V. Larson - Mech

“My instructions were quite clear,” her amplified voice boomed inside the hut. “I was to perform all the actual executions myself. Who is responsible for this?”

“Oh great Gi, forgive him, but Jin killed the boy,” one of the brutes ratted quickly, gesturing toward a giant that was in the act of brutalizing a young woman. The other giants, a worried look in their eyes, quickly assented, pointing to the slack-jawed Jin.

“They lie-” he began.

He got no further as the dragon’s mouth opened and the blue glow inside grew in intensity. With a sudden gush of burning superheated gas, Jin, the girl, and two other peasants were engulfed in searing blue vapor. The surviving palace guards vaulted out of the windows and through the ruined door, running through the mud toward the castle.

Mai Lee, enjoying herself thoroughly again, continued her work in the hut until it was leveled. The sound of the chest guns ripped the air; the flares of livid blue ignited the horizon. Before she marched Gi back up the flagstones to reenter the garden, three huts had been burned and twelve people lay dead.

The hot little water-world with its swampy sister planet had grown from a speck to a fat blue-white disk over the last two days. Less than a million kilometers out and coming in fast, the Parent began a hard three-gee braking to bring it into a safe descent pattern. Landfall was only hours away. The larvae had been hatched and birthed and now crowded the tiny ship with their humping, glistening bodies. They ate liberally of the protoplasm supplies, and the Parent estimated that soon the tanks would be sucked dry. At that point they would enter the pupae stage. They would transform and awaken as adult offspring less than an hour before the invasion began.

The Parent herself ate sparingly, taking in only enough to keep her ovaries working. Her external egg sacs were already distended with the seeds for more offspring, and every hour they swelled further.

The Parent heard a rustling back in the cryogenics chamber. Extending a pseudopod to investigate, she found two of the larvae had climbed through the hatch and had gotten into a death struggle inside. One of them had killed and half eaten the other, to her chagrin. She could not, of course, blame the surviving youngster. It was quite possible that the dead larvae had been defective genetically in some way. It shouldn’t have been so easily bested. Yet it was vexing to have to birth another so soon.

Reaching out with her tentacles, she herded the surviving youngster out of the chamber and sealed it. The others romped about in the control room and chased one another up to the ceiling on their sticky-padded feet. One of the larvae had bitten a chunk of sticky flesh from the other, causing it to run a little faster.

The Parent sucked up the carcass of the dead larvae with her foodtube and ruffled her tentacles in amusement at the antics of her offspring. Then she turned back to the ship’s data-interface. She shifted the ship’s approach path to bring it in directly behind the smaller planet, interposing the satellite between the planet and her ship. Orbiting the moon were many of the small ships that seemed to sneak down to the planet’s surface so easily. She targeted one that was just picking up speed and falling out of orbit toward the planet. Her dark, silent ship locked onto the target and rapidly closed the distance between them.

Once this was done, there wasn’t much left to do other than to enjoy the last frolicking of the larvae before they settled down and spun their fleshy, egg-shaped cocoons.

“Come on, come on, you poor wretches,” muttered Sarah Engstrom under her breath, sitting in the cockpit of her flitter.

Sarah’s flitter sat in the middle of the vast swamps of Gopus on an illegal saber-reed farm. Daddy and his son Mudface lived on the huge triangular-shaped island, a lump of mush called Sharkstooth. Their huge moldy stockade was visible through the trees, built out of tough mangrove-like timber. At each of the seven guard towers that lined the walls of the stockade bearded thugs slumped over their rattler turrets. Sarah eyed the walls with trepidation, although it looked primitive, she knew the electronics and weaponry employed by the drug kingpins were unsurpassed. They maintained a facade of simple-mindedness because they liked it that way.

Several hundred swamp-folk lived with them in and around the stockade, doing all the work and getting off-handedly abused for it whenever Daddy or Mudface had a little too much reed-whiskey.

She pushed her dark hair back from her face and wiped sweat on her jumpsuit. She wanted to move fast because Mudface was showing signs of getting amorous again, and worse, Daddy would be back any minute.

“You sure are pretty today, Sarah. You sure you don’t want another hit off the reed-juice?” asked Mudface, leering at her. He was rail-thin, with a stupid-looking grin that belied the malevolent cunning behind it. He flicked at the dark flies that encrusted a patch of filth on his cheek.

“No time for it, but thanks,” Sarah said, managing to smile back at the man. She knew that it was best to keep on the good side of Mudface and Daddy, especially when visiting their island. Despite their rustic appearance and manners, their illegal harvesting of selective varieties of swamp reeds had made them wealthy and powerful. “Your people have gotten almost all the cargo aboard now.”

Mudface nodded, watching the swamp-folk load Sarah’s flitter with bales of dried bluish saber-reeds. “Ground up into blur dust, this load will make a lot of people happy down there,” smiled Mudface. “We grow the best here on Sharkstooth, you know.”

“Yes, you can’t get a better hallucinogen anywhere in the system.”

“This is the good stuff. Our customers rarely go blind,” said Mudface proudly.

Sarah’s stomach twisted at the thought. Blur dust induced euphoria with the usual vicious side effects such drugs had on the chronic user. The drug was named for the side effect of temporary blindness, which sometimes became permanent. “I just can’t help but take on a load now and then,” Sarah said defensively. “Every free-lance spacer in the system does it, if only to make ends meet when the stiff spaceport usage fees, and the even stiffer graft premiums, come due. The colony is growing the demand for the drug is growing with it, inflating the price.”

Mudface looked at her in askance. “I think I missed your point, Missy.”

“Nothing,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

Mudface turned a sharp eye back to the swamp-folk, which were carrying heavy wicker cases to the flitter on their permanently crooked backs. One man, even thinner and less healthy-looking than the rest stumbled and sagged down beneath the weight of his burden. He struggled desperately to get up, feet slipping in the loose mud. Despite the generously low gravity on Gopus, he couldn’t stand. There was a wild look in his black-circled eyes. An old woman and a boy came forward to help him up, but Mudface waved them back. He pulled his short-barreled shotgun out of his belt and hit the old woman with it. It was a Wu hand-cannon automatic, loaded with high-velocity shells. She staggered away with blood running out of her bedraggled hair.

“I said leave him be! Y’all never listen!” shouted Mudface. Then he bent down beside the fallen man, prodding him with the barrel of his shotgun. The man struggled harder, and got one corner of the wicker case off the ground. “You sick or somethin’ boy? You ain’t got the fever, now do ya?”

Sarah squirmed in her cockpit, biting her lip.

“Can’t have you spreading no fevers,” said Mudface, cocking his hand-cannon.

“I’ve changed my mind about that drink, Mudface,” Sarah called from the cockpit of the flitter. “It’s quite hot out here.”