Fear smells of death. Decaying flesh sealed tight into a jumpsuit. We just don’t know it yet. The fog of war makes me think things are going well for us. At least it seemed so at first. The thing about best laid plans and all is that they go to shit when you’re fighting people diametrically different than you are. We had no way to plan for what they threw at us.
It was a massacre of biblical proportions, steeped in blood and effluence. Viscous gore in near zero gravity causing mayhem on the ground, plastered to our visors, and gumming up exposed moving parts. Chips and fragments of bone piercing us from every angle. Troops caught it ferocious traps built to maim and to terrify. Splattered guts and limbs thrown about like dandelion seeds on the wind. We were but dust in a maelstrom.
We threw our newest technology at them, they countered with ghastly biological hulking monstrosities that ripped and roared and consumed as much as they killed. Growing and shambling along like mindless conglomerates of green tinged limbs. Grasping and tearing, ripping and rending flesh from bone. Soaking up endless rounds of ammo, unconcerned for their own well being. A mindless horde exposed to the vaccum of space, ceaselessly encroaching on our placements. Leaving wide swaths of devastation in their wake. Gaping maws of ragged teeth, bone spurs and sharp spines. Belching pus and bile, sloshing around like over filled buckets of chum.
Our automated Fire Teams and Tankers cut through them like butter when the Admiral finally put the augmented boots on the ground. A charnel house of ruined plant materials inter mingled with human bodies littered every surface of the barren waste of UB313. But as our side began to make headway, that’s when they started the unthinkable. They had even bigger monsters waiting on the float, just out of sensor range, hiding among the heavenly bodies, as old as ice. Who began to spin up the available asteroids and unleash them upon UB313. Obliterating the fighting forces, their own and ours alike. Whatever had been on the surface, or buried beneath the surface in the base itself, pulverized to dust and chunks of wet molecules effectively beating us to the punch, as the mobile Bison Drones were trained to do the exact same thing. It turns out the two sides weren’t so different after all. In the heat of battle both the Fire Teams and Tanker units somehow managed to retreat. I saw them come apart at the seams, as if they had broken down into a cloud of ash and then reformed, over and over.
I was jettisoned from a larger chunk of UB313 and cast out into the void, helpless. Screaming as I tumbled in the darkness. Calling out on every possible channel I could remember. It was dumb luck that one of the smaller run abouts was nearby and was able to swoop in and pick me up. It was from the squashed confines of this crab unit that I was able to take in the navy battle of The Company flotilla.
From a distance the naval battle of the flotilla looked modest and rather dull. But upon closer inspection it was a chaotic mess. With no more large scale targets to go scrutinize, with the obliteration of UB313 the vast city sized ships sat idle. I suppose the assumption was that with the black ops insurgency base destroyed, the battle was won. Not realizing the swarm of hungry plantmen hybrids were bearing down upon them from the shadows and crevices of the wreckage. Feeding off of the decaying remnants of the ground attack, and enriching themselves in the wash of the fleets great engines. The UV light put out by all of those behemoths swelled the ranks of the plantmen hybrids a thousand fold.
Soon the plantmen hybrids would breach the hulls and disgorge massive clouds of fungal spores, ensnaring the crews, bringing them to their knees. That was until the nanotech integrated Fire Teams and Tankers were alerted to the matter by the last great call from the flotilla wide emergency broadcast systems.
Over a period of days each side would swing from near defeat to near total victory and back again. Over and over. Equally matched in their single minded desire to win at all costs. Mindless machine versus mindless biological fungus.
Those infected by the spores were brought low in a matter of hours. Not quite dead yet, no longer really alive. Their flesh putrefying from the lungs outward. Their flesh and organs liquefying slowly, as they bled into lengths of intermingled puddles of blooming fungus. Like a mushroom farm grown out of a field of messy dead bodies. Great blooms of orange, red, purples and blues. Fantastical spires of fleshy mushrooms with broad angled caps and sticky bulbous stems. A colorful wonderland of fungal gardens. That smelled of vacated bowels and the last gasped breaths of the dying. The air a thick moist fog of spores, and yeast, and the condensation from evaporating blood, and liquefied internal organs.
Many miles away. “Racquelle. It has begun. If you don’t breach the partitions for us, I fear this war will make it’s way back to Earth, and to every single human colony. This will not end here. You must help us. You have to act!” Katayna whispers urgently into the ear of a huddled and crying Racquelle. Her weakened body tangled submissively in her bed sheets. Her skin a pallid off white, with specks of blue around her lips. The fear of the impending battle has stolen her appetite, draining the fight from her, stealing her will to live. “But I don’t know how.” She whispers back, through dry and cracked lips. Limply she lies against the seated Katayna. Glancing over the frail body of Racquelle, Katayna says. “I need you to give me a hand.” Katayna croons soothingly into Racquelle’s ear. Brushing her lank hair away from her ear, and over a sallow and sunken cheek. With a mighty effort Racquelle pulls out of Katayna’s arms to raise her right hand palm up to Katayna’s waiting cupped hands. A single tear rolls down Katayna’s face. In one smooth motion forms a long blade with her fist as she cuts Racquelle’s arm off just below the elbow, as Racquelle crashes back against the bed in a spasm of pain. Amidst the shrieking and flailing Katayna stands up, lifting the severed limb and quietly leaves the room. A thick stream of blood falls in her wake. The shouts of anguish echo around the hall behind her. The door wooshes closed quietly and the muffled screams continue unabated.
Seventy two hours after the first hull breach by the plantmen hybrids a mysterious vessel of writhing off white and grey appears. It blasts out a single tone, like a fog horn, on a private frequency, causing all of the integrated Fire Teams and Tanker units to fall back from the fighting. The nanobots cannot resist the sirens call. K bids them to retreat to him.
Vast swarms of nanobots flood through the hull breaches and rapidly descend upon the mysterious vessel known as K. Soundlessly the nanobots assimilate into the hull, and the ship begins to transform. Gathering itself up to strike K splits into a multitude of hungry tendrils, feasting upon the flotilla, the plantmen, and all of the fungal remains of the crew. Increasing in size, and exponentially growing more tendrils to feast. The vessel known as K gives way to his basest instinct to feed and grow and consume. He can feel himself becoming lost in the primal urges of expansion and growth.
In the bridge Katayna stands unnoticed with the severed limb of Racquelle’s, ready to place the hand palm down on a lock box keyed to the her DNA. Time is running out. She can feel herself, and K, growing rapidly, losing all sense of himself in the ever growing feedback from such rapid growth. Pressing down lightly on the palm shaped lock with the limp hand, a loud click sounds. A puff of dust and smokes is emitted, and an inner lock whirs open slowly. A tiny door springs open, and a dazzling purple light shines out. Inside the fist sized chamber is a glowing purple push button. Without any hesitation Katayna slams the palm of the severed limb down on the button.
In the heavy dust cloud of the remains of UB313, the massive vessel known as K, the entire Company flotilla, and all of the plantmen hybrids phase out of existence with a crackle of lightening, a thousand cubic kilometers wide.
In the one hundred billionth fraction of a second it takes to transit, K is simultaneously inside a grey box, a pink glob of goo, having an ongoing conversation over several years with the captain of Margot’s Fever. Passing through a wormhole via galactic distortion giving him the basis for the idea of the Fore E’s engine, talking to his best friend the morning before the last shift he ever did with a full crew as a human, fighting a rogue android AI on the run from him as a man now named Karcher, evading a solar storm and mistakenly banging against a Mark One capsule near Pluto effectively killing The Non Sequitur, during a test jump using the new engine design for the first time. He is time, all at once, yet separate.
In the blink of an eye, it’s all gone. Many years later the university on Torus Station, and on Mars will teach classes devoted to what happened here. But for now, it’s all a mess from the fog of war. We’re all dead, we just didn’t know it yet.
Part Forty One: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
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