Rene on no account believed himself to be a quick thinker. He was a follower first, a soldier second and an officer last. But those who have learned to obey often develop a talent for quickly discerning the winning conditions of any scenario. It was only when orders came flashing down the wire that Rene could clear away all distractions and carve right to the meat of the matter. If the order went: “Get back up there and retake the breach, you cowards.”
Then this meant that the passage blasted into the side of the mound was a hopeless meatgrinder that would chew through men just as fast as the Fleet could funnel them into it. In which case, simply cover the sappers as they place charges and set to work with mining picks. With any luck the gap will widen or better yet, collapse in on itself. Either way, the problem disappears. On the other hand, if the boys up top hit you with the ever-ominous: “Resupply not guaranteed, pray hold fast until relieved.”
In that case, drop your trousers, pucker up and prepare to get stuffed; the horde is set to envelop your position and cut you off from the rest of the army. Dig ditches and pitfalls, set caltrops and stakes. Conserve ammunition by firing only on command.
And if lead don’t stop em? Steel will.
Steel will, the pathfinder found himself repeating as he stared into the pitiless lenses of the flayed god. How many centuries had this thing spent hiding within the frozen heart of this moon? It predated the Fleet itself, of that much Rene was certain. There was only one reason this mutilated wreck of a man would continue clinging on to life and (relative) sanity for so long: it had a purpose to fulfil, a sacred duty. The same duty which it had passed down to Rene and all the millions of its descendants back home. Grasping at the insight which now presented itself, Rene told it:
“Beware, sentinel! Kill us now, and the only hope for your species dies with us. All will be lost, and your long vigil will have been kept in vain. You have been warned.”
The flayed god held Rene’s gaze for what seemed an eternity, the overlapping iris diaphragms of its lenses contracting into pinpricks. Then it placed Rene’s neck inside a pair of its shears and held him there like a gardener about to clip off a rosebud from its stem. Meanwhile, Zildiz remained frozen with indecision, a circular saw snickering millimeters away from the tip of her nose.
“You overestimate your importance,” it replied, “My consciousness can withstand another 1231.11 draconic years in the dreamstate before its engrammatic manifolds start losing coherency. You are not the first primitives to come stumbling into my dragnet, and you will not be the last.”
And there we have it, Rene thought. Our first winning condition. You need us ‘primitives’ for something, or else you would never have allowed our shuttlecraft to land.
“Aye, you could wait till the Amits or the Vitalus scour our people clean off the face of the earth. You could wait till hell itself freezes over,” Rene replied, “But waiting ain’t winning. And you do still want us to win, don’t you?”
Throughout this exchange the flayed god’s armaments never stopped swivelling about, barrels sniffing at the air like a pack of predators tracking their prey. Rene felt the shears tighten like a vice and his feet left the ground as it lifted him by the scruff of his neck, saying: “Us? Us?” the flayed god’s voice was a knife’s edge skidding across a pane of glass, “For a unit which claims to share my core directives, you have an awfully funny way of showing it.”
“If you’re referring to the creature which stowed away on our ship, we weren’t aware of its presence either,” Zildiz said matter-of-factly. She pushed the bandsaw out of her face by the flat of its blade and stepped closer to the progenitor, continuing: “It is called a Leaper, and we would like to see it destroyed just as much as you do.”
“T-t-that’s right,” Rene said as he dangled in the air, “We don’t even know how it survived hard vacuum for the better part of the three days. I knew Leapers were tough, but this is just absurd.”
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“Of course they can tolerate vacuum,” the flayed god scoffed, “They’re cosmophages. It’s what they were bred to do.”
There was a clang as a piece of junk somewhere inside the hangar fell from a high place. Their interlocutor turned on a dime and immediately bracketed the area with a burst of shot and shell, its quad cannons and rotary chain guns filling a nearby scrap pile with more holes than a slice of pig cheese. It followed that up with a rocket from its pod that broke into a dozen pieces in midair and sprayed the area in a shotgun blast of white-hot submunitions, turning the whole trash heap into a mound of glowing slag.
It was such a casual display of destructive potential that Rene began to seriously reconsider his conceptions of divinity. Perhaps it was only fitting that a world as cruel and senseless as Arachnea would have a set of deities that were equally deranged.
“…did you get him?” Rene asked after the ringing in his one good ear subsided.
“Probably not. Though I’ve spotted a trace heat signature on one of the dented ceiling panels,” the progenitor said, “I think your friend has crawled up into the ventilation system. Not that it matters—I sealed off every access tube and crawlspace as soon as I heard you were coming. In the unlikely event that it gets through all that composteel, I’ve also rigged the exits with proximity claymores.”
“And how do you intend to root him out of his hiding place?” Zildiz asked.
“I don’t.”
Abruptly the shears released Rene and the progenitor retreated, its tracked lower chassis wheeling in reverse while it kept some of its guns pointed at the two of them.
“I’m going to step outside for a few minutes. Then I’m going to pump this entire hangar bay full of a special cocktail of neurotoxins, cyanogen and a lovely strain of flesh-eating bacteria that I call Revenant-E. If that doesn’t do the job, I don’t know what will.”
“Excellent,” Rene said, “We’ll go right ahead and join you, in that case.”
“No, you won’t,” the progenitor said simply, and turned to leave. But then Zildiz ran a half circle around it and placed herself directly in its path.
“Get out of the way,” it said without slowing down.
“I’ve got something else to declare after all,” she told it.
“Oh? And what’s that, cosmophage—”
Zildiz went up on her tiptoes and hawked a throatful of spittle right into its face.
Oh no she didn’t, Rene groaned inwardly. Oh no she didn’t. Oh yes she did.
Looking back, Rene had been rather impressed by her whole I-intend-to-spit-in-the-eye-of-god routine. But he would have never imagined that she meant it so literally. The chunky gob of phlegm struck the flayed god in the middle of its rows of lenses. It froze for a moment, stunned by the unthinkable act of bravado and stupidity. It wiped off the gunk with back of its hand while Zildiz’s voice rang out, defiant:
“Don’t you dare call us that!” the Gallivant stuck a finger at it and ignored the still-smoking muzzles which pointed back at her, “We are not the abortive offspring of the void crawlers. We are the True Kindreds, children of the gilt helix and the rightful heirs to Arachnea!”
The progenitor reared its shrunken head back and roared, its voice box emitting a noise that was a mix between water meeting a panful of hot oil and the hunting scream of a monitor drake. It took a moment for Rene to realize that it was laughing.
“You!” it said, nudging its battle rifle at Zildiz again, “I like you! But that’s the trouble with intermediate forms like you, isn’t it? You’re almost human enough to make me hesitate. But I’ve been there and done that. Better to isolate and cauterize than to risk the spread of infection.”
“Ignore this degenerate primitive,” Rene thrust Zildiz aside for her own good and went down on his knees to beg, “Oh blessed ancestor, hear my prayer. I have uncovered a weapon from the age of myth that holds the power to bring about our final victory. With but a single act of mercy, it could be yours again!”
The flayed god ran a thoughtful tongue over its crooked teeth.
“Intriguing. But there’s no shortage of weaponry on this moon, let me assure you. But I’ll tell you what is in short supply: amusement. For almost three hundred years I’ve had nothing to watch but reruns of dome-settler soap operas. Unfortunately, there’s only so many times you can watch Estella Esteves strip down to her purty pixelated panties before things start to get a tad stale. So here is what we can do; I will hold off on turning this place into a gas chamber for thirty minutes. If you can find and sanitize our uninvited guest in that time, then I will hear the rest of what you have to say, crewman. If not, then at the very least your efforts will make for some memorable recordings on the security feed…”
Rene and Zildiz stumbled out of its way as it trundled back out the way it had come. An egress port slid open on the side of the hangar and the progenitor rolled its bulk on through.
“Thirty minutes!” it called to them right before the door closed behind it, “You brought the problem here, so you fix it!”
“You’re a lousy flipping god, d’you know that?” Rene yelled back at it. But it had already gone. The pathfinder surveyed the enormous cavern and bit his lip in apprehension. This wasn’t going to be easy.