Salvage Merc One: The Daedalus System (11 page)

“Sensors are not detecting sound,” Mgurn said. “They appear to be only mouthing words.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the sensors are reliable anymore,” I said. “This may be the point where we have to set foot down there.”

“Oh my,” Mgurn said. “Must we?”

“The monsters are still flopping, and I’m not seeing any clue as to what our next step is,” I said. “Except that a whole bunch of talking trees just pushed their way up through the bloody ground. We can’t hear what they’re saying up here, so we probably need to go down there and check it out.”

I pointed up at my horns.

“Gonna have to rig a helmet for me,” I said.

It took us a lot longer than we liked to get a helmet fitted around my horns. I honestly didn’t think we’d do it, but with a lot of duct tape and the destruction of two normal helmets, we finally got something rigged to seal around my environmental suit.

Mgurn looked at me and shook his head.

“I do not approve of you going out there alone,” Mgurn said as we stood by the cargo ramp. The ship was hovering about three meters off the ground, just in front of what I thought looked like the exact same vision tree that had spoken to me when all this crud started. “I should accompany you.”

“I need you in the pilot’s seat,” I said, my voice muffled by the clapped-together helmets.

The coms in the helmets had to be disabled to get them to fuse together in the right spots. My personal com didn’t seem to like either the helmet mash-up or maybe my horns. Either way, I wouldn’t be able to talk to Mgurn once I was outside the ship. Yay.

“You have to watch my ass, watch those floppy monsters, watch the other trees around the lake, and also watch for whatever else we haven’t thought about to watch for,” I said. “If things get weird,
weirder
, then you swoop down and pick my ass up. Use the cargo claw to pluck me the fo off this shore. Don’t even wait for me to be in the hold, just take off and fly the hell away from here.”

“We will have failed the quest if that happens,” Mgurn said.

“Yeah, but we’ll live to flee another day,” I said.

“I believe you have that saying wrong,” Mgurn said. “It is live to fight—”

“I know what it is and I know what I said,” I replied. “Just roll with it, Mgurn.”

He nodded and clapped me on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

The cargo ramp opened and extended to about half a meter off the shore. I gave Mgurn a thumbs up then hurried down the ramp and jumped to the bloody shore. My boots sank a few centimeters into the soggy ground, making a stomach churning squelching sound. I shivered and started walking towards the tree I was almost ninety-nine percent sure was the one that I needed to have a quick chat with.

“Hey there,” I said, giving the tree a quick wave. “Remember me?”

“You are not known to Us,” the tree replied. “You are a foreign entity. A destroyer of the balance. A blight upon our sacred planet.”

“Us? What us?” I asked. I turned and looked around the shore, which wasn’t easy since my rigged helmets didn’t allow much swivel room on the old neck stem. “Are you a collective? A slit-mouthed tree co-op? Is this a Space Communist thing?”

“Your levity is wasted,” the tree replied.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Have you met Mgurn? Half of what I say goes right over his head.” I made the over the head gesture with my hand and just barely cleared the helmet. “Whoosh. So much sarcasm that is never appreciated.”

“To continue with our lives, we must expel you from here,” the tree said. “You must be flung far and wide, never to be seen or heard on this planet again.”

“You and me are of like mind on this subject, Slitty,” I said and patted the tree’s bark.

It screeched then recoiled and hissed, its branches swaying down at me. The trees that lined the lake mirrored my tree’s movements. Perfect unison again.

“Don’t like to be touched,” I said. “Got it.”

“You will be thrown free and sent on your journey,” the tree continued. “You must be flung far and wide.”

“You said that, but repetition is good sometimes,” I responded. I looked up and down the shore. “Is this a metaphorical flinging or do you have some sort of catapult or…what?”

“We must expel you,” the tree said.

“Right.” I nodded, which wasn’t easy. “Expelled. Thrown free. Tossed out on our asses. Sent packing. Adios atreegos.”

The ground began to shake, and my boots slipped a little further into the squishy shore.

“Oh, huh,” I said. “So this is a literal flinging then? Is that what all the shaking is?”

I turned to hurry back to the ship, but I didn’t get very far. Mainly because of the paralyzing fear that gripped me as I faced the massive head of the leviathan. While I’d been talking to Treey McSlitmouth, the monsters in the lake had stopped flopping and started moving. Turned out that all the ground shaking was just huge monsters moving. I would have known that if I had a working com. I was willing to bet Mgurn was freaking the fo out up in the ship’s bridge.

I glanced at the ship, hoping to see Mgurn turning the weapons on the creatures, but that wasn’t happening. The ramp was still open, but not glowing plasma cannons. It was a bit of a bummer.

“Hey there,” I said to the leviathan. “Nice monster. Good monster. Friendly monster?”

It came at me in a rush, its massive mouth opening wide. I was swallowed whole before I could even blink. As I tumbled down the throat of the leviathan, I struggled to get my KL09 free from its holster. When I finally had it out and ready to start scorching some leviathan innards, it was yanked from my grip by something intestinal and worm looking.

I screamed as I watched the intestinal worm swallow my KL09 whole. I’d been swallowed whole, then my pistol. The circle of suck.

The tumbling stopped as I met open air. Or open space. I don’t think there was any air inside the leviathan. I could be wrong, since I am not an expert on giant monster anatomy, but I wasn’t about to take my helmet off to find out.

Below me, churning and bubbling like the lake of boiling blood had been before we emptied it, was a pool of greenish liquid. Even through the environmental suit’s helmet, I could smell it.

Bile.

I splashed down and went under fast. My instincts were to swim back up to the surface. But a glowing light caught my eye. It reminded me of the light I saw when we came out of the passage between the black planet and the lake of boiling blood planet. It was bright and welcoming, like it was saying, “Joe! Come shove yourself through here, Joe!”

Or something like that.

There was a massive gurgling and the liquid around me was filled with huge bubbles that streamed from the light. I slowly sank closer and closer until I could make out what exactly it was. It wasn’t good.

You see, Mgurn had been wrong. The whole void and drown thing wasn’t about voiding the lake and having the monsters drown in the air. Nope. The moment I saw the opening close and open, close and open, I knew exactly what definition of void I was looking at.

It was the voiding of a digestive system. It was about me being voided. Voided right out the poopchute of the leviathan. Oh, goody…

Eleven

The journey was brief and disgusting.

I was swallowed yet again, but that time through an intestinal sphincter and not a giant mouth. The opening was wide enough for ten of me to get through, but it only dilated enough for me to fit. Efficiency of digestion, I guess.

I found myself in the leviathan’s small intestine. Hunks and chunks of what it had been eating for Eight Million Gods knew how long were stuck to ridges and puckered pockets of intestinal flesh. I couldn’t make out too many details of the hunks, hallelujah, but I could make out enough to know that maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t been the first environmental-suited chap that had been swallowed whole.

A boot here, a cracked helmet there, a pocket filled with nothing but tattered and fluttering gloves, it was an ugly sight. Then it was gone. I was swept past by the current of the intestinal liquid. I believe it’s called peristaltic motion, but don’t quote me on that.

Small, shadowed openings rushed by on each side as I was sent zipping along the colonic express. I swore I saw eyes and maybe some teeth here and there as I zoomed along the canal to beat all canals. The leviathan had parasites. I’d suggest a juice cleanse, but that would probably take half the galaxy’s fruit and wheatgrass supplies to accomplish. There were a lot of guts to cleanse.

Another opening appeared suddenly, and I smacked against the flesh next to it. The pressure of the flowing juices pushed me into the flesh, shoving me deeper into the softness of the leviathan’s intestines. I tried to clamber my way to the opening, but the liquid pressure was too much, and the guts were too soft; I just couldn’t gain any purchase.

I was so close to calling it quits and opening the seal on my helmet. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t like I was giving up and going suicidal or anything. But a problem had started to present itself. There was an odor creeping into my suit.

I tried tapping at my wrist to run diagnostics, but the control interface had been eaten away by the intestinal juices. Damn leviathan bile! Maybe I was imagining things; maybe the stink was my fear sweat.

Hanging onto that hope, I struggled some more and was able to crawl my way a little closer to the opening. To think my life had come down to needing to be pooped out of a giant monster. It wasn’t exactly the quest I thought I had signed up for. Not that I had signed up for it. Sort of thrust on me and all that crud.

Speaking of thrust on me, I was so busy trying to work my way to the intestinal opening, fighting the folds and tucks of gut flesh, that I didn’t see the object shooting towards me. Or not exactly towards me, but towards the opening.

Before I knew it, two hands had me gripped by the ankle and were pulling me along, back into the stream of things. I barely had a chance to make out Mgurn’s environmental suit before I was shooting backwards down the rest of the leviathan’s colon. He had me by the boot, which meant I couldn’t face forward and had to experience the trip in reverse.

I never saw us leave. Which, when thinking about it, is probably good. No one needs to see that.

There was darkness then suddenly light. So much light. Way, way, way too much light. I had the feeling I was flying then falling then landing hard. The feelings were all real as I tumbled some more, but the tumbling was down a towering sand dune, not through a monster colon.

When I came to a stop, I was shoulder to shoulders with Mgurn, both of us on our backs, staring up into the four-sunned sky.

He patted me on the arm and made a circular motion with his finger. I looked at him and shrugged. He sighed. I couldn’t hear the sigh, but I could see it.

Mgurn took off his helmet and sat up. I did the same.

“We need to conserve air,” Mgurn said. “Without the ship, we have no way to recharge the suits and we don’t know if we’ll need them again or not.”

“My suit has a leak anyway,” I said, patting the makeshift helmet. “I think one of the welds didn’t take.”

“It took well enough to get you through the digestive system of a monster,” Mgurn said.

“Hey, now, I wasn’t criticizing your helmet weld skills, buddy,” I said and held up a hand. “You are totally right, the welds held long enough for me to get pooped out onto this planet. That’s what matters.”

I took a deep breath.

“That and the fact the air is breathable,” I continued. “Good stroke of luck there.”

“Yes, well, I do not know how much luck we should attribute to our current situation,” Mgurn said. “We are without the ship or any supplies. Neither of us have weapons, except for our utility knives on our belts, and if your original vision is to be believed, this is the desert planet with the ants. The biting ants.”

“Had to kill the moment, didn’t you?” I said and stood up.

I offered a hand, and he took it. I helped Mgurn to his feet, and we both regarded the landscape around us. Sand. All the sand. So much sand. Way more sand on this planet than there was boiling blood on the last planet.

The interesting part was that even with four suns above us, the air was surprisingly crisp. It felt like those last fall days right before winter where the wind blows down from the north and you can taste the snow that lay in the future.

Okay, that was all terpigcrud. I grew up on a swamp planet. I had no idea what any of that felt like. But I’ve read a book or two, so it sounded good in my head.

“If this is the base temperature during the day then we will need to seek shelter for when the suns go down,” Mgurn said, giving a quick shiver. “We will not want to be exposed at night.”

At night. That triggered a memory, and I shivered too. But not because I was thinking of how cold it would get when the sun went down. No, I was thinking of what would happen when the dayscape turned into a nightscape, just like in my original vision.

“Yeah, we need to seek shelter,” I said, kicking the toe of my boot into the grains of sand at our feet. “Because I don’t think this is sand sand, but ant sand.”

“Ant sand is not a thing, Joe,” Mgurn said.

“Really?” I replied then bent and scooped up a handful. I looked at it, smiled in triumph, frowned in triumph, scowled in fear, and held out my hand. “What do you call this?”

In the palm of my glove were thousands of inert ant bodies. Thousands of them. I let them slip through my fingers and fall back to the trillions and trillions of ant bodies we stood on.

Mgurn couldn’t respond. His mandibles worked over and over, but no words came out of his mouth. Finally, he shook his head, looked left, looked right, looked straight and nodded as if that settled everything. He started to walk, and I didn’t argue. We couldn’t just stand there and wait for the suns to set.

We really, really, really needed some kind of shelter.

So, on we walked, nomads of an ant sand desert. We hiked across a vast plain, climbed our way up huge dunes, slid down the other sides, faced more plains, never stopping once. Not until our legs gave out, and we were forced to rest.

“We arrived early in the morning,” Mgurn said, glancing up at the four suns that hadn’t even reached mid-sky yet. “It appears the days here are not galactic standard. If my calculations are correct then a day on this planet is closer to forty-eight hours than twenty-four hours.”

“That’s a good thing,” I said. I knew that even with a longer day, we needed to get our butts up and walking again. But I was stuck right where I was, my legs completely exhausted. “I’m in no hurry to see the suns set.”

“Neither am I,” Mgurn said, “but the rotational difference does present a different problem. If the day is exceptionally long then it stands to reason that the night is as well.”

“Which means more quality time with the sand ants once they show their tiny, bitey heads,” I said. “Super.”

Mgurn scooped up some of the insectisand and studied it for a minute. He tilted his head this way and that, his eyes narrowing as he brought his hand closer to his face.

“Careful there, buddy,” I said. “You do not want those things to get in your eyes. Or your nose. Or anywhere really.”

“I detect no life,” Mgurn said. “While my senses are not as powerful as ship’s sensors, Leforians do have an innate ability to perceive the lifeforce of other beings. I do not perceive anything coming from these ants.”

“Maybe they are dead,” I said. “Maybe in my vision I was on a part of the planet where the ants are still alive, but here they are all dead. You think we could get that lucky?”

“No,” Mgurn stated flatly. “Your vision has not been wrong yet. These ants will come alive when the suns go down. I am sure of that.”

“Why are you so sure?” I asked.

Mgurn shrugged. “Because there is no reason to think they will not.”

“But you just said you don’t detect any lifeforce from the little buggers,” I responded. “Things don’t die during the day then come back to life at night, Mgurn. That’s just not how nature works. I’ve been on a lot of planets, and the one thing that always stays constant is that things that are dead stay dead. The suns setting have nothing to do with it.”

“Yes, I agree,” Mgurn said. “But there are exceptions to every rule. You have pointed that out to me time and time again, Joe. I prefer to not believe it to be true, but experience has taught me it is.”

I couldn’t argue with that. He was right. Exceptions happen often enough that they shouldn’t even be called exceptions. We’d been through enough wackiness together that the idea of dead ants coming back to life at night was not even close to out of the realm of possibility. The very fact we were dealing with the quest and trials that we were forced to deal with proved that.

“We need to keep moving,” I said to Mgurn. I didn’t budge.

“Yes, that is true,” Mgurn agreed. He didn’t budge.

“On three?” I said.

He nodded.

I counted to three. Neither of us got up.

“We’re going to die here if we stay,” I said.

“That is most likely,” Mgurn said. “Yet I do not possess the strength to move. Walking through sand, even sand made from ants, is exhausting, Joe.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “And I’m just a human being, not a big strong Leforian like you.”

“Leforians become tired just as all races do,” Mgurn replied. “There is no need to bring my species into this.”

“But, you know what I mean,” I said. “It’s why Leforians make such good assistants. No matter how down you get, how tired your body is, how defeated things seem, you always have enough strength to take care of your number. The SMC is lucky that so many of you volunteer to become Salvage Merc assistants. We’d be lost without you all.”

Mgurn sighed. He looked at me like he was going to argue, blinked a few times, then started with surprise. He scrambled to his feet and pointed at my head.

“Your horns are gone,” he said.

“Say what?” I responded and patted my head all over. “Son of a gump, will you look at that! They are gone! That’s great!”

I jumped to my feet and gave Mgurn a huge hug. We spun about, whooping and shouting, each of us reaching up now and again to smack the top of my head where the horns had been seated only a short while before.

Or had they? Maybe they were gone when we arrived on the desert planet. Maybe they disappeared as we struggled up and over the dunes. Didn’t really matter. They were gone, and that was very good.

“Well, we’re up,” I said and turned towards the direction we’d been walking all day long. “Keep going the same way?”

“Perhaps,” Mgurn said. He looked up at the four suns. “Hmmm…”

“And what does the hmmm mean?” I asked.

“Four suns,” Mgurn stated. “But we know the Daedalus System only has one sun. A very large, bright red star in the center of everything.”

I shielded my eyes with a gloved hand and looked where he was looking.

“That one there?” I asked, pointing with my other hand at the brightest and reddest of the suns. “Right?”

“Yes, I believe so,” Mgurn said.

“Then what are the other three?” I asked.

“That is a very good question,” Mgurn said. “There is no way to know.”

“Not without my ship,” I said. “Speaking of…”

“I had to leave it, Joe,” Mgurn said. “When I saw you get swallowed, I really had no other choice.”

“You could have used the plasma cannons to slice the monster open and get me that way,” I said.

“Then you would not have followed the proper path to this planet,” he countered. “I made the right choice.”

“Yeah, you did,” I said.

He looked startled by the admission.

“What?” I snapped. “You’re right. It sucks we don’t have the ship, but if you hadn’t left it behind so you could get swallowed up too then you wouldn’t have been able to grab me and pull me through that second sphincter. I’d have stayed in the leviathan’s guts forever.”

“Technically not forever,” Mgurn said. “Eventually your suit would have ruptured, and you would have been dissolved by its gastric juices.”

“Yes, technically that would have happened,” I said. “So thanks for not letting it happen.”

“You are most welcome, Joe,” Mgurn said.

We kept walking, letting the momentous occasion of my acknowledging Mgurn’s worth fuel our journey.