The Parabiont Invasion Book 3

by Y. J. Gendron

  No!

  He put a hand to Beatrice’s forehead. She was terribly cold, so much so that he lifted his hand away in shock.

  My God!

  He turned to Eklan. The Amilaki was staring at the ceiling with vacant, lifeless eyes, his skin the color of ash.

  Noah’s hands shook with the realization that he needed to do something to save them. But what? He watched the blobs of luminescence travel back and forth inside the ghastly tendril. They were somehow linked up to the Disruptor, to the machine Eklan and Asalak had created. Looking around, he saw the remains of ugly, spider-like things heaped up in a tall pile at the base of the 3D printer. They looked a lot like the trilobite-thing that he’d crossed path with. He didn’t know why they were dead but he didn’t care. They were out of order, and that meant someone had found a way to stop them.

  And if they could be neutralized, maybe he could do something about the tendrils; and about the stack.

  Going back to Garcia, he went through the soldier’s backpack, looking for anything of use.

  Bingo! I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Corporal!

  There was a small axe, the head wrapped up in a red leather sheath. Gripping the handle, he snapped off the sheath and hefted the tool. It was well balanced. He straightened and moved closer to Beatrice. He stared at the tendril. For lack of comparison, his mind settled on an image of plastic tubes collecting sap from maple trees. Both were translucent, but the tube at his feet was flowing with light, not fluids. He raised the axe and without hesitation brought it down with force.

  There was a brusque jolt and the axe arced back up toward his face. He felt the blade hit his cheekbone, followed at once by a sharp stab of intense pain. Steadying his nerves and doing his best to ignore the pain, he seized the handle with both hands and brought it down once more on the tendril.

  The appendage ruptured. There was a sharp intake of breath, overly loud in the Cube’s felted atmosphere. Beatrice jerked upwards reflexively, eyes wide in confusion. She put a hand to the back of her head, behind the ear. The appendage still hung from the skin, going down her back.

  “Beatrice! Are you okay?” Noah asked, clearly worried.

  As if in a daze, she turned to the voice that had called out her name. A young man stared back, disheveled and visibly distressed, the right side of his face sporting an ugly lump. He repeated the same words, gripping her shoulder with a strong hand. The physical contact woke her senses up and she felt better at once, the fog in her head lifting away instantly.

  “Noah,” she said, the word coming out like a plea. “Where am I?”

  He bent down and helped her to a sitting position, making sure not to touch the tendril.

  “We’re inside the Cube.”

  He watched with relief as her stare regained its focus. She’s back.

  Beatrice turned to Eklan. A shadow crossed her stare. Looking up at Noah, she touched once more the appendage still stuck to her head. There was an intense look of doubt on her face but it vanished a millisecond later. She pivoted smartly and glanced at the dead insectoid drones crowding the floor.

  “I need one of those.”

  Noah wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “What did you say?”

  With a quick nod, she indicated the drones. “Those things. Bring one to me.”

  This time Noah was certain he had not misunderstood. Getting to his feet, he bolted over to the pile of dead things and grabbed a specimen by the leg. There was a plasticky noise as the limb flexed in his grip. He stared at it with revulsion. The bug-like construct was without beauty, hacked from disparate parts and materials. He ran back to Beatrice.

  “Here,” he said, depositing the thing on her lap.

  A loud whirr of machinery made him jump out of his skin. Veering to the sound of the disruption, he noticed the 3D printers had sprung back to life, the robotic arms feeding the machines with a blur of quick, darting, movements.

  “No time.”

  He turned to Beatrice. There was a haunted look in her eyes, filled with such anguish that he stood transfixed, a dagger of doubt knifing his insides.

  Turning the dead drone over to what Noah referred as the thing’s stomach, she split open the hull with her fingers, exposing a small chamber inside. Gently plucking the tendril from behind her head, she closed her eyes for a second and with one swift gesture inserted the loose end, the one Noah had severed, directly inside the cavity.

  The drone sprung to life. Noah gaped in awe as the thing’s servo’s buzzed with energy, the spindly legs rotating every which way. Beatrice pulled the tendril out and said: “Insertion.” For a second, he couldn’t understand what she meant. Then it dawned on him. He grabbed the drone by the hull, keeping his fingers away from the spinning legs, and deposited it on the floor. At once, the drone raced off, heading directly for the stack.

  “Watch out!”

  Noah turned his head. Beatrice’s stare was fixated to the opposite side of the Cube, to where the fabrication took place. An intricate succession of noises, mechanical and artificial, caught his ear. He pivoted to where the sound came from. At first, he was unable to catalog the monstrosity lurching free of the robotic arms. Towering over him, the thing was thin, like a rail, with along its pieced-together shaft, an assembly of what could be considered as arms. Bolted to the thing’s frame, the appendages flexed and moved with stunning velocity, clawing the air with cold efficiency. Noah watched as the thing’s legs, all eight of them, scurried forward, shoving aside the heavy steel tables like so much brushwood. One arm, ending in a serrated saw, spun crazily in a wide arc, cutting up the floor and throwing fragments of concrete all over the place. Stunned by the sight, Noah’s gaze fastened itself to the thing’s monstrous features. Though some of them were beyond his understanding, the pincers were not, nor were the sharpened ends of the overly long, carbon-fiber fingers. But it was the sheer alienness of the thing that he found unnerving. For even though the giant moved with purpose, there was no head, nor eyes, just a jumble of wires, circuitry and sensors. To him, the thing shouldn’t be able to exist, yet alone move. It was an hirsute bundle of heterogeneous bits, lumped together in a whole that couldn’t possibly function.

  Yet it did.

  And it was coming for him.

  Shit!

  He retreated at once from the approaching nightmare. His mind was screaming at him to run, to get the hell away from the thing-that-shouldn’t-be. It was a warning call from deep within the primitive center of his brain, from where Evolution had deemed fit to install Man’s instinct to survive. A hand gripped his shoulder. From the corner of the eye, he saw Beatrice climb to her feet, her stare ablaze with intensity.

  The monster rushed forth, tossing aside whatever stood in its path with quick, explosive thrusts. A millisecond later, it loomed over them, the dark array of deadly limbs whirling above their heads, millimeters away.

  Noah closed his eyes, waiting for death. He hoped it would be quick, maybe even painless. The air moved around him. In his mind, he saw his parents smile down at him, their eyes full of humanity, as they had been before the Amilaki changed them. He smiled back at them, his heart finding solace with what they’d become.

  He waited.

  The moment dragged on.

  He cracked open an eye. The dark limbs were frozen in mid-motion, an hair’s breadth away. He shot a glance at Beatrice. There was a pincer around her throat, and even though it had stopped short of crushing her, he realized with shock that she couldn’t breathe. Galvanized into action, he moved away from the deadly limbs and took position. Gripping the pincer with both hands, he pulled the fingers apart with a strong heave. The pincer’s hold relaxed with a sudden hiss and he wrenched Beatrice away, holding on to her as she collapsed in his arms.

  He staggered away from the monster, dragging Beatrice with him.

  The light in the Cube changed as he moved away, the glow getting harsher with each passing second. Glancing at the stack, he saw Beatrice’s drone scale the tall assemb
lage of flickering machines. It probed and skittered across the decahedron-shaped shells, poking and prodding with a thin, needle-like extension. It moved with steadfastness as it burrowed without hesitation inside the complex machinery, darting in and out between the levels as fast as the eye could see.

  The drone’s actions impelled Noah to move even faster. Propping Beatrice up, he moved with haste across the empty floor, the wide-open doors urging him on.

  “No!”

  The voice crashed inside the room like a thunderclap. Noah flinched despite himself, astounded by the malevolence behind the call. He shot a glance at the stack. Level by level, the lights embedded in the decagonal devices were winking off, turning silent. The entire structure flickered with energy yet one could see a dark buildup in its center, spreading outward. The black spot was a whirlpool within the stack, sucking away the power flowing up the structure. And at the center of this newly-formed black hole, Beatrice’s drone slowly spun upon itself, a parasite endowed with purpose.

  For that was Beatrice’s doing, Noah realized. She had re-programmed the drone to infiltrate the stack and was shutting it down, from the inside.

  Glancing up to where the stack still burned with energy, he watched as the black hole swallowed the lights, a plague devouring everything in its path. The speed of the conquest was astounding and a few moments later only a few decahedrons remained ablaze, the last ones still alive.

  He realized Beatrice had stopped walking.

  “What is it?” He asked, at once worried.

  For all answer, she swung her sight to the stack.

  It was dark as night, now. Silent and lifeless. Noah wanted to cry out in victory but he felt at once that something was amiss, that the danger wasn’t over. There was a sudden movement inside the stack. He saw that it was the drone. Beatrice’s drone. He turned to her. She was staring at it with a mixture of awe and fear, absorbed by the sight. He was about to ask what was going on when the drone launched itself from the stack, sailing high into the air. Dumbfounded by the sight, he watched as it landed directly on the monster’s back, the drone squirming its way at once within the towering giant’s jumble of wiring.

  “Shit!” Noah cried, the adrenaline surging in his veins.

  There was a sudden hiss of noise and the giant flexed an arm, taking a tentative step forward.

  “So you thought you could stop me.”

  Noah’s heart leaped. It was her. The voice was a caricature of its former self, but it was recognizable nevertheless. Tebayi was inside the monstrosity, inhabiting the nightmarish creature she had brought into the world.

  He gripped Beatrice’s shoulder, attempting to get her to move.

  But she pushed him away and said, “Noah, go!”

  Frozen into place, he shook his head. There was a silent plea in her stare but there was no way he could leave her behind.

  “Time for you to die.”

  A six feet long arm, ending in a hand composed of three spiked fingers, exploded into movement. It threw bits of concrete in the air as it raked the floor, racing toward them. Noah took a step backward, an automatic act of self-preservation. He noticed that Beatrice had stayed put, directly in the path of danger. Riveted by the vision, he could only watch as the titan’s talon pulled back to better strike her.

  The realization sunk inside him, penetrating his heart. Beatrice was seconds away from death.

  It was unavoidable. Terrible. Absolute.

  There was a flash of movement, unexpected.

  Eklan’s right hand shot upwards. It reached inside the beast’s innards as it walked by, twisting and pulling the mess of wiring with a violent tug.

  “What?” Tebayi hissed, shocked.

  At the same moment, Beatrice dashed forward, pushing herself between the outstretched arms of the giant. She wriggled her way close, to where the monster’s core shimmered, the only thing ablaze with light. She fingered the tendril, the one behind her ear. It was still attached to her head, an eerie reminder of how strange the world had become. It was a link. A link between her and the Amilaki, but also between Humanity and the Beyond.

  Kalxin had implanted a tiny device inside her head.

  One designed to protect her inner being, what made her Human.

  And it had worked.

  And all she had needed to do was to listen herself, to what her soul had to say. For, contrary to what Tebayi believed, her spirit was a real, vital, force; as fundamental as her heart. It was this conviction that allowed her to confront the darkness, and to stand up to Tebayi.

  And it was why she could do what had to be done.

  Her fingers wrapped themselves around a thick wire, as black as space. It was the only one left to the monster’s nucleus. To where Tebayi holed up, cornered in her last stronghold.

  Down on the floor, she saw Eklan’s hand fall back to his chest. He stared up at her, his features etched with hope.

  She yanked the remaining wire from the thing’s core.

  A rasp escaped the machine’s artificial body.

  Beatrice closed her eyes and set all thoughts aside.

  Then, without hesitation, she inserted the loose end of the tendril inside the monster’s core.

  There was the dizzying sensation of being wrapped in pure light.

  She invoked a last, final, command.

  Delete all.

  32 Aftermath

  Colonel Tobias Graves shook his head in wonder.

  Too many unknowns.

  That’s what his friend, Captain Lloyd Henderson, had said when he’d first spoke of his project of combining Human and Amilaki technology.

  I should have listened to him. I was too reckless, too eager to find a solution.

  In the end, those unknowns had disrupted his plan, as assuredly as if the Disruptor had been turned against him, instead of the Snyl.

  There was no one to blame but himself. He couldn’t lay the blame on the Amilaki. On Tebayi, yes; but not on Asalak. The man had died after all. Died while protecting those around him. Graves was convinced that without his intervention, he would have lost more people… maybe a hell of a lot more.

  By disabling the enemy drones, Asalak had cleared the way for Eklan to confront Tebayi. It had been a turning point in the battle, the one that had saved them all.

  Asalak’s loss would mean difficult times ahead.

  He was the de facto leader for the sensible Amilaki, for those who preferred cooperation over confrontation. Even the humans working at his side had found him a worthy man to follow. Graves himself missed his keen mind, genial attitude and even, to his surprise, his companionship. At first, a gulf of suspicion had kept them apart, but as they worked together in building a bridge of trust between both species, they, too, had learned to appreciate each other’s company.

  Survival wasn’t an easy thing. Graves knew that on an instinctive level. It was damn hard in fact. A lot of things could derail your best laid plans in the blink of an eye.

  Looking back, Graves thought they had been lucky in the end. Lucky to have a courageous young woman stand up to terror. Lucky to have a visitor from the stars give his life so that another species may live.

  “Sir, we’re ready.”

  Graves turned to Garcia. The Sergeant’s voice was hushed, as if wary of breaking Graves’ pensive mood.

  “Very well, Sergeant.”

  They had salvaged all they could. Asalak’s dream, the disruptor, was an accretion of dead circuitry. Tebayi’s attack and subsequent termination had caused havoc in the towering assemblage of Amilaki tech. Eklan had managed to extricate a handful of useable components from the ruin but even he was astonished by the machine’s disastrous state. It was Noah that had said it most succinctly: “It’s just a crap pile of scrap, now.”

  With a last glance at what could have been, Graves followed Garcia out of the Cube, his footsteps resounding loudly in the deserted hallways. They crossed through a number of doorways then found themselves outside, in front of the main entrance. A Hu
mvee was parked outside the door, waiting for them. Privates De Rozan and Williams lounged nearby, keeping a sharp eye to make sure all was secure… even though there was no around for more than fifty miles.

  Graves knew the threat level had radically decreased now that Tebayi had been eliminated. With their leader gone, those that had followed her into battle came to realize that her dream of an Amilaki dominated Universe would remain exactly that. A dream. Most of her faction surrendered on the spot. The few that kept on fighting, like the man with the ugly scar, were neutralized with extreme prejudice.

  Graves had lost good soldiers on that day. Men and women of heart, and of valor.

  They would be missed.

  But never forgotten.

  “Let’s finish this, Sergeant.”

  The two men made their way to the Humvee and climbed inside. Garcia pressed a button on the dashboard’s center screen and a live feed of the Cube’s interior flashed into view. Graves pulled out a highly polished, ovoid-shaped object from a breast pocket. Eklan had showed him how it worked. It was easy, once you knew how. He pressed a thumb to the smooth hull and waited for the decagonal symbols to materialize. Once they came into view, he rotated the interface and selected a golden-yellow icon, the one that meant ‘engage’.

  He kept his thumb to the symbol for a few seconds and waited.

  Inside the Cube, on a tripod mounted at the bottom of the stack, the high output laser of the activator came alive. The glow was so bright that even on the Humvee’s screen, it lit up the cabin, forcing both men to shield their eyes. The beam from the light-drill hit the stack at point-blank range. The effect was immediate.

  Meltdown.

  Straightaway, the hundreds of components and parts that comprised the stack began to dissolve, superheated to the point of molecular breakdown. The beam was merciless as it obliterated, level by level, the array; turning Tebayi’s sanctuary into a puddle of smoldering sludge.