I got to my feet, intent on congratulating her, but we didn’t even get enough time to celebrate before I saw at least a hundred times more eyes glowing from the other side of the hole.
“Run,” I said breathlessly.
Mimi tilted her head back, letting out a grating, chilling sound that reverberated through the entire room. In response, a crack opened in the runoff containment and the mimics came erupting out.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, they weren’t the only material that sprayed out of the opening. Waves of molten, nuclear waste erupted in a fountain that went straight for the oncoming horde of robots. That bought us some time, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough. Looking behind me, I pivoted and ran back to the point where the first wave had tried to strike.
“Higgens!” I heard Mimi cry, reaching after me.
But I didn’t stop, sliding under an errant spray and grabbing the shielding orb that Ciangi had jammed into the ground. It took a second and the help of my ionic welder to yank it from the ground, but I managed.
I shot to my feet, yelling for her to activate it, when suddenly it felt like my arm was slammed with a sledge hammer that was also part sun. Looking down, I saw a burned hole no bigger than the head of a syringe in the arm of my suit and an immediate wave of nausea hit me.
It seemed that I’d been hit with a droplet of concentrated nuclear waste. That wasn’t good.
The headache was almost immediate, but I didn’t have time to worry. My suit was already trying to fuse itself back together, coolant and an analgesic gel rushing to the damaged area. Thankfully, Ciangi had heard my cry and activated the shield again, this time in a curved shape.
Forcing myself to run again, I attached it to my belt behind me to buy us a little extra protection until we were out the door.
But I realized something as we pelted toward the exit. Even if we shut the door and the creatures somehow couldn’t break it down, they would just go back out the hole and around to meet us. If we wanted this fight to end, well…we needed to end it.
But how?
I dashed along, almost to the door, when the blue glow behind me began to flicker out. The thudding and zaps of robots hitting the field faded and dread filled me.
“Ciangi!” I cried. “What’s happening?”
“It’s just a little ball, it’s only meant for temporary use!”
“It’s overheating,” Bahn answered more plainly.
“Uh, that is definitely not good.”
“We’re almost there,” Mimi said. “It just needs to hold another second!”
I didn’t know if we had another second, and I was last in the group. I could see the machine soldiers climbing along the walls and ceilings, waiting to get a drop on us with every flicker.
But then the first wave of mimics made it out the door. Then Eske. Then Gonzales. Somehow, we made it, and my foot crossed over the threshold, all my friends ready to slam the door shut behind me.
Unfortunately, my other foot never quite made it over.
This time, it felt like lightning had straight up enveloped my already injured arm, and I looked to see that one of the machines had reached through during one of the flickers and grabbed my limb. Already blood was welling up and I could feel oxygen rushing out of my enviro-suit.
“No!” Mimi cried, pulling me to the side. She got most of my body out of the door, but the machine dug its feet in, trying to yank me backwards.
If the shield flickered again, his buddies were waiting right there. They would snatch me up in a second and I would be done for.
I would die.
Normally, I would say that I was willing to sacrifice my life to make sure that Mimi and the little ones lived. And if I had to now, I would do it. But I was suddenly filled with such a burning will to live. I knew I wasn’t ready to go yet.
“Close the door!” I yelled.
“But your arm!”
“Close the door!” I repeated. “All of you! As hard as you can before the shield fails.”
I looked down to Mimi, who was holding onto my waist with all of her might. I smiled at her as best as I could given the situation, before pulling my gun from my waist and aiming it right at the nuclear waste runoff.
I had to time it perfectly. The door swung closed, narrowing my field of vision, but I waited until it was less than half a foot open before firing at the vat. Just like I hoped, a massive explosion rocketed out of it just as the door slammed shut with a crunch, the force of all the mimics and my friends behind it.
The pain was indescribable. I didn’t look, I didn’t want to see, but in my mind’s eye, I had a pretty good idea what it looked like. I tried to be positive about it as I swayed, my enviro-suit now really scrambling to repair its damage. After all, I had already lost some fingers on that hand anyway, plus the nuclear poisoning. Really, I was lucky to lose it.
“Hold on, Higgens,” Mimi said, her tone sounding just as frantic as it had been on our home planet. “Just hold on.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, recognizing that shock was most definitely setting in. “You’re stuck with me, minus an arm or not.”
“We need to patch his suit and stop the bleeding,” I heard Eske say from beside us. “We should get him to Harunya.”
“No!” I argued. “There’s no time. There’s still at least forty lifeforms on this vessel we have to take care of.”
“Thirty-five, actually,” Mimi corrected. “But I think I might…have an idea.”
I looked to her blearily, my body feeling very, very cold. “Oh really? An idea? I like ideas.”
“It will be painful.”
I went to shrug but that just caused a welp of pain to escape from my lips. “I think I’m already in pain.”
“Right.” She took a deep breath and looked to the others. “We need one of their weapons.”
“How do we get that?” Gonzales asked.
“The hold!” she said, her eyes widening. “I’ll have one of the little ones bring one from the second guard in the hold.” She closed her eyes and her face did the thing again. When her eyes opened, she looked a modicum more hopeful. I didn’t know why she looked so bummed, though. I was the one with a missing arm, and I felt great.
Ow.
Okay, maybe not great, but it hurt a whole lot less than some of the other things that I had been through.
“Come on, let’s pull him into one of these room and prepare ourselves for a possible attack.”
Her arms slid behind mine, pulling me up, and there was that pain that had been missing. I screamed, and she just shushed me desperately while dragging me into the space.
We got into the room, and that was about when everything got super fuzzy. Time seemed to waver between a rigid structure and a sort of pile of mush. But I was very clear when the little mimic carrying the gun came crawling in through a pipe. I went hazy again as Mimi handed it to Gonzales then stood against the wall, but I definitely snapped to attention when the weapons engineer shot her in the side.
“Wait, what?” I sputtered, trying to sit up only to have Eske, Bahn, and Ciangi hold me down.
“It’s okay,” Mimi groaned, stumbling toward me. My vision wasn’t exactly the greatest at the moment, but I could make out that her side was just a mess of oozing, gooey darkness.
“Why did you do that?”
“Shh,” she whispered, her forehead pale and covered in sweat. “I’ll heal fast, and now you will too…I think.”
She reached to her side, grabbing a good handful of the thick, onyx ooze and slathering it over the end of my stump. “Bind it,” she gasped, stumbling backwards. “Seal it in there in the suit.”
The others rushed to do it, and I was more confused than ever. But that confusion quickly flew to the back of my mind as my entire body began to seize.
It felt like my body was one giant raw nerve and I had stuck an ionic wrench into a live feed. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I was being scoured from head to toe until there was n
othing left.
And then, suddenly, it was all over. My soul and body felt like it was dunked in cold, refreshing water, and it was all over.
I sat up, looking around for Mimi. She was sitting in a chair, her body reknitting itself, and she looked at me weakly.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Um… Good.” I said. “How do I feel good? That shouldn’t be possible.”
Ciangi let out a scream, nearly giving me a heart attack. “Higgens! Your arm!”
I looked down to see that the hasty patch job on my enviro-suit’s sleeve was pushing outwards, eventually popping off to reveal a growing limb of pure black.
“Is…is this what I think it is?” I asked, raising it to my face.
Sure enough, it moved when I wanted it to, and I could feel a strange sort of coolness to it, but it was entirely alien to me.
“It’s our cell structure, yeah,” Mimi said. “It’s integrating into you.”
“I…” My brain was still struggling to catch up with what was happening. “How did you know this would happen? Did you know this would happen?”
“Not for sure,” she answered honestly. “It was a theory I had back before we left our planet, but I never had time to confirm it. These aliens and their tendency to assimilate reminded me of it.
“You see, you humans are so adaptable. You evolve at an insane rate. I figure if there was a way to reduce our flesh into a state of repair, it might be able to integrate into your system.”
I couldn’t believe it. Of all the things I thought were possible in the grand universe we were in, this was not it. “So…I’m a mimic now?”
“Well, part of you is, but you are also human.”
“I think I’m almost jealous, but also a whole lot of queasy,” Gonzales said, coming over to eye my arm. “That’s something else, man.”
I looked down at it, willing it to take a form that was more familiar to me. It surged and buckled for a moment, little waves of spikes running along it before it finally looked like my original arm.
“That’s incredible,” I breathed, wondering if I had passed out from blood loss and was just dreaming this incredible circumstance.
“You’re incredible,” Mimi added, rising to give me a soft peck on the cheek. That was about the last of her tenderness, however, as her face grew suddenly serious. “Now who’s ready to take over this ship?”
“Oh, I definitely am,” I said, standing up. I felt more energized than I had in ages.
“Wow, a frontal assault,” Gonzales murmured, grabbing one of her many guns. “My favorite.”
14
Cleaning House
We stalked down the halls, a sort of strength in us that I hadn’t felt in ages. There was no uncertainty, no fear. Just a whole lot of rage and justifiable anger. As we walked, two more aliens spotted us and came charging down the hall, but Gonzales took out both before Mimi even had a chance to shift.
Normally, I didn’t revel in violence. I didn’t like seeing people hurt. I didn’t like causing hurt.
But this…this was so different. These aliens had caused so much pain, so much torment, and I was here to end this.
We all were.
We continued down, and I heard more footsteps pounding toward us from a side hall. I looked down it but before I could shoot, my arm flashed forward toward the alien and picked him up, slamming him between the ground and ceiling repeatedly until he didn’t get up again.
Nothing could stop us. We were like a wave, relentlessly marching forward. By our count, we had downed twenty of them before we reached the barricaded door to the bridge.
I reached into my pack and pulled out one of my charges, but Mimi just shook her head. “This is for us,” she said quietly.
We all understood and moved to the side. Mimi closed her eyes, her head bowed, and for a moment, nothing happened. But then a low rumble filled the ship, growing louder and louder until I saw the surge of mimics come churning down the hall like an unstoppable force, the mimics that had fed from the runoff vat.
They hit the door with more force than the explosion I had just caused, and it flew inward. The five of us humans just stood there, listening as the bridge devolved into a cacophony.
It was a long, long few moments as shrill noises, screeches, and bangs filled our ears, but eventually there was silence.
We stepped in, expecting carnage, but there was none. Sure, there was blaster fire and most of the furniture in the room was smoking, half-melted messes while several displays were giving off sparks, but there were no bodies. There was no blood.
I didn’t question it. For once, I was glad for a little break from all the grimness in our lives.
Mimi turned to us from where she sat in what I assumed was the captain’s seat, a wan smile on her face.
“I believe this is the part where we steal this ship and drive it home?”
“Holy halibut, you really did it!” Gonzales said, rushing the woman and throwing her arms around the shapeshifter in a hug. It was certainly unexpected, but not unwelcome, and we all broke out into our own laughs, tears, and shouts of joy.
“I have to hail Harunya!” Ciangi said, bounding past me to grab one of the few non-smoldering seats.
I didn’t mind standing. I locked eyes with Mimi, so much emotion pouring through me. She caught my gaze and offered me her hand. I took it with my new arm, and we were connected more intimately than I ever thought possible.
“Let’s go home.”
“Yes, let’s.”
It was a long journey home, even with enveloping our ship into the docking bay of the alien ship and using its advanced engines to send us there. First of all, we had to learn how the whole thing worked, and despite all of our hacking into their systems, that still took several solid days to be familiar enough for cross-system travel.
Eventually we did make it, though, and the mimics rushed out to rebuild the city that had been razed.
There was a massive celebration, of course. The young mimics gorged themselves while Eske’s family cooked food from the processors and the coin twins played their favorite songs. There was dancing, there was peace, but I couldn’t get into the cheery mood.
I found Mimi standing in front of the ship we had stolen, the night sky dark against her pale silhouette. I wrapped my arm around her and leaned my head on her shoulder, feeling comfort in her presence.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I could feel that she was upset in the same way I could feel if I was hungry or thirsty. Something had certainly changed within me when she integrated her cells into my body, and I was interested in seeing how that played out. But for the moment, we were more connected than we had ever been.
“They’re going to come back for us.”
“Yeah, we know that. But they won’t come back today, or even tomorrow.”
“That may be,” she said, her arms wrapping around me as well. “But I can feel it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until this is all over.”
“I understand. I don’t think I’ll be able to either.”
We fell quiet for a moment, looking up at the stars, one of which was the sun that warmed the backs of the beings that wanted to kill us all. That certainly made the beautiful display a lot less welcoming.
“I don’t think we can defend this planet, Higgens,” Mimi whispered finally. “We’re still growing, and I worry trying to keep it safe will destroy it entirely.”
There was a ring of truth to what she said, and I swallowed harshly. “Then what do you suggest we do?”
“I think…” She hesitated ever-so-slightly, causing curiosity to bubble up within me more than ever. “I think we have to take this fight to Earth. If we team up, maybe we have an actual chance of stopping them for good.”
“Earth?” I echoed dubiously. “You mean the one that’s recovering from a massive coup after we threw it into political upheaval?”
“Yes, that one.”
I sighed, wanting to argue with her but kn
owing she had a point. “Well, at least things never get boring with us.”
Mimi turned to me, the stars reflecting in her eyes as she gazed at me with all the emotions neither of us were good at expressing. “But at least we’ll face it together.”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, giving her forehead a kiss. “We will.”
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading Mimic Saves Her People, the eighth book in the Space Shifter Chronicles. This adventure is getting intense, isn’t it? And it’s only going to get more intense from here. If you enjoyed this story (or even if you didn’t), it would be awesome if you left a review for me. That really helps me know if people like my stories or if I need to change things.
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Mimic Saves Her People Page 9
