Arach

by C. M. Simpson

  “Get your people off me,” he growled, when he found Tek standing near the door, “or I’m going to start splitting shells.”

  Another two wasps wandered over, and pinned his legs.

  You and whose army? I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.

  I’d forgotten I didn’t need to.

  “When I get out of this,” Mack snapped, “you and I are going to spend some time on the mats.”

  We were, hey? and, for some reason, the thought cheered me up, no end.

  “Bring it,” I told him, lifting my chin in challenge.

  Before Mack could respond, Tek came and planted a foot in the middle of Mack’s chest, pushing him down to the floor.

  “I will make sure you are on your feet, when my queen arrives,” the wasp commander said, and tilted its head towards Tens. “Him, too.”

  “Your word?” Mack insisted, and Tek flicked his wings, and settled them to his back.

  Around him, a ripple of unsettled wings washed through the vespis warriors, and they turned their heads to regard their commander. I couldn’t be sure, but I had the distinct impression that Mack had said something particularly insulting, and they weren’t happy. I got an inkling as to what, when Tek replied.

  “All my words,” he answered, and walked back to the door.

  He caught Tovy’s eye as he did so, and I knew he was giving the medic his orders. I watched as Tovy flicked his wings, and then lowered his antenna, and made a note that the wing-flick probably meant irritation… sometimes… maybe…

  “In this case,” Tovy admitted. “Your Mack is a most uncooperative patient.”

  “I heard that.”

  “If the boot fits…” Tens murmured, and Mack sighed.

  “It’s a mutiny.”

  “It’s in your best interest.”

  Mack had no reply to that, but settled back to the floor. The wasps pinning him down slowly released him, but their bodies were tense. I figured they were ready to pounce right back onto him, if he didn’t cooperate.

  He must have figured the same, because he sighed, and closed his eyes. He didn’t open them again, until we heard the clash of metal on chitin coming from outside, and the faint thud of solid rounds impacting with the walls.

  When the first loud crack drifted through the vents, Mack opened his eyes, but he didn’t need to say anything, because Tovy was already moving. The vespis removed the needles from Mack’s arms, expertly staunching the bleeding, and resealing the blood bags. He also hit Mack with another shot in the arm, before helping the captain to his feet.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Mack said, and my heart lurched as I thought of our Doc, the one I hadn’t seen since the arach incursion had begun—which reminded me.

  I sank back into my implant, and rolled through Askavor’s link and into the ship’s comms system. This time no alien code tried to ensnare me, which was a good thing. Odyssey needed to know about this latest arach incursion; Mack had a standing contract with them.

  “And you’re only thinking of this now?”

  Of course, Mack had followed me through.

  “I’ve been kinda busy.”

  His snort was comprehensible even in the digital world.

  I drafted the message, describing the arach attack on the ship, the attack on the settlement, and the suspicion that something else was afoot, which we were investigating. Mack took a copy as soon as I’d finished it, and Tens sent his own version.

  “You, too?” Mack asked, and we both knew he was referring to the delay there’d been in notifying the cruising security company.

  “They kinda locked us down, boss. Cutter had to deal with that. If she hadn’t, we’d have been toast.”

  Well, that was nice of him.

  “Enjoy it while you can, kiddo. It’ll be back to ‘hands off my system’ in no time flat. Speaking of which…”

  But he didn’t get to finish. I became vaguely aware of what sounded like someone knocking, and then Mack and Tens were gone.

  “Hurry up, Cutter. I want you with me, when we talk to her.”

  Oh, he did, huh? Well, this day just got better and better.

  “At least they’re not trying to kill you anymore.”

  Tens had a point.

  I surfaced up and out of my head in time for Mack to pull me to my feet. I looked down at where Rohan was sleeping against Cascade’s side, and wondered how he was going. He opened his eyes, and looked up at me.

  “Don’t worry about the hangar-bay doors,” he said. “I’ve got them. Whatever Askavor did to clear the system worked.”

  Askavor! And I glanced over to make sure the spider was okay.

  “It’s okay,” Mack reassured me. “I’ve decided he can live… for now.”

  Askavor ignored him, having turned slightly so he was facing the doors. Two of the vespis warriors that had accompanied us to rescue Tens were standing to either side, and slightly in front of him. Tovy caught my frown as I noted how much it looked like they were guarding him, and hurried to explain.

  “The queen’s guard is fiercely protective, and their ichor will still be boiling.”

  Boiling ichor, huh. I wondered if that was anything like boiling blood for humans, and received a slight gesture of acknowledgement. Right. Like Mack when he runs out of enemies in a battle.

  “Right,” Tovy agreed, and I felt Mack’s hand tighten on my own.

  “You need to open the door, Cutter.”

  I what? Oh. Oh! Oh, dear.

  I’d jammed the door.

  I probably should have remembered that while they were still fighting outside. Given I didn’t want to sit down, again, I leant against Mack, and closed my eyes. It was a good thing he understood that I couldn’t be inside the system, and paying attention to the outside, too, or he might have been thinking I was seeking something else entirely.

  Even so, having him wrap his arm around my shoulders wasn’t funny.

  “Mack!”

  “I need to keep my gun hand, free.”

  I wanted to ask him why, but Tek was starting to look anxious, and I remembered bad-tempered, blood-boiling, vespis bodyguards, and didn’t want to cause any trouble.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Unfortunately, it took more than a minute. I’d pretty much destroyed the operating instructions for the lock. Well, oops. I built a new set, and tried to insert them into the code, but the ship’s security system was having none of it.

  “Tens!”

  “What? Oh, I see,” and he grabbed my piece of coding, gave it a bit of a twist, slapped the security program, hard, and jammed the new instructions inside. “There. Try that.”

  I was blinking my way back to reality, when the door slid open, and the first of the queen’s guards moved into the room. They made a lunge for Askavor, and their blades were turned, as the two vespis guarding him, blocked their path. They stared into each other’s eyes for a good, long moment, and the two guards shook themselves all over, and stepped back.

  After that, they paid the rest of us some attention.

  I truly had not understood just how big they were until they came and stood in front of me. Compared to Tovy and Tek, or any of the others, these bu…wasps were massive. They still carried the same black and orange-yellow markings as the others, but theirs were tinged with red, and had a core of pure gold running through their center.

  “It is how we know they will be guards,” Tovy told him, his voice muted inside my head, and, even so, the guards snapped their heads towards him. “I meant no disrespect.”

  They stared at him a moment longer, and then returned to their inspection of all those waiting in the room. I stiffened, as they ran their antennae lightly over my skin and combat suit, and Mack went rigid. I don’t know how Tens reacted, but I guessed he was about as relaxed as the rest of us. Whatever. The guards took no offense, and went on to complete just as thorough a check of the vespis squad.

  It was interestin
g to see that the vespis stood just as rigidly as we had. These guards must be really something!

  One reached out a wing as she passed, brushing it along the top of my chest on her way to inspect the wounded.

  “Care for a demonstration?” she asked, her voice edged in fur and power, and I shivered, glad, for a change, that Mack hadn’t taken his arm from my shoulders.

  I shook my head, pressing closer to Mack’s side, as I lowered my eyes. The vespis gave a short series of buzzes, and continued on her path towards the first crewman. I felt Mack shift beside me, his arm leaving my shoulders, as he turned.

  “Don’t move!” Tek commanded, and Mack hesitated. “They will not harm your people.”

  Tension vibrated through Mack’s chest, and I held my breath. It was more than a relief, when he turned back, and tucked me under his arm, once more. Domineering bastard.

  “Never forget it,” he said, and there was something in his voice that was more than a commander stating a fact.

  It was not something I cared to explore. Not right, now, anyway. I turned my attention to the bodyguards moving amongst our crew. At first it was hard to understand why our people weren’t doing more than the initial flinch when the guards bent over them, but, as the inspection progressed, I caught the faintest change to the air around me.

  It was… a creeping sweetness, somehow as soothing as it was tantalizing. I both wanted to find its source, and just stand there and let it wrap around me. What the fuck was that? It was… nice.

  “It’s a pheromone,” Mack said, but even his outrage had a peaceful edge.

  I wanted to both laugh and slap him out of it.

  “Please remain still,” Tovy told me. “We do not want any incidents.”

  Which was when Rohan slapped the bodyguard inspecting him upside the head, and scrambled back across the floor, keeping his hand scrunched firmly in the fur on Cascade’s neck. Mack and I moved at the same time.

  At least we didn’t go for our guns. As the other bodyguards closed in on the boy, we dived for the space between them. I slipped between two before their sides came together with a sharp snap. Mack chose the space beneath the tail and skated under the thorax of the guard Rohan had hit. Tens tried to go around, only to end up being grabbed and lifted by Askavor, as he passed in front of the spider’s claws.

  I thought I heard shouting in my head, but I couldn’t make out a single word above the buzzing that roared through my mind. This would not have been enough to stop me, but the hardened claws driving through my shoulder and thigh did the trick. Mack was in slightly better shape. He had a large foot on the center of his torso, and claws hooked through his shirt and over his collar bones—through the flesh.

  Rohan had made it to his feet, but had been lifted up against the wall and held there, with Cascade turned onto his side, and pinned, growling and twisting, but helpless to help.

  “Rohan!”

  I caught sight of a stinger coming into view, and then a sharp whistle cut through the room, and everything froze. The air changed scent around us, going from sweet to a bitter amalgamation of citrus, cloves and honey. I watched the guards turn their heads, directing their antennae towards their queen. The scent around me softened, and the tension eased.

  “That was extremely foolhardy, of you,” the queen said.

  “Rohan…” Mack began, his voice rasping with pain. He tried again. “Young.”

  “Old enough to know better than to attack something so much larger than himself,” came the queen’s reprimand, and I caught myself flinching, in spite of myself.

  Typical boys, I thought. Always causing trouble.

  The creature above me shook, and I heard the series of buzzes I’d come to associate with vespis amusement. Well, at least someone was happy. The wasp pinning me to the floor, bent its head to look at me.

  “And yet, there you are.”

  I glared at it, all too aware I was about to hurt… a lot… but probably not as much as I would have, if the queen had not intervened.

  “More…and less,” the vespis guard said, and I recognized her as the one who had brushed my chest with her wing. “If the queen had not intervened, you would have died, and felt no pain at all.”

  Well, that was hardly comforting.

  I heard movement, and watched as Mack was dragged forward. The wasp holding him released its grip, passing him from the foot of its central-most pair of legs, to its unoccupied foreclaw, and propping him against the wall. Blood soaked the front of his shirt, but the wasp wasn’t finished.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as it lowered Rohan into Mack’s lap.

  “Your young,” it said, and I was relieved to see Rohan was unharmed.

  Mack struggled to get an arm around the boy’s chest, but I doubted he’d be able to hold the kid, if Rohan panicked. The wasp that had me pinned, shifted slightly, and deposited Cascade beside his young master. The dog growled, and interposed himself between the boy and the big bodyguards, keeping its head and tail low, its ears laid flat against its skull.

  The bodyguard standing over the three, looked down at them, and the air sweetened. I heard the dog stop growling, watched as it sat, and pressed itself against Mack’s side, leaning on him and Rohan. Nice… or it would be, if I didn’t have a clue about what was about to happen next.

  “Not yet,” I whispered, when the wasp above me twisted to inspect where it was holding me.

  “Not yet,” Tovy echoed, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I couldn’t follow the discussion that followed, and the two vespis kept it well and truly out of my head. I figured, from that and the way they kept looking at me that I wasn’t going to like what was coming.

  “It might be better if you weren’t conscious,” Tovy said.

  “I’d rather see it happen,” I told him.

  The vespis guard shifted both the claws she’d driven into me, and my body voted me out of the equation.

  12—Cutter in Command

  Personally, I think I’d have been better off if I’d let the bodyguard sting me.

  I drifted back to consciousness and found myself in the ship’s control center, looking up at the back of Mack’s command chair. Fantastic. Just what I always wanted, a view of the back of Mack’s head. As if he could hear my thoughts, he turned the chair.

  “This is my better side,” he said, looking down at me, with the faintest of smiles.

  “How are we doing?” I asked, and I didn’t mean him and me, since that implied a relationship that didn’t exist; I meant the ship.

  “Well, there’s another ship heading in-system. Askavor says it’s the arach queen, and the vespis want your advice on how best to secure the Shady Marie.”

  My advice?

  “But it’s your ship!”

  “Yeah. Maybe you can explain that, after you get them to secure it.”

  “I trust you,” sounded in my head, and I wondered why he’d decided to do a dumbass thing like that. Mack ignored the question.

  “Also, you’re special; you’ve now got two escorts.”

  I did? I turned my head to take a proper look around. I mean, I knew I was on the floor of the control center; I just hadn’t looked at anything but Mack.

  “That’s because I’m the best-looking thing in here.”

  I rolled my eyes, and made a note of the two wasps, weaver, boy and dog, sitting and standing not very far away. One of the wasps was a bodyguard looking somewhat disgusted—and somewhat familiar, too. What was she doing here, and not standing near the queen?

  “To learn control,” she said, and I heard Tens crack up, somewhere, out of sight.

  “The queen thinks if she can work with you for a day without killing you, then she will have all the control she needs.”

  Oh, for pity’s sake! Seriously? But the guard confirmed it.

  “Yes.”

  And Tens lost it again. Hell! Even Mack cracked a smile—a whole one, and not the ghostly thing
he’d managed before. I decided now was a really good time to change the subject.

  “And what are you doing here, Rohan?”

  Him and the dog, I noted.

  “It’s supposed to keep me out of trouble. The queen thinks if I stick with you, I might learn not to slap every bu… wasp I see.”

  Ah, that made sense—and it was clear that Rohan had had the same correction regarding the ‘B’ word, that I’d had. I wondered who had offered to sting him, this time.

  “Me.”

  Tovy. Well, that was typical. I mean, if you sting one, you might as well sting ’em all, right?

  “Exactly.”

  Honestly. Didn’t any of these b…wasps have a sense of humor—and Rohan snickering beside his patch of wall was definitely not a help.

  “Yeah, laugh it up, kid, but you’re stuck with me, until you calm the fuck down.”

  “And there’s the Cutter we all know and love,” Mack said, sounding thoroughly disgusted with me.

  Yeah, well. Like he could talk.

  “Speaking of which,” Tens interrupted. “You can keep your grubby little paws out of my system, now. I’ve got it.”

  Sure, he had.

  “I mean it, Cutter.”

  “Nice to see you back on line.”

  “You can thank Rohan for that. He unlocked the crew implants. Thought the crew could help us secure the ship.”

  “But the vespis won’t let them have any weapons… or let them out of the feeding room,” Rohan added.

  “They are too weak,” Tovy cut in, “and their judgement is impaired.”

  Recalling what they had gone through, I just bet it was. You give them weapons, they’d probably shoot anything that came through the door—humans and vespis included.

  “Exactly.”

  Well, at least the bodyguard agreed with someone.

  In the meantime, I had a ship to secure.

  “Head out of my system,” Tens warned, when I linked into the ship, and started running my way through the security feeds.

  For a minute, I thought about telling him where to shove it, and then I had a better idea—one that let me be in more than one place at once.