Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  The Ubuku initiates crawled up the creature, using grappling hooks to climb on to his back, its tail to run up, any way they could get an ounce of traction. And they started plucking the dinosaur’s scales like a chicken. Fire Breather sent boluses of flames against the human lice infesting its sibling. But the natives just smiled back at it, using their trance state to make them immune to the fires. Considering these latest entrants to the arena were still not full-fledged Ubuku, Laney found their trance state abilities troubling enough.

  Tool Wielder grabbed a mace to hammer at the humans crawling up its sibling. But he was being peppered by the automatic rifles in the hands of the natives on the ground. He needed to repeatedly interrupt his charges with a flick of his tail to clear the ground of troops. Those troops, in turn, losing their footing and their targeting, sent stray bullets into the crowd. A few spectators took the shots poorly and died. But most had raised their transparent shields in time, the same ones urban SWAT teams used to suppress street rebellions. Nothing, apparently, was about to curtail the crowd’s enjoyment, including these occasional mishaps.

  The fellow dinosaurs wailed in sympathy for the pain The Petrified Dinosaur was communicating by way of its outcries each time enough of his scales were peeled off for one or several of the humans, hanging from him by ropes, to take their battery-powered jack hammers to his soft under flesh. Each time they drilled down to the creature’s spinal cord, he lost coordination in some part of his body. By the third group to break through, he was pretty much done for. He collapsed to the ground, unable to even do much spasming or twitching in pain after having so many of his spinal nerves severed. Once more he appeared to be living up to his name of The Petrified Dinosaur. “Mother. I can’t move. Why won’t they let me move?”

  Laney, wiping her eyes, trying to keep her cool, had been working on the problem the whole time. But as The Petrified Dinosaur wasn’t a particularly good listener and student, she’d had to make modifications to the two other ones instead. She was beginning to appreciate the sadist’s Panno’s methods better with culling the wheat from the chaff when it came to finding the best evolvers. She may not have agreed with his technique, but the reasoning behind it was sound enough.

  The humans disengaged from The Petrified Dinosaur to attend to the other two. Back on their feet on the dirt floor of the arena once again, fanning out so the dinosaurs couldn’t target more than one at a time, they thought they had the situation well in hand.

  Imagine their surprise when the dinosaurs ejected their scales like a dog flicking water after a bath. Every single one of the humans went down, killed in the same tour de force, most in the ugliest of manners. The scales cut through them with so much force few of the bodies were left whole as the body parts rained to the ground. Several severed heads and torsos, arms and limbs ended up in the audience. The crowd roared and hoisted the trophies proudly overhead.

  The dinosaurs had managed their masterstroke without leaving themselves unduly exposed; they had enough scales remaining to continue to protect their bodies.

  Panno just nodded and smiled.

  When the two remaining dinosaurs fled the stadium, up through the bleachers, he just let them get away this time. He figured they’d earned their stripes.

  As to the humans in the audience mashed under the feet of the escaping monsters, the ones who hadn’t taken the time to don protective clothing prior to entering the coliseum didn’t fare particularly well. But most had worn flexible body armor that apparently when sufficiently concussed hardened in the vicinity of impact. These humans rode out the storm front of otherwise crushing forces blowing over them. Surviving to tell the tale just added to their excitement.

  As it turned out, the city streets around the coliseum were narrow, and herded the fleeing animals toward the egg-shape pods that would take them off the spaceship, headed for the Amazon forest below. Once inside the hi-tech incubators, the creatures were put in suspended animation so they could all be released at once, when enough graduates of the arena filled the last of the ejection pods. Laney could see it all in her head by way of the chip on her forehead.

  There was nothing she could do for The Petrified Dinosaur. Not in the time he had remaining. He would never be able to apply her teachings fast enough. So she sent him soothing images and tried to relieve his suffering as best she could with her voice, and by getting him to secrete natural pain killers. Again, being a C-student in nanotech at best, there was only so much pain amelioration she could do with variations to the body’s own natural pain killers. Further advances in pain management would come only when she could hook up with her husband’s mind.

  Ironically, more was known about biogenesis than pain management, making it easier to genetically alter lifeforms on the fly than to figure out how to ameliorate pain. Panno could do it; if he had learned to dial it up, he could dial it down. But those secrets were locked in his head and away from her access.

  When The Petrified Dinosaur breathed his last breath, relieving her of her burden of pain containment, Laney led Truman over to the other side of the three ring circus, curious to see what Mudra was up to with the ones closer to graduation.

  Truman was being curiously silent and docile. Evidently he figured she was doing just fine catching on with her part in things without further coaching. That, and he must have found the games sufficiently entertaining to be just as absorbed in her handiwork as Panno and the rest of the audience.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mudra’s fighting style was decidedly more hands-on than her brother Panno’s. She preferred to ride her mounts until broken. Or until they learned to respond to the commands she was sending them via her headgear.

  Seated in a saddle on the dinosaur she was riding, she pulled at the reins to direct its mouth away from the dinosaur’s intended victim—one of the human warriors harassing it with a sharp-edged boomerang that took slices out of its flesh better than a good papercut. Using the pulley mechanisms on each rope that gave Mudra the strength in her hands to control the reins, which she would otherwise not have been able to do against the dinosaur’s powerful neck muscles, she steered the creature towards the denser throng of human contestants. Meanwhile she drove the spurs on her boots—in reality, they were retractable Japanese katana swords—between the scales of the dinosaur. The animal roared and sped up on command.

  Its movement, surprising the flock of humans on the floor of the arena, caused it to stomp several of them to a bloody paste before they could get away. The animal was thus able to kill several warriors instead of just one, and roared with satisfaction, thus learning slowly to trust its rider better than it trusted its own instincts. Mudra, by way of her headgear, secreted hormones and endorphins in the creature’s brain after it mastered each task to reinforce the learning.

  When twenty or so of the bird men charged the beast, firing bows and crossbows at it to get their grappling hooks to find purchase, then scaled the beast just so they could wedge their own blades beneath its scales, the animal’s instinct was to crane its neck and bite off one of the ticks at a time. Mudra let it have its way long enough for it to see the error in its ways, as the humans got blades into him faster than the dinosaur could pick the natives off. Then, when he’d learned his lesson, she sent a command prompt from her headgear, visualizing what she wanted the creature to do, and at the same time yanked back powerfully on one of the two reins. She thusly took the dinosaur into a roll.

  She released the reins in time and retracted the blades on her boots to ride the rolling belly of the beast the way a contestant does in a log rolling contest on water. By the time the beast was back on its feet at the end of its third roll, all the humans had been brushed off it, or more accurately speaking, ground into blood and guts on the hard pan earth of the arena floor. She remounted her saddle, patted the creature on the back affectionately as her headgear triggered more hormones and endorphins to secrete in the creature’s brain. Mudra must have been working with this one for a while because it wa
s no longer fighting her.

  Deeming it sufficiently broken, she signaled for the gate to open, and dismounted. The dinosaur fled the auditorium into the streets where it ran into its incubation pod and awaited whatever came following graduation day.

  Meantime, Mudra signaled the release of the latest dinosaur into the arena.

  Her assistants restrained the creature by a variety of ropes, with which they lassoed its neck and legs and tail. Each line emitted an electrical current, causing the dinosaur’s muscles to clench, effectively immobilizing it long enough for the handlers to get the saddle on it, and for Mudra to mount her new steed. She circled her hand once for the controllers to release the beast and they retracted their poles and ropes.

  The creature attempted to roll her just as she’d taught the last one to do. Just like the dinosaurs in the last stadium, the ones caged along the inner wall of this arena kept a close eye on what was going on with the fighting and adapted accordingly. But Mudra was too good a rider to be thrown in this manner. Ditto when the cousin to a T-Rex craned its neck to pick her off. This beast was stronger than the prior one. When initially the pulley mechanism regulating the reins was overwhelmed, she quickly introduced another couple wheels to further augment her strength. She hung low off the saddle, dangling by one arm from the saddle horn, while she fiddled with the pulley until she got it adjusted. For a brief moments she hung suspended between being eaten to death and crushed to death as the creature began another of its rolls. By the time it was back on two feet Mudra had found her way back into her saddle and back into control.

  Mudra signaled for the gate to be opened. In rushed another dinosaur, just as keen on ridding its mate of its rider as the dinosaur she was riding. She dodged his snapping mouth as readily as she did the snapping mouth of her own mount. She yanked back on the reins and used the head of her own mount to bat the other one’s head away.

  Slowly she got the second dinosaur to pull back with the amount of pain she was sending through her headgear to it, transmitted and amplified by the headgear the creature was wearing, which try as it might, it could not peel off itself. The creature was so overcome by pain and so wracked by it that it couldn’t focus on its psychic assailant, instead it seemed to want to bite or claw its own head off.

  Mudra signaled some more gates to go up.

  In rushed damn near a hundred natives. She was training the dinosaur she had mounted to fight alongside the humans against the other bigger dinosaur. To help inspire the opposing dinosaur to play its part properly, she curtailed its pain every time it snapped at its sibling. Or at the humans. The better the job it did at defending itself, the better it felt. The dinosaur she had mounted likewise could only get relief from the pain it was feeling by way of her headgear by attacking its opponent. Every time it bit him or gouged him with its talons it felt the endorphin release. But if he tried that against the humans guarding him, he just felt pain.

  The creatures, quite bright, and quite good at adapting, didn’t take long to learn their parts in this drama. In less than a minute they were entirely in character. Now there was just the matter of teaching the dinosaur Mudra had mounted to trust her more than its own instincts when working with the humans to kill the other dinosaur.

  To that end, Mudra fought the creature’s innate desire to charge, bite at its opponent’s neck then retreat before allowing the bigger dinosaur to roll over on him and break his bones with its sheer bulk, or worse pin him so he could bite away to his heart’s content until he’d severed her mount’s head. The creature did this repeatedly, despite ending up just as it feared, pinned to the floor beneath the bigger animal and getting its head chewed off. A fate he was saved from only by Mudra’s intervention, getting the bigger animal to back off with boluses of pain directed at its temporal and frontal lobes. That directive in turn was bolstered by the many bird men taking stabs at the bigger animal, their piercings like countless maddening bee stings.

  Finally, feeling sufficiently battered by its own approach to consider listening to Mudra’s directives coming at it over its headgear, the creature she had mounted grabbed on to the belly of the larger animal and wouldn’t let go. Looking very much like a baby lizard riding its mother to the next location with food. Each time the larger creature tried to pick it off with its mouth, the natives got to its mouth first, stabbing it with their spears, firing arrows into it or slicing at the cracks in between its teeth, swords in hand, like mad dentists determined to facilitate the teeth’s extraction. Meanwhile, the smaller creature, at Mudra’s behest, busied itself with biting a hole in the big one’s belly. It did so until it had opened a wound big enough for the creature’s womb to spill out. Apparently the large one was female.

  The larger creature toppled. Its fall was so momentous, it shook the stadium hard, sending cracks through the cement and some of the supporting pillars. The roar coming from the audience quieted as they stared at the propagating fissures. The sounds from the advancing jagged lines taking on a life of their own in the ensuing spectator silence. When they eventually stopped, the crowd relaxed and it was back to business and back to cheering.

  The self-healing cement was already working on sealing the gashes running through the stadium.

  The gutted dinosaur lay on the ground close to death. Sufficiently out of commission, Mudra got her mount to back off, let nature take its course.

  But Laney had a surprise in store for everyone by then.

  The smaller creature couldn’t resist getting in a final dig as it turned its back on its victim, slicing through the womb with its tail. Thereby exposing the many eggs inside.

  The eggs spilled out of the pouch like a child’s dropped Easter egg basket.

  The children inside clawed their way out of the soft shells before the eggs even stopped rolling.

  And the sentient serpents hit the ground running. Going after the humans first. Why? Because these lizards were no bigger than they were. Born without tails, they looked more human than lizard despite their blue-green serpentine skin and overly faceted heads whose skull plates dominated their features. They fought with no less savagery and conviction than the astonished natives, who may have been surprised by the turnabout but certainly not cowed by it.

  The superior strength, reflexes, and endurance of the Ubuku’s premier fighters were no match for the sentient serpent serial killers, which Laney had nicknamed the Umbrage, because they took such umbrage, even at birth, at being born into the world. She needed some way to separate them from the larger, more dinosaur-class of lizard, moreover, which she decided to call, the Nomads. Once released into the Amazon rainforest, she imagined the Nomads would have no choice but to roam far and wide and possibly alone to accommodate their diet. No one area could provide sufficient food long enough.

  The Umbrage mowed through their opposition like a Kansas combine across a cornfield. They could anticipate their rival’s punches, kicks, weapons jabs, seeing in their minds what their opponents were thinking as if they were telecasting their movements like amateurs. The Umbrage’s inborn psychic abilities were no match for the abstract reasoning and alien language of the Ubuku, but the Umbrage could interpret well enough the images in their heads of a swinging fist or a kicking leg. And because the Umbrage had faster transmission speeds throughout their nervous systems, those broadcasts were all they needed to duck, jab, plunge, resist, roll, whatever they needed to do to neutralize the blows they saw coming ahead of time.

  Mudra sat calmly on her dinosaur nodding, looking just as pleased as her brother at the latest graduates to their breeding program. When the Umbrage had eliminated the human adversaries on the ground, they turned to face her. And they had her and the dinosaur she was mounted on surrounded.

  She graced them with a thumbs-up as she made her dinosaur turn on itself three hundred and sixty degrees so she could face each of her adversaries in person.

  Then in the next moment, she was all business. She set after them with a sweeping bolus of flames from the dinosau
r’s mouth she was riding. Not one of the Umbrage was the slightest bit susceptible to the fire. They had been born with the genetic modifications learned from the dinosaurs in Panno’s arena. Though they had never physically laid eyes on them, their psychic connection was enough.

  Once again, Mudra nodded and smiled as she pulled back on the reins and pivoted the Nomad to indicate another change in strategy.

  Mudra charged through the throng of Umbrage with her own dinosaur at full gallop, flicking its tail, tripping over its own feet at her command and rolling on the ground, all without telecasting her moves. She was sending the transmissions to the animal’s headgear in coded language. Even thoughts visualizing what she wanted to do had been locked down within layers of encryption. Her mind, what’s more, was now shielded by the interference shield the headgear could put out. Finally, she had bypassed her mount’s need to receive the transmission in a visual language it could understand. The instructions instead went straight to its medulla oblongata, which required no such visualizations to act on the commands. All in all, she’d short-circuited the Umbrage’s ability to read her mind or the mind of her mount, frustrating any number of attempts at once to hack their way back in.

  And still the Umbrage evaded her predatory moves. Their minds clear as crystal, unclouded by fear or thoughts, like a bunch of Zen monks determined to use her own thrusts against her. It was damn well working. She struggled to get out of her tripping dinosaur’s way by climbing against his angle of rotation in order to avoid finding herself on the ground with the Umbrage, in hand to hand combat against an enemy that might have her bested even one on one. Though that test for later.

  Finally, Mudra desisted with her efforts, calming her creature with some pats on the back and endorphin releases despite its failure to do any damage. “You’re free,” she said to the Umbrage. “Go live your lives in accordance with your natures.” She gestured for the gates to be raised and the paths cleared to the escape pods.