But it would do them no good for Anya to ruminate on her thoughts, so she strove to suppress them as they stepped back outside of the bare emptiness that was their Central Command into the bare emptiness that was the base connecting the endless rooms by way of equally endless halls. All with no bodies inside them. All with so little purpose.
And so Anya took to the rear-right again alongside Will and Jesús, with Lululu, Luther, and Chris on the rear-left, Dio, Alissa, Alex, and Jessica on the front-left, and Peter and Henry on the front-right. Raethor was in the center, and Yuna to the front-right nearest him, acting again as a melee-range backup in case the enemy showed itself directly from the walls or ceiling without chance to react.
But there was no dripping flesh and red and red and red and red from the halls as they moved tactically back row to front to back row to corner and door. Peter simply touched the inscribed ring of flesh inside flesh that pulsed rhythmically with the beating veins inside it and they simply opened without fanfare. Fourteen bodies entered the same armory that they had set out from. Fourteen bodies crowded around the two comms links on either side of the long hall that was this room, and six bodies helped plug Chris and Yuna in on either side. By the time the metallic skin of the sphincter-door closed, they had all collapsed in a standing position from exhaustion, and Raethor seemed especially pale. It didn’t seem so hard to stand at attention without even a rifle drawn, but perhaps the burden of command had really begun to eat away at him. Perhaps his first dead soldier in many years had torn off his mask of sanity.
But there was nothing off with his words when he gave the order to begin transmitting to the Most High as Chris and Yuna’s jaws tightened. The long pale yellow tissues intubated with veins and nerves that connected to them at wrists, ankles, and breasts had bound them tightly into the base, just as the muscle-clad bone ribs that had been fallen from retracted panels in the ceiling and now hugged them tightly from above kept them firmly in place. The sensation of sight and speech from a thousand eyes and teeth and tongues was nauseating, but the sensation of sending a message outside the base was somehow worse as not only did they have to control a thousand thousand tissues, all of them had to coordinate with each other and with themselves in a symphony of bodily conflict to create the strength of signal necessary to wirelessly connect to the Imperial signal network. That is to say they needed to broadcast a synchronization request to all targets in the country, as they had no knowledge of where exactly the members of the Most High were located at any given time.
The seconds passed in agony as their flesh was consumed not to power the base, whose interior nutrients and exact mechanisms were obscure even to its designers who had all perished long ago, but to control the base whose power was beyond anything anywhere else in the nation. Most broadcasts took place over a long network of flesh-nodes, each tasked with the same repeating step of signal combination of the multiple disparate messages into one, and the same broadcast step inward and outward towards and away from the central imperial signal processing core, but this one demanded both perfect security and high speed. To walk the nodes was slow and prone to interception, and the Most High was a perfect target for impersonation, being as their identities were a blank slate. It would be possible to use the network anyway on an encrypted channel, but every step along the path added a second or more of transmission delay, and each step itself only covered a handful of kilometers.
The flesh relay was a marvel of modern technology powered by an endless stream of fresh bodies and supple nutrients, but this base was one of the few and perhaps the only place in the world capable of circumventing it by the sheer strength of a single signal. Unfortunately, in contrast to the flesh relay this single node was overseen by two individuals broadcasting over all waves in the specified channel given to the base. The seconds passed in slow-burning agony. Tick-tick-ticking away their sanity and flesh into evaporated matter expelled from their lungs, hearts and minds destroyed in every second of the process.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
Chris gripped the ribcage that bound him so tightly Anya was afraid he would break the bones holding him together, and Yuna’s toes curled so forcefully it seemed her arches were about to form a perfect circle. But at last as the two in the chairs at opposite ends of the long hall found themselves about to break, the Most High returned a synchronization acknowledgement. At last the base could power down and begin multicast transmissions destined for multiple fixed points. Anya had a basic understanding of how you might synchronize data from one point to another, but how the imperial signal network guaranteed lossless transmission to and especially between multiple points was unclear. Perhaps it stored the data for a brief period inside the network? She supposed this could work if the repeater nodes had sufficient memory inside their skulls, but given the sheer volume of data that flowed through them it seemed impossible… Perhaps it was only guaranteed for high-priority transmissions.
Whatever the mechanism, it probably wasn’t important beyond a base level. She just remembered the time before when there was no flesh repeater and no wireless transmission technology, only a relay network powered by flesh walking on two and four and eight legs. So slow and prone to death along the way: but now her messages could be guaranteed. Now she didn’t have to worry about lost orders causing the deaths of many comrades in a single blow of lacking movement.
The base sent back an acknowledgement alongside the first message in their transmission. There was still a significant delay to these messages, so it would be a rather stilted conversation.
“Oh Most High you grace us with your Presence and we revere your noble grace.”
In less urgent times the beginning transmission was usually sent alone, waiting for permission to speak which was all-too-often denied. But in this case they could not wait and could not ask. The only requirement was that they were heard. Decorum be damned to hell.
“We must report a most pressing situation.”
Chris and Yuna’s lips and tongues and teeth spoke as one.
“An enemy composed of contorted flesh has appeared before us, and struck down two of our own. We think it may perhaps not be possible for our meagre selves to destroy the enemy as thoroughly as demanded of our post. We deeply regret this failing, but plead for your mercy and support.”
They had been presumptive, but it was deeply important that the Most High hear their plea. They knew to be denied would mean a fate worse than death, and yet despite how unnatural the words that escaped their lips had always been, there was no alternative.
A deep and deadly silence fell over the room as a miasma of saliva descended from the walls as lips formed on every surface above and below and beside as teeth formed to protrude from under the slivers of red-blue lips in just-visible yellow stains. From every surface the same tongues spoke the same words in perfect unity.
“You will be granted salvation.”
And then the walls fell silent and the mouths that had covered every surface and ceiling and spot between their feet on the floor emptied themselves from all the open surfaces as the connection terminated. Yuna and Chris slumped into the backless stool’s suspended rib cage for support, their energy totally drained, but at least reinforcements would come, even if they had no knowledge of when, and at least their equipment should be unlocked, even if they didn’t know where it was, looked like, or how to operate it.