by C. Gockel
They’d gone hardly eight cautious steps when a glint of light above the blooms caught his eye. Before he’d thought about it, he’d dragged Volka beneath the shade of a giant, sagging leaf. A craft that his Q-comm identified as a planet-to-orbit freighter shrieked over their heads. It was tailed by two smaller near-range vessels—a twenty-three-year-old civilian two-seater and a seventeen-year-old “sedan” according to his Q-comm query. “Civilian,” “freighter,” or “sedan”—he knew from his independent trader experience that they were armed with a mishmash of weaponry, more dangerous because it was impossible to know for certain what their armaments were. His Q-comm sparked and he found himself smiling grimly behind his visor. To think some machines thought that he’d “wasted” that time he’d spent with the traders.
He waited 2.3 minutes after the ships had passed, almost rose, but then the screech of a freighter with malfunctioning hover engines made him clutch Volka tighter and huddle lower. Sparks fell around them like rain, close enough that if they hadn’t been in their envirosuits, they might have been burned even with the coverage. The leaf above them shuddered, and he swore that he heard the flower-forest rustling as though rippled by wind. Following the storm of sparks with his eyes, he saw that the flower-trees were parting beneath the ship as though trying to avoid the onslaught of fire before it rained down on them. He blinked. Some trees on earth did warn other trees of diseases with chemical signals. Perhaps the flower-trees had something like that for fire?
He swallowed. If their leaf had moved aside, even the sensors of a pirate vessel would have recognized their forms.
They waited 3.5 minutes after the defective vehicle was out of earshot…and then another 3.5 minutes. The backpack with snoring Carl was between Volka’s back and his chest, but their hips and legs interlocked like spoons. Closing his eyes, he savored it, even though there were layers of envirosuit between them. Volka’s life was in danger, and he was ridiculously grateful for the moment. He scrunched his eyes shut, as acknowledgement of that danger set off a chain reaction in his processors. Every second they remained here was another second in which Alexis was more likely to get infected, injured, or killed. His core programming kicked in, and he reluctantly rose, a puppet on strings. He had to attempt to save Alexis. Not just for her life, but for the lives of all Luddecceans and Galacticans his cooperation would save if the alliance was maintained. They could not afford to be enemies right now.
Rising beside him, Volka looked apprehensively at the sky.
“We’ll stay close to cover,” Sixty said. “And we will proceed cautiously and slowly from here on out. There’s bound to be more security this close to the camp. Less haste, more speed." Getting captured would not allow him to save Alexis or Volka.
Volka nodded. His eyes dropped to her phaser rifle. Their enemies were pirates and kidnappers, possibly in league with a hostile alien entity. He didn’t have to disarm Volka even though she carried a deadly weapon. His brows drew together. He still couldn’t use phasers to kill. He had a single stunner pistol—the only one that had been aboard Sundancer. He took it out of its holster…and realized Volka was staring at him with wide, trusting eyes.
“Go now?” She didn’t say the words, but he saw them in the movement of her lips. He nodded, and they set off through the forest of flowers up a gentle incline. The journey hardly touched his power reserves in the mild gravity, and Volka wasn’t the least bit winded by the time they reached the hilltop. From the rise, they could look out over the pirates’ camp. It was a clearing, completely devoid of flower-trees, and was considerably more developed than he would have expected. There were thirteen buildings, the walls of which were surprisingly robust poured polycrete. The roofs were another matter. Some were made of neatly fitted polycrete tiles, others were crafted from bits of spaceships, and some were a bit of both. His brow furrowed. It appeared that ingredients for the polycrete had been quarried just to the north of the settlement, although flower trees were springing up in the quarry pit. He noted that the polycrete tiles and walls looked to be several decades old based on the weather staining on the sides. Pirates didn’t create sturdy, neatly tiled structures or stone quarried polycrete. It painted the picture of an organized settlement that had been abandoned or taken by the pirates. Not an unheard-of scenario.
His brow furrowed. If Alexis was in one of the buildings, it was possible a direct rescue by Sundancer would involve caving a roof in. If she’d landed just outside the appropriate building, they’d have alerted the camp, and would have had every pirate in the camp shooting at them as they tried to enter. He thought of the weapons he’d seen on other independent trading vessels. The buildings were sturdy, but not sturdy enough to resist a phaser cannon. If the pirates’ purpose in the kidnapping was to sow discord between the Republic and Luddeccea, dropping a building on top of their rescue party and their prisoner might not be a loss to the pirates. Even if they wanted Alexis for ransom, they might collapse the building if they thought they couldn’t collect. Sundancer’s diverting “werfle chase” had taken care of the heavy weaponry and at least sixteen pirates who would have been needed to crew the ships they’d seen.
“Which building is she in?” Volka whispered, and he thought he heard a note of despair in her voice.
6T9 scanned the structures. From his vantage, he could see that at least five were garages for spaceships or land-based wheeled vehicles, though curiously he saw no roads, not even dirt tracks, leaving the settlement. Hovers only then. That was strange. Hovers were more difficult to maintain and required more power. Independent traders usually resorted to the simplest technology in their encampments. As if to verify that assessment, a woman with a wheelbarrow left one of the buildings and trundled the wheelbarrow over to the door of another building. A man there emptied a rectangular container of black earth into the wheelbarrow, and she went to the next building. At another one of the buildings the scene played out again, but this time it was several men with multiple containers of “earth.”
“What are they doing?” Volka whispered.
“It’s…” He used the delicate description. “Compost from the toilets.”
“Shit,” Volka corrected.
“Yes.”
As he watched, the two humans with the wheelbarrows wheeled them toward the east of the camp. They emptied the wheelbarrows and two humans with shovels, guarded by a man with a phaser rifle, heaved the piles into the nearest flower-trees. “Spread it farther!” shouted the man. “Don’t get too close!”
6T9 tilted his head. Get too close to what? Also, why weren’t they just dumping the compost in the obvious place—the quarry? The men shoveling moved northward half a meter and resumed their task evenly distributing the compost.
“Pirates…like flowers?” Volka whispered.
6T9 blinked. They were fertilizing them—or having slave labor fertilize them. He began counting the humans carting “fertilizer.” So far, there were at least ten. He swallowed. “They’re using slaves. We’ll have to find a way to rescue them, too.”
He heard some sort of aerial creature fluttering overhead and the rustle of flower-trees.
Volka bowed her head. “No, we won’t. The…slaves…they’re infected, Sixty. I can feel it.”
His Q-comm sparked, analyzing the situation. If they stunned the infected, they might be able to take them to the Republic. “The Republic has a cure in the works…” He mused.
Volka sighed. “Maybe they can come back for them later. But I doubt we’ll have time to save them, Sixty.”
His circuits dimmed.
“But the Dark cares about flowers?” Volka mused.
The question made his processors spark. “Maybe it hasn’t realized how flagrantly sexual they are?” His lips turned up in a smirk.
Volka’s snort was muffled by the visor.
The Dark hated sex as much as it hated machines. He glanced over at an unusually short plant. Only a little taller than him, its objectively beautiful purple bloom was bent low,
so close he could stroke its stamen. Doing so would shake the pollen on the delicate anthers. He wondered if the flower would appreciate the hand job. He wasn’t programmed to provide sexual relief to flowers, but it seemed like a nice gesture—one species that the Darkness despised to another it should and probably would despise.
“We still need to figure out where Alexis is,” Volka said. “We’ll have to wake Carl. He’ll know.”
She swung the pack from her back, and 6T9 moved aside to give her room.
“Carl,” Volka whispered. “We need you to wake up.”
His necklace crackled softly. “Can’t…busy…”
“Can you just tell us where Alexis is?” Volka asked.
Carl’s necklace crackled. “Have…to…focus…”
“I’ll show you the layout,” Volka said. “Just look for a moment.”
6T9 stepped further aside to give Volka room. Lifting the pack so Carl’s vantage point was higher, she whispered, “Which building, Carl?”
The werfle’s necklace crackled. “It’s…can’t…”
There was a hiss and a snap, and 6T9 found himself squeezed so tightly about the chest that all the air in his artificial lungs—there to give him the illusion of breathing—squeezed out of him in a rush.
“6T9!” Volka cried softly. Dropping Carl, Volka raised her phaser but didn’t shoot. “Where do I aim?”
Gaping down at himself, 6T9 saw that his body was swaddled in purple petals. Stabs of static arose along his body. Light in his visor informed him his suit had been breached by the petals’ serrated edges. Light in the periphery of his ocular apparatus told him his skin had been punctured and that he was being injected with a molecular mix that would cause paralysis in 99.9% of Earth mammals and birds.
Volka gave another soft cry. Roots had thrust from the ground and began wrapping around her feet. “What’s happening?”
The petals held him like a vise, and he was too busy struggling to respond.
“The plants are carnivorous,” Carl hissed. “Did you think I was sleeping this whole time?”
“Yes,” Volka and 6T9 replied. Volka hopped out of the roots, but more caught her feet. Gritting his teeth, 6T9 writhed and tried to break the petals. His Q-comm fired uselessly with the realization that the wildlife’s avoidance of the ground and the blooms made sense.
Carl’s growl was muffled by his visor. “Alexis is in the warehouse. Now let me go back to meditating.”
Swinging the pack onto her back, Volka beat back a root with her phaser rifle. Carl snorted and then snored. The bloom holding 6T9 burst open, and he slumped to the ground with the force of the sudden release. The roots retreated.
Volka gulped.
Carl snored…loudly.
Rising to his feet, 6T9 dusted off the pollen. To think he’d considered giving the plant a hand job.
“6T9, you’ve got punctures in your suit,” Volka exclaimed softly. “Let me check you for the Dark.” She began running her gloved hands over every perforation. His first thought was that it was very unscientific, but as her hands moved over his arms, back, chest, and thighs, his second, third, fourth, and every thought thereafter was that he needed examinations like this more often.
Pulling back, Volka retrieved a roll of duct tape from the pack and kneeled beside him. “I don’t sense the Dark, but we’ll need to tape you up so it doesn’t enter through the perforations.”
Grimacing, he surveyed himself. “And to keep any bugs that flower injected into me with its poison from spreading to you.”
“Poison?” Volka squeaked looking up at him. Her eyes were wide. She seemed to be, as the human saying went, “frozen in place”—down on one knee, hand on the tape, body rigid.
His processors lit on the problem, and his circuits hummed. Bowing his head, he tapped his visor to hers. “Volka, I’m immune…to the poison, and any biological virus, bacteria, or parasite.”
“Oh, right.” Ripping a bit of tape with a shaking hand, she began patching the punctures with the same care she’d given to creating his pauldron. Finishing, she replaced the tape, and they looked toward the pirate camp. No one seemed to have heard the disturbance on the hilltop, or maybe they’d been heard and mistaken for a snared animal.
The warehouse was to the south, just north of a line of buildings. Sundancer’s jaunt had probably distracted many of the pirates, but there were still guards watching the men and women hauling compost. 6T9’s jaw got hard. “We’d probably better think of some sort of ruse to distract them.”
“Any ideas?” Volka asked.
“No.”
“I know you’ll think of something before we get there, General.” He could hear the smile on her lips.
Despite her words, she didn’t move.
“Volka, were you injured?” Maybe he’d missed something when he was struggling with the petals.
“No, I’m just scared. Hoping that it’s worth it.” She closed her eyes. “But it’s a test; I can’t fail.” Taking an audible breath, she headed through the flower-trees toward the camp.
It was illogical, but it would only waste time to argue with her. Following close behind, he set to devising a plan.
They were reaching the border of the camp. Volka couldn’t see much, but the foul feeling of the Dark made her stomach queasy. Sixty put a hand on her back and gestured for her to follow him to the right. She saw light in that direction. Not knowing what he was planning, but trusting him, she followed. A few steps later, they were in a small clearing, perhaps thirty meters from the clearing the camp was in. The cause of the clearing was quite evident. There was a large rock at the center. Broad and flat, it didn’t rise higher than Volka’s ankles, but it was resisting the flower-trees’ efforts to grow there.
Quickly surveying the sky in all directions, Sixty led her onto the rocky flat and crouched low, gesturing for her to do the same. Volka understood. The flower-trees almost obscured the view of the camp from here, and the suits were very well camouflaged, but making themselves small would lessen their chances of being seen even more. The moonlight was behind Sixty, backlighting him and casting his face in shadow. Volka couldn’t see him very well, but she had the impression he was about to speak.
From the pack on her back came a ferocious snore and then a snort. Carl’s necklace crackled, and then he whispered, “Finally, I can speak without you two being eaten. Volka, put me down and turn me around so I can keep my voice low.”
Volka hastily did as he said, setting the pack upright so Carl could see them both in his “sausage suit.”
“Look, Hatchlings,” Carl began. “The way to the warehouse is clear, but I don’t know for how long. You may need a distraction on the way back, and I know how to give it to you. You’ll have to leave me here, though—”
Volka went cold at thought of leaving the little creature alone and helpless in his cumbersome suit. “What?”
“—also,” Carl went on. “I’ll need the four extra pistols and six of the grenades you have squished in this pack with me.”
“Extra pistols? Grenades?” Sixty said.
Volka blinked. He sounded surprised. “As many weapons as I could carry seemed like a good idea.” She looked at Carl, stomach sinking. “But we can’t leave you here alone.”
Carl sighed. “I was able to persuade the plants not to attack you, but I’m going to need to control them for what I have planned. To do that, I’m going to have to hop from this body into theirs, passing the weapons between their roots. You’re going to need me to do this, Volka. The ship with the farting hover engines is on its way back. They have heavy guns…we need them occupied.”
“Carl… ”
He squeaked. “This body is going to cry piteously when I leave it. Squeaking that would give you away if you kept me with you. You have to leave me. On the way back, try to pick me up if you can, but it isn’t absolutely necessary. I can’t die. You can. Get in and out of the camp as soon as you can. It’s teeming with Darkness.”
“No,
Carl,” Volka said. “We stick together.”
“Do it, Volka,” Sixty said.
“But—”
Sixty put a hand on her shoulder. “He’ll find us again, one form or another. And I hear the freighter. We have to move now.”
“Toss the weapons into the tree roots,” Carl commanded. “I’ll stay right here. I can’t move anywhere in this blasted suit.”
Volka could hear the freighter, too. It wasn’t advancing quickly, its hover engines stuttering dangerously…they probably needed to land, and without a werfle to “persuade” the plants not to bite, the only place large enough would be the pirate camp.
Taking Carl out of the pack, she whispered, “I hate this.”
“Go,” Carl said. “Just drop the pack with the weapons at the rock edge. The roots will be able to reach them, and I’ll be able to persuade the forest not to bite until you reach the camp.”
Sixty pulled her arm, and she rose. Together they went to the rock edge. Volka deposited the pack and the extra weapons on the roots of a flower-tree, attaching a single shock grenade to her belt. From her paperback education she knew it wouldn’t create a fire or shoot fragments that could pierce a hull, but it would create a stun blast strong enough to topple a grown man. In her heart, she heard Carl say, “Go!”
She went, and the trees did not protest. It was only after they reached the edge of the flower trees that she heard a piteous werfle squeak. She didn’t look back though, not until she and Sixty were hidden behind one of the buildings on the outskirts. “The way looks clear for now,” Sixty said, brandishing his stunner. Volka nodded, but her eyes were on the trees where she’d laid the weapons. They were bending one to another, as though by an unseen wind or as though they were passing something between them. She swallowed. Carl was in those trees, not in the frightened werfle trapped in a sausage suit on a rock, alone and afraid.