18. Two for every ten
The cloning facility entering shutdown was not subtle. Nor did it go unnoticed. Except for the fact that, at the moment, he was dealing with an invasion of humans and their four legged friends, Horthus himself would have been notified immediately. So it got moved into the queue as the second most important thing happening on the surface that day, while the rest of the Named on the other worlds and crafts throughout the Horthus system were more focused on preparing to defend their homes from the oncoming Aurealian swarm.
But it was noticed. Aboard the Theseus, a young Pan troglodytes sapiens noticed the change in the uplink jacks that the Rodentia corps had been leaving behind in their various targeted sabotage projects. He was a young computer expert with a specialty in xenotechnology and xenosoftware. All of the cloning facilities were off of the primary Jurassian network, and did not follow established Aurealian protocols either. It was similar to both, yet neither, and he was forced to work from scratch and by remote.
Fortunately the computer handled the translation of the lexicon for him very well, and when the alarm was triggered, he knew what it meant.
"Athena, contact Captain Jon Cassonova, priority message."
"User Simon has been set to ‘mute.’ A combat mission is underway. User Simon is a civilian contractor in an advisory role. Priority message request denied. Would you like to leave a message?"
"Oh for, Athena, contact Katherine, priority message."
"User Simon has been set to ‘mute.’ Priority message request denied. Answering message: ‘I don’t want to hear you sulk, Simon, cry on someone else’s shoulder for once.’ End message. Would you like to leave a message?"
"I am going to -"
A second facility went into lockdown. For what it would be worth, Simon tried to send a message to the leadership of the Rodentia corps still on the Theseus to update them as to the situation. A hologram of a dancing rat popped up with the text "We are unable to take your--"
A third facility lit up.
Realizing that he couldn’t call for help, Simon stopped trying. Instead he began to do his damn job, what the old man had brought him to do in the first place. He began to hack.
"Hack the planet," he muttered to himself under his breath for a reason he didn’t clearly understand. It was simply tradition.
~~~~~~~~~
Yellow and Purple Dots and their litter were not alone. They were far from alone, as the Rodentia squad realized after leaving them behind. There had been almost thirty stuck in that one little room, without enough space, and there were three other rooms with kips of the same age and maturity level as them. And there were another four rooms of kips of a slightly younger age. And another set of kips younger yet. There were at least five hundred kips in the facility.
And they were all in a bad place. They needed help, and the Rodentia corps were the only ones available to provide it. They were able to contact Athena, and Rodentia command, but command was so busy with all of the other facilities that it was hard for them to try to communicate their sense of urgency. And when they managed it, they were informed that they were not the only team in the same situation.
The humans and the commandos were unavailable. They were helping, in a way, by keeping the Jurassians focused on the capital city and not the sappers. But while it had been expected to find some of the Aurealians – an expectation which was news to Pleasant Scent and his crew, although they knew they weren’t told everything in advance for various reasons – the sheer number of kips was beyond their expectations.
The Rodentia couldn’t make themselves understood to the kips.
The kips couldn’t understand the Rodentia.
The kips didn’t seem to understand that they were in danger. Even when the sappers opened the doors for them, the young Aurealians were reluctant to leave the comfortable – cramped and squallid – confines of their imprisonment.
"How do we help them when they do not want help don’t they know their school is an abattoir?" One of Pleasant Scent’s squad mates asked nervously. That discovery, a room of horrors, of little skeletons picked clean, was still on each of their minds.
"There may be nothing we can do," the squad leader answered unhappily. "Nothing but trust the humans I am certain the humans mean to help the song singers and that is why we are here but we are not warriors we were sent to gather information and sabotage what we could. We must trust the humans to come up with a plan, but we are only here for recon and early sapping the work we did today will help the humans help the singers but we can do no more."
None of the squad was happy with this answer. But what could they do? They were Rodentia corps, the best maintenance, mappers, and sappers in the UEOSC combined forces. But they were not warriors. The Rodentia squad won their fights by leaving a mess of cut wires and network relay jacks behind them. And most importantly, by stealth. None of them even had a gun in their kit.
"We must retreat, for now," Pleasant Scent reluctantly agreed. "The humans will come to save the singers, and they will bring the dogs and the tiger and the gorilla, and the predators will regret what they are doing and have done, but we are just Rodentia, and this is all we can do."
"Yes, we must retreat, for now," the squad leader agreed, relieved that the others were seeing the logic of his conclusions. Reluctantly, they returned to the initial classroom and began filing into the vent they had arrived through. The Aurealians lamented to see them leave, but did not try to stop them.
~~~~~~~~
Yellow was sad to see the dancers leave, but she was happy to have met them at all. She hoped that they would come back, they were funny, furry little things that made her happy. Even Purple Dots was happy that the dancers had visited them and asked that they come back as soon as possible, and Purple Dots never intentionally agreed with Yellow about anything.
Once the last of the dancers was in the air vent, Yellow reluctantly pushed it shut behind them, although she did not attempt to secure it as it had been. She wished that she was still small enough to have crawled through it after them, but it had been many, many lessons since she and her sisters had been that small.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
"Oh, little Dancers, please come back and play with us again, it is so lonely with only ourselves and the Others to keep company," she called into the air vent, and her sisters echoed her.
Soon after, they heard the heavy incoming "slap, slap, slap," of the others’ bare feet walking on the hard floor of their homes, and Yellow had a dash of fear. Not for herself, for the first time in a while, but for the dancers.
Would the others know about the dancers? What would they do when they found out?
~~~~~~~~
Gone followed his nose, but his nose led him everywhere. Something was in his facility, something that should not be there, and he could smell it. It was like it was coming out of the air handlers themselves, but that was impossible. The air vents pushed through the facility were filtered and scrubbed, with the filters cleaned weekly and replaced three times annually.
He had ordered them checked anyway, and a small team of Nameless were working on that now, while Gone and the Nameless he had designated as his ‘security team’ were searching for the intruders. And Gone was not liking what he found.
Access panels forced open, and the wires inside cut. Superconductive relays removed. Power conduits inverted. Fuses and circuit breakers disabled. Sabotage. Sabotage everywhere.
He was furious. It was not his fault, he knew, but he would be blamed. Quickly, he ordered a shutdown of the facility’s independent fusion generator. The power source was so old that it would be hard to get it started again, but it would be better to cut the power completely than to fry the components of the cloning facility that nobody understood how to build or replace. Fortunately he had ordered the embryos to be put in cold storage, which should protect them for decades even without power.
He could not fix this. His facility, his happy role in life, would be taken out of his hands and given to someone else, someone with the knowledge and experience to undo what had been done.
But before that would happen, he would indulge his appetites one last time.
~~~~~~~~~
The sound of claws raking the walls echoed through the little classroom-prisons just as the lights went out. Where the teacher had been singing one moment, suddenly there was silence. Hundreds of kips cried out in surprise and alarm, their little daily routines had never been interrupted thus before and they knew not what to think.
Yellow knew. She did not know how she knew, but she made the connection quicker than her sisters, or any of the other kips who knew about the dancers. The Others had learned of the dancers’ visit, and they were very, very angry. But what could she do? She was just a Kip, small and defenseless, while the others were tall and strong, with sharp claws and terrible teeth.
Bravely, she placed herself in front of the air vent, hoping to conceal the dancers’ escape route. She could think of nothing else.
~~~~~~~~~
Gone raked his claws over the bars of the weaning rooms, hearing the satisfying ‘clack clack clack clack’ as he scratched the steel of each bar. The doors had been replaced long ago, the automatic doors controlled by the station’s network replaced by ones that the Horthians could control. Otherwise, there would be no keeping the kips where they belonged. The doors of the facility, except for the ones with the cloning machinery itself, would just open for them wherever they went.
He relished the reaction of the little morsels as the generator shut down and the facility moved to reserve power. He walked by room after room, deciding how many of the little Aurealians he would kill in each. He didn’t have all the time in the world, he knew. Eventually, his superiors would realize what was happening and send someone to relieve him. But he wouldn’t rush either. Opening the door to one of the rooms at random, he grabbed the nearest kip and sank his teeth into it, the savory taste of its blood filling his senses.
The others in the room screamed, a sound that even he could hear. The kip was still alive when he threw it away, locking the door behind him. He did not care if his victim lived or died. The blood, and the screams, had been his goal. Quickly the weaning rooms began to fill with the scent of Aurealian fear and stress pheromones. Scents which the foolish prey themselves seem to be unaware that they even create, but which drove the Jurassians wild.
Intoxicating.
However, he was a Named One, and he remained in control of himself. He reminded himself what he was doing, why he was here, and what his goals were. The facility was defunct, for now, and all of the Kips would be sent to the hunting grounds ahead of schedule. And so he would teach them fear, and that meant that he could kill no more than two in ten.
But there were eight thousand kips in his facility.
His grin was feral and terrible, with the soft green of Aurealian blood dripping down his body.
He continued to walk through the hallway in the center of the weaning rooms, running his claws over the walls and the bars of the doors. "Clack clack clack clack," "clack clack clack clack," "clack clack clack clack," "clack clack clack clack."
He retained enough of his senses to notice that the scent of the invaders was growing stronger. Something to investigate as he continued his duty. His wonderful, terrible, frightening duty. He visited six more rooms as he followed his nose, leaving behind him terrible scenes of blood and gore.
Two for every ten.
~~~~~~~