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“Shit!” Lenney cursed. “I think it’s armed with weapons of its own, and it just got into range.”
The abomination hurled several greenish-yellow blobs at us as the mothership’s auto-evade programming kicked in. I was ready, my feet wide and braced for the sudden movement, but Sam wasn’t. She yelped as she was flung to the side. I reached out, caught her in my arms, and hauled her back against my chest.
“You okay?”
A pair of gray eyes, wide with terror, looked back at me. I’d never seen her like this. She was always so sure of herself, always ready with a smart retort.
Before she could reply, the ship jerked again. The second evasive maneuver was too much, even for me. All the hunters who were not sitting scrambled so as not to smash into each other as we all slid to one side of the room. I curled my body around the tiny human to protect her from the melee of heavy bodies and hard horns.
It wasn’t often that our motherships engaged with the scourge in space. Usually, the only scourge units that survived the vacuum of space were the scourge’s so-called live ships, and those weren’t truly alive once they’d been in space for a while. Certainly not enough to fire back.
Nests grew these live ships when they sensed that a host planet was running out of resources. After a larva on the planet morphed into a scuttler, the queen would order the others to feed it, forcing it to grow enormous. When large enough, the scuttler’s stomach lining stopped producing acid and hardened into a large chamber. They then would line it with oxygen-producing algae, or that planet’s equivalent.
Then, with a single queen and an army of scuttlers inside, flyers lifted the bloated mutant into the atmosphere, where it released some of its built-up gas and propelled itself into space,seeking a new planet to conquer, virgin soil to infest. The queen could control the residual gas to change direction, but that was it. There were no weapons aboard.
All this was to say, our motherships were designed to follow and hunt these live ships, preventing them from landing on the next unsuspecting planet. They werenotdesigned to fight something that fought back. That was a job for the smaller, more nimble hunter shuttles.
It had always been a challenge to catch all the live ships, as the scourge often sent hundreds of them off at once from all over the planet. Like the summer swarms that carpeted the land with relatively weak but extremely numerous scuttlers, the live ships’ main survival tactic was sheer numbers. Whatever this monstrosity was, it was different.
There was a loud rumble and a shudder that I felt in my bones. The lights blinked. Sam threw her arms around me, and the scent of her fear stung my nostrils. Something inside me rose up and demanded that I comfort her, even though I hated her so much that my chest tightened every time I saw her.
My chest did not rumble this time, but even so, nothing would make me leave her side, not when she was clearly so frightened.
The lights blinked several more times as the ship righted itself.
“Krux!” Ror’k roared. “We are taking damage!”
“What the fuck was that?” Jask’l asked.
Ror’k pulled up the damage report on the screen. One of the shots had breached the hull, but the ship had already sealed the area off.
“The pattern of damage looks like it came from your energy blaster, but there’s something else,” Lenny said.
Now that he mentioned it, the locations of the protrusions on the infested vessel were very near where the ship’s blasters should be. They didn’t look anything like our weapons anymore, though.
“It looked like it had been laced with the fungus,” Sam said, so softly that only I heard it.
I repeated it louder for everyone else. They turned to look at us, and I realized I still had my arms around her; I released her hastily.
Sam cleared her throat. “It looks like a blend of scourge and Xarc’n technology. This is just an idea, but it’s possible either the fungus taught the scourge how to use your technology, or it converted your ship and reprogrammed it.”
“Is this conversation being recorded and sent to other hunters in the galaxy?” Lenny asked in a way that sounded like he was worried we wouldn’t live to warn the others.
“Affirmative.” Ror’k looked as grim as Lenny sounded. “We are getting reports from the hunters watching the nests on the ground. The scourge are starting to move.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Nowhere…yet…but they are separating into groups and moving in a way similar to how they do before leaving the nests at the start of a swarm.”
“A swarm? Now?” Sam shook her head. “But it’s winter! That doesn’t make any sense. Unless… Maybe the strange behavior we saw was them waiting for this...this thing.”
“But that would mean they couldhearit, or have known about it for days,” Lenny said. “I thought they didn’t have any form of advanced communication?”
“Scuttlers can hear a queen’s call for miles out where we are in the flat plains,” Sam said. “There’s nothing out in space to stop the transmission if the ship is boosting the queen’s message. Humor me, please. Look for a signal.”
Ror’k continued shooting at the enemy ship as Yam’r scanned for a signal. The ship, now much closer to Earth than before, did not shoot back. It merely continued hurrying toward its destination. Sam wriggled out of my arms and made her way over to Yam’r and his console. I followed her, staying close in case we were hit again.
Sure enough, there was an unknown signal coming from the detachment.
