by Chris Turner
It seemed likewise once they had adapted, the creatures made efforts to preserve their environment in whatever state it was, as unnatural or freakish that might be. Yul wondered where the plant-crab-butterflies would go from here, with their eerie environment now in a stasis. Evidence supported the fact that species that remained static in its evolution would die off, unable to survive further catastrophes, and of no further value to the ecosystem. But not these horrors. He shuddered at that thought. He hoped he was not about to find out.
“Stop, you fools!” cried Goss. “What the—Vrean, you fucker!” Goss whirled on him as he made for the door. “Stop firing, you idiots!” he yelled again over his shoulder.
Pretending submission, Yul put on a penitent look and casual droop of his shoulder. Without warning, he snatched at Goss’s sidearm, wrenching it out of his grasp. He blasted Xix, Goss synthetic’s goggling lieutenant, wires, head, android fluid and all, as it lifted its E1. Greasy liquid spewed everywhere.
“Are you insane, Yul?” called Goss, staggering back, gasping.
Yul debated taking out Goss but he saw himself getting cut down in a line of fire. If he didn’t die here, he saw Mathias hunting him down for the rest of his days. Living his life as an outlaw. Not knowing when the next civilian at the local space hub who had innocently asked him for directions might put a plasma shell between his eyes. “I’m no man’s bitch, Goss,” he roared as he fled for the exit and tore down the companionway past the mutilated Zikri. Goss cursed after him, his men at his heels.
Blaster fire clipped by him. Stun shots, he surmised, by the sound, but enough to create deadly pain if they found their mark, and death if his suit were punctured. He scrambled on into the Zikri hold.
* * *
Subcommander Krin had always been larger than his peers. He had built developed muscle on his upper body, giving him massive strength that made him a fearsome enemy. He had been part of the bomb team that had extracted the first human specimen known as Hurd from the alien control deck. Now he stared unblinking down the corridor from the tank room through slitted eyes. Why were the humans being so exasperating? All they had to do was yield. The Mentera would take proper care of them.
Krin’s polyped lip curled in a fleeting grin. It quickly faded to a stony grimace. By his calculation, only one rebel remained in the halls. But he was a formidable one—full of piss and vinegar, a tricky, ruthless one. Three times the human had eluded their nets. By luck or circumstance, possibly skill, Krin still had not decided. He had caught a momentary glimpse of the human as the bridge door had slid shut, sealed by the protector ring. A stocky, suited creature managing the impossible. A fighting machine. He had a compact body, balanced weight and design which Krin grudgingly respected.
He remembered that offensive-defensive technique with vivid clarity, alternating with blaster, kicks and shoulder butts as he took out Gorge, the hall monitor, before that wretched door had clamped shut, assisted by the extraordinary strength of his left arm.
The other survivor, the weak, suited, freckle-faced one, had yielded without struggle.
The rebel would make a good slave. The tanks would be too good for the wretch. He would personally see to the human’s torture and breaking. The manacles and brain disruptor would come in handy in this regard.
Krin gave a snuffling grunt. The rebel could be sneaking around anywhere aboard his ship. He must stalk every corridor and flush him out. Krin’s commanding officer, Druluk and other Zikri had died in agony in the battle on the human bridge. Through no fault of his own. Druluk had been stupid to underestimate the resourcefulness of the humans. Now he was a blood-caked carcass, host to those plants or whatever fiendish brood they were. Already his superior, Krake, had warned Krin of the death penalty for botch ups on these hijacking missions. Two black marks were tagged to his name already. One on the primitive monkey world of Ygramex, the other during the gory Pzyon affair. His very life hung in the balance.
First priority was to flush the human out with their limited crew, now that so many Zikri had been killed. A foolish and unnecessary waste. If only he had have taken more Zikri warriors, more firepower, when they stormed the bridge, this mess could have been averted...
Hindsight. How could he have known the human demon would have fought with such ferocity? Never before had explosions been used against them on a boarding mission, especially coming moments after being tractored aboard. It was unheard of. Still, he had to admire the human’s quick thinking.
The other survivor, the weak, suited, freckle-faced one, had yielded without struggle. He looked out from his tank with goggle-eyed surprise. Why hadn’t his superior been on the bridge? He had left the weak one there to die? It made little sense. Krin gazed back upon the specimens in the tanks, staring out of their glassy prisons like helpless minnows.
Could the human thing be playing him?
No, the human was not that smart. He had made mistakes before: wandering the ship alone, leaving the human unguarded on the bridge. He was lucky to have pulled through.
With his two, blood-slimed comrades, Krin stalked the halls, looking for his quarry, his tentacles curling in a menacing expectation. He would find his quarry and when he did, the rebel would pay dearly.
* * *
Tottering on through the Zikri’s spidery corridors, Yul desperately retraced his path back to the tank room. He avoided the dead-end corridor where fallen debris had blocked it off. Shouts and blaster fire raged behind, echoing like hail on metal. He crashed through the hallways, following the places where he had notched the creepy veins and motifs with his blaster.
Much of the corridor had lost its scary menace from before in contrast to all the horrors he had experienced: mutant crazed moths, bloodthirsty Zikri, explosions, Greer’s loss in space...
Panting, despite the slightly lower gravity, he reached the familiar U-shaped archway that gained entry to the house of horrors he remembered so well. Are you crazy, Yul? Why go to this length? Is Mathias going to let you off the hook after this bungled job? Why not put a blaster to your head and be done with it?
Some crazy intuition drove his legs onward, but now he staggered to a halt.
The room was slightly different than he had remembered it. The floor was soaked with water and smashed glass glinted at the far end. Regers, lolling doll-like, hovered inside the largest tank, coated in some chalky white substance, the like of which he could not decipher. A grotesque monstrosity gaped behind the glass, coral-eyed, comatose, sprawled in a corner with some strange, moth-like fish with fins and wings grown huge, flitting about the water, like some lord of the manor.
Yul reeled back in horror and disgust, his blaster sagging in his hand. “What the shit?”
Even Goss, storming through the arched gap, did a double take, seeing the room with all its ungodly lifeforms.
He caught up with Yul and bawled. “What in the blue flames of hell is this? He swung his arm in a wide arc.
Yul had seen enough. Opening fire on the barriers of glass, he blew up Hurd’s tank first. Then Frue’s.
Glass shattered everywhere, water slewed, releasing a torrent and their occupants.
Hurd tumbled out of his prison, sprawling in a ragdoll heap. He did not move. Frue struggled to his knees, gagging, coughing foul liquid out of his lungs. Miracle of miracles, the man was alive.
Goss caught at Yul’s arm, venting a curse. A stray blast from Yul’s gun went wild, hitting the alien heptadoria’s tank.
Water gushed out and Regers with it, cracked helmet and all, falling forward on his knees in a pitiful, slimy rush. His pale lips, white as parchment, arched in a soundless cry. The man’s right-hand fingers trembled, yet his left hand was only a stump where it had been gnawed by the heptadoria.
The butterfly, moth, or whatever it was, flapped about the ground like a beached mackerel, confused at its new environment. Then in a burst of soggy adaptation, its iridescent wings took it high and wide about the room, soaring inches over the newcomers’ heads, d
ive-bombing them like an angry eagle.
The men crouched and aimed. Some lifted blasters, others cursed and backpedalled for the exit.
Yul ducked, lest one of those razor sharp wings cut at his throat in a low pass.
A marine’s throat was laid open ear to ear as a wingtip sliced flesh like a machete, and he fell back choking on his own blood.
Goss slapped another commando’s arm away as he lifted a weapon. “Fool! Capture the thing. We have no live samples yet.”
“But, sir? Brenes back there, his neck—”
“What about Brenes?... Use your gear, man! Why’d you bring it all this way?” He snatched away the marine’s E1, his fist shaking.
The man cringed. While his team-mates trained weapons, others extracted nets, and guns that ejected clamp-ons. Two rummaged through their personal kits to shoot darts and stunners on the flying thing. They did this, but with unexpected results.
A gunman who had knelt in the pooling liquid and fired clamp-ons, yelled triumph. A metal restraint hooked on the thing’s wing and the butterfly teetered and dropped in midflight. Men moved in, scrambling forth to net it. But it flicked out its wing and sent the shiny clamp spinning away with surprising strength. It dove at the gunman, squirting an acrid, glistening liquid from its proboscis.
The man’s faceplate melted in a wash of glass as acid sizzled on the flesh beyond. He slapped at his face, yowling like a whipshot hound, clawing at his burning face.
“Damn...” Yul edged back from the tanks, shaking his head.
More marines rifled through their kits. Others crabbed back, spooked, shaken by the grisly deaths of their comrades. Goss cursed them all and kneed them on. “Contain it, you asswipes. What are you waiting for?”
The butterfly’s knife-edged wings tore through the net like paper and it swooped upon the offenders without mercy. Its wings drove it with pulsing purpose, shimmering with bright colour as the thing’s thorax bulged with new strength.
How fast could the thing adapt? Yul gasped. The eyeless head zoomed in on its perceived enemies via some extraordinary sense of radar.
Oddly the pooling water did not freeze. Only a fine blue mist rose from the viscid puddles, which Yul assumed meant the liquid retained its normal temperature. How, he knew not. The components of this alien were unknown.
Yul took in the evolving scene in a glance, sucking in a sharp breath. The butterfly had grown in size, shy of three feet long, and was adapting by the minute. Perceiving the men as a real threat, it began to spurt acid indiscriminately and rake barbed legs and razor wings across men’s suits, slicing them. The captives who had been released from their tanks, choked out vile fluid and gasped and moaned, weaving about like drunken sots.
Yul glared around at the insanity of it all. Let him out of this loony bin. How could those men and women be alive, their lungs full of water?
He considered blasting the rest of the tanks, liberating the remaining nine human figures. But he envisaged them flopping out in dizzy confusion without suits and dying in the alien atmosphere. Better to live as prisoners to the Zikri or Mentera, or die here put out of their misery? A tough choice. One he would not decide for them.
Goss loosed a cry of fury. He flung himself on Yul with renewed zeal. The commander, it seemed, hated being defied... but also knew Mathias would flay him alive if he terminated Yul prematurely.
Yul scoffed at the man’s anger and his feral grimaces. He thrust him away, disliking that ugly face mere inches from his own faceplate. But he recognized the strength in those bulging limbs. That strength was characteristic of a Class A synthetic. This one was a full cyborg, as had been Xix, whereas Yul was only a partial.
The commander’s eyes flared in determined purpose and with some surprise at the ferocious strength of Yul’s fingers which dug rivulets into his shoulder and ribs. Fingers not completely human, suddenly hurled Goss over his shoulder to land in a clumsy heap in a slimy green pool.
The synthetic was up in a flash, as if Yul’s move were but child’s play. “You’ll pay for that, Vrean.”
The commander lifted his E1. An explosion suddenly smote the hull, its thud echoing from above. The Zikri hull shook with resounding force. Goss’s eyes narrowed with surprise and dismay.
Goss’s communicator chimed. “Two war Orbs, sir. They’ve landed on Phebis. More are coming.”
“Engage them!” cried Goss. “Keep those fucking squids away from this craft.”
The commander motioned his weapon at his remaining men and staggered aside. “Back to the ship! if you want to live. You too, Vrean.”
The commandos scrambled to the exit like drowning rats. The dead they left behind.
Yul gingerly scrambled across the trail of bodies. Goss, perceiving insubordination, jerked his weapon to peg him off with stun fire, but the dragonfly, hovering like a predatorial shadow, perceived the act as a signal of aggression and swooped. A splatter of sickly orange fluid splashed across Goss’s rifle arm. His weapon melted and Goss’s suit and arm beneath with it. Goss gaped, eyes widening in horror as electrical sizzles and sparks flew from the prosthetic. He flapped the ruined stub uselessly. Cursing, he struggled with his good hand to seal up the crack. Failing, he stumbled back in the direction of his fleeing men.
Yul saw Goss’s features frosting up as cold penetrated his suit and bit into the artificial skin. His straggling team members blinked in wonder at their commander who with the visibly sparking synthetic limb revealed he had never been human.
“What’s the matter? Never seen a prosthetic limb before? Move!” he bawled.
Yul checked Hurd’s pulse. Nothing. The man wore only his air mask and was not breathing. Frue was shaking like a leaf, sprawled beside his tankmate, gagging and gibbering like a lunatic. He pulled the pilot to a sitting position, readjusted his helmet, which had jarred loose. The offensive water had drained from his suit but the air was freezing and Frue had gone into shock.
Quickly he knelt to tear strips of repair adhesive from his pouch and apply it to the punctures at both knee and waist. The resilient polyethylene instantly bonded and would handle any kind of rough wear, having properties of industrial duct tape. Oxygen would fill the suit soon. Thankfully, Frue’s suit was still functioning. The green pilot light on the helm was a steady glow. He slung the quivering man over his shoulder and stumbled toward the exit.
His journey took him close to Regers. Yul paused, heart beating. He considered dragging the half-crawling man behind with his free, mechanized arm, but seeing the sorry state of Regers, mauled by the mutant fish in the tank, reconsidered. There passed an intense lucid moment between the two that would haunt Yul forever. Regers’ bloodless lips forming words ‘Fucking bastard’ and ‘Leave me here to die?’ and his voiceless croak with it. Yul shivering, lurched back, empathetic to Regers’ deplorable condition and embittered state, as he bowed under Frue’s weight, but not willing to do more about it. An image of Greer fled past his mind, wrenched from the Albatross, dying in space, and his scowl deepened. Regers would have to fend for himself.
Yul reached in his pouch and tossed one of the extra rolls of adhesive at Regers’ side, sensing the man’s suit was beyond repair. Regers was a dead man crawling.
Yul stepped back, nearly upending himself on one of the marine’s remains. He hauled out of that lunatic asylum, happy to take his leave of butterfly and fishy horrors lording over their pile of corpses.
Yul struggled to catch up with Goss, carrying Frue as best he could. The man’s suit had been breached. Shit, the man had drowned! It was unfathomable that Frue was still alive or Regers. But he could feel him twitching and the occasional racking cough jerking his light frame. He would die of exposure unless he could get him to Goss’s Wren asap.
His mind thought of the oddest things during that mad dash. A journey that lasted forever. Staggering through the Zikri hold nearing the tractor port, he saw Goss’s small clot of men frog-hopping their way in the lower gravity for their ship that hovered at the
ready over the lunar plain, lit in a ghostly grey-white of fresh fallen snow before the low, slate-grey hills.
Yul turned his head, saw Frue’s lips shivering. He was hyperventilating, the man’s skin turning blue. The suit was not heating up his body fast enough.
“Almighty hell!” Yul swore. Frue would never make it out there to the plain on time. What to do? Leave Frue behind and race after the others? He made an instant decision. He turned back to the Albatross, only to catch out of the corner of his eye, a starburst of fire blossom on the armoured turret of Goss’s ship. Kaboom! An iron-spiked Orb, like some ball and chain, shimmered out of nothingness, an instrument of deadly menace, dominating the darkening sky.
Yul stopped dead. New stealth tech? How had the Wren been caught so blind-sided? A stab of hopelessness pierced his heart. The Zikri were not taking any prisoners.
The smoking, rocking Wren loosed counterfire on the Orb and the Orb trembled to its double torpedo assaults. The spiked invader loosed its last devastating bombs on the Wren, a ship now doomed, and both crippled, smouldering vessels crashed to the surface, igniting like matchsticks on the desolate plain.
Survivors of the blasts, a few of Goss’s team, raced back to the downed Orb, clawing desperately up the sides.
Without hesitation, Yul hobbled back to the hold and hauled Frue aboard the Albatross and into the landing bay. Lander stood there intact, her octagonal grey fuselage gleaming dully under the halogen bay lamps. He triggered the loading ramp, shuttled Frue aboard.
Six of the survivors of Goss’s team were soon clawing at Lander’s hatch, Goss himself with his shorn forearm. Before Yul could seal it, the ramp descended and Goss came storming aboard, spitting curses and waving his E1. Two of his men forced their way up the ramp and crowded themselves into the depressurization chamber. There was only room for five. Goss jammed the hatch closed as the three other men in his team gaped, the door slamming in their faces. Yul grunted in dislike at the synthetic’s cold-heartedness.