Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 3
Amused as I was by Kemedis’ outburst, I clung to the phrases she’d used when speaking about this mysterious visitor. Its nature. The fabric of reality. Distortions.
These sons of bitches were going to feed me to Kruthara.
And indeed, even as this bombshell blindsided me, I felt the weirdness trickling into my bones. It’s a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to explain if you’ve never had the misfortune of running into Kruthara directly. Still, it’s worth a shot.
Think back to the last time you were struck by a serious malady. A burst of gamma radiation, perhaps, or an ikuran navel-flu. Maybe just a head cold. Whatever the case, you surely remember the earliest and most surface-level indication something was wrong—a sense of deep, dark unease in the body. A protest staged by the very molecules that comprise your meat sack. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know there’s something afoot. Something that sends you scurrying under your blankets.
Maybe you understand what I mean, maybe you don’t. If you’re a genetically perfected humanoid who doesn’t have to fuss around with the primitive world of illness, try this comparison on for size. You know that feeling when you’re at a zero-grav nightclub, and one of your friends has just spiked your drink with a psychotropic drug? Yeah, well, think back to the precise instant you realize you’ve been drugged. Reality is fine, just a little… off.
These two analogies are the best I can offer in terms of describing Kruthara’s presence. Still, it’s missing that dreadful je ne sais quoi. If you cannot quite summon this feeling of inexplicable “wrongness” to your mind, fear not. Someday, whether you like it or not, you may encounter one of the quiet horrors that lurks in the multiverse.
And when you do, you’ll think back to these sentences and understand exactly what I meant.
But enough of that cheery business!
My mind, quite naturally, fought to shift gears into survival mode. And though I listened to this automated program running loops through my consciousness, I felt quite dissociated from it. Persuade Kemedis to release your leg clamp. Pay the technician off. Deglove your entire hand and slide it through the wrist cuff. On and on it went, my mind generating escape ideas that were increasingly outlandish and decreasingly viable. I listened to the nonstop mental chatter in an aura of strange calmness, of acceptance, even.
I’d spent my entire life running from, buying off, and disarming problems. And in each of my many death-defying scenarios, I’d been confident in my ability to turn the tables on my aggressors. But here, now, I had the wisdom to know I’d run my course. I was little more than a strip of sun-baked jerky strapped to a military-grade torture table, sealed inside the Hegemony’s most secure prison, likely millions of kilometers from anybody or anything that didn’t want to kill me.
And the cherry atop that fatal sundae was the fact that Kruthara was here. Remember, a few of its droplets could spread across an entire planet and assimilate everything into Kruthara’s mega-mind. A few droplets. Judging by the conversation I’d heard, Kruthara had sent a whole vessel here.
Any way I sliced the situation, the outcome was clear: I was not leaving the Contrition in any state one could call “alive.” In a matter of minutes, Kruthara would infect and overtake me. My memories, ingenuity, and meat would be absorbed into its humanoid-purging crusade.
And after all I’d endured in simulated hell-realms, I was ready to relax and roll with that.
Ready to meet oblivion, even.
Every vid needs a killer finale, right?
“Their emissary is approaching our position,” an officer explained, drawing me out of my internal rambling. “Shall I unseal the doors?”
Kemedis was staring at me, almost through me. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Unseal them, and raise the lights to seventy-five percent. I’d like Mr. Drezek to see his fate well in advance.”
In line with Kemedis’ order, the room incrementally brightened around me, and the overhead eye-sizzling bulb winked out.
Although being bolted down made it difficult to get a full read on the area, I gleaned that we were in a standard Hegemony interrogation chamber. My table of dishonor was located at the bottom of a sloping pit, surrounded by a raised ring of terminals, readouts, and interfaces. Green-clad officers worked diligently at their assigned posts, clearly doing their best to avoid eye contact with me, the real star of the show.
“Unsealing outer doors,” a tall, lanky officer said.
“Decontamination commencing,” added another. This was followed a moment later by, “Decontamination complete. Unsealing intermediary doors.”
“Second-stage decontamination commencing,” a third officer said.
I won’t bore you with the full procedure, but rest assured, it took a while. They must’ve had four or five separate door sequences leading into that side of the chamber. Now, the official reason for this had to do with Kruthara’s volatile biological hazards. My unofficial (and surely correct) reason is that Kemedis was terrified I might escape. Again.
Regardless, the final set of inner doors—located up and to my right along the terminal ring—eventually unsealed with a wisp of pressurized gas.
Kemedis glanced at me, on the verge of sadistic ecstasy. “Are you ready to gaze into your maker’s face, worm?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Just tell your visitors to get a move on. My leg’s got a horrible itch. One might say I’d rather die than sit here and—”
“Shut up.”
“In a few minutes, I’ll shut up forever.”
Kemedis continued dissecting me with her eyes, looking away only when heavy boots began clanking across the terminal ring’s metal grating. I followed her gaze.
In what was almost certainly a negotiating concession, Kruthara hadn’t come into the station directly. See, I’d been expecting mutated, shambling zombie-things to come for me, similar to Thamok’s infected form. But no. A team of three Hegemony scientists in triple-layered biohazard suits waddled along the terminal ring, as human and uninfected as they came.
Then I spotted the Kruthara “emissary” in the hands of the foremost scientist.
It was none other than a squirming, reddish slug sealed inside a transparent canister. The specimen was about the size of my hand and had managed to pucker itself against the inner glass walls, displaying an impressive assortment of tiny teeth.
Now, again, I knew that this thing had been spawned solely to intimidate me. A single drop of Kruthara’s cells would have more than sufficed to bring me under the control of its collective consciousness. Clearly Kemedis (or another disgruntled Hegemony bootlicker) had put in a request to make me squeal as I died.
“It feels good to be right,” I told Kemedis, sighing. “So, what’s this deal you struck? My mind in exchange for Kruthara leaving you alone?”
Her jaw twitched. “Even in your last moments, you are a thorn in my side.”
“I’m just asking for curiosity’s sake. I mean, come on. You’re making a deal with Kruthara. Times have to be pretty tough, huh?”
“Just know that they will all die because of you,” Kemedis whispered, staring blankly at the Hegemony’s Kruthara-carrying team as they descended a stairwell. “Your crew… your precious insurgents… your inustrazan lovebird… your knowledge will belong to Kruthara. It will lead him to their positions. And when he finds them, he will have no mercy upon them.”
Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t suppress the belly-busting laugh that exploded out of me. Half the room’s officers spun around, startled.
“They’re still alive!?” I cried. “Hah! Keep running, my dear friends. Keep running!”
You might assume this final burst of defiance was just that—a way to get under Grand Mediator Kemedis’ skin in my twilight hour. It was not. In spite of my caged-animal status and Kruthara’s slug drawing nearer, I was overjoyed. Those I cared for—those I loved, even—could still be flying free in this circus called the universe. They could be carving out lives that had nothing to do with the Hegemony or war or endless backstabbing.
They could be happy.
And thus, as I stared at the canister and the slug writhing within, a soft smile came over me.
The three scientists came to stand between Kemedis and me, presumably gazing down at me through those black-tinted visors. The figure in the center held the Kruthara slug, while the left and right held tongs and a funnel, respectively.
“Permission to administer the emissary?” the central scientist asked Kemedis through his suit-mounted transmitter.
Kemedis nodded curtly, her eyes drilling into me. “Make it slow. Don’t worry about hurting him.”
Satisfied, the scientists took up positions around my table. Those on the right and left worked to remove the various wires and electrodes hooked up to my body, and the canister holder came to stand directly behind me. His imposing hazmat hood leaned forward and blocked my field of view.
“Remain calm,” he said, as though that would mean anything to your average death-row inmate facing extinction. “Do you have any final words for the Contrition’s records?”
I opened my mouth, quite prepared to offer a rambling soliloquy, only to be halted by Kemedis.
“He’ll receive nothing. Proceed with the transfer.”
“Is that legal?” I asked Kemedis as I tilted my head toward her—only to have it promptly and forcefully fixed back in position. “Seems like you all might be breaking some laws.”
“In times of war, law is a luxury,” Kemedis growled.
The scientist to my right squeezed a bundle of open-sesame tendons on my face, forcing my jaws apart. Right on cue, the one to my left shoved the funnel’s end into my esophagus.
Tears welled up, and my throat went into spasms as the survival reflexes kicked in with a vengeance. My hands clawed at the cold steel beneath me. Every cell in my body begged for refuge as I heard the canister’s top sizzle open.
Then I heard the slug’s squelching and quiet trilling.
“Goodnight, Bodhi Drezek,” Kemedis called out in a singsong voice. “You won’t be missed.”
A pair of tongs brought the squirming slug directly over my face. It glistened in the floodlights, all mucous and feelers and teeth, moving ever closer to the funnel…
That was when the slug-holding scientist’s head exploded.
Two
For a good second and a quarter, the two still-living scientists stood rigid as though their colleague’s head hadn’t just burst open like a ripe melon. Their visors were absolutely showered with fleshy bits, much like their biohazard suits, the floor around us, and my forehead. My entire body, even.
The blood freckled my face in warm splotches. It dribbled into my mouth and down the sides of my torso. It dripped from the overhead lamps, which now cast everything in a ruby haze. Blood, blood, blood.
And despite all this, the three of us—indeed, the whole room—just stood there for that precious one-point-two-five-second span, not quite sure what the hell had just happened or what to do next.
Then all hell broke loose.
The dead man’s body toppled backward in tandem with a chorus of shrieks and shouts. The scientists flailed away from the table, dropping the canister and the funnel and, most critically, Kruthara’s slug. Absolute pandemonium. All around me, alarms wailed and Hegemony officers dove for cover. Kemedis drew her pistol, frantically aiming at nothing in particular. More blood drizzled onto my face.
But I was not concerned with the general hullabaloo. No, I was more concerned with the slug, which had plopped onto the floor about a meter to the right of my torture slab. I’m not exaggerating or being metaphorical when I say that this thing wanted to devour me.
Its feelers flicked at me, tasting the air, and it began a disturbingly fast slither toward the base of the table. It was plainly intent on getting its midnight snack.
Crimson emergency lights lit up the chamber, accompanied by an automated voice that instructed all personnel to remain calm. Well, fat chance of that one.
While watching the slug vanish behind the table’s edge, however, I peeped a fascinating detail that most of the Hegemony had missed—a coin-sized hole drilled into the chamber’s wall. Pressurized gas was streaming through it.
No sooner had I noticed this anomaly than another hole suddenly appeared a hand’s width above the first puncture. More screams echoed, and the scientist who’d been holding my funnel dropped to the floor, missing most of their neck. A fresh round of blood sprayed my legs as the body crashed into a heap.
In a flash, I understood the gist of the situation: I was being rescued!
Well, either that, or the universe was giving me a final send-off in the form of an extremely convenient (and hilarious) assault on the Contrition. Whatever the case, it was clear that Kemedis’ worse nightmare had come true. High-velocity, steel-punching bullets were ripping through the chamber’s walls and laying waste to the Hegemony’s best and brightest.
Indeed, as I lay there and struggled halfheartedly against my restraints, the wall-piercing rounds kept a-comin’. One evaporated a senior officer’s entire face, while another took out a technician’s kidney region and left hip.
“Lower all blast panels!” Kemedis screamed as she took cover behind one of the room’s only shielded terminals. “This station is under active attack! I repeat, this station is under attack! Mobilize assault forces!”
Believe it or not, I was less interested in escaping than in figuring out what was causing so much of a headache for Kemedis’ forces. Whichever marvelous bastard was pumping killing-grade ammo into the room had to be using some sort of echolocation or thermal-based targeting to aim through multiple layers of Hegemony alloy. Such a weapon would’ve sold handsomely on the market, if I’d ever been able to cook up the right schematics. I made a mental note, then and there, to reverse engineer that product if I managed to escape.
“Grand Mediator,” called an officer who had stoically (or obliviously) lost half his hand, “Operations Command is reporting that the panels are offline! Something has breached our systems.”
Kemedis’ metal-melting gaze fixed squarely on me. “You.”
“Me?” I shouted, straining to be heard over the screams and intermittent pops as more bullets tore through the walls. “I was just trying to die in peace!”
With a bitter scowl, Kemedis surveyed the remainder of her forces and pointed to a door on the far side of the chamber. “All forces, fall back to your lockdown positions!”
As one might expect, the lion’s share of her officers remained huddled in place, waiting for some idiot to make the first move. It didn’t take long. A bushy-tailed junior officer poked their head out from behind the terminal, only to lose most of that head in a red puff. But their purpose had been served. A gaggle of officers, and Kemedis herself, used the temporary distraction to rush to the evacuation door and pile out.
Kemedis boldly paused in the doorway as the last officer slid past, staring down at me with all the vitriol she could muster. “Kruthara will have your body soon, worm,” she hissed. “May you fester in the infinite darkness!”
And with that, she sealed the evacuation door.
I lay there for several seconds, breathing in the coppery death fumes and wondering what had just occurred. The pitter-patter of blood on my forehead was my sole indication that I was still conscious and in the real world.
Then, much to my chagrin, I heard the puckery slurp of Kruthara’s slug creeping up the side of my table. This was how it ended—not with a bang, but a sloshing whimper.
Ah, well. At least I’d gotten to see Kemedis lose her mind one last time.
But wait, there’s more!
Yet another bullet punched through the wall. At first, I had no idea where it had gone. There were already a metric ton of corpses and limbs scattered throughout the chamber. But soon I heard the electric crackling of a technician’s terminal, the long, steady discharge of hydraulic fuel, and…
Voila, my restraints popped open.
Not a moment too soon, either. Kruthara’s slug appeared at the edge of the table, clawing its way closer using those devious suction-feelers.
I rolled away from it, eager to hurtle off the table and sprint to freedom, but my body had other plans. See, I was still weakened from a long stint in captivity. Little more than a walking corpse, you might say. So in pushing myself out of the restraints and scrambling to the left, I succeeded only in flopping face-first onto the chamber’s marble tiles.
Now, keep in mind—I say face-first as a concession, but I was nude. You do the math to figure out which part of my body hit the ground first.
Oof.
Anyhow, after a few slips and stumbles in the scientists’ blood, I wobbled onto my own two feet. And promptly realized I was screwed. The chamber’s emergency lockdown protocols had sealed off every doorway, hatch, and maintenance shaft leading in and out, thus trapping me inside a gory, red-tinted hellhole with Kruthara’s spawn. Worse still, the lack of the former frigid breeze informed me that they’d gone so far as to shut down the ventilation systems. Even if I managed to outrun the little creep for an hour—doubtful, given my mind-scrambling exhaustion—I’d eventually run out of air.
But I still wouldn’t go down without a fight. And by fight, I mean a desperate plea to be spared from the slug. To that end, I scrambled up onto the raised terminal ring, dragged myself over to the door Kemedis had used to flee, and began pounding my scrawny fists against the steel.
“Lemme out!” I howled, only half in jest. “Come on, you savages!”
One glance back revealed that the slug was unusually swift. That, or I was abnormally slow in my current condition. The damned thing had already crossed half the floor, slithering over a network of limbs and tissue clumps and leaving a splotchy trail in its wake.
