Pressia | A LOK Forums Original Novel | by AMJ

[axmanjack]

Starting writing on the last section right now.
My next comment will be action 10.
au revoir

[axmanjack]

ACTION 10: [schicksallied]
Part I

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Pressia: Action 10

[begin transmission]
[begin audio playback]

His death comes and goes quickly, like a feather falling from a bird in flight. I turn him off and sit with him through the convulsions that wrack his body as it rails against the inevitable. A few tiny beads of sweat pop up on his brow and then that’s it. He goes slack and a few seconds after the tension leaves his hand it begins to grow steadily cooler. There are no sheets on the bed to cover his face with, I made due with a discarded set of scrubs.
I sat back against the wall for a moment, trying to make myself feel, honestly feel, something. Anything. I’d spent a lifetime priding myself on my reserve, my ability to remain detached and analytical. Cool in the face of danger. After a life of maintaining that façade, the mask I thought I had been wearing had become me. I needed to expel the steam building up in my skull, clouding my eyes and making my teeth grind like millstones. I disconnected him from the machines around him, pulling all the tubes and wires free with methodical detachment.
I pushed his stretcher across the hall to the rectangular incinerator attached to the wall. I fumbled for a moment with the controls in the dim light before I managed to open the chute and lock the stretcher onto the guide rails. I depressed the glowing red button that activated the burn process. The guides clattered a bit at first, then slid the stretcher into the mouth of the incinerator with an oil-smooth wisp. I fumbled a quick, pointless salute as he disappeared from view. The chute closed and the machine hummed to life for little more than a second.
Then he was gone. Completely. I turned away from the incinerator in a sort of listless haze. I popped my back. I looked around the dark emptiness of the medical bay for nothing in particular. I clicked my tongue in rhythm to an old song I suddenly half-remembered for no reason at all. I shifted my attention to the waning sounds of gunfire outside and then back to the song again. I was down a man and there was no one to kill in retribution.
You could always just kill yourself. The thought popped into my head so suddenly I glanced around the empty building to see if anyone noticed me thinking taboo thoughts. I tried to shake it out of my head, but it irritatingly persisted, like a scratch on the roof of my tongue.
You’re so good at killing things. Look how quickly you killed that guy you barely know but felt all flustered for, only took you a few seconds. Just grab one of the syringes over there and give yourself a quick embolism. It’ll be quicker than what’s going to happen if you leave here.
Oh, shut the fuck up.
Aww, are we finally having some of those big, bad feelings we were so envious of all the other girls having? Fitting. You’re no better than any of them anyway. You only made it this far by luck. Well, luck and fucking your way out of a bad situation.
“God. Fucking. Dammit!” I screamed, punching the window that separated the nurse’s station from the hallway. The partition fissured from top to bottom and splintered around my fist in a little circle full of radiating cracks. Something shuffled on the roof as I grabbed my now-bloody hand and sucked in air through my teeth. A few wet drops splattered on the ground as I moved to the nurse’s station for some sort of dressing.
The top of the plastic pull out trays all had basic first-aid components and I set to work fixing my hand. The rhythm of the work calmed my nerves. Alcohol, tweezers for the two little pieces of glass, alcohol, styptic foam, sterile bandage and tape. My hand was shaking when I started, and by the time I finished it was steady as marble again. The mean spirited voice in my head was gone as well.
I’d like to think that it was some Pressian nonsense that had made me think those things, that some ill-effect of removing my collar had left some indelible mark on my conscious that was only just now manifesting, but I know it had just been me talking to myself. I sat back in the hard plastic chair I had sat in to dress my wound and ran my clean hand over my hair. Whatever had been moving around on the roof had stopped for the moment. The medical bay was silent, save for the hushes and beeps of the abandoned machines chugging away in the empty dark.
Rick was dead. Yep.
Next move? Dunno.
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling I couldn’t see, then promised myself I’d take up drinking if I survived. A thought of my mother disdainfully watching me slug back a bottle passed through my mind and I laughed, a single, hard “ha!” It echoed off the steel walls loudly enough to startle me, and whatever was on the roof took on a newfound interest in moving around. Then I started to honestly laugh. A slow chuckle that picked up intensity until I was doubled over, my stomach cramping from the effort. Any casual observer would have thought me completely mad, but the thought of being seen just made me laugh harder, until tears rolled down my cheeks and every breath was a strained effort. It took me a while to finally stand up and catch my breath.
“I have finally lost my shit mom,” I said aloud, my head hanging to my chest and a few stray strands of hair clinging to the wet spots on my face. “Your little girl is over-the-fucking-rainbow.” I fought a sudden urge to vomit and stayed with my hands on my knees until the nausea passed.
I stretched out, suddenly feeling much better. The depth of my situation had hit me, just how absolutely alone I had become by surviving the last few days. Now that I had been branded a heretic, the safest planet in the galaxy might have been the one I was, at the moment, standing on. No one would believe my story without my collar, and even if they did, I’d still be a heretic. I didn’t have any real friends. My entire family was either dead or estranged. My entire net worth had been reduced to zero after the Orion was scuttled.
At least you weren’t forcibly impregnated by a spider thing.
“At least I didn’t get forcibly impregnated by a spider thing,” I repeated after my internal monologue.
I took a deep breath and fixed my hair, checked my bandaged and retied my boots. It was time to get moving. Moving means being seen, being seen means being attacked and that meant I need a weapon. I rubbed my temples and remembered what I could about the layout of the camp.
Weapons would be on bodies, in the armory and in the brig. The armory would be heavily locked and weapons on bodies wouldn’t be reliable, so my best bet was the brig. If I had remembered correctly, the brig was right next to the medical center, about 25 meters away. Real close, no sweat.
“Easy-fucking-peasy,” I said to myself standing in front of the exit. I hoped my friend on the roof wasn’t smart enough to ambush doors. “Once more unto the breech, my friends, once more.” I tore the door open.
And I ran.

[end audio playback]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]

Unknown Life Form
Releian Coast, Pressia

Mira revels in the dull thrum her body makes as it jets through the water towards her new ship. Great cavernous passages in her core take in water and expel it in rhythm with others, pushing her quickly through the waves and reverberating throughout the length of her mantle. She coos, a booming subsonic noise that sends the few red children she has swimming in her wake into a frenzy. She can feel their raw, primal excitement building at the prospect of a fresh meal and a mate.
On the beach, she can feel the multitudes of her children that have squirreled away mates and food for her grandchildren into handmade caves. A litter of newborns from each mate, her heart swelled at the thought. Her children in the ocean had found far less success, the native marine life had proved too aggressive and most of them had perished in the blue. She thrums a sigh of anguish that makes the children in the school behind her chirp angrily in the frothing surf. Packs of them break off onto the shore to chase after something and she wishes them a fond farewell.
Your children are so very strong, my dear, says the old-mother. My faith in you has been well rewarded. Mira beams with pride, the bioluminescent cells covering her body cycle through a multitude of rippling green and blue patterns. Through her massive red eyes, she can finally see the Pericles, and with her second sight she can feel her children in the interior. Only a handful of the crew remain untouched, protected by the thick steel doors of the command center. Throughout the rest of the ship, her children have constructed larders of fresh meat and nurseries.
Take care not to damage the ship, says the old-mother. There isn’t another like it on the planet.
Mira is very careful as she slides ashore on the thick slime secreted from her foot. The last bit of water cycles through her jets, spraying thick foam the length of the Pericles. On shore, she can see the few remaining pockets of humans fighting for their lives against her children and the hive mother’s offspring. A group of five black-clad soldiers sees her and open fire, doing negligible damage to her thick hide. She flourishes her bioluminescent skin, an undulating patter of orange, black and purple that stuns the group long enough for a pack of her children to get the drop on them. The come out of their stupor just as the first few red bodies pile on, and she trumpets her voice box victoriously, a sound so loud it kicks up sand for hundreds of feet.
Be quick dearest, there is little time to tarry at this stage, says the old-mother.
Mira begins to slowly push herself inside the ship. Her body folds and stretches and bends to fill every nook and cranny of the tight space. She takes care to move slowly, to keep the pressure down even as the steel pushing against her groans in protest. In only a few minutes, the full length of her body is inside the vessel, filling the central corridor that runs from the aft maintenance deck all the way to the foremost supply room. Now, take the crew, but be ever so gentle with the poor dears.
Mira lets her body push against the steel doors of the command center. For her children, the task was impossible, but the metal gives quickly beneath her touch. She can smell the fear of the crewmembers through the skin of the first tendril to snake through the door. Two of them manage to get off a few shots before she begins her light show, filling the room with slow-moving pink and powder blue bands that enthrall all but one of the crew.
The last one sits facing away from the door, face-down with her arms wrapped around her knees as the others drop their arms to their sides and slowly walk towards the comforting glow. Mira feels her begging the others to say something, anything. Her tendrils snake across the floor and ceiling of the cabin, thin and flickering with unnatural light. She has pushed her entire face into the cabin now, and she opens her wide, toothless mouth for the crew to slowly amble into.
The girl recoils from her tendrils, but doesn’t fight back when one of the strong, prehensile arms wraps, whisper-dry, around her waist and lifts her to her feet. Mira turns the woman about, and can see that her eyes are tightly shut against the maelstrom of color that flickers and waves around her. She gently caresses the woman’s face with another tendril, deftly moving the hair from her eyes and lifting her chin up from her chest. The woman trembles in her grasp, her arms slack and her skin cold and clammy. She bites her lip and slowly opens her eyes.
The last thing the woman sees before falling slack-jawed into madness is her own terrified reflection in the monster’s eye.

[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]

Jon Jonson
Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia

Jonson hears 5 call contact, all hands, over the C-2 channel and almost freezes completely when he turns around. There’s a woman’s face, mutilated by god knows what madness, five meters across and just floating there in the sky. Its eyes glow red like cigar embers and he swears he can feel it staring through him. He gives the command to fire and the blistering crackle of their rifles lights the dunes around his team with pale fire. Then the face splits open down the middle and a cascade of insane color shifts across the thing’s face, illuminating the beach--
The little red man-creature is crawling up his face and digging its fucking claws deep into his chest, trying to gain enough purchase to sink its sizable fangs into his neck. Jonson snaps the thing’s snout shut with a gloved hand, screams at it and crushes its face into a pulp. The team has fallen apart around him.
Black 2, check in! Check in Black 2!
Main! 2 is down, cover 3, providing aid.
Jonson tries to make sense of the conversation, but everything is fuzzy. He aims and fires a round through the head of one of the red things, blowing pieces of its skull into the eyes of the two running behind it. He realizes he’s firing his sidearm and moment of shear terror runs through his head as he tries to find his rifle. His left hand dumbly paws at it, as he fires away with the short-barreled backup pistol in his left, taking the two things with bits of bone in their faces in the chest and pelvic area. They drop and start slowly moving away across the ground.
No, he thinks. I’m moving. His legs won’t move. He watches the heels of his boots digging rivets in the sand. To his right is another pair of boots, almost next to his face, but the trenches they dig in the sand fill quickly with blood. The trail leads back to a small pile of dead red things. All dead but one. It’s trying to pour handfuls of the blood in the trench into its mouth, but its jaw is missing and blood just goes back in the trench. Jonson shoots it in the chest and it falls to the ground and curls around the wound, chirping alien nonsense and shivering.
He tries to shoot it again, but the hammer falls on an empty cylinder.
Clear? Clear!
Whoever is dragging him jerks hard to his right and suddenly the world is neon-white. A great black rectangle sits in front of him, teeming with slow-moving red monsters. The nasty little things are out for blood, aren’t they? Then a door slams shut and everything is white. Everything is white. Everything.
Black Main. Main! Sir get up. Someone slaps him and he comes to, goes out again.
Another hard slap.
Jonson sits up straight, breathing heavy and wild eyed. 4 is kneeling in front of him, helmet off, bending the tip of an auto-injecting needle into a hook and fixing it to the front of his body armor. His helmet’s missing too, so is his rifle and his sidearm.
“Next hand slaps me comes off,” he says, forcing his voice not to waver. He takes in his surroundings. Barracks room, sparsely outfitted. Three concerned grunts trying not to look concerned standing guard around him. A set of boots covered by a red-stained sheet. “Black Team, check in.”
“Black 3, up.”
“Black 4, up.”
“Black 5, up.”
He waits a second for 2 to respond. He doesn’t. 4 is staring at his eyes, checking for something.
“3,” Jonson calls. “What happened?” Black 3 doesn’t move from his position, Jonson knows his eyes are still focused on the door.
“That big thing hit us with some sort of natural dazzler,” he responds. “You and 2 took the brunt of it Main. The red fuckers have neurotoxins in their fangs, they got you while you were stunned.”
“You should be dead, sir,” said 4, still staring at his eyes. “You were for a minute. Five atropine injections. Your heart stopped.” Jonson looks down at his vest where 4 hung the syringes. “You killed five of those things while you were drooling on yourself.” Jonson reached down and touched the leg of his pants.
“I also seem to have pissed myself,” he says, shakily rising to his feet. The world swims for a second, but he forces himself to stay upright. “How did 2 go?”
“Things got him in the leg,” says 3. “Nicked the femoral. He was gone by the time we got inside.” 4 stands up in front of Jonson, she’s still looking at his eyes.
“Not a round left in his magazine,” says 4. “A good death, sir.”
“A good death,” he repeats. The others nod.
“Sir,” says 4. “That much atropine…”
“I’m already mad as a hatter, 4,” he says. She nods and hands him his helmet and rifle, then puts hers on. The rest of the team follows suit. Jonson feels his head swimming again. His vision blurs and waits a second to engage the C-2 channel. He taps out a rhythm on his thigh with the fingertips of his gloves.
Tick-ta-tick-tick-ta-tick-tick-tick.
Tick-ta-tick-tick-ta-tick-tick-tick.
Good to go.
Team Black, we’re down a man. It happens. But we’ve got to finish this thing. The COC’s toast, air’s been grounded since those things took over the Pericles and this firebase has taken severe casualties. If we weren’t the best fucking kill-team in the galaxy, I’d say we should hightail it out of this mess, but we are the best and the best doesn’t fucking run.
We’ve got a broken arrow situation here, and hell if I’m going to leave the Pericles out there for the birds. So we’re going to burn it, and this camp, to the fucking ground. Stellar bombardment can’t be aimed at friendly ships, but we drop some high explosives from the armory that old girl’s engine compartments and that won’t be an issue.
The armory is at the end of this barracks row, about 200 meters. We stick together and move fast. The enemy doesn’t have any known projectile capabilities, only fire if they get close enough to be a threat.
Black 5, police up anything useful from 2, then pull his burn pin. I’m not letting any of these fuckers get a chance at him. The rest of you get ready, this is going to be a hell of a ride.
5 pulls the pin on 2 and his body disappears in shower of sparks and smoke, burned away by the inert phosphorous in his blood.
Tick-ta-tick-tick-ta-tick-tick-tick.
Tick-ta-tick-tick-ta-tick-tick-tick.
And so we all go, in time.
TEAM BLACK
KILL
TEAM BLACK
KILL
TEAM BLACK
KILL
They take their positions by the door Jonson had been pulled in through, guns up and ready to go. The last second before the door opens is taught and strained, like a thin piece of cord scraped by a sharp knife.
The cord snaps.

[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
His Holiness, The Metatron
Command Operations Center, Fire Base Bravo, Pressia

He waits, patiently. The flashing red emergency lights had cut out a little after the ensign had rushed off to the medical bay. His retainers hadn’t returned after her departure. Likely dead. What a shame.
He passed the time by going through the fire base commander’s desk, pawing through the documents in the two steel drawers set to the right of the chair. There was a dented pack of playing cards in the top drawer, along with some bits of cellophane and a few tobacco crumbs. The bottom drawer was mostly consumed by a pile of unused office bric-a-brac that had been piled over the top of a mostly empty bottle of cheap liquor. Marl dug out the snifter, opened the top and sniffed at the contents. Bland, oaky and as tasteless as the fleshy, red-faced man that had bowed and curtsied his way out of the room when Marl had introduced his self.
Marl slid the bottle back into its warren and heard the bottle connect with something hard.
“Curious,” he said, lifting the sheaf of papers a bit higher. The dull-black barrel of a small revolver poked out from just to right of where he had retrieved the bottle. Marl replaced it with the whiskey and popped open the chamber to reveal a single chamber filled with brass. He stifled a chuckle.
“My dear commandant, how delightfully cliché of you,” he said, giving the chamber a sharp spin and deftly shutting it with a flick of his wrist. It makes satisfying snap and he turns the chamber until it sets into position in front of the barrel. He places the gun squarely under his chin and pulls the trigger. The hammer falls on an empty chamber and Marl sets the gun gently on the desk in front of him. “Momento mori… but perhaps later.”
The door to the squat bunker opens and shuts, and Marl can barely contain the smile that spreads across his face.
“Speaking to yourself alone in such a dark room—your holiness—it may give the wrong impression,” says the shawled woman at the door. Marl revels in the lilting sarcasm, the precise delivery of the sentence. He had, admittedly, been waiting for this meeting since he began to plan his little insurrection so many years ago. He ceased fighting the smile.
“It seems the only way I’m able to have a decent conversation these days is to go on in such a fashion,” he responds. She chuckles, briefly.
“Then maybe you’ve found balm in Gilead,” she says, making herself comfortable in the chair across from him. He takes in her weathered face, her preternaturally red eyes and the single mocha colored hand she rests upon the desk in front of him. It’s sun damaged, wrinkled and rough from a life of toil, but her nails are clean and strong and they pronounce solid staccato notes as she taps them in rhythm on the steel desk top. He suppresses an urge to reach and touch her fingers if for only but a moment. “I’ve always held discourse in high esteem.”
“More a fly in my ointment, I believe,” he says, shifting to the right in his chair, resting his elbow on the chair’s armrest and placing his chin in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. “Actually, I believe it’s spiders you’ve been dropping in my salve, isn’t it?” She beams him a smile to rival his own.
“You see far, your holiness.”
“Farther than most, at times, and only because I know where to look, but rarely, I think, far enough.”
“Were you your tongue you’d be a gymnast,” she says with another controlled chuckle.
“And were you your son you’d be a patricide,” he responds, his smile fading somewhat. She laughs honestly this time, leaning back from the desk and letting the shawl slip down around her shoulders. This is the first time he has seen her hair, he savors every second of it. “Children of the gods slay the gods, the ancient Greeks would be proud.”
“Were only you a matricide,” she says, “then both your parents would be truly proud.” She sighs and cracks each delicate knuckle of her fingers in practiced, rhythmic fashion, beginning at the thumb of her left hand, moving down to her pinkies and then back to the thumb on the right. “But I’m afraid that opportunity hesitates to present itself, and, at length, it isn’t what you’ve asked me here to discuss with you.”
“I believe we are quite past the any point of discussion in our individual escapades, true?”
“Possibly,” she says. The woman shifts in her seat to match his posture. “What is transpiring will run its course naturally with or without any effort on our parts. I’m a deft weaver, and this tapestry was finished long before the scorpion felled the hunter from his lofty perch.” She gives him a half smile, a toothy little grin that shows off the single, sharp incisor on the right side of her mouth. Bone white. “I didn’t however, expect a second set of hands at the loom. Men of the cloth are surprisingly inept with textiles.”
“You could say I’m well-blooded in that field,” he says.
“Like a horse?”
“Like a hand.” Marl’s smile cuts a bit wider.
“I see your point,” she says. Her expression softens and Marl takes a second letting himself be pulled into her eyes. He imagines what color they may have been before the garish, luminescent crimson spread across her iris. Brown, he thought, and deeper than an ocean. “But I’m not here to question your pedigree. Your motives are my greater concern.” Marl sighed, and let the smile go. The fading tension came as a relief. He picked up the revolver and set it between them on the desk. She raises an inquisitive eyebrow.
“The—late, I presume—commandant’s dark little secret,” he says. He flicks the engraved wooden handle with his thumb and the revolver begins to rotate with a lazy rasp on the desk. “This may have, one day, been the ignominious end to a boring, forgettable little man who held the lives of other boring, forgettable little men in the palm of his hand, and was, himself, held in the palms of men just as boring and forgettable. He was locked in a generational cycle of fatal pedantry by a religion that would prevent have taken even this one, pathetic act of dignity from him. Some unseen observer would cry suicide and the commandant would be humanely shut down until he could be physically remanded to reeducation.”
“Your living god’s collars made dogs of humanity, did they?” The woman sits up straight, keeping her legs crossed and inspecting the fine nails of her right hand.
“A simplistic explanation, but yes, mankind chose slavery over suffering,” says Marl. He places his flat on the floor and rests his elbows on his knees. “An old, boorish dilemma, but one that needed to be solved.”
“So you killed god and destroyed a civilization for some hope of progress?”
“Humanity has always been more phoenix than pheasant,” he responds, “they will persevere.”
“For a time,” she says, folding her hands in her lap, “but they aren’t the protagonists in the story I’ve envisioned. They will be supplanted, it’s only a matter of time.” She leans forward, only just slightly, her red eyes peering into his and she implores him: “His death overshadows the mischief you’ve caused on Pressia. The Matron will rise, and you are forgiven your trespasses against her. Marlstone, your mother misses you.” He spends a final few seconds looking into her eyes, letting every nuance of her gaze wash over him. The smile comes back in tugs and pulls of skin across his teeth. His greatest weapon. His only real armor.
“No,” he answers, sitting back in the chair. She sighs and her shoulders slump almost imperceptibly.
“What will you do?” She asks. “There are only a few more decades left for humanity in this universe after the conception.”
“I don’t believe the odds are in your favor,” he responds, sliding the revolver back across the desk. He opens the cylinder. The bullet is positioned just before the barrel, the next trigger pull would have fired. He turns the gun and lets the bullet fall into his hand, place it into his pocket, then slides the gun back into the desk. “But regardless the outcome, I intend to see it through.”
She cocks a final inquisitive eyebrow. He thinks it a shame they will never meet again. So very much left to discuss, but never any time. Such a shame.
“At large fractions of the speed of light, a body will experience the effects of time dilation,” he says. “I have twenty years of provisions on my craft. I will exile myself through time, and live in the universe I have created through my actions, if any universe still exists at all.”
“What a romantic punishment,” she says, preparing to stand. He rises before she does, placing a hand perpendicular to his heart and thanking her. She replaces her shawl and turns for the door, pausing just a moment to speak over her shoulder. “Until you leave, consider yourself a guest of the matron. Regardless of intent, your actions have placed you high in her favor. You are safe from any harm for the remainder of your stay.”
“That is most gracious of you,” he says, deepening his bow somewhat. She opens the door.
“You have your father’s eyes,” she says, adding just before the door shuts behind her: “And your mother’s smile.” Then she’s gone, and with her departure, Marl feels a strange, melancholic wave pass over him. To have been so close, and never have even touched her. Such a shame.
Marl begins to move towards the door, but hesitates for just a moment, then goes back to the desk and removes the commandant’s bottle of whiskey from the drawer. He stands still for a moment, taking in the bottle, the absentee commanders personal effects and the near perfect silence of the room. He breathes in deeply, reveling in the act, then lets the smile slip away for what feels like the last time. He unscrews the cap and swirls the pale-gold fluid about in lazy circles.
“As god made man from clay, was I, clay, in turn made from my mother and the circle made whole,” he says, taking a slow, deliberate pull from the bottle. He hisses at the taste and laughs at himself. He had never taken well to strong drink.
“À quelque chose malheur est bon,” he says, tapping the surface of the desk and refitting the cap of the bottle.
Marl opens the door, takes a single look back into the dim confines of the commandant’s office, then leaves, bottle in hand.

[transmission interrupted]
[begin audio playback]

I made it to the brig without complication.
It felt like the world had been brought to a standstill. The screaming din of combat had been replaced with the dull rush of the ocean tides. Dim, purple bands of color had painted the horizon while I was inside the medical bay. Somewhere out there the sun had already risen, and cool gusts of salt-sea air fought to blow the stench of death away from the camp. Still, none of this set me at ease. The crunch of my boots in the sand in the still morning air only let me know how alone I was. On my own in the eye of the storm, keeping a wary eye out for the moment when walls would shift and swallow me up again.
Something had damaged the door to the brig, leaving it stuck permanently open. A single, weak shaft of natural light extended into the building, brightening the interior just enough for me to see the pair of torso-less legs lying in a pool of blood just inside the doorway. Male, I guessed from the build of the hips. Somewhere inside the building I could hear something scratching around.
This is incredibly stupid, I thought, inching my way inside the door to check the corpse’s pants for anything useful. I patted him down, getting a bit of tacky, half-dried blood on my hand in the process. I wiped it off on my increasingly disgusting pants and moved further in bit-by-bit, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom and straining my ears for any hint that whatever’s making the scratching sound has noticed me. It was coming from my left, just past the body into a room that looked to be some sort of reception room.
I could barely see inside, but what I could hear was enough to keep me from going in. Wet, nasty plops and burps and the soft sort of crunches you only ever get from breaking down living things. I wasn’t scared because they were strange to me, but because they were far too familiar.
I moved deeper still into the dark, fumbling my way as efficiently as possible while taking care not to make a sound. The scratching noise kept its pace, along with the wet sounds. My mind raced with grim possibility, and the fear filled my blood with adrenaline. I could feel every tired, over-taxed sinew in my legs creak and pull. I could feel the soles of my boots compressing between my feet and the floor. Nothing escaped me. I was raw, on the edge and completely wired.
The journey through the dark stretched from seconds into minutes, and my eyes caught up with the dark just as I found the entrance to the guard shack opposite the lobby. I moved carefully to the closest wall, feeling my way up the pebbled, matte surface until¬ I accidentally hit the light switch and blinded myself.
Panic took over, and I turned to face the lobby, preparing myself for the inevitable confrontation, but nothing comes. The lobby is too dark to see into, especially with the lights in the guard shack blinding me. Whatever’s in there is blinded too, I think, and I hurry to find something to fight with without taking my eyes off of the doorway. I fumbled about until my fingers find something skinny and metal: a small, flat-head screwdriver only about the size of my fist.
“What the fuck would you need this for?” I mumbled under my breath, squaring up with the door, readying myself for the oncoming blitz. I could hear the scratching still, and the wet noises. I stay ready, poised, waiting for the attack, but still nothing happens. I was frozen in place by fear. Why did I even come in here?
Then I noticed the legs in the hallway were gone, just simply not there. My heart caught in my chest as something began to dawn on me. There wasn’t even any blood on the floor. A chill, colder sort of fear crawled up my spine and I looked at my pants and the hand I had used to pat the corpse down with. Nothing. No blood, dirt, anything.
“I felt it,” I said aloud to myself, shaking as the adrenaline wore off. Cold sweat matted loose strands of hair to my forehead. My toes clenched in my boots involuntarily. Could I have just hallucinated all that? In a dumb sort of haze I walked into the hall and peeked back and forth down the corridor like a child, gave myself an “all-clear,” then strolled across the hall and turned the lights in the lobby. The room was completely clean, as though none of what had been happening outside had had a chance to make its way in here.
A standing water-cooler glugged away in the corner, cycling water through its refrigeration unit in gurgles and spurts. A few small, disposable cups rasped listlessly across the floor, blown about by the breeze coming in through the open door. I took a deep breath, walked back out into the hall and locked closed the brig door behind me. I was honest-to-god crazy then. The only reason you made a huff about coming in here was to get a rush, I thought to myself. I had become an adrenaline junky.
I looked at the little plug of a screwdriver in my hand and shook my head. What the hell was I thinking? A little over a day ago I was attacked by a spider the size of a large dog and now I was trying to clear buildings bare-handed. Stupid move.
I gathered myself together and cleared the rest of the building room-by-room, starting with the guard shack I had just walked out of. The weapons rack on the wall was full, but locked. It was strange that they even established a brig, I thought. This unit wasn’t involved in any sort of operation that would require detention facilities, the standing orders didn’t call for taking prisoners. I shrugged off the questions, none of that was important.
Outside the winds of conflict picked up again, a faint rustle that never rose above a whisper. I forced myself to ignore it, whatever weapons they were firing wouldn’t be able to puncture the heavy walls of the camp buildings. Hearing fire orders being called out between the bursts of gunfire, I could almost imagine whomever was out there popping up and down through the dunes, firing and moving against a backlit horizon. Maybe winning. Maybe not. It wasn’t my problem.
The gunfire ceased for a moment and I pricked up my ears for only a moment before some thundering vibrato tone made me instinctively flatten out against the ground. The gunfire resumed and I stood back up, my eyes darting around to make sure nothing had changed. I had heard that same noise before in the Pressian city. That big thing off the coast had joined our little beach party. It seemed I’d never be rid of that fucking island. The gunfire stopped again.
I took the little screwdriver and jammed the flat end under the door of the weapons rack, near the right-side hinge, and made sure it was fully jammed in place. I dragged one of the nearby office chairs over and set it close enough for me to stand on, then steadied myself atop it and slammed my heel down on the screwdriver. It took a few tries, but eventually the metal frame bent away from the door to slide the pin-shaped hinge out of its socket with a grinding pop.
I took a moment to thank god for shotguns, then pulled one of the girls out and cleared the chamber with a satisfying pump. Empty, but clean and well-oiled, then shotgun’s action worked back and forth with a silky-smooth snick-snack. The door to the weapon locker fought me every step of the way as I tried to fish one of the oversized boxes of rounds out, and I eventually succeeded by pulling too hard and breaking open the plastic case, scattering the green shells across the floor behind me.
I kept an eye on the door out of habit and gathered the eight rounds needed to fill the black, cylindrical magazine set beneath the barrel of the gun, then slid them into the feeding chamber fore of the trigger guard. I flipped out the collapsing wire stock and set it into my shoulder, then chambered a round and began to clear the rest of the building. I didn’t bother bringing the rest of the rounds just yet, reloading bottom-loaders like the one I was holding wasn’t economical in such a confined space. Once I ran out of ammunition, that gun became a club.
Clearing the brig was easy, rhythmic work that settled my frayed nerves. I went to task up and down the hallway, zigzagging perpendicularly to make sure nothing had a chance at my back. The only room that was shut and locked was the rehabilitation room at the end of the hall. It would be a simple matter to just shoot the lock apart and enter, but the pointless exercise would just hurt my ears and waste ammunition. With the lights on and the safety of the building relatively secured, I took care to do a more in-depth search of the rooms I’d cleared.
The lobby and guard quarters were already taken care of, though I did take minute to shove all the shotgun shells I could into my cargo pockets. The three unlocked cells in the rear were empty, unfurnished cubes with drainage slots in the floor and a cushioned metal slab welded to the wall about three feet from the ground. I touched one, and found it was essentially polished rubber the consistency of a truck tire.
The warden’s office, essentially a carbon copy of the cells with a desk and a chair in place of the cushioned slab, had the best finds, a full-tang commemorative knife and two sealed tins of fish. I sat at the warden’s desk and cut open the tins, savoring every morsel of watery fish-meat. My stomach grumbled appreciatively, and I washed down the meal with a cup of water from the machine in the lobby.
In the office adjoining the lobby, I found a few oversized flak-jackets that I passed on wearing, and a roll of heavy mechanical tape that I used to fashion a makeshift sheath for the knife that sat parallel to the rear of my belt. I drew the knife, returned it, drew it and returned it again, before I was satisfied the jury-rigged accessory wouldn’t be a hindrance. I took out the knife one more time and read the engraved, gilded lettering running down the side of the blade.

TO HONOR THE 30TH YEAR OF SERVICE OF
MAJOR CHENG JUN
THIS WE GIVE

I’d never heard of the guy, and I wondered what year of service he had made it to before leaving that knife in an abandoned brig office. I returned the knife to my sheath and continued to poke around the office for anything useful. After a second, I managed to scrounge up a ring of keys, a strap for a radio that I converted into a shotgun sling and a weak-beamed flashlight that seemed nearly out of batteries. I taped it to the barrel of the shotgun, making sure to keep the “on” switch exposed and the light itself off.
I slaked my thirst with a few more cups from the water cooler in the lobby and spun the keys in my hand. Despite all the technical advance mankind had made since leaving earth, humanity still had a fondness for old, totemic items like keys. In the few civilian penitentiaries, like the two on Grand, electronic, magnetic locks kept cell doors shut, but analogue, mechanical locks were still needed in places like this brig, where you couldn’t rely on electricity. I thumbed through the heavy, copper-colored keys. They were all thick, blocky things about three inches long that ended in rounded, rectangular heads. Each had a number to its corresponding door stamped on its head, one to four for each of the doors at the end of the hall. I fumbled out key four, the last door on the left that I hadn’t opened yet, and walked to the end of the hall.
Something bugged me about it being the only door left locked in when they had abandoned the place. I had to know what was in there, and I couldn’t just walk away from it. I slid the blade of the “4” key into the lock and felt the length of it knocking pins into place inside the heavy steel door. Nothing so much as made a whisper on the other side of the door, and I turned the key halfway in the lock, putting my ear to the door and listening for movement. I couldn’t hear anything through the cold metal of the door. My heart began to pound as I turned the light at the end of the shotgun on and got into position, turning the key until I heard the rasp of the bolt sliding the rest of the way out of the wall.
I pulled the door open and backed away from the opening, my shotgun up and flickering a weak, yellow light into the cell. I flipped on the light-switch in the hall, hoping to surprise whatever may be in there by blinding it, then cleared the room. It was completely empty, except for a semi-conscious Pressian man lying on the cell’s slab, drooling and staring blankly at the ceiling. I recognized him immediately as the kid from the hangar.
His face was covered in large beads of sweat that sporadically lost their moorings and shot down the side of his face in wide, glittering trails. A heavy white cast encased his left leg from just below his knee to the bottom of his foot. His eyes, dilated despite the bright light of the room, focused on some unseen point in the middle distance. Someone had fitted him with a Thought-Collar after he was captured, it seemed, and attached a Lotus Unit to pacify him. I felt around the device and detached it from the collar.
The change was instantaneous. His eyes focused and dilated, and he curled up into a ball, nearly rolling off the slab in the process. He tried to scream, but his voice was weak and raspy. I put a hand on his shoulder and he recoiled, moving to a sitting position and keeping a hand on his stomach.
“Are you ok?” I asked, and he looked up at me. Our eyes met and I could see that he recognized me, then he turned and retched over the side of the slab. Nothing came up, but he dry-heaved a few more times anyway.
Lotus Units are nasty little devices used to incapacitate people wearing collars. They hijack your nervous system at its roots and cause a sort of hallucinatory coma. The clergy were known to use it to “rehabilitate” notable heretics by reconstructing their minds from the ground up. If my sentence had gone through, I’d have spent some time with one of those on, before they turned my mind to jelly and had me confess before my execution.
He turned to me when he was finished and shook his head.
“I can understand you,” he said, burying his face in his hands. His nervous system had accepted the most rudimentary language functions of the collar. “Why?”
“The collar they put on you connects your brain to a built-in computer suite that translates what you hear and say,” I tell him. An collarless human and a collared Pressian. We were one hell of an odd-couple and, as far as I knew, that kid was the only friend I had in the universe at the moment. I realized I didn’t even know his name.
“My name’s Katie, by the way.” I reached down and grabbed him under the elbow, helping to his feet. “You?”
“Per,” he responded, looking down at the ground and trying to stay balanced. His name threw me for a bit.
“Like a pear?” I ask. “They have those here?” He stood up straight and I noticed he was actually a good few inches taller than me, though I hadn’t noticed before. We made our way out of the cell to the lobby, where I had him sit in a chair. I could see in his face he was still groggy.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, yeah, that’s how it’s pronounced, but I don’t know what a ‘pear’ is.” I got him a cup of water and he drained it in a single, long gulp before handing it back to be refilled. “None of this is right,” he said, massaging his temples and trying to adjust the collar. “This isn’t the right building, that wasn’t the right room and I’m not—“ I saw him absent-mindedly rub at his thigh. He took the second cup of water and drank it slower than the first. He looked up at me and repeated himself. “This isn’t right.”
“Yeah, they had a thing attached to your collar that shuts you down and makes you see stuff,” I said, moving into position to keep an eye on the door. It had been a while since I heard anything. I was getting nervous. “They’re quick-and-dirty brainwashing machines.” He filled another cup on his own, finished half of it, then poured the rest over his head and rubbed the water around on his face and head. “What happened to you?” I asked.
“They…” He drifted off, looking up at nothing and trying to remember. “… shot me down I guess. Everything’s fuzzy after the crash.” He stood up, awkward but ambulatory on his busted leg, and stretched. “I don’t even know how much time’s passed. With that thing on, it felt like… forever.” He looked at me and shrugged. “What about you? Where are all your friends?” I laughed.
“I think you might be it, funny as it is. Things went to hell around here over the last few hours. I’ve been charged with treason, your old city is gone, there’s all kinds of wildlife eating people and that island my ship crashed into is apparently alive.” I mirrored his shrug. “How the hell you people live here is beyond me.” He laughed.
“Well,” he said. “What do we do?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “This place is lousy with things that want to eat us, and all I’ve got is a knife and a shotgun with about 12 rounds. We aren’t going to make it far on foot.”
“Fair,” he said, tapping the heel of his cast on the ground. “Don’t you have aircraft around here?”
“Yeah, but I’m a lousy pilot.”
“I can fly whatever.”
“Really?” I asked, cocking an eye up. “Even alien ships?”
“I’ve been getting the feeling since all this started that you Imperials aren’t quite as alien as I’ve been led to believe,” he said, turning his palms up. I nodded, deciding to save what I’d learned from the shawled lady in the hills for another conversation.
“So we get to the airstrip, find a starship and fly it to the outer colonies,” I said, laying out the plan. “Sound good?”
“Too good to be true,” he responded. “But it’s not like I have anything better to do.”
“Alright.” I pointed to his bandaged leg. “Will you be able to keep up if things get crazy?” He nodded and I went to the other room and pried a shotgun out of the locker for him, then gave him six of my cartridges. He loaded up the gun and chambered a around.
“What a fucking weekend,” he said, taking position to clear the right of the open front door while cleared left.
“It’s the weekend right now?” I asked, scanning the shadowy beachhead for movement. The local star must be sitting just beneath the horizon, I thought, as we moved out onto the sand. The sky glowed from the slanting light of the sun in bands of blue, green and red that I would have liked to sit and admire if I had time. To my left, the Pericles thrummed ominously, silhouetted black against the burning skyline. The wind had shifted back towards the sea.
I could smell death in the air.

[axmanjack]

Part II

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Jon Jonson
Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia

Team Black moves out onto the sand quickly and quietly, passing information back and forth silently across their closed C-2 channel. They rotate in a tight circle away from the barracks door and onto the improved road running up the center of the camp. Their boot prints carve curved lines into the relatively undisturbed terrain, creating patterns of disjointed circles that mark where they’ve been.
Jonson tells them to keep an eye on the Pericles. It’s silhouetted against the rising sun, a rectangular black blotch in the sky. He can hear the engines cycling up, the high-pitched whine of takeoff preparations and it fills him with a sickening dread. He knows that thing is on the massive starship, that it wants to leave this planet. Can’t let that happen.
Their rotation takes the ship out of his field of vision, and he strains his eyes to pick up any hint of motion in the long, pooled shadows that lie between the camp buildings and the dunes around them. The team is low on ammunition, men and morale. Another successful ambush would be the end of them. 5 calls a possible contact over the radio at his nine-o’clock.
Two foot-mobiles, non-threatening posture. Human and Pressian. Looks like the girl we picked up in the foothills.
Armed?
Two pump-actions, 12-gauge it looks like. They’re waving us down, advise.
The rotation of the team brings him to face the two. They’re close, but not close enough to engage with the guns they have. The Pressian is standing behind the woman, covering the area behind the closest building. The woman, her name’s Teuschle, he remembers, has her gun pointed at a 45-degree angle towards the ground, and her right arm up, palm forward. He doesn’t like that she’s out of confinement, but he isn’t too surprised. Lone-wolf SF types like her were especially resourceful, though bringing the pig-boy along with her didn’t help her case. He slides his mask up, finding the morning surprisingly enjoyable.
“What are you doing out?” He asks, lowering his weapon only slightly. He can feel the tension of the team behind him. They’ve all slaved their collars to his, waiting for the tiniest reason to turn and fire should they have to.
“The Metatron let me go,” she shrugs. “I’m trying to find a ride out of here.”
“Yeah? And those shotguns?”
“Nobody was using them,” she says. “Figured it’d be OK, given the climate.”
“And him?” Jonson asks, nodding towards the Pressian.
“A friend of convenience,” she says. “We’re going to the airstrip, and then we’re leaving. How does that sit with you?”
Jesus this chick’s a cowboy, says 5 over the C-2.
Want Main to ask if she’s single? Asks 3. I think she might be into pig-boy over there.
That’d be an honest-to-god shame, says 5.
“Sits just fine with me,” Jonson says back, ignoring the banter from the team. Carrying on like that was a good sign they were all still in the fight. “But you’re going to have a hard time taking off.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That ship over there,” he jerks his head in the direction of the Pericles. “Something went south with the crew, and it started shooting down every bird in the sky.”
“Huh,” she says, shifting her weight and adjusting her grip on her shotgun. Jonson can see that her gear has been jury-rigged together. His team had disarmed her only a few hours ago, and now she was fully-armed again. The woman was dangerous. He respected that, but it didn’t make her any more trustworthy.
“We were sent in to fix the problem, but things went to shit and now we’re going to re-up at the armory.”
“Why?” She asks.
“Get bigger guns and finish the job,” he says. Her mouth twists up into a toothy grin, and she turns to Pressian and confers just quiet enough to keep Jonson from hearing. The Pressian looks worried, but shrugs and nods all the same.
“Promise not to fuck with us and we’ll help out,” she says. Jonson doesn’t have to think it over long. The need to survive has a tendency to blur established lines. He doesn’t think the woman, Teuschle, has any reason to backstab them. He nods to her and she taps her companion, and they jog out into the middle of the road, waiting for his team to catch up to them. Jonson slides his mask down and gives the order to move and the team complies. He can sense their unease about the situation, but he doesn’t bother trying to ease their minds. Soldier on.
Teuschle and her pig-boy companion stay a few meters abreast of Team Black as they walk down the road, not bothering to integrate with the silently communicating team. Everything is quiet. The sun makes snakes of their shadows that twist and writhe across the faces of the buildings ahead as they move down the road. The air steadily grows warmer, and the heat brings the stench of decay out of the unseen dead around them.
There are no bodies, says 3 over the C-2. What’re these things doing to them?
Jonson shrugs mentally, it’s not important, but his guess is they’re being eaten or squirreled away in larders. Every drying bloodstain he sees has a trail leading away from it from something being drug along the ground. It was insane how quickly the camp had been decimated by the things. They hadn’t seen another soul since their failed assault on the ship, save Teuschle and the Pressian. Jonson wonders if the Pressian knows what’s happening, and decides to save the question for later.
GOD DAMMIT!
A rain of sand falls across Jonson’s back and helmet, making a sound almost like rain. He recognizes the mental “voice” as 3 screaming, and the air is suddenly full of noise. A mental click over the C-2 channel lets him know that the rest of the team have control of the situation, and he steadies himself forward, ready for contact.
They’re coming out of the sand! Yells 5. Sweat breaks out on his forehead as he resists the urge to turn around. He sees Teuschle a few meters to his right, kicking the Pressian out of the way and rolling to her left as a spider-like thing the size of a writing desk lurches out of the sand, spraying the brown, silicate particles around in a glittering shower. Teuschle finishes the roll with mechanical precision and fires her shotgun into the clutter of eyes on top of the thing’s head, turning them into a puddle of green mush. Its mandibles quiver erratically, and it shivers and dies, still half submerged in the sand.
Jonson sees the sand just beneath his feet start to bow upwards in bowl shape, and for a moment he can see each individual grain rolling down the side of the growing hill. He fires directly downward, boiling the sand with laser-fire and feeling the sprays of molten glass burning the sides of his pants. He hears some thing shrieking beneath him and the mound of sand resides. Several more mounds begin to shake and rise from the ground around them, and Jonson gives the order to move out at double time. Another fucking ambush, he thinks, ejecting the magazine on the rifle and reloading mid-sprint. He doesn’t bother checking to see if Teuschle is behind them, his teammates had all checked in.
There are about ten of those things right behind us, calls 4 over the radio. No casualties to report.
Fuckers got my new fake leg, says 3. Who loses a leg twice in 24 hours?
We’re 100 meters from the brig, says Jonson. Keep it tight.
He hears the shotguns firing behind him. Boom. Pause. Boom. Pause. Boom. He wonders if he’ll see Teuschle at the armory. It’s only 20 meters away now, and he can see that the doors are still shut. He hopes they aren’t locked. Boom. Pause. Boom.
The armory is a squat, metal box like the rest of the camp, and its sole feature is a sizably heavier door than usual. Jonson curses over the net when he finds it locked tight.
Cover fire! Gotta get this fucker open.
The team obliges and Jonson beats on the door as hard as he can, pulling his mask up and screaming for whoever’s inside to unlock the door. The few seconds that pass before the heavy locking bolt slides open and the door swings outward, nearly smacking Jonson in the face, seem to last forever.
In a second, his team is inside the building, and he barely registers 4 dragging 3 in by his shoulder straps. The inside of the bunker smells like feet, and the few wide-eyed survivors staring at them look like a ragtag group of homeless people, despite the heavy weaponry they clutch in their hands. One of them goes to shut the door, but he’s knocked flat on his back by the Pressian, who comes barreling through off-balance and lands flat on his face. Teuschle moves through the door immediately afterwards, back-peddling and wielding the shotgun like a hammer.
She lets the spider following her get partially in the door, then slams the heavy slab of steel on its head, slowing it down and covering the lower corner of the door with green sludge. She brings the butt of the gun down on its head with two hands so hard the thing’s head pops, spraying chunks of green gristle and black exo-skeleton across the front of her clothes. She hits it one more time for good measure then kicks its ruined head out of the doorway and shuts the door, locking it and turning to lean against it. Everyone in the armory stares at her in silence. Jonson realizes he’s holding his breath.
Teuschle looks at the shotgun in her hand, inspecting the gristle dripping off the bottom of it, then drops it on the floor in front of her and slides down the door into a sitting position. Her chest rises and falls with each breath. Her hair has fell loose of the ponytail, and hangs in wet strands around her face, soaked through with sweat and green blood. Nobody moves.
“Hey you,” she says, pointing at one of the survivors, a mousy-looking man with a sad comb-over. He clears his throat and rasps out some sort of reply. “Izzat… water?” She slurs between breaths. The mousy guy looks around, confused, not realizing she means the canteen at his belt. “In the canteen… there.” She points and he nods briskly. She curls two fingers of her right hand in a bring-it-here gesture and he fumbles to pull it out of the neatly snapped nylon pouch, jerking his pants up and around for moment before finally freeing it. She claps her hands together and puts them up in front of her, palms out, and he tosses it to her underhanded. When she finally takes a drink, the whole room seems to sigh audibly.
I, for one, am very happy she didn’t try to fight us when we picked her up, says 3. He’s sitting on the ground between 4 and 5, the only two people in the room not fixated on the woman sitting against the door. They look about the room idly, taking note of whatever may be important. Jonson regains himself and steps forward, causing everyone’s attention to shift to him. To his right, the Pressian sits cross-legged against an empty weapons rack, and to the left of the Pressian, the survivor that had tried to shut the door stood awkwardly, unsure of how to get back to his group through the cluster of masked special forces units in front of him.
“Who’s in command?” Jonson asks. There are only ten survivors, likely the only ones left in the camp. The mousy-looking one that gave Teuschle the canteen raises his hand.
“I’m the ranking officer,” he says, then points at a stocky, gray-haired woman wearing oil-streaked coveralls. “But Bryant, er, Warrant Officer Bryant, is in charge.” Jonson nods to her.
“Bryant, I’m Sergeant Jon Jonson, leader of Team Black. Can you give me a rundown of what’s going on?” She nods and takes a breath.
“I’m not sure what’s going on out there,” she says. Her voice has a gruff swagger to it that makes every resigned syllable feel like a eulogy. “I’m the mechanical engineer on the Pericles. I came over here last night to grab some grub and get some fresh air, next thing you know everything went to hell in a hand basket. I grabbed who I could and made tracks for the sturdiest building I could find. Been here since.” She waves her hand to the rest of the survivors. “Pretty much the same for the rest of us.”
“Has there been any contact with the Casa Nostra, or anyone else?”
“No,” she says, hanging her head. “We don’t have long range communications in this building, but I don’t think that would matter anyway. We had the Pericles’ command deck on the shortwave for a while and they couldn’t reach them either.”
“The Pericles? Can we still get through to them?” Jonson asks, but she shakes her head.
“They’d been trapped in there, same as us here on the shore. Scared, but safe, until about half an hour ago.” She sighs deeply, and the other survivors shift uncomfortably, rubbing their necks and scratching their shoulders. “They were compromised. We turned the radio off after it got bad.”
Jonson could see that a few of the survivors were sobbing, a couple behind Bryant had sat down together and one of them stroked the others hair. The situation was, generally, pretty fucking grim. Jonson thinks of the giant face floating over the beach, moving slowly towards the Pericles. He thinks of the Pericles’ engines cycling up off the beach. Spiders in the sand. He has no moves to make.
“So,” says Teuschle, standing up and putting the lid back on the canteen. “I’m getting the fuck out of this place, any of you coming along?” She tosses the canteen back to the mousy-looking guy and he just sort of stares at it, dumbfounded. “It’s empty, sorry.” She laces her fingers together over her head and cracks her back loudly.
“This guy can fly you guys out,” she says, pointing at the Pressian. He doesn’t look up at the survivors, instead focusing his attention on something incredibly interesting on the back of his hand. Jonson feels as dumbfounded as the mousy-looking guy. His mind feels numb, like all of his thoughts are made of cotton. He thumbs the atropine shots hooked to his chest, feeling as though something important is coming to an end. Something almost like hope has begun to bloom in the bloodshot eyes of the survivors as the blood-stained woman in front of them nonchalantly explains the escape plan.
“There were about 50 of us at the start,” says Bryant. “They tried to get to the ships, but they didn’t come back.”
“Yeah,” says Teuschle, “They’re probably dead.” Some of the survivors suck in air through their teeth. Jonson applauds the woman’s tact in his mind.
Nice, says 3 over the C-2 network.
“This whole firebase is lousy with nasty shit, and according to these guys,” she jerks her thumb in Jonson’s direction, “the Pericles out there is shooting down friendly birds. So that has to be addressed too.” More of the survivors bow their heads, but Teuschle continues. “Either way, I’m not fucking around with this motivational speech bullshit. You’re all going to die here if you don’t get on one of the ships over their in the airfield and fly the fuck off to wherever. A few of you probably won’t even make it to the ships, and I could honestly give a fuck, cause that has nothing to do with me.” Jonson cocks an eye at her, trying to guess her game.
“I hate this fucking planet, and I’ve got a grudge to settle with whatever the fuck that thing in the Pericles is, so I’m going to take a shit-ton of explosives from this armory and blow it the fuck up. End of story. I’ll probably die doing that, so whatever. If you all are smart, you’ll take that opportunity to get over to the 548’s and get the fuck out of here. Regardless, do whatever you want. I’m getting what I need and then I’m leaving.” She walks away from the group and down the aisles of the armory, picking through the selection on her way.
Anyone else turned on? Asks 5.
Affirmative, Black 5, says 3.
I making an exception for her, says 4.
They chuckle over the C-2 net, but Jonson can hear the strain in their voices. He slides his mask back over his face and closes his eyes, hoping the darkness will quell his nausea. The survivors begin to bicker in hushed tones over whether or not to follow Teuschle’s plan. Jonson bickers with himself over the same issue. She’s a nut, but she’s competent, he thinks, but she’s not good enough to get to that ship without help.
The ship was a monster all in its own right. Ambassador class ships boasted incredible defenses, and without the ability to communicate with the Casa Nostra, stellar bombardment wasn’t possible. He taps out a rhythm on his leg.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Dropping high-explosives into the ship’s power plants would do more than enough damage to scuttle them, he thinks, but that would necessitate getting into the ship. Like Teuschle said, it’s a suicide mission.
He looks at his team, set around him in a circle. 4 has sat down next to 3, and is inspecting the prosthetic joint below his knee for damage. 5 sits cross-legged, idly picking through her weapons and magazines, checking and double-checking for dirt and damage. Even with their masks on, he can see their faces in his mind. He knows they’re worried, just as much about him as they are each other and themselves. Black isn’t his first team by a stretch. There have been dozens over the years, but this is the one that mattered, he feels. The last team. He takes a knee.
They stop what they’re doing and look up at him at the same time. They’ve been waiting for this moment, though none of them likely knew what it would entail. He orders them to pull their masks up. They oblige, and he looks into each of their faces eye-to-eye as he slides his mask off his face. 3 is the closest to him in age, followed by 4 and 5, that’s how he always numbered his teams. Other team leaders had different methods, but that was how he did it. Just made sense.
“We aren’t getting off of this rock without taking out the Pericles,” he says, taking a knee. “That’s a fact.”
“We’re there with you sir,” says 5, and the earnestness in her brown eyes pulls at his heart, but he raises a hand shakes his head.
“Not this time Black,” he says. The team goes still. “I’ll be providing support to Teuschle. 4,” he pauses to look directly at her, and she returns the gaze. “You’ll be taking over as Black Main once we depart.” She hesitates for just a second.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” he says, trying not to let his pride show through. “The rest of you will escort this group of rag-tags to the airstrip. When the Pericles goes up, you all get out of here as quick as you can.”
“Yes, sir,” the team responds in unison. His voice threatens to get shaky, to break on him, but he doesn’t let it.
“Team Black, it’s been an honor,” he says, and they nod together silently. He slides his mask down one last time.
Dismissed.

[transmission interrupted]
[begin audio playback]

I can’t tell you why I gave them all such an idiotic speech. Honestly, I think I was just talking to myself, more than I was talking to them. Trying to get myself in gear, to get ready for what I knew I had to do. I thought of that old lady in the shawl in the hills, and her stupid little premonitions. Marl the Metatron, sitting like the Cheshire cat behind that desk in the command operations center. That floating behemoth of a monster I had thought was an island, that seemed like so long ago even though it had only been a few days since I had been on it. I wanted control again, or something like it. Maybe I wanted a return to normalcy, I don’t know.
The way they looked at me when I closed that door stuck with me as I walked down the isles of the armory the way some people walk down the pews of a church, and I knew this was the mission that broke me. Military training has a way of getting into people’s minds. It makes them colder, more efficient, but there’s always a sense you’re still talking to a real human being when you talk to those people.
I remember seeing the old veterans during advanced training and thinking they weren’t like the rest of us, not just because they were so much more competent, but because when you looked into their eyes it was like you were seeing into the real world. The one that lay just beneath the skin of every hopeful idealist. The world humanity had struggle for eons to leave behind, but that certain, cold-blooded people were forced to return to in order to let the general population live a life free of bloodshed and cruelty. The world I found myself living in now.
The slaughter in the camp had left the armory relatively well stocked, and I found everything I needed in short order. Luckily, small bases kept the ammunition and weapons in the same building, and soon I had amassed a small arsenal. A few grenades, a medium-sized combustion rifle, a sidearm, several magazines for both, a modestly-weighted flak jacket that actually fit and enough bricks of plastic explosives to scuttle the Orion twice.
I found some spare backpacks and some tape and set about making satchel charges. I made two of them, just in case one failed, and put a type-3 fuse on each of them and set the timers for twenty minutes, more than enough time to get clear of an exploding starship engine.
The work was calming, and keeping my hands busy took my mind off going inside that ship, the Pericles. Just thinking its name sent cold chills up my spine. Despite the cool interior of the building, I was sweating. My hair had come loose at some point, and stuck to my face and back. It was long, I thought, and I couldn’t remember why I had been growing it out before all this happened.
I pushed it out of my eyes again, then took out the knife I had found in the brig, impressed that my makeshift sheath had held up during the fight with the spider monsters. I used it to poke holes in the side of the plastic explosives for the detonator caps, which I then slid into the soft, gray putty.
If their were spiders around, that meant that psycho, red-eyed bitch Lacy was around too, and likely had cause this whole thing. I didn’t want to have to deal with her, she was one of the more unnerving aspects of this place. Not because she was the mother of a brood of flesh-eating spiders, in fact, that I could handle. What really bothered me about her was how akin I felt to her. She was another version of what I had become over a life of killing. Feral. Powerful. Insane. A host of other little fears rushed through my head and I steadied myself by gripping the chest-high shelf I had been preparing the bombs on.
Then my hair fell in my eyes again and I reached up, grabbed a handful of it and lopped it off with the knife. The feel of the weight of it leaving my neck, of the thick strands falling loosely over my left hand was almost exhilarating. I stood for a moment, dumbstruck, and just stared at the dirty-blonde clump in my hand before turning my palm over and letting in flutter to the ground. A few golden, wet hairs still clung limply to my hand, but I didn’t pay them any mind. My hand and the knife went up to my hair three more times and shore off several inches. I breathed in deeply, wiped my hand against my pants until it was mostly clean, then got to work finishing the bombs.
Near the entrance, the two groups I hadn’t been paying attention to had come to a consensus about what they were going to do, and the various members had begun to walk the aisles of the armory to gather up the supplies they needed. I guessed they had decided my plan was better than starving to death inside a box. Per had managed to make his way down to me, though getting down the tight aisles with his cast on seemed to be a bit of a chore.
“Katie,” he said, leaning across the shelf towards me. “I’m not sure if this is the best plan of action.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, putting on one of the packs and testing its straps. It was a bit heavy for a long sprint, about 30 pounds, but the two packs were small and wouldn’t be too obtrusive. “Why’s that?”
“I know we put our, differences behind us out of necessity, but that doesn’t mean the rest of your people trust me,” he said, his eyes darted around the room at the survivors and Team Black. “Our plan changes if they get on a bird with me.”
“Take them with you then,” I said, checking the other bag and finding it satisfactory.
“To, what, the outer colonies?” He asks. “I honestly don’t even know where that is, I just went along with it because you seemed like you knew what you were talking about.” I laughed.
“Sorry,” I said, still chuckling. “I guess I got ahead of myself.” I could see that he was honestly worried, so I changed my tone. “Alright, so the plan changed. I don’t know how you’re going to get a happy ending out of this Per. I don’t and I’m sorry for that, but for any of us to have a fighting chance, I’m going to have to do some shit I don’t honestly think I’m going to be able to walk away from.”
“And how do you know you have to do this Katie?” He asked. “These people betrayed you, didn’t they? How can you be certain we can’t just fly out of here on our own?”
“There were dozens of planes in the sky when I was brought in, and now I can’t here the sound of one that’s even miles away,” I said, hefting one of the bags over my back and shouldering the other. “We’ve got to face facts, this is the only way anyone gets out of here alive.” He looked me in the eyes, right then, and I could see that he was one of those people who stayed human, even if he was Pressian. He’d recover from this. There was a future in those eyes, if he could make it out of this alive.
“Why does it have to be you then, Katie?” He asked the question and it made me smile honestly, with purpose.
“I’m the one who can,” I said to him, reaching across the rack and patting him on the shoulder. He wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but accepted it, biting his lip and nodding. “Try not to dwell on it, and find yourself some weapons before this thing kicks off.” He nodded some more and moved away to peruse the weapons on the shelf a meter down from me.
“Teuschle,” said Jonson, coming down the aisles towards me. “Can I have a moment?” I nodded, and he sidled up, resting his arm on the rack I had previously been working on. “I’ll cut it short, I’m coming with you.”
“Yeah?” I asked. He nodded and tapped the quintet of atropine injectors hooked onto the front of his rig.
“I don’t have much longer,” he said. His were a deep brown, and the whites still seemed clean, but I could tell he was having trouble focusing. “Maybe if I could get to hospital in the next twenty minutes, yeah, but my priority is getting what remains of my team off this rock in one piece.”
“Why don’t you do that by escorting them to the bird?” I asked, unslinging the satchel charge on my shoulder and setting it on the ground between us. He took cue and picked it up, put it on his back.
“I’m an old man,” he said, adjusting the straps to a comfortable length. “Been at this for a long time. Out with bang or a whimper, you know?” He finished the thought with a laugh and I joined him.
“You know I don’t really plan on dying right?” I asked between chuckles.
“Does anybody?” He smiled at me. “I’ve already briefed the rest of the survivors and my team, and they all know what they’re doing. Your boy—the Pressian—excuse me, just has to keep up. Me and you’ll break away at the fork in the road and they’ll continue on to the airstrip.” He shrugged and laughed, a single, gruff huff of air. “Then that’s all she wrote.”
“If that’s all she wrote,” I said, loading a magazine into my new rifle and chambering a round. “Then she sounds like a real shit.”
“Katie,” said Per, moving steadily up the aisle. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Gotcha,” I responded. “You’ll be moving with Team Black. They’re the team dressed in all black.” He laughed, and I counted it a success.
“That’s completely coincidental,” said Jonson, turning to move up the aisles. At the front, near the door, the survivors and Team Black’s remaining members were staged to leave. The survivors looked tense, nervous, but ready. I realized I’d probably never learn how they faired after we split up, and that bothered me despite not knowing any but one of their names. Bryant, the black lady in the overalls. She’d found a flak vest and heavy laser emitter. They suited her nicely, though she didn’t look as confident with them as she might have. I silently wished her luck and started up towards the door. Per kept in step with me as I walked.
“Katie,” he said quietly. “I never got to thank you properly… for what you did for my dad.”
“It’s cool,” I said back.
“I’m not going to leave you, if I can help it,” he said. “I’ll get these people off the ground. I’ll get them out of danger, whatever they need me to do, but I will come back for you.”
I mumbled something back to him, something lighthearted that I thought might break the tension, but I can’t remember what it was. He meant what he said, meant it wholeheartedly and I believed him. He would come back for me, given the chance. If he ever even got the chance. I think he knew though, what it meant to me for him to say that.
I didn’t have a place in the universe anymore. I was just a leaf in the wind being taken from place to place, but I’d make damn sure that kid got out of here. If there was a single, worthwhile thing for me to do in this life, I would make sure Per’s story didn’t end on this beach. I would die to ensure his survival.
And I would sure as shit kill.
We took our places next to the door.

[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Jon Jonson
Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia

Jonson moves through the door first, followed by 4. The survivors are out next, followed by Teuschle and the Pressian, and 3 and 5 pull up the rear. 3 shuts the door behind himself out of habit, a quick snick of metal sliding over metal that stands alone as the only sound on the beach, save the distant waves and the chill hush of the salty sea air blowing off the ocean. The scattered corpses of nearly a dozen oversized spiders lay decaying on the beach. A quartet of the little red imp things have buried themselves neck deep in one of the carcasses, and some of the survivors visibly cringe at the sounds of them sucking out the thing’s entrails. 4 asks to engage and Jonson declines the order. They won’t be walking close enough to have to bother with them.
The beach is quiet, but every step across the flat packed sand feels like a push through a minefield. Their footfalls crunch and scrape so loudly it feels like the group is making every noise in the world at that moment, even though Jonson knows that it’s only his frayed nerves that are causing that reaction. In less than a hundred meters, his team will walk on without him, towards whatever fate lies in their path and he won’t be there for them, he thinks, raising his rifle slightly to cover a small bump in the path. His heart feels like it’s about to explode in his chest, and his skin is so hot and itchy that his mind refuses to discount the possibility of ants crawling around beneath his armor.
The group reaches the crossroad soon enough, and he and Teuschle make their leave soundlessly. Nothing is passed between them and the group, it just rolls on with out them, and only the rear guard makes the most cursory of backwards glances. Something that could be the atropine, but isn’t, catches Jonson in the chest and breathes in audibly, just once, and it’s gone. No tears. No languid waves to the retreating shadows. Teuschle falls into step behind and to the right of him, roughly a meter away, and they begin their quiet trek towards the beachhead.
The sun has risen over the top of the Pericles, bathing it in shadow and sitting like the eye of Ra over top the gaping black maw of the aft hanger. The umbra of the ship is a single, long finger pointing at them as they make their way cautiously past the camp buildings. The base is painted in blood and shadow. The brush lies ahead, tucked away inside the Pericles, but around them, its work has been drawn in broad strokes. Dried brown handprints smeared across the corner of the first barracks building. A solitary boot sits upright on the side of the road. Jonson feels an inexplicable urge to kick it over.
A steady, pulsating red light begins to glow from inside the ship as they get within the last 200 meters of it. Jonson can feel Teuschle tense up without seeing her do so. Whatever was in there, that face and whatever horrors it had wrought upon the crew inside, that was hers to face. It was calling to her and she could feel it.
I’m not going to make it inside, he thinks, and, in for a solitary, sickening moment of weakness, he thanks god he won’t. His mission would end out here on the sand, he was sure of it. He sees the silhouette of something growing clearer against the sickly red light of the ship’s interior, and he feels his pulse begin to beat in his ears.
“Teuschle,” he says. She responds with a low grunt and he continues. “There’s something up ahead. Human-looking. About 100 meters up.”
“Roger,” she says. He hears her spin on the toe of one of her boots midstride to check it out, then turn around again to continue covering the rear. “I can see a few things keeping pace with us behind the dunes to the left and right of the road. No solid count, but my guess would be four.”
“Roger,” he says back. Their voices barely rise above a whisper. Waves lap against beach, a paced rhythm that set his hair on edge. They’re only about fifty meters from the entrance to the ship, and he can clearly see the figure now. It’s a woman, younger, wearing a heavily damaged set of infantry fatigues. Her arms are crossed, but she raises a single hand and waves her fingers at them playfully. Her eyes are the same glowing red as the ship’s interior. He stops walking and Teuschle follows suite, he tells her what he sees.
“She’s hostile,” says Teuschle. “These spider things are her… kids or something. There is four of them in the dunes. One left, three right. How do you want to play this?”
“No matter what,” he says, “you get that bomb in the ship. Ambassador class ships aren’t heavily armored past the rear hangar. Past that, the walls are thin enough for that bomb to do what it needs to.” The red-eyed woman purses her lips impatiently, and cocks her hips to the side. It was the eleventh hour, or maybe the twenty-fifth, he couldn’t tell, either way this was it. “You go left, start the attack, then move up. I’ll cover you. Mark. Go.”
Teuschle turns and hits the single spider bursting over the wall of sand with a clean, three round pattern that caves in its skull. It dies before it hits the ground, digging a two-foot trench into the sand and kicking a fine spray of particles into the air. Two of Jonson’s three are dead before they can get to him, green and black blisters boiling and popping across their carcasses from the emitter beams. The third one is too fast and it manages to get its mandibles caught in the fabric around his prosthetic leg, whipping Jonson’s legs out from beneath him.
He hits his head and stars swim across his vision, threatening not to fade from the atropine poisoning but for shear power of will. He slams the heal of his boot into the creature’s exposed eyes, smashing two of them and covering all but one in blood. The spider rears back, angrily hissing and trying to free itself from his leg. It drags Jonson backward across the ground, and the rough sand grates against the now exposed skin of his lower back. He tries for another kick, but misses high.
The road slopes sharply upward in the last few meters to the ship’s lowered hangar bay door, pushed up by earthmovers to give the massive steel doorplate something to rest on. It slows Teuschle down just enough that she can stop herself from running directly into the massive group of spiders that skitter about from underneath the door. Ten, twenty, thirty of them, Lacy’s entire brood, rush like a single dark shadow from the darkness beneath the door and make a slavering, mad dash towards Teuschle.
She backpedals immediately, firing round after round into horde until her magazine runs dry. She drops the rifle and pulls out her sidearm, but that too goes dry in a matter of seconds. Teuschle has killed only eight by the time the spider at the head of the pack gets close enough to launch itself at her. She braces for the impact and rolls with it, dropping the spent pistol and drawing the knife. The thing howls when she jams the knife into its sternum and rolls over it, leaving it squirming on its back, but that only gives its brethren the time they need to pile onto her, pinning her to the ground and hissing triumphantly.
“Stop!” Cries Lacy, and the spiders obey, shivering reluctantly away from Teuschle, save the few pinning down her arms and legs. She gets close enough to look over the backs of her children into Teuschle’s eyes and smile down at her. “My little guys are just so zealous sometimes,” she says, stroking the fuzzy black and brown carapace of one of the spiders. “They can smell how much of a prize you are, Katie.”
“I don’t believe we’ve actually introduced ourselves,” Teuschle says, straining to get a hold of the grenades at her chest and failing miserably. Her eyes dart around for a chance, any chance, to get out.
“Oh, the matron has told me all about you, and that gypsy lady,” says Lacy, laying over the spider’s back and resting her cheeks on the heels of her hands. “They traded me first dibs on the base camp for a crack at your. Tender. Ass,” she says, leaning to one side to accentuate each word with a poke of her index finger. “You’ve been bought and sold, like a piece of meat.” She laughs, sick joy making her red eyes glitter. “Traded like chattel. You’ll be a great mom.”
“Eat a dick you crazy cunt,” says Teuschle, fighting to get up. Lacy exaggerates a frown and makes kissy faces at her.
“Oh, poo poo,” she says. “Consider yourself lucky. Your kids are going to spread to the stars! All I get is this stinking planet for my little babies.” Lacy scratches the spider’s back and it coos with delight, its abdomen shuddering just centimeters from Teuschle’s face. Lacy leans further over the spiders and pokes at Teuschle’s rig. “What were you even trying to do? Kill the matron?” She laughs again. “Other than that being impossible, you could have just walked in the front d¬–“
Lacy’s face contorts into silent confusion, and she tries to catch her breath but can’t. She looks into Katie’s eyes, trying form a question, but instead a small, bright red trickle of blood leaks out of the corner of her mouth, dribbling over her top lip and pooling in nose as she goes limp over the side of the spider. Jonson leans his head over the top of the woman’s body and grabs her mouth, making her eyes go wider. He looks into Teuschle’s eyes one last time and winks, then wrenches Lacy backwards as hard as he can.
The spiders scream in unison, rushing away from Teuschle and forming a perfect circle around him and Lacy. She’s suspended in the air in front of him, her ribs caught on the blade of Teuschel’s knife, and he revels in the look of surprised awe in Teuschle’s eyes as he draws the horde away from her.
You still got it, old man, he thinks to himself, sinking to his knees in the throng of hissing black chitin. He pulls the knife out of the woman’s back and stabs her again between her ribs, hitting her heart and sending her into shock. His last kill is a clean one, and he slides the blade out of her and wipes it off on her shirt. Jonson reads the inscription and laughs, dropping the knife and letting the woman rest against his chest as the last bit of shuddering life leaves her body. He takes one of the grenades off his chest, pulls the pin and lets the spoon fly before sliding it between his back and the satchel charge.
Around him, the horde of spiders hiss and spit, slavering to get at him, but held at bay by the prospect of hurting their dead mother. Only seconds now. He wishes he could hear the ocean surf instead of the insane cacophony of grieving spiders. Only seconds now. The knife he killed the woman with was a retirement present, given to someone else, and passed along to him. Fate at its most hilarious. Only seconds now. His fingers tap out a rhythm on his leg.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.
Tink-ta-tink-tink-ta-tink-tink-tink.

[axmanjack]

Part III

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Per
Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia

Though the world has become a strange and unfamiliar place, Per realizes he knows, roughly, where he is. This stretch of beach is only a few kilometers away from a seaside vacation spot he used to visit with his family in life that he barely recognizes as being his own anymore. Maybe four hundred kilometers inland of where they’re walking now is a major highway that runs between the coastal towns. He fantasizes about running away from the formation of bedraggled Imperials, finding some abandoned vehicle alongside the road and taking it through the winding foothills far, far away from this nightmare. He’d been maybe halfway to the next town out before an Imperial interceptor had shot him out of the sky.
What if he’d made it?
Would he have arrived already branded a traitor by the low king, with nothing more than a quick, ugly execution to look forward to?
Would he have been recognized as a hero?
Would he have led the charge to retake Relei from the Imperials?
“Why are you helping us?” Asks one of the survivors. The timing throws him off-guard, and he sizes up the red-haired woman who asked the question. She’s middle-aged, clean uniform. It’s likely she’s an officer, but her clean uniform and awkward combat composure point to a profession outside the infantry. She stares daggers at him, but he immediately goes back to scanning the area.
“Will my answer matter if you survive?” He asks, taking a second to look into her eyes and gauge her answer. She continues staring at him, but doesn’t answer. He leans closer, still keeping an eye out on the dunes. “Then let it haunt you.”
He shakes off the questions running rampant through his mind and scans the short, hilly dunes surrounding the path. Thousands of the fine-grained, windswept mounds ran from the sea to the foothills and beyond to the massive western desert, where the High King sat in the capital city. His brother was there, hopefully safe, though even that wasn’t any sure fact. He glances up at the sky. The Imperials have starships that can fire lasers large enough to demolish whole cities. If the Imperials were like Pressians, they’d have destroyed the capital city first. Cut the head off the snake and the tail will follow.
He doesn’t want to help these people survive, he thinks, but he has a deep debt to repay that woman, despite the circumstances that caused it. Before the Imperials he had never seen combat, almost nobody on the planet had. It had been generations since the first High King had subjugated the world, leaving few contingencies to fight save the odd regional insurrection. He’d been an adjunct to the crown, his life had been perfect, but now it felt real. Purposeful. That woman had taught him, incidentally, the value of his own life, and he wouldn’t forget that.
Per sees the first little red thing pop out of the sand, and it seems so surreal that, for a moment, he can’t believe his eyes. He hesitates for a second. It’s too far away to attack, and seems more inquisitive than aggressive, and he doesn’t want to call contact and scare the group of survivors into firing. He realizes the woman is still staring at him, and an old saying of his father’s comes to mind. You can’t see the dunes for the desert. Fitting.
The thing continues to watch the group as they move down the road. Out of the corner of his eye Per can see the first of the grounded aircraft, though not well enough to see which can fly out of atmo. He didn’t know what constituted space worthy as far as Imperial ships were concerned, he thought, watching the red thing start to nibble at one of its claws. All the ships or none of them could fly out of orbit for all he knew. He reaches behind him to tap one of the black-armored Imperials, the one who fashioned a peg leg for himself out of a cut-down and spot welded machine-gun barrel, and tells him what he sees.
“Roger,” the Imperial says. “I’ve got about four directly in front of me. Do not let those things get their teeth on you, they’re poisonous as shit.” He turns his head slightly to scan Per’s sector and catches the red-head glaring at him. “Hey you,” he says to her, “head on a fucking swivel.” She starts and looks around, and Per takes a measure of satisfaction from the sound of her sucking air through her teeth at the sight of the red things.
“Oh, fuck,” she says under her breath. “Oh fuck me, oh fuck, oh fuck.” Her fear spreads like cancer through the ranks, and Per can actually see the red things getting excited by the rising panic. Someone near the center of the formation starts crying in soft, wet sobs. More red things pop their heads out of the dunes, nearly twenty that Per can count. He sights in on one of them and sees that they’re mostly translucent with the sun behind them. The one in his crosshairs is nibbling on its claws as well, and Per can pick out little golden drops of venom leaking down the dual set of fangs and gathering on the long nails of its two fingers.
“They’re getting ready to attack,” he says, just loud enough for the peg-legged Imperial to hear him. “They’re getting their venom on their claws.”
“Clever fuckers,” the Imperial says back. “Don’t run. Don’t panic. You trip and fall and these bastards’ll be on you like crabs on whore-cock.” Per laughs.
“Is that a real saying?”
“Bet your ass it is,” says the Imperial.
In the distance, by the Pericles, something massive explodes, instantly knocking a four-foot tall cloud of dust off the ground. For a moment, the dust is over the heads of the little bastards, and Per can see, can actually see the sound wave from the blast rocketing towards them at the speed of sound, pushing a dense cloud of dust ahead of it. The noise of the explosion hits his ears like a sledgehammer and blasts away the shelf of dust covering the red things. They’re moving fast, only a few meters away and he calls contact and fires at the same time, staving in the foremost one’s skull and dropping the second closest with a group of rounds to the chest.
Then the entire entourage starts firing, and several of the survivors through ammo conservation to the wind, pockmarking dunes a hundred meters past their targets. Inexplicably, one of the survivors, a man in a frayed gray jumpsuit, drops his rifle and sprints directly into the fray. The things are on him in a second, and he doesn’t make a noise as they tear into him with their fangs and claws. The empty-eyed woman that had been put in charge of the black-clad Imperials takes advantage of the grouping and tosses a grenade into the mix, calling for everybody to hit the deck. The explosion sucks air out of Per’s lungs, and he feels the hot sting of shrapnel peppering his body, but the bits of metal are outside of their effective range and do little damage.
“Move, move, move,” says peg-leg. “Guys fucking dead, stop gawking and move.” The attack seems to have abated for the moment, but Per can see still more of the things milling about in the sand now, picking apart their dead and gnawing at the bits. There were hundreds of smooth red heads out there bobbing from dune to dune, glittering in the rising sun like rubies.
“This was a bad idea,” says a female voice from the center of the pack. “Oh god why did I let you fucking assholes talk me out of leaving that bunker. The Nostra was sending reinforcement and we were gonna be fine and now we’re gonna be eaten and fucked by these fucking things and its all your fucking fault you stupid fucking cocksuckers I hate you I hate you I hate you…” Her voice fades off into the same pitiful sob from before. Per takes the brief lull in action to check his gear, and some of the better put-together Imperials follow suite.
“Ten full mags—rifle, three mags—pistol, five grenades, up,” he says aloud, there’s no point in trying to cover their position now. Every one of the things he could see that wasn’t cannibalizing their dead was looking at them and biting their claws. The closest ship is only 50 meters away now, and they need to get to a defensible position before the things decided to attack again.
“Roger,” called the woman leading the patrol. The rest of the group starts calling up their equipment checks from back to front, and Per can feel the people around him calming down as the ritual progresses. Ammunition consumption was light on the first wave, but they still had fired too many rounds. Per wonders if the things know they’re spooking the group, forcing the frightened ones to burn off their rounds on expendable units before taking out their patrol wholesale.
The airstrip is little more than a long, flat road like the one leading through camp, only with a single, reflective white strip of dots running down the center of it. Four planes line the side of it, three on the right and one on the left. The three on the right are all large troop-carrying military vehicles, sitting with their drop-down cargo bay doors open in fifty-meter increments along the runway. The ship on the left is larger, but built differently, with sleek lines and a bulbous fuselage that makes Per think of a yacht.
The second ship down on the right was abandoned in the middle of being loaded, and a large, gleaming steal container sits half-on and half-off the door. Some sort of bi-pedal construction gear has fallen down on its side a few meters away from the ship’s open hatch. Things left unfinished, thinks Per as the group walks the last few meters to the open hatch of the first ship. As they arrive, all hell breaks loose.
“Contact!” Screams the front of the patrol as red bodies pour from the dark interior of the ship towards the group. Some of the survivors lose their cool almost immediately, firing with abandon into the crimson sea of teeth and claws. Per barely has the presence of mind to rear-face and cover the area behind them, and nearly misses the group of four scrabbling out of the sand he had just walked over. He takes his time to fire his shots and finishes them off without wasting a shot. The mayhem behind him dies down except for the high-pitched howling of the girl from the middle of the patrol. The tall, gray-haired lady is lying face down in a pool of blood.
In clips and phrases Per gathers that the girl had panicked and fired a round into the back of the woman’s head, and that she was sorry and that it was everyone else’s fault for dragging her along on a suicide mission instead of just staying put in the hangar. The mousy-looking guy has been bitten on the leg, but keeps saying he’s fine until he falls over and begins foaming at the mouth. The third black-clad Imperial kneels down next to him, whispers something into his ear, and quickly slides a knife into his chest. His feet kick a few times and then he’s gone. The girl stops crying and picks her weapon back up again.
The group begins to move again, they can’t use the ship. The two bodies are pulled sizable distance apart and booby-trapped with grenades. Around the group, the red things watch and bide their time, sucking on their poison fingers and picking at the dead. Per gets a good look inside the ship as they pass.
It’s a nightmare. A stack of dead bodies—spiders, humans, the red things and whatever else—has been built up so high it blocks the front windows. All around the fuselage, even on the ceiling, people have been glued in place by some red gel. He can hear them as he passes, listlessly moaning, their bodies distended by the writhing young of the creatures in their bellies. A host of the things in their infant stages, no bigger than the palm of a hand, crawl over the festering pile of corpses, gorging on the putrid flesh.
Per wants to burn the ship, to toss in a grenade and annihilate every trace of the abominations, but they can’t afford to. They have to be able to make it to the last ship in the row, the second one doesn’t have a closing door. Not having a closing door would be the least of their problems if the ship was full of dead bodies like the last one. The insanity of the situation had Per grinding his teeth.
“Hey,” says the peg-legged Imperial.
“Yeah?” Per responds. He’s impressed that the guy still isn’t fatigued by walking across the sand on a rifle-barrel, or, if he is, he’s not showing it.
“I saw you get those things, good eye,” he says. “You notice the sand they came up out of wasn’t disturbed? It was still flat as when they tamped this place out.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I think they’re tunneling under from the softer sand over there,” he says, moving his finger in and upside-down arc. “And popping up here where we wouldn’t expect it.”
“Makes sense,” Per responds, trying to figure out if there were still as many red dots in the dunes as there were a second ago. “Think that’s why that explosion set them off?”
“Maybe,” he says, turning his back to Per to cover his blind spot. “If that’s so they’ve probably dug a bunch of shallow tunnels around here.” Per nods, it makes sense, but it doesn’t set him any more at ease.
“Are you going to tell the rest of your group?”
“Already have,” the Imperial says, tapping the black collar on his neck. “You know what’s interesting though? Those things are using the same trick as the spiders, but you can tell they’re less equipped for it, that’s why it takes them so long to get up.”
“Yeah?”
“I think they copped the spider’s moves,” he says. “That means they can learn, or at least be taught.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Maybe. Either way it isn’t good.”
The group passes the second ship without incident. The big loading machine next to it is covered in scratch-marks and blood. A drag-trail leads away from the torn leather back-piece of the machine towards the dunes. Per fails to repress a shudder. Twenty meters past the ship, the group stops.
“Fuck,” says peg-leg. A chill sweat beads on Per’s forehead. Even the most distant red dots in the dunes have begun to bob toward the group. Whatever they’ve been waiting for to happen had begun. “Turn and run for the second ship, now, go!”
Per is turned around and off to beat the devil, sand flying up from his heels as his leg piston him across the runway. He sees them beginning to pop up, hundreds of them, as he turns to squeeze past the metal container in the doorway of the ship. He’s relieved to hear the clank of metal on metal mixed in with the sounds of footsteps behind him on the ramp.
“Move as far in as you can!” Yells somebody near the bottom of the ramp. People are screaming. The first few gunshots erupt in the steel cabin of the ship and shear loudness of them makes Per’s head spin. He looks towards the bottom of the ramp and sees a tide of red things pushing in to overtake the cabin. He moves forward without thinking, and out of his mind with adrenaline, begins to fire in short, controlled bursts down the left side of the cargo container. He drops to his stomach to get a better angle, and drops round after round into the seething mass of gnashing teeth.
He runs out of ammo, and for a single, frightening second one of the things makes it within a meter of him, but he slides his magazine home and once again he’s tearing the things apart shot by shot. He fires and fires and fires. The heat coming off the barrel burns his eyes. He reloads. He fires. He reloads again. He empties his magazine again, but before he can pull a fresh one from his rig, he’s being pulled back and somebody lays on top of him. There’s a massive thump that rattles his teeth in his skull, followed by another, and just before his vision begins to swim from the crushing weight of the body on top of him, it’s off and he’s being pulled to his feet away from his firing position.
Per tries to fight the hands on him, but they grab his face and soon he’s staring into the patrol leader’s cold, unblinking eyes. She shakes his face, getting his attention. If she’s mad, her expression doesn’t show it. When she’s sure his focus is on her, she speaks in loud, blunt sentences.
“Good job covering that side of the ship,” she says. “But you get scratched by those things, you die. You die, we all die.” She pulls his magazines out of his rig and grabs his rifle and his grenades, deftly slotting them into her own equipment pouches. “The pilot doesn’t fight. Get this thing as ready to take off as you can without being targeted by the Pericles.”
She doesn’t wait for a response, she just turns and heads back into the fray. Per looks after her for just a second, one of the moments that get stuck in time and seem to last forever. The rest of the survivors are firing into a pile of red bodies, some that move and some that don’t. The patrol leader pulls the pin on one of the grenades she took from him and deftly throws it, sidearm, around the right side of the container. It disappears into the throng of bodies and detonates with a muffled thump, spraying the interior with red goo and body parts.
The image stays with him as he ducks between the metal partitions that lead to the cockpit. He numbly goes through a pre-flight checklist the collar squeezes into his brain. The cargo bay door is too weighted down to close. Once he takes off, he’ll just pull past it, he thinks, and that’ll free up the door. He can’t see the Pericles from his seat, the cockpit faces the other way, but he can see across the runway to the fancy-looking ship he saw earlier.
A sallow-faced man sitting in the cockpit of the other ship catches Per’s eye and the man smiles and waves. His feet are kicked up on the console, and he’s thumbing through a book. Per is too stunned to do anything but wave back at him.
Behind him, the gunfire has become a constant. Between bursts he can hear muted yelling for ammunition, calls for covering fire and screams of pain. He blocks them all out and looks forward through the glass of the cockpit, waiting for his signal to move. He takes out his sidearm, removes the magazine and places it on the console in front of him, and puts the rest of the magazines where the patrol leader can find them if she needs them.
He waits.

[transmission interrupted]
[begin audio playback]

I rolled to my feet and started running as the spiders rushed around me to get at Jonson. I knew he was going to blow his satchel charge, go out with a bang and take as many of those things with him as possible. His face was burned into my mind as I stumbled to my feet, limping on an ankle I couldn’t remember twisting and making a beeline for the shadowy area beneath the hangar-bay door. I prayed to myself that none of the spiders are still hiding under it, and that every single one had run out to Lacy’s aid, and the prayer was answered. Waving trails of light reflected off the surface of the bit of ocean that pooled between the ramp embankment and the ship onto the bottom of the ramp, curling and waving rapidly back and forth. The steel was clean, empty, and I curled up as close as I could get to the center of my hasty shelter, blowing the air out of my lungs and plugging my ears in anticipation of the explosion. I didn’t have to wait long.
Jonson’s satchel exploded and the overpressure from the blast wave rattled my heart in my chest, pressed against my eyes and sucked the air from the sky. I felt concussed, even after the blast receded, my ears ringing despite my fingers blocking the sound. I took a deep breath and wheezed it back out, coughed, breathed in again and that time it held. My legs felt like jelly when I stood up, bending over to keep from smacking my head against the bottom of the ramp. I could hear sand and bits of whatever pinging across the metal surface of the ship like rainfall, accentuated by the occasional heavy thud of something large finishing its arc through the sky.
I dumbly reloaded my weapon, cursing myself when I had to clean a handful of sand that had packed itself into the magazine well. I cycled a couple rounds through the chamber, making sure the little grains of silicate hadn’t impeded the action of the rifle. It was fine. I checked myself as well, running my left hand over the parts of my body I couldn’t see to make sure I hadn’t been injured and just not noticed. Endorphins kill the inattentive, I heard my mother say in the back of my mind. My body was fine, serviceable at least, despite the limp.
I shuddered at the memory of the spiders holding me down, the hot, animalistic stink of their bodies milling about around me. I relished the confusion on Lacy’s face when Jonson stuck her, and wiped at my face without thinking. Her blood had gotten on my cheek when it had dribbled out of her mouth, and now it made a tacky stain on face, dotted with bits of brown and black sand from my dive beneath the hangar door. I made my way back out into the sun, wiping the gunk off with my shirt sleeve and wishing I had a mirror to make sure it was gone.
The brightness of the morning light made my head pound, and I squinted my firing eye shut to preserve my night vision for the inside of the ship. A wide, but shallow, crater of heat-blackened sand was all that remained of Jonson and Lacy’s brood. Beyond it, the camp glowed in the rising sunlight, heat waves already beginning to waver up from the heating surfaces of the metal buildings. I turned and made my way up the ramp.
My boots made heady thumps on the metal ramp with every footfall that was nearly inaudible over the sound of the surf and the slowly subsiding ring in my ears. The interior of the ship was considerably darker than it should have been, and the hundreds of white deck lights that covered the ceiling had been covered over with some unseen filter that softened their light to a dull red glow. The hangar itself had been almost completely emptied, save a few unused buildings and a row of all-terrain vehicles that still sat locked onto the cargo tracks that ran the length of the hangar from back to front. The hangar on the Orion had been an order of magnitude larger than this deck, because of the size difference between the ships, but the Pericles’ hangar was still impressive, with nearly 500 meters of floor space in a single room that stretched 100 meters to its ceiling.
I kept my rifle at the ready, but it seemed I was alone in this part of the ship. The stench of decay, and the things that fed upon it, hung in the air like a fog. I felt incredibly alone, keeping as silent as possible as I walked through the ghostly interior of the ship. A day ago, this hangar would have been bustling with activity, as loading machines and mechanics scurried back and forth to complete the myriad tasks that accompanied being a supply unit during a combat mission.
To my right, a 548 still hung from a chain lift, its wing disassembled for some esoteric maintenance task. Hundreds of little metal pieces sat unattended on an oil-streaked canvas drop cloth. A curved spatter of blood, dried to a coppery brown, framed an impact wrench that sat on the corner of the drop-cloth, still plugged into an electric floor-socket. An untaken action is a like a clipped wing, said my mother from the distant past, its definition lost in a purpose denied. I tried to shake my head to clear it, then picked up my pace through the mausoleum of dust-gathering equipment.
A single red light set into the bulkhead at the far end of the hangar was my only guide through what steadily became a clotted mess of bizarre organic material that covered more and more of the area as I progressed through it. It was thick, flat red stuff, vaguely translucent, with a texture and give that reminded me of fresh wood. In the last hundred meters to the door, the growth had covered the surface area of every static object in the vicinity, creating rows of rounded, indefinable shapes out of the hangar’s cargo.
I tested the gunk with my rifle before stepping on it. It covered too much of the floor to be avoided, and I’d learned a few lessons about the planet’s flora from my time on the island, if what I was looking at was flora at all. I poked it with my rifle barrel first, then pushed a gloved finger against it. It was warm to the touch, body temperature if I had to guess, and covered in loops and whirs like the skin on the palm of hand. I pushed one boot against it, then leaned my weight on it, but it didn’t give. I shrugged, then continued on over the callous-like stuff.
It absorbed the sound of my boots, and any other sound in general. I could still hear the faintest echoes of the sea from outside the ship, but even that faded as I came closer to the door that led to the belly of the ship. The ten-meter tall, bifurcated steel door had been left open, and I could still see the locking teeth through their new red coating as I got closer. Beyond the opening, there was nothing but complete darkness. I’d have to use the flashlight fastened beneath the barrel of my rifle past that point.
I stood there for a moment, taking in the dark beyond the door. The light over me painted my skin and clothes in hellish crimson light that faded as it reached the unidentifiable blobs of red-coated cargo that formed the path that led me here. Hundreds of finger-thin tendrils hung languidly from the top of the door, occasionally moving in the slow, muggy currents of air that issued from the mouth-like door. I felt stuck, immobilized by my dread.
I looked back at the sunlight streaming in through the hangar entrance behind me. I had adjusted to the darkness, and the morning was too bright to make out any discernable details. The massive entrance was a brilliant oval of light that cut into the murky shadow of the interior. I turned my back on it and, with due resignation, walked into the dark.
I depressed the switch on my flashlight as I walked through the door into the central corridor that ran the length of the Pericles. It cast a harsh, conical beam of light that illuminated what it was pointed at and little else. The red growth was thicker in here, and the same kind of tendrils from the doorway coated the ceiling, hanging only a meter or so over my head. Claustrophobic paranoia began to take potshots at my fraying nerves, threatening my resolve. The humidity of the interior was insane, my sweat gluing my clothes to my skin. I took the single canteen of water I had brought with me out and took a long swig, then returned it to the pouch at my waist. The water was as warm as the air, and did little to alleviate my discomfort.
I began my long walk down the central corridor of the ship, missing the convenience of my old collar’s navigation system. The walls were marked with directions to different parts of the ship, but I had to get right up against the wall with my rifle to see them through the growth. Jonson had said the first stairwell down would lead to the engine room, and eventually I found the door I needed, but it was covered over and impossible to open. I cursed to myself and hit the door with my gloved fist, making a dull thud that I felt more than heard. Something chirped at the far end of corridor and I turned sharply, trying to spot whatever it was with my light. Nothing. The beam fell off into darkness after a certain distance, and nothing moved.
I continued down the corridor, each hair on my standing up. The only things I could hear now where the sounds of the gear on my rig, the raspy inhalation of air through my nose, my blood rushing away from my heart and even the pop of the muscles in the corner of my eye as I tried to blink away beads of sweat. I shivered, despite the heat. At the far end of corridor, where I had come in, something chirped again, making me grit my teeth just a bit too hard. I gripped my rifle harder, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
Minutes of paranoid walking passed before I found a door that had been frozen open by the growth. I raised the light to shine into the black void beyond it, making harsh shadows of the doorframe against the wall. It was a stairwell, and it led downward. Mission complete, I thought to myself, moving through the door and feeling a moment of undeserved elation when I realize, for the first time, that I really might be able to make it out alive.
The stairs were nearly vertical, and I had to press myself hard against them during my climb down to avoid the red tendrils dangling from the ceiling. I inspected the floor before beginning my slow climb down, then turned off the flashlight. The barrel of it had become almost too hot to touch, and I worried that it might overheat on the way down. Having to find my way out of that place without any light would have been a nightmare beyond description.
I got to the ground relatively quickly, turned the light on and scanned my surroundings. The growth had made the room into another collection of shapeless nonsense, but it was hotter down there than it had been in the corridor, and humming, mechanical vibrations penetrated the suffocating quiet. I set my satchel charge down next to the closest large shape I could find, then opened the top of the bag and activated the timer after giving the bomb a quick onceover. A little red light blinked on to let me know that the explosive was active and then it was done.
“Huh,” I said aloud to myself. I turned and cleared the area with a broad sweep of my flashlight beam before going back to the stairwell for the climb up. I popped my shoulders, glad to be rid of the weight of the pack, then shimmied quickly up the stairs. I turned on my light at the top of the stairs and shone it out into the hallway. Waves of cold dread chilled my blood, I’m sure I had probably gone completely pale.
The path leading back to the hangar had filled with the red tendrils. They now stretched from the ceiling to just a few centimeters over the floor, hanging so densely I could barely see past the first row of them. I looked back down the stairwell and saw that the path I had just taken was being blocked as well. The red vines descended in a quick, smooth motion, like melting tallow, until they hit their intended length.
I moved my hand closer to them and the few closest to it began to writhe in slow waving patterns. Any genius could tell there was no passing through that knotted mess. I was trapped. Whatever had taken control of the ship was letting me know that. I walked into the center of the hallway and searched the unobstructed corridor with the light. It was empty, but the tendrils in the ceiling had begun to wave more freely. Only one way to go. I walked.
I moved down the corridor like a prisoner about to be executed, checking the few open rooms to my right and left indifferently. Most of them were full of vines anyway, and the tendrils barred entrance to the ones that weren’t. I saw a lot of things through those vines, things I’m sure the entity waiting for me wanted me to see. A room filled with dead people, their bodies neatly stacked in four pyramid shaped piles. Rooms where the walls and ceilings had been coated in clusters of eggs the size of toddlers, their dingy yellow shells partially embedded in the red growth. The ship’s navigation suite, where the ceiling tendrils had merged with the skulls of hollow-eyed, emaciated crew members. They worked slowly but carefully at their terminals, and I could see they were plotting a course for Grand Station.
The tendrils descended behind me as I walked, and I soon got used to the rubbery stretching sound of them forcing me down the corridor. I walked until the vines cut off the path, forcing me into a stairwell that led upstairs. I obliged the things numbly, climbing the stairs with a tired resignation. I hated the vulnerability, the helplessness of the situation, and a cold fire burned in my heart. I wondered if the explosion from the satchel charge would reach me before whatever was going to happen ran its course. I thought of Jonson and touched one of the grenades on my chest. A host of last resorts coursed through my mind.
At the top of the stairs I found myself in another, smaller corridor that led straight ahead to a circular doorway covered by interlaced tendrils. The air was at its warmest here, even more so than it was in the engine room. I took the canteen from its pouch and slugged back the last of the water, then wiped my mouth and returned it to its pouch as a force of habit. My heart threatened to beat out of my chest, and every breath I took was shaky and off-rhythm. It was final showdown time. I walked forward rifle up, and the tendrils swirled away from the doorway, filling the corridor with blinding light.
I squinted and dropped to a knee, trying to find something to kill despite being blind. I heard something moving and I fire at it. It squealed and I fired again, but I’m taken off-guard by something strong and ropelike that wraps around my left and ankle and pulls me toward the door. I fall on my butt and then I’m being drug across the ground into the brilliant white light of the room. I curse and go for my grenade, but something grabs my wrists and pulls them apart. I hold onto the grenade, but it’s useless with the pin still in.
“Please calm down, Katie,” said a somewhat familiar female voice. “You’re causing a scene.” I ignored her and tried to kick what I figured to be one of the tendrils off my leg. My vision has adjusted to light just enough for me to see my free leg being wrapped up by one of the vines and immobilized. I heard the woman laugh. “She is spirited, mother. Up you go.” Several more vines wound their way around my chest and then I felt myself being lifted up. Squinting, I could just make out a female figure standing a meter or so in front of me.
That she is, my dear, said a voice that I heard only in my head. It felt old, or, more accurately, ageless, and indefinitely feminine. My eyes had almost finished adjusting, and I could see that the area I was in was substantially different from the rest of the ship. The floor was covered in the same loamy moss that had covered the island, and thick green vines roped their way around the walls of the circular room. Hundreds of thick, glowing white mushrooms grew in a ring on the ceiling, filling the room with incredibly bright light. And in the center of the room, perched on a flower the size of a mattress, was Mira, her red eyes burning over the warm, inviting curve of her lips.
The vines slackened enough for me to stand on my own feet, but kept my arms spread apart. It’s time to prepare her for our meeting, dearest. Mira stood and began walking over to me. Her appearance had changed since I last saw her. She was taller, and almost perfectly beautiful. I kept my gaze directed at her eyes, fighting the urge to let my eyes glide down over her naked body.
She stopped close enough to me that I could see the detailed lines of her iris. Her skin was as white as a lily, and seemed to glow softly. She raised a single, delicate hand and caressed my cheek. A wave of familiar warmth passed through me, and I felt my heart skip a beat. Her hand moved back to the nape of my neck, her slender fingers slid into my hair and she pulled my mouth to hers. My body went slack in the vines. I heard the gentle thumb of the grenade falling into the moss.
She kissed me again, softly sucking at my lower lip, and she moved free hand up to the clasp of my rifle strap, deftly unhooking it and letting it fall to the ground. I tried to protest, to fight her off, but every kiss drug me deeper into a mind-softening stupor. Her hand moves confidently over my body, unhooking this, unclasping that, never taking her lips from mine for more than a second. She unclasps my rig and my shirt, then pushes them off my shoulders as the vines let my arms fall slack to my side.
Mira turned me around, kissing the spot where my neck meets my shoulders. Her hands moved down, caressing my stomach and she looped her thumbs over belt. I couldn’t help but lean against her as she pulled my pants and underwear down in a single hard motion. In my mind I raged and screamed, but my body remained hers. In a single, fluid motion she took me to the ground and began untying my boots, keeping me subdued by kissing my thighs. A moment later, I was fully naked, lying on my back with her at my side, running her smooth, warm palm in circles over my stomach. Her fingers found their way between my legs, then pushed against me. I gasped, and my back arched involuntarily. Her tongue flicked at my earlobe.
“I wish I could make you mine,” she whispered, sliding one of her fingers inside me slowly. I couldn’t hold back the moan that followed the rush of warm pleasure that spread through my body. “But you belong to the old mother.” She slid in another finger and went to work on me, making me clench my eyes shut. I beg my legs to shut, but they don’t respond. “Would you like to be mine? Tell me.”
Through the milky haze of endorphins clouding my mind, I managed to focus on the single, hot coal of hatred still burning in my chest. I envisioned myself beating her skull in with a rock, focused on every gristly detail. I imagined the flow of blood from the first strike, and then the deformity of her face after the second. I felt Mira startle and she pulled her fingers out of me, then looked me in the eyes with a scowl that twisted her beautiful face into something hideous and nearly inhuman.
“Well you’re no fun,” she said, sucking my juices off her fingers with a satisfied pop. She stood up, then bent and picked me up by the neck. She was surprisingly strong, and she easily drug me across the mossy floor to the large flower in the center of the room. My vision blurred from the tightness of her grip, but whatever poison she had put into my system kept my arms and slack and useless. With only one hand, she threw me onto the surface of the flower, then smiled meanly and wiggled her fingers.
The flower flexed beneath me, then began to curl up, folding me tightly inside itself. Mira watched as it enveloped my body and begun to sink beneath the loamy floor of moss. I struggled against it as best I could, but my body was limp and useless, then the last petal closed tightly over my face, and everything was nothing but suffocating darkness.

¬
I was sitting on a old, wooden bench in the yard behind my first house on Pressia. My mother was inside, cooking dinner. Dad had just left to fight the war he would die in a year from then. It had just rained, and the thick-bladed grass of yard shimmered with beaded water. The air had the green smell of spring. The sky was painted yellow and red by the setting sun.
The first time I had experienced this moment, I was 16, overly emotional and wiping tears out of my eyes with the sleeve of an ugly red shirt I’d lose in a move a few years later. This time I wasn’t. I was wearing the uniform I’d put on the day I graduated from the academy, but the white gloves where stained red with blood. There was a woman on the ground in front of me, an older, gray-haired woman with a deep laceration across her neck.
She was the first human I ever killed. Four years after sitting on that little wooden bench in my backyard I’d break into a house on a planet light years away from the one I grew up on and I’d slit her throat as she showered with a knife I stole from kitchen. A week after that I would be commended for killing a high-profile heretic and given a medal.
I was sitting on a cold leather seat in an air-conditioned room on Grand Station. A faceless clergyman explained the intricacies of the Thought Collar to my stone-faced father as a young female doctor who smiles too much clipped the collar around my neck. I had a small seizure from the connection process and fell out of the cold leather chair.
This happened when I was five, and I could remember thick, coppery taste of blood and the pain of biting my tongue. I had worn cute little white dress that my dad had bought to commemorate the occasion, but I only got to wear it once because blood got all over the front of it. This time I wasn’t wearing anything. I was the goose bumpy naked I had been eleven years from then, when I lost my virginity in an empty barracks at the academy.
The first time I experienced this, my dad had blocked my snapping jaws with his own hand, smiling and gently trying to calm me despite the little teeth cutting into his skin. This time, it’s Rick, and he can’t quite keep from wincing despite his best efforts. Both times I cried because I’m scared for the person helping me, and both times they reach up with their free hand wipe away my tears with the pad of their thumb.
I was sitting on a collapsible canvas stool, perched behind a sniper rifle on a warm summer day. Through the window of the building I’m in, on the street below, people were celebrating their liberation from tyranny with a parade. I fixed my crosshairs on an elderly fat man with a broad smile who waved cheerfully to the roaring crowds around him, and began to slowly pull the trigger.
The first time this happened, I was wearing a bland set of street clothes common to the region, but this time I’m wearing the modest black dress I wore to my mother’s funeral a year before I kill the fat man and his wife with five well-placed rounds. I pulled the trigger and watched the bullet hit the man in the chest, but this time he’s a Pressian instead of the human leader of a resistance movement. He collapsed all the same, and I finished the job with the same number of rounds.
This time, panic doesn’t erupt after the second shot, the people just stop cheering. I scanned the crowds and saw that all the people down there were looking directly into my eyes despite the distance. Their eyes are the milk-white orbs of corpses, and I recognize the people in the parade as the men and women I’ve killed over the years. They’re hail and healthy, save for the blank, colorless stares they give me. I fold up the rifle and get ready to leave.
I’m sitting in the mess hall on the Orion, wearing the workout clothes I’ll be in when I pod out of the dying ship in a few days. The hall is empty because I prefer to eat alone, my tour of duty on this ship will only last as long as I’m needed, then I’ll be transferred to my next assignment like always. Best to not make friends you’ll never see again.
The first time I experience this, I eat alone, shower alone, and then go to sleep alone in my solitary room at the end of the dorm wing, but this time I don’t do any of those things. This time I talk to the kindly-looking lady with red eyes that sits across from me, waiting for me to finish this thought till she speaks.
“Your life, in a nutshell,” she said, folding her wrinkled hands on the table in front of her. “How does it strike you?”
“More boring than I thought it would be,” I said back, looking down at the empty plastic tray in front of me, trying to shake off the cobwebs.
“Well, whose fault is that?” She asked with a chuckle.
“Mine, I suppose,” I responded, flicking the tray down the table to my left. After it moved a certain distance, it simply ceased to exist. “I’ve got a pretty usual battery of questions for you, which I’d rather we just got to right away. Is that an cool, or is it rude not to talk in riddles in this sort of situation?” The old lady cracks a wide smile. Her teeth were gleaming white, but shot through with spidery black veins. I shuddered.
“Yes, I suppose in the sake of timeliness that would be completely acceptable.” She leaned forward over the table and winked conspiratorially. “Though I do love my riddles.” She resumed her former posture, cracked her neck once, loudly, and continued. “Where to begin? With myself, I guess. For the sake of conversation, you can call me the old mother, or just mother, or anything really—except old.” She guffawed at her own joke and pantomimed wiping a tear from her face. “I’m projecting my thoughts directly into your mind, and your mind is making an approximation of my ‘human’ form so we can communicate naturally. I could just jam all this information in your head in one big transfer, but that method…” She shrugged and cocked her head to the side for a moment. “Tends to lack a certain finesse that I pride myself on, and you’ve already seen my physical form.”
“The island thing?” I asked. She put her palms up, weighing the air.
“Yes and no,” she said. “An accurate answer, but imprecise. That form is a state of being for me, but so is the material coating the inside of the ship your physical body is currently resting in. Biologically, I’m close to what you would identify as a fungus, but with a great deal more physical and mental latitude than such a primitive organism. My parts are myriad, and each cell is interconnected through channels that defy my ability to explain. I am here, on Pressia, but I am also light years away from here, in star systems so distant that physically uniting myself would be an exercise in futility. The connection between the parts is just as strong at its greatest distance as it is at its shortest. I am here, and I am… here.”
The old mother waved her hands and the mess hall fell away, leaving only the table we sat at floating in the quiet void of space. The sudden change of scenery made me jump slightly, and she made the tiniest smile at my expense. Behind her, a great white behemoth of a planet turned languidly in the light of its star. Millions of little black satellites rushed soundlessly in orbit around the planet until they accelerated too fast and shot off into the empty darkness.
“This,” she said with a smile. “Is one of the most successful versions of myself, and, by far, the oldest. I came to understand myself long, long before the galaxy you come from came to exist as it does today.” She looked off over my shoulder and nibbled at her first knuckle, then threw a palm up and shrugged. “In fact, I’m not even sure if original me is from the same universe as this one. I only understand physical distance as a sort of coincidence of density in my physical manifestation. It’s not important where the pieces are, only that they are.”
“No offence, but I’m only interested in what you want with me,” I said, placing my elbow on the table and resting my cheek on it. “Can we get to that part? I’m actually pretty fucking sure I’m dead, and I’d like to avoid a Sartre-inspired afterlife if at all possible.”
“Well, if hell is other people,” the old mother said with a quick chuckle. “Then you’d be exactly 9,241 times worse off with me.” She saw me raise an eyebrow and smiled. “That’s how many human minds I’ve made a part of me.”
“People you’ve eaten.”
“Again, precision and accuracy. My existence is quantified in terms of biomass. I add to that mass by breaking down and restructuring proteins, lipids, various nutrients, etc. and using them for energy or cell development, like any organism, but I can also record and store the electro-chemical information of neurological processes within myself.”
“You record people’s thoughts?”
“No, the people themselves. A perfect copy…” She winked again. “Just like you.”
“So I am dead, and you fucking ate me,” I said, leaning back and yawning. “Fucking wonderful. So is that it, is that all you wanted?” The old mother shook her head and waved the notion away with a flutter of her right hand.
“You’re still alive and perfectly whole, though the structure of your DNA has undergone a few minor upgrades to make your body compatible with my seed.”
“Your girl had me on the ropes up there,” I said, watching the little black balls firing off into space. “And I’m pretty firmly in your grasp, why not just convert me into whatever you need now? Why bother with all this dog and pony?”
“Manners, for one,” she said, playfully rolling her eyes. She snapped her fingers and space gave way to a green carpeted room with blue walls that I didn’t recognize. We were now sitting in high-backed red leather chairs as well, and I was wearing a larger, adult-cut version of the ruined white dress from my childhood. My hands felt softer as well, and my hair was clean and longer than it had been when I cut it. A brick fireplace crackled away to my left. The mantel was full of pictures of children of different ages, and they all looked very familiar. On the wall to my right a picture of myself and Rick, me in a white dress, him in a tux, hung in the flickering light of the fireplace. The old mother smiled at me, and her teeth looked far more menacing in the firelight. She gestured to the room with a broad wave of her hand.
“A possibility that’s no longer a possibility,” she said. “Your life with Rick if he weren’t a corpse and you weren’t a sociopath.” I glared at her, but she continued on, unfazed. “The result of a thousand choices you could have made differently. That’s what this, the ‘good’ end. Though, for you maybe this is the good end?” The room shimmered and changed. The pictures of the children vanished, replaced by two antique shotguns hung in an X and a glittering collection of trophies and medals. The portrait changed to me in my dress uniform, considerably older and well decorated, accepting the charge of consul by taking the Counter-weight from the incumbent. “Power. Love. Freedom from pain. The presence of pleasure. Freedom from death. Eternity. These things are all within your grasp, but they are beneath you.”
Her face hardens and she claps her hands, turning the room into great pyramid. We sat on top of it, side by side in two grand marble thrones. The dress had vanished, and I sat naked on the warm marble, my white skin burning with an ethereal glow as three suns set over the distant horizon. I looked over at the old mother, and she smiled at me. In a larger throne between us sat a massive man, his skin as radiant as the setting suns, and I knew he was my son. He stood, drawing himself to his full height, and held out his hands. At the base of the pyramid, a crowd of a million people fell to their knees and bowed.
Then it was gone, and we were back in the mess hall again. I was wearing the dirty clothes I had had on before Mira stripped me down. The hall was just as empty as before, and the old mother stared at me blankly from across the table.
“Your life,” she said, “has been a long, interesting thing compared to other members of your species. Perhaps, even, the most interesting of your generation, maybe even the century, but time has a way of paving over things. I’m offering you the chance to create something everlasting, and to be a part of it, to watch it grow to maturity and see the impact it has on the universe. Your unique physiology is one in a trillion, and it’s no accident you made it here. The most basic components of you are capable of melding with me in a manner that will make you, in essence, a god.” I laughed at that, a quick, incidental snort.
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding gravely. “The last human to come as close as you was the ‘living god’ your race has been subjected by, but he was an imperfect specimen…” She rolled her eyes. “Both physically and mentally. His parlor tricks and immortality are a fraction of what you’ll be capable of, and what your son will be capable of eclipses both of you the way a sun eclipses an ant, but only if you strike while the iron’s hot, so to speak.” She leaned forward over the table and took an apple I didn’t notice from the tray I thought I had gotten rid of. “If you give your body willingly to Mira’s animus, and let her plant my seed in you, then you will, one day, sit atop that pyramid at the left hand of the god you birthed.”
“Or.”
“Or,” she said, standing and cracking her back. “You can slay the animus and save your womb for some, less worthy vessel you pick up off the side of the road, but you’ll be putting your pearls before swine, so to speak.” I thought of Per, I don’t know why exactly, and she laughed at me. “Exactly.” She stood up and cracked her back, twisting sharply side to side and producing pops loud enough to make my ears ring. “Either way, it seems our time has drawn to sudden and abrupt end, thanks to your nasty little surprise in the engine room. I honestly didn’t think that would work as well as it did.”
“One more thing,” I asked. “Has any of this meant anything? If I was always going to end up here, if this was fated or designed or whatever, then did all that pain mean anything, was it worth it?” The old mother laughed and turned her back on me.
“It’s easy to see the path that led you here as being a straight road, even when you know for a fact you took a fork here and there. Even if I or somebody else blocks a fork here and there, you’re still the one that makes the decision to keep walking on down that road. Did it matter? Does anything? I’ve watched a sun be born out of a cloud of hydrogen, grow from a white dwarf into a red giant and then collapse into a black hole. The experience had as little effect on me as watching the synapses of a human mind slowly stop firing. Statistically speaking, even I could ‘die’ one day, but I doubt there will be anything around to record the event.
“If you care, then it matters, at least until you don’t care anymore. That’s the best I can do for you.” The old mother waved a casual hand over her shoulder and walked off down the aisle of empty seats, leaving me alone. When she had disappeared completely, I could still hear her last words echoing in my head.
“Creation and destruction. Make and take. The dual forces of the universe from the simplest particle of energy to the most complex sentient thought process, they’re all driven by those two simple actions. So what’s it going to be?”
Creation or Destruction?

[end audio playback]
[signal terminated]

END ACTION 10: [schicksallied]
AND BEFORE THE CHOSEN ONE SHALL BE PLACED A STONE OF RED AND A STONE OF GREEN
IN BESCHEIDENER KNOPSE, BLUHET EWIG

[axmanjack]

Well, there it is guys.
All 25,867 words of it.
I'm going to drink and take a nap, then play a video game.
Yep.
Let me know what you think,
-AMJ

[NamelessSynthetic]

\o/ Excellent excellent excellent! When can we possibly expect the next installment?

[axmanjack]

\o/ Excellent excellent excellent! When can we possibly expect the next installment?

I dunno for sure, but I'm thinking about starting a week from when I posted.
The next section shouldn't be as anywhere near as long as action 10, so it'll probably be cranked out in about a week.
Most of the plot threads have been wrapped up, and only three main POV characters are still alive and plot relevant.
Once their story arcs terminate, that'll be the end of Pressia, and the little over a year and a half of my life it's been a part of.
It's weird to think about.
I'm finishing the single longest piece of writing I've ever completed and I can't actually put my real name on it or show it to my close friends.
Because it's weird.
Soooo weird.
But, it's been fun to write, and the ten of you that pop in to tell me how much you love it really make the process worthwhile for me.
So, yeah, look back around Friday.
I'll know by then.
Later ya'll,
-AMJ

[Throbby]

Haven't read the last section yet, but I'll reiterate that I love your story and the process is worthwhile for us too!

[axmanjack]

I'm starting the outline for the Final Action tonight, and I'll likely finish it tonight as well.
I'll probably start writing tomorrow afternoon, and I might even try to write a bit tonight.
This is it, my constant readers, the final stretch.
No more platitudes from me from this point onward.
I'll get back to you guys when I've made progress.
-AMJ

==>

[axmanjack]

I'm 3000 words in and nearly done.
The final action is going to be pretty short.
I hope to be done by tonight.
-AMJ

[axmanjack]

Got stuck on the last section.
I'm going to finish up tomorrow.
Til then.
-AMJ

[Eumel2]

awesome as fuck
im kinda missing a good sex scene though^^

[axmanjack]

Can't seem to make myself start writing, pushing her back another day.

[axmanjack]

Last Action: [redemption]

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Pressia: Last Action

[begin transmission]
[begin audio playback]

The old mother had left, and I was sitting alone in the mess hall in the Orion. It changed slowly after she faded from view. To my left, the hall had morphed into a jumble of twisted wreckage, lit only by the fluttering tongues of flame that had begun to eat away at the distant walls. To my right, the hall had become cleaner and brilliant white light flooded down from the ceiling lights. Two stones had materialized in front of me on my plastic lunch tray, each the size of a fist and covered with minute engravings. The both glowed with an intense inner light, and brightly enough to cast shadows of my hands down the length of the tables to my right and left. Left and right. Red and Green. Creation and destruction.
I felt tired, and the light from the spherical stones in front of me and the lights to my right hurt my eyes. My choice was clear, I felt, tentatively outstretching my fingers and preparing to pick up the green stone and put an end to all that nonsense for good. An inch from picking it up, firm fingers encircled my wrist and pushed my hand gently back to the table. I heard the familiar click of a tongue.
“Katie,” said my mother as she sat down at the bench next to me. “Being tired is no excuse for poor judgment, I know I taught you that.” There she was, her ice-chip blue eyes staring back into mine. She cocked the familiar old half-smile I hadn’t seen in years at me, and I couldn’t help but beam back at her. My heart shifted in my chest.
“Mom,” I said, trying to keep myself calm. I sniffled a bit. “You’re dead.”
“Yeah,” she said with a laugh, “you can tell because I’m talking in this hideous peasant tongue. Gah! Why can’t you think in New Prussian?” I laughed aloud in response, confused and still overjoyed to see her.
“I don’t know… mom… there’s been just, so much that’s…” I tried to stammer out anything, but memories of her flooded into my mind and thickened my tongue. The grayed strands of hair mixed into her wheat-colored ponytail. The single, overly white false tooth she had come home with after a month away on business when I was eight. She tongued it when she was thinking, I remembered, and I saw her tongue it then, almost reflexively.
“Don’t get too worked up, daughter,” she said, leaning sideways to rest her elbow on the tabletop. “I’m not back from the dead, or even myself. You’re just thinking of me. Your subconscious is trying to prevent you from being an idiot and going off half-cocked, so now you’re thinking of me, even though you aren’t sure why.” I rubbed at my eyes, they were starting to itch and I didn’t want her to see me cry, whether she was real or not. The image of my mother looked around the bifurcated mess hall. “What an absurd metaphor,” she said, then we were standing on a beach that no longer existed. I looked around.
“Earth,” I said, taking in the surroundings. The area for miles around us was unpopulated, nothing but powdery sand behind me and ocean ahead. The tide sat still and silent against the bank, as though it were frozen in time. Overhead, the sun sat at its apex, filling the world with blinding light. My mother nodded, then cocked her head and started to walk along the beach and I followed her. As we walked I found the ocean too cold to walk in, and the sand far too hot for my bare feet, and so I took care to walk the terminus between the two, where the surf had cooled the sand.
“This is all gone now, but it does feel quite familiar, doesn’t it?” My mother asked, and I agreed and she continued. “There’s a name for that feeling, it’s called the Sagan effect.”
“I remember that from school,” I said, relishing the feel of the sun and the wet sand between my toes. “Any organism native to Earth, whether born on Earth or otherwise, will instinctively know when they’ve set foot on earth, even if they’ve never been there before.”
“Correct,” she said. Her footprints didn’t leave marks in the sand. “It’s a sort of genetic déjà vu, and the first definitive proof of non-human sapience in animals, but, conceptually, it became taboo after the ‘discovery’ of Pressians, who likely exhibited the Sagan effect when they were brought to Earth. Before Earth was destroyed a few decades back. You’ve never been here, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s a shame that the place we all shared a common link to is gone. What you’re walking in now is just a memory of a picture you saw when you were much younger, but even still you can feel the power of this place.”
“Mom, why are you showing me this?” I asked, struggling only slightly to keep up pace with her in the sand.
“It’s a better metaphor for your ‘choice’ than that abysmal dining hall,” she said, “and this is better than those two awful rocks.” She took my hand and placed a coin in my hand. It was a simple, hard iron circle with a single, smooth gouge out of one of it’s otherwise smooth sides. “Which side of that coin is creation?” She asked, and I turned the coin over and over in my hand, trying to figure out the answer.
“The smooth side?” I asked, rather than said, knowing I wasn’t getting the whole picture.
“Possibly,” she said, “but there is no perfect answer to that question. The cut is obviously an act of destruction, but in that act a second side of an otherwise featureless coin was created. If the choice were between creation and destruction, what purpose lies in the side of the coin that represents neither? Is the choice then stagnation or change? Are those choices different from choosing either tradition or rebellion? And those choices, and they the same or different from subordination or obedience?”
“I… I don’t know,” I said, thumbing the cut in the side of the coin, feeling the upturned metal scratching against the ridges of my fingerprints. “Yes, they’re all different questions, but that’s because you chose words that mean slightly different things.”
“Exactly. Perception,” she said, taking the coin from me and tossing it away behind us, “of choice creates the illusion of choice itself. Absolute freedom of will is as illusory a concept as fate. Taking the choices given to you wouldn’t have led to you choosing one of the available option, it would have been you choosing to give in to the old mother’s chicanery, and my daughter knows better than that.” She reached down and squeezed my hand, and we stopped our walk along the beach.
“So, what do I do?”
“What comes naturally,” she said, resting her other hand on my shoulder and giving it a slight squeeze as well. “I raised you right, and you made it this far on your own. I’m sure you’ll be able to get over this last little hump on your own.”
Then she was gone, and I was standing alone in a green and red carpeted hallway facing an open door. Behind me, the path stretched further than I could see, and ahead, only a short distance away, white light spilled through the door into the hall. I stepped into it.

[end audio playback]
[signal interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Per
Landing Zone Bravo

Per grits his teeth, barely able to feel the vibration in his gums over the sound of gunfire behind him. Sound itself has lost meaning as time stretches on in the cabin of the ship, battle cries, gunfire and screams melding together into one continuous, hot noise. He thinks that if he even survives this, it’s likely he’ll have gone deaf. If he survives. If. The word of the fucking day is if.
He sits with his arms crossed in the cockpit of the ship, watching the writhing mass of red bodies that fill the window in front of him. The things crawl over each other, jostling for position to strike at the window with their claws and mashing their faces against it to give purchase to their nasty looking fangs. The light of the rising sun shines through their translucent bodies, coloring Per’s face a sickly red as though they were some sort of macabre stained-glass window. His pistol and ammunition are still where he left them.
One of the things is staring through the glass directly into his eyes, its own eyes a colorless orb like that of a sharks. A viscous stream of yellow poison drips from the fang it has pressed against the glass, only a meter away. Per imagines the noise the ugly thing would be making if he could hear it, and the thought of its tooth clunking on the glass sends a chill up Per’s spine. He thinks, involuntarily about what will happen if the ammunition runs low, if the line behind him breaks and the swarming red mass pours into his safe little hovel like wine filling a glass. The pain of the first few bites and the fear of dying giving way to the sort of floating inexistence he had felt with the device on his collar.
The ground moves beneath him, and for a second he thinks the things are trying to sink the ship into their tunnels. Cold sweat breaks out on his forehead as he thinks about dying in darkness. The soundless, blind pain giving way to nothing at all. The things pick up their pace squirming around on the glass, but he notices that something has changed. The thing staring at him has lost focus, and its predatory gaze has twisted into something resembling surprise. It and the rest begin flailing wildly, turning to swat at their backs and Per sees the blisters and seared flesh and realizes what has happened.
He fires up the engines to full and guns the vertical thrust. The smell of burning bodies fills the cabin as the exhaust ports vent superheated air directly into the throngs of red things milling around the ship. He hopes the Imperials figure out what’s going on and have the sense to grab onto something as he moves the ship the first few meters up and forward off the ground. He feels the resonating scrape of the huge cargo container sliding away from the ramp, and then they are free of the surface, flying further and further away. They’ve made it.
Per flies the ship with robotic precision, but his toes curl in his boots anxiously. He waits for the screaming red indicator lights to flash and tell him that he was wrong, that he followed the wrong cue and took off too early. He waits for the first jarring impact of anti-air fire to tear the craft apart and send them hurdling to the ground. It never comes. A hand slaps his shoulder he looks over into the face of the patrol mouthing something, but he can’t read her lips. Her right hand is centimeters from his face, her thumb slapping up against the rest of her fingers as though she were trying to use an imaginary sock puppet.
Close the hatch.
Per nods and flicks the necessary switch. The pneumatic arms of the cargo bay door engage the slab of thick steel and cause the craft to shudder less than he expected as the door closes. The patrol leader flashes him a quick thumbs up and he nods. The rush of wind through the open hatch subsides, and he finds he can hear again, despite the constant ringing in his ears. Mumbled snippets of conversation waft up from behind him as his ears readjust. At least four distinct voices. At least four survivors, maybe more. An uneven smear of gunky, red whatever on the glass in front of him is all that’s left of the red things, the rest had fallen off shortly after liftoff. He pulls the yoke to the right, hoping to get a view of the wreckage.
He hovers a few hundred meters over where the camp should be, but it’s completely gone, save the charred wreckage of the back half of the ship that has slowly begun to sink into the ocean as it fills with water. On the landing strip, a pile of red bodies nearly a hundred meters wide and at least twenty meters deep wriggles and smolders where his ship had been only a minute before. The other ship, the one the man had been sitting in, was gone. Circling closer to the camp he can see that a massive crater had been blown into the beach where the ship was docked, and blackened sand had been blown onto the shore, half covering the buildings in the fire base.
“Shit,” says the patrol leader. “They did it. Wow.” She nods her head to nobody in particular and takes the seat next to Per. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I highly doubt either of them survived that.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking at the gun on the console in front of him, “it doesn’t seem likely. What now?”
“Well,” she says, leaning her head back against the seat. “I’ve got to figure out a way to get these folks home, but we’ve got no functioning communication equipment to hail the Casa Nostra.”
“Kah-sa what?” He asks, hovering a bit lower to get a better view and seeing nothing through the viewport.
“It’s the name of the ship in orbit around this planet,” she says. “It’s the only way back home for us. She’s a big girl, but if we can’t talk to her, she can’t tell us where she is, and trying to find a ship even that big in all that vacuum is essentially impossible if you don’t know where to look. This can will run out of air, if the seals even hold, before we find her.”
“So what then?”
“A recon party is bound to get sent down after they see that explosion, so we’ll set up a rescue beacon and wait for them to pick us up.”
“If they saw the explosion,” he says. There’s nothing on the beach. He turns and heads inland.
“Yeah,” she says, “if.”
They travel in silence, and neither the patrol leader nor any of the other survivor says a word before they land. None of them ask where they’re going. He doesn’t volunteer the information. The ship flies away from the beach and over Relei, which lies smoldering beneath them. He can see the ruins of the palace. To his left, he can see the smashed and flooded remains of the residential sector. Fires burn intermittently here and there. Nothing moves. The patrol leader doesn’t give any indication of whether the scenery affects her at all.
They move far past the dead city. Over roads and desert and green fingers of rivers that creep through the sands towards the sea. Brown gives way to the green of farmland, and he makes preparations to set the craft down on a grassy field in the middle of nowhere. The ringing in his ears has almost subsided. The ship touches down with a soft, disgruntled thump and he cycles down the engines and opens the rear door. He looks over at the patrol leader and she matches his gaze after glancing at the pistol on the consol.
He hears the survivors mill out of the back of the ship quietly. There’s no more crying. There’s no more gunfire. There’re no more screams. As the combat high subsides, he feels ennui rest itself on his shoulders like a cold towel.
“Did you know it’s treason to leave military equipment in enemy hands?” She asks.
“We have the same rule,” he replies. The gun still has a single round in the chamber. The rest of his ammunition sits on the console between them. “So what now.”
“Now? There is no now,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “We walked here on our own two feet, simple as that.”
“Why?”
“To get out of a hostile situation,” she says.
“No,” he asks the question again. “Why are you letting me go? Even if you don’t report this, one of the rest of them might.” She laughs.
“Grunts like us get a lot of orders in our lives,” she says, “and you have to follow all of them, though some less than others. This one, I’m following to a tee.” She stands up and walks through the back and out the door. He watches her go, leaving him alone in the ship. The interior of the cargo bay is dark, and covered in all sorts of gristle. It stinks of gun smoke and ozone and blood and fear, but she walks through it unfazed, clean as a whistle, out into the bright new day beyond the door. He closes it behind her, then fires up the engines and takes off, leaving them behind him.
In the air, he circles back towards Relei, only glancing down at the clearing once. Per doesn’t see a thing, and he doesn’t know how to feel about that. A heads-up display on the console shows a small squadron of aircraft hundreds of kilometers away from him. He cruises at a lower altitude and wonders to himself if they’re Pressian or Imperial. He takes his hands off the yoke and lets the ship steer itself, then takes the pistol off the console in front of him and ejects the single round in the chamber into his palm.
Per looks at the small, copper and black thing, turning it over in his fingers, then puts it in the pocket of his utilities. He disassembles the pistol, and throws the pieces over his shoulder into the cargo bay behind him. He pushes the extra ammo off of the console to where he can’t see it anymore. He puts his hands back on the yoke.

[transmission interrupted]
[begin audio playback]
I flailed out with my hands, groping frantically for something to grab a hold of. I barely registered that I was underwater, and the briny taste of the ocean filled my nose and lungs, burning and cold. Waking me up.
I oriented myself and pushed up with my feet, felt my toes sliding through mucky wet sand and I kicked for the surface. Little voices in my mind grew louder as I pushed upward and upward. My eyes were blind to anything but the growing light. The world I could see was little more than a confused, blurry mess. My fingers broke the surface first, and the warm air over the water filled my blood with adrenaline. A last, final push and I was free of the ocean, my eyes clearing, but my lungs still short of breath. I instinctively pushed myself to shore, the waves washing me closer to my goal than my feeble attempts at an overhand stroke.
Then I was on the beach, sputtering and vomiting salty pink water onto the flat brown banks of sand. My first deep breath felt like an electric shock. It rumbled through my body, collapsing my fear-tightened muscles to the point I couldn’t control myself. I heaved again, coughing up more and more fluid until I felt dry inside.
The waves came and went while I suffered my rebirth on the sands of a foreign shore, washing away the foamy spew with foam of its own. I stayed, curled in a ball, my forehead dug into the sand until I felt the first tenuous hint of strength return to me. My breathing was ragged, and punctuated by coughs, but I was still alive. Naked, half-drowned on a beach, but still alive. Despite the cool breeze blowing in from the sea, my wet skin didn’t bother me. In fact, I could say I actually felt pretty warm.
“Ha-ha!” Yelled a voice near me, accompanied by the sound of someone clapping. Strong hands, from the sound, I thought, my head aching from the sudden volume. In contrast to the steady rhythm of the sea, the applause was skull-splitting. “You’ve survived, just as the old mother promised.” Strong, smooth hands felt beneath my arms and I was lifted to my feet.
My knees buckled beneath me, but the hands held me up. They felt familiar. A warm, unsettling feeling crawled through my guts and I vomited one last time. My vision had returned just enough to see the silly little mound of pink bubbles, rather like a lump of alien cotton candy, being sucked away by the tide.
“What happened? Where … the ship…” My eyes crossed as I tried to form the words. My blood felt too thick for my brain.
“Gone,” said whoever was holding me. “Completely gone, thanks to your last, little act of rebellion.” His voice was vaguely androgynous, almost like a boy whose voice hadn’t quite dropped after puberty, but without the awkward scratchiness. He clucked his tongue three times at me, then let me go. I could stand on my own. “But…the old mother sacrificed that last, little bit of her body she had here and cocooned us in it. We flew away from the ship and all the way down here. I’ve got to say, it took a while for you to finally bloom, you must have had soooo much on your mind.”
I stepped away from whoever and ran my hand through my hair, shook my head, and tried to get a bead on the situation. The nausea had seemed to run its course, and I found I could make a few, short steps forward. I took a few more, remembering bits and pieces of a conversation I’d had with a dead woman, and another I’d had with a woman that had never truly been alive. My stride gained a pattern, and the motion felt invigorating. I looked at my hand, white as a sheet, as I walked.
“Katie? Katie? Katie!” The voice called as I walked. He chuckled a bit. “Where are you going?”
“Find a shirt,” I mumbled back, my brain involuntarily listing off several incorrect possibilities of why my hand had become colorless. Severe blood loss? No. Wearing gloves? No. Wrong hand? No. Fucking bleach? No. A bit of my hair fell irritatingly into my face and I brushed it away. It was as white as spider silk. The thought of spider silk made me shiver and the hand that had picked me up grabbed my wrist, firmly, and spun me around. “Are you fucking serious?”
“What?” Mira’s suddenly more man-like face asks with a voice that I recognize to be an octave-deeper version of the original. “Yes, I guess? Uh, maybe, but you know you don’t need to wear clothes anymore right?” I stammered something in response, and tried to avoid looking at the thick appendage that now dangled between her legs. I swallowed, blinked and pulled my arm away from her, or him, or whatever.
“Uh, no, I do, but, uh, I’m, uh, leaving now… so, yeah, goodbye.” I turned to go, but he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, hard enough that time to nearly knock me off my feet. He glared at me, his red eyes glittering maliciously in the white expanse of his face.
“Look,” he said, pointing a fat finger at my face, his hand gripping my shoulder tightly. “Your eyes are blue, and I don’t know what that means, but we have to follow old mother’s will and consummate this relationship.”
“Blue?” I asked, confused.
“Yes, blue,” he said in a huff. “The old mother said that if you came up with red eyes, you’d be all huffy and I’d probably have to do this by force, and that you’d definitely be more agreeable if your eyes were red, but their blue and I’m hoping that you’ll just go along with this so that we can move on to the next step.” He sounded exasperated, but I shrugged his hand off and slapped down the finger he had jabbed at my face.
“Yeah,” I said back to him, pinching the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger, needing the fold of skin their in frustration. “Yeah, I get that, there were plans, or whatever, but I’m not in for it.” I looked up at him, he was getting madder by the second, but I couldn’t have given fewer shits at that moment about pissed alien transsexuals. “I’m going…” I looked around, trying to find smoke from the ship or, anything really, that would give me a hint as to where I was. “… somewhere else. Whatever this is, it isn’t happening. Sorry.” I turned to walk away. I didn’t make it far before he hit me from behind. My reflexes were off, and I stumbled a few steps before landing face-first in the matted, wet sand of the surf.
“Fine then,” he said calmly. I could hear his feet slapping wet against the sand. I could feel the flecks of water splashing the back of my thighs. He had hit me in the back of the head, but I wasn’t as dazed as he thought. He knelt down behind me and placed a hand on my left buttock.
I got a feel for where his face would be, then rolled hard to my left and brought my right heel around in a hard arc across his jaw, snapping his to the left and spraying blood and teeth onto the sand. He screamed and I stood up, then brushed the sand I could get to off my knees, face and chest. I turned to face him, and saw he was trying to push his dislocated jaw back into position. His eyes were glowing bright enough to cast pale red light on his cheekbones. I shrugged and turned my palms up.
“Like I said, ‘no.’” I dragged one of my toes through the wet sand, making a coarse line, then pointed at it and shook my head. “Get the picture?” I turned and walked away, but I heard him getting up behind me.
“You bitch!” He screamed, but I ignored him. “You have no right, no fucking right to deny me this! My son is your god! You can’t. Just. Walk. Away.” I looked back over my shoulder, and stopped in my tracks, then turned back again. He stared into my eyes and crossed the line in the sand, his own personal fucking Rubicon. “I’m not going to let you.” He lowered a shoulder and charged. I watched him sprinting in what felt like slow motion, closing the distance between us as I set my back foot and readied for the impact. He hit me and I rolled with it, letting his momentum carry his body over mine and rolling to my feet. He was strong, but strong didn’t mean he knew how fight.
I got ready for him to get up, but I didn’t press my advantage when he took his time getting to his feet. He threw sand when he got up, but I just closed my eyes and ducked beneath his wild first punch, tossing my right fist into his ribs a couple times as I moved around him. He growled, and threw a wild mule kick back at me that I pinched between my right side and my elbow, pulling back and throwing him off-balance. I notice his broken jaw has healed when he tries to jump up from his knees and grab me, but I plant an overhand right on his face that burst his nose like a balloon and makes him go limp into the sand.
Mira came to his senses and made an angry swipe for my leg, trying to pull me off-balance. I just raised it out of the way, then smashed my heel down on the back of his head, driving his broken nose back into the ground. I grabbed two handfuls of his hair and dragged him to the water, not wanting to have to do the extra work of snapping his heavily-muscled neck.
He was heavy, but sliding his body across the wet sand wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. His shattered nose was already knitting itself back together. I shuddered and pushed his face beneath the water. He woke up, his red eyes still glowing but suddenly full of fear, and I could see him panicking beneath the waves. His fingers clawed at my hand on his neck, desperately trying to free himself. Desperately trying to survive.
I thought of jungles and spiders and castles and plants and blood and fire and pain and sweat and death and death and death and , and I let him up, falling back onto my butt and watching, astonished, as he sat up, sputtering. Alive. He stole a terrified glance at me, shaking from adrenaline. He tucked his chin into his knees and wrapped his arms tightly around them.
“Why?” He asked me, his voice breaking on an involuntary sob. I shrugged, nonplussed.
“Because… I could.” I got to my feet, not bothering to brush off the sand this time. He had begun to cry, and he tucked his face away from me in shame.
“We were supposed to be together forever,” he said. His words fell out in a sad, pained jumble, losing their cadence and falling over each other with each breath. “There were plans.” I walked away from him, leaving him curled up with himself on the sand.
“Not mine,” I said. My hair fluttered free in the breeze around me, as I looked up into the fresh sky and the blue waves washed clean the velvet shores around me. The sun was all the way up now, it was officially morning. The sand to my right wasn’t too hot, and the ocean wasn’t too cold, but I found I preferred walking the line between the two.

[end trans]
[audio playback terminated]
[tape one finished]

END LAST ACTION: [redemption]
TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD, AND I, I TOOK THE ONE LESS TRAVELED BY
AND IT HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE
AUF WIEDERSEHEN

[axmanjack]

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

AN AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

Wow, so here it is. I’m finally done with a novel that, for all intents and purposes, should never have turned into what it’s become. I’m actually pretty impressed with myself, so let me gloat a bit and give some insight on what happened to make Pressia what it became.

I wrote the first ‘action’ before I had an entire actual premise in my head for the story. It was, admittedly, little more than a heavy-handed attempt at writing porn that I had decided to make because I was bored and didn’t really have anything to do but try to get attention from people on the internet. I shared the first action on 4chan’s /d/ board, got some positive feedback, then promptly forgot about it for a few months.

By the time I posted the first action to the LOK forums (back when creative corner was just one board), I had been lurking the forum for a while. I figured I might as well contribute something to the site, considering all the content I got for free from it, and I started the Choose Your Own Adventure Novella thread that you’re probably on right now.

Pressia wasn’t supposed to balloon to the size it is now. I originally planned for there to be around 14-ish actions all roughly 2000 words a piece or less, because there simply wasn’t supposed to be any character development. However, I planned to play every voting session true to the plot map I drew up for Pressia after I made the first post, and, honestly, you guys surprised the shit out of me. I didn’t intend for Katie to be this badass chick you guys voted for.

To keep things interactive, and give you all a semblance of control over the story, I designed the first few votes to define Teuschle’s character. In order, you guys chose 1. (a woman who stays calm under pressure), 2. (who would pick up a gun and a medical kit, but not heavier clothing), 3. (who would rather go down fighting than surrender), and 4. (sacrifice her dignity to protect a comrade who protected her). I was blown all-the-way the fuck away by your decisions when I was crafting the early chapters. In fact, I never expected her character to become anything more than the typical “my hips are moving on their own” hentai heroine.

So, the story evolved as time passed. That sort of thing happens with fiction, but in this case, I still had to keep the narrative within the confines of the Choose-Your-Own-Story framework I had created at the start. I had no idea you guys would turn Teuschle into a hyper-competent, battle-weary super soldier, but I can’t think of a way that this could have gone that would have working on this project feel so rewarding.

That’s it for Teuschle, Per, Team Black and the rest of the gang. It’s actually kind of sucking a hole out of my chest to write this. I’m still kind of giddy over the fact that I’m fucking done. Like, seriously. Done. Wow. Ok, there’s still a MOUNTAIN of editing to do, and the size and shape of the actual finished project will definitely change, but you heard it first here, this is how Pressia ended.

I’m going to try and sell the thing after I’m done polishing it. (Said the gigolo to his friends, lol). Dunno if anyone’ll buy it, dunno if I care or not. My favorite readers have already finished the story . … Finishing a story makes me a bit bubbly, so if you’ll please excuse my silliness.

Honestly, I couldn’t have finished, that is, wouldn’t have finished this without support from the few loud voices who’ve bugged me to keep putting out copy along the way. Here’s a thanks to you guys for sticking with me along the way and making sure Katie finished her stroll through the jungle.

(A Big Shout-Out to All My Commenters | In Order of Appearance}
Lucky777
ReaperCarnage
Lumino
Aliaga
Gorepete
Smackman
Ethomas
Thaedael
Darkluke1992
Ethomas
Talin
Blakdutchman
Thealchemist
Riley65
ByHisBillowingBeard
Guitargler
Qwerttree
Icaelus
MobileGrunt
NamelessSynthetic
Callumg9911
PervertedFreak
TheDaughterOfHades14
Dariusthethird
Red Jello
Amerninja38
Corpse_face
Whatdontlookaatme
Yillsemkcuf
Demon6k
Cthulhu
Kyos_sahrin
Daxtinator396
STJIMMY
Dercas
Throbby
Eumel2
ADIDAS
The Management

An especially big thanks to NamelessSynthetic and thealchemist, who prodded me the hardest to finish this.

But the biggest thanks right now goes to you, reader. Yeah you, looking at the page right now. If you read this and everything before it than you’ve made it worthwhile for me to write every single word.
I fuckin’ love you guys.

Thanks, and goodbye,
-AMJ

[transmission terminated]




[….]











[….]













[…]








[insert tape two to continue]

See You Space Cowboy
-AMJ

[thealchemist]

Sniff.... Where the hell is tape two? Nameless, do you see tape two anywhere?! On a side note, thank you for the great story there axman. I hope for better stories to come.

[NamelessSynthetic]

Sequaaaalllll..... Seeeeeeeeequuuuuuaaaaaaaallllllll. xD

Thank you for the amazing ride, AMJ. I'm going to parrot alchemist's post and hope for more to come from you, perhaps even a "what happened after" reference in another story, but who knows? I am a bit sad about the ending, but hey, that's a good thing. A mediocre ending couldn't make me feel like this. The whole time, I've felt like those transformed by the various inhabitants of the island, (Mira, Lucy, etc.) have had things forced upon them. I was kinda/sorta having a fantasy where Mira would get with Katie, and Katie would be able to convince Mira into letting Per and Team Black go, yadda yadda yadda and whatnot. But hey, I like this ending too ^_^

You've done one hell of a job here. Hopefully, if you can get published, the book does end up netting you some dough from the extraordinary effort you've put into it.

Until next time,
~NS

[axmanjack]

Sniff.... Where the hell is tape two? Nameless, do you see tape two anywhere?! On a side note, thank you for the great story there axman. I hope for better stories to come.

Insert Credits to Continue.

Sequaaaalllll..... Seeeeeeeeequuuuuuaaaaaaaallllllll. xD

Thank you for the amazing ride, AMJ. I'm going to parrot alchemist's post and hope for more to come from you, perhaps even a "what happened after" reference in another story, but who knows? I am a bit sad about the ending, but hey, that's a good thing. A mediocre ending couldn't make me feel like this. The whole time, I've felt like those transformed by the various inhabitants of the island, (Mira, Lucy, etc.) have had things forced upon them. I was kinda/sorta having a fantasy where Mira would get with Katie, and Katie would be able to convince Mira into letting Per and Team Black go, yadda yadda yadda and whatnot. But hey, I like this ending too ^_^

You've done one hell of a job here. Hopefully, if you can get published, the book does end up netting you some dough from the extraordinary effort you've put into it.

Until next time,
~NS

I hinted at it through the native's comments about the island, but it may not have been completely apparent. The island's effects can make people lose their natural resistances, but conception and, following, the physical changes that create matrons, have to be accepted willingly. Mira, Lacy and the mysterious woman accepted the island's gifts, and the people who rejected them usually died as a result.

The ending was left open-ended on purpose, in keeping with the theme of free will that dominated the last third of the story, but you should be able to see where people end up going based on their drives and personality.

Did you think it was a sad ending? That wasn't my interpretation, but could you tell me why?

Again, thanks for the well-wishes and the positive feedback everybody. I'm taking a week or so off to defragment and work on some personal projects. Please feel free to ask any questions about the story or me or upcoming projects you might have and I'll answer them when I get back.
Also, I'm thinking about running a quick RP game in LOK's RP forum as a shameless attempt to increase my fan base.

Till then,
-AMJ

[NamelessSynthetic]

No no no, I didn't mean that the ending was a sad one. What I meant was that I was just the tiniest bit disappointed that Mira and Katie didn't... you get the picture. XD Galactic domination of the perfect race! But still. I can't vote more than once, otherwise I'd be voting constantly to reach that 1000 mark. x.x We're only 8.5% there, for cripes sake!

~NS

[tadpole92]

Wow. So I discovered this little gem WAY too late and read the entire thing in about three days. This was an amazing story - definitely not something I would have expected to find here. This was a seriously great story and I want to thank you for making it. I hope to see more stories by you sometime in the future! Also, axmanjack, (and I don't know if this was mentioned in earlier posts or not), but there's a site by the name of Literotica.com where authors such as yourself can post stories that they make. Often times they have erotic elements to them, but it's not a requirement. If you ever decide to write more and, for whatever reason, don't want to post it here then Literotica is a great alternative. Just my 2 cents, but I think you would be really popular there as you are here. Anyways, thanks again for such a great story!