Spoiler (click to show/hide):
Action 9
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The words came quickly, building momentum after the first utterance until they flowed, river-like out into the cramped cabin of the airship. They watched me, their expressions blank as I yammered my way through the last few days. The landing, my time on the island, my capture and escape, every last detail spilled out unedited. They never even blinked. One of them took notes. Another drifted to sleep. The hull vibrated and hummed as the engine cycled, faster and slower, until I was done and we landed.
Jonson spoke first.
“If what you’re saying is true, then I’d respect your decision,” he said, pointing a finger to my neck. “But you lose a collar, you lose veracity. There’s no way for us to know if you’re even who you say you are. How can we believe you?”
He’s right, I thought, biting the inside of my lip and sighing. Without a collar people could lie, they could invent new realities to supplement the real one and you’d never even know it was happening. If they’d picked me up with a collar he could have downloaded my data right there. Katie Teuschle, SF: Orion survivor and escaped POW. I could see in his eyes that he knew I wasn’t bullshitting him, the man wasn’t an idiot, but protocol was protocol and I’d be remanded into custody of the closest cleric for screening. I had made it back behind friendly lines but I was still as alone as I had been since the crash. A thought of Rick’s face slid through my mind and I shook it away the second it came.
“Guess you can’t,” I said back to him, standing with the rest of the soldiers as the door began its slow descent to the ground. He shrugged and grabbed a collapsible crutch from the soldier sitting across from him. They caught eyes briefly and I could see the little tics in their movement as they passed signals over a private comms channel. Jonson extended the crutch and made his way carefully down the ramp.
“After you,” says the soldier by the door. She shoulders her rifle but keeps the barrel pointed at the ground, waiting for me to take the first steps off the back of the bird.
We were on a beach somewhere far south of the town and the palace. A good distance away a wispy pillar of black and gray smoke plumed out across the sky. The stench of a burning city mixed with the salty air of the ocean. It was an old stink, too familiar to war. A presidium class ship floated off the shore, tethered to the seabed. Even from several clicks out I could hear the hiss of it boiling the native water to make it drinkable and sucking megagrams of fresh oxygen into its scrubbers.
I walked forward on autopilot, taking in the sights of the camp while the soldier kept pace behind me. There were only a few hundred in the landing party. Mostly infantry, they scurried around rank and file to put up twenty-man tents and a mess pod, while exo-suits lumbered back and forth from cargo holds with kiloliter water tanks and equipment pallets. In the sky, fighter pilots circled the camp in groups of three, twenty-one black dots formed into little V’s.
Here and there the soldiers would pause, or an exo-suit would stop for a moment in its routine to look at me. I could feel the unasked questions while they sized me up, but nothing on their faces registered as recognition. I wasn’t a publicly wanted individual or they’d notice my face. When a citizen was wanted for inquisition their face would be added to the inbox of every Collar in the universe. For that matter, POWs’ faces were sent out as well, especially during combat missions. My standing as SF didn’t make me special, so why didn’t anyone recognize me?
“Hey hey,” the soldier said from behind me. “Stop there.” We had come to a mobile bunker, a house-sized chunk of metal capable of withstanding stellar bombardment. It had adapted its color to the sand it sat on, and from the sky or a great distance you wouldn’t ever be able to see it.
“Operations?” I guess, halting in the sand and resisting the urge to wiggle my feet into it until they were buried.
“Can’t say,” she said back. I turned to face her and she raised her rifle halfway. I got the message and gave her my back again.
Being a prisoner is boring, I thought, counting grains of sand while she gave the appropriate commands and codes to the door guard inside. I watched her shadow and profiled her movement habits to pass the time. She was right handed and had a habit of placing all her weight on her right foot for comfort.
She was new to wearing a mask too. She hadn’t learned to hide her body language because her subconscious told her the mask was sufficient concealment. Her shoulders shrugged. Tired. The pop of a few fingers beneath the black glove. Bored or impatient. The sound of sand moving while she constantly shifted position. Uncomfortable, maybe nervous.
I slowly stop moving altogether and she stops feeling as though I’m a threat. I wait for the next shift in her weight, when she moves back to the right leg. She’s bored and doesn’t expect the foot that hyperextends her knee to come. The mask muffles her scream of surprise and I’m on her, the knife from her kit buried deep in her neck before she can register what’s happened. She shudders, slaps a quickly weakening hand against my back while I hold her and dies.
“Hey Teuschle,” she said, shocking me out of my daze and back to reality. “They’re ready, let’s go.”
The heavy metal door to the bunker slides aside with a groan and a sallow-faced man in black greets me with a broad smile and open arms.
“Ensign!” He declares. “Come on in, we’ve been waiting.”
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[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Hive Mother Lacy
Impact Zone, Relei, Pressia
Acrid smoke wafted through the silent remains of alien city, curling in wispy tendrils along and away from the sides of buildings as Lacy and her brood stalked through the shadows in search of food. Lacy had had the presence of mind to remember the old emergency drills when she saw the second sun in the sky. Her children had sensed her distressed and formed a living shell around her. Several had died, a necessary sacrifice.
One of the spiders, a spitting image of its father in size and shape nuzzled her leg as it passed. She could feel their hunger growing as they themselves grew, all them now nearly the size of her torso. Two of her older offspring had devoured their injured brothers after the blast and their ruthlessness had sent shivers of pride up her spine. Her brood was strong, and its blood would be passed. Inhuman screams pierced the air and her cohorts froze alongside her, then faded deeper into the shadows of the ruins. The red ones were coming.
Lacy smiled as the first of a small pack rounded a corner, it chitinous black eyes pulsing sickly yellow light onto the dim, dirt-covered ground. It smelled her, hissed and signaled to it’s own entourage, a group of twenty identical abominations. They almost make it to Lacy on their long, ungainly limbs before her children fall upon them. The red ones’ slivery claws have little effect against the thick hides of her brood and the melee is over in seconds. Iridescent orange ichor seeps from the wounds of the bizarre creatures. Her children drink at it greedily.
Lacy basked on a rock as her children, sluggish from their blood meal, crowd around her to rest and grow. The largest, her favorite by far, crawled over his siblings to rest his bristly head on her exposed chest. The leathery folds of its neck were warm against her skin. She reached up and stroked the unyielding steel of its mandible, sighing as she felt it drift into dreamless sleep.
The change, her transformation into what she had become had been difficult, she thought idly, but worth it to be so close to her little army, her boys. The spiders’ abdomens rose and fell around her. She could almost hear the rubbery stretch of their exoskeletons and muscles shifting as they grew. Soon they would have to leave her to start brood of their own. The thought made her sigh and push her favorite spider’s head to her face. She nuzzled her cheek against his other mandible, then kissed it gently and let his head go back to where it was comfortable. She knew she would miss them terribly, but she had a matronly duty to ensure her progeny made her a grandmother.
Lacy breathed in steadily, tasting the salt air of the sea, the stink of the red ones’ blood and the chemical stench of the smoldering city. There were no prospects here for her children, no usable mates. The red ones made excellent food, but lacked the appropriate equipment. She sensed, in fact, that they weren’t really animals at all necessarily, but actually some type of moss or plant. She’d have to find one of the natives, a healthy girl like she had been, to receive her children’s blessings. Many girls, she hoped, so that her favorite wouldn’t have to slay so many of his brothers for the right to breed. The thought of expanding her matriarchy, of watching her new daughters take her grandchildren on their first hunt flushed her cheeks filled her chest with warmth.
“Such little miracles they’ll be,” she said aloud, ruffling the bristles on her favorite’s brow. “Just like all of you.”
“I agree, matron,” came a voice from close by, too close. Lacy turned to look fast enough to wake her brood, and the momentary dart of fear sent a rumbling shock through them. Red eyes peered out at her from a dirty brown shawl. A woman, from her voice and the way she smelled. None of the spiders so much as shuffled to attack. The woman stepped forward into their circle, then bent and stroked on of Lacy’s children along the top of its abdomen and it cooed in response. “Such miracles.”
“Who are you?” Lacy asked, thinking back to when she had first awoken in the alien prison, heavily pregnant and delirious from fever. The guards hadn’t dared to approach. She had begged for water. Red eyes in the darkness answered, eyes that matched her own. This woman meant her no harm.
“A matron, like you. And… an admirer.” The woman sat and continued to pet the arachnid as it and its brothers settled back to sleep. “My own child was difficult to bear, to raise. Unlike you I was able to choose my patron. Your children were rarely picked willingly. Their species is notoriously dangerous. The other women, I’m afraid, didn’t survive the ordeal, but you are very different. Stronger, full of will. You have my respect, and my admiration.” The woman pulled her shawl from her face. Lacy was surprised to see a human.
“You’re not from here,” Lacy said, somewhat regretting conversing while on her back. She though about shifting, but the peaceful drone of her favorite’s abdomen as he breathed kept her still.
“No. I, like you, was once a human being.”
“We aren’t humans anymore?”
“I think you know the answer to that question.” Lacy tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Though the answer begs more questions and is a question in and of itself: ‘What is human?’” The woman’s smile was a simple flash of teeth, there and gone in an instant.
“Not us?”
“An answer that is, I’ll admit, deceptively beguiling in its elegance. True in content and false in its lack of specificity, it’ll do to prevent our palaver from continuing on in a fashion that would preclude my reasons for beginning it.”
“Sorry, what?”
“I’ve lost you, my apologies, us older ladies tend to go on at times.”
“You came here for something, right?” The darkening Pressian night around them was depthless, and Lacy’s new red eyes were better adapted to dark places.
“Yes, my sister, a warning and an offer.” The woman slid two ceramic flasks from beneath her robes and twisted the top off of one, taking a long swig before setting the other on the ground in front of her. “Your children have grown strong, but they will not live long if they cannot give their patronage. Their numbers will whittle down as they feel the burden of competition descend upon them. You are right to favor the one who lies upon your breast. He is the most loyal, the strongest, and his seed will flourish wherever it is planted. They are all capable of bearing your grandchildren, but you must seek out your own kind.
“The ship on the beach will never leave its moorings. Send your children under the cover of darkness and they will find immeasurable bounty, but be warned.” The woman leaned closer, her eyes an iridescent crimson. “A higher being than you has claimed the green eyed warrior who slew your patron. Only blood and pain will find you if that claim is challenged.”
The woman’s voice softened, and she replaced her shawl. “Heed my words and move softly through this land, the unyielding gaze of the Matron sees even the machinations of spiders and their queens.” She tapped the top of the ceramic flask. “This is simple water. Slake your thirst, your children’s satisfaction isn’t the only sustenance you need.” Then she was up and gone back into the shadows, barely a sound but the wisp of heavy cloth and leather against the ruined stones, then nothing.
Lacy stifled a quiet “thank you” then rested her head back, letting the stiffness her in her neck dissipate. Her hearing adapted to the silence again and soon all she could hear was the gentle exhalations of her brood around her. She tasted the air, letting it fill her mouth and nose and throat. Ichor, ocean, fire and ... something else. Somewhere on the Pressian beach her new daughters were waiting, oblivious, for their broodmother. She could almost feel the heat on the horizon. The gentle glow of their bodies lumped together in some tight, drab encampment. She felt her brood stir as her anticipation spread to them.
Lacy opened her mouth and tasted the air.
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[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Detainee #C8990
Detainee Block, Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia
The prisoner rubs his thigh a few inches above the top of the cast the medical staff fitted his broken leg with. They had been quick and professional, definitely not what he had expected given his own people’s tendencies towards prisoners. Ground soldiers were treated as commodity on Pressia, worth little more than the bullets they fired and only then if they were talented fighters. Prisoners were traded and sold like cattle, and injured prisoners were left to die, executed if they were lucky. Wasting medical supplies on a crashed enemy fighter pilot would have been inexcusable. He tried to wiggle his toes but they were immobilized by swelling. His instep itched terribly.
They had put him indelicately on the rough, synthetic cloth of one of the cell’s two bunk-like cots before slamming the metal-rimed, translucent door shut. The walls were made of steel and covered in some sort of matte, oily finish that drank the light from the ceiling fixtures and flattened the only ambient noise, an air-conditioning vent recessed into the ceiling, to a dull vibration. There were no echoes, no boot scrapes or snippets of distant conversation. The prisoner tried to shift his leg and rub the itchy side of his foot against the rough stitching in the fabric at the base of the cot. The motion set his leg on fire and a suffocating wave of red heat rode up his chest to steal his vision for a moment.
Hours passed on the cot in the dull vacuum, maybe days. Minutes? One of his warders came and went what seemed like an eternity ago. A square-jawed woman who came and put a heavy black color on his neck that snapped shut loudly in his ear. She spoke two questions directly into his mind: Thirst? Relief? The words were visible in his mind’s eye as both the letters familiar to him that made up the words and the strange, alien glyphs that comprised the woman’s alphabet. A host of sensations and images accompanied them as well: His own mouth, dry after a long night of sleep; the feel of water sliding over a parched tongue; condensation on the outside of an ice cold glass; the mental panic of needing to urinate and not being able to find a place; finding the place and feeling the relief of fading pressure.
The sensation of her speaking directly to his mind was disconcerting, but not entirely unpleasant. The simplicity of the thoughts left them in a sort of shared space, as though they were universal constants, experiences they had both lived their entire lives with and found, in an instant, common ground.
He had pushed the thought of water toward with the sort of inelegance a toddler shows in forming its first words, even feeling a moment of pride when she received the message and set a plastic straw between his lips. Drink, came the thought across the channel between them. And he did, suckling like a babe in his weakened state and taking a sort of perverse comfort in knowing his enemy didn’t want to kill him, that it was somehow distasteful to them to abuse prisoners.
She sensed when he had finished and left as quickly as she came, only returning some indefinite time later when the water had run its course. The prisoner had understood that through some unknown accomplishment of science they were able to glean his thoughts through the collar. A moment of pure fear for the loss of his internal privacy shook him to the core and he flailed about in his mind, searching for some door to lock, some wall to build to keep the from getting in. His warder had merely placed her hand on his shoulder and radiated the thought of calmness into him. His breathing slowed alongside his heart. He had asked her what they knew about him and she replied with one single, quiet concept. All.
That, however, was hours ago, or days, or minutes, and the prisoner found that his soft, conflict free imprisonment was beginning to drive him insane. His mind ran in circles as he tried to decide whether to keep them out, or if that was possible. He tried to hide the shame he felt towards the catheter the warder used to remove the urine from his bladder. He tried to the shame of feeling that shame. He tried to project to them that before his current predicament he was a brave man. He remembered they could see his every moment of cowardice and he tried to project that he wasn’t a liar, but that sometimes he had moments of weakness. He realized they could see every lie he’d ever told and he fell into a mental feedback loop of denials and justifications. Frustration built within him and he tried to scream, but found his voice too weak to manage more than squeak and a few sputtering coughs.
Eventually he had given up, which brought him to where he was now. The dull burr of the ventilation system had a hitch every eight beat, and he realized he had been clicking his tongue along to it absentmindedly. He thought of his jailors watching him doing such a boorish thing and stopped, then thought meanly of doing it anyway to irritate whoever was observing him. Then he thought of how childish he would look to them, a captured soldier on foreign world clicking his tongue in some misguided attempt to lash out his captors. He decided to cluck, and hoped his rhythm would be impressive, then realized he had been imagining the hitch in the ventilation system’s rhythmic burr.
For hours, it seemed, his own tortuous internal dialogue was all he had to keep him company. Every thought was met with a counter thought. He tried to think of good times in his life and invariably settled on some embarrassing anecdote. He tried to think of ways to escape or turn the collar off and found his self going in circles, every good idea obviously moot from its inception. Eventually he begged his warder to come in, to hopefully slow the creeping erosion of his sanity. The timeless context of his imprisonment made it seem as though she appeared instantly, his water bottle in one hand and his waste bladder in the other.
Please. Speak. He threw his request into the void and feeling the presence of her mind filling it nearly brought him to tears. She set the items down next to the cot and took a knee next to him. The proximity brought her close enough for him to see her face. She had very dark, weathered skin that folded into deep wrinkles around her mouth. Her bushy white eyebrows sat in contrast the midnight umber of her eyes. He could feel himself falling into her. Her thoughts came in sentences and single word concepts that rang with clarity as his unpracticed mind absorbed them.
You are our prisoner, he felt her say. The sight of thick chains and walls rushed through his mind’s eye. You are being kept under observation. Towers covered in transmitters and glass eyes complement his last thought. You won’t be harmed. The last image fades away, replaced by the feeling of soft sheets of padding encircling him, constricting his movement but protecting him from some unseen threat. The prisoner felt relief wash over him, as though this had been the first time the thought had crossed his mind.
Why am I alive?
Information. The concept in his mind was all encompassing. He felt the uselessness of resistance, the freedom of surrender. He tries to probe his warder’s thoughts and finds only a vacuum. He inquests, she answers. His collar could only give information freely.
They communicated in this way for what seemed like hours, or minutes, or seconds, until he ran out of questions to ask and she left, the door shutting with a hollow thud. There was nothing more to consider, the prisoner thought, considering her last, solemn answer to his questions.
Will this end, he had asked.
No.
The prisoner rubs his thigh a few inches above the top of the cast the medical staff fitted his broken leg with. They had been quick and professional, definitely not what he had expected given his own people’s tendencies towards prisoners…
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The inside of the bunker had been modulated into a field office, and not by anyone with any degree of taste. The cleric swished around to the other side of a slate-gray steel desk, and the featureless black cloak he wore flourished this way and that with every slight turn of his shoulders. My guard gestured to the flat, backless stool bolted to the ground a meter or so in front of the desk. The metallic surfaces of the room gave every noise its own distinct, tinny echo. Two yeomen stepped forward from either side of the room, their every movement a brisk, self-conscious jerk.
“We’ll take charge of the prisoner from here, ma’am,” said the yeoman to my left. My guard nodded, turned briskly, and left, casting a shaft of light across the blade-nosed cleric’s face for just a moment before the door shut behind her. He’s all black eyes and teeth, his smile cutting ear to ear across his face, but there’s nothing behind the friendly face. Above the blameless proclaimer collar there was nothing to read. He was emptiness, vacuum. I never broke eye contact with him, but I still can’t say if that was of my own will or his. What a fucking creep. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the yeoman to my right making a show of flexing his grip on the combustion pistol at his waist.
“Don’t cause any trouble, ma’am,” he said. The thought of killing him flickered through my mind briefly and I swear the cleric saw it in me when the corner of his smile tested its limits and raised just a hair higher.
“Oh, I highly doubt there will be any difficulty with our guest here,” he said, the monotonic inflection in his voice filled the room, flat and colorless as the gunmetal walls. “Despite the barbarous nature of her profession Ensign Teuschle is actually quite the refined specimen.” He shuffled a bit in his chair, leaning forward and placing his chin on his interlaced fingers. “She received a proper upbringing from her parents on New Prussia. Genau?” The casual Prussian threw me and I gave a half-hearted smile in return.
“Ja, und wie kennen Sie diese obskuren Sprache? Nicht von dem Universität in Grand Station?”
“Nein. Ein einsames Kind findet Trost bei Bücher.”
“Sind Sie ein Autodidakt?” I asked, he laughed and raised a hand. The two guards exchanged curious glances now and then. My native language is a rarity even on my home planet, and a collared society has little need of foreign tongues.
“Bei Gelegenheit, aber dass is weder hier nicht dort.” His smile softened and he leaned back in his chair. “What we’re really here to discuss is your pending excommunication for heresy.” My half smile faded as well. He’d done research on me, gotten in my head as easily as he pleased just by knowing a few small facts about my past. I felt myself being drawn ever closer to the void behind his eyes, the black spot where his soul had collapsed upon itself.
“I never faltered,” I said, finding my voice absorbing some of his flat, toneless delivery. Beads of sweat broke out along the back of my neck. He was making me nervous.
“Fair, what little data we do have on record before your unauthorized removal of your collar suggests that your allegiance never swayed, however,” he continued, leaning in further. “Your submission to the abominations and the alterations made to your genetic makeup suggest the possibility that you’ve been compromised both physically and mentally. The genetic aberrations that you now carry with you make you, I’m afraid, little more than an abomination yourself.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It may very well be, but—“ A sudden blast of gunfire from outside cut off his sentence. Almost instantly the scream of sirens filled the steel chamber, causing the cleric’s nose to turn up distastefully. He continued: “Laws are laws and one can hardly defy the mandate of God, correct?” Seconds passed in the screaming red din of the sirens, I never responded. He leaned back and gestured to the doors. “Could you two go out and see what all the fuss is about?”
“Your holiness,” said the male yeoman, still flexing his fingers on the sidearm. From the corner of my eye I could see the heavy veins on top of his large hand, the tightness of the uniform sleeve on his forearm, the soft, callous-free pad of his thumb. He was strong, but untried. Untried steel breaks only when you need it most, and his frayed nerves betrayed him. “Our charge is—“
“Perfectly capable of minding her manners with or without you in the room, my son. I applaud your dedication but the only thing preventing the Ensign from dispatching the lot of us is her own predilection for decent behavior. Now make some use of yourself out there with your compatriots and leave me to my guest.” The yeomen nodded and mumbled a quick affirmation before leaving. The door opened on screams and gunfire, then closed on silence. He continued.
“Now that we have ourselves a bit of privacy, I’ll introduce myself formally. My name is his holiness, the Metatron, but you can call me Marl.”
“Why is the Metatron needed on Pressia to try a heretic?” I asked. The cold steel of the unpadded stool had begun to drain the warmth from my legs, I resisted the urge to shift.
“I’m not really here for that. I’d been following your progress since I received a universal transmission from a secret admirer of yours, the late Comms officer of the Casa Nostra. You really are quite impressive, did you know that?” The sudden shift in conversation, my resentment at being a pawn builds up in me and I can feel myself getting ready to boil over.
“Watching me? My collar feed? There’s enough manpower and equipment here to vaporize this rock and nobody thought of sending a fucking exfiltration team to pick me up? The others? Do you know what the fuck kind of shit goes down on this goddamn planet? Hijacker species, rapist fucking pigmen, god damn living island?” I knew I was yelling, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even try to slow down. “I’ve been down here living in my own personal hell and I’m trained for that, but fuck you, you fucking cunts have been watching me down here writhing the entire time? I thought I was alone, that I was going to fucking die on this fucking rock or get sold into slavery and you cocksucking fuckers have been floating up above me for god knows how long and you just. Fucking. Watched?” I don’t know when I had stood up and gone to the desk, but there I was only a few inches from his face, shaking with my palms flat on the steel desktop in front of him.
I looked into his eyes for what seemed like forever, even now I only barely remember wishing he would shift or flinch or attack and give me any reason, any reason in the world to give into my instincts and tear him apart. We stayed like that, me looking at him and him at me until he broke the silence.
“Yes.” The answer drained me and I stumbled back to my stool. He never broke his smile. “And by now, I’m sure, you know why.” I nodded as the pieces fell into place in my mind. A military force with no anti-star defense systems couldn’t have scuttled the Orion, a presidium-class ship couldn’t jump across the universe on such short notice and foreign powers couldn’t reverse engineer a technology they had never had access two. I reached up and touched the spot on my neck where my collar used to sit.
“Black Flag,” I said, both to Marl and to no one at all.
“Precisely,” he responded. “I’m sure you picked up on it a while ago, but it is hard sometimes to understand why you’ve been betrayed by something you’ve given so much of yourself to. I suppose that’s why I feel a bit of kinship with you, our stories are remarkably similar up to a point.”
“Why? The Pressians? This “heretical” biosphere?”
“No, I’m afraid more pedantic motives were in mind when these cards were dealt,” he says, and for the first time his smile truly faded. “The living god created this place as a testing field for a genetically advanced race of humans using material from the alien growth that granted him his own power. He had grown bored with us all and sought to improve, so to say, on the original design by modifying various characteristics of the human genome. He succeeded, to a degree, but also gave the alien growth a place a method to mature its self. After millennia of evolution, the growth matured to its original form, and god grew jealous and insecure and decided to have it destroyed.
“Unfortunately, our “living god” was still just a man after all and the ages hadn’t been kind to him. He grew weak, old and cruelly paranoid, which is why our civilization has been purging the universe of dissention and heresy for the last several decades, even going so far as to destroy our own original home. The Consulship, in its infinite wisdom, decided to try and supplant the living god’s rule, and, in fact, would have succeeded if I hadn’t accelerated the black flag mission on Pressia, started a few small uprisings and shot Consul Tanner to death in his chambers.” He shrugged.
“He was a good leader, but humanity needs to spread and find its own way, not be bound together by one singular doctrine, so he had to go. The living god had to die to allow humanity to break the plateau he had mandated for it, and the abomination out there in the ocean, well… all this would be quite moot if another person managed to ascend the way he did.” He spread his hands palm up, leaned back and laughed. “I’m sad to say but I think I might just be the best assassin in the room at the moment.”
“And me,” I said softly. “I’m just a pawn in all this aren’t I? Like I’ve always been. A fucking chess piece.”
“Well,” he responded. “I’d like to think of you as a queen of sorts, for your tenacious versatility if nothing else.” I glare at him but it doesn’t make me feel any better. He sighs. “We are all, including myself, pawns in the larger game. Though you’d like to think me some grand conductor of this orchestration I can not admit to any feat of cleverness above the skill of any other man or woman. In fact my influence can be chalked up to little more than a fortune of incidence, though I don’t begrudge my intellect for allowing me to take full advantage of the situation. Honestly a brighter man may have found a way to accomplish all this with far less bloodshed,” he paused. “Though I doubt that admonition would do anything to lighten your burden.”
“No fucking kidding.”
“Well, to continue your metaphor, the pawn that crosses the board is allowed to retrieve a piece that has been taken by the enemy. Your piece is waiting in the medical ward.” Rick. My heart jumped in my chest at the possibility that he was still alive. He catches everything that crosses my face and the smile returns. “The captain is in the furthest room on the right, and you’ll find the medical center 100 meters south of here. Do be careful, your old friends have become new enemies and your old enemies are swiftly approaching.” I jump to my feet, ready to go.
“You’ll just let me go?”
“It’d hardly do for a commissioner of deicide to hold a woman for heresy. I’m many awful things ensign, but I’ve never been a hypocrite. Take care my dear.”
I turned to open the door on the chaos outside and looked back at him as it closed behind me. He didn’t move an inch. If I didn’t know better he might still be sitting there, beaming that creepy smile at no one as the whirling emergency light washed his face in red over and over again, unable to cast a reflection off of the inky, empty blackness of his hollow eyes.
[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Unknown Life Form
Releian Coast, Pressia
She hears the motion of the water lapping about her. Her senses have become so much more blunt, unrefined since the transformation was completed. Thousands of miles away a fissure in the tectonic plate her body floats radiates gentle vibrations. A few thousand kilometers up the beach she could feel the raspy wisps of boot-falls and heartbeats as the soldiers fought to protect themselves from the spider-girl’s brood. Next to them she could feel the warm thrum of the starship she would use to escape the planet siphoning gallons of water from her ocean. In the ocean itself she could hear the shallow breaths of her children as they let themselves be sucked into the vents below the ship and the brittle crack of their carapaces being dissolved by the ship’s filtration system. It wouldn’t do much to slow them down. Mira opened her three, massive red eyes and surveyed the ruins of her cocoon.
The corpse of the old-mother still smoldered in places from the stellar bombardment. Inside the impact area some of the children who weren’t thrown from her during the burst crawled blindly about, squalling in the dim red luminescence of her eyes. They picked at the dead and stuffed their faces with whatever scraps of protein they could find. The majority of them would die here, unlike their brethren, who were flung far into the sea and the city and had much to feast on. They adapted quickly to their environments, eating what they could find where they landed. Some of them had already mated, and had begun to sequester their mates in hand-dug burrows. When her gaze passed over them they basked in it, her loving children.
It is time to move, my dearest, says the old-mother in her mind. Time grows short, and you must feed and prepare to lay your final seeds. Mira accepts the order in her mind, graciously thanking her for the advice. The old-mother had chosen Mira to be her successor, and though her body had perished, her mind live on in Mira’s subconscious as a guide. Mira focused her mind on moving and could feel the muscles of her foot beginning to guide her across the smooth sand washed in by the tide.
The thought of passing her gift on to her green-eyed sister filled her with warmth. She reached out to her in her mind, pulling the threads of their common connection. Teuschle. Mira reached out and caressed her, hoping the smooth palm of her good intentions would soothe the girl. She seemed stressed, full of doubt and pain. Mira could feel her running from one strange encounter to the next. She could feel her fear and anxiety growing even as the girl refused to admit those fears to herself. Mira pulled at their connection a bit too hard and felt the girl fall to her knees and vomit. Guilt over her zealous attempt made the tendrils in her mouth quiver and flex involuntarily.
Be calm, my dearest. Her transformation is incomplete, only your other sisters will be able to speak so eloquently with your mind. Reach out to them.
Mira focused on the spider-girl. She didn’t begrudge her the hundreds of children her brood had feasted on, though she did find it somewhat distasteful to think about. Her babies being sucked dry by the eight-legged beasts. Mira tried not to let that thought slip through as she greeted her sister. Lacy.
They speak in phrases and ideas, and only for a moment. Mira feels Lacy’s distrust. The woman only cares for her brood, and Mira finds she can respect that outlook. She tries not to find Lacy’s threats of violence funny after she mentions her intentions to move to the human encampment, and relishes in Lacy’s gratitude when she transmits her knowledge of the camp’s layout as a bargain for the ship, its crew and Teuschle to be left to her. Lacy mumbles something about a hag, the other sister, who had already made her promise to lay off Teuschle. Mira sends her thanks and the connection withers and fades.
Leave your last sister to her rest. The old-mother warns Mira that her final sister needs her rest and Mira abides by the rule, focusing all her attention on making a swift arrival at the encampment. Out in the ocean she can feel a group of her children floating idly by the slowly sinking corpse of some large mammal they had just finished eating. In the city she can feel her first grandchild growing steadily larger inside of its mother, and its father pulling another screaming survivor from the city down into its burrow. Growing children need to eat.
Thousands of miles away, the plates along the fault line finally give way to each other.
[transmission interrupted]
[trace found]
[observation point found]
[subject located]
[begin trans]
Captain Rick Tanner
Medical Bay, Landing Zone Bravo, Pressia
He lies in static silence, fading and falling through the lightless space between his ears. The hushed thrum of the medical equipment, panoplies of lights, boxes, and tubes that coil around his ruined flesh has become a part of him, inseparable and permanent. Hot and cold waves of pressure move through his chest and radiate out into his limbs where they become indistinguishable and alien, a part of him that is not a part of him. Rick tries to think of his own name and forgets it for a moment. Remembers. Forgets.
His only concept of time is the tenuous line in between vague consciousness and the vivid and sudden dreams that he always wakes from nauseas and confused. Walks through warm blue-bricked buildings with windows full of stars. The pain of a broken bone, a child crying, and the warm caress of a palm. Soft lips hesitantly greeting their first partner. The shuddering chest of a dying man. Hot blood pouring from an open wound, scalding the hands trying in vain to stem the flow.
Steam from a mountain hot spring licking smooth the ice coating the banks.
Fog pouring through pine trees as the sun rises.
Rain over lovers.
Sun at a funeral.
All the while he falls through the static silence. Rick imagines his body whole, dipping and diving through the dark. A single glittering jewel that fades into the distance, a tragedy as grand and as pointless as a dying star. One trillion flecks of light fading into inexistence without witness. Chronicled by none.
Death, he thinks. Has ceased to be inconvenient.
Before him, applause shatters the silence of the deep marble antechamber. His classmates give him a standing ovation, the wide sleeves of their dark red and green robes fluttering throughout the hall. His father comes to the podium and hands him his diploma. An excellent summation, son. Rick beams, waves to the audience, and thrusts his diploma into the air triumphantly.
In the inky black space he summersaults perfectly, exiting the roll and making his body into a spear. His form is perfect as he hits the water.
The salty ocean water in the bucket burns his eyes. His captors are hurried blurs that rush back and forth, screaming nonsense alien words and hitting him. A fist to his cheek knocks one of Rick’s teeth loose and fills his mouth with blood. His face is too swollen and weak to spit. The blood dribbles from his mouth onto the floor, mixing with the water from the bucket and swirling down the drain in the center of the cell. A rough, greasy towel cleans his face and he can see one of the pig-men hammering flat a long, thin pipe. He begins to cut the end of the pipe into strips with a torch and something hard catches Rick in the back of the head.
He pirouettes, free and lighter than air through the cosmos of his mind. Little memories come and go for as long as he tries to concentrate on them. The girl on the island. Her insistent professionalism. The fear in her eyes while he lay bleeding on the ground beside her. The wild, sweet duality of her scent and the heat of her body next to his for that one, perfect little moment.
“Oh, Captain.” Her voice. “I don’t…” Her voice. “Oh my god.” Her voice.
Her.
“Katie?”
[end transmission]
[begin audio playback]
Five minutes in a quiet room having a conversation was all it took for Pressia to rear its head and send everything back to shit again. I left the Metatron’s bunker and made pace through the chaotic din of the encampment towards the medical bay. Large-scale combat is a very impersonal event. Outside of your own squad or team the world becomes a blur of distant faces, sporadic gunfire, and screaming. I sprinted through the confusion and chaos without anybody paying me a second glance.
To my left, infantry units lit the inland beach with circles of light from their muzzle flashes, firing at something I couldn’t see. To my right, fires burst from the loading dock of the moored starship, casting harsh shadows across the sand. A man runs breathlessly around the side of a building and screams for someone to help him as blood spurts wildly from where his right arm should be, painting the slate-gray wall of the nearest bunk with hideous spatters. Before I can turn to him a massive black spider slinks out from shadows and drags him away into silence. I run faster.
There are no lights of any kind inside the medical bay when I enter, nor are any personnel on duty. The dark, bleak central corridor drinks up the rotating red emergency light, leaving oily pools of shadows in the doorways of the ten rooms that line the hallway. The intake office was on my left, and I pushed open the door onto a hurriedly abandoned workspace. Portable tablets had been left open and strewn across the work desk, and the operation lights on the holographic projection nodes were still on. The place would have been full of readouts if I’d still had my collar on.
Against the wall, an assortment of plasma bags, synthetic blood-cell replacements, and painkillers covered the surface of a rolling tray with a glowing green “ICU 8” on the readout. A tablet hanging from the side of the tray displayed the patient’s medical charts under his codename, “Richboy.” It was Rick, I’d thought to myself, it had to be. I grabbed the hastily discarded cart and wheeled it down to the right room, taking care not to trip over anything on the shadowy floor.
My heart broke when I pushed that door open and saw what was left of him lying on the table. His legless body covered head to toe in bandages, lit only by the dim blue analog displays on the machines around him. His face was covered in wrappings dyed pink from the blood constantly weeping from his wounds, except a tiny hole over his mouth where the doctors had pushed a bypass tube down his throat. Despite the weak light I could see his teeth were chipped and broken, his lips torn apart by god knows what. I said something, I can’t remember what, and saw him trying to respond. One word popped up on the screen to the right of his head. My name.
I reached out and touched the bandages over his cheek, only then noticing the transparent skullcap atop his skull, and the wires leading away from it into the machine attached to the screen. He asks if it’s me, the question popping up one letter at a time on the screen in blocky blue type.
“Yeah, Rick,” I say, hearing my voice waver. “Or, uh, sir. Yeah—“ I sniff at the heat building around my eyes. Beneath me his body shivers out a raspy chuckle.
I think we’re past those formalities. Are you OK?
“Oh, yeah Rick I’m … fine I’m—“ I had to step back to keep my chest from heaving. Him just lying there in the dark with all those tubes and wires coming out of him still hangs with me, even now. “I’m OK. No complaints.” He sighed and I could see the faintest tug of a smile at the corners of his mouth.
That’s good. I know we barely know each other, but I have been thinking about you a lot while I lay here. Once they hooked me up and bandaged me up everyone seemed in a big rush to leave. I feel like I’ve been lying here forever. I wonder how long it’s been since the spec ops guys pulled me out of that cell?
I nearly slapped myself in the forehead, he had been on the 48 with me, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Anyway, I need you to do something Katie.
I told him I’d do anything and I meant it. He flashes me another half smile through his bandages and drops a bomb that sucks the air out of my lungs and turns my knees to jelly.
I need you to turn off my life support.
“No, Rick, no… I—“ Against my will the process to kill him painlessly slips across my mind. Turn up the painkillers, inject the anti-seizure compound into his mainline, disengage the safety on the life-support machine and turn the dial down to the lowest position. Off. “I can’t do this Rick.” He sighs.
Don’t worry about me, I’ve made up my mind about it and it’s only a matter of time anyway.
“It’s a matter of time for anybody Rick, please, you’ve got plenty of time left.”
Potentially, yes, but time stuck like this. I’ve got too much nerve damage for prosthetics from the device they used on our collars for prosthetics. I’m blind, brain-damaged, and I’ll never walk again. Eat solid food. He smiles. Be with you.
“Rick…”
Don’t worry about me, you need to take care of yourself now. On the flight back, I wanted to say something to you, but I can’t speak with this thing in my throat. I heard everything you said, the whole story. I’m sorry trying to save me cost you so much.
It felt like he was crying too, along with me. I didn’t notice until the first tiny, warm tear fell out onto the shallow depression over his right eye. I still think about his face here and then, and, in my deepest nightmares, those black holes I never saw in person are all I can see until I wake up. He was beautiful. Beauty fades and, yes, that can be tragic in its own right, but it’s impossible to forget seeing it being torn away in front of you. His short time in this life was so brutal and abrupt, and his memorial in my heart is little more than a bittersweet testament to loss. It’s fair to say I could have loved him, and in that room, in that one precious moment, I did.
You won’t be able to take me out of here. I won’t just slow you down, I’ll immobilize you. I’ll never leave this planet, this room. But Katie, you can. If anybody can it’s you.
He laughs. I could hear the phlegmy, bubbling pops of blood in his airway. A second later the vacuum tube alongside his bypass pulled a blackish wad of detritus from somewhere inside him and spirited it off down the line to whatever receptacle it terminated in. I leaned down to rest my forehead against his, and he manages a feeble attempt at returning the contact.
You get out of here Katie. Get out and leave this place far, far behind you.
“Oh Rick, you jackass.” I moved my face to press my lips against the corner of his mouth. He smelled like disinfectant and blood and sweat and none of that mattered. I kissed that dying man for all the love and pain and fear and hate that planet that kept us apart. I kissed him for myself. I kissed him for no god damned reason at all. Even as the tears pouring down my face soaked his I kissed him. Then, I pulled away and he said the last thing he’d ever say to me.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
[end trans]
END ACTION 9: [culminate]
BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE MATRON, FOR SHE IS RISEN, AND ALL WHO BOW BEFORE HER SHALL BASK IN THE GLORY OF LIFE ETERNAL
by NamelessSynthetic » Mon Sep 17, 2012 6:01 am 
And here I was, thinking the thread had finally died U_U and then you show up once again! You trickster, you~
Big Fat Update
Re: Pressia|Choose your own adventure novella|Updated: March