Mech (imperium)

by V. B. Larson

  The humans were speechless for a moment. Then they all choked on their dinners, near to vomiting. Dev held back the urge, however, too angry to give in to retching. Instead he walked into the ruin of his barn and his livelihood, shouting inarticulately for whatever had done this to come out.

  Uncle Rolf put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “You go back to the house now, boy,” he said. “You tell your mom to get the militia on the net and bring them out here.”

  Jimmy nodded and stumbled back toward the light and safety of the house. On the way, he vomited into the well shaft.

  The two men squinted up at the roof and examined the loft carefully. “There,” said Uncle Rolf, pointed toward a patch of black sky visible through a hole in the roof. He wiped acidic bile from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Whatever it was, it probably entered and left through that hole.”

  “Not big enough for a landshark, not even a small one,” said Dev doubtfully. “Besides, a ‘shark couldn’t climb up there.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Uncle Rolf while the two men warily approached the hole and stood beneath it. “I’ve seen ‘em scuttle right up a hork tree after a howler. Anyway, it must have jumped down into the orchard on that side of the barn. Probably, used one of the trees to get up there.”

  Uncle Rolf would have said more, but Dev held up his hand for silence. Both of them listened. There came a sound from the trees outside the barn, the sound of crackling branches. Walking quickly and quietly, the two men left the barn. Uncle Rolf paused to grab up a heavy wrecking bar that hung near the entrance. He hefted it experimentally, feeling the weight of it.

  Outside it was cold and a fresh breeze had come up. The cool air blowing in their faces helped lift the drug-induced fog from their minds. They stalked the source of the sound, following it into the orchard. Gopus was just coming over the peaks of the Polar Range to the north, and it provided a bluish light that filtered through the finger-like branches. A tree creaked with the weight of a moving body, the sound coming from deeper in the orchard. Perspiring despite the cold, they followed it.

  Dev saw something ahead, a shadowy form that flittered from behind one tree trunk to another, crossing their path. He halted, raising his gun.

  “What is it?” whispered his brother.

  Dev didn’t answer. Above them a branch creaked, then snapped. A few twigs fluttered down from above, swirling about in the wind.

  “It’s above us!” shouted Rolf, holding his wrecking bar over his head.

  Dev’ shotgun boomed, more twigs showered down and a dark shape fell out of the tree and landed with a heavy thump.

  They jogged forward to the fallen body. “It’s one of your dogs.”

  “The head’s missing,” Rolf pointed out unnecessarily. “Where’s the head?”

  They found it laying a few feet away. The lips were curled back in a permanent snarl.

  “It’s Shaker, dammit,” said Dev, “a good dog.”

  Rolf was examining the tree above them. “Look,” he said, pointing to more shapes up in the tree. “They’re all hanging by wires. The same wire you use to run the fences, I’d warrant.”

  For the first time they knew real fear. Above them hung Dev’s whole pack of seven dogs, minus Shaker who lay at their feet. Dev swung the shotgun barrel about in wide arcs, aiming into the trees and cursing.

  There were more sounds of creaking branches directly ahead of them. Almost immediately afterward, a gray shape moved through the shadows off to the left. Another rustling sound came from the trees to the right a moment later. “There must be more than one, I just saw something up ahead a second ago. Nothing could move back up into the trees so fast.”

  “They’re stalking us,” said Rolf with mild surprise in his voice.

  Without thinking, the two men stood back to back, their boots buried in wet grass. They breathed in visible gushes of white mist. Their heads swiveled rapidly, trying to pick up any significant movement in the dim light.

  Suddenly, a shape dropped down from a nearby tree and ran toward them for a moment before darting behind another tree trunk.

  “What the hell-” Dev said, swinging his shotgun into line. He fired, scarring the tree trunk with a gash of white wood in the dark pool of bark. They advanced on the tree the creature had gone behind, wrecking bar and shotgun upraised. Dev jerked his head, indicating that Rolf should go forward and flush the creature from behind the tree trunk with his wrecking bar. Rolf hesitated for a moment, but as he was the younger of the two and accustomed to following Dev’s lead, he did it. He moved through the grass with the wrecking bar cocked over his shoulder like a rayball player swinging for a double.

  He came around the far side of the tree with a growl, swinging the wrecking bar with killing force. It struck the bark with a dull thunk, stinging his hands. There was nothing there.

  “Did you get it?” asked Dev.

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Dev said in amazement, stepping around the tree with the shotgun leveled. While Rolf sagged against the trunk and waited for his heart to slow down, Dev examined the bark and the dirt at the foot of the tree. “It was here, see these claw marks? And they go up the tree, too. The thing just ran up this tree like a goddamn howler.”

  Rolf snapped erect and backed away from the tree quickly. “Do you see it up there?”

  Both of them stared up into the treetops, but saw nothing. Rolf heard a swishing sound off to his right, behind Dev. Dev stiffened, making a strange sound. A gray blade-like object protruded from his belly for a moment, and then it was withdrawn. Slumping against the tree trunk, he sagged down to his knees. Behind him stood the creature.

  It resembled a giant lizard of some kind, with gray reptilian skin. There was no visible hair, horns or claws except for the blades of hard black material that sheathed the feet. It had run Dev through with one of these machete-like blades. The creature stood at least seven feet high on long powerful hind legs. Two short, wiry forelimbs each ended in three opposing fingers that had a sinuous, rubbery look to them. It had no head, but rather from the top of its torso sprouted several ropy-looking stalks and a cluster of mandibles above an open maw for eating. The stalks floated about and appeared to direct themselves in unison. Their behavior immediately suggested that the bulbs terminating the stalks were eyes or at least that they were sensory organs of some kind.

  Rolf swung his wrecking bar for the creature’s head-area, or at least for the spot where the waving stalks sprouted. The creature danced away and disappeared into the trees.

  Snatching up his shotgun, Rolf took a moment to check on his brother.

  Still hugging the rough black bark, pressing his cheek against it, Dev was dying. He choked on blood, then stopped breathing altogether. The light of Gopus glinted in his dead eyes.

  Too scared to feel grief, Rolf snatched up Dev’s shotgun. He began to run for the house. Something came up behind him, and then it paced him, running through the trees to his right. Then it vanished again, and appeared over to the left. With sudden clarity of thought, he realized it was playing with him, that it had been simply probing-testing for reaction the whole time.

  He fired a wild blast at the dark shape, hoping for luck. He got it. The creature was bowled off its odd feet. It rolled through the wet grass that carpeted the orchard. Showing a horrible vitality, it sprang back up again, like a tumbler at the end of a run.

  Rolf stopped and tried to take advantage of his lucky shot. He fired again, but this time he missed. Black dirt and grass fountained behind the creature. It charged him. Even as he heard the click of the next shell being automatically spring-loaded into the firing chamber, he realized he would never get off another shot. Perhaps if he hadn’t smoked the second pipeful of swamp-reed, or if he had been less surprised, he wouldn’t have missed so badly. But he had and now the thing was on him.

  The thing snatched the shotgun from his grasp as effortlessly as Rolf himself had snatched a jax-goad from Jimmy’s hands earlier t
hat very day. In almost the same fluid motion, the thing made a flying kick for his head. The bladed foot swept up, caught Rolf under the chin, and cleanly decapitated him. His head and body fell in separate directions.

  Showing its lack of familiarity with the human anatomy, the killbeast pointed the shotgun at the headless corpse, found the trigger with its odd rubbery fingers, and fired several times in rapid succession.

  Jimmy, hearing the shots in the orchard, reached the house at a dead run. He entered the backdoor and was swept up in the welcoming arms of his mother.

  “Sarah! Bili! There’s some kinda monster out there!” he sobbed into his mother’s dress. “It killed the jaxes!”

  Sarah and Bili exchanged terrified glances. Sarah wrapped her arms around her Bili’s neck and shoulders, squeezing him tight.

  “You two know what he’s on about, don’t you?” demanded Sasha Herkart. Her eyes squinted with suspicion; her otherwise comely face went taunt with dark lines. “You know about this. You came out of the forest like something was chasing you. Now you’ve brought it here!”

  Outside, there was a renewed screaming from the jaxes milling about the yard. Something was among them, something was killing them. Sarah listened but there were no human sounds. There were no more shots, no more shouts, and the men didn’t come back.

  “Where’s the cellar?” Sarah asked, heading for the kitchen. On the way past the home public-net terminal, she pressed the emergency call button three times and kept going. The woman followed, not seeming to hear the question.

  “My man is out there fighting that thing. You should be out there. Those jaxes are all we have,” her voice wavered and she was trembling.

  Sarah found the door to the cellar and she took Bili down the steps with her. Sasha and Jimmy stood at the top of the steps, uncertain. Jimmy rubbed at the spacer’s watch that Bili had given him as a present. His eyes were big and wet looking.

  “Come down, we must hide,” called Sarah. She and Bili moved crates of wine away from the walls to make room for them to hide beneath the stairway. Sarah had her gun out and the safety was off.

  “No,” said Sasha. “I’m going to get Dev.”

  “Don’t do it,” said Sarah. The two locked eyes for a moment. Sarah could see the battle of emotions running through the woman. Jimmy, two years younger than Bili, began to cry. Suddenly, he turned and raced through the kitchen and out the backdoor. Sasha ran after him.

  Sarah sprinted up the stairs after them, but hesitated at the top of the steps. The door had shut itself, so she opened it a crack, her pistol leveled. Bili waited behind her, panting in the dark. In the kitchen she could see the net terminal’s screen flare into life, it was the militia duty-sergeant, wanting to know what the trouble was. There was no one to answer him.

  Sarah screwed up her courage and readied a simple plan of action. She would order the woman and her child back into the cellar at gunpoint and they would all wait for the militia. The militia could handle this. They had to handle it.

  Two shotgun blasts rang out in the yard. Sarah’s plans crumbled. She and her son just stood there in the dark at the top of the cellar steps. Although she wanted to go further, a deep dread stopped her. It was as if an invisible wall, a barrier had sprung up at the top of the stairway. She couldn’t will herself to go further. After what she had seen in the forest, that creature, swimming through tough roots and stony soil like a walrus swimming through dirt, somehow she couldn’t bring herself to follow. She didn’t want to see any more aliens. She wanted to forget that she had seen anything at all.

  When sounds finally did come, they were the stealthy, furtive sounds of something coming in from the night outside, quietly opening the backdoor. Taking great care lest the stairs creak, and cursing silently every time they did, they made their way back down into the black cellar on wobbly legs. Crawling into the alcove they had made beneath the stairway, Sarah and Bili pulled sacks over their bodies and rested their backs against a lumpy wall of preserved tubers.

  Overhead, they could hear the creature as it roamed the house. The timbers creaked beneath its heavy tread, giving away its otherwise silent movements. After a quick survey of the house, the killbeast left, as yet not familiar enough with human dwellings to realize that there was probably a cellar worth investigating.

  Outside, under the shining eye of Gopus, a pair of trachs moved among the dead. The trachs were table-like creatures with four powerful legs and a single, massive claw that they used to load the carcasses on their wide, flat backs. Their squat bodies were slow-moving, but fantastically strong, able to carry or drag thirty times their own weight. They were very thorough, preferring to head back to the nest only when they could carry no greater a load up the mountain. They picked the place clean of protoplasm, including the gibbets on the walls of the barn and the shorn limbs in the yard that glistened in the moonlight.

  At last they made their final trip back to the tunnel entrances, stumping away toward the breach in the electric fence with the killbeast protectively hovering near, sensory organs quivering. Behind them the bodies of the jaxes, dogs and humans were gone. Only the bloodstains were left behind as evidence of the slaughter.

  Deep beneath the polar mountains near New Grunstein, the Parent received her first nife commander while ensconced on her birthing throne. Approximately every two minutes she shifted her uncomfortably bloated body to a new position and released another larva from her birthing chambers. She was in full production now, with all four chambers working around the clock. Her birthing orifices had already grown quite sore.

  The nife commander, fresh from the cocoon, was overconfident, overzealous and talkative. He was the first of his kind on Garm. The only true males of the Imperium, the nife leaders were the field commanders of the race. The Parents themselves ruled over them, of course, but often accepted the judgment of a trusted nife in military matters.

  The nife swaggered up to the birthing throne, his exo-skin still glistening with the slimes of his cocoon. The Parent’s orbs tracked him carefully. Just to see him, after so long with no companionship other than the boring killbeasts and the nearly mindless trachs, sent a shiver through the Parent’s digesters. Here was stimulation of an entirely different sort.

  “Welcome, offspring.”

  “My birth was long in coming, but none the less glorious for it,” replied the nife with a flourish. “You are a welcome sight to my orbs as well, my Parent. Clearly, you are no loose-fleshed immaculate at the end of an over-stretched life span. You glisten with youth and beauty.”

  The Parent ruffled her tentacles, affected by the nife’s words in spite of herself. It was good to hear praise again; especially when she felt it was true. She was, after all, still quite young physically. She felt that the years spent in cyro-sleep couldn’t truly be counted. “You flatter me in good taste, I am proud to have birthed you,” she replied formally.

  “I will go further,” declared the nife, immediately growing exuberant at her approval. “I intend to capture this world and bear it back to this historic nest-site on the backs of ten thousand trachs. My glories shall outshine those of the Imperium’s Ancients, and lastly,”-he paused dramatically and extended his stalks so far toward the roof of the throne chamber that the Parent half-expected to see his orbs to pop out of their cusps, “I will win the right to meld with you and conceive the Imperium’s next generation of Parents!”

  The Parent made a shocked sucking noise with her food-tube. “You overstep yourself! You are beyond the boundaries of decorum!”

  “But my ambitions are boundless!”

  “Your ambitions are the foolish dreams of the inexperienced,” the Parent snapped back severely. “Only I will choose whom I am melded with.”

  “Of course, I meant only to state my goals.”

  “You are fortunate that you are the first of your kind,” continued the Parent, her frontal clump of tentacles lashing the air in idle irritation. “There is no one for me to promote over you for your impro
priety.”

  Crestfallen, the nife seemed to shrink somewhat. His stalks drooped, and his orbs retreated again into his cusps. “I beg forgiveness.”

  “I grant my forgiveness. Don’t presume upon my good favor again, however. Now, we must have a tasting of the fresh flesh the trachs are bringing in. Some of it may not be fit for the larvae to eat.”

  “And some of it may be good enough to set apart for us,” amended the nife. His spirits and his stalks were on the rise again, seemingly he had already put the recent rebuke out of his mind.

  While they were eating, delicately selecting chunks from the back of a patient trach, the Parent continued to gestate new offspring. With great regularity, more offspring larvae were unceremoniously birthed, coming out squirming and hungry into the chute behind the birthing throne. As soon as they appeared a small spider-like creature known as a hest trotted up on numerous churning feet and carried it away to its own individual supply of food, safely away from other ravenously hungry larvae. Located beneath the Parent’s four dripping orifices, the birthing chute was slick with amber resins. The resins produced a vile pungency that permeated the throne chamber.

  “Exactly what are our strengths?” asked the Nife professionally, in military matters his genetics took over and he functioned well, despite his incredibly young age. “How many effective killbeasts, juggers and umulks do we have?”

  “The initial complement upon landing was only six effectives.”

  “Six?” asked the nife, incredulous. He almost dropped the shaggy jax haunch he had been gnawing on.

  The Parent took a moment to slip her food tube into the skull of a jax and slurp out a good portion of the brain before continuing. “Of the task force only our one ship made it through. Fortunately, we have yet to encounter serious resistance. Our original complement included an arl, a killbeast, two trachs, an umulk and a culus with her ingrown shrade. Of that group, we lost only the arl in a planned diversionary maneuver.”