Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

“What is it? What’s happened?” Brenlor demanded.

“I believe the Aboriginals have performed an abrupt termination of their computer’s function. They have ‘crashed’ it, in their parlance.”

“So they no longer have control of the ship?” Brenlor’s voice was not merely eager, but malicious.

“No, but nor do we.” Although I was about to secure it.

“Then they are helpless.”

“They have fewer options. But now, so do we. I can no longer terminate their life support, nor can I secure tactical advantages by controlling bulkheads, lighting, and other on-board systems.”

“They are not needed.” Brenlor rolled out of from behind the cover of a doorway and into the corridor. “And I suspect they won’t have many defenders left.” He slid a thick tube off his back and began undoing one tightly sealed end. “Jesel, check for thermal blooms at the intersection.”

Jesel complied, moving forward and turning up the sensitivity of his faceplate’s built-in thermal imaging sensor. He stopped about three meters away from the corner. “Faint signatures to the left; none to the right.”

“We might miss some of the defenders, particularly if their duty suits are sealed and fitted with cold cans,” Vranut pointed out.

“It is unlikely that they are taking precautions to conceal their body heat,” Brenlor countered. “Look at these.” He toed a dead Aboriginal. “They’ve left their helmets unsealed. Probably to conserve the pittance of air they have in their tanks. But today, that conservation of resources will prove their undoing.”

“How?” Jesel asked.

“Because today they are going to meet these.” Brenlor smiled as the lid of the canister came off with a depressurizing hiss. The open mouth was a honeycomb of twenty-two hexes in two concentric rings around one central hex. A hideous head, somewhat larger than that of the animal that the Aboriginals called a weasel, popped out of one of the cells of the honeycomb.

Three similar heads followed shortly. In the thin air, the creatures emitted coarse, clattering whines, akin to sand being tossed into a desk fan. “These are upt’theel,” Brenlor explained with a smile. “They are old friends of our Family, used for boarding or other assaults where a well-prepared defender has taken refuge in tunnels and similar close structures.”

More upt’theel heads emerged from the canister. Idrem had only seen the diminutive monsters twice before, had only used them once, and did not relish the memory. The upt’theel was a long-bodied octoped with chitinous legs that were even sharper than they looked. Its almost neckless head was liberally and evenly speckled with light sensors, with two genuine eyes directly above the mouth. Its wide-hinged jaw hung open to pull in as much of the thin air as possible, revealing a serrated ridge in place of teeth. The ridge was the color of obsidian and, by repute, harder than basalt.

“Should we not be moving?” Vranut asked from the corner of the intersection.

Brenlor watched the other creatures emerge, with the same rapt fascination of the Evolved who patronized helot death-arenas. “We do not need to rush. Their slow movements tell us that no enemies are near.”

“They are…Awakened?” Jesel asked.

Brenlor laughed aloud. “Idiot. No, of course not. But their sense of smell is acute. They will detect a carbon-based animal, or its decaying flesh, quite readily.”

“So the other defenders of this ingress point have fled?” Jesel sounded dubious.

Idrem looked at Vranut, who ran a thermal imaging sweep down either branch of the tee intersection.

Vranut shook his head. “No; they are edging closer again.”

Brenlor actually smiled. “Then let us welcome them back.” Taking an opaque vial off his light cuirass’s left load-strap, he walked to Vranut’s position, the canister of upt’theel in his other hand. “They are unique creatures.” He spoke with the didactic detachment of an aficionado. “Their world was at the inner edge of the habitable zone — such as it is — of a blue-white giant. Not many species can evolve, much less thrive, under the gaze of such a punishing furnace of heat and radioactivity. Yet this species did.” Brenlor laid the canister down. “It is always gratifying to watch them do their work.” He slung the opaque vial around the left-hand corner, ending the toss with a sharp twist of his wrist. The glass container smacked into a wall: its shattering elicited one or two cries of caution from the Aboriginals who had apparently been trying to sneak up on the boarders.

The sand-and-fan whine of several of the upt’theel suddenly rose to a full chorus of pebbles-into-a-turboprop screeching. Like a horde of perverse lemmings mutated into pangolin-centipede-gila monster hybrids, the strange beasts flowed out of the honeycomb cells of the container with serpentine fluidity, snuffling as they sped around the corner. Not one bothered to look down the other, right-hand extension of the corridor.

Idrem nodded in that direction. “Apparently, the right-hand turn is clear.” Meaning that the most direct path to the bridge was open.

Brenlor was unconcerned. “By the time the upt’theel reach the rotting bait I’ve thrown down the hall, they will smell the Aboriginals who are approaching.”

“And this is why we remain with suits sealed?” Jesel asked.

“Yes. As long as the upt’theel cannot smell us, we are of no more interest to them than the bulkheads.”

Stony, screeching disputes — probably over Brenlor’s morsel of bait — rose, and then were suddenly still.

“Ah,” said Brenlor, “they have the new scent.”

Jesel made toward the corner aggressively, his needler coming up.

Brenlor put a restraining hand upon his arm. “Give them a moment to get started. It’s easier for us. And more gratifying for them.”

Around the corner, a fusillade of panicked gunfire erupted, followed closely by high-pitched human screams.

* * *

Ayana could not breathe as she watched the monitors displaying the approaches to airlock C-2. A swarm of small creatures akin to crustacean weasels had emerged from one of the attackers’ containers and were now flowing like a low, rolling tide toward a half dozen defenders preparing an ambush in the corridor beyond the ruined barricade.

The creatures’ sinuous, serpentine advance ensured that only a few were hit by the crew’s gunfire, mostly by their one autoshotgun. Then, as the strange animals neared the defenders, they launched into what appeared to be a somersault.

But the somersault did not end. With their eight liberally jointed legs rolling them forward, their exoskeletal back plates worked like the rim of a wheel. The defenders, apparently perplexed as much as unnerved, fired wildly. The duty-suited humans splattered a few more of the attacking beasts into chunks just before discovering that they had emptied their magazines. The rolling creatures bore in among them like a herd of animate hoops.

The small predators used the speed they had accumulated by uncoiling straight out of their final revolution into a mouth-first leap at their prey. Even before the creatures’ claws and legs started slicing at and embedding in the flesh of the defenders, their sawlike jaws were at work, burrowing into viscera. Ayana felt bile jet up into her mouth as the killer weasel-crustaceans became more akin to gut-burrowing worms, their progress marked by intermittent spurts of blood and ruined intestines. Their screaming victims tried yanking them out, only to slice their hands open on the knifelike edges of the beasts’ bodies and legs.

“Jorge — Captain!” Ayana cried, knowing she could not regain full vocal composure. “The boarders have eliminated both layers of defense for airlock Charlie-Two. Repeat: the—”