Chapter 1: Thirty 6ix (2/2)
She exhaled smoke across his nostrils and to his surprise, he didn't cough. He could smell the smoke, but it didn't bother his sinuses.
It bothered him that a clear nictating membrane suddenly covered his eyes.
She giggled. ”I thought about adjusting you. Making you into a living bioweapon, since your people are particularly enamored with them.”
She jumped down and walked back and forth, the cigarette in her mouth, her hands clasped behind her back, leaning forward slightly.
”Every day your species produces between 35 and 60 gallons of methane per day per mootuar,” she said. ”The flatulence always contains bacteria and viruses, harmless to your people as it fills your intestinal tract. You actually need those microbes to digest properly.”
She stopped and looked at him, leaning forward slightly. ”I can change that. I should change it.”
She jumped up again, moving over to what looked like a primitive cryotube. ”I could run you a few times through my baby here, take you apart, adjust you, put you back together each time.”
”Send you back improved, Falmy,” she said. ”New and improved.”
She moved over and started to lower a duraglass cover of Falmo'o. She moved back over and tapped a key on the mechanical keyboard.
Mist started to fill the tube.
”You always were my favorite. That's why I'm going to let you go. Go home.”
She pressed her face against the outside of the tube. ”Sorry about losing it and eating you that one time. You shouldn't make me angry.”
It felt like he was being torn apart by red hot needles, millions of them at once.
”You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.”
He couldn't even scream.
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Go home
”Come on, we can make it,” the voice said. It was Lanaktallan, helping him move down one of the docking tubes. ”We'll take the human ship, get away before she finds us.”
Go home
Falmo'o put his legs stiff, sliding to a stop. He was dressed in armor with his sabotage kit on his chest, his weapons on him. Terran blood spattered on his chest.
The other Lanaktallan had on a set of security boarding armor with the name Ukvo'ok on the chest.
”No, we can't,” Falmo'o said. He coughed, tasted blood, and looked around. ”We cant' go back.”
Go home.
”Why? Why not? We're lucky she left that knife of hers where you could kick it to me,” Ukvo'ok said, staring at the other Lanaktallan. ”If she comes back and finds us gone, she'll go crazy on us, well, crazier.”
Go home.
Falmo'o coughed. ”She wants us to escape. Wants us to get out,” he coughed again. ”Don't ask me how I know, I just do.”
Ukvo'ok stared at him. ”We've done this before, haven't we? Over and over.”
Falmo'o nodded. He thought for a second.
There was a way to stop her. Only one way to stop her.
”You get to the Demands Answers and get out of here. I'll buy you time,” Falmo'o said. They weren't far from where he'd first woken up. He leaned forward and whispered a statement, an order, an instruction into Ukvo'ok's ear. The other Executor nodded, his tendrils curling and his ridges inflating with anxiety.
”Good luck, Most High,” Ukvo'ok said. He clattered away, heading for the Executor ship.
Falmo'o knew he wouldn't make it back. That the ship would be empty.
But that was all right. Better than all right. None of them could ever leave this station.
Mathematics are mathematics, went through his head as he hurried over to the grav-lift. He looked up and down, seeing that it was empty both ways. He stepped in and touched the lights going up, taking him to the top of the station.
He circled the Hellcore room, moving quickly, until he found what he was looking for.
The control/experimentation room for the Hellcore in the center of the top of the station. It took him long minutes to find a cable that led directly to the Hellcore. It was Terran design, but standard as far as Hellcores went.
He'd worked with a few, once in a while dead Precursor machines were found by neo-sapients and they attempted to research it.
It had been Falmo's job to destroy it and the research.
The design was similar enough that the differences were hard to detect until Falmo'o ran into them. He knew he was sweating and twice he pulled cud from his pouched and jammed it in his jaws, chewing on it as he worked.
The coordinates weren't hard. His brain seemed to work faster than ever, knowledge just popping into his mind, connections coming easy to him.
He saw the Demand Answers had crossed the boundary of the bubble and vanished.
I'm going to send you home, Falmy, echoed in his mind. Go home, Falmy, go home.Go home.
He knew the Hellcore would be glowing now, full of energy. He typed as fast as he could. He'd done this five times in real life, hundreds of times in simulation.
It was the only sure way to dispose of a Hellcore.
He was about to press the activation key when he smelled it.
Cigarette smoke.
”Whatcha doin, Falmy? I told you to go home,” the voice was female, Terran, a slight edge of anger in it. He could tell she was standing in the narrow blind spot all Lanaktallan had between the side eyes and rear spot.
”Nothing,” Falmo'o replied. ”Don't call me that.”
”I thought we were friends, Falmy,” the Terran's voice was closer.
”You're a primitive barbaric species who the universe would have been better off if you'd never passed the Great Filters,” Falmo'o shot back, hitting the execute key and then typing rapidly, as if he wasn't done yet. The pulses from the Hellcore were coming faster and faster.
”Stop that,” the Terran female snapped.
”Make me,” Falmo'o said. He could feel it, the ravening ripping tendrils of Hellspace attacking his mind.
The legs wrapped around his waist as the human landed on his flanks. The rivet gun pressed against his side and there was a thudding noise. Once, twice, three times. A knife stabbed into his back.
Everything started to go dim but the pulses suddenly stopped and extended off into eternity.
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The Hellrip opened less than a kilometer from the station, pulling it in, yanking it into Hellspace.
Dee Taynee laughed. It didn't matter. She'd installed a mat-trans on their stupid ship.
The Devourer of Stars had marked her, she knew it, left its appetites within her.
But that was all right, what was a Goddess without any appetites or vices?
She felt herself being pulled into Hellspace and rejoiced. Felt the bubble go down and stared out at the stars, feeling a new and urgent hunger to consume them fill her.
Her first FTL travel.
It lasted a split second.
The other end was inside the neutron star.
The star shuddered for a moment, then went still. The gravity lensing stopped, radiation crashed onto the surface then radiated away like normal. Gravity reasserted its rightful place and crushed the structure on its surface into a molecule thick smear.
The neutron star drifted through space, merrily doing neutron star things. The infection inside of it had been destroyed by a surge of energy, but it didn't care.
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On the empty ship Demands Answers, sitting in the radioactive desert, was an addition. In the cargo hold.
A mat-trans chamber. A machine where time and space had no meaning unless it was programmed in.
The radiation put out by the blasted desert seeped through the torn and rent hull. Through the crew spaces. Into the hold.
And began attacking the memory circuits of the mat-trans.
Affecting the buffer.
Inside the buffer Dee Taynee screamed and raved, throwing herself against the walls of her tiny prison, shrieking at what she could see with her electronic senses.
A simple piece of tape over the latch of the mat-trans doorframe.
Preventing the latch from catching and the mat-trans from activating and reassembling what was in the buffer.
Bit by bit the radiation ate away at the memory.
Dee Taynee felt herself slip away bit by bit.
And screamed in rage.