The Path to Loss (Approaching Infinity Book 4) (16 page)

Jav and Hilene had encountered nothing in the transit tube, but had come to the end of the line. A massive wall, dotted with sealed access ways, greeted them. One of these access ways was open and led to a corridor along with the beginnings of artificial gravity. After several hundred meters, the corridor broke into a vast chamber. They listened to Vays’s report as they entered and were struck by the similarities between what he was describing and what they were seeing. Before Vays was finished, Jav and Hilene were set upon. Fat shapes darted from the shadows, but neither felt the bite of teeth. Though the creatures were fast when hungry, the Shades were faster. Jav caught one in the air by the throat, breaking its neck with only the sudden reversal of velocity. He flung this away, and rent another with a claw hand. Their own little claws enabled them to cling to steel, it seemed, and they were leaping from all heights, including from the ceiling. Hilene ran her spear hands through several before the attacks required her to use the Ten Deaths as an expedient.

The chamber had walls which pulsed with glistening life. They understood that this was due to the translucent skin catching the feeble light from the disused but still tenable systems. Thousands if not millions of the creatures clung to the walls, still dormant and ignorant of their presence, though many yet remained which sought to reproduce.

Jav and Hilene shared a moment of unspoken communication—something that had become somewhat routine with them in certain circumstances—and slaughtered in silence every creature that came at them and any that stirred from slumber.

To maintain silence, Jav spoke through his Artifact. “What do you think, Hilene? Can we get through without waking the whole nest?”

“Yes. Or at least I could. But what would be the fun in that? Or the point?”

Jav nodded. “Let’s head back.”

When they’d gotten far enough away from the nest, Jav used his Tether Launch control to contact Witchlan and the other Shades. “Minister, I realize that you must be very busy at the moment, but how close are we to freeing the Vine from the struts?”

“The quadrant-four breach, which we assume was not infected with grotesque little quadrupeds, is clear and closed off with temporary seals. Demolition crews have planted charges to reduce any potential threat the strut might offer through further drift,” Witchlan said. “The quadrant two breach is taking more time.”

“Minister, please hold off on the explosives. The fastest way back for Icsain and Nils is the way they came. Nils, Icsain, hurry back. Identify your re-entry point and coordinate with engineering crews to minimize damage. Raus, Vays, you two head back as well.”

Though it had only been hours since the collision, word of the little monsters had in fact come a bit late to the Palace. Several of them had been wandering the corridors of the strut and had been drawn to the break by simple inertia along with the outrush of air. Most of these were pulverized either by impacting into any number of obstacles, or by being ground between steel and the hard skin of the Vine, but three living specimens had managed to drift through the ruptured strut into the Root Palace. Finding gravity and purchase for their little claws, they sought out the nearest source of warmth. They, like most living things, were possessed of the biological imperative to reproduce and so continued on in the vein that had sent them from their nest in the first place.

The bodies of their first two victims were hidden, not through cunning but by circumstance, under fallen debris in a largely inaccessible cavity overlooked by the engineers and repair crews. There was a power junction there, tended to by the two dead technicians, which attracted the third creature since no other living prey remained nearby. Thus it was that a small colony of the little creatures came into being in a very short time. Feeding off the remains of their parents and the power supplied by the chewed-through live wire issuing from the junction, they multiplied and soon could be counted in the hundreds. They crammed the hemmed-in space, clinging to the walls and every other surface, giving the appearance of a polyp-ridden membrane, which pulsed in waves with their breathing. Some still vied for access to the junction, but the majority slipped into hibernation, lulled by a synchronous heartbeat and made insensible by the pleasant warmth of proximity. Some could not find a comfortable place to settle, though, and these set off singly on lone quests for food and reproduction as their forebears had, exiting through gaps in the debris further into the Palace.

One of these strays happened upon a repair crew consisting of ten men. Now, those who made their lives in the Palace, despite being on the Empire’s ever-expanding frontier, were not accustomed to up-close encounters with alien life of any sort—that was the bailiwick of Shades, who saw that all such life was wiped out before any normal stepped foot beyond the Palace walls. So when a member of the crew spotted the creature moving beneath some fallen partitions, he was stunned into mute fascination. Acting on his curiosity, he approached the waddling creature, bending to get a closer look. Busy with their own tasks, his fellows paid no attention to his distraction, and he gave no alert as the creature leapt at his bent form, latching onto his neck and chest with its powerful jaws, crushing his vocal cords and snapping his cervical vertebrae with the same locking bite.

The sound of the man’s neck breaking was lost amongst the noise of the crew’s work, but the hiss of blood being siphoned through the creature’s body to fill the squirming sacs upon its back soon had the attention of most of the men.

They, like their doomed fellow, stood and stared in mute fascination mixed with horror, too shocked to act. This did not go on long, however, as the little creature exploded beneath the growth of its young. Not filled with the blood—which is not truly blood—of Raus Kapler, the young completed their race to maturity on the bursting of their parent with the final, forced infusion of nutrients and protein, and so the now nine-man crew faced twelve of the little beasts where there had been but one. Some of the men were able to break the shackles of their terror and seek escape, but the agility of the newborns exceeded their ability to flee, and soon a second colony thrived.

With variations, it went on like this so that the numbers of the creatures increased exponentially, all in the hardest to reach regions of the damaged Palace. At about the time Vays made his report, other reports had started coming in, describing vicious animal attacks, but those reporting were cut off and not heard from again.

Witchlan himself took charge of the operation, coordinating with the Palace Planning and Infrastructure Division. Crews were teamed with Imperial Police escorts and everyone was armed with knowledge of the danger and, perhaps more importantly, fan guns. These pistols were repeating seed guns, the ammunition of which rapidly regrew within the weapon itself and primed the targets for quick absorption into the Vine. They had no power to penetrate even thin armor and were of little value in most of the warfare conducted by the Viscain, but for the crisis at hand they would serve perfectly.

Strays were encountered and dealt with, but it took some time to locate the nests. Each time a crew did locate a nest, chaos invariably resulted. The fan guns proved to be extremely effective against the creatures, which were dubbed
glass pigs
for their appearance and singular appetite, but once the beasts were roused from their hibernation, they scattered so that while the majority were killed, there were always those which managed to scramble away to find a new hiding place.

They were all assembled in the war room for the second time in roughly six hours. Witchlan brooded in the shadows just beyond the light of a holographic screen at the head of the room.

With arms folded and an uncharacteristic disconnected disgust, Witchlan spoke. “We’ll let the Biological Sciences Division fill you in on the details concerning our vermin problem, then discuss plans for the Palace. Director Jaspo?”

The thin man on the screen sat forward, the lenses of his spectacles catching light and becoming opaque. “Thank you, Minister,” Jaspo said. “We have collected a number of specimens, both live and dead—and some somewhere in between, thanks to General Kapler—and have arrived at the conclusion that these. . . glass pigs have been genetically engineered to do exactly what they are now doing here within the Palace. They are a pest whose sole motivation is to reproduce through feeding, either upon nutrient rich blood or, with somewhat reduced results, on raw energy.

“Each full grown animal has fifteen eggs in three rows of five running along the length of the spine. Their teeth and claws are extremely sharp and durable. While their claws are too short to cause much harm, they enable the animals to adhere to just about any surface. Many of you have witnessed them clinging to smooth metal surfaces and this is not surprising. While the musculature of their jaws is impressive, it is the combination of sharpness and durability of the teeth which makes their bite so dangerous, even to Shades. We have measured some of the edges to be as thin as a single molecule.

“Each full-grown animal is a perfect copy of its parent, completely indistinguishable.”

“Excuse me, Director Jaspo,” Raus said, “but if that’s the case why aren’t there fifteen offspring with every successful feeding?”

“Successful is the key word, General. Every food target will offer different potential. Ideally, yes, there would be fifteen offspring with each feeding. If there are defects in the food target’s blood it seems these are filtered through an amazing combination of organs designed for this purpose. The eggs immediately above the spine are given priority, then those on either side of the spine moving down the length of the body. It is always the eggs furthest from the food source that suffer and fail to develop if any should fail to develop. First in line and all that.

“The animals are better equipped to process blood than pure energy, but they have two separate means to process the latter. One of the filtering organs previously mentioned is essentially a converter with only thirty percent efficiency. Still for a biological mechanism, pretty efficient and something we will be looking into replicating. Their translucent skin is an even less efficient converter, which works on a principle similar to photosynthesis, capturing maybe ten to twelve percent of input.

“They are quite hardy in the face of energy discharge weapons, but the fan guns have worked very well against them and we can see no better approach to exterminating them.”

“Just so,” Witchlan said. “Mr. Porta, will you assist me in distributing these.”

“Of course, Minister,” Nils said, moving to where Witchlan indicated. He gripped the handle of a meter-long rod that stood erect upon a tripod base. Secured to the rod, which ran through the trigger guards, were ten pistols. When he held the thing aloft, the base gathered and retracted within the rod. Nils detached the first weapon and placed it on the glass table before Jav. He proceeded to provide each of the Shades with one of the guns.

Jav stared dumbly at the weapon for a moment and snickered uncontrollably.

“Something funny, Holson?” Vays said.

Jav raised his eyes slowly to meet Vays’s gaze, looked to Hilene briefly, then back to Vays. His lips parted and shook as if he were afraid to voice his thoughts. “It looks like flare gun.”

“What’s a flare gun?” Hilene said.

Jav shook his head, shrugged, swallowed hard.

Icsain turned his head sharply, regarded Witchlan, who stepped forward.

“Yes, Mr. Holson, tell us. What is a flare gun?” Witchlan said.

“It’s a gun,” Jav said, his eyes losing focus, “that looks like this. It. . . it fires a small combustible charge that operates like a primitive version of a jump ship’s optical beacon before burning out.”

“How quaint,” Witchlan said.

Jav laughed nervously, his lips still quivering. “I don’t know how or why I know that.”

“You’ve doubtless come across them over the course of our many acquisitions,” Witchlan said.

“Doubtless,” Icsain said, but was quickly cowed by a sharp look from Witchlan.

“What bothers me,” Jav said as if not hearing either of them, “is that I remember thinking this before, that this weapon looks like a flare gun.”

Jav blinked several times, but he saw nothing. A single image flickered in his mind, that of a woman’s face spattered with blood. She was maddeningly familiar, but would not come into focus long enough to bring recollection, despite temporarily overwhelming his vision. Frustration, also familiar, boiled inside him, fueled by a combination of emotions that he’d felt before but couldn’t properly sort through. He wanted to break something, and it took all his self-control to not reach down, take the fan gun up in one hand, and crush it.

Silence reigned. The atmosphere was taut with a tension that only two in the room fully understood. Icsain sat straighter in his chair. Both he and Witchlan stared at Jav, waiting for more from him, perhaps the loosing of all his repressed memories, but nothing came.

“Anyone else care to share any instances of deja vu?” Witchlan said with careful jocularity. “No? Right.” He fixed his attention on Scanlan as he turned the weapon over in his brass hands, examining it.

“Fan guns,” Witchlan went on, “were in wide use in the early days of the Empire, but as with all things, more efficient means were developed and employed. Still, they will have their use once again. They require no loading. Their ammunition is inexhaustible, but reproduction may require some time.”

“Reproduction?” Scanlan said, raising his eyes from the weapon to regard Witchlan.

“They are products of the Vine, just as your Artifacts are, but are of a much simpler order. While we do not in any way dispute your powers or abilities, each of you will take one of these weapons and use them as a first line of offense.

“The thought of the Palace filled with parasites—
uninvited
parasites—is sickening.”

Several Shades shared uncomfortable looks at Witchlan’s clarification.