Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  This arach did not speak. Instead, it tucked its legs, and swung, and I realized it was dangling from a nearly transparent fiber extruded from its bulbous rear-end. Definitely a species of arach I hadn’t seen before. I needed a stick. A really big stick. I was going to treat this thing like a ball-on-a-string.

  The arach swung towards me, again, its forelegs lashing out in another grab.

  Fine! I was going to treat it like a really grabby ball-on-a-string… just as soon as I found a stick.

  I hit the grass on my stomach, trying to dodge it as it swung back. I wasn’t quite fast enough, and I felt its talons rake down my back. This time, I was lucky, and it didn’t find a grip on my clothing. Those cuts were going to hurt like hell. They would have to hurt later, though, because, right now, I didn’t have time for hurt.

  I rolled, getting out of its return path, and seeking the shelter of a clump of bushes clustered around the foot of a tree. I realized, just a fraction too late, that they had thorns, slamming into them, as the arach spun by me, again. It had learned from its previous near-miss, and, this time, its claws raked the ground, where I’d lain. When it saw where I had rolled to, it dropped all the way to the ground, and lumbered towards me. I tried to wriggle free of my thorny haven, and yelped.

  The arach laughed.

  “Ravreshret,” it said, reaching cautiously under the bush to wrap its clawed feet over my back, between thorn branches. “This is going to hurt you a lot more than it will ever hurt me.”

  I just bet it was. There was nothing like impaling yourself on some serious thorns, unless it was being torn off them, again, by a creature who thought your screams of pain were funny. I gritted my teeth, tensing in the arach’s grasp, as I waited for it to start pulling.

  That pressure didn’t come. Instead, a loud buzzing filled the air, sort of like the sound of a wasp trapped against the glass, only a million times louder. The feminine voice that followed was both unexpected as it was unfamiliar.

  “Let it go, and I might let you live.”

  It? I was an it? I seemed to remember someone else referring to me that way before… We hadn’t gotten along. Right now, though? Right now, I had other things to worry about.

  The arach’s grip tightened, and it gave a little tug. The thorns tore at the skin of my back, my scalp, and my legs, and I screamed in spite of myself. The owner of the feminine voice was unperturbed.

  “Death it is, then,” she said, and I steeled myself for the pain to come.

  Except that it didn’t. The arach let me go, even though it raked its claws viciously across my back as it did so.

  “Bastard,” I said, and tried, very carefully, to get out from under the bushes.

  I choked back another cry of pain, and resigned myself to being stuck in the rava, ravra, the whatever-the-fuck-they-were bushes, until someone pulled me out. All I could hope was that they pulled me out gently, because I wanted some skin left when they were done. In the meantime, I might as well watch the show.

  Because there was going to be a show, right?

  Oh, hell yes, there was.

  The sound of a million wings could only have come from the four, large, wasp-like creatures hovering around the edge of the clearing, and—now that I was looking up—the arach could only have come from the shuttle that had suddenly put on power, and flown across the top of the wall and out of sight. One of the wasps turned its head to watch it go.

  “Your web-mates have deserted you.”

  “They know you will not harm me.”

  That sounded like bravado to me.

  The wasp whirred its wings, and lifted higher into the air.

  “They don’t know us very well, do they?” and even I knew it wasn’t looking for an answer.

  The arach rattled out a curse, and charged towards the wasp closest the trees. That wasp, too, lifted up, but only to move out of its reach.

  “I am not your opponent,” it said. “That is the queen’s privilege.”

  Queen? Fuck me. I’d had enough of near-royalty dealing with Skymander. I had no desire to deal with more.

  “Near royalty amongst humans is not royalty,” and this time I realized that the voice in my head was not matched to the sound in my ears, that I could only understand the sound in my ears because there was a voice in my head. This also meant I had company inside my own skull.

  It struck me that this was actually going to be worse than having Mack and Tens privy to my implant. I groaned, and would have tilted my head back to close my eyes, except that my head was well-and-truly trapped in the ravra bush. Fuckit. Fuckitfuckitfuckit.

  “Our hospitality does not include participation in acts of procreation,” the wasp informed me, and I had to laugh.

  It was a short-lived laugh, full of pain and irony, and a sadness that Mack hadn’t returned for me.

  Fuck it all.

  “Ah, cursing. Not an expression of the desire to procreate. Our mistake.”

  I had never heard insects laugh, before, and it was an experience I could have done without. The arach, also, was not in the mood for laughter. It charged after one wasp, and then another, ignoring the queen, who hovered above it, watching its antics.

  Finally, the spider backed itself into a corner, where it was sheltered by the trees, and, only then, did the queen descend.

  “Which form?” she asked, touching lightly to the ground, and I guessed the speech in my mind to be a courtesy.

  The spider rattled its fangs at her, and hissed.

  “That is your choice, but you are trespassing, and I am the final judge.”

  Well, that was interesting.

  Again, the spider spoke, and this time, the queen’s insect-like form faded away, and a tall, woman stood, where there had been a giant wasp. She was armed with a Blazer 54, two Jhinevra pistols, matching foot-long blades sheathed on each hip, and a longer blade sheathed in a scabbard hanging down her back.

  I noticed the wasps on either side of her lift uneasily from where they’d touched down, and guessed their queen had surprised them.

  “It is dangerous,” was not accompanied by sound from the wasp that spoke, and I guessed it was keeping its observations strictly between us.

  Even armored? I thought, for the queen was wearing something that looked like a cross between the modern combat armor Mack’s marines wore, and something made of flattened circlets of metal looped together. This time, the spider said nothing, but watched, until the queen reached for the hilt of the sword at her back—and then it charged.

  I don’t know what I expected—for the queen to leap out of the way, perhaps. For her to draw her sword and side-step to avoid the charge, and then attack as the massive creature passed her by. I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t that she would continue reaching for her blade with one hand, while tilting the Blazer with the other, and firing it from her hip.

  Where had she learned to do that? I wondered, as the solids ripped through the charging spider’s head and the great beast crumpled and slid to a stop before her. She continued firing, pulling her sword free, as she stepped to the side of the arach, and then she let the Blazer hang loose, and swung the sword two-handed, separating the arach’s combined head and thorax from the rest of its body.

  To my surprise, the spider remained a spider. I had expected it to revert to its natural, more human, form. The wasp in my head laughed.

  “Ignorant human. The spider form is its natural form, just as, when we die, we revert to our native insectoid form—the one you know as ‘wasp’.”

  I blushed, feeling like I’d been caught in a faux pas, even though I hadn’t known what their race was called. Given how a lot of humans felt about wasps, it was a miracle I had found the two species living in harmony on this world.

  “We have a mutual enemy,” the wasp told me, and pointed to where the queen was stepping around the corpse of her fallen foe, stripping the limbs from its body with her blade, and separating the abdomen from
the rest of it.

  I felt my stomach lurch, despite the ritualistic gravity of the scene, and looked away, focusing on the golden creature that spoke to me, even as it watched the gardens around its queen. I had no problem with those who hated the arach as much as I did. None at all—but the sheer butchery before me was hard to take.

  “They plunder every world they come to,” the wasp said, ignoring my discomfort. “We refused to let them plunder ours. The humans we allowed to settle here overcame their fear of us when our warriors fought alongside them to save their homes. It is why a wall surrounds each of the colony’s cities. That is the land we grant them; the rest of the world is ours. They know the penalty should the treaty be broken.”

  There was an odd hint of menace to those words, but I couldn’t fathom why. The wasp, for its part, watched me carefully, and I had the strangest feeling that it walked the corridors of my mind, invisible, and unstoppable, opening doors as it went. It was unnerving, but I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t know if it would be offended if I asked it to stay the hell out of my head.

  “Please stop.”

  The queen’s voice drew my attention, and I looked back to where she had been dissecting her kill, only to find myself staring at her gore-covered boots and ichor-spattered armor. She bent down to look into my eyes, and, in an instant, I was falling. I pressed my hands into the earth, and pushed myself back as hard as I could, but it was no use. Her eyes formed windows to another world, and I tipped right over the sill, and into them.

  I gasped, landing hard at her feet, and staring stupidly at the hand she offered to help me up with.

  “Come,” she said, when I finally accepted it, and she hauled me to my feet.

  I braced myself for the sting of the thorns, but did not feel them.

  “You are free of the thorns,” the queen said, “but we need to talk, and you need to explain why you have come. You stink of arach, but the clan scent is unfamiliar.”

  Man. If that was the case, it would be really nice to have a bath.

  “You will be bathed,” the queen said. “The ravreshret is poisonous, and you have many injuries to tend.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did not mean to be a pain.”

  She smiled.

  “We know, but, tell me, why are you here?”

  That gave me pause. It was a good question. Why was I here? I truly didn’t know. Beyond the arach forcing Mack to cooperate, and then abandoning me, I had no idea, and I found myself apologizing, again.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “There was supposed to be a grab bag, with instructions. The arach insisted.”

  “You work for the arach!” she sounded furious, and I couldn’t blame her, no matter how wrong she was.

  Before I could tell her that I would never willingly work for the arach, she had spun me around, pushing me away from her side, and following after me with the sword. I suppose I could have fought, but I found myself on my knees, trying to explain, instead.

  “I… We… They…”

  Memories of the arach boarding, the arach restraining Mack, the arach demanding blood, and… I squeezed my eyes tight shut. The wasp’s blade descended, slowed—and stopped, coming to rest lightly against my throat.

  “Show me!” she snapped, reaching into my head, and spinning me back to when the arach had first arrived on the ship.

  She made me relive it all, from when Mack first pulled me away from the stove, to when one of the wasps came to collect me from the security station.

  “Ah,” she said. “I see,” and she spun me back, out of my head, out of her eyes, and back under the ravreshret, where six sets of hands were carefully disentangling me from the thorns.

  “I thought you said I was free of the thorns,” I said, and she shrugged.

  “You were easier to read than we dared to hope. We have returned earlier than I anticipated.”

  Well, lucky me, I guess.

  6—Allies

  I won’t say getting out of the thorns was fun. Even with three of the wasps working as gently as they could, it was painful. I couldn’t move, and, if I did, it met with disapproval.

  “Stay still.”

  “Stop wriggling!”

  “If you move again, I’m going to sting you.”

  That last bit reminded me that wasps come with their own form of needle, and that knowledge sent me scooting backwards—or it would have, if the queen hadn’t reached in and pinned me in place. This time, the buzzing was not translated.

  I stared at them, holding myself as still as possible as they worked, and resisting the urge to help them when they pulled me free. Once I was clear of the bushes, they flipped me onto my stomach, and examined my back more closely.

  “This is not good,” was not what I wanted to hear.

  “The poison has started to take hold,” was something else I wished I hadn’t heard. I didn’t want to know. Not really. Not now the fire that was creeping across my skin, was seeping into my muscles. Nope. The fire? And the numbness that followed it? Not something I wanted to know was bad. What I wanted to hear was that it was going to wear off.

  “It’ll wear off,” the queen said. “Hold still.”

  Hold still? I thought I was already…. oh.

  I guess the good news was that I wasn’t going to be worrying about the pain and numbness, for a while, because the queen delivered a sting that hit like a hammer, and put me out cold. When I woke up, the two of us were going to talk about that.

  We, sure as shit, were.

  The darkness lasted for what felt like an eye blink. I surfaced to find I’d fallen into fire. It was weird because I couldn’t see any flames, but my skin burned, and a thousand miniscule threads burrowed through my flesh. I tried calling Mack, or Tens, or even Rohan, but got no answer. My implant felt like so much weight in my skull, and I didn’t know how I was still thinking.

  Where the fuck was Mack?

  And where was I?

  It felt like I was swathed in cotton wool, and soaked in water, all at once. I couldn’t move a muscle, but I was shivery all over. And my head was pounding like a bitch. I wished it would stop.

  Worse, I wished I knew that Mack and Tens were okay. I really did. But the ship was gone. Wasn’t that what the wasp man-lady had said? The ship was gone?

  The mission was blown, and the ship was gone, and my day couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  Okay, except for the arach. I tried to twist away from the thought, didn’t want to fall into a morass of biting, venom-filled hell. Except that that’s exactly what I did…

  As the first of them sank its fangs into me, I figured it was better me than Mack or Tens. They were useful. Me? I was expendable, no matter how many times Mack told me otherwise.

  For some reason that made me want to cry. The tears felt cool against my skin, and then they felt hot, which was stranger than it sounded. And then they stopped. This was the worst I’d felt in a very long time.

  “The thorns are poisonous.”

  Yeah? And which dipshit had thought adding wasp venom to the mix was a good idea?

  “That is no way to refer to our queen.”

  Who was answering me?

  “Never you mind. You need some sleep.”

  Oh no… that usually meant… Yup. Thanks, guys. ’Nother needle. Just what I always wanted.

  Honestly, you’d think I’d have gotten over being afraid of those, amount of shots I’d had. Still, it was nice when the darkness came, and I didn’t have to worry about anything for a while. Not so nice when the darkness faded and I found myself still unable to get in touch with Mack, or Tens, although that might have been a problem on their end, rather than mine.

  I found myself hooked into the ship’s security feeds, watching Mack as he faced down the arach commander for a second time.

  “No!” Mack shouted. “No. No. No. No. No! Goddammit! I said NO!”

/>   He’d been sitting on the edge of his bed, in what was clearly his cabin, but he’d risen to his feet as he’d shouted, and the arach had backed up a step. One step—and then it had set its feet shoulder-width apart and crossed its arms across its chest, cocking its head, and looking up at Mack’s face. When it spoke, its voice was soft with menace.

  “Are you sure, Captain? Your little girl hasn’t tried to contact you yet?”

  His little what?

  “I’m sure, and she’s not anyone’s little girl.”

  Those words made me feel inexplicably sad. The man was right; I was no-one’s little girl. Not my father’s, because he’d left me with my mother, and hadn’t looked back. And not my mother’s, either, for all that she’d tried to raise me. No, definitely not my mother’s. No mother turned a blind eye when their little girl said they were being threatened by her latest squeeze. None!

  For her to have done nothing meant I was not, and had never been, her little girl. I don’t think I’d been anyone’s little girl, since I don’t know when—and I certainly wasn’t anyone’s girl in any sense of the word. Not their big girl, not their girl-friend, not even their Girl Friday. Nope, the arach had it wrong. I was on my own. I might have felt sorry for myself, but the arach was speaking, again, and I had to listen.

  “We are running low on supplies.”

  Mack was far from sympathetic.

  “You can always go back to your own ship. I’m sure it has—oof!”

  The arach had blurred, become a human-spider hybrid, and then it had reared and slammed three curled fists into Mack’s chest and stomach in quick succession. He doubled over, but didn’t try to retaliate. I watched as the arach blurred back to human form, and saw Mack slowly straightened.

  “We will need to feed soon.”

  “Not. My. Problem.”

  The arach reached out and wrapped his hand around the front of Mack’s throat. I watched as Mack tensed, but, again, did nothing, and wondered why.