The Story Thus Far
Dreln scrambled through another doorway into a side hall, grabbing the handle as he passed and slamming it behind him. He hadn’t made it six paces before the door exploded into splinters that pelted the stone walls and floor behind him.
“Once we’ve broken your limbs…”
“…you’ll join us in our tank! We…”
“…have never tasted human…”
“…meat!”
Eaten alive by incestuous cephalopods inside an aquarium strapped to a robot body on a planet of homicidal, eight-limbed, humanoid giants that worship their mad emperor as a living manifestation of the entire cosmos, Dreln thought to himself as he sprinted, throwing tables and chairs to the floor behind him as he ran in a desperate and failing attempt at slowing the monstrous machine hot on his heels. I should have stayed on Earth selling historical pornography to rich perverts.
“Where are you going, little human?”
“There’s no haven for you under this blue sun!”
The hulking thing made a grab for Dreln but he dodged through an open doorway, leaving its dozens of intricately articulated mechanical fingers to scissor futilely in empty air. Dreln looked around the room frantically for a means of escape and caught a glimpse of a bloody mess in the bed before dashing into the bathroom and slamming the door behind him.
“Cornered!” Paxlin and Monda crowed in unison outside, but Dreln was already forcing the tiny window open and scrambling up onto the sill.
The air outside was thick and sulfurous, but breathable for humans over short durations. Shimmying along a narrow ledge on the outside of the building, forty feet above the courtyard and beneath Frond V’s crimson moon, Dreln finally realized that he was alone. P&M hadn’t been lying when they said everyone was dead, judging by the brutalized corpse he’d just seen and the absence of any response to his chaotic midnight dash through the halls of the hermitage. Despite the fear, he felt a genuine pang of grief for the loss of Schanderkreit, who had showed him compassion and understanding as he adapted to his strange new life as an Andomeite.
While Paxlin and Monda were obviously the spies Clade had warned him of, this all had to be Clade’s fault. Everything had been fine until he showed up…but then there was that mysterious ampule. That was all Dreln’s doing. He’d uncovered something the GC didn’t want uncovered, and P&M had been activated to clean up the mess. His curiosity had doomed everyone in the hermitage. Inching around a cornice, he hopped down onto a section of steeply canted tile roof and began to sprint, hoping to put some extra distance between himself and his brutal pursuer.
A tile broke loose underfoot and Dreln slipped, crashing to his hands and knees and sending more shingles cascading down the incline. Then he began to slide as well. Clawing desperately but failing to find purchase, he accelerated towards the edge of the roof and the lethal drop beyond.
The Lesser Concordat’s decision was binding, and its will was executed without delay. No one questioned it, from the officer that sent the order to the local defense group in the Perseus arm via warp drone, to the strike commander that selected the armaments, to the engineers that ran a full systems check on the warp drives, to the dozens of technicians that checked and re-checked the target coordinates, planned trajectory, payload, energetics calculations, projected g-wave impact, and long-term dispersal of fallout.
Everyone performed their role loyally and dispassionately, secure in the knowledge that their work, as much as any public servant’s within the GC’s leviathan control and command structure, served to keep the galaxy safe and prosperous for everyone willing to play by the rules. ‘The rules’ being a short list of red lines that, if crossed, prompted a warning in nine cases out of ten, and virtually instantaneous, overwhelming violence in the remaining cases. This was one such instance.
“A teragram specimen at two kilolights should clean up nicely,” the battery officer remarked to his lieutenant, retroactively taking credit for the work of his underlings. The station was parked in interstellar space, nestled within a ten thousand kilometer-wide asteroid field. Hundreds of them were equipped with slow but powerful warp drives, each only capable of achieving speeds a few thousand times that of light, but with warp bubbles hundreds of meters in diameter—large enough to enclose some extremely hefty projectiles.
A tow ship wove between the floating mountains, scattering maintenance drones and technician ships like minnows in its lumbering wake. As it approached its destination, it fired a tow cable which snaked through space, guided by a targeting computer and a small rocket to thread the three-meter diameter iron eye bolt anchored to the space rock and securing itself. The line drew taught as the ship, dwarfed by its cargo, slowly, slowly, dragged it out of the swarm towards empty space. Once sufficient velocity was achieved, the cable was detached and withdrawn, and the tow ship maneuvered around to the eye bolt’s antipodal twin, coupling itself to the behemoth once more and gunning its impulse engines in the opposite direction to slow the asteroid as it fell into position 5,000 kilometers from the station and perfectly at rest relative to it.
The catapult was primed, the payload positioned. All that remained was the launch order.
Dreln managed to get his feet in front of him and dug his heels into the roof, still trying to halt his momentum. It worked, but only to slow his descent. He was still going to hit the edge of the roof at far to great a speed to catch himself…suddenly, an enormous fist burst through the roof just in front of him, pelting him with splinters and fragments of stone and pottery. He tried to throw himself to the side to avoid it, but it was too late: the multiply-articulated metal fingers closed around his legs and he spun around the arm like the spoke of a wheel until his head and shoulders were dangling from the roof. Then, before he even had a chance to catch his breath, the hand pulled, dragging him back onto the roof and then violently down through the hole it had made.
He felt the splintered beams of the steeple tear at his robes and skin and everything went black for a moment as he passed through the layers of insulation and atmospheric filters that kept the inside of the hermitage relatively sulfur-free and then he was hurtling through open air again. He screamed, bracing himself for that horrible, final impact—the one that broke bone and destroyed consciousness, the one that ended life. But it never came.
Dreln opened his eyes and found himself suspended, upside down, from one of the rafters in the great hall, ten feet off the ground. Looking up at his feet, he saw that same robotic fist closed around them, and beyond that an impossibly long segmented arm that looped over a crossbeam and then back down to the shoulder of Paxlin and Monda’s s-skin, standing a few feet away.
“Caught ourselves a nasty…”
“…little rat! Skittering across the rooftops! Where…”
“…were you planning to go?”
“Please!” Dreln gasped, staring into the darkened window that P&M’s real bodies floated behind, trying to ignore the twin looks of twisted glee their face-sims wore. “I didn’t see what was in the ampule, I don’t know anything of value. Just let me go and I’ll return to Earth! I won’t tell anyone what happened here!”
“Chitter, little rat,” the two said in unison, positioning themselves directly beneath Dreln, “your screeching will make lovely bubbles in our chamber.” With a hiss, a hatch opened on the s-skin’s back, revealing a circular portal into a tank of roiling, faintly green water. Tentacles emerged from those sinister waters, lashing the air and churning the surface of the liquid, and Dreln was shocked by how much larger the creatures within were compared to how they had looked through their port window—did that mean it was concave or convex? Funny, where your mind goes when you’re about to die, he thought. Then the arm holding him began telescoping again and he descended towards the writhing mass. Two beaks, each large enough to shear through an arm or a leg, began snapping within the heart of the tentacles.
A boom resounded across the hall, and Dreln was momentarily blinded by a flash of white. He blinked furiously, trying to clear the scintillating lines from his vision, but then he was falling. He braced his arms over his head, waiting for the impact, the feeling of razors shearing his flesh…but it never came. His fall stopped with a jolt, and as his vision returned, he saw the floor inches from his face—he was still hanging, but the arm had been severed and fused to the rafter with a rapidly-expanding white foam. Feeling the grip of the now-severed hand loosen, he posted his hands on the flagstones and twisted himself, trying both to free himself and see what was happening.
Two machines squared off in the center of the hall: P&M, now one-armed, hatch re-sealed, appeared to be simultaneously swelling and contracting as mechanisms surrounding the aquatic habitat within reconfigured themselves to counter their new adversary, a much smaller mechanical quadruped bristling with secondary appendages extending from its flanks. A small drone whistled through the hall over both combatants and peppered P&M with a barrage of small-caliber kinetic fire. In response, the larger machine’s exterior seemed to explode outward to harmlessly absorb the impacts. In that moment, the second machine struck, closing the gap between the two in a heartbeat and grappling its foe.
Several arms tipped with laser and sonic cutting tools, thermal and electrical energy depositors, and traditional kinetic and energy projectile weapons sprang to life, pumping a variety of destructive energies into P&M’s s-skin. The action was entirely too fast for Dreln to follow, the two machines’ impossibly precise movements looking almost comically sped-up, but he could tell that despite the smaller figure’s impressive array of weapons, it was hopelessly outmatched by P&M’s sheer size and durability. A moment later, it was caught in the remaining arm’s implacable grasp and hurled across the hall like a toy.
Dreln reached upwards towards his feet, desperately wishing he’d spent more of his time developing his physical strength and less of it lost in virtual realities. He managed to get his hands around one of the sausage-like fingers that still grasped his legs and began wrenching at it with all his remaining strength. It budged, but not by enough to free him. The shriek of distressed metal and blinding flashes of light continued to fill the chamber as the battle raged behind him, but he ignored it. Whoever had come to his rescue, their victory was far from assured. He had to free himself, then retrieve his data, then somehow make his way to the nearest spaceport, and then…
The next finger snapped open and Dreln’s legs started to slip from the severed hand’s grasp. He landed hard on his right shoulder, grunting in pain but mostly uninjured. He leapt to his feet, planning to run, but his attention was drawn inexorably back to the spectacular battle unfolding before him. P&M had finished their transformation, somehow becoming even larger than they had been before and, like the interloper, dozens of weapon-tipped limbs now sprouted from all over their s-skin’s body. Lasers lanced across the hall and explosions cascaded back and forth as the two mobile weapons of war jockeyed for position while the drone bobbed and weaved through the chaos, appearing ineffectual but making strategic strikes to throw P&M off balance in moments where they overextended themselves.
Suddenly, the pilot of the smaller s-skin changed tactics, flanking its enemy and latching on to its back in a moment it was distracted by the drone’s strafing. A laser cutter flared to life, and in seconds the hatch P&M had opened earlier was torn open. Rope-like arms plunged into the chemical soup of the s-skin’s interior and emerged clutching two cuttlefish-like bodies by their mantles. Deprived of their communication systems, the two creatures were unable to even scream when a second arm, tipped with a flamethrower, whipped around and roasted them to a crisp as twin streams of dark ink spurted from their rears, pelting their executioner ineffectually. Despite his revulsion, Dreln’s stomach rumbled at the smell of cooking seafood.
“WHOO!” The quadrupedal s-skin’s occupant whooped triumphantly, slamming his two felled foes to the floor where they exploded, releasing a spray of pus-colored innards and sending charred bits of tentacle skittering across the flagstones. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
“Clade?” Dreln asked incredulously, taking a hesitant step towards his savior.
“No, I’m Clade’s identical twin. Of course it’s me, you insipid primate. Do you have the data?”
“It’s in my room. Should be decrypted by now. I came to find you, but—”
“But I was in my ship, prepping to make war on these fuckers. War’s over, I won, time to leave.”
“Everyone’s dead,” Dreln said sadly, “what’s the rush? We should at least bury them…” He trailed off as Clade stayed silent, feeling foolish for expressing such sentimentality. He didn’t have a spiritual bone in his body, but he’d never been confronted with so much death and his staunch atheism was proving to be an insufficient coping mechanism.
“Think it through, dumb-dumb,” Clade said scornfully, “whatever’s in that ampule was important enough for those fish to commit war crimes against a civilian group, and they’ll have been acting on the orders of someone with even less compunctions. They also probably already sent word back to their masters via warp-drone. How would someone like that respond?”
“I don’t know,” Dreln admitted.
“Trust me, you don’t want to stick around and find out.”
Back in the dorm, Clade waited impatiently as Dreln fiddled with his various devices, shoving a few portables into a travel bag and extracting the data from the rest.
“Here,” he snapped, picking up on Clade’s nervous energy and shoving a drive containing the A-Kazeryk data in his direction. A serpentine arm flew out of Clade’s s-skin, grabbed the drive, and penetrated its data port. Within seconds, the drive’s contents were streaming across his internal display and they confirmed his worst, darkest suspicions.
“Whatever you’ve already grabbed is going to have to suffice,” He said firmly, “we have to leave. Now.”
As if on cue, a series of thuds resounded in the hallway outside and the door to Dreln’s room exploded in a shower of splinters as P&M’s empty s-skin shouldered its way inside, demolishing the doorframe as it forced its massive form through the far-too-small opening.
“Son of a—” Clade cursed, rearming his weapons and leaping to put himself between the two-ton autonomous killing machine and his extremely squishy human charge. If it came right down to it, he’d sacrifice Dreln to save himself, especially now that he knew what he knew and had the evidence to back it up, but for the moment, he was enjoying having someone to defend.
Dreln, reading the situation, ducked at the last moment as a bright blue beam erupted from one of the s-skin’s shoulder-mounted cannons and lanced across the room, splitting the Delving rig in half and reducing the rest of Dreln’s computers to slag. Clade took decisive action and deployed a shaped charge at the wall, blasting a wide hole in it that overlooked the courtyard. An instant later the drone zipped into the room through the gap and dove straight into the open hatch on the s-skin’s back. Without hesitation, Clade scooped Dreln up and dove through the gap: an instant later, the drone detonated all of its armaments inside of the s-skin’s fluid tank.
The resulting explosion decapitated the tower Dreln’s room had resided within, sending a massive plume of fire hundreds of feet into the dark sky. Clade took the impact of the drop with his s-skin’s legs and hit the ground running as chunks of stone and flaming debris impacted all around them.
“You can let me go, now!” Dreln gasped.
“So I can leave you behind? I’m headed straight to my ship, and I’m ten times faster than you.”
“So we’re really just going to leave?”
“The sooner the better. You’re lucky I had to abandon my old ship: you wouldn’t have found it terribly hospitable.”
Clade blew through the massive double doors leading out of the courtyard as more explosions sounded behind them from within the hermitage.
“Atmosphere processors in the walls and ceiling blowing,” Dreln remarked, desperate to contribute something as he was carted away like a piece of cargo on the s-skin’s back. He twisted in Clade’s grasp and caught one last glimpse of the Andomeite hermitage, now fully ablaze, before Clade jolted off the compressed dirt road at a switchback and up a rocky escarpment that quickly obscured his view.
Author’s note: It was never my intention to draw the finale out as much as I have. I’ve yet to learn the lesson that a plan of events in my head always takes far more words to express than I anticipate. Next week is the end of finale, and the following week will either be an epilogue or something else entirely. Thanks for reading.