“It’s alright. The thing is dead.” Kol turned the carcass over. It was one of the Ru’at dog-things.
Only it wasn’t a carcass, Solomon saw. “That thing isn’t dead,” he said, taking a closer step. “It’s a skin.”
The four-limbed body looked curiously deflated, as if its insides had been scooped out, leaving nothing but the outer covering.
“I don’t understand.” Kol kept the gun lowered against the thing, although it was clearly as dangerous as a wet dishcloth.
“It’s hide,” Mariad Rhossily was saying. “Like a snake.”
“It doesn’t look much like a snake to me,” the Martian sympathizer muttered.
“Snakes shed their skin.” Solomon grasped what the imprimatur was saying. “When they grow into their next stage. When they grow larger.”
“Sskkrkr…” There was a low, hissing sort of rattle that echoed across the Ru’at nursery grounds. If it was indeed the same Ru’at creatures that they had faced just before, Solomon thought—and he had no reason to assume otherwise—then they had lost their earlier, piggy-sounding sort of noise. Instead, the new form of the Ru’at sounded deeper, more menacing, and yes, larger.
“Look!” Solomon spotted another shape further up the path, again lying prone.
“Another hide?” Mariad asked, moving quickly along with Solomon to it.
“No, this one…” Solomon grimaced as he saw the scraps of torn flesh that was all that was left of the thing. “Our gun didn’t do that.” And my kick to the thing’s head certainly didn’t do that either, he was forced to admit. “It looks like it’s been eaten,” he said with a trace of horror.
They were only born a little while ago, Solomon’s mind considered. Like reptiles, what would these creatures need as soon as they were born?
Nutrients.
“They were born. They needed food, and then…” Solomon breathed.
“We were just in the way,” the imprimatur said. “Those things were meant to feed off each other to achieve their next stage of evolution…”
“Skrkrkrk!” The sound was louder now, but it still didn’t sound very close. It sounded as though it was further out, in the middle of the nursery area.
“Maybe we should go back to that airlock,” Kol admitted, his eyes wide with fear.
“No,” the imprimatur said with fierce determination. “We’re here now. And I, for one, want to know what the Ru’at has planned for that thing!”
“Wonderful,” Kol muttered. “I guess I’m going to take the lead, then.” He begrudgingly stalked forward in a crouch, the gun held high and locked against his shoulder.
The party crept their way back into the same place that they had so recently run from, heading toward the large mounds of vegetation that had been split apart to release the Ru’at dog-things.
But most of the vegetation pods were now just burst-open heaps of compost against the moss and lichen. The nursery ground had performed its function, apparently, and there appeared to be no more reason for them to grow.
Gone too were the drifts of glowing pollen and the wavering tendrils rising from the lichen. Whatever strange mutagenic process they had walked into had clearly run its course.
Ochrie had been right, Solomon found himself thinking as they stepped carefully through the center of the farm, heading back the way they had come to the distant steps and tunnels to the colony above. It’s quiet now. It would almost count as peaceful, were it not for the fact they were walking through a strange alien environment, where every bit of vegetation apparently was designed to eradicate humanity.
“And it’s too quiet,” Solomon breathed. The sound of the evolved Ru’at monster had stopped, and that made Solomon even more nervous.
Ker-THUNK! They all jumped as a loud, industrial-sounding noise started above them.
“What was that?” Mariad said, worried as she looked up to scan the distant cavern ceiling. Solomon did the same. It was hard to make out what was happening up there beyond the glare of the blue and yellow grow lights that hung from long chains, but Solomon could see shapes moving.
“It looks like…some kind of machine,” he whispered, watching the silhouettes and shadows take on a blocky, mechanical appearance just as they slid into view.
What appeared to be some kind of lift was descending from the shadows of the caverns’ roof, but it wasn’t any normal human lift, Solomon could see. It was made of a lowering hexagonal platform with a silver grillwork floor on which sat ragged and red humps of what appeared to be meat.
“It’s feeding time,” Kol murmured.
The platform appeared open apart from the cables that supported it, but what was different was that descending outside the lift came metal columns encrusted with modules and sensors. Solomon could make out protruding forms like antennae or needles, as well as rotating units and flashing lights.
“Like some kind of drone testing station,” Solomon murmured. He had once watched a Discover! Channel documentary on how the Confederacy assessed a potential new planet for colonial habitats. They lowered drone sensing stations—large pod-units encrusted with antennae and sensors and refractors and a hundred and one other instruments—into the new planet’s atmosphere, where they collected data and extracted molecules or even drilled through ice and rock.
“Are they weighing the babies for their health records?” Kol muttered. From his tone of voice, he had been attempting to make a joke, but from the anguished look on his face, even he didn’t find it very funny.
Solomon thought the man was right when he said it was feeding time. The central lift lowered out over the middle of the Ru’at farm-nursery, and the humans had to change their positions to get a clear glimpse of what was happening. They watched as it lowered itself by steady increments, before finally halting just a few feet from the mossy floor.
And waited.
“Maybe it’s not hungry,” Solomon said. “It did just eat all of its brothers and sisters, after all.”
“SCKRKREARGH!” A sudden, deafening roar split the cavern, and even Solomon couldn’t help but flinch as they twisted in its direction.
A shape was rising from the higher mounds of undergrowth. It stalked. It lumbered.
“Holy frack…” Solomon breathed.
The Ru’at creature was now fully bipedal, still with its backward-jointed legs like a cat or a dog, as well as long arms that gave it a sort of hunched appearance.
The creature had changed color, still mottled but now a lot darker—looking more like a rock formation than normal skin, and shot through with lines of rusty red, making Solomon think that it had imbibed some of the iron oxide from the surface of the Red Planet itself. The Outcast Commander could still see the way that the thing’s skin moved strangely across nodules and muscle groups that he could not name. It was alien in every respect.
It was also tall now. From Solomon’s estimates, it must have easily reached seven or eight feet and was proportionately wide. It’s taller than even Corporal Malady, Solomon could have sworn.
For a second, even surrounded by alien biology and in these circumstances, the man’s heart swept to the memory of his squad. What had happened to them? Were they even still alive? Had the Ru’at taken over everywhere apart from Earth?
But the creature roared again, loping forward on its strangely articulated legs. Solomon watched as it raised its head—now not just an open maw but more human-like, with a smaller, bony forehead and brow over a wide grin of a mouth filled with rows upon rows of small teeth.
“That thing grew up,” Kol whispered, and the moment that he opened his mouth, the creature froze and turned its head in their direction.
“Oh frack,” Kol whispered, and Solomon saw the man’s hands start to subconsciously lower the Jackhammer as his body realized that there had to be little they could do to stop such a behemoth.
The thing’s questing hiss traveled over the blue-green vegetation toward them.
The would-be escapees froze, no one moving or making
a sound as the humans all held their breath. Even the brainwashed Ambassador Ochrie appeared horrified by what she was seeing.
“Sskrargh!” The thing shook its head with a grunt of annoyance, clearly having given up on finding whatever had disturbed its hunt for food, and slowly turned back toward the platform.
Solomon and the others let out a slow sigh of relief but didn’t even dare move until they had seen the creature close in on the platform and circle it suspiciously.
Ker-thunk! Suddenly, the platform rose a few feet into the air, meaning that even the monster, with all its height, couldn’t simply reach in and grab the meat.
The thing will have to climb onto the platform to get the food, Solomon saw.
Which, after carefully sniffing the metal and the wires in front of it, the thing now did, not using its ‘arms’ at all but hopping up onto the platform with its long legs in one easy, smooth movement.
Where it leaned down like a cat over its kill and started to shovel the hunks of red meat into its mouth.
“Uh… We should go.” The imprimatur broke their self-imposed silence. Off on the platform, the creature was too busy gorging itself to apparently pay them any heed, and so Solomon nodded, starting to back away at a crouch, gesturing to Ochrie beside him to do the same.
“Where are the others?” Solomon whispered when he had moved back to Rhossily’s position. They could still clearly see the platform-lift with the creature in place on it. “The other hatched, or grown, or whatever they did, monsters?”
“I think it ate them.” Kol grimaced.
“It’s the last one left,” Mariad agreed. “All the others were just food for whichever one remained”
Solomon shuddered once more. Who would design such a system? If the Ru’at were indeed playing a centuries-long game of domination, what did they hope to achieve by creating some new breed of super-monster?
Not just a monster, a predator, Solomon thought, pausing in his escape.
“Lieutenant?” Mariad whispered in alarm. “What is it?”
Solomon shook his head, trying to put into words what his subconscious was trying to tell him. It had always been like this for the thief. His brain just worked quicker than most people’s, but it often worked quicker under the surface, delivering dazzling realizations and escape plans at the last possible moment.
It must be my genetics, Solomon thought grimly. My genetics that were lab-grown, based on the Ru’at’s perversion of Earth biology.
It was just like what was happening here, he started to put the clues together. This is what the Ru’at did. But the realization went deeper than that. There was something about the way that his own training mirrored that creature’s somehow. He had been grown in a lab, and then guided—or directed—by Matty Sozer on a life of learning the sorts of skills that he would need out here.
Like I’m a predator in a laboratory…
Solomon had been betrayed and charged with his many crimes, about to be delivered to the penal colony on Titan, when Warden Coates had instead redirected him into the newly-formed Outcast Marines.
Which was where I was always destined to be…
There was a sort of symmetry with the life of the apex predator behind them. A creature bred and tested in a controlled environment, until it came time to—
“SKRARGH!” The thing’s roar was deafening, and full of pain.
“Holy—” Kol had turned, raising the Jackhammer in alarm, but there appeared to be no need to worry about their safety—any more than was to be expected, given their current situation. The creature was not going anywhere.
“What are they doing to it?” the imprimatur asked. “Why are they doing that?”
The massive creature was now standing tall, still with hunks of red meat at its feet and with rivers of gore running from its wide mouth, but it was no longer eating. It was screaming.
The thing’s arms were stretched out to either side, making it look like some macabre, obscene religious icon. From the first elbow joint—the thing appeared to have two to each arm—there extended a silver cable, pulling taut to the outside sensing columns. As the humans watched, the thing’s arms were winched that little bit wider.
“What? I don’t understand,” Kol muttered. “Why go to all the trouble of creating some new species, only to torture it?”
“Just like they played games with humanity? Sending the probe, changing the Earth, fooling us into believing that they were trying to gift us with their advanced technology?” Solomon whispered back.
“Look! Something’s happening,” Mariad indicated.
The two columns were slowly moving closer to the monster, and from their sides started to extend what could only be called utensils. Solomon saw the gleam of sharp bits of metal, and others with attachments that whirred and rotated.
“I can’t watch.” Rhossily buried her face in her hands. Not out of any sympathy for the creature, Solomon was sure, but just the sheer grossness of the situation in front of them.
With sudden speed, the utensils darted forward and back from the creature’s body, and the columns themselves started to move, rotating around the lift platform slowly at first, but getting faster and faster as the devices plunged in and out of the creature ahead of them.
“SKRARGH!” The thing roared in clearly apparent agony, but it didn’t die. And now the columns were slowing a little, but still sweeping around the creature in measured rotations. It retracted the torturous implements, and other devices started to extend from the machinery. Solomon saw shapes like molded forms of metal, as well as vice grips holding smaller items.
Hang on a minute… Solomon’s subconscious finally started to make sense of what they were watching.
Up and down the columns were extending more strangely twisted shapes of metal. Some of them long, some of them wide, others just curious scoops. Like mechanical parts.
“Like cyborg parts,” Solomon whispered.
“What!?” Mariad said.
“Look.” Solomon saw the utensils move forward again, still lightning fast, punching their nodules and modules, their devices and strange metallic organs, into the incisions already made on the creature’s body.
“We’re not looking at the thing getting tortured. We’re watching it being operated upon,” Solomon breathed. “This is the final stage of its evolution…”
The creature shook and trembled underneath the onslaught of metal, but it no longer roared in agony, making the Outcast commander think that at least one of those implants must have been some kind of pain reliever.
Instead, with every second that passed, more of the creatures’ body was left a gleaming silver or a dull bronze. After only a few moments, the thing’s legs were now entirely inlaid with lines of metal, to then be covered by sheath-like plates.
Solomon watched in a sort of sick fascination as the creature’s flesh became a canvas for its new skin, a metal skin, one that didn’t cover its alien flesh completely. Just like the NeuroTech cyborgs, it had exposed areas of skin surrounded by metal plate.
It didn’t even flinch when into the thing’s hips were driven what looked like metal rods to form the support for an external harness very much like the sort that created the superstructure of any power armor or full tactical suit. By the time the columns had finished their ghastly work, the creature had assisted joints with external rods and pistons that would probably turn the already impressive creature into something with superhuman capabilities.
Its shoulders were built up, both with layers of metal as well as a tough exo-skeleton, capped by more armor. The thing lost its neck, and instead its comparatively small head ended up sitting inside a cowl of metal, the same way that Malady’s faceplate was in the center of a mound of metal that stretched from shoulder-tip all the way around his head.
“They’re taking clues from us,” Solomon thought. Wasn’t that what Tavin had originally said about the cyborgs? That even if they were functionally stupid, their machine-learning and strategy-awareness cir
cuits were unlike anything that anyone had ever seen. The human cyborgs, controlled by the Ru’at, could learn. They could study and analyze the battle moves and defenses of their opponents, the better to outmatch them the next time.
What Solomon thought he was looking at here was the pinnacle of all the experience that the Ru’at must have had from fighting the Confederate Marines. No, fighting MY marines, he corrected. The Outcasts. My company. They were the only group of marines who had consistently and repeatedly engaged with the Ru’at forces in any and all of their diverse forms.
There were elements to the creature’s construction that reminded Solomon of power armor—the way that the harness was built around the hips and lower back, forming an external support cage for the layers of armor.
But unlike power or light tactical armor, this stuff was bonded and implanted directly to the thing’s body. A bit like the bio-chemical bonding that Malady has in his full tactical. As if the Ru’at had taken all the best bits of Marine Corps technology and was about to use it against them.
And then, finally, came the last adjustment.
The creature was now standing inside its own heavy, articulated suit of silver and bronze, looking like something out of a myth, or a nightmare. Solomon could see the thing’s metal chest plate rising and falling as it panted. And still, it no longer roared in pain. Solomon wondered if the thing could even feel pain anymore, or maybe the mysterious Ru’at had taken that ability from it.
The two columns drew back, slowing in their cycle to a complete standstill as if admiring their handiwork.
Ker-thunk! There was another heavy industrial sound from the dark of the cavern ceiling far above, and the sound of turning gears.
Out of the darkness, and into the glare of the strip lights, came a final column of metal instrumentation, this one gleaming white and touched with the brightness of stars. In the column’s center glowed a very pure, bright blue light, the same sort of radiance that had come from the ruined Ru’at orb that Solomon still had in the pocket of his General Luna Assistant service suit.
Outcast Marines Boxed Set Page 98
