by B. V. Larson
This wasn’t the Boldo Nicu had saw die, however. The mustache was still there, but little else was recognizable. There were—stalks coming out of him, sprouting from the neck and shoulders. Things that looked like fleshy clamshells floated at the end of these moving stalks. Inside the clamshells rolled what looked like smooth balls of pink flesh. Could those be—eyes?
Somehow, this was worse than the wormy shrade. It was a person he knew, someone who had died in front of him, who had obviously been hideously altered. And what was that dark, bulging material underneath the spacesuit? It looked hard, like a shell. Finally, who had blown all those holes in the suit to reveal the shell?
Nicu panicked. He turned and ran off down his dark corridor. He managed not to scream, but that’s all the self-control he was able to exert. In his mind, he was screaming. In his mind, he yearned for the sweet oblivion of madness to take him.
He didn’t even know exactly where he was going. He made random twists and turns. He did not even think about his mirror and peeking around corners. He wanted to escape this new Boldo, this nightmare from his past who had returned from the dead. The new Boldo was more terrifying by far than the old Boldo had ever been.
He found himself in a wider corridor. He slowed down, panting hard. He knew where he was now. The public section. He was in the very heart of the base. He smelled something then, something strange and vaguely organic. Was someone boiling soup? He tried to step lightly, to control his panicked run. He didn’t think Boldo had managed to follow him. With luck, he’d lost him.
He stepped up to an open set of doors and saw he’d reached the cafeteria. He stood there at the entrance, mouth agape. What he saw inside... his mind could not process it for several moments.
The tables and benches had been pushed to the sides. The kitchen doors had been flung wide and pinned open. From inside, a yellow steam emanated. The stoves and ovens, what he could see of them, worked hard to heat bubbling glass cauldrons of unknown substances.
The floor was painted with dried blood. Bits of flesh were everywhere, mixed with scraps of hair, individual teeth and shredded clothing. Lying in the middle of it all was a swollen figure. It looked vaguely human, but a human who had been blown up like an over-inflated, multi-segmented balloon of stretched skin. Hunched over the balloon-human on the floor was a mottled-brown octopus-thing.
It was at that point Nicu made the discovery that drove him temporarily mad. He saw the balloon-human’s face. It was Kizzy’s face. Slack, emotionless, absent. But still alive, with the eyes open. Staring.
Nicu gave no warning shout. He was not a man prone to battle-cries and showy displays of rage. Instead, he trotted forward lightly, decisively. His knife appeared in his hand and he held it low. Seemingly of its own accord, it began whirring. His eyes glittered with madness. He was not himself.
A hest saw him and moved to intercept, hissing. The octopus thing noticed him next and began humping away, seemingly in fear. Nicu charged after it, but the spider caught up to him and tripped him. He turned on it and vented his rage. He slashed off its limbs one after another.
When he climbed back to his feet, the octopus thing had vanished. He stepped toward Kizzy, who made grotesque attempts to rise, but could not. She was too inflated, too full of shivering things that moved under her stretched skin.
Nicu cut her head off. He wept as he did it, but he knew it was an act of mercy. He fled the cafeteria then, and ran for the blastpans. With luck, there would be a fueled ship there. The Vlax always kept their ships ready, in case an emergency required evacuation.
As Nicu ran, he might have been screaming. He wasn’t sure.
#
The Savant was horrified. She cautiously slipped out of her hiding spot to find the wild human had left, but who knew when the creature might return? How had it evaded detection? Her team of three shrades had sought humans for days in this base, and turned up nothing. She had already recalled all her forces to the cafeteria, her last hest and the remaining two shrades. The Boldo-creature arrived before any of the others. Agitated, it stomped from foot to foot in an annoying fashion. The Savant supposed it was anxious to continue hunting for the elusive human. But she was too fearful the human might return and attack her again to allow the pursuit. The human had already done tremendous damage and would have to wait.
She worked on the Kizzy-creature frantically. Blood-loss was her biggest concern. The creature no longer really required the head, fortunately. There, at least, the human enemy had made a miscalculation. Due to intensive modifications, the Kizzy-creature had two spare brains. In fact, the obsolete one in her skull had only been doing routine work such as autonomic breathing and digestive operations. The primary brain, now located much more safely in the central thorax, could take over critical functions. Blood-loss, however, was a problem. She began working on the Kizzy-creature, ministering emergency medical help.
The last surviving hest tried to send her an enquiry datablip as she worked. As it was not categorized as an emergency, she ignored it. With the Boldo-creature there, agitated and stomping in place or not, she felt safe enough.
The Savant slathered sealant over the Kizzy-creature’s neck stump and monitored all the metabolic processes until they stabilized. She looked up, feeling like matters were under control again, only to get another datablip from the hest. This time, she examined it.
The dome over blastpan six had opened, the hest reported. Stunned, the Savant demanded vid feed. Organic bridges, attached to the electronic base surveillance system, fed her the data fed her data from the human cameras. As she watched in horror, a small ship lifted on twin cones of blue exhaust and rumbled into the moon’s dark sky.
Over the preceding days, the Savant had spent her spare time (of which there had been precious little) studying human spacecraft. The Vlax had one primary type of ship they used for all operations. Called a rook, this single workhorse design had been adopted long ago. It allowed the isolated Vlax flexibility in recovering from breakdowns. Every ship could fight, carry cargo, transport colonists and even operate as a mining vessel. There were better specialized designs for all these functions, but by sticking to a single utilitarian design, they were able to keep their fleet in repair and could always field a vehicle that could perform any required mission. As a result of this strategy, every ship in the Vlax fleet was a rook.
She watched the human escape with her mind racing. What should she do? She almost ordered the Boldo-creature to follow, but realized it was too late. It had to be the wild human who had assaulted her and the Kizzy-creature.
She fought against a wave of despair. She had failed to contain the enemy. The human had escaped and would immediately warn his comrades. Too soon! She was just not prepared for this at such an early stage. The many bio-seeds in the Kizzy-creature had yet to hatch, although they ripened quickly. If she had only been allowed a few more days...
But she had not.
Emergency evacuation! she beamed the order to her tiny collection of creatures. They immediately set about picking things up and heading for the blastpans. They moved with frantic energy, as did she. They would load the remaining rooks and launch within minutes. They would follow the human. They would jam his communications as best they could. He did not have much of a head start. With luck, they could blow him out of space, or follow him to his base and catch another unwary hive of humans.
It was a faint hope, but it was all the Savant had. She had to try. It was embedded in her genetic compulsions to do so.
Ten
When ex-governor Lucas Droad arrived on Neu Schweitz, he was surprised to find that no one was there to greet him. There were no government officials smiling and reaching for his hand. No military personnel wanted to whisk him away to debrief him. No hover-limo sat humming, waiting to glide away to a command bunker. Nothing.
He put his prominent nose up higher than before and sniffed loudly. During his long trip from Garm to Neu Schweitz, he’d never cut his hair. Now he fit in better
with the locals, sporting rich curly locks of dark hair that fell to his shoulders. Personally, he preferred a short-cropped style, but with every world he journeyed to, he endeavored to fit in with the locals. It solved many problems before they even came up.
He had messaged the Nexus government everything concerning the invasion and his successful, if costly, repelling of the invaders. He had no information concerning the events since his departure, but he’d thought the Nexus would at least be interested in his report, seeing as they’d lost half a world over it.
As he ran his diplomatic credentials over the scanners and was emitted from the spaceport without inspection or question, he considered his position. Could political events have progressed in an unfortunate direction since his departure from this same building ten years ago?
He stopped in the lobby, eyeing his surroundings with growing suspicion. He lifted his phone and tapped codes he was not supposed to possess.
Not far off, in the cargo and quarantine area, Rem-9’s optics switched on.
“Is this an emergency, governor?” asked Rem-9 with a short data-blip. The signal penetrated many layers of packing foam, in addition to a dozen yards of bubble-crete.
“No, not yet. But I want you awake, and alert. Things are not as I expected them to be.”
“Message received.”
Droad let his hand drop. He thought perhaps he was being overly-cautious. He missed Jarmo at that moment. It had always been good to have his bodyguard at his side. Perhaps he’d made a mistake to leave the giant on Garm to watch over the new governor. He heaved a quiet sigh as he headed for the luggage turret. He’d come too far for such regrets now.
As a precaution, he had left Sarah and Bili with Fryx back on the ship. They would come down when he gave them the signal. There was no point in allowing anyone the chance to use them as political chips in whatever game was afoot in the Nexus halls these days. He had been out of touch for a decade, and quite probably out of favor. Perhaps those that ruled here considered him a failed governor, one who’d done nothing more than manage to lose half a world within the span of a month.
It was as he reached for his bags that he received his first shock. A steel gripper reached past his shoulder and grabbed the handle he’d been about to take hold of.
“Excuse me, are you Lucas Droad?” the mech who owned the gripper said politely.
Droad eyed it appraisingly. The feminine voice, emanating from such a monstrosity of metal and flesh, was disconcerting. Droad nodded in response to the query and watched as the swiveling optics bobbed up and down, perfectly tracking his head movement. Was the thing staring at his chin?
The mech lifted his bag without the slightest effort. She, thought Droad, reminding himself that the thing would probably think of itself as female. She was clearly a domestic model. She wasn’t as large or formidable as combat models like Rem-9 and his platoon members, but being over two meters tall, she was scary enough to a normal human.
“Who sent you?” asked Droad.
The mech made a concerned sound. Was that the clucking of a tongue? He didn’t think mechs had tongues, which left him wondering if the sound could have been a recorded digital file, or worse yet some simulation of a human non-verbal utterance. What exactly, he asked himself, was this thing clucking?
“Did no one tell you of my assignment? I’m so sorry, governor. An oversight, I’m sure. I humbly ask for your forgiveness.”
“Not a problem,” said Droad, pasting on a smile. This action came very naturally to him, as he was after all, a politician. “And who might I thank for sending you along?”
“Why, Senator Fouty, of course.”
Droad nodded, understanding more now. Senator Yannick Fouty. He was still in office. How old was the man? A hundred and fifty? No, closer to one-sixty now. After all, Droad reminded himself, he had been gone for about a decade.
“I asked to meet with the Nexus Militia Chief of Staff.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, sir. I’m sorry.”
“You were sent to greet me?”
“Yes sir.”
“Just you?”
“Yes sir,” repeated the mech. She said it with exactly the same inflection she had used to answer the previous question. Mechs were like that. Sometimes, Droad thought, it seemed like they saved bio-ram space by storing up answers and playing them back at appropriate moments.
“Right this way,” said the mech, ushering him with a gripper.
Droad didn’t move. He was thinking hard. He was certain that his experiences on Garm had made him paranoid, but he didn’t like this at all. What was the Senator’s game? Why had no Nexus military personnel come? He decided, before the mech could say right this way again, with exactly the same cadence and rhythm, that he wasn’t going to play the Senator’s game, whatever it was. At least, not without changing the rules somewhat.
“I’m sorry, but I need to wait for my friend, first.”
“Your friend?”
Droad tapped at his phone. A voice said, “I’ll be right there, Governor.”
“I’m sorry to pry, Governor,” said the mech, voice still soft and polite, “but was that the voice of another of my kind?”
“A mech, yes. It’s Captain Rem-9.”
“Captain? As I recall, he was a lieutenant.”
“Yes, well, he received a field promotion.”
“From Nexus?”
“From me,” said Droad. He eyed the mech, but sensed no hostility from her. He decided to relax somewhat. Perhaps sending a mech out to the spaceport as a greeter was standard practice for the Nexus now. He had been missing for quite a while. “Excuse me, but what’s your name?” he asked the mech. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask sooner. I’m distracted.”
“Zuna, sir. And there is absolutely no need to apologize.”
She had no sooner said this than she snapped alert and swiveled her optics toward a bay door near the spacer’s lounge. She stepped forward in front of Droad.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s a disturbance of some kind,” she replied.
Droad stared past her quite unwomanly hips toward the bay doors she indicated. He felt vaguely like a child with a mechanical mother, looking out from behind her.
The bottom of the rolling steel door rattled and shook. Something punched up through it, like a can opener popping through thin aluminum. With an irritating screech of metal, the door was forced upward, rolling itself into the ceiling. Rem-9 stepped through the damaged entrance and swept the area with his optics. Silver eyes slid over the scene with cold calculus. Rem-9 spotted Droad and strode toward him. Behind him, the steel doors quivered and hung at a broken angle.
“There you are,” said Droad, stepping out from behind Zuna. “You shouldn’t keep me waiting like that.”
Rem-9 paused for a second before answering. First, he sized up Zuna. Then he swung one optic to Droad, still directing the first at Zuna. “You are joking,” he stated.
Droad smiled. “Yes. Yes I am.”
“What is the situation?” asked Rem-9.
“This is your friend Rem-9 then?” asked Zuna.
Droad introduced them. Zuna was careful to use Rem-9’s new rank of Captain. Soon, the three of them exited the spaceport. Droad had to show his credentials to get past various officials who seemed upset about their bay door and the state of the cargo area behind it. Droad explained that they could talk to Senator Fouty about restitution. This got them to let him go, but didn’t please them. The Senator was notoriously stingy when it came to paying for such things.
As they walked out, people stared, but less than Droad expected. Apparently, seeing mechs walking about wasn’t as unusual as it had been the year he’d left Neu Schweitz.
Zuna had a flitter waiting outside. Together, Droad and the two mechs climbed aboard. Droad noticed the distinct shift in weight distribution as the mechs took their positions. Zuna sat in the driver’s seat, donning an absurd octagonal cap as she took up the role. Droad smir
ked at that. Fouty would make her wear a chauffeur’s cap. The senator liked formalities. At least, that hadn’t changed.
Droad’s smirk changed into a frown, however, when she didn’t take hold of the two steering sticks with her grippers. Instead, she strapped in and addressed the flitter.
“Take us home, Bruno, if you please.”
“I’ve been waiting for an hour,” complained Bruno. The voice emanated from a hidden speaker.
Droad leaned forward, eyeing the sloping exterior of the flitter. “Am I sitting in a mech? Or did someone give this vehicle a computer personality?”
“Both,” said Bruno. There was the distinct hint of amusement in the voice.
“Governor Droad,” said Rem-9, sounding worried. “There is a slight probability—”
“Yes, yes,” said Droad, cutting him off. “We have to take risks somewhere along the line.”
Droad heard the whine and snap of servos and artificial muscles behind him as Rem-9 tried to keep an eye on everything at once. He understood Rem-9’s concern. A good bodyguard never liked surprises of any kind. And this situation was indeed a surprise. He had been greeted by a mech and now flew inside another mech. A decade ago, mechs had been limited to human forms on Neu Schweitz. Now it seemed they were not only more common, but also took the form of various conveyances.
Droad looked over the flitter’s dashboard, which was covered in reactive instrumentation. He was looking for an optic, and he found it. Bruno was a mech all right. The thing had a silvery eye looking right at him.
The flitter was up and cruising now, increasing speed and banking as it turned toward a nearby cluster of peaks. Like all people of means, Senator Fouty lived up on the higher ground above the city.
“Is there a problem?” asked Zuna, watching him.
“No, none at all,” said Droad, forcing himself to relax.
In truth, he felt considerably more relaxed around Zuna now that Rem-9 had taken a seat directly behind her. Droad knew that every millisecond, Rem-9 was watching her movements for something suspicious with his lidless, roving optics. There would be no surprises.
