Back to chapter 4 “Lair of the Beast”
Ilya came to his senses as adrenaline jump-started his body. He was lying on his stomach in the dust, but he was not alone. A bestial stench washed over him, and something huge … no, something gigantic sniffed at his back. He heard rocks crack and felt the ground shift as the megabeast turned away, apparently uninterested in the little morsel of food.
Ilya dared to open an eye, blinking away a crust of dust or dried blood. He saw the bulk of Bubbles’ – who the hell named something monstrous like this “Bubbles”!? – massive body moving past as if in slow motion. It stopped here and there to sniff at something on the ground, once moving aside a chunk of rubble that must have weighed several tons with a casual flick of the paw. It felt like a week until it finally vanished between the ruined walls that encircled the area.
Ilya groaned and tried push himself up from the ground. Everything seemed to spiral sideways, so instead he settled for rolling onto his back and waiting until the vertigo subsided. His head throbbed will dull pain and he felt a lot of half-dried blood on his temple. He winced as he touched the spot where he must have hit the rock.
Eventually he managed to sit up and take stock of his surroundings. He saw what the megabeast had been sniffing at: bodies. He recognized the two Hunzakut hunters that had gone ahead of him into the lair. They looked very dead. Not good. Had the Druze killed everyone? Where was Saladin? Was he the only survivor? He looked around desperately. Shinju’s sun was getting low in the sky, but some of its reddish rays still found their way into the ruins, illuminating broken walls, patches of dust and piles of rubble.
A metallic glint from where Bubbles had pawed at the rubble caught Ilya’s eye. He struggled to his feet and slowly made his way over. He listened for any sounds of the beast, but all had gone quiet. Even the incessant wind had died down for a moment. Between the rocks lay a metallic storage cylinder Ilya recognized. It was one of the pieces from the stash that the Hunzakuts had pulled out. Had Bubbles been looking for it? Or had he pushed it into the rubble? How was he to know?
Curiosity overcame Ilya. He turned the locking mechanism of the cylinder and pulled it open. He saw three silvery … things entwined around each other. Perhaps half a meter long, 2 cm thick, segmented, tapering at one end, capped with a glassy capsule filled with a greenish liquid on the other. They reminded Ilya of nothing so much as mechanical snakes. He had no idea what they were, but he had seen things similar in design and look. Xenotech. The stuff everybody was looking for here on Shinju. Ruby’s treasure. His heart thumped.
Gingerly he reached out and touched the silvery skin of one of the snakes. It was hard, cool and very smooth. He tapped one of the green heads. Something happened, the green liquid seemed to drain into the body below. Suddenly it moved under his fingers, wrapped around the hand and slithered up his arm. In panic Ilya flung the container away and tried to grab the snake. The smooth body slipped through his grasp. Much too quick for him, it was up on the shoulder, around the neck and up on his head in a moment. Ilya felt a sharp pang on his temple as the snake reached the laceration on his head and … bit him? He felt dizzy for a moment, but then his head cleared and the lingering pain just went away. His legs steadied and fresh energy seemed to flow through his body. Even his vision got clearer.
The snake fell to the ground, now inert. Ilya prodded it with his foot. A healing device? Some sort of alien medikit? He felt great. He picked up the container again and pulled out the remaining two snakes, being careful not to touch their heads. He stuffed them deep into his pack, then put the drained snake into the container, locked it and put it back where he found it. He looked around. No one was there, no one had seen him. This might be the find that would make his career as a treasure hunter, a proper Sāchā.
Full of energy, all traces of exhaustion and injury washed away, Ilya decided to find his way back to the rendezvous point and headed out of the ruin. He made sure to take the opposite direction to where he had seen Bubbles go.
It was a flyer scanning the site for survivors and bodies that eventually found and picked Ilya up from the desert. The crew seemed happy to see someone unhurt, and from their comments he gathered that the whole operation had been a horrible mess. Less than half the team had made it out alive. A Ghulam doctor gave him a quick check over and curiously inspected the right side of his head, but then just gave him a thumbs up.
They landed back at their operational base and unloaded the bodies of the two Hunzakut. Ilya had told the crew where to find them. He had learned that the hunters didn’t have cubes and there would be no bringing them back from death. Still, they had come on this dangerous mission. Ilya thought of Kleio and her lack of a cube. Where was she? Was she alive? He hadn’t heard anything from her since before the mission to the laboratory.
Night had fallen, but the base was busy and illuminated by many lights. Everybody seemed to be packing up, loading equipment onto the drop ship. His geist connected back to the base’s data sphere, listing orders, times and rosters, but it was still cut off from the larger Maya sphere. Operational security was still in effect, and the information he got was strictly limited. He went to find Saladin, the commander.
“It is good to see you, Ilya. I am glad to see that you made it out alive.” Saladin sounded sincere, but then he always did. “We lost many good soldiers today and my heart is heavy. Allah be praised, you are not one of them. At least the mission was not a complete failure, and we recovered some of that dangerous xenotech.”
Ilya’s pack felt heavy on his shoulder and he thought of the two snake-like objects in there. But he didn’t mention them. “I am sorry, sir, but did you get any news from Kleio?”
Saladin looked at him sadly. “I fear I have bad news for you, son. We found her two hours ago, on the north side of the ruin. She was among the enemy, as her mission demanded. But it looks like she was discovered and shot.”
Ilya’s knees suddenly went weak and he had to steady himself on the field table Saladin was sitting behind. He tried to speak but no words would come out. He felt numb. The commander radiated sympathy and just sat there, waiting.
“Where … where is she?” Ilya finally managed to get out from his dry throat.
“She is over in the medical tent, with the others we are taking with us to give proper burials. Go there. Say your farewell. This is the soldier’s way.” Saladin’s dark eyes seemed to burrow into Ilya’s mind. “You are dismissed, soldier.”
A paramedic directed Ilya to the row of body bags in the back tent. Each of them had a quantronic tag that gave information on the body within: name, next of kin, home, address to be shipped to. Except for one. It just gave “female operative” as the ID.
He swallowed, then slowly opened the bag. The sound of the zipper felt like a file rasping over his nerves. There she was. Her face looked peaceful, but the whole side of her upper body was a burned and broken mess, the left arm almost gone. Whatever had hit her hadn’t been a simple bullet. All hope that Ilya had entertained of enacting a miraculous healing vanished, despair taking its place.
His geist flagged up a message notification. Ilya subconsciously glanced at it and was startled. It was an external message, but the Maya lockdown was still in effect. Who got through that security? The sender read “Ruby”.
He opened the message, which started a live connection. The familiar mocking smile and colorful hair of Ruby Monday appeared in his display. “Come, give it a try. It can’t hurt, can it? You don’t know what these things can do until you try!”
“How? What?” Ilya found himself stammering. “How do you know? I wasn’t …”
Ruby Monday just winked at him, and the connection ended. But for a moment, he still thought he heard her voice: “Trust me, you are part of us now.”
Ilya looked around, afraid someone had heard the short exchange. But the tent was empty. The doctors and paramedics tended to the wounded, not to the dead. He reached into his bag and pulled out the two “snakes”. How could Ruby have known what he was thinking about? Was it a good sign that she encouraged him? He took a closer look at one of the devices. It seemed inert, only the green liquid in the head gave the impression of movement. “It can’t hurt, can it? She is already dead.” Ilya muttered to himself.
He held the thing like a wand and touched its head softly to the side of Kleio’s body, where it was most badly damaged. He felt the snake come alive in his hand and let it go. The liquid drained from the head into the body, then it slithered over the dead figure, waving its head left and right, as if examining the damage. It stopped right below the ribs, reared its head and then plunged it into the damaged tissue. Ilya held his breath. Instead of falling off, as it had done with him, it wriggled and began to make its way into the body, vanishing segment by segment. He made to grab its tail, but stopped himself. No sense in interfering now.
Ilya took a step back, fear and hope mingling in his mind, as he waited for something to happen. At first it looked like nothing would, but then he noticed pieces of charred skin and flesh moving and falling off. Underneath a silvery sheen appeared, spreading outward, replacing the destroyed parts of the body. Ilya gasped as the same process began on the stump of the arm. Instead of just replacing the skin, the material grew outward, perfectly reproducing a human upper arm, elbow, lower arm, then the hand, fingers. Perfect in shape, but not look. It kept a silvery, metallic surface, with very fine, hardly visible tracing, along which tiny greenish impulses ran.
The process finished and Ilya saw that the damage had been perfectly repaired – or at least replaced – from the side of the neck all the way down to the hip, as well as the whole arm. But still no sign of life. He reached out to touch the metallic skin, but before he could, Kleio’s body arced up, as if hit by an electrical surge. Her eyes opened wide and she took in a deep, desperate breath. Then she screamed.
Ilya stared at her as she sat upright in the open body bag. Her eyes were wide, but unseeing, the dilated pupils huge. He heard calls outside, then the first paramedic came rushing in. A moment later more soldiers appeared. Everything was confusion until the calm and authoritative voice of Saladin took over and brought order to the chaos.
Ilya found himself confined under guard and interrogated repeatedly. They took the remaining snake from him. He got the opportunity to clean up a little, and in the mirror he noticed that on his left temple was a small patch of silvery material covering his skin, etched with fine lines and showing an occasional tiny flash of green.
Saladin talked to him himself, a look of serious concern and perhaps a hint of disappointment on his face. Ilya told him everything that had happened except for the voice of Ruby. As the commander stood up and made to leave, llya blurted out: “How’s Kleio? Can I talk to her?”
Saladin turned around and paused a moment. “I will ask her, whether she wants to.” Then he walked out.
Kleio ducked past the guard into the tent. She stopped close to the entrance, crossed her arms and looked at Ilya without saying anything. Her body and arm were covered in a tight-fitting jacket and she wore a glove on her left hand. Ilya couldn’t read her expression.
“Are you… okay?” he asked.
“Why did you do this?”
“I … I dunno… because you were dead?”
“Why do you think I don’t have a cube? Did it occur to you that I might not want to be resurrected by some alien technology?”
“No.” Ilya felt stupid, but also relieved that she seemed “normal”, her personality intact.
Kleio shook her head. “This…” She touched her arm. “This feels wrong. Not mine. Not me. I can feel it talking to something else. I can never be sure again that it is only me in my body.” She looked at him. “I wish you hadn’t done this.”
“I am sorry.” Ilya looked at the floor. He heard the swish of the tent flap as she left. He thought he heard a soft chuckle in his mind and a voice. “Don’t worry, she’s one of us now as well.” He buried his face in his hands.
Ilya didn’t see Kleio again. He got a thorough medical examination, was generously compensated for his services as a guide, warned not to tell anybody about the details of the operation, and then let go. Enough information about Ruby’s treasure hunt had leaked out to make him famous in the Sacha community for a while, and he developed a real knack for finding xenotech-artifacts in the ruins of Shinju.
And Ruby continued to talk to him.