Mech (imperium)

by V. B. Larson

  Sarah felt a sudden added weight on her shoulders. She had been so concerned about Bili that she had blanked out all the recent events with Mudface and Daddy. She shivered, although the air in the tunnel was surprisingly warm, even hot. She noticed that her clothes were still wet from the pool, which meant that she couldn’t have slept too long. Now that she was more fully awake, she realized just how much pain she was in. Being murdered and then brought back to life played hell with your body. She felt like a bruised lump of overripe fruit.

  “Daddy’s here? What about Mudface?”

  “They offed him,” said Bili, sounding positively cheerful. “It was enough to make me cheer for their side. Almost.”

  Sarah was again taken by a wave of guilt. This whole situation was her fault. She had gone for the money by dealing with Mudface and Daddy in the first place. She had even given the aliens her ticket for a ride down to the planet when they needed it. Worst of all, she had dragged Bili into all this with her, her own son.

  “Oh, Bili,” she said, her voice weak in the darkness. “I’m so sorry for getting you into this.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. Besides, I’m the one you did it for. I guess I’ll never get that regrow for my arm now.”

  In the blackness, Sarah let tears run down her face, but she didn’t make a sound. It would only upset Bili.

  After an unknowable length of time, during which Daddy made fitful mewling noises and breathed like a smithy’s bellows, they reached an opening. Sarah could feel the wash of moving air, the different reflection of sound.

  “We must be in some kind of big chamber,” she said.

  “You think this is where they’re going to eat us?” asked Bili.

  Sarah blinked rapidly in the darkness. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, why else would they drag us down here?” asked Bili reasonably. “These things are just like the bone-cutter ants down in the jungles around Bauru. They dig tunnels, attack everything that moves, carry food back to the nest on their backs.”

  Sarah could think of nothing to say. The boy was probably right.

  After crossing the great chamber, which took long enough to convince Sarah that it was truly huge, they reentered a smaller side tunnel again. Soon they became aware of a growing glow of light from down the tunnel. Sarah raised her head and saw the dim outline of her son, crouching on the next animal up ahead.

  The column stopped, and they were unceremoniously tossed into a shaft that branched off from the tunnel. Inside was a small, low chamber, perhaps thirty feet deep, six feet wide and three feet high. The room contained several people, in the midst of whom sat a tiny, portable glow-lamp, which was the source of the illumination.

  They turned to look back at the beast of burden and were just in time to scramble out of the way as the massive form of Daddy rolled into the cramped chamber. At the entrance, one of the carrying types levered a heavy thickness of some kind of transparent material into the opening. Another type that they hadn’t seen before, a small spidery creature with many eyes and appendages, squirted a substance around the border of the transparent material, sealing them in.

  “Let me introduce myself,” said a resonant, half-familiar voice behind her. “I’m-. ”

  Sarah and Bili had turned around to face the speaker. They all three froze.

  It was ex-Governor Rodney Zimmerman.

  Before she knew what she was doing, Sarah had punched him in the face. His head jerked up, striking the roof of the low chamber. She followed up with a kick to the belly that probably hurt her sore body as much as it did Rodney, but the effect was gratifying. He rolled on the tunnel floor, groaning and trying to get away from her.

  “Restrain her!” he shouted to the others, his nose bubbling blood. “She’s a murderess, she and the brat. Killed a whole farming family and-Ow!”

  Bili had produced a rock from somewhere and bounced it off the ex-Governor’s tender nose. “The aliens got that family, you bastard!” shouted Bili. “The same way they got us now.”

  Muttering something about treason, Rodney withdrew to the rear of the chamber and squatted there.

  Sarah and Bili pulled back from the rest of them, which was almost impossible in the cramped chamber. She did her best to avoid both Daddy and the ex-Governor. The other miserable-looking people in the chamber made no threatening moves against them.

  Sarah, head still pounding, curled herself protectively around Bili, as she hadn’t done since the accident when he had lost his arm. She watched the others closely. There were eight people in the chamber, including themselves, Daddy, Rodney Zimmerman and four others. She turned her attention to the ones she didn’t know. There were two women, a little girl and a tall thin man with a pallid face and long limp hair that was so blond it was almost white. She noted the red streak across his face and knew him to be a skald, a member of a peculiar religious sect of Garmish origin.

  The skald looked particularly distressed by his captivity. His body was frequently racked with spasms of twisting motion, seemingly without purpose. His eyes were haunting holes of blackness. The others were doing their best to avoid him.

  “I’m Sarah and this is my son, Bili,” Sarah said experimentally, addressing the women. The women and the little girl huddled together, making no attempt to reply. They did turn their eyes on her, however, and the darkness she saw in them made her wonder what horrors they might have witnessed.

  Sarah assumed they were related to one another. They were squat and strong-bodied New Manchurians, with the look of the land about them. Sarah was reminded of the farmer’s wife, Sasha. A cloud passed over her face and she shivered in the sweaty cell, thinking about the bloody mess the aliens had left behind after attacking the farm. Could Sasha and Timmy still be alive down here somewhere? The thought cheered her a bit, although she didn’t know why, given the grim situation.

  Bili soon had had enough of her mothering and pulled away from her embrace, moving to the entrance. He circumnavigated Daddy and inspected the seal the aliens had made.

  “It’s like safety-glass,” he said over his shoulder to Sarah. “Like inches-thick safety-glass.”

  Sarah joined him. “It’s some kind of transparent resin. A polymer, I would imagine. It’s quite amazing that they can secrete it from their bodies.”

  “It was only that special little one that could do it. The big table-like types just put the door into place.”

  Sarah pressed against the surface experimentally. It was as hard as rock, as unforgiving as iron.

  “Well, I hope they don’t let us suffocate down here.”

  Bili then raised his fist and pulled it back to pound on the surface.

  “NO!” screeched someone behind them.

  They turned to see the skald racing toward them on all fours, his thin arms and legs pumping like a scuttling crab running from the surf. Sarah almost screamed herself as she caught sight of his face. It was an image of extreme insanity. The mouth hung lax; spittle flew from the quivering lower lip. Odd croaking noises bubbled up from his throat. The eyes were the worst: two wild staring glints of blue inside a stripe of livid red skin.

  Sarah pulled Bili back, away from the sealed entrance. She put her hand out to stop the skald in case he attacked them.

  Seeing them move away from the entrance, his charge faltered, slowed, stopped. Aimlessly, he wandered to the nearest section of wall and propped himself against it. He slumped forward, resuming the same posture he taken before.

  “Jeez,” said Bili, frowning fiercely at the skald. “He’s nutso.”

  Sarah only nodded, moving to a new spot from which she could watch everyone in the chamber and the entrance, too. It was clear to her now that these people had been stressed to their limits. They had stepped past the thin veneer of civilization and become barbarians. In the case of the skald, it seemed to have gone as far as insanity.

  Time passed. She had almost dozed off when she realized that Bili had left her side to go exploring again. He was leaning ove
r the prone bloated figure of Daddy and the sight of him, so near to those deadly hands that had strangled her just hours before, brought her instantly awake. She stiffened, but didn’t want to just start screaming at him, in case the man was really asleep and not just laying for him, for her baby. She rose up into a cat-like crouch.

  Bili noticed she was awake and crawled back to her. With intense relief, she gripped his shoulders. “Don’t ever go near that man again, Bili,” she whispered fiercely.

  “Awe, come on, Mom. He’s out cold. I think he’s poisoned, too. One of those killer things cut off his some of his fingers, you know. I think they must have venom on their blades or something. He’s sweating real bad and he stinks.”

  Sarah looked Bili over briefly, then looked toward Daddy’s dark bulk. “Stay right here.”

  With infinite caution, she crept to where she could see his face. He did indeed resemble a victim of poisoning. He breathed in shallow gasps, his body was bathed in sweat and his arm was red and swollen. The stumps of his fingers had stopped bleeding, but were discolored and raw-looking.

  “I think you’re right. Still, you must promise me that you’ll go no closer to him.”

  Bili nodded and promised.

  A few more minutes passed during which the Asian women began to weep for some reason, speaking quietly among themselves.

  “What have you all seen? Why have these monsters imprisoned us?” Sarah finally asked the group aloud, tired of moping in this dark hole. She was feeling better now and thoughts of escape were running through her mind.

  It was Rodney Zimmerman who came forward to answer. He approached them warily, but smiled insipidly the entire time. Sarah was reminded strongly of a reptile. The stench of his clothes-she thought that he must have befouled himself-added to the image.

  “You haven’t been to the throne room then?” he asked, his eyes shifting from her to Bili and then back to her. He gazed frankly at her breasts, which were only partially covered due to her struggles with Mudface and Daddy.

  Self-consciously, she shifted her clothing, but it did no good. Bili came to the rescue by placing his head back against her chest. She was grateful. Together they glared at the Governor of Garm. “We just got here, Zimmerman.”

  “Ah, please, call me Rodney,” he said with a leer. “Then you haven’t witnessed one of their feasts, yet?”

  “No.”

  “They’re quite a spectacle,” he said, a shadow passing over him. He was silent for a few seconds, then coughed wetly. “They, the aliens, that is, have a big queen-mother alien. A whole group of them, actually. They seem to be the ones who lay the eggs, or whatever.”

  “Go on,” said Sarah, intrigued despite her disgust with the source of information. She felt a desperate need to know what was going to happen to them.

  “The trick to survival is to go unnoticed. I have been to the feasts three times, and still I return to my cell, unnoticed. Our fat smuggling friend over there,” he nodded toward Daddy’s limp form, “is currently my greatest hope. They seem to have an affinity for the fat ones, you see.”

  They followed his gaze. Sarah tried to find pity in her heart for Daddy, but couldn’t. “So that’s why all these people are cracking up. They’ve all been to a-feast?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is that all they like, the fat ones?” asked Bili with hope in his dark eyes.

  “No, they seem to like the young as well,” he said with a wicked smile, “and the females.”

  Bili seemed to shrink. “You’re second in the fatso contest, you know,” he said defiantly. Then he turned up to Sarah. “We got to get out of here, Mom.”

  “You really are a prick,” Sarah told Rodney. “First you hand us over to killers, then you work hard to scare a little boy.”

  “Ah, please excuse me. My trips to the feasts have been very stressful. And as to the presumption of your guilt, all I can say is that I made a mistake. I thought you were murderers, you see. So when those wretched smugglers threatened to kill a lot of good people to capture you, well… I guess I made the wrong assumption,” he gave her a winning smile that didn’t quite cut through his greasy stench. She didn’t believe him, but somehow just the possibility that it was all a mistake made her feel more trusting. After all, why would he lie now?

  “So, how do we get out of here?”

  As if he had been waiting for those exact words, Rodney came alive. “Now we are thinking along the same lines. I have a flitter, out in the forest not far from here.”

  Sarah narrowed her eyes. “How do you know where we are?”

  “It has taken me some time to piece together our position from various sources, but after interviewing a lot of cellmates, I feel confident I know what part of the Polar Range we are under. What helped is that I keep a hunting lodge not far from here. That’s where the flitter is stored.”

  “But where, exactly?”

  A calculating expression came over his face. “Can you pilot a flitter?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Of course,” he echoed, smiling, wrapping his thin white arms around his knees and rocking back. “I’ve waited what seems like an eternity to hear those words. You are the first qualified pilot I’ve come across in three trips to the feasting room! I suspected it, of course, as you are a smuggler.”

  “So your plan is to break out somehow and get to the flitter and escape, right? Can you tell me where it is? How far it might be? I know these mountains well, I’ve flown over them a hundred times.”

  Rodney looked back at her with a crafty glint in his eye. “Ah, but why would you take your worst enemy along with you on a jaunt into the wild blue? No, no, the location must remain a secret for now.”

  Try as she might, she could get no more out of him. She quickly began to see what kind of man he was and began to despise him even more deeply, now that he was familiar to her, than she had before when he had only been a cruel stranger.

  Inside the dark, unknowable workings of Garth and Fryx’s joint mind things had taken a turn for the worst. The stress of actually being captured by the Imperium and, horror of horrors, held prisoner inside an enemy nest, was simply too much for Fryx. His great age and natural reclusiveness didn’t provide the mental structure he needed to face his worst nightmare.

  Garth was caught in the middle. An insane thing was locked in his mind, threats no longer coerced it, and reasoning was pointless. It was all he could do to keep from attacking the other captives around him.

  When the scuttling sound began again in the tunnels above them, only the faintest vibration came through to Garth’s back and buttocks. He had placed himself completely against the resonant surface of the nest for precisely that reason, to be forewarned. His body rose up, twisting sinuously of its own accord, writhing like a headless snake in flames.

  Fryx was frenzied, the enemy were returning, another feast had begun. Forcing his body to move in an organized fashion through sheer force of will, Garth crept toward the others.

  Sarah shrank back from the bizarre skald’s approach. He seemed to be forming a single word with his lips, straining mightily to get it out.

  “Feast-” he slurred.

  Sarah’s blood went cold. Everyone in the cell fell quiet, even Daddy’s gasps and warblings seemed to subside.

  Then they could all hear it, feel it-the approach of churning feet on the nest floor.

  “We must form a plan!” hissed Sarah to the others. “We must fight.”

  Rodney shook his head and snorted.

  “We must do something!”

  Rodney’s shook his head more vigorously. “No. You must listen to me, you must trust me on this one point for I need you alive. You must not attract their attention in any way. To do so is usually fatal.”

  “Well at least it would be a clean death,” retorted Sarah. She felt helpless and scared.

  “What would your boy do then, eh? Do you want him to die alone down here? In the dark?”

  “Bastard,” she spat ou
t.

  The aliens had reached the opening by then and they removed the seal by squirting some kind of solvent around the edges, dissolving the earlier secretions. The humans, huddling, moaning, were dragged out and placed on the backs of the waiting transport creatures. Daddy was grabbed up first, and it seemed to Sarah there was some eagerness in the aliens that handled him. The thin skald fought them spastically, but was easily overpowered. The three Asians were spared for some reason, left behind on their own.

  Soon they were moving through the black tunnels again to be dropped into a black pit in the midst of what felt like a very large chamber.

  “It’s always the same,” Rodney hissed in her ear. She jumped, not having realized he was there. “We sit here in the dark, listen to them grunt and smack themselves, then finally they choose their first course and tentacles come down out of the blackness. Then comes the worst: listening to them feed.”

  “How have you survived three times?” she demanded, trying not to move, not to be noticed.

  “Come with me, I have discovered an alcove that conceals most of my body from view. However their senses work, they seem to find me unpalatable in that position.”

  He took her hand and she almost jerked it back before controlling herself. She felt like she had been bitten.

  Suddenly, new ghastly alien sounds erupted from above them. Wet slappings, blatting noises, sudden warbling gasps. Sarah and Bili clutched at one another, trembling.

  “A Tulk discovered amongst the food creatures?” gasped the Parent. “Do you have any idea how serious this is?” Her tentacles curled protectively around her foodtube in a gesture of fright.

  “Well, I would suggest that we interrogate one of the food creatures,” said the nife.

  “Interrogate? How?”

  “The bio-computers now have a thorough understanding of their sonic vibration-based speech patterns. If you could be troubled to grow a sound-producing organ for one of them, we could easily communicate,” suggested the nife. The Parent noted that his orbs were riding very high indeed today. She suspected that he was after something special, perhaps he would even attempt to excite her enough to allow a second melding.