by Ramy Vance
The screen flashed, displaying a rough schematic of the voids and tunnels in the asteroid beneath her: a map of the base layout.
“It looks like we’ve made contact with a smaller access corridor,” she announced over the open comms channel. “Now that we’re through most of the shielding, your scanners should be able to track basic life signs.” Satisfied that the corridor beneath her feet was currently empty, she clipped her computer onto her belt. Toner passed the laser cutter down to her.
She anchored the tool into the walls and pushed herself up to squeeze beside Toner. He pressed himself against the tunnel to make room for her, but the close quarters forced them into an awkward side-hug. “Beginning Phase Three.” She depressed the laser cutter’s trigger.
Searing light filled the tunnel as a precision laser sliced a new door into the Creeper base. Shocked by the flare, she turned her face into Toner’s shoulder.
In that instant of dazzling light, she felt him go very, very still.
As quickly as it had come, the light went out. There was a distant thunking noise, followed by the cold rush of air as different pressures equalized.
“Door’s open,” Bufo said.
“Good hunting.” Jaeger heaved the laser cutter to the side, activated her infrared filters, and plunged into the pitch-black hole.
She was disappointed, but not surprised, to wind drifting in an ordinary-looking ovoid tunnel about two meters on the long edge. The Creepers evidently didn’t know the Overseer secret of artificial gravity. Light panels lined the walls at long intervals, filling the space with a soft yellow-orange glow.
Falling into single file, like drops of oil, the others filled the tunnel around her. One after another, they activated their mag soles. They hadn’t anticipated that the Creepers would have built their tunnels from the right balance of ferrous metals necessary to make the mag soles entirely effective. Still, as they’d hoped, there was enough electromagnetic field available to allow them to push and pull against the walls. None of them had Toner’s effortless skill with the antigrav setting, but they were competent.
Silently, Toner and Bufo lifted their scanners and vanished around the curve of the corridor, their teams following them like shadows.
Jaeger turned to regard the three dark shapes floating around her.
She had wanted all of her new crew to choose their names—ones that felt right to each of them, ones that had meaning—but in all of the hustle of the few hours since their birth, there hadn’t been enough time to give the matter the true weight and thought it deserved.
Aquila, she thought, studying the tall, slender figure of the female eagle-mutant, then the male at her side. Pandion.
The third member of her team was small and long-limbed and already crawling lightly along the walls to scout around the corridor curve. Anolis.
They were labels drawn from the old Latin designations for the animals from which they drew their primary genetic modifications. They weren’t names, really, but right now, they were all these people had. She would hold that much sacred.
She gestured for them to venture into the unknown.
Anolis skittered silently down the hall, keeping his body pressed to curved walls to minimize his silhouette. His camouflaging exo-suit, now calibrated to the environment, turned a rippling matte-gray that made him practically invisible. Jaeger could see him only as a specially painted, vaguely human-shaped thing on her thermal sensors.
That was good because camouflage was the only cover in the long, essentially featureless tunnels, where the endless gentle curves shortened all line-of-sight.
Anolis was scouting several meters ahead when he froze with his body pressed flat to the wall. Moving with an instinct that must have been pre-programmed, Pandion and Aquila pressed their backs to the wall, shrinking to decrease their profiles. Jaeger went still, holding herself steady between the two eagle-people.
Something crawled into view at the edge of the tunnel.
It had the distended, soft-carapace body of a two-meter long termite nymph. Its pale, bloated mass filled half the tunnel as it ambled forward. Its stubby antennae bobbed through the empty space ahead of it.
Jaeger held her breath. This was it. If the alien creatures had senses sharp enough to pierce their camo-suits, then the mission was over before it had truly begun. Not knowing Creeper physiology, they’d had no way of testing it—until now.
She studied the creature as it crawled toward her frozen team. It was the first look she had gotten of a Creeper in the flesh, and she nearly wished she hadn’t.
A double set of mandibles, each wide enough to clip a telephone pole in half, hung beneath a horizontal row of countless glittering, multi-faceted orbs that must have been eyes. Rows of stubby, needle-sharp legs undulated beneath its long body. She counted seven pairs before losing track. Something writhed within the sack of the abdomen dragging behind it. Eggs? Living young, ready to break free and begin life?
Or some unfortunate supper that still wasn’t quite dead?
For all its bulk, it moved lightly—nearly bouncing through the low-gravity environment in much the same way Baby towed herself through the Osprey’s corridors.
Either its senses were quite dull, or the camouflage did its job perfectly. The creature passed, indifferent to their presence. A trail of glistening slime lined the tunnel behind it.
When it finally disappeared around the curve, Anolis made a gagging noise over the radio. “It smells awful. Consider yourselves lucky you don’t have enhanced noses, too.”
They gave a collective sigh of relief, and Anolis continued his careful crawl down the tunnel.
The base layout reminded Jaeger of an ant farm. However, she couldn't tell if her understanding of the complicated web of interconnecting, haphazard tunnels was a true memory of some childhood hobby or a depiction drawn up from the pop culture references that filled her head where her past should have been. Even with the button-sized thermal beacons they placed at every cross tunnel, pointing them back toward the exit like shed breadcrumbs, she worried they would get lost in the maze.
“These tunnels are nearly featureless,” she said over the open radio channel. “I’m not finding places to hide the explosives.” This was a problem they hadn’t anticipated. If she left the cue ball-sized bombs stuck to the wall, the Creepers would discover them almost immediately.
“We ran into the same problem,” Bufo responded, his voice staticky from interference. “After a while, we found several corridor cross-sections cluttered with some kind of tubes and conduits. It gets better.”
The tunnels might’ve been sparsely populated where they first entered, but encounters with more of the bloated nymphs became common as they delved deeper into the base.
“They appear sluggish,” Aquila observed as two of the monsters shuffled out of a damp, warm side-tunnel.
“They must be at a different life stage than the Creepers that go raiding on Locaur,” Jaeger murmured. “Perhaps juveniles, not fully developed. The pictures Art drew were of hard-bodied creatures, without the distended abdomens.”
“Agreed.” Pandion paused at a branch in the tunnel ahead. “I believe we’re in a protected, domestic sector of the colony.”
Twenty minutes into the mission and they had yet to encounter any sort of door or sealed portal. The soft-bodied aliens appeared naked, without tools or clothes or any indication of rank or office. They made almost no noise but for the faint gurgling, rumbling sound of their passage. Jaeger fought the instinct to think of them as nothing but overgrown insects.
These are intelligent creatures, she reminded herself, watching one corpulent body amble past, blind to her presence. Spacefaring. Tool-using.
She resolved to think of them as K’tax if only to remind herself that they had a name—and not only the dehumanizing description of Creeper that Occy had given them.
“There are other kinds of aliens moving through these tunnels too,” Anolis said softly over the radio. “Bigger. Faster-mo
ving. I’m trying to avoid them.”
“So the ones we’ve come across so far are drones,” Jaeger mused. “Anolis might be seeing the warrior forms that have been raiding the Locauri.”
Their progress slowed as they pushed toward the heart of the sector, where an increasingly thick layer of slime coated the walls. They began to feel the occasional distant rumbling of what might have been heavy machinery in the distance.
“All six of our seeds planted.” Bufo’s voice came over the comms channel, muffled by the dozens of meters of rock between them. “We’re heading back to the exit.”
“Good,” Jaeger murmured as Anolis held them back from a cross-tunnel long enough for some distant K’tax to pass by. “Toner?”
“Only planted three,” he grunted, sounding much closer. “We’re having trouble spreading out without risking detection. Temperature and atmosphere are fairly standard, but the camo function is sucking up suit power pretty quick. We’ve only got about thirty minutes left before running dry. What about you?”
“Still looking for good places to hide them,” she admitted. “We haven’t come across the cross-tunnels Bufo described, but I think we’re getting close to one.”
They turned one corner to find a section of tunnel dappled with rows of windows, each barely a meter across. The section was heavy with the scent of warm viscera, something even Jaeger could smell through the filter of her re-breather.
They followed Anolis cautiously between the rows and froze as he threw up a stalling hand.
A drone-form K'tax, barely a meter long, crawled out of a side-hole. It emerged wet and soft and wiggling, covered in a fine layer of slime. The material lining the hole was soft and squishy, like warm flesh. The drone sucked its way out of the side chamber and trembled faintly, shaking off drops of moisture that hung like a cloud in the gravity-less space. It turned, and with its stubby antennae waving through the air, crawled down the corridor.
“It’s like they’re being born.” Pandion sounded vaguely nauseous as another small drone extracted itself from an orifice farther down the hall. When this one shook itself, it shed a cloud of hard, gritty flakes that reminded Jaeger of dried leaves or the shell of an empty chrysalis.
It’s a nursery. Jaeger slipped a hand to her waist and felt the explosive orbs in her pouch. It’s full of babies, and I feel nothing.
“We’re in a good location to plant the bombs.” Aquila consulted the map on her computer. “This is a fairly central location, and these birthing chambers provide a good hiding place.”
“We should do it before one of the warrior forms shows up,” Anolis whispered. He had positioned himself at the far end of the row of nursery chambers and was watching the hallways.
They should plant the bomb, Jaeger agreed. Bufo’s and Toner’s team had managed to spread their explosives out adequately. Planting a cache here would damage the entire base beyond repair. She intended to send a humanitarian warning to the K'tax. They should have adequate time to evacuate their mindless children.
Were they mindless? She didn’t know. She’d watched a dozen of these bumbling, blind creatures crawl past her in the last hour and she felt no more sympathy for them than she did for a colony of termites chewing at the foundations of her house.
Or am I telling myself they’re mindless because it’s convenient? So I won’t feel so bad about slaughtering them?
Pandion watched her, waiting for her approval.
I can’t blow up a nursery, she thought, dizzy. Then: I don’t even know for sure it is a nursery. I don’t know what it is. Maybe they function like insect collectives, like a hive-mind. They might not care about individuals.
Aquila approached one of the newly abandoned birthing orifices and peered inside. She gasped.
Grateful for a distraction, Jaeger shoved past Pandion and crouched beside Aquila. The woman moved to the side, allowing Jaeger to peer into the shadowy chamber.
Jaeger’s sight was not as keen as that of the eagle-folk. It took a moment for the deep shadows to resolve into shapes she understood.
It was a closed chamber, about the size of a large dog house, with squishy walls coated in a thick layer of mucous.
Crammed into the center of the chamber was a shed exoskeleton. At first, Jaeger thought it might be one of K'taxes own shed skin, but she saw the long, slender legs protruding from the shell of a dainty thorax. The tattered scraps of photosynthetic pseudo-wings, shredded and strewn across the chamber.
Shoved into the corner of the chamber, discarded like trash, was the ghostly shell of a Locauri head, sucked clean of all its organs, staring up at her with lifeless eye holes.
Jaeger’s mind went blank.
“There’s one in every chamber,” Aquila reported from farther down the corridor. “Empty shell. Empty shell. Oh. Oh!” She pushed herself away from one of the orifices, lifting her stunner as another K’tax larva began to birth. Blind to her presence, the corpulent little thing broke free of the orifice with a faint sucking sound, its soft, new mandibles working rhythmically as the tip of a Locauri leg vanished down its gullet.
Jaeger’s team froze, fully exposed, as the larval creature shook itself. After an achingly long moment, it dropped its head. Following some trail only it could sense, it crawled away.
“It seems they’re nearly blind when they’re…young,” Pandion murmured.
Jaeger wanted to look into the newly-evacuated chamber, but Aquila had already glanced into it and was shaking her head grimly. Jaeger moved on to the next one—knowing what she would find but forcing herself to witness it anyway. She needed to see what had become of the Locauri stolen away in K’tax raids.
At first, she thought the Locauri in the next chamber might be alive. It was whole and pinned to the chamber wall by a thick layer of milky slime. It twitched, its abdomen jerking at first one way, then another.
But no. The Locauri exoskeleton was ghostly pale, lifeless. It wasn’t moving. Something was moving inside it.
Something eating it from inside out. She stared, horrified, as the Locauri’s thin abdomen shell split and a pair of glossy dark mandibles broke free of the body.
The rest of the K'tax larva followed shortly, birthing itself from the corpse.
Hand on her mouth to hold back the bile, Jaeger hopped to the side as the baby K’tax crawled out of its birthing chamber and began its steady, droning crawl into the heart of the colony.
“Captain,” Pandion radioed. “I’ve found a living one.”
“No,” Jaeger said quietly, turning away. “They’re Creeper eggs planted in corpses—”
Pandion and Aquila were beside one of the far orifices with their arms plunged into the wall as they wrestled with something. At first, thinking they were getting pulled into the morbid little cubbies, Jaeger snatched her stunner and lifted it.
The two eagle-folk braced against the wall and wrestled a gooey mass out of the chamber. The battered Locauri bobbed in the low gravity. Ropes of long, sticky mucous trailed behind it.
Beneath the layers of slime, the Locauri had all of its natural, deep olive coloring. The desperate twitching came from its arms, not its abdomen, as it would if it were being eaten from the inside out. Its pseudo-wings and antennae had been torn off, but it flailed weakly—alive.
Jaeger shoved her stunner in her belt and dove for the fragile creature, frantically clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. In her exploratory visits to Locaur, she had learned a few simple words of the insect language. Friend, she clicked, frantically slapping her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Peace. Quiet. Friend.
Pandion and Aquila backed away, uneasy, as Jaeger gathered the mutilated Locauri up in her arms. With its antennae gone, all the little creature could do was paw at her with the sharp ends of its legs and make a tired, despairing trill.
“Quiet,” Jaeger clicked again.
“There are more.” Aquila glanced into the next orifice. “Should we—”
“Pull out the ones that are still
alive,” Jaeger snapped. “Quickly. We need to get out of here.”
“I’m picking up increased life sign activity nearby.” Anolis consulted his scanner.
Toner’s voice cut abruptly across the radio channel. “Shit. One of the warrior morphs got a beat on us. I cooked it in its shell, but I think it got word out to its buddies. We’ve worn out our welcome, Captain.”
Around her, Pandion and Aquila pulled body after body out of the birthing chambers. Most of the Locauri drifted, still and lifeless and pale. A few others twitched and chattered weakly. She recognized the mottled yellow-olive pattern on one of them. Art drifted in the air, his multifaceted black eyes glittering in the dim light.
The young Locauri in Jaeger’s arms made a distressed keening noise, straining against her arms to reach for Art.
“Activity coming this way,” Anolis whispered.
“How many more are there?” Jaeger asked Pandion, who had reached the end of the row of birthing chambers.
“I think that’s it.” He pulled a final body free. It crumbled—a dead, empty husk in the force of his grip.
“Take the survivors and fall back,” Jaeger whispered. “Right now. I’ll be right behind you.” Gently, she heaved the Locauri from her arms, sending it on its way. Her team gathered up the surviving Locauri and shepherded them down the hallway. Art turned his head in her direction as he passed, but he was too weak to make a sound.
Any debate she’d had about bombing a nursery simmered and died in her chest, replaced with calm resolve.
She fumbled in her pouch and withdrew the first cue ball-sized explosive. She gripped it in both hands, unscrewing the two halves of the shell.
With three swift twists of the outer shell, she finished the arming sequence. She reached into the nearest birthing chamber and planted it in the empty husk of a dead Locauri.
“Everybody, fall back to the shuttles on the double,” she broadcast as she moved to the next chamber. Second bomb drawn, activated, planted. “We’ve rescued a few Locauri prisoners. I want them brought home safe.”
