“They’re asking him about the children.”
Leanne nodded in a harsh, jerking manner. Jack looked at her. Seems like she had a soft spot for children. He only knew one child, Rye from Wa-ter. He never really felt one way or the other about her until he imagined someone feeding her to a Terminal as a resource. Forced by crabs to that point. He placed a soft hand on her shoulder. She started and looked at him with narrow suspicious eyes so Jack pulled it away.
The giant’s eyes were massive spirals that consumed most of his face. Above the warrior’s heads were exclamation marks. The next panel showed the giant striking down the big warrior.
The panel after that was large and simply adorned; it showed a mountain of Human bodies at the foot of the giant’s corpse. A man stood atop it, hand raised with the giant’s spiral-eyed head grasped in his hand.
Surprisingly Jonah had the next insight, “The spiral eyes, their leader went insane.”
Leanne continued, “It must have been from sacrificing the children to heal the warriors.”
Jack stated, “Not ‘him’, ‘it’.” The other three turned toward him with questioning looks.
“It’s not a ‘him’, the giant wasn’t a man. It.”
The look dawned on their faces near the same moments, Jonah mumbled “of course. Obvious now that you say it.”
The next few panels showed Humans rebuilding the piles, much reduced in size this time. Some of them showed the Men taking apart the giant’s corpse. Oversized heart and head were the only parts that were still visible as they were held in either hand of a man standing over it. Other parts were shown being fed into the Terminal. Others… Well, it was hard to tell. It was intricate work. The kind that suffered the most from the passage of time.
“Is the mural repeating?” Leanne had noticed that the images of Humans laying horizontally with other Humans surrounding them, question marks above their heads, as before.
They were unsure as the images seemed to repeat for a time. The varied conflicts with the crabs.
Jonah stopped clearing the murals, “is this it? It’s done?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s not. Keep going Jonah.” Jack wanted the end of this story. If it repeated then there would be something to learn from that too.
It repeated as Humans lay dead with question marks above them.
It moved on to a battle between Humans and crabs. Leanne picked it up first, “They had gone back to the giant… the SI, now the Humans are fighting the crabs immediately after. This is new.”
Jonah nodded and picked up his pace.
The response from the carved Humans was much faster this time. More battles with crabs appeared although these ones were much reduced in scale from the earlier ones. It showed fights in cramped tunnels and side passages where the Humans were forced to stoop over or crouch as they battled the crabs. It showed 2 to 3 crabs attacking each man in a small carved box. The crabs’ claws were depicted inside, bisecting, or amputating many of the Men they surrounded.
Jack thought about fighting two or three crabs surrounding crabs at the same time while stooped over. Without his Gauntlet he didn’t like the sound of that. “The small tunnels, they ambushed the Humans. There wasn’t an SI to coordinate their attacks.”
The next image was of the Pod, now Pods. The tube that went to the Terminal was filled with...
“Rats.” The three turned to Tule. It was the first sound Tule had made the entire time.
They turned back as the wounded Men stepped into the pods on the left side of the panel and stepped out on the right side. They were no longer muscular and large but smaller, slightly hunched, faces that were pointed, and… tails.
The new, smaller Men were more effective in the small tunnels as the crabs replaced the men as a majority of the corpses.
“They’re Rat-Men or Man-Rats.”
Jack didn’t like the sound of either of those. Still he couldn’t help his gaze flashing over Tule for a moment. Better than crab-men.
The panels showed the Rat-Men consuming the crabs as others of their kind continued to fight the crabs.
Another large mural was after that, this one more roughly carved and still smaller than the massive, spanning first battle they had seen. Unlike before when the smaller crabs had used tunnels to attack the Men from behind, in this one the Rat-Men and crabs continued the fight in the small tunnels around the main battle. The battle was… Jack, Leanne, and Jonah at least were glad that they weren’t there for that.
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Repeating waves of small rats and Man-Rats, or Rat-Men, it depended on whose mind was processing the images. The Rat-Men carried weapons that fired… spiral energy or bullets, something odd or too specific to suss it out from an old mural. In front of the rifle-armed Rat-Men waves of smaller rats charged forward. Across from them was a mega-swarm of crabs. The number of crabs drawn was uncountable.
Clearly the technology of the rats alongside their smaller size put them heavily in favor. It showed the crabs retreating and fighting amongst themselves.
The new Rat-Man drove them back to a Door which showed increasing amounts of crabs going through it. The Rat-Men stood in victory in front of the portal. Above the Door, ‘Cryo-Laboratory’.
“Does this mean?”
“The origin of crabs. They started here. Before they came to the Labs. I have heard that they weren’t always in the Labs.”
Tule proffered, “That’s true. W… They were not always present in the Labs.”
Jack didn’t miss that. He didn’t look at Tule as a pump of heat sank into his brain. He tried to breathe deep to calm himself.
“There’s more.” Jonah’s finger prepared to repeat the process he had done with the earlier murals but this one. This one was new.
It wasn't an extraordinarily large piece that also looked to be carved quickly. It showed the Door, not labeled ‘Cryo-Laboratory’ this time but clearly meant to be the same Door. It was open with rough carvings of crabs swarming over the floor. It would have been impossible to decipher if they hadn’t spent the last however long staring at so many carved crabs. Contrasting the rough surroundings, in the middle of the open Door there were three figures drawn in meticulous detail.
The center of the three was the largest, a man-crab. It had two Human arms not on the side of its body, but near the inside. Above both of those were a pincer claw on its right and a bladed claw on its left.
To the creature’s right side was a much more Human-looking Man-Crab, except for its eyes. Jack had seen eyes like those before. He looked at the side of Tule’s head. Leanne unconsciously looked at Tule as well. The creature on the carving had pointy, messy, or spiky hair, fairly broad shoulders and… something else. There was something familiar about it.
On the other side was a third crab, this one with some sort of striped pattern around its chest. The pattern continued onto its arms and feet. Its right hand had the pattern continue down its arm, just below the elbow. It had Human hands on the outside, and inside, lower than the Human hands, around its ribs were bladed arms. The face triggered an even more familiar feeling.
Jack pointed at the last one, “Does that thing look familiar to anyone else?”
Jonah screwed his eyes closer and examined, “Hmmm, difficult to say.”
Leanne pointed to the other flanking Man-crab, “No, but that one looks like you. If you were a hybrid.”
Jack whirled on her about to tear her apart, but froze, mouth agape. He spun back to the image. He grabbed Jonah’s head and moved the light from his goggles closer to the image.
No. That’s crazy. There’s no way, that’s impossible. Jack studied the image again, closer this time.
Jack eyed Leanne, “It doesn’t look like me.” Jack’s protest sounded weak, even to him. In all fairness, he wasn’t too sure about it, he hardly even knew what he looked like. He did have some idea though and there were uncomfortable similarities. Jack didn’t even need to compartmentalize that, it did it all its own with, what he was sure he imagined, a soft chuckle that softly reverberated through his mind.
Tule studied the other figure, the discolored one. “That’s… what was his name? The one who had your Gauntlet before.” Now that Tule was looking at it, how had Jack gotten the Gauntlet?
The cold feeling that blew over the smoking ocean in his mind brought some clarity.
“Devin?! No way.” He looked closer at the image. It was, in fact, Devin now that he was looking at the crab creature the kid had become. The image that flashed through Jack’s mind of Devin’s flayed flesh matched the darkened areas exactly. “Huh. Guess he made it.”
He turned away from the mural. He eyed Tule, even if some had questionable loyalty. The AI hadn’t put ‘limited trust’ next to Tule’s name for no reason. He wanted to trust Tule but he wasn’t going to lie to himself, this was looking like the place where it could be tested. That whole rat-eating thing made his teeth itch and an uncomfortable tingle crawl up the back of his neck, over the back of his skull. Were those Man-Rats he was eating? He’d take Ratmen over crabmen every cycle on this bucket. Time to get the squad motivated.
“Looks like crab’s back on the menu.”
“What are you talking about? You turn pale just at the thought of taking a bite of crab.”
“Sweet f… It’s just a saying Leanne. There are crabs and you’re probably going to have a chance to eat some. You should be excited, next time we’re eating crab I’ll let you shovel down my portion.”
“Did you just try a catchphrase?”
“I don’t know what that is Jonah.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Is that from one of those crappy movies you were yammering about?”
Jonah’s face twisted and reddened, before he could protest Tule spoke.
“Whether rat or crab, I’m ready.”
Jack gave him an appreciative nod, “Thanks Tule. See? He gets it.”
Jack and Tule spoke genially to each other but if Yuma had been there she would have been able to pick up emotions and thoughts that were layered deep beneath their words.