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Episode 26 - An Educational Melee
🕑 Added 2024-07-26 15:35:51 +0000 UTC
Creepy looking fellas, huh?
============================
Ha ha! Emilia, you absolute saint! I can’t believe you managed to coax a picture out of it in that condition. How much am I paying you, anyway? Whatever it is, double it!
…
Nothing?
Oh, that’s right, you’re an intern. Well, that works out splendidly then.
Why is the picture tilted like that, though?
…
Yes… I suppose being partially crushed and stuck to the bottom of a cryogenic chamber would present a problem. Just do what you can with it. And in the meantime, keep it focused on Subject One.
Maybe if we add in a bit of suspenseful music, that’ll help sell the Dutch angle…
…?
I don’t much care, Timothy. It’s one lightly modified human versus a couple of armed Broddgoltur mercenaries. Even drunk, I expect they’ll make short work of him. Just keep the camera steady, and…
Goodness! How did he get all the way up there?
*
Naomi watched with a distracted sort of fascination as Mike scaled the sheer wall on the far side of the room. Apparently, his blunted claws, combined with sheer brute strength, were enough to find purchase in the rubbery material. That alone would have been impressive, but then the guy somehow pivoted upside down and perched there like a goddamned spider!
Her fingers hurt just looking at him.
Not for the first time, she found herself wishing her claws had a bit more utility. Sure, they were great when she could put them to use for what they had actually been designed for, but stuck in here, they were next to totally useless. They were not quite sharp enough to puncture the walls, yet what little sharpness they did have made them too thin and brittle to allow her to achieve anything like what Mike was doing. They simply would not support her body weight.
Now if they could just find a species with metallic bones…
Regardless, it was not until she blinked her thermals that she realized his aim. Just below him, there was a widening spot of yellow-white where the ‘guests’ he had mentioned must have been cutting their way in.
“Wait here, my ass,” she growled, a snarl curling her lip. She was the Destroyer, not him. That should have been her job! “We’re a team, you stupid lummox!”
But before she could take a step after him, the Nexus started texting:
Focus on assigned task
Mission Critical: Establish communications with local environs
“The hell it’s critical,” she hissed with a swipe of her claws toward the expanding spot. “We’ve got incoming! I’m not going to just stand here while Mike takes on that sniper all by himself. What if he gets hurt?”
Predictive algorithms indicate high probability of…
environmental reaction on weapon’s fire: detected
Must establish Friend v Foe status before rendering aid to Seeker Unit
Her lips peeled back over her teeth in frustration. “Environmental reaction? Like what?”
The computer did not say… if it even knew, but her imagination was quick to provide a host of disturbing possibilities. It could be anything from teleporting them all into the brig with no hope of being let out again to simply flooding the room with Zyklon B.
Though, how the series of waves she was sending out were supposed to establish any statuses, friend or not, was anyone’s guess. All she had to work with were the two-dimensional images the Nexus had presented with.
Figure 1: Build a ball of a certain diameter
Figure 2: Snap fingers
Figure 3: Quickly position hands in a line, fingers angled outward
Result: An O-shaped distortion wave of a density and thickness defined by the ball in Figure 1 expanding along the conical path defined in Figure 3.
This would then be repeated with a new set, but with minor variations to the size of the ball and angle. It was kind of like blowing a bunch of smoke rings, she decided.
“What the hell am I even saying?” she asked before quickly spinning up a pin-sized sphere, then sending it out in a wide arc. She frowned at the paper-thin result critically. “Am I doing this right? You realize I’m only approximating these.”
The Nexus did not respond to her first question, but for the second, it apparently had some insight to offer.
Required specificity of wave-forms: unknown
Observation: foreign interface node remains attentive
That was true enough. The alien machine almost looked like some kind of twitching, electrified eyeball as it eagerly absorbed wave after wave.
“Lovely,” she muttered, her voice heavy with sarcasm, then moved on to the next set of images while doing her level best to ignore the expanding circle of heat in her peripheral. “If it’s so attentive, why isn’t it reacting to that? Is it blind? Surely cutting through the wall must count for something.”
Unknown: parameters undefined, interface node link required
Please limit further inquiries
She gritted her teeth. In other words, shut up and do your job. “Limit inquires… I’ll limit your inquires, you stupid… fuggin’…”
*
Mark was in the midst of an out-of-body experience.
That was the only way he could describe it. Whatever combination of methamphetamine, PCP, and solid rock cocaine that stupid… fuggin’ computer had just pumped into his bloodstream had him so amped up, he had absolutely no idea where he was, what he was doing or why.
His conscious mind was currently convinced he was a dragon—an actual, real-life, fire-breathing dragon—perched on a cave-side wall above the entrance to his hoard. He had blocked the way in with a rockfall, but adventurers were nothing if not a persistent sort. Naturally, they had taken one look at the literal tons of rock in front of them and concluded that must be the way to a mountain of treasure.
They were right, of course. The entire room gleamed and sparkled with it, floor to ceiling, but he was not about to let them waltz in and steal it without a fight. And he wasn’t going to just lie on his pile of gold and wait for the pesky buggers, either.
Oh, no.
He was going to do this… Dark Souls style.
Meanwhile, his subconscious mind was vacillating between a playful lark through a field of poppies and a recurring night-terror where all he could do was lie there, helpless, while his sleep-paralysis demon slowly ate him alive.
Whatever was left of his mental faculties was just watching all this from above in something akin to shock.
“I am so going to die.”
*
What is she doing, though?
Obviously, it’s been a minute since I last read up on them, but I cannot recall any mention of the Podar’unek using sign language. Nor would I imagine it so simplistic and repetitive; her other pair of arms would be necessary, at the very least.
There has to be more to this.
Emilia, start cycling through camera filters until you—
…
Oh. Well, whichever ones you can get to work, then.
< sigh >
Do you think we should we break our communications embargo? I realize it would taint the experiment irreparably, but… I mean, honestly. At this point? And it really would be beneficial if we could get the subjects on board with this.
…
Yes, that does complicate things somewhat.
Hmm… their ship is bound to be damaged after that blast… perhaps even to the extent that they’ll be unable to escape the planet. If we agree to render aid, that might just give us the leverage we need to negotiate a brief rental.
*
“Okay, now what?” Naomi asked on completing the final series of pulses. She still had no idea how this might accomplish anything and was beginning to suspect the whole thing was a colossal waste of time—mostly because the ever-brightening spot was on the verge of a volcanic eruption!
And here she was, out in the open like a sitting duck.
However, the Nexus did not have a chance to respond.
Burp!
In a blink, the strange eyeball zipped down below her feet and hit her with something that might have been some new and thus-far-unseen type of distortion wave, but from her point of view, it may as well have been a black hole shot directly into the center of her brain.
And there it stayed…
…where it began to unfold…
*
And now she’s just standing there, twitching!
Timothy, we simply must pull Camera A away. Even a moron could tell something is happening to the girl, and we need a functional filter system if we’re to have any hope of actually catching any of it on film!
Look at this! People will think we paid her to do that and forgot to include the special effects.
…!
Yes, I can see the blasted hole. I still don’t care.
…?!
Would you—
< audible groan >
Why are you wasting my time with this? Do I look like a military tactician? Obviously, they must have some reason for cutting it that way. Maybe they want to send out an automated probe first or… or…
…?
Oh… oh, dear. Yes, you’re right. I’d totally forgotten.
I may have neglected to mention that.
*
In a blast of molten debris, the duo of alien mercenaries rolled into the room, firing randomly through the smoke and ash.
Each of them was covered, head to toe, in a dense layer of thin spines that rattled and clacked with their every movement, all save for their front, which evolution had seen fit to leave bare. This they had protected with a form-fitting chest and face plate that showed the scratches and scars of long and continuous use. A pair of bandoliers crossed loosely over top of their armor, each packed with assorted grenades, ammo clips, and other such paraphernalia, while their legs sported a multitude of sheathed knives of varying length and manufacture, ready to be used for throwing, simple utility, or flaying flesh from bone. Their Gellite cannons were currently affixed to their backs via a quick-release latch system, but for the moment, they were each wielding a smaller, general-use laser rifle.
Or, put more simply, they looked a bit like Rambo trapped in the body of an alien hedgehog.
Which is to say, they were about eight inches tall.
One of them stumbled woozily—then froze, wide-eyed—prompting the other to glance over at him with an air of drunken superiority.
[translated from Broddgoltur, Skepna dialect]
“Get it together, idiot. We’ve got work to do,” he hissed, taking the opportunity when nothing immediately leapt out at them to fan aside a bit of smoke. The move prompted him to squeeze his eyes shut with regret. “Fuck me… I’m gonna have such a hangover after this. And from brandy, too. What a disgrace.” He followed this up by muttering something mostly unintelligible—though the words, ‘boss’, ‘kill us’, and ‘her ship’ could just be made out—then sighed. “Tell me you have a visual. If those things have started laying clutches already, we’re gonna have hell on a plate cleaning this shit out.”
The first merc nodded. Once. Slowly and without blinking.
The other swung his rifle around, aiming in the direction the first was staring, but through the settling dust, nothing was immediately obvious. “Where?” he whispered. But when the first did not reply, he swore, “Where, damn it?! Whatever’s in the walls is fucking with my targeting computer. I can’t see shit.”
His mute companion merely nodded again, slightly more forcefully.
He squinted. “What? Behind that lumpy pillar over there?”
The first shook his head, then finally spoke in a scarce whisper, “That ain’t no pillar, Blain.”
“Statue, then. Who gives a fuck?”
“That ain’t no statue, neither. It’s breathing.”
“Bullshit, it is.” Blain lowered his rifle slightly to take a step forward. “You’re such a fuckin’ pussy, Billy. It’s way too big to be… t-to be a…”
He stammered into silence, staring.
“Uh huh,” Billy agreed stoically.
Blain shifted his shoulders. Clearly, their briefing had left out a few details.
“Don’t change nothing. ‘sides… look at that thing—sleeping standing up? I could peg it from here, easy.”
“Not with that pea-shooter, you ain’t,” Billy shot back. “You’re just going to piss it off.”
“So we go back for Veronica first,” he retorted, already starting to back-step away. “Cunt’s a bitch on wheels to haul around, but she’ll put so many holes in that great big fucker even your pecker’ll get worn out fuckin’ ‘em all.”
Blain had a way with words—usually measured in F-bombs per second.
“Now, come on. Before it wakes up.”
But Billy caught him by the bandolier. “Wait,” he muttered, pausing for a moment to allow his eyes to scan the area. But nothing else jumped out at him. “Something’s ain’t right. It’s got my hackles up.”
“Something’s always got your hackles up,” the other said—and for good measure, he sneered out another, “pussy.”
“I’m telling you, something’s wrong,” Billy hissed through his gritted teeth, his eyes darting about as he searched his mind for what had been troubling him. It came to him in a flash. “Weren’t there supposed to be two of them?”
Blain’s face fell.
In that instant, and seemingly from out of nowhere, thousands of ounces of furious demon-flesh slammed down upon his head, taking him to the floor with the force of a battering ram.
All Billy could do was stumble aside, just trying to create enough distance between himself and the seeming mountain that had just descended upon his partner to understand what had attacked them. A moment later, the four-armed monstrosity howled with pain from puncturing its own hand on the hapless Broddgoltur’s quills, and hurled his limp body across the room.
Billy looked on in shocked horror as his long-time companion arced through the air, a mere child’s toy when compared to the enraged giant before him, only to land dozens of feet away in a heap. Tears in his eyes and screaming with fear, he opened fire. The great beast merely flinched as the comparatively tiny laser bolts rained upon its exposed flesh, and with an effortless afterthought, it delivered a backhand to Billy’s chest.
He saw it coming. He could hear the crescendo of wind swooping in its haste to make way for that enormous mitt… if only he could do the same. Before he could so much as blink, it connected.
His armor absorbed most of it, but even so, it was like getting punched by a meteor. Ribs cracked, lungs popped like balloons, brains concussed into jelly, and then he was skipping face-first across the open floor. By the time he rolled to a stop, he would have been hard-pressed even to remember his own name, but long years of training had instilled enough discipline to keep his wits about him.
That monster would not stop until he was dead.
Struggling even to breathe, he hastily mashed a button on one of his bracers, signaling them to inject a host of medical nanites into his bloodstream. They would not last long, but they should be able to repair most of his critical life-functions before expiring—enough to get him back on his feet, anyway. Now he just needed to figure out where his gun went before—
“KILL KRITES!”
Instinct flared its warning, and he rolled out of the way just in time to avoid another brutal overhand smash as the beast thundered its way past, carried along by its own rampaging momentum. Had he been even a millisecond slower, his already-battered body would have been smeared into dryer lint, but he did not have the time to wonder over such miracles.
Or wonder over whatever language the monster was screaming in. His heads-up display wasn’t registering it, that much was certain. Likely, the idiots in charge of this operation had picked up some semi-sentient malcontent from an unaffiliated planet in the middle of nowhere to do their experiments on, but he didn’t much care. It was his job to somehow capture this thing.
Teeth clenched with the stinging nettles that came with billions of microscopic machines stitching his body back together, he thumbed a pin from a grenade and hurled it toward the creature’s head, hoping to distract it long enough to get his feet back under him. The very idea was laughable, of course. He might as well have been a squirrel throwing an unexploded kernel of popcorn at a rhinoceros, but grenades were grenades. Delivered to the face, an explosion like that was bound to do some damage.
But luck was not on his side.
As the enormous beast whirled to face him, one of its many fists connected with the missile, carelessly swatting it aside. The handheld incendiary exploded not half a second later.
Both he and the monster had to spare a moment for surprise at the unintentional fireworks display.
It would have to be enough.
Surging to his knees, Billy punched the latch at his hip, which allowed his cannon to swing into its armed position. He only had half a dozen Gellite canisters to work with, and big as this bastard was, he would need every single one of them. With a precision that came with long practice, he jerked the first round loose from its spot at his chest, tore the protective film from its injection casing with his teeth, and slammed it into place. A quick pull on the cannon’s draw-latch was all that was needed to then load the chemical into the weapon’s firing chamber.
“Suck on this, bitch.”
*
Mark was staring at the still-glowing remnant of the grenade that had embedded into his forearm. It hadn’t done a phenomenal amount of damage, exploding a couple of feet away from him as it had, but it had definitely stung like a bastard. Those guns they were packing weren’t anything to scoff at either. Sure, the laser bolts they delivered were nowhere near as bad as the sniper round he had been hit with earlier, but they still packed a punch—enough to pock his flesh with second and third-degree burns, anyway. And now he had to pick out a bunch of microscopic shrapnel?
That summed up his initial encounter with these weird alien commandos to a tee: small, annoying, and wildly painful. They were even covered in spikes!
And while that pain wasn’t doing a great deal to help with the rage that had descended on him, it was helping to clear at least some of the mental fog that had come with it. This was real. He was in an actual fight.
Kind of.
And then… the little bastard shot his ankle with some sort of goo. Whatever the transparent ball of snot was, it expanded in a matter of seconds into a foam that completely covered his foot—a foam, he was quick to discover, that was sticky as tar.
His eyes rose back toward the interloper, smoldering with renewed malice. So, this cheap, creature-feature wannabe thought it could tie him down, did it? Him? A mighty dragon?!
He would roast this fucker alive!
The remnants of his rational mind groaned in despair.
*
Billy groaned in despair as the malignant beast inhaled with terrible purpose—a purpose that could only presage his own swift and agonizing demise. He was caught out in the open. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
And the twice-blasted briefing had said even less about breath weapons than it had the size of these damned things! He hoped he gave the poor sap that had to chisel his remains off the floor ass cancer. And they gave it to his boss… through the strap-on. That’d teach her.
However, when the inevitable exhale of doom came, he was met with neither fiery explosions nor streams of acid. The beast merely let out an impressive, if not instantly perspicuous, roar.
Still, the dots came together quickly enough.
Billy sucked in a breath before the invisible poison cloud could reach him, then rolled back and away just in case the gas had some kind of secondary corrosive effect. It was not until he had achieved several meters of separation that he thumbed on a switch behind his facemask and allowed himself a few cautious, yet shallow, gasps.
He was okay. Still more than a little injured, but okay.
His armor came preloaded with a basic air filter, which should protect him from the worst of it, but that did not mean he could just rush back in. Gas attacks were no joke. Besides the obvious concerns, they could have any number of horrific side-effects depending on where you were exposed, many of which he had experienced firsthand. Blindness, uncontrollable laughter, incontinence… He’d even had to tie a guy down once to keep him from offing himself after getting hit by some particularly nasty itch powder.
“Shit…” he muttered with a resigned sigh.
This complicated things. Tremendously. With such limited airflow, he would not need to worry about the gas spreading around too much in this vast chamber, so he should be fine as long as he kept his distance. Not that he would want to get close to that monstrosity again, it was just that his Gellite cannon could only deliver its payload reliably within a certain range. Beyond that, he might as well be pissing in the wind. And with limited ammo, precision was key.
He was just glad he’d gotten in a solid shot first. Gellite foam was really intended as a full-body capture system. Cover your target with the stuff, and you’re good: one animal packaged up and ready to be delivered. They could even be released at the press of a button, keeping zookeepers and other ‘clients’ safe from retaliation until an enclosure had been prepared.
But limited to a single foot?
He looked on nervously as the enraged monster tugged and yanked at its chemical shackle. From how badly the stuff was stretching, it was obvious it would not hold long. Even so, any time his quarry made the mistake of touching anything with that limb, it would re-adhere, effectively stopping the beast in its tracks until it could pull itself free again.
He could use that to his advantage… though it would be tricky. Especially with the added worry of the gas attack.
For now, though, he needed to check on Blain. He fully expected to find his associate and sometimes friend dead after a blow like that, but if the foulmouthed merc had any life left in him at all, he owed it to him to at least trigger his medical nanites. That wouldn’t get him back in the fight, but it might just save him for the next one.
Either way, the guy was in no position to begrudge Billy the use of his spare ammo. Or his gun.
*
There. You see? I told you military precision and hard training would win the day. You can always tell the mark of a true professional from the way they hold their liquor under fire. If Number 2 hadn’t managed to quite literally get the drop on them, he would never have done even so well as he did. But it’s over now. With his friend stabilized, all our champion need do is keep his distance and tire the brute out.
…so can we please swing the camera around to Subject #1? The potential for scientific discovery here is staggering, and you’re squandering it on a completely mundane com—
< the sounds of screaming and gunfire followed by several explosions momentarily overwhelm the audio >
‘Struth, the balls on that lad. What a maneuver!
Oof! He glued one of the brute’s hands to the floor that time. Number 2’ll have a hard time pulling that one loo—oh shite!
He kicked him! Number 2 kicked him clear across the bloody room! Took a few spines for it, too. What a corker!
…
Can it, you.
Look out! Grenade… grenade!
*
Whatever mechanism the eldritch eyeball was using to beam information into her skull was not agreeing with Naomi in the slightest. It was still working, but it was not at all pleasant to stand paralyzed while you slowly drowned in your own spittle.
But she could handle that. What was really eating at her was the certain knowledge that her soulmate was currently engaged in a life and death struggle against armed vigilantes while she was being held helpless.
She couldn’t even watch! Her head would not turn to look, no matter how much she begged it to, and the fight was going on well outside the range of her pervation sphere. But her ears still worked fine. She could hear his screams, his howls of agony. She could imagine his flesh, perforated with holes, slowly bleeding out onto the unfeeling rubber. It was enough to practically drive her mad with worry and boil her blood with the need for revenge.
The absolute worst of it was in how irrelevant most of the information she was receiving was. Oh sure, it was all being delivered in about the most rapid-fire manner imaginable, unfolding into her brain through a higher dimension as it was. But she desperately wished it would just give her a quick summary and let her loose!
She didn’t need to know anything about these aliens, their various languages, or their stupid, exploded planet. What did she care about their prevailing cultural zeitgeist? What value were their poets, the rare genius of their arts, or their inexplicable taste for disco music?
All she cared about was in how she could use their technology to defend against the lunatics assaulting them—something she was learning… at least in theory. The ship they were in utilized a branch of science for its power source that humanity had never encroached upon, so while it was being explained to her, she was not fully capable of contextualizing any of it yet.
The main takeaway was that the ship’s energy resources were currently idling on standby, which was why it had yet to retaliate against the armed invaders. Or reacted much to them until just recently.
Crashing here, it had explained, had knocked out almost all of its automated functions, so it had defaulted to self-preservation and repair until it could bring itself back online. But by that point, it could detect no life-signs from any of its charges, effectively turning their cryogenic chambers into coffins and the marvel of a ship that had brought them here into little more than an overpriced tomb. Saddened and with nothing else to do, it had simply settled in to wait.
But now that she and Mike were here, the ship had reawakened. Apparently, their just-passable ability to communicate had convinced it that some few of its passengers must have escaped while its higher processes were offline, but after many… many generations, the hardships of living on such a primitive world had erased the last vestiges of civilization from their minds. Fortunately for them, this was a limitation the ship came well-equipped to help them overcome.
And one which had Naomi livid with impatience.
However, just as she was about to despair of ever being released, an errant bit of metal, roughly the size of an acorn, sailed into her sphere of awareness. It bounced along the floor toward her a few times before ultimately settling against her foot… where it exploded.
The pain of having her ankle shredded was enough to finally break her free from her trance, and she staggered away from the ongoing session of forced tutelage. That ‘session’ was still visible, too. Or pervable, anyway—and that was an odd thing to suddenly notice. It was like discovering a map of her own brain writhing around midair.
But she had no time for that. Or for the state of her foot.
With a growl, she whirled to take in the ongoing battle. It only took a moment for her eyes to harden and for her lips to peel back in anger. This was worse than anything should could have imagined.
Her precious Mike was absolutely riddled with burns, bits of skin were hanging like rags from around his subdermal armor, and what little of his flesh had been left unravaged had been embedded with needles. Maddened and rampaging from the pain, he was still doing his best to impose his body between herself and their ‘guests’, guarding her from errant laser blasts and all but the one grenade. But he was failing fast. There were at least a dozen blobs of white foam sticking to him—all of which seemed dead set on gluing him to literally anything it came into contact with.
That could mean only one thing: the aliens were trying to capture them! Again.
But she had their number now. She and Mike were being experimented on to become these aliens’ disposable bioweapons—no doubt for the purpose of eventually conquering Earth. However, the derelict had put a wrench in their plans. They must have only detected it after releasing the two of them, which explained why they had dispatched a sniper to chase them away. After all, they were in an underwater grotto; there was no way their tractor beam would have worked. But when their plan backfired, their only choice was to come down personally and drag them back out again.
And the only reason for them to do that would have been if this ship could somehow be used against them.
Whether that ultimately panned out to be true was a question for another day; her tutorial had been cut short before she had gotten to the matter of ship-to-ship combat. But this old junker ought to be more than enough to handle the paltry weapons she was seeing now.
All four of her hands came up in a flash, and she twirled together a few commands with an ease that was as surprising as it was completely natural, as if she had grown up speaking this language. “Abort education program. Hostiles aboard.”
The eye-interface’s reply was instantaneous. “Confirm hostiles?” The question came combined with the mental image of one of the armored porcupine-looking things, bristling with as many weapons as it had quills.
“Confirmed,” she pulsed back.
“Course of action?”
A malevolent grin tugged at her lip.
“Eliminate.”
=================
Alrighty then!
I tell you, the ending of this book has really been putting me through the wringer. It's been hell trying to find the right words, but I'm getting there, slow and steady.
Stay tuned for the next episode. If everything goes as planned, it'll be the last one, and then on to the next project.
Comments
Jack5d5
Really ramping up the action and excitement for the Last couple chapters I see. Excellent as usual.
