Mech

Ten

The farmer had a loud rolling laugh that boomed out over the fields and was audible among the smooth dark trunks of the horkwoods. It was the loud laugh that killed him. Thinking that the sound was a warning, that perhaps the vertebrates had somehow detected it, the killbeast altered course toward the farm. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered with this farm, as there was a relatively small herd of food-animals huddled in the barn. Its orders, however, were clear on the subject of detection: there could be none. Any enemy attempting to sound the alarm had to be silenced.

Reaching the edge of the trees, the killbeast paused to investigate a crude electric fence. Clearly, it had been designed to keep unintelligent animals in and out. With a single, contemptuous spasm of its powerful hind legs, it vaulted the ten-foot barrier and landed in the moonlit fields. Slinking toward the unknown and misunderstood sounds of laughter, it slid from shadow to shadow, nothing but another ripple in the waving fields of grain. Using the radio crystals grown in its thorax, it sent a single burst transmission. The chirp of data signaled the trachs waiting back in the forest to advance, there would be much protoplasm to carry back to the Parent’s digesters very soon.

The jax herd in the barn lowed mournfully at the strange and frightening smells that came from the woods. Inside the shelter of their barn, they shoved and grunted their way into a huge circle of tightly packed animals, forming a single mass of woolly bodies. The ones in the center were soon crushed near to death and bucked up above their comrades, scarring the others with their stone-sharpened hooves and trying to walk on the lumpy, woolly sea of jax backs.

“The jaxes are balling up again!” cried little Jimmy Herkart, trotting into the harvester garage where his father and Uncle Rolf were smoking a bit of swamp-reed in their long-stemmed pipes. “Daddy, they’ll kill themselves this time, it’s real bad. They’ll be deaders in the middle for sure!”

The two men stopped laughing abruptly at the news. “Damned morons,” muttered Jimmy’s Uncle Rolf as they set aside their pipes and followed Jimmy out of the garage. They were a bit unsteady on their feet, and Dev Herkart, Jimmy’s father, almost fell into the old dried-up well shaft as he staggered across the yard.

“Where the hell are the dogs?” Dev demanded, rubbing bleary eyes. He shook his head to clear it, and seemed to stand straighter.

“They ran off into the fields, barking at something out there. They haven’t come back yet,” explained Jimmy, pointing toward the shadowy treeline. The silvery wires of the electric fence glimmered in the bluish light of Gopus.

“Probably after a tree-yeckler, or maybe a landshark pup that the patrols missed. If the herd’s been harmed, I’ll take the lot of them to the auction tomorrow,” said Dev with a growl. As the two men and the excited boy approached the barn, the frightened lowing turned to a terrific screaming. The scream of a Jax, despite its great size, had a disturbingly human sound to it, and all three of them recoiled.

“Sounds like a slaughter!” shouted Uncle Rolf, clapping his hands over his ears.

Dev broke into a run, and the others followed. As they passed the toolshed, the farmer stopped to throw open the door and pull out a long-barreled Wu shotgun and a box of shells. He shoved shells into the breach as they all trotted up to the barn door, cursing his absent dogs with each step.

“It’s a landshark, sure as shit.” said Uncle Rolf with just a hint of nervous fear in his voice. “It’s got to be.”

Inside the barn, the unmistakable sounds of a slaughter in progress continued. If anything, they had heightened. The very walls of the barn shuddered with the impact of heavy bodies charging about in blind panic. The leaves of the doors buckled, and the chain across the opening went taunt with a rattling sound. Human-sounding shrieks, wild grunts and the heavy thumping of hooves filled the night air.

Dev didn’t bother with the chains; he simply blew the lock and the chain apart with his shotgun. Inside, a jax buckled against the doors and the body rolled out into the yard, forcing the doors open wide. The leaves opened with such force that they smacked against the wooden walls. The jax was dead, its head half-blown away by the shotgun blast.

Then the herd charged for freedom, but fortunately they had been expecting this and had stepped out of the way. Eyes rolling with terror, tusks wet with blood from chewing their own tongues, the jaxes poured out of the barn in an avalanche of woolly bodies.

“Only forty?” howled Dev as the last of the jaxes able to move staggered out. “I have ninety head in there!”

Rage took over and drowned out all caution. Dev rushed into the barn, finding and snapping on the overhead lights. They flickered into life and illuminated a scene of dreadful carnage. More than half the herd lay twitching, all obviously victims of violent death. Throats had been ripped out and left exposed, entrails had been pulled from soft bellies and splattered on the walls. One nearby jax, its front legs both severed at the midpoint, tried repeatedly to stand on its remaining stumps. Blood covered the walls and ran in rivers on the concrete floor. There was an overpowering odor of excrement and death.

The humans were speechless for a moment. Then they all choked on their dinners, near to vomiting. Dev held back the urge, however, too angry to give in to retching. Instead he walked into the ruin of his barn and his livelihood, shouting inarticulately for whatever had done this to come out.

Uncle Rolf put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “You go back to the house now, boy,” he said. “You tell your mom to get the militia on the net and bring them out here.”

Jimmy nodded and stumbled back toward the light and safety of the house. On the way, he vomited into the well shaft.

The two men squinted up at the roof and examined the loft carefully. “There,” said Uncle Rolf, pointed toward a patch of black sky visible through a hole in the roof. He wiped acidic bile from his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Whatever it was, it probably entered and left through that hole.”

“Not big enough for a landshark, not even a small one,” said Dev doubtfully. “Besides, a ‘shark couldn’t climb up there.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Uncle Rolf while the two men warily approached the hole and stood beneath it. “I’ve seen ‘em scuttle right up a hork tree after a howler. Anyway, it must have jumped down into the orchard on that side of the barn. Probably, used one of the trees to get up there.”

Uncle Rolf would have said more, but Dev held up his hand for silence. Both of them listened. There came a sound from the trees outside the barn, the sound of crackling branches. Walking quickly and quietly, the two men left the barn. Uncle Rolf paused to grab up a heavy wrecking bar that hung near the entrance. He hefted it experimentally, feeling the weight of it.

Outside it was cold and a fresh breeze had come up. The cool air blowing in their faces helped lift the drug-induced fog from their minds. They stalked the source of the sound, following it into the orchard. Gopus was just coming over the peaks of the Polar Range to the north, and it provided a bluish light that filtered through the finger-like branches. A tree creaked with the weight of a moving body, the sound coming from deeper in the orchard. Perspiring despite the cold, they followed it.

Dev saw something ahead, a shadowy form that flittered from behind one tree trunk to another, crossing their path. He halted, raising his gun.

“What is it?” whispered his brother.

Dev didn’t answer. Above them a branch creaked, then snapped. A few twigs fluttered down from above, swirling about in the wind.

“It’s above us!” shouted Rolf, holding his wrecking bar over his head.

Dev’ shotgun boomed, more twigs showered down and a dark shape fell out of the tree and landed with a heavy thump.

They jogged forward to the fallen body. “It’s one of your dogs.”

“The head’s missing,” Rolf pointed out unnecessarily. “Where’s the head?”

They found it laying a few feet away. The lips were curled back in a permanent snarl.

“It’s Shaker, dammit,” said Dev, “a good dog.”

Rolf was examining the tree above them. “Look,” he said, pointing to more shapes up in the tree. “They’re all hanging by wires. The same wire you use to run the fences, I’d warrant.”

For the first time they knew real fear. Above them hung Dev’s whole pack of seven dogs, minus Shaker who lay at their feet. Dev swung the shotgun barrel about in wide arcs, aiming into the trees and cursing.

There were more sounds of creaking branches directly ahead of them. Almost immediately afterward, a gray shape moved through the shadows off to the left. Another rustling sound came from the trees to the right a moment later. “There must be more than one, I just saw something up ahead a second ago. Nothing could move back up into the trees so fast.”

“They’re stalking us,” said Rolf with mild surprise in his voice.

Without thinking, the two men stood back to back, their boots buried in wet grass. They breathed in visible gushes of white mist. Their heads swiveled rapidly, trying to pick up any significant movement in the dim light.

Suddenly, a shape dropped down from a nearby tree and ran toward them for a moment before darting behind another tree trunk.

“What the hell-” Dev said, swinging his shotgun into line. He fired, scarring the tree trunk with a gash of white wood in the dark pool of bark. They advanced on the tree the creature had gone behind, wrecking bar and shotgun upraised. Dev jerked his head, indicating that Rolf should go forward and flush the creature from behind the tree trunk with his wrecking bar. Rolf hesitated for a moment, but as he was the younger of the two and accustomed to following Dev’s lead, he did it. He moved through the grass with the wrecking bar cocked over his shoulder like a rayball player swinging for a double.

He came around the far side of the tree with a growl, swinging the wrecking bar with killing force. It struck the bark with a dull thunk, stinging his hands. There was nothing there.

“Did you get it?” asked Dev.

“It’s gone.”

“Gone?” Dev said in amazement, stepping around the tree with the shotgun leveled. While Rolf sagged against the trunk and waited for his heart to slow down, Dev examined the bark and the dirt at the foot of the tree. “It was here, see these claw marks? And they go up the tree, too. The thing just ran up this tree like a goddamn howler.”

Rolf snapped erect and backed away from the tree quickly. “Do you see it up there?”

Both of them stared up into the treetops, but saw nothing. Rolf heard a swishing sound off to his right, behind Dev. Dev stiffened, making a strange sound. A gray blade-like object protruded from his belly for a moment, and then it was withdrawn. Slumping against the tree trunk, he sagged down to his knees. Behind him stood the creature.

It resembled a giant lizard of some kind, with gray reptilian skin. There was no visible hair, horns or claws except for the blades of hard black material that sheathed the feet. It had run Dev through with one of these machete-like blades. The creature stood at least seven feet high on long powerful hind legs. Two short, wiry forelimbs each ended in three opposing fingers that had a sinuous, rubbery look to them. It had no head, but rather from the top of its torso sprouted several ropy-looking stalks and a cluster of mandibles above an open maw for eating. The stalks floated about and appeared to direct themselves in unison. Their behavior immediately suggested that the bulbs terminating the stalks were eyes or at least that they were sensory organs of some kind.

Rolf swung his wrecking bar for the creature’s head-area, or at least for the spot where the waving stalks sprouted. The creature danced away and disappeared into the trees.

Snatching up his shotgun, Rolf took a moment to check on his brother.

Still hugging the rough black bark, pressing his cheek against it, Dev was dying. He choked on blood, then stopped breathing altogether. The light of Gopus glinted in his dead eyes.

Too scared to feel grief, Rolf snatched up Dev’s shotgun. He began to run for the house. Something came up behind him, and then it paced him, running through the trees to his right. Then it vanished again, and appeared over to the left. With sudden clarity of thought, he realized it was playing with him, that it had been simply probing-testing for reaction the whole time.

He fired a wild blast at the dark shape, hoping for luck. He got it. The creature was bowled off its odd feet. It rolled through the wet grass that carpeted the orchard. Showing a horrible vitality, it sprang back up again, like a tumbler at the end of a run.

Rolf stopped and tried to take advantage of his lucky shot. He fired again, but this time he missed. Black dirt and grass fountained behind the creature. It charged him. Even as he heard the click of the next shell being automatically spring-loaded into the firing chamber, he realized he would never get off another shot. Perhaps if he hadn’t smoked the second pipeful of swamp-reed, or if he had been less surprised, he wouldn’t have missed so badly. But he had and now the thing was on him.

The thing snatched the shotgun from his grasp as effortlessly as Rolf himself had snatched a jax-goad from Jimmy’s hands earlier that very day. In almost the same fluid motion, the thing made a flying kick for his head. The bladed foot swept up, caught Rolf under the chin, and cleanly decapitated him. His head and body fell in separate directions.

Showing its lack of familiarity with the human anatomy, the killbeast pointed the shotgun at the headless corpse, found the trigger with its odd rubbery fingers, and fired several times in rapid succession.

Jimmy, hearing the shots in the orchard, reached the house at a dead run. He entered the backdoor and was swept up in the welcoming arms of his mother.

“Sarah! Bili! There’s some kinda monster out there!” he sobbed into his mother’s dress. “It killed the jaxes!”

Sarah and Bili exchanged terrified glances. Sarah wrapped her arms around her Bili’s neck and shoulders, squeezing him tight.

“You two know what he’s on about, don’t you?” demanded Sasha Herkart. Her eyes squinted with suspicion; her otherwise comely face went taunt with dark lines. “You know about this. You came out of the forest like something was chasing you. Now you’ve brought it here!”

Outside, there was a renewed screaming from the jaxes milling about the yard. Something was among them, something was killing them. Sarah listened but there were no human sounds. There were no more shots, no more shouts, and the men didn’t come back.

“Where’s the cellar?” Sarah asked, heading for the kitchen. On the way past the home public-net terminal, she pressed the emergency call button three times and kept going. The woman followed, not seeming to hear the question.

“My man is out there fighting that thing. You should be out there. Those jaxes are all we have,” her voice wavered and she was trembling.

Sarah found the door to the cellar and she took Bili down the steps with her. Sasha and Jimmy stood at the top of the steps, uncertain. Jimmy rubbed at the spacer’s watch that Bili had given him as a present. His eyes were big and wet looking.

“Come down, we must hide,” called Sarah. She and Bili moved crates of wine away from the walls to make room for them to hide beneath the stairway. Sarah had her gun out and the safety was off.

“No,” said Sasha. “I’m going to get Dev.”

“Don’t do it,” said Sarah. The two locked eyes for a moment. Sarah could see the battle of emotions running through the woman. Jimmy, two years younger than Bili, began to cry. Suddenly, he turned and raced through the kitchen and out the backdoor. Sasha ran after him.

Sarah sprinted up the stairs after them, but hesitated at the top of the steps. The door had shut itself, so she opened it a crack, her pistol leveled. Bili waited behind her, panting in the dark. In the kitchen she could see the net terminal’s screen flare into life, it was the militia duty-sergeant, wanting to know what the trouble was. There was no one to answer him.

Sarah screwed up her courage and readied a simple plan of action. She would order the woman and her child back into the cellar at gunpoint and they would all wait for the militia. The militia could handle this. They had to handle it.

Two shotgun blasts rang out in the yard. Sarah’s plans crumbled. She and her son just stood there in the dark at the top of the cellar steps. Although she wanted to go further, a deep dread stopped her. It was as if an invisible wall, a barrier had sprung up at the top of the stairway. She couldn’t will herself to go further. After what she had seen in the forest, that creature, swimming through tough roots and stony soil like a walrus swimming through dirt, somehow she couldn’t bring herself to follow. She didn’t want to see any more aliens. She wanted to forget that she had seen anything at all.

When sounds finally did come, they were the stealthy, furtive sounds of something coming in from the night outside, quietly opening the backdoor. Taking great care lest the stairs creak, and cursing silently every time they did, they made their way back down into the black cellar on wobbly legs. Crawling into the alcove they had made beneath the stairway, Sarah and Bili pulled sacks over their bodies and rested their backs against a lumpy wall of preserved tubers.

Overhead, they could hear the creature as it roamed the house. The timbers creaked beneath its heavy tread, giving away its otherwise silent movements. After a quick survey of the house, the killbeast left, as yet not familiar enough with human dwellings to realize that there was probably a cellar worth investigating.

Outside, under the shining eye of Gopus, a pair of trachs moved among the dead. The trachs were table-like creatures with four powerful legs and a single, massive claw that they used to load the carcasses on their wide, flat backs. Their squat bodies were slow-moving, but fantastically strong, able to carry or drag thirty times their own weight. They were very thorough, preferring to head back to the nest only when they could carry no greater a load up the mountain. They picked the place clean of protoplasm, including the gibbets on the walls of the barn and the shorn limbs in the yard that glistened in the moonlight.

At last they made their final trip back to the tunnel entrances, stumping away toward the breach in the electric fence with the killbeast protectively hovering near, sensory organs quivering. Behind them the bodies of the jaxes, dogs and humans were gone. Only the bloodstains were left behind as evidence of the slaughter.

Deep beneath the polar mountains near New Grunstein, the Parent received her first nife commander while ensconced on her birthing throne. Approximately every two minutes she shifted her uncomfortably bloated body to a new position and released another larva from her birthing chambers. She was in full production now, with all four chambers working around the clock. Her birthing orifices had already grown quite sore.

The nife commander, fresh from the cocoon, was overconfident, overzealous and talkative. He was the first of his kind on Garm. The only true males of the Imperium, the nife leaders were the field commanders of the race. The Parents themselves ruled over them, of course, but often accepted the judgment of a trusted nife in military matters.

The nife swaggered up to the birthing throne, his exo-skin still glistening with the slimes of his cocoon. The Parent’s orbs tracked him carefully. Just to see him, after so long with no companionship other than the boring killbeasts and the nearly mindless trachs, sent a shiver through the Parent’s digesters. Here was stimulation of an entirely different sort.

“Welcome, offspring.”

“My birth was long in coming, but none the less glorious for it,” replied the nife with a flourish. “You are a welcome sight to my orbs as well, my Parent. Clearly, you are no loose-fleshed immaculate at the end of an over-stretched life span. You glisten with youth and beauty.”

The Parent ruffled her tentacles, affected by the nife’s words in spite of herself. It was good to hear praise again; especially when she felt it was true. She was, after all, still quite young physically. She felt that the years spent in cyro-sleep couldn’t truly be counted. “You flatter me in good taste, I am proud to have birthed you,” she replied formally.

“I will go further,” declared the nife, immediately growing exuberant at her approval. “I intend to capture this world and bear it back to this historic nest-site on the backs of ten thousand trachs. My glories shall outshine those of the Imperium’s Ancients, and lastly,”-he paused dramatically and extended his stalks so far toward the roof of the throne chamber that the Parent half-expected to see his orbs to pop out of their cusps, “I will win the right to meld with you and conceive the Imperium’s next generation of Parents!”

The Parent made a shocked sucking noise with her food-tube. “You overstep yourself! You are beyond the boundaries of decorum!”

“But my ambitions are boundless!”

“Your ambitions are the foolish dreams of the inexperienced,” the Parent snapped back severely. “Only I will choose whom I am melded with.”

“Of course, I meant only to state my goals.”

“You are fortunate that you are the first of your kind,” continued the Parent, her frontal clump of tentacles lashing the air in idle irritation. “There is no one for me to promote over you for your impropriety.”

Crestfallen, the nife seemed to shrink somewhat. His stalks drooped, and his orbs retreated again into his cusps. “I beg forgiveness.”

“I grant my forgiveness. Don’t presume upon my good favor again, however. Now, we must have a tasting of the fresh flesh the trachs are bringing in. Some of it may not be fit for the larvae to eat.”

“And some of it may be good enough to set apart for us,” amended the nife. His spirits and his stalks were on the rise again, seemingly he had already put the recent rebuke out of his mind.

While they were eating, delicately selecting chunks from the back of a patient trach, the Parent continued to gestate new offspring. With great regularity, more offspring larvae were unceremoniously birthed, coming out squirming and hungry into the chute behind the birthing throne. As soon as they appeared a small spider-like creature known as a hest trotted up on numerous churning feet and carried it away to its own individual supply of food, safely away from other ravenously hungry larvae. Located beneath the Parent’s four dripping orifices, the birthing chute was slick with amber resins. The resins produced a vile pungency that permeated the throne chamber.

“Exactly what are our strengths?” asked the Nife professionally, in military matters his genetics took over and he functioned well, despite his incredibly young age. “How many effective killbeasts, juggers and umulks do we have?”

“The initial complement upon landing was only six effectives.”

“Six?” asked the nife, incredulous. He almost dropped the shaggy jax haunch he had been gnawing on.

The Parent took a moment to slip her food tube into the skull of a jax and slurp out a good portion of the brain before continuing. “Of the task force only our one ship made it through. Fortunately, we have yet to encounter serious resistance. Our original complement included an arl, a killbeast, two trachs, an umulk and a culus with her ingrown shrade. Of that group, we lost only the arl in a planned diversionary maneuver.”

“Ah yes, I picked that up from the datastream briefing in my cocoon. A nice maneuver, sending off the majority of the ship with the arl to lead away the enemy’s atmospheric fighters. The umulk, of course, was a requirement for digging the nest. The culus and shrade, however,” the nife paused and made a gesture indicating perplexity. “I don’t understand your reasoning there, given how limited our defenses were. What if it had come down to an immediate fight?”

“Then the plan would have failed and we would all have died,” replied the Parent with an unconcerned shrug. “I deduce that you are thinking I should have birthed a second killbeast for security?”

The nife bobbed his stalks in assent, too busy with a mouthful of slippery intestines to vocalize a reply.

“You could be right, but I reasoned that if the landing ruse had failed, if it had come down to an immediate fight, then the whole invasion would have been a failure anyway. One killbeast wouldn’t have made the difference in such a battle. On the other hand, planning for the best case, getting the valuable military intelligence that the culus and shrade can provide is very helpful. Without them, we would be virtually blind right now. Proper reconnaissance is critical at this early stage.

“Your decision shows cunning and foresight.”

“Thank you. To answer your original question as to our strength, I can say that with your hatching we now have one nife, a battlegroup of killbeasts, a squad of umulks, three culus and shrade teams, two teams of trachs and six hests. In another forty-eight hours, we will have another four more battlegroups of killbeasts and more of each of the other types. At that time too, I will have to consider melding to conceive more daughters. One Parent can’t populate a whole planet alone.”

“What about juggers?” asked the nife immediately.

“I have jugger zygotes in the birthing chambers now, but have halted their gestation until we formulate our attack plans. They simply eat too much and can do no useful work other than in battle. It would be bad logistic practice to birth them too soon.”

At this the nife waved his claws briskly, signaling an emphatic negative. “I must differ with you and urge you to produce as many juggers as you can immediately. They take a longer time than most in the cocoon stage anyway, and we simply must have them for security purposes. For serious defense or offense, the killbeasts alone aren’t enough.”

The Parent ruminated on this a moment, mashing raw flesh with slow movements of her mandibles. “I bow to your greater genetic prowess in warfare. I am by nature conservative, perhaps too much so in an offensive campaign.”

“Secondly,” continued the nife. “There is the lack of arls to contend with.”

Again, the Parent shrugged. “We have no more need of pilots. There is no means of manufacturing imperial battlecraft on this planet, probably not for the duration of the campaign.”

The nife waved away her argument impatiently. “Of course not, but the enemy have such craft. We must be prepared to make use of their equipment, as we have no mass-transport technology of our own. For this reason maintaining a cadre of arls is essential.”

Again the Parent ruminated and assented to his judgment. Once the production goals were set, their attentions turned to the flesh they were consuming. Both found that they preferred the flesh of the humans slightly over that of the jaxes. Although it was more spare on the bone, it tended to have more flavor, probably due to greater variety in the diet. Both of them agreed after careful tasting of the limbs and abdomens of various specimens, that the female probably tasted the best. The flesh was soft and generally had a higher fat-content.

Rasping upon something hard in her mandibles, the Parent indelicately picked at her serrated grinding spikes with her tentacles and pulled loose a metal object. It was a spacer’s watch that had once belonged to Jimmy Herkart and to Bili Engstrom before him. Tossing it aside, she went back to chewing.

One of the Hests scuttled out of a gloomy tunnel and snatched up the gleaming piece of metal. To the creature’s vast disappointment, she found the watch to be inedible. She carried the ruined watch away and deposited it down one of the rubbish tunnels where most of the bones from the endless feast in the throne chamber were going.