“Perhaps the best solution to see what they’re all so mindlessly progressing toward,” Bahn said, looking in the direction the little shapeshifters were dutifully marching. “Perhaps they have evolved some sort of hive mentality and our answers will lie at the epicenter of all of this.”
“That’s definitely a theory,” Gonzales said, nodding hopefully. “I like it.”
Mimic nodded, wiping her face before pulling herself from my arms. “Thank you. That sounds like the best idea considering the situation. Let’s go.”
And so, we were marching again.
It was slightly disturbing to walk straight through the mini-mimics, but they paid us absolutely no heed. We could nudge them aside with our shoes, even give them a little air with a gentle scoop with the toe of our boots, and they would pay us absolutely no mind. As soon as they were back on their feet, they would continue their persistent trek upward.
None of us said anything, but perhaps that was because none of us knew what to say. What was there that we could say? After so much work, all the danger we had survived and impossible odds that we had beaten, we had finally found Mimic’s people, only to have it be the most disappointing turn of events since I had learned that Colony Claus wasn’t a real person and didn’t deliver presents to all the good little girls and boys at the solar eclipse.
The sun had sunk far into the sky by the time we reached a large, craggy opening of a cave that all the mimics were pouring into.
“Is it just me or does this seem straight out of a horror sim?” Gonzales asked, dubiously eyeing the dark entrance.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this exact scene,” I answered, raising my arm to press in the code for my head-light to illuminate.
The roughly hewn stone seemed to go down quite a far way, but there, just at the edge of my vision, I saw the walls smooth out and fade into something that looked almost jade in nature.
“Come on, guys,” I said, stepping forward cautiously. “This way.”
“Are you sure?” Ciangi asked, her face pale and her cheeks quite flushed.
But Mimic was already striding forward, her lips tight in a grim line. We didn’t need much other discussion beyond that and went right along after her.
Sure enough, while the cave was completely primitive for the first stretch, less than five minutes later, we passed into something that was anything but.
“What is this?” Gonzales asked, running her hand along the metal-like surface.
“If I didn’t know better,” Bahn mused, “I would say it looked like the interior hull of a ship.”
“But this isn’t a ship, Bahn. It’s a mountain.”
“Yes,” he answered with a cool shrug. “But was it always?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. While I agree the idea is improbable, it’s nowhere near impossible. And, as science dictates, once the obvious has been eliminated, the improbable is what to explore next.”
“You know, he has a point,” I said sheepishly, unsure if I should be cutting into all this scientific thought. “Mimi said that what might have happened is one of their comets was knocked into this planet’s gravitational pull and that’s how there are mimics here. What if something knocked into that comet and that’s what caused the sudden change? And, what if that something was a ship?”
“It’s all possible,” Mimic said. “But we won’t know until we go farther.”
“So let’s go farther,” I said with a resolute nod.
The mood grew even more tense as we crept forward. We didn’t want to make too much noise, so that led to another eerie silence as our footsteps echoed through the long, high-tech corridor.
I couldn’t say how long we marched, but time seemed to stretch on forever. We didn’t halt, however, until we suddenly reached a large chamber that was illuminated with a bright, blue light.
We all dropped and crouched instinctively. For being a bunch of eggheads with no military experience, we had some pretty good instincts. Or maybe that was from surviving so many near-misses when we were hopping through the far-side of the galaxy we had accidentally wormholed ourselves to.
The mimics all continued their march past us, continuing up a ramp and finally to what looked like a massive vat not unlike our own mineral containers back on the mining ship. We watched, a bit mesmerized, as one by one they climbed to the top, walked onto a gangway over the vat, and then regurgitated some sort of liquid paste into the container.
“Ew! What the heck!” Gonzales hissed.
“It’s the half-digested form of the minerals we eat,” Mimic explained. “I can smell it from here.”
“And why are we doing that?”
“Normally it is either to offer nourishment to another who is too weak to take in their own food, or to feed younglings. I am guessing it’s neither in this situation.”
Bahn held out his scanner, aiming the reader at the vat. “I think—now, I could be wrong--but this all seems like they’re fueling something.”
“That’s good, right?” Ciangi asked. “Some sort of group effort toward a goal implies sentience.”
“I don’t know…” Mimic admitted, her voice tense. “This is so unlike anything my people would do. I’m afraid I don’t understand. I know evolution is often dictated by environment, but this…this does not seem right.”
Then, as if in response to her comment, a blaring sound ripped through the corridor. All of the aliens froze, including Mimic, shuddering in their spots for the duration of the noise.
I myself had to clap my hands over my ears, the deep, boneshaking siren making my teeth chatter and my head throb. When it finally stopped, I had double vision and had to shake my head vigorously to clear it.
“What was that?” Ciangi asked.
“It was a call,” Mimic answered, eyes locked on something we couldn’t see. “This way.”
Before any of us could object, she was striding forward into the open chamber.
“Mimi! What are you doing?”
“Finding out what’s going on and putting a stop to it.”
Oh. Well, I guessed that answered that.
Unsure of quite what to do, the four of us followed after Mimi, our footsteps much less sure than hers. She strode forward like she knew exactly where she was going, which was as worrying as it was disconcerting.
She didn’t slow even as we exited the chamber, or as we went through another room with another vat that mimics were dumping small, green stones into. And then through more halls and rooms until, finally, she crouched down once more.
“Quiet,” she ordered, finger to her lips.
I didn’t need to be told twice and neither did anybody else on the team. For the second time in a short while, we were creeping forward into the unknown.
My thighs began to ache in earnest, but I couldn’t stand, afraid of giving away our position. All of us sensed that something significant was about to happen, but we weren’t sure if it was good or bad. Any whispered questions to Mimic were only responded to with short shushes. I didn’t know where Mimic had learned that habit either but I wasn’t super thrilled with it.
The hall widened abruptly and we all dodged behind ornate pillars at either side of the opening. Peering past the edge, we saw what basically looked like the shiniest, most holographic bridge I had ever seen.
It was arranged in a circle, what looked like array after array that had once been filled with useful data but were now dark with disuse. A fine layer of dust covered everything, except for a loan figure in the center.
There were no words for what I saw there, and Ciangi let out a short gasp before Bahn covered her mouth.
In the center of the bridge, sitting in a chair that was easily twice my height, was a massive living creature. Somewhat gelatinous in nature, it had rolls and rolls of flesh that dribbled over each other. Its skin was a rotten, sulfurous yellow and the stench rolling from it was just as thick.
I wanted to gag, but I dare
d not make a noise. Was this the creature who was responsible for the strange antics of the mimics?
It raised a long, claw-tipped hand that glistened with some sort of viscous slime and called up what looked like a holo-display, but it was the wrong color. Slowly, laboriously, it pressed in several sequences. When it finished, it let out a wheezing grunt and there was a moment of silence.
Then the horn sounded again.
My hands went over my ears once more and we all struggled not to make noise. Well, expect for Mimic of course. She turned to look to us, a rage-filled expression on her face.
“We need to get out of here,” she hissed through the cacophonous alarm. “Now.”
“Why?” Ciangi whispered. “What’s going on?”
“Feeding time,” Mimic answered.
“Alright, I don’t need a tutorial on why I don’t want to be around for that,” I murmured. “Let’s go.”
We edged backward, keeping to the sides of the halls. As we went, the horde of mini-mimics we had left behind came skittering along, carrying a huge canister of I-don’t-know-what on top of them as if they were a rolling platform. We didn’t whisper a single word until we were out of the cave.
“Whoa,” Gonzales said, looking down at the mountain.
I followed her gaze to see that what once had been a surging mass of black skittering creatures was now just plain rock. It was quite jarring and it just made the scale of the number of mini-mimics sink in in a way that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
“Wait here,” Mimic said, her face grim.
“What do you mean, wait here?!” I objected. I didn’t like the tone in her voice oe the expression on her face.
“Give me five minutes. I need to get something. Oh, and I need your helmet.”
If this were any other circumstance, I might have argued with her on it. Demanded an explanation to make sure she wasn’t doing something ludicrous. But even I knew that now wasn’t the time. There was something in her eyes that said there was no questioning her.
So, I didn’t. I handed her my helmet and she walked back into the cave without another word.
“Well…now what?” Gonzales asked.
“If we’re going to stand here, I’m going to take some readings.”
“Good idea,” Bahn offered. “Maybe even deploy some mobile units if you’ve got them.”
The blond let out an un-adorable smirk. “As if I’d ever go planet-side without them.”’
“I dunno,” Gonzales countered, hands on her hips. “I seem to remember an entire story arc where Bahn had to build some handhelds for you.”
“That doesn’t count. I wasn’t probably equipped for all that.”
“You don’t get to just decide what counts and what doesn’t.”
“Says who?”
“Says--”
The engineer was cut off as Mimic stepped back onto the landing. “I have returned.”
“Indeed you have.” Bahn said, eying her carefully. “And you are not alone.”
“No,” she said, eyes hardening. I looked to my helmet in her hands that had been bent entirely out of shape until it was almost like a sphere and something was moving frantically inside of it. “Not anymore.”
Memories in Gridlock
“So…this is what you looked like?” Gonzales said. “When Higgens first found you?”
“Actually, it was more of her finding me.”
Mimic paid no attention to either of us, staring intently at the mini-mimic she had brought onto the ship. Bahn had it contained in a small field not unlike the containment unit Giomatti had tried to keep her in. I was a bit worried about bringing it onto the ship, but I knew that I needed to trust her. Mimic had put her stock in me for so long, this was the least I could do.
“I need you to put on the ship’s shields,” Mimic said finally.
“Wait, what now?” Ciangi asked. “We’re on the ground. And there’s no one attacking us. And an energy spike like that will definitely alert that alien, goopy thing we saw that we’re here.”
“I need the shields on now,” she repeated, her tone much more tense than before. “I need to talk to it and I can’t since it’s already receiving a signal.”
“Wait, signal? What signal?”
“It’s something I’ve been hearing since I was in that cave. At first, I thought it was the children using a language I didn’t understand. But now I know exactly what it is.”
But Gonzales wasn’t having any of it. “Wait, children? And you know what what is? When did you lose your ability to speak normally?”
“Shields. Now.”
It wasn’t a request and I didn’t think I had ever heard her use that tone of voice before. “Hey, let’s just do what Mimic asks. She’ll explain when she’s ready.”
Gonzales shrugged but thankfully didn’t seem to be in an argumentative mood. “Fine. I just like to know why I’m doing something as I do it. That’s why I’m an engineer.” She crossed over to the console and pulled up what I recognized as the security command board. A few seconds later, I could feel the hum of the engines change and the pitch shifted ever so perceptibly. “The shields are up.”
I opened my mouth to give Mimic the go-ahead, but she was already nearly doubled over, her face almost pressed against the containment field. She was murmuring something, but her voice was so low and her words were so fast that I didn’t have a hope of understanding it.
“I know that we’ve seen quite a bit in our short time together,” Bahn said, carefully grabbing his data pad from a console and typing something in. “But this strikes me as decidedly odd.”
“Yeah, I’m creeped out a little,” Ciangi admitted.
Then, as if Mimic had been studying comedic timing, her human face melted away, leaving only the black, shiny surface that comprised her true form. Little tendrils spiked out of the darkness, almost like a cross between audio waves and tentacles.
“Okay, change that to creeped out a lot. Is that necessary?”
“I’m sure whatever Mimic is doing needs to be done.”
“What about a tentacle face is necessary in this situation?” Gonzales asked, although she looked more amused than horrified.
“I don’t know, I’m not the shapeshifter. We’ll have to ask her when she’s done… doing whatever it is she’s doing.”
“I’m talking to it.” That was distinctly Mimic’s voice, but there were no lips on her onyx face. No tongue. No eyes. Only the polygonal obsidian and angular tendrils.
“Um, how are you talking to us?”
“Through my mouth, as is customary to your species.”
“Um…where is your mouth?”
“I’m a shapeshifter. It’s wherever I want it to be. I need you all to be quiet, you’re scaring the baby.”
“The bab-- Oh. Right. Shhh.”
We fell into a very tense silence for several moments before Mimic finally began to speak to us again, although I still had no idea where her voice was coming from and I tried not to think about it.
“That creature, the alien we saw, he is part of the reason my people were in space to begin with.”
“Come again?”
“He crashed here, millennia ago, knocking several mountains greater than the one we were on into the atmosphere. A few of my people were on those chunks and I suppose you could say the rest is history.”
“So what, you guys just drifted through space until you were caught in the gravitation pull of that asteroid belt?”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
“And what, that little baby shifter told you all that?”
“Of course not. It has no idea what gravitational pull is. I was merely pulling context from its mind.” She stood, but she kept her fingers splayed out to either side of the containment field, as if still connected to the mini-mimic. “My people have a sort of…communal memory. Some things must be learned, but some things are engrained into our DNA. I can tap into these memories, while this youngling is too premature to
do so.”
“But if you have communal memory, why didn’t your people know this?”
“Perhaps they did once, but through the centuries, it proved to be irrelevant to our evolution and was phased out.”
“Wish I could phase out some of my memories,” Gonzales muttered. I sent her a look begging her to lay off the quips for now. She rolled her eyes, but then nodded.
“So, these mimics kept the memories because they were still relevant to them. Which makes sense considering that the alien is still here.”
“And using them,” Mimic continued. “It is…grossly uncomfortable how similar the creature’s story is to our own. After it crash landed on this planet, the crew tried desperately to get themselves back home. But between the predators and weather and entirely incompatible atmosphere, they all died out. Except for one.
“They knew that they would never survive as it was, so they began to make…alterations to their body.”
“Alterations? Alterations like what?”
“I… The little one doesn’t know how to describe it, nor can I decipher it from their fragmented memories.” She tilted her head as if listening harder, and it was uncanny considering she was still completely faceless. “But I do know the alien was a…engineer, of sorts. It fused parts of itself into the ship, changing, improving, re-forging, until it was able to eke out some sort of existence. But there was still the matter of the great beasts that wandered this planet, and how to fix its ship since it no longer was a mobile creature as it had been before.”
“What predators? All I could find on the scanners were lifeforms smaller than your standard human hand.”
“Exactly. From what I could tell, the alien captured one of this guy’s little ancestors and experimented on it. It was able to figure out the sub-harmonic frequency at which we communicate and exploit that. It developed a system where it could issue commands, commands that normally adults would issue and juveniles would follow until they were able to understand their own genetic memory and mimic ability.”
“And what did the adults do?”
A dark expression crossed her face. “They died. The first order the alien gave was for the juveniles to kill all of the adults. The adults didn’t try to resist, and were wiped out within a few weeks.”
Mimic and the Journey Home (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 2) Page 8
