Yuma dropped to the ground in a heap as the Clan held off from approaching.
It seemed like it was over, the Clan Head nodded to Yosef and he ran forward, he placed his fingers against the side of her neck.
Nothing.
“Clan Head I don-”
He jerked his hand back and yelped.
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His awareness swam back with a buzzing that rattled around his head, it felt like he was waking up from a dream. Or a nightmare. Faint hints of memory whispered at the edge of his awareness. Each whisper was like a grain of sand, the more he grasped at it, the quicker it continued to slip between his fingers. Jack tried to gather the grains together, make sense of it all. Whether he could recall the memories or not, a deep sense of importance rested there.
Jack opened his eyes. Gray and black metal filled his vision as it swam into focus. It was a cage or… something. Shit. He must have gotten captured. He kept his movements small, as imperceptible as possible. There was a small gold and silver-furred rat staring down on him from the top of the cage.
Huh, it looks familiar. Was that the same ra-
“Are you quite finished over there?”
His head rocked back at those words. “Jonah?”
Jack stood up as much as he could and a chorus of sound assaulted the edge of his hearing and swept away the final shards of his dreamlike memories before a wall of fur rushed him.
Rattigan roared in a raspy squeak, “BlackJack bring RatKind to glorious death-apocalypse!”
A chorus of squeaks turned into a droning buzz, “BlackJack. Death. BlackJack. Death. BlackJack. Death!”
A roar of squeaks echoed through the space. “Glorious death awaits! Our Time now!” “Time now-NOW!” “Our Time now!” “Purpose in Death!”
The ManRats struggled to peel apart the electromagnetically sealed metal ball in a frantic, writhing ball of fur.
Jonah pushed aside ManRat and rat as he walked up to Jack’s cage of metal. He shot out a short beam of red from the tip of a finger then twisted the last joint to focus the beam into a narrow line. Before he started cutting he leaned in close, “You just had to make yourself a doomed messiah to a ManRat Death Cult didn’t you?”
Jack’s smile froze on his face, “Wait, what do you mean, ‘doomed’? Death Cult? Jonah, what’s going on?”
Jonah shook his head as his hand went up to his forehead then tapped around the area a few times, seemingly in confusion. He closed his eyes for a long second, let out a deep sigh, and started cutting him out.
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The heat-signatures had faded some time ago, now she was following her gut. Well, the other part of her gut, the one that wasn’t telling her to withdraw as fast as possible.
Leanne had her arms and legs wrapped around a pipe that was on a steady heading upward, following the increasing size of the corridor. The crab patrols were too thick to travel on foot anymore. It had honestly surprised her, she had half expected her idea not to work but crabs really didn’t look up, at all. The pipe continued into the wall but thankfully there was a small ledge to her right with a metal grated platform and a door. The stairwell that connected into it had led to the ground, or at least at some point in time a stairwell had existed, all that remained were the final top steps and a decrepit door that looked to be covered in some sort of decay.
She dropped her legs down and readjusted her grip as she started to rock herself back and forth. The metal pipe creaked and threatened to drop before she let go, her legs sweeping toward the platform. She landed and the platform groaned before shifting down in a hitch. Leanne pushed herself into the door and it stuck before groaning loudly open. The platform shifted again before she finished grinding it open.
How old was this place?
She ran her hand over the door and thin shards of auburn flaked under her fingers, it wasn’t color it was… rust?
That didn’t make sense, rust wasn’t something that appeared on the ship. Nano-steel didn’t rust. That could only mean one thing.
This place must be ancient.
Even though she wasn’t able to follow the heat signatures anymore she had observed a certain logical progression to the group’s movements. Once the crab patrols had increased in size and frequency the group’s path no longer doubled back or made alterations beyond what the tunnels required.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The tunnel beyond the door was small, unusually so. Well, maybe it was just unusual for her. She had hated the cramped tube they had to travel through to get to another cramped place, this time in a trash heap.
She didn’t like unknown variables and the crabs down here were definitely one, that wasn’t even considering the hybrids and Tule’s relationship with them. She suspected that Tule was less of a prisoner and, at best, a willing visitor. Leanne would find out Tule’s status, what the crabs had planned, and… well, she would keep her third objective open.
Hopefully she wouldn’t have to make it ‘escape’ but this was the Ship and unwelcome surprises were the norm. That particular lesson had only become more and more pertinent as she traveled through each section.
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Jack was finally released and after he emerged a wide bowing circle surrounded him. At a loss of what else to do he waved his hand dismissively. That started a furious grinding that filled the room and drowned out any potential for conversation.
For some reason he had been thinking about Yuma a lot in the last minutes as he waited for his release. He didn’t know why, but he felt a deep sense of guilt and concern when she entered his head. The negative feelings were vague and he tried to put them away but for some reason the compartmentalization process that was his primary emotional processing didn’t work this time. It was like his mind was forcing him to deal with the negative emotions. Thankfully they were vague and didn’t carry a significant emotional impact for him, they were just… uncomfortable.
He took a look back at his cage, it was a near perfect oval with assorted scraps of metal melded and bonded together more completely than a conglomeration like that should have been. ManRats in a near manic state, armed with portable grinders of physical and energetic natures, showered sparks through the room as they ripped off chunks of metal and fought other ManRats to solidify their claims.
Rattigan snatched two grinders from other ManRats and cut off a piece of hyper-dense metal. His rat face grinned wide and bowed to Jack before motioning for him to follow. Jack checked with Jonah who was glaring at him, surely complaining about something which Jack couldn’t hear. Probably about breaking his finger.
They followed him to a shadowed wall and walked through a door that neither of them noticed until they were already walking through it. Unsettling. The ringing in their ears subsided as their hearing started to repair itself and Jack asked, “What did you mean ‘doomed messiah’?”
Jonah glared and seemed like he was about to complain about something else but stopped himself, “They are a death cult. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but you should have seen it when you were in there. Probably not since your eyes burst viscera all over us.”
Jack didn’t feel the need to respond to that one, Jonah continued, I’m assuming you have some sort of Magnetic Affinity now?”
Jack was a bit shocked at the question and it triggered a flash of memory. It was gone again before he could decipher it. “I don’t know, I don’t think so, why do you say that?”
Jonah’s face turned like that wasn’t the answer he was expecting and that Jack was purposely being obfuscative, “Well. First of all you absorbed that Magnetic Nano that Tule had given to you… and the second reason is the whirling ELECTROMAGNETIC DEATH STORM THAT NEARLY KILLED ME!”
Jack gave Jonah a confused sheepish look, not quite sure where this was coming from. Before he could respond they were through another door into a small hall with a pointed ceiling, around it were balls of lights, many different paths led away and through the room. Uncomfortably close in front of them stood Rattigan, Jack couldn’t help but wonder how he hadn’t seen the ManRat get there.
He squeaked in a somber voice as he spread both paws to either side, “Yes ManJonah… you understand! Glorious death storm! BlackJack give many Blessed death-purpose, The Eternal Black! Calm-self ManHumanJonah, the BlackJack will guide all ones to ultimate death-purpose!” A wide, knowing smile punctuated the end of his sentence as if his words were water to a dying man.
Jonah looked like his brain had stopped working, Jack felt a touch of sympathy for him, he also found it somewhat hilarious. Jonah had been able to talk plenty after a Psy User treated his brain like a spoiled child’s plaything but a ManRat death-cult was too much to process. Jack took over the mantle of conversation for him, “Tell me more about our death-purpose.”
Rattigan had a look in his eyes at Jack’s request… he really wished that Yuma was here to translate ‘look-speak’, being a master of it herself, but without her he would just try to note when he saw weird looks and try to put the pieces together down the road.
The head rat cultist turned and continued walking through the echoing and empty small hall.
Jack shrugged and prodded Jonah to follow with him, “Guess you got a death-purpose too.”
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Jack had been wondering why Rattigan and the rest of the rats had called him ‘BlackJack’, so far he wasn’t able to make heads or tails of it. A whispered ‘death…’ flowed around them, ‘jack…’ following it, tickling the ear. They continued onward.
Jack turned a corner behind Rattigan and stopped. This was different. It was completely dark and he could no longer see their ManRat guide. Shining teeth reflected from the light shining behind him.
“This way BlackJack.”
First people gave him shit about being named ‘Jack’ and now he had a dumb nickname. The more he heard it the less he liked it. This ManRat Death Cult business was becoming a problem. He didn’t see how it could be worse. Jack suspected though, by some twist of creation that even having that thought guaranteed that it would be. To be fair, the likelihood of “worse” when dealing with a ManRat Death Cult and crab infestation probably didn’t need his help.
They walked in darkness before Rattigan swung open a tall, bisected door on its hinges and stepped forward.
Jack’s feet automatically took him to the edge of the hall, he hardly felt Jonah run into his back and start cursing. He didn’t notice, the room before him had taken all of that.
The floor was woven of rat, the carpet of fur and flesh and tail flowed and swelled. ManRats lined the walls on either side standing at attention, with raised platforms on either side at regular intervals where larger, fatter rats perched as they squeaked to each other in small groups. The room stretched away and was topped by a vaulted ceiling that went from his position all the way to another wall.
It looked like a chapel but… desperately, terribly perverse. The room’s red light sources were covered by crude skulls made of black metal, the eye-sockets and mouths of the metal facsimiles speared beams of hard-red in beams across the space. It added to the shifting queasiness of the room. The carpet of rats ended near the back of the room as Jack saw steps ascend up to an altar that was possessed by a deep red glow. The room was long.
“Jack what is in there? I can’t see!” Jonah was shoving at his back.
Jack stepped forward and the carpet parted to let his foot reach the ground.