Terrak
I thought the thing that attacked me was just a heap of vegetable matter on the floor, until it rose and sent me stumbling, and then tried to consume me. I slashed out with the burning blade, and that helped, until it extended thick tendrils and pinned my arms. Then it got my helmet off, the reek of rotting leaves in my nose, and I knew, I just knew , that it was going to jam its foul body into my mouth and down my throat.
Azad came back for me, jamming her rifle’s barrel into the bulk of the thing and pulling the trigger. The heap shuddered apart, falling to fragments around me. “Sonic pulse,” Azad said. She gave me my helmet and I put it back on after brushing some goo off the faceplate. “Do you feel mind-controlled?” she asked.
“I do not.” We’d both taken shots of the cure before boarding – Azad said her bosses were “pretty sure” it would have a prophylactic effect and keep them from getting compromised. “Like, eighty percent sure.”
I had not been reassured by that number, but either the mind-control spores weren’t airborne here, or the cure did its job.
Azad looked at him with narrowed eyes. “You’d say that even if you were compromised, though. How about you walk ahead of me?”
I couldn’t argue with her logic, so I took the lead, making my way more carefully now, though I sensed her impatience. We reached the elevator, and amazingly, it still worked – I’d assumed it would be jammed with vines, but upon reflection, I realized this wasn’t wild growth. Everything that grew here was cultivated and deliberate under the care of Ohseroh, and it wouldn’t impair the ship’s vital functions.
I didn’t need Azad to tell me to stand to one side before the lift doors opened, so neither of us was caught in the gunfire that sprayed out when they did. Azad tossed a flash-bang inside the elevator car, and after the noise and the burst of light, she dodged in and dragged out the Letnev man we’d seen on the screen earlier. He fought wildly, biting and scratching and clawing at her suit, until she finally banged his head against the wall hard enough to make him stop… which was, unfortunately, also hard enough to break his skull. A spray of spores shot out of the crack like it was under pressure, and she shuddered and dropped his body to the floor.
We descended silently to the engineering floor. The other known puppet on board the Crystal Stair , a human woman, opened fire as soon as the doors opened, but we were lying flat on the floor against such an eventuality. Azad shot the woman’s legs out from under her.
Overall, our mission was going well, and I hated that “going well” in this case involved so much blood and death. “I wish we could have saved them,” I said, after checking the woman’s vitals and failing to find any.
“Can’t save everybody,” Azad said.
“We can try. The whole point of the work we do should be to save lives and minimize suffering, Azad.”
“You must have way different kinds of handlers than I do.” She gestured for me to take the lead, and we made our way to the engineering storage bay, where replacement parts and supplies were stored… usually.
When the doors opened for us, we saw the space had been cleared to make way for something else.
In its basic shape, the Letani was just like the little nodes we’d rooted out. They were something like a mushroom, crossed with a carnivorous plant, crossed with a squid, topped with a red flower, and this was the same… only Ohseroh was immense, filling the bay, bobbing flower towering above us. Its root-tendrils extended all over the cargo area, many stuck to the walls and ceilings, others free to move and curling toward us. The immense flower lowered down toward us, almost like a head looking at us, though I knew that was entirely the wrong paradigm.
A figure shambled forward, connected to the Letani by a series of vines that terminated in the back of its head. It was a human, or had been – now it was a corpse, flesh gray, features slack. A Dirzuga, in the tatters of a Mentak Coalition uniform. I wondered if it was Grisham, the protégé Harlow had mentioned, possessed so long by the Letani that their body had given out, and been repurposed for this. Such a waste, and such a horror. Treating people like objects or tools was the greatest crime I could imagine, and it was even worse, because I’d done it myself, often enough.
At least we could stop Ohseroh from doing it anymore.
“Terrak,” the Dirzuga said. “Azad. You have come. You have come to make my new Symphony into cacophony instead. But you are too late. You have stopped my ships, but I had other plans, always other plans–”
Azad shot the Dirzuga in the face, making its head explode in a cloud of blood, brain matter, and spores. Then she launched three grenades straight into the middle of Ohseroh’s flower, projectiles disappearing into the cup of the blossom. She spun and ran from the hangar, and I followed, booms filling the air behind us and making the deck vibrate.
“I gave it a frag and a couple of incendiaries!” she shouted.
“You just killed it ?” I shouted. I’d somehow imagined a longer stand-off, perhaps an exchange of banter, or the Letani pleading with us to join its cause – Azad seemed to thrive on such drama, after all.
“I said I wanted to look it in the bee-hole!” Azad yelled. “Not that I wanted to talk to it! What would I talk to an insane plant about?”
She grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the engine room itself. “We can’t be sure it’s dead, though. Who knows how hardy these things are, or if they can regenerate from a twig or something, you know?”
“We could burn the entire cargo area,” I said. “Turn it all to ashes. Or vent the remains into space. Or–”
“Or just blow up the whole ship.”
“You said we didn’t have enough explosives.”
“We didn’t have enough explosives to blow up the ship from the outside . From the inside, though…” She took her rifle off its strap and looked around the control room. “This will do.” She held up the gun and grinned at me. “When I enumerated the features of this rifle, I left one important function out. This all-purpose mayhem machine is sometimes called a ‘scuttle-gun’. The Mentak Coalition raiders use them when they need to… well, scuttle something. You can set a timer, here.” She twisted a dial. “Then you press this button, here.” She depressed a spot under the hilt. “Then you put the rifle as close to the magnetic bottle housing the fusion reactor as you can. When the timer runs out, the gun sets off a burst designed to breach containment, and then… you get a brief uncontrolled fusion reaction. And, subsequently, no more ship.” She leaned the rifle against the engineering console.
I took an instinctive step away, which was foolish. It was like backing up a little to avoid being hit by a nuclear explosion. Exactly like that, in fact. “That seems extreme.”
“We can’t leave any of those mind-control spores laying around for someone else to pick up,” she said. “That’s one of my fundamental mission parameters. Gotta burn it all. Cleansing fire scenario. I’m just glad I found the scuttle-gun. It would have been tricky to rig the ship to blow remotely otherwise. This way, we have time to get back to the shuttle and out of the blast radius, and I don’t have to convince you to stay behind to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
“You are not that convincing,” I said.
“That timer isn’t infinite , so let’s move.”
We moved, back to the airlock, past the dead we’d left behind, and into space again. We reached the shuttle, boarded, and made our way as rapidly as possible out of the asteroid field.
Not long after we cleared the area, a bright light filled our screens as the Crystal Stair became a cloud of dust and spores. I have never seen such a beautiful and welcome moment of destruction.
“We did it,” Azad said. “Look at us. Saviors of the galaxy over here. Who would have thought, a couple of old spies like us, doing something pretty much totally unambiguously on the side of good for once?”
“It’s an unusual feeling,” I agreed. “I am a bit troubled by Ohseroh saying we were too late, and that there were other plans in place…”
“Maybe we ruined those other plans by blowing everything up. That’s the assumption I’m going with. Makes me a lot happier.”
“In the absence of verification, I suppose we might as well be hopeful,” I said. “But… what do we do now? Both the available ships have been destroyed. We won’t make it far in this shuttle.”
“I’ll call and get us a ride.”
“What, send a distress signal? The Barony will pick us up. That would be bad. We don’t even know if the puppets have been stopped. Even if they have been neutralized, I’m sure it will take time for the truth of what happened here to be understood by the powers that be.”
“You act like this is my first time destroying things in a hostile system,” Azad said. “My bosses have an exfiltration team on standby. Don’t worry. We’ll give you a ride to a nice neutral moon where you can wait until this all gets sorted out.”
“Where I can wait? Where will you be?”
“To make my final report, and collect my bonus,” Azad said.