on whatever he offered.”
The conversation slowly fizzled out, and the team rested. It only took about twenty minutes before the premade contents of the vending machine had been eaten—Bender had the machine 3D-print several more items, but he soon depleted the internal stock of raw foodstuffs. When you had a team of men as muscular as the Argonauts, appetites were not small. Rade decided he would make further stops on the different floors below to raid the kitchens, in lieu of rationing the meal replacements installed within their jumpsuits.
Three hours passed without any disturbances.
And then something happened.
fifteen
Rade had joined the robots by the door to observe the office area, paying particular attention to the blast shields. He had placed one of the kitchen chairs near the entrance and sat in it, keeping most of his body behind the door frame. He had modified the arm assemblies of his suit to act as makeshift bipods and arm rests, essentially hardening the exoskeleton so he could fully lean on it with the weight of his arms and not exhaust the muscles. He held his rifle out in front of him, and slowly pivoted his torso from left to right as he scanned the office beyond.
The Argonauts remained quiet behind him, resting and keeping to themselves, saving their energy for when it would be needed. Tahoe had joined the robots guarding the opposite entrance.
Rade found it strangely easy to focus, which he attributed to his years of training. He preferred watch duty to idling on the floor and waiting for the designated night time to come: at least it felt like he was doing something. And he still felt no desire to cave out. A good sign.
All was silent out there. It seemed the enemy was going to overlook them after all.
And then he heard a soft banging coming from his right.
Rade spun his rifle in that direction, toward the blast shield covering the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Units A, B—” Rade began, but before he could finish he heard a woosh, and his faceplate slammed shut. His body was drawn forward so that he fell out of the chair; he disabled his locked exoskeleton so that he could catch himself before he hit the floor.
“The office area has depressurized,” Unit A said.
Rade was lying on the floor half outside the kitchen, staring into the open area where the cubicles resided. He spun his head to the right, toward the cone of artificial sunlight that now shone into the office building. The blast shield on the far wall was riddled with a diagonal line of touching bore holes, and a spider was forcing open the resultant gash and crawling inside.
It hadn’t seen Rade yet, he didn’t think. He hastily shoved himself back into the kitchen.
“Got a spider!” he said over th
e comm.
He glanced at the vital signs of the others—all green, including the civilians. The AIs had shut the faceplates in time.
The robots remained in position by the kitchen door, just out of the alien’s view. That wouldn’t last for long.
Rade glanced at the ceiling; it was composed of a grid of flat metal supports with square panels set in between them.
“Those panels are removable...” Rade said.
“Think the metal framework can support our weight?” Tahoe asked.
“It’s going to have to,” Rade said. “Argonauts, follow my lead!”
Rade leaped onto the countertop beside the fridge—with a helping hand from his jetpack—and then reached up to dislodge the panel directly above him. He pushed it inward, and then slid the panel from view, revealing a dark hole that contained various PVC conduits and pipes.
Rade grasped the flat metal supports and, hoping that they would hold his weight, he pulled himself up. The supports bent slightly, but held.
“Send up the civilians next,” Rade ordered.
The environmental suits didn’t have jetpacks, so once the Kenyans attained the countertop, Rade reached down to help them up in turn. As the Kenyans moved into the inner crawlspace of the ceiling with him, he told them: “Try to stay on top of the metal grid. I’m not sure the panels by themselves will support your weight.”
The Argonauts and combat robots scrambled into the claustrophobic confines after them, forcing Rade and the Kenyans to worm ever deeper into the dark crawlspace to make room.
As Rade advanced, he kept expecting the aliens to race into the kitchen at any moment and begin executing his brothers. So far that hadn’t happened. But tell that to his racing heart.
Rade obeyed his own advice, sticking to the metal bars illuminated by his headlamp. The panels below were crowded against each other, and didn’t shift much when he placed his weight along their edges. The conduits overhead occasionally caught at his bulky jetpack, and he had to halt and reach up to unsnag himself.
When everyone had gathered into the ceiling crawlspace, Tahoe, the last one up, replaced the original panel Rade had dislodged. Tahoe left the panel open a tiny crack, allowing him a view of half of the kitchen and one of the entrances. Rade knew, because he had tapped into Tahoe’s video; he minimized that feed, placing it in the upper right of his vision.
“Headlamps off,” Rade said. “Disable Implants and jumpsuit comm nodes as well. I want complete radio silence. No signals of any kind. Turn them on again when I reactivate my headlamp, or the alien attacks. Whichever comes first. Meanwhile, sit tight, and leave the panels where they are.”
The confines became pitch black as headlamps deactivated throughout the squad. Rade disabled the adhoc networking functions of his Implant and jumpsuit, and Tahoe’s feed vanished. Rade had already instructed the Argonauts to reduce the signal output to restrict the comm range to the kitchen, but now he was cutting out the team’s EM emissions entirely. It was possible the aliens couldn’t detect human comm signals, but he wasn’t going to bet his life, nor the lives of his team members, on it.
Rade selected a panel half a meter in front of him and opened it a crack, partially revealing the kitchen below. He slowly lifted his rifle forward, braced his elbows on one of the metal supports, and aimed the scope through the crack. He had a good view of the entrance on the far side of the room, opposite the doorway Tahoe watched.
The tense moments passed. In the adjacent room, he caught sight of the spider as it plowed through the cubicle separators, upturning desks along the way. Its behavior almost seemed angry, but Rade knew it was a mistake to assign human emotions to the alien. What he called angry may have been the creature’s natural state.
And then the alien, apparently growing weary with its wanton destruction of the external office space, turned its attention on the kitchen. It literally ran right up to the opening, as if noticing it for the first time, and then plunged its thick head inside. It placed its forelimbs onto the left and right sides of the entrance like fingers and pulled its large body through.
Rade was reminded of something he had seen in his youth: a long-legged tarantula, emerging sideways from its slit of a nest in the desert sand, an image that had stayed with him for all of his life.
Rade hadn’t expected the alien to fit that doorway, but it seemed able to compress its body to a high degree, and as it emerged into the kitchen he involuntarily shuddered. He noted that it didn’t carry the usual weapon turrets strapped to its abdomen like the others of its kind; he supposed it was a scout unit of some kind, not meant to engage with targets except at absolute close range. If it had in fact come there with a turret, it was possible it had shucked it off somewhere in the office, so that it could squeeze through the smaller entrances, like the current doorway.
The spider twisted itself so that its sideways body was once more flat on the floor. Now that he had a chance to study it up close, Rade saw that while it didn’t carry a weapon turret, it was in fact porting some sort of tank on its thorax region. He guessed the alien used that for respiration, or teleportation. Maybe both.
Long, thick black hairs covered the rest of its body, including the five pairs of segmented legs. The hairs became sharp spurs near the feet of those legs, forming claws or gripping extensions of sorts. Small devices were attached to the knee areas, and connected by a thin wire that formed a threaded circle around the creature. Rade guessed it was the alien equivalent of a strength-enhancing exoskeleton.
The head and thorax seemed fused into a single unit, attached to that round abdomen. The mandibles were made of four crushing organs, large blade-like protrusions from the head that had the ability to fold and unfold like a deadly blossom; the mandibles opened and closed very slowly as he watched. Several small dots on the head might have been eyes, or ears.
The creature remained still, its thorax rising and falling out of sync with the blossoming mandibles, as if breathing the atmosphere provided by the portable tank.
Rade kept his rifle aimed at its center of mass. He was ready to fire. He didn’t want to fight here. Didn’t want to potentially reveal their position and bring down the whole swarm on them. But if he had to...
The alien vaulted forward in a sudden spurt, rending the coffee table in two and making Rade start. He tracked the spider with his scope, watching it leap onto the fridge and tear the container to the ground. The vending machine was the next object of its wrath, which suffered a similar fate. The absolute silence of the whole thing imbued an eerie, almost surreal quality to the scene.
The alien moved noiselessly over the broken glass and steel, probing with two thick forelimbs that appeared to serve the dual purpose of feelers and limbs. It slowly edged forward, making its way toward the opposite exit. It would be coming into the view of Tahoe’s scope soon, if it hadn’t already.
As the spider continued advancing, for a moment Rade thought it was done with its sweep of the room.
But then it paused and retreated two steps to the far wall, where the table had been.
It stabbed upward in a blur, striking the ceiling panels and startling Rade anew. It tore through, pulling down a humanoid figure. Rade feared it was one of his own at first, but he realized the newcomer wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit, but rather a business suit. His exposed skin had turned deep black, the limbs frozen in place.
It was some stranger who had been hiding there in the ceiling all that time. Someone Rade and the others hadn’t noticed, who had died when the office depressurized.
Rade had almost reactivated his Implant when he believed it was one of their own the alien was attacking, and was relieved he had not. Hopefully Tahoe hadn’t either. Judging from the alien’s behavior, it seemed likely his friend had maintained radio silence. Maybe Tahoe couldn’t even see what was happening. If so, he was lucky.
The alien stabbed its long legs into the corpse, then buried its folded mandibles into the chest until they protruded from the dead man’s back. Tho
se mandibles blossomed open, splitting the body in two. Red mist evaporated into the air.
The alien dove onto the upper portion of the body, those jaws moving back and forth slightly as if chewing, and then it violently spat out the material. It seemed angry, and proceeded to dismember the body into a gory pulp with its legs.
When nothing recognizable remained of the man, the alien departed.
Rade waited a full half hour before turning on his headlamp, signaling the others to reactivate the networking components of their Implants. He rebooted his own network, careful to limit the range to the kitchen.
“Why the hell didn’t we realize that guy was hiding in here?” Tahoe said.
Apparently he had seen the incident after all.
“What guy?” Manic asked. Besides Rade and Tahoe, no one else would have been peering through the roof panels.
“Switch to my viewpoint,” Tahoe said. “And you’ll see.”
“Ugh, that’s disgusting,” Fret said.
“Considering where he dropped from,” Lui said. “He had to have crawled past a bunch of PVC pipes, which would have blocked him from view, at least from up here. Look at how dense the conduits are to the left of us.”
“How did the alien know he was there?” Manic said.
“Must have smelled him,” Lui said. “When you die in the void, your skin molecules are going to flake off.”
“But why the hell did it have to do that to him?” Fret said. “Dismembering him like that.”
“Guess it wanted to make sure the man was dead,” Harlequin said.
“I could swear it took a taste before acting up,” Tahoe said. “It sampled the man, then spat him out. That’s when it really got riled up. It’s like it got mad that he wasn’t edible.”
“Of course we’re not edible,” Lui said. “I’m not sure why it even bothered to try. Our lipids and proteins are probably poisonous to the thing.”
“Maybe it hopes that if it keeps trying, someday it might be able to eat one of us?” Manic said.