The Dead Fields, Sun-Side Plains
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.2.25 Interstellar
The morant was a simple creature that was perfectly adapted to its environment. Its brain—if the distributed clusters of reactive ganglia could be called that—was quite small relative to its overall mass. Things moved slowly up there, which was fortunate in the Dead Fields. By the time it became aware of most pain or discomfort, it was already a fading memory.
What made the morant the apex predator of the Dead Fields was its ignorance. It did not know it lived in an area so dually resplendent in and inimical to life that most species not smart enough to avoid it either died or were changed. It simply ate what was left behind, absorbing all manner of organic and inorganic matter through its feeding pods, themselves more akin to independent and opportunistic macro-bacteria than true limbs.
If one of its “feet” landed in an aberration, the morant simply allowed it to die, replacing the lost mass through another one of its members. Its body, held up by no less than eleven limbs at the time and suspended ten meters in the air, had persisted in this manner for more than a thousand years.
It was not aware of Mick when he emptied an entire pack of Greed Leaf powder against one of its pods. It simply absorbed the new material, passing it through a complex system of cellular exchanges that allowed it to distinguish opportunities from dangers in the chaotic environment of the Dead Fields. The substance was something it had never sampled before, except from certain short-lived species of toad it sometimes enjoyed. It was organic, did not damage its cells, and, in fact, had a rather pleasant effect on some of the nerve clusters it came into contact with.
This series of interchanges and subconscious decisions—for subconscious was all there was—rapidly passed the Greed Leaf up the leg stems to be sampled by the body primary, where it lit up the morant’s basic and unprepared nervous system like a string of LEDs.
Stimuli and information raced through the morant’s limbs at a pace it had never experienced before, allowing it for the first time to get a near real-time impression of its surroundings. It became aware that one of its eleven limbs was a quarter into an aggressive cancerous mutation and jerked it back as if stung. It became aware of living, moving things in the surrounding terrain. Usually, this meant food. The food was moving toward it, creating vibrations in the air—sounds, some of them fast and sharp and others more drawn out and modulated.
The morant dipped its head beneath the mists that usually formed from its exhalations and oriented some of its heat-sensing organs toward the little things. It looked remarkably like a crudely drawn spider nightmare a child might have, and so one of the compartmentalist soldiers shot at it.
The morant bellowed in pain as the hot metal tore through sensory organs and membranes, making the first conscious decision of its life.
The small, stinging food things needed to die.
***
Janus watched as Mick emptied the packet of Greed Leaf onto the pulsing side of one of the morant’s appendages. It was a phenomenal quantity of the psychoactive drug, enough to give most land animals an overdose, but probably not that significant when he considered a creature whose foot was bigger than the bull emberthorn they’d faced in Hayyam. He also lacked knowledge about a morant’s cognitive processes. He only hoped there would be some kind of a reaction that would distract the compartmentalists long enough for Ryler to get the service access open.
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He was surprised when the large scavenger thrust its head under the mist layer it exuded from its skin. The morant’s constant absorption of atmospheric humidity and exhalation of mist had earned it the moniker of “mist monster” and “fog boggart” from enthusiasts and researchers alike.
He was shocked when a comp soldier shot it, and the morant shook the air with a mournful bellow. As far as he knew, morants had no sound-producing organs. This was, therefore, either a specific and individual mutation, or the creature was vibrating its entire body in rage.
“Mick! You might want to run!” Janus yelled.
The morant pulled its head back into the clouds and charged.
The battle rapidly devolved into chaos from there. Mick was almost pulped as the spider-like creature turned on its aggressors at a full-blown gallop. Its feet were like swinging wrecking balls. At this point, the nearest compartmentalist team was 200 meters away, but that was a mere ten to twenty strides for the enraged morant.
“That worked better than expected!” Mick said, slamming himself down into the mulch next to Janus.
Snap! A shot kicked up the sod to Janus’s left.
“Got my rifle?” Mick asked with cheerful disregard.
Janus handed Mick the weapon and shouldered the one Lira had given him. His chem-pistol was useless at these ranges.
A compartmentalist soldier let out a yelp and then a bloodcurdling scream as the morant stomped him, and his body was drawn into the appendage.
Mick started snapping off shots, one every six seconds or so. What they lacked in weapons or manpower, they somewhat made up for in ammunition.
Janus was having a harder time of it. It was one thing to tell Mick to shoot someone or to do it with gas or capsules he could potentially help them recover from. It was another to look through the scope at the small shapes in the distance and send burning metal their way at the speed of sound.
“Just like target practice, boss,” Mick said.
Janus swallowed and let out half a breath. He lined the scope’s glowing chevron up with an enemy soldier—two ticks high, for the distance—and slowly pulled back until the rifle bucked against his shoulder. Crack! Janus lost sight of the soldier, not knowing if he’d hit or not, and raised his head.
“Nope!” Mick said, grabbing Janus by the back of the harness just as a volley of shots hit their position. “Move, move, move!”
They took three running steps—Mick traveled more distance than Janus in that short time—and then Janus slammed himself down behind the next piece of micro terrain. He shouldered his rifle and took aim just as Mick was getting off his next shot.
The compartmentalist side of the battlefield looked like madness. The morant was tearing through their lines, seemingly striking at random as its legs lifted and crashed down on enemy soldiers. From what Janus could make out, they looked like they were wearing Pugarian browns and oranges. Crack! Had the comps hired mercenaries? A comp machine gunner let a stream of tracers loose at the morant, firing from the hip, and Janus snapped another two shots at her before scooting to a new position in a baby crawl, poking his head and rifle out from behind a moss-eaten log.
They’d chosen to defend this position partially because of the morant but also because there was a defined area around them where there were no aberrations, allowing them options to shoot and move. It still made Janus nervous. He couldn’t imagine what it was like on the comp side, having to choose between getting eaten or shot at or running into an aberration and coming apart.
“How’s the door coming?” Janus asked over the comm.
“It’s coming,” Ryler said.
“Try doing it faster,” Janus suggested.
Mick snickered over the channel, and Janus rolled his eyes. Crack!
Snap! Another shot almost hit him. Janus was learning to tell those apart from the sound they made, and he went completely flat as he low crawled backward, trying to push himself into the earth.
There was a boom as a comp heavy weapons’ expert hit a morant leg with a rocket launcher, and the air rang out again with the creature’s bellow as the coldsider aspirant unleashed a stream of molten fire in the creature’s direction, causing it to stagger back. To Janus’s dismay, the “wings” of the compartmentalist line had continued advancing. They were taking casualties from having to move forward together through the aberration zone, but they were moving forward.
Janus was also surprised to see one of the Verazlan rangers moving forward with the sea of red. Had he betrayed their team and Veraz, or was he taken prisoner? Either way, Janus couldn’t help but feel bitter regret over it.
“We’re ready, Janus,” Lira said. “Fall back.”
Mick was already moving.
The two of them ran back toward the others, staying as low as they could.