* * * * *
Chapter Fifteen: Lael Hrish-Ek
A trickle of hope bled into Urdizine’s spirit. Hrish-Ek knew him well enough to see the transformation in his body.
The Zhoogene had told her that except for one brief moment when the mutant woman had appeared in the starship’s hold, he’d been convinced his only fate was to die, and die horribly. Ever since the day his Legion unit at Camp Faxian had been nuked, he’d been delaying the inevitable.
He boasted that the prospect of inevitable death had made not the slightest difference in the way he’d acted. He’d held the line as best he could, no matter that it was hopeless.
Legionaries were simple like that.
Now, as the door through the wall rolled back into its slots, hope blossomed within her friend. Naturally, she was delighted herself, but these trials were proving easier for Littoranes. Her people possessed faith.
From the 343 side of the wall, the portal had proved impenetrable. They’d tried battering, burning, stabbing, and cutting it. They’d searched for hidden control panels across the entire length of the wall and found nothing. The door had been built to withstand everything they could throw at it, and far more. It was not to be opened.
On the other side of the wall, they’d discovered a portable activator glued directly underneath the number 242.
Warm with pride, she stood with Urdizine and the other members of the pathfinding team and enjoyed the jubilant crowd cheering in 343.
She welcomed her people through the gate.
For a moment, her faith was restored. In this universe, good things did happen to those who believed.
Then a knot of Humans led by d’Anje pushed their way to the front of the new arrivals. Her skin chilled.
The Zhoogenes and Littoranes were her people, but not the Humans.
She didn’t trust the Humans.
* * *
Lael Hrish-Ek and the seven other community leaders formed a circle in front of everyone. Urdizine joined them.
The captives had agreed on this crude form of representative leadership on the first day they’d woken up in their hexworld. They didn’t formally acknowledge a single commander, but even the dreadful Human, Captain Roberto d’Anje, tacitly recognized the magnificence and authority of Lael Kayshen-Oeyl. According to his petty nature, he would complain and sneer, but he would listen and then obey.
“I intended this probe over the wall to be a reconnaissance,” Kayshen-Oeyl told the circle. “That we have opened the portal changes that. We must exploit this to the full. If we can open more doors, we can recruit more captives. If we cross more portals, ultimately, we can find a way out. Maybe we can seize a ship or perhaps capture a strongpoint. I cannot tell you what lies before us, which is why we need intel fast.”
She snapped her jaws in anticipation of a pointless argument, but the humanoids agreed. Even d’Anje.
“Are you onboard?” she asked the Cora’s World officer.
He arched an eyebrow. “You really don’t understand us, do you? We’re not monsters. The zombies are. No one deserves to be here. Everyone deserves to be freed. You, us, and there may be other Humans on this world.”
Nonhumans were the majority in the 343 group. Hrish-Ek hadn’t considered the possibility that this might be reversed.
“Good,” said Kayshen-Oeyl. “We’ll dispatch recon teams to each gateway and attempt to open more doors.”
They drew up names of individuals for the recon teams.
“I’ll stay here,” Urdizine said when he heard his name suggested. “My injuries will slow everyone down.”
“Which is why we shall carry you,” Kayshen-Oeyl responded. “Hrish-Ek, can you do that?”
Hrish-Ek went rigid with anger. If those words had come from anyone but the person she admired most in the universe, she would have bitten them.
The idea of carrying a humanoid on her back like a beast of burden was shameful.
Hrish-Ek forced the tension out of her muscles and bowed to her superior. “I would be honored. The Zhoogene’s limbs are few, and his body broken, but his eyes and ears are sharp. Although only those who study him the closest can detect the faint spark of intellect in his brain, its vegetal nature may bring insight of some small value. Yes, I will carry you, Urdizine.”
“That’s big of you,” he replied, “coming from a primitive water lizard who hasn’t even reached the evolutionary milestone of standing on her hind legs.”
Some of the others coiled tension into their tails, angry at his words, but Hrish-Ek understood his banter and shook with laughter.
Lael Kayshen-Oeyl did not. She swept away the moment with a majestic flick of her tail but held her glare at the Zhoogene a moment longer. Urdizine didn’t see it, but Hrish-Ek knew he would pay dearly for his remark.
Excitement soon overcame concern for her humanoid friend when Kayshen-Oeyl ordered her and the other sub-leaders to organize the recon teams. Other groups were dispatched back into the heart of 343 to bring back food, weapons, and other supplies.
They were moving out for good.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixteen: Urdizine
Despite his weight, Hrish-Ek made good progress across the sterile ground toward the wall along the northwest side of the hex, easily keeping up with the others in their team.
She had the easier part of this.
Riding the Littorane was neither simple nor comfortable. She was big, but almost half her length was her tail. Her upper half was shorter than he was long, and she walked on her six limbs flat to the ground like a lizard, so he couldn’t straddle her in an upright riding stance without scraping his feet along the ground.
So he rode her prone, with his hands over her powerful foreshoulders, and his feet tucked in around her rear limbs.
He settled there for a short while, wondering how the ground had become so desiccated.
Before he could put his mind to an explanation, Hrish-Ek bucked painfully and informed him in a gurgling growl that if he stuck his boot up her cloaca again, she would bite it off.
So Urdizine readjusted, finding a more or less stable position with his feet crossed beneath the base of her tail that didn’t involve poking her up the ass.
Although Hrish-Ek’s spine still stabbed painfully into his abdomen, he was secure enough to look around, trying to learn something about this empty hexagonal cell.
The contours of the land matched that of 343. At the center of each side of the wall was a copy of the gate he’d climbed over. All were shut. There was nothing else to be seen.
He heard something, though. Screams came from a spot ahead and to the right. They sounded humanoid. From the far side of the wall they were headed for came a clamor of sucking. It was a noise like no other, but he convinced himself whatever was causing it had sucked the moisture out of 242.
That’s weak thinking, he admonished himself. Perhaps 242 is simply a cell that’s never been activated.
He was so lost in these thoughts that he almost failed to notice Hrish-Ek’s gait had become erratic. She was panting hard.
Had she been injured?
She came to a hard stop and threw him off. Pain jolted through his shoulder as he crashed into the unforgiving ground.
He rolled onto his back and looked up into her face.
Her eyes were wide, and the usual powdery orange of her snout had flushed into a fiery red. “Don’t ever touch me there again.”
“My apologies,” he said and pushed himself to his feet. “I think I’ll jog the rest of the way under my own power.”
“Don’t be foolish.”
“It’s in my nature, Lael Hrish-Ek.” He picked up his feet and ran for their objective.
He managed 10 strides before the natural hydraulic bands circling his abdomen locked up and Urdizine arced for the ground, chin first.
Before he made another bruising reacquaintance with the dead surface of 242, Hrish-Ek scooped him up in her forelimbs.
Despite the abdomina
l pain, he yelped with new levels of agony when Hrish-Ek grabbed him tightly by the crotch in her powerful hands and threw him over her shoulder.
She raised her upper torso, using her mid and hindlimbs for locomotion while her front limbs secured him in a fireman’s carry.
She kept poking the base of his buttocks, presumably in some kind of retaliation for rubbing his feet under the base of her tail.
It made an already undignified means of transportation even more humiliating, but if she thought she was hurting him, she couldn’t be more wrong.
As she kneaded his butt, the tension from months of living on the edge released in waves. She was giving him an in-flight massage better than any masseuse he’d visited.
When he encountered whatever horrors waited for him on the far side of the wall, he would be thoroughly relaxed beforehand.
* * *
The five-strong recon team faced the door in silence.
It was a little more than 40 feet high at this point, the surface layer of 242 having been stripped away.
In time, they could bring materials from 343 and climb their way across as they had before, but Hrish-Ek judged they didn’t have that time, and Urdizine agreed. Once the zombies had realized they’d escaped, time would be short, indeed.
So they’d open the door if they could. Sure enough, underneath the number 242 was a similar door control to the one they’d used before at the southeast door.
On the far side, the sucking sounds had become more intense, but had also moved farther away. When they opened the doors, would they be spotted by whatever was making that noise?
“Do we open them?” Hrish-Ek asked.
Urdizine had learned to respect the Littoranes of Rho-Torkis, but once transported to this hex world, they’d become erratic.
In ancient times, clans had existed in many Zhoogene and other humanoid societies, but they ran deeper with Littoranes. With good reason, their complex tiered caste system was generally harmonious. Effective, too.
You weren’t born into a caste; you grew into your role.
Ripped away from their clans, Littorane confidence was brittle. On Rho-Torkis, Hrish-Ek had been fierce and dynamic, to the point of being impulsive.
At this moment, she was paralyzed by indecision. Seeing her weakness, the other three Littoranes in the group could only stare at the dead ground, hoping it would swallow them up.
Maybe that’s why Littoranes didn’t often serve in the Legion in the current era.
“Yes,” Urdizine told her softly. “We open the door. Those are our orders, and I agree with them.”
“Runner!”
Urdizine turned and saw a distant Littorane tearing across the ground toward them.
“I think we’ll wait to hear what this runner has to say first,” he said.
For once, the news was not that the universe had decided to kick Urdizine in the guts one more time.
Quite the opposite. Luck was on their side.
* * *
The messenger greeted them with a torrent of Littorane Urdizine couldn’t follow. Then he appended some Terran Standard. Urdizine wasn’t Human, and no one had set foot on Terra for millennia, but he got the gist.
“Do not open the gate,” the runner said between gasps for breath. “We discovered a viewing mechanism in the one we used to open the gate to 343.”
He adjusted the controls. Six viewing slits appeared across the gate about eight feet from the ground.
“The open slits are invisible from the other side unless you look very closely. When you have seen what there is to see, one of you will run back with your report to the center of this hex. We are all gathering there.”
“Nice job investigating your control panel,” Urdizine said.
“It was the work of Captain d’Anje.”
“So there is some point to the Cora’s World vecks. Who knew?” Urdizine was halfway through working on a follow-on insult when Hrish-Ek pushed against him and then lay on her belly beneath one of the slits.
“Hope I’m reading this right,” he muttered and then stepped onto her back.
He had. She lifted him up so he could look through the slit and out onto a scene from hell.
* * * * *
Chapter Seventeen: Urdizine
The zombies were working their way from one side of the hexagonal enclosure to the other, systematically sucking the life from every leaf, every drop of water, absorbing the cells of every inhabitant, from the largest to the smallest.
They’d begun at the gate to Urdizine’s left and swept along the ground from there. On the far side of the hex, the land was still green. Water flowed, as did the screams from people unseen. They sounded like they were making a hopeless resistance to their fate.
Urdizine described what he was seeing to the others. He explained that they needed a better name for their foe, because the creatures Urdizine saw weren’t zombies. This was something else. Perhaps the things behind the zombies.
It wasn’t a single race. Perhaps an entire phylum of individual forms was coordinating in its task, each specialized to perform specific functions, but sharing some similarity in design.
On the other side of the wall, unaware they were being observed, the enemy was conducting mopping up operations. Large items of organic material had already been removed, but dark red and green liquid was spattered over the ground.
Rubbery patches two meters long oozed across the ground, making the repulsive sucking sound Urdizine had heard from miles away.
In their wake they left nothing, the same dead soil he was standing on in 242. He was certain if he examined the ground through a microscope, he would discover not one particle of life remained, that even bacteria were victims of this purge.
The sucking patches didn’t work alone. The largest of the alien forms nearby was a pack of four cylindrical creatures he dubbed tankers.
They reminded Urdizine of the caterpillars Humans had brought with them from their homeworld, their bunched skin dotted with thick hairs a meter long that stood out from their hide, but they were much larger, so huge they could barely pass through the gates in the walls.
In fact…they were a perfect fit for the gates. Or more likely, he decided, the gates had been built specifically for these tankers.
Humanoids were walking around, too, eight feet tall with digitigrade legs like dogs and a second pair of arms growing out of their shoulder blades like docking cranes, like that warped Zhoogene who’d shot the mutant. Most of their bodies were covered in hairy patches similar to many humanoid species, but their chests were a sleek field of coppery feathers with a chevron pattern. Their heads were crescent discs with four protuberances that could be mandibles.
Were these the dominant form?
One of them snatched a pair of sucker discs off the ground. Carrying one under each arm, it jumped in a massive leap onto a tanker’s back. Leaving one of the patches aside for the moment, it held the other in its overhead arms and bent down to massage the base of one of the tanker’s hairs.
After a few moments, the hair engorged and lengthened.
The four-armed humanoid rubbed a little longer until the hair was to its satisfaction, then it plugged the hair into the sucker patch.
It wasn’t a hair. It was a hose.
The contents of the patch’s guts pumped through the hose hair and into the tanker. When it was done, the four-arm tossed the limp patch to the ground, where it slid back to where it had left off and began sucking again.
Further out from the section of wall Urdizine was looking through, other forms roamed the hex, each playing their part in digesting it. The humanoids roamed more freely than the other shapes. Perhaps their specialty was mobility?
In his travels across the Federation, Urdizine had encountered a number of species whose digestive processes were carried out at least partially external to their bodies. Perhaps these creatures, most of whom resembled giant, bloated grubs, were external stomachs for a compound organism?
More s
creams reached his sensitive ears.
They were new and coming from farther to the right. He peered in that direction.
It was a long way off, and the massive creatures kept blocking his view, but he thought the gate on that part of the wall was open, and some of the tankers were on course to squeeze through.
“Azhanti!” he screamed. On the other side of the wall, a bloated creature charged directly at him.
The thing was a louse the size of a truck. Sturdy cilia waving beneath its base propelled it along the uneven ground.
At the last moment, it veered to the side, leaving Urdizine shaking with terror.
“Are we in danger?” Hrish-Ek asked from below him.
“No,” he replied. “Be patient. We will be very soon.”
He watched the creature that had scared him so. It was 10 feet high and 20 from front to back. Massive though it was, it was tiny compared to the tanker it drew up alongside.
It shared with the tankers and the larger creatures the characteristics of wrinkled, pulsing skin dotted with thick individual strands of hair tubes. Unlike the mottled hides of the others, this thing was hooped with bands in the color of pallid bone alternating with purple, and it wasn’t the vibrant violet of that mutant woman’s eyes, more the purple of necrotic flesh.
The bands of color strobed along the length of this disgusting body as a proboscis emerged from its backside. It stuck this appendage through the thick hide of the tanker and pumped itself through. A wet, slurping noise came from the front of the tanker as a new segment of flesh unfurled out its nose. It slowly inflated as it absorbed whatever was being pumped in.
Hrish-Ek gave no complaint to her extended service as a platform, so he watched the louse thing pump three-quarters of its volume into the tanker. By the end, its flesh hung flaccid over the ground. When it retracted its proboscis, it extended its cilia once more and flowed away in search of something else to consume.
Hold the Line (Chimera Company Book 5) Page 10