Mech 2 Page 7

  Surprise, therefore, was critical. She must maintain that advantage for as long as possible. She reminded herself that she had only the tiniest of strongholds in the furthest reaches of the Kale system. Many more battles would have to be won.

  The biggest decision she had to make was the creation of a Parent. She would dearly love to seed one, but in the end she decided the time was not yet right. She had to have more available sources of food first. Parents were far more useful on planets, where the food supplies were much greater. They could produce more creatures, with a greater variety, but they were less efficient in producing them. The Savant was able, using modification techniques, to take a human form and construct a useful creature. The Parent had to consume vast quantities of flesh to produce larvae, which in turn had to grow and feed.

  After considering the situation, she realized she simply didn’t have the bio-mass yet to support a Parent. She would probably have to reach the planet before they would be viable if the other remote human bases resembled this one.

  Having made her decisions, she worked without rest. She had rested long enough in that lifepod. She had had centuries of rest.

  She planted seeds in churning wombs. She designed new genetic modules and attached them to critical nerve junctions. Her army grew by the day and by the hour.

  #

  Nicu had come to hate his locker. Not long ago he had been willing to do anything he could to spend as much time as possible hiding inside, but now he dreaded each cramped, trapped day. His suit’s waste unit had long since backed up and failed. His legs were burned by overflows of urine, but as yet he had not dared to try for the showers.

  Taking a deep breath, he finally made a crucial decision. He would have to get a new suit. This one was his favorite, his baby, with its hacked systems. But he couldn’t take the itching and the stench anymore. He was going to miss the suit, like a baby who loses his favorite, comforting blanket. The suit had gotten him through some very hard times. The aliens were terrifying and they were everywhere, and he thought they were even building ships now. After various claws and tentacles came by to scrape and jimmy the locker door, he’d jammed the locking mechanism. His fears had been palpable. By playing quiet games and allowing his suit to give him soothing touches, he’d managed to keep from screaming, from losing his mind completely.

  Now, however, he just couldn’t take it anymore. He had to get out of his locker, permanently. He had to get to a ship and get off this rock. He had to risk his life.

  Nicu waited a full hour after making this decision before taking action. His locker wasn’t in a heavily-trafficked area. He’d chosen it as his hiding place long ago for precisely that reason. For a full hour he listened intensely. He heard nothing.

  With fantastic care he popped open the lock. The hinges squeaked ever so slightly as he swung open the door, making him cringe. Painfully, he unfolded himself from the locker. He had to stretch and work out the cramps in his muscles and joints, standing exposed in the hallway. This was terrifying and took several minutes, but he had to do it. He wouldn’t be able to walk properly otherwise. He hated every moment of this exposure.

  The first order of business was to replace his failing suit. He crept into the base, taking every precaution. He urged himself to greater speed, feeling that he was risking everything with each second he spent slinking about. All logic dictated that he was going for luck anyway, so the best policy would be to race to his destination and trust his luck would hold for one more precious minute. These thoughts were overridden by his naturally cautious, slinking instincts. He simply couldn’t force himself to run through the base and trust to luck. He’d spent a lifetime hiding and slipping into spots others didn’t think were even possibilities. He couldn’t change his nature now.

  With quiet, padding steps he crept from corner to corner, peering into each new corridor with a tiny cracked mirror he kept in his pocket for just such situations. Careful to keep it tilted low, so it would not flash a reflection toward any waiting guardian, he examined each new space around each new corner.

  It was in the eighth corridor that he met his first obstacle. At first, Nicu didn’t even know what he was looking at. A less paranoid person would have disregarded the impossibility of what they were seeing and continued, but Nicu wasn’t like most people. His senses of self-preservation had been tuned to a very high pitch indeed.

  There was something, a spider-like being, working on the wiring in this corridor. The light was bluish here, and flickered occasionally, as if the lighting-strips needed replacing. The spider-thing had a panel open, and two brownish, mottled limbs worked inside the walls. Six other limbs, with feet like spikes, held its bulbous body aloft.

  Nicu tilted the cracked mirror in his hand downward, so it would not reflect a chance ray of light. Then he withdrew his hand with fantastic slowness. His heart pounded, but his breathing was controlled, as silent as he could make it. He hoped the monster didn’t have super-hearing of some kind, or worse, an enhanced sense of smell. Because he was giving off quite a stench by now. A very human one.

  Backing away three, padding steps—he’d left his noisy boots behind in the locker, of course—he turned when he thought he was clear and trotted lightly the way he had come.

  He paused at another junction. Here, he had already disconnected the lights and cast it into pitch-blackness. Hiding in these deep shadows, he felt relatively safe.

  His eyes drifted down to the sewer tubes at his feet. He’d considered them before, but not with relish. He blinked unhappily, but couldn’t think of a better path to his destination. He had to get a new suit, and he had to get out of here.

  Nicu opened the entry port into the sewer tubes. The port wasn’t really meant to be entered by a human being. Only thirty centimeters around, the hole led down into the bubbling tubes that pumped and recycled wastes throughout the base. He’d only used these tubes on very special occasions. In fact, he’d used them last to plant his pinhead cameras in the women’s shower cubicles. He smiled at that happy memory.

  Sliding down into the muck, he flipped his faceplate down. He wasn’t sure if the tubes were any worse than the inside of his suit, but at least he didn’t have to risk getting a mouthful.

  He shimmied, sloshing through the water like a snake. He could not bend his knees more than a fraction. He could not extend his arms. Instead, he wriggled his body, worming with his shoulders and his hips, giving tiny pushes with the tips of his toes.

  He engaged some of his special hacking software and caused his suit to grow barbs at his elbows, shoulders, kneecaps and toe-tips. This program he’d devised himself, and it gave him much more traction to scrape his way through the pipes than would otherwise be possible.

  The tight turns were the worst. Those he had to negotiate with a lot of grunting and wriggling. Sometimes he gave up, panting and gasping in exhaustion. But always he managed to get himself going again. He kept telling himself he’d done this before, and he could do it now.

  He reached the women’s showers and paused. There was a fairly large portal here that led up into the center of it, a main drain for all four of the cubicles. He thought about that. A shower. The concept was like magic to him. He’d erase half his vids of Kizzy-showers in trade if he could have a shower himself right now.

  He chewed his lips in indecision, eyeing the drain port. With any luck, the room would have a vacc suit he could fit to his form. With nano-cloth, the overall size was the issue, not the configuration. He could wear a woman’s suit. Most of the men’s suits were too big for his lithe body anyway.

  He balled up underneath the drain and listened for several minutes. He turned up the external pickup on his helmet to maximum, and waited.

  Nothing. No sounds reached him other than the plinking of a dripping faucet.

  Finally, his paranoia was as satisfied as it was ever going to be and he pushed open the drain grate. It clanked when it slid away, and he cursed with clenched teeth. Then he froze, listening for monst
ers.

  Nothing came. It took him thirty precious seconds to wriggle out of the drain in the midst of the shower cubicles. He popped open his helmet and looked around, panting. He snorted to himself. The place looked very familiar.

  He eyed the showers, and finally gave in. He turned on the spray in one shower cubicle, and then went a stood behind the door in the darkest corner he could wedge himself into. His monofilament knife hummed in his fist. He waited for something to come. Wouldn’t the monsters investigate why the water had turned itself on in the shower room?

  Nothing came. After a minute or two he couldn’t stand it anymore. He set up a small warning system, however. He put his helmet at the very spot a foot might go when it first stepped into the room. He placed the helmet upside down on its rounded crown and balanced it carefully, so it would roll away if touched, like a bowling ball.

  Then he stripped off his suit as fast as he could and jumped into the warm spray. Nothing had felt so good for weeks. Filth, scabs and nervous sweat were all washed away. He ran soap everywhere, even though it burned in places. When finished, he didn’t turn off the spray. If the sound of it hadn’t brought any attention, why change things and give the aliens another chance to notice? Running water in the pipes was the most noticeable when it started or stopped.

  Finished with glorious shower, he headed over to the row of fresh, hanging suits. There were only three to choose from. He took the largest of the women’s suits and checked the circuitry. The battery was a little low, so he exchanged the power pack with the best charged one of the three. He had no idea how long it might be before he would be given an opportunity to recharge. He switched over his data-beans next, making the suit his. Nicu was about to put the suit on when he heard something. A rolling, rattling sound.

  His helmet, which he had placed so precisely, had moved.

  His eyes snapped up. Reflexively, he snatched his screwdriver-shaped knife from the shelf he’d placed it upon. Naked, he wedged himself into a dark corner behind one of the dry, silent shower cubicles.

  Something slapped its way into the showering module. A long creature, like a sea worm. Although much more terrifying, it reminded Nicu of a two-meter long slug, but with sucker-feet along its belly that resembled the bottom of a squid’s tentacle.

  The creature, known to others as a shrade, lifted its head section up and regarded the operating shower with curiosity.

  It had clearly come to investigate the sound of flowing water, but Nicu didn’t care what had attracted it. He could see no way out of this situation. Should the monster turn and take a good look around, there was no way it could miss Nicu.

  His first thought was of escape. But the drain was practically under the creature’s tubular body. In fact, as Nicu looked at the drain, his heart almost stopped. He had left it open, uncovered, with the grate lying beside it. Anything with any kind of intelligence could see that something had opened it. And, as if to confirm his fears, the shrade moved to investigate the drain next. The monster looked excited. The suckers near its head-section worked the air, making little popping sounds, as it humped over to the open drain. Nicu got the impression that it liked open sewers.

  There was no way he was going to sprint out of here naked, Nicu thought to himself. Maybe the corridor was full of these things. Maybe not. But in any case, even if he could outrun this worm-thing, it was certain to sound the alarm and the entire base of aliens would know they had a human running around freely in the base. Still, he might have chanced it if he had been in a vacc suit. But naked... No way.

  So, hesitating only long enough to take in a deep breath, Nicu lifted his knife and padded forward in a crouch. His plan was simple, he would creep up behind it and slash off its head in a stroke, flicking on his knife only at the last instant.

  He had not counted on the shrade’s excellent senses. When he came within a foot of it, the head turned and reared up. With wild speed the tail section of the monster whipped around his feet and swept them out from under him.

  It was strong! He couldn’t believe the pulsing, steel-like strength of this fleshy nightmare. He managed to flick on the knife, but dropped it as he fell.

  Suckers burned into his legs and chest. The thing wrapped around him. A rib popped free of his sternum and he howled.

  But he had the knife again now and he slashed with it in wild strokes. Gouts of thick, yellow-green slime poured out. He didn’t know if it was the monster’s blood or its bile. Finally, the head was off, but incredibly, the shrade kept squeezing him.

  Nicu blacked out for a moment, unable to breath. He came back to life moments later, gasping and vomiting. Finally, the creature had relaxed in death. He had to shave off some of the suckers one by one to be free of its grip. Spots of his own skin came off where his knife got too close.

  Staggering to the vacc suits, he struggled into the one he had chosen, secured his knife and clicked the new helmet into place. He looked at the shrade, dead and twisted in a disgusting pile on the floor. He wondered, right then, if the rest of the Vlax bases knew what had happened here. Were the Vlax ships coming? Had they even been warned?

  He felt a pang of worry. Concern for anyone other than himself wasn’t a normal thought for Nicu, but he felt it now. How could they fight an army of such things? Did these aliens have ships? Perhaps a battlefleet? Even those arrogant bastards on Neu Schweitz should be warned about this invasion. Humans must unite against these horrors.

  Shuddering, gasping, his mind turned to a more normal path as he thought about his own escape. He had to get out of here. He had to get to a ship.

  Nine

  The Savant only got a single datablip from the shrade who investigated the running showers. The Savant was hard at work at that moment, planting bio-seeds into the Kizzy-creature, who sprawled upon the cafeteria with almost every bloated birthing-sac full to bursting.

  The Savant continued her delicate work, probing for a spot to plant more bio-seeds in the Kizzy-creature. She wasn’t overly concerned by the shrade’s discovery. Her shrades had long since swept the base and declared it clear of enemy resistance. An intrusion from outside was unlikely as well as they now had the base’s primitive detection gear analyzed and operating. Any approaching ship would be noticed, and there had been none.

  The shrades were always discovering something they thought was very interesting. It was in their nature. The big empty base had been full of reported hazards, most of which turned out to be one automated system or another. In this case, the Savant suspected the cleansing equipment had gone on by itself for an automated self-cleaning process. Perhaps it did that if not activated for a long period.

  But then the shrade switched on its vid feed and the Savant stiffened in alarm. The Kizzy-creature likewise lurched in discomfort. The Savant had its tentacles deep within sensitive regions as it tried to plant the bio-seeds manually.

  The vid feed showed a crazed, skinny human with some kind of weaponry in its hand. A fight ensued. The human, incredibly, managed to defeat the shrade.

  The Savant, fearful of its own safety, withdrew its tentacles with great speed. The Kizzy-creature shuddered and gargled in protest. The Savant ignored the complaints and transmitted an emergency datablip to the Boldo-creature.

  Seek. Kill. Protect!

  The Boldo-creature reacted as if stung. It sprang erect and shambled rapidly out of the cafeteria.

  #

  Nicu ran lightly through the base. He paused, hugging each corner. Trying not to pant, he slipped his mirror around one corner, then two, then three. It was the fourth peek around a corner that nearly killed him.

  At first, he saw nothing. He withdrew the mirror just in time to hear something. Some kind of thumping sound. The sound was very familiar. He knew it and had run from it a dozen times. It was the heavy tread of space boots. The sound was unmistakable to someone like Nicu, who lived listening for approaching footsteps.

  These footsteps were heavy. Not even Boldo made such a racket. Whoever it was, they
weighed a lot.

  Nicu’s hopes rose wildly. The Vlax from the central stronghold had come! Someone had gotten off a distress signal, and they’d sent out a ship. Nicu felt plans bubbling up inside his mind. Excuses. How had he survived? How had everyone else died? What part had he played in this mystery? Suddenly, he was glad he’d fought to the death with that worm-thing. Nicu had just become a hero. When this was all over, he’d be decorated and promoted. His clan would be proud and very, very surprised.

  He lifted one foot. All he had to do was step forward and greet the approaching, heavy-footed trooper. But as a man who lived by wits and intense depths of caution, he hesitated. What if things were not as he imagined—not as he hoped? What if this invader shot first? Should he shout out a greeting?

  Then, once set upon a path of doubts, more sprang up unbidden. What if this approaching person wasn’t a Vlax rescuer? What if those bastards from Neu Schweitz had released these horrors upon them, testing some new secret weaponry? What if this trooper wasn’t Vlax at all, and instead blasted him down on sight?

  He hadn’t heard any sounds, he realized now, of a ship landing. One could not usually hear the jets, of course. But there was a lot of docking equipment. Klaxons should have sounded, heralding the arrival. Yellow, spinning lights always signaled when such an event occurred.

  That foot, which had been raised and ready to move forward, now placed itself behind Nicu. He took a step back, then four more, in rapid succession. It could be this was a rescue. But if not, caution was warranted. Nicu retreated at a run to his darkened passages. There, in the dark, he waited, peeping out.

  What he saw come around the corner surprised him greatly. It was none other than Boldo himself. Just in case he wasn’t sure, the man’s name was still stenciled on the front of his grossly-inflated, half-shredded vacc suit.