Corinus Lifhe
He had known not to run, was the thing.
In their distant past, Centaurans had been a prey species, four-legged herbivores grazing on the never-ending plains of their planet of origin. Their planet was home to a great number of predator species as well – enough to make their fossil record dizzyingly complex, and largely filled with evolutionary wins for the predators. Centauran anthropologists theorized that the reason their particular species had risen to the top of the food chain, so to speak, was entirely due to the development of their telepathic abilities – the ultimate defense for any prey. They had gone from the hunted to the hunter, and were able to confound and, eventually, destroy all their natural predators because of it.
The old instincts were still there, though, and still had to be fought against. The greatest of these was the urge to flee in the face of danger. All Centauran children had to take classes that walked them through interactions with aliens who demonstrated predator characteristics, in order not to run from them if they interacted in the future. They also learned to use their telepathy, their powerful hind legs, and their strong, flat foreheads as tools for self-defense. Fleeing… that was the act of a frightened child.
That was how Corinus had felt when he ran. Like a child, or a fool, out of control and forgetting everything and everyone around him as he ran for a place where the revenant – with a mind so hollow he couldn’t influence it, his thoughts bouncing against nothing but each other – couldn’t reach him.
Fleeing failed him. It only served to make him the choicest target, the focus of the hideous creature’s wrath. He had known even as he ran that there would be no escape for him. The distant part of his mind still capable of thought had calculated the moment of intersection, the instant he would feel the first sharp pain of death come upon him.
Dr Yoche, I have failed our people. I have failed myself.
And then… a miraculous reprieve.
The crackle of lightning filled the air, along with the scents of ozone and burning dust. Corinus turned, panting, and watched Dizzie blast the revenant with the weapon they had made out of their scanner. Of course they came to his rescue – they always looked out for him. And they were so clever, and so brave. Corinus felt his twin hearts begin to slow their furious racing as the revenant collapsed in a heap.
“Wow,” Dizzie said, sounding as pleased as they felt. “That worked better than I–”
Relief turned to dismay, and the brief hope Corinus felt shattered as the revenant’s legs straightened with terrifying speed. One of them caught Dizzie square in the chest, hurling them back until they hit the closest refinery with a muted clang. Corinus felt their pain and disorientation like it was his own.
This is your chance. Get into the smaller hallway, head to the lab, lock yourself inside the testing chamber. The revenants won’t be able to get you in there. You’ll be safe. You have to be safe. It’s your number one priority.
Only…
Only it wasn’t. Not right now. For the first time in his life, Corinus felt with complete clarity the absolute rightness of setting someone else’s safety ahead of his own. The revenant wasn’t back on its monstrous spiky legs yet, twitching from residual electrical impulses and the impact of Divak’s rounds blasting into its heads and chest. Corinus set his jaw, lowered his shoulders, and sprinted across the room to Dizzie.
“Cor’nus?” They recognized him, at least. Hopefully that meant they weren’t wounded too badly. “You… what hap’nd?”
“The lightning didn’t keep it down for long,” Corinus said, wrapping one arm around Dizzie’s shoulders and pulling them to their feet. “We’ve got to get to the lab. We can–”
It was Divak’s mind that alerted him to the danger – he felt her go from focused to furious, which always meant something wasn’t going her way. If her shots weren’t stopping the revenant…
“Get in!” Corinus shouted, but he didn’t wait for Dizzie to remember how to coordinate their limbs, just threw them straight in through the narrow inlet of the refinery they’d wound up against and then jumped in after them. The revenant was so close to catching them that Corinus could practically feel the wind whistling past his hind legs before he escaped into the narrow compartment – too narrow for the revenant to come in after them.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to try. Claws scrabbled against the front of the refinery’s open-ended pipe, mindless and wild for a few moments before they pulled back out of view. Corinus shifted against the uneven wall at his back, molded together centuries ago out of parts scavenged from the Nexeri’s original components, most likely. This ship hadn’t been intended to be a refinery, but its owners had done a thorough job of repurposing it.
Too bad they hadn’t included the weapons that Divak was so fervently wishing for right now.
“What’s it doing?” Dizzie whispered. Corinus wasn’t sure whispering was necessary – the revenant knew where they were, after all – but he responded in kind.
“I can’t tell. I can’t get a clear read on its mind.” He shrugged helplessly. “I’m not even sure it has a mind, to be honest. More like…”
He concentrated on the hollowness he’d felt before. There was a structure there, a boundary holding this thing’s killing instincts together, perhaps even granting them. He’d never felt anything quite like it, but he had come close once before, when he was learning about the M’noth, an intelligent race of trees that lived both individually and as a single organism on their home planet.
“More like a collective, very rudimentary consciousness,” he finished. “This revenant doesn’t feel like a Caridian at all.”
“The mold,” Dizzie said, staring at him with wide eyes. “Could it be the mold? Can mold even have a consciousness?”
“Before now I would have said no, but this… we know it’s capable of creating change, both mental and physical, in its victims,” Corinus replied. Half-remembered images from Dizzie’s holos swirled before his eyes – hideous, tentacled beasts attacking and devouring humans as they desperately fought for survival.
“That’s amazing! If that’s true, it’s a – aah!” Dizzie jerked Corinus’s head down just in time to get him out of the way of a long, spear-like appendage that… hadn’t existed a moment ago. It was crusted all over with mold, and looked like it had been pieced together out of a random assortment of Caridian limbs. “Shit! We need to get farther back!”
“But the slag hole is back there!”
“There’s a grate covering it, come on!”
They crawled backward until they reached the edge of the grate that led into a chamber. No, a furnace. Even a thousand years after the liquid Xenium had been produced here, the air still smelled faintly of its sharp, chemical tang. In another lifetime, Corinus would have been worried about the minute traces of radiation he was exposing himself to by being inside one of these things.
In this lifetime, he had more than enough to worry about right in front of him. The revenant’s new limb followed them down the tunnel, smashing back and forth against the walls as it sought them out. Its edges were sharp and serrated, like the blades of an ancient saw, and the point at the tip would probably skewer straight through one of their EVA suits if they got in the way. They ducked down low, pressing their bodies up against the back wall and keeping their heads on the floor as the revenant swept the space less than half a meter over their heads.
“Maybe if we stay quiet we can make it think we escaped,” Dizzie whispered. “Or it’ll…” Their next, unspoken thought filled them with shame, but Corinus quite agreed with it – it would be far better for the revenant to fixate on one of the others than to keep harassing them. The lives of the rest of the party weren’t Corinus’s concern. Only his and Dizzie’s were.
A faint buzz sounded in the back of Corinus’s mind – a manifestation of his stress, most likely. He was certain he’d never been so adrenalized in his entire life.
The limb retracted a moment later. Cautiously, Dizzie sat up and looked down the refinery tunnel. “I think it’s still there.” In the distance they heard Divak firing, and the crash and bang of numerous impacts. “Shit, if anybody sets any of the Xenium on fire we’re all toast.”
Worse than that. More like toasted molecules. The buzz got louder, stronger.
“I wonder where Six is?” they went on. “Perhaps he’s–”
The buzz suddenly coalesced into a single, powerful voice inside Corinus’s head. GGGEEEETTT DDDOOOOOWWWWNNNN!
He tackled Dizzie again, and a second later two long, spiky revenant limbs came shooting down the tunnel, scraping horribly against each other as they searched for prey. One of them scratched a line across Dizzie’s shoulder – not quite deep enough to break through the EVA suit, but the ease with which it penetrated it was just as awful as Corinus had feared.
The second, newer limb was more mobile than the first, able to get some play vertically, not just horizontally. They huddled in a pile as far back on the creaky old grate as they could, but it was only a matter of time before one of them was fatally skewered.
That same new, buzzing mental voice started Corinus out of his horror.
CCOOOVVERRRR YYOOUUURRR EEAAAARRRSS!
It was Six! Corinus, almost out of his mind with fear, nevertheless managed to clap his hands over his earholes. Dizzie followed his lead, and a moment later–
The sound began as a low growl, rising to a metallic gnashing of teeth that made Corinus feel like he’d been swallowed by some ancient, benthic beast. The chamber they were in rumbled alarmingly, and then the rock crushers that lined the tunnel came on. The noise then was a physical blow, like being punched in the head over and over again. Carapace cracked and crunched, and a second later they were both showered with shards of it as the activated belt fed the pieces of the revenant forward into the furnace they were sitting in.
A furnace whose grate was getting hotter and hotter.
“Tell him to shut it down!” Dizzie screamed, but it was so loud in here already that Corinus only heard them in his mind. “Shut it down before it burns us up!”
It was worth a try. Corinus mustered all his faltering mental capacity and focused on Six’s odd hum-buzzing mind. Shut it down! he projected.
A second later, the crushers stopped. The machine went back into a resting state, and the rising heat dissipated. It took a while for Corinus’s head to stop ringing, but once he recovered enough to make sense of what he was seeing, he gulped.
The tunnel was filled with bits and pieces of the revenant. At the far end of it, the lower half of the body still twitched and twisted a bit, but there was far less mold down on those pieces, and no sensory organs. They were aimless now – but probably not for long.
“Let’s… let’s get out of here,” Dizzie said breathlessly. “We need to get the rest of the revenant’s legs in before the mold transforms them again.”
Corinus agreed. “You go first,” he said, pointing at the tunnel.
Dizzie smiled. “Whatever you want.” They led the way, and Corinus watched them go with a sense of satisfaction.
Dizzie was alive. He had done it; he had saved his best friend. He had fought against his instincts and won. Him! A Centauran, putting someone else first! He felt deeply relieved, sure that for the first time in his life, he was the emotional equal to an alien he admired. They’d been colleagues for so long… now they were truly friends. He felt almost overwhelmed with emotion, reeling with glee.
Goodness, he was really reeling right now. Too much exposure to others’ minds and hearts. Corinus stumbled as he slid out of the refinery tunnel. Dizzie was already picking up the nearest leg, which seemed surprisingly light – their EVA suit gave them a decent increase to strength, but nothing like power armor.
“Good thinking with turning the crushers on!” they called out to Six, who was standing by a glowing screen on the refinery’s wall. His expression was as imperturbable as ever, his mind thankfully closed off to Corinus once more, but his antennae were waving in an excited manner.
“I was merely in the right place at the right time,” he demurred. “I could not have guaranteed your safety without Dr Lifhe’s help.”
“Oh, of course!” Dizzie looked at Corinus with admiration in their eyes. “You finally made that mental connection with him, huh? Good work!”
“Thank you,” Corinus said faintly. His legs were starting to tremble. Exhaustion, the aftereffects of adrenaline, low blood sugar. Your brain needs food, now. “I think I should… maybe I should sit down for a moment.” He slid – more like slumped – to the ground, hind legs out in front, and that’s when he saw it.
The split in his EVA suit.
No, not just a split. A rend. And beneath it was the stain of his pale blood, oozing out of two puncture marks.
“Oh no…” Corinus breathed. He met Dizzie’s confused eyes, his own eyelids blinking so fast he could barely see them. “It bit me.”