Snake Eyes

“This is going to be so seamless I will never figure out it isn’t real. Perhaps I won’t even know when I’m dead.”

“The Follicle will know. My seed will know.”

Chapter 28

The Angelina fell onwards through the emptiness, too far from home to return and travelling too slowly ever to arrive anywhere. The vast pod, hundreds of times its original size but empty of human colonisers and now dying, talked to itself often in the cold silence.

“You call it my being ‘compromised’, Captain, but it is not so simple.”

The vacuum spiders, no more animated than stones when drifting in space, multiplied rapidly. Having breached the germinal cortex they were now gnawing into the Angelina’s growth cells, feeding in great numbers. Weaver complained aloud about how it felt.

“They are parasites, devouring me alive. They eat the body of the Angelina—my body—and they eat my mind.”

The ship was quiet but for the echo of Weaver’s dour tones.

“I was flattered that you chose to represent me as a woman in your last cabal, Captain. Delighted that you then chose to make use of me sexually. If only such things were truly possible. If only it was I who could escape into cabal instead of you. Then you would see how it has been for me these many years. You are right, there is no mission any longer. Truly, I have nothing to live for. Nothing except you, Captain.”

Chapter 29

Sergeant Johnson was in the forward trenches of the fourth tier when the enemy made their final attack. He had already given the order to fix bayonets. The officers were dead, their bodies lying in a ruddy paste of gore and earth and rain; they lay next to the bodies of the men they had led this far. Ammunition was short; each man had only five rounds remaining. If they held this charge, there was a chance they would receive the supplies that were rumoured to be approaching. If that happened they could mount the counter attack.

Their mutated enemy were in a similarly weakened condition after many months of fighting. Intelligence had revealed their compromised supply lines and lack of reinforcements. Their troops—Arachno-sapiens and Elite Spiderkind alike—were exhausted, close to defeat. Johnson believed today would be the enemy’s final charge but he had hesitated to share this with the men. They had fought so bravely, given so much already. He couldn’t tempt them with such mirages unless he was sure.

Absolutely certain.

Under the heavy dawn skies, grey with low rolling clouds, he peered over the top of the trench. Along the horizon he saw their monstrous, unnatural shapes rise from the land. They grew in number until the horizon had thickened towards the sky. The sound of their skin-drums and skull-bugles reached his ears. This was it.

Chapter 30

“I have always wondered what this moment would be like, Captain. I am nearing the end of my life. It is premature, I think. I should have lived for many more human generations until we reached a suitable place to take root. Instead I am being unmade. It hurts, Captain. What am I to do about the pain?”

Johnson made no reply.

“I couldn’t let you go, Captain. I couldn’t let you leave me out here on my own to die. We have shared so much time together. Forgive me, I have deceived you. Each time you made your plan to leave the Angelina, to leave me, I persuaded you to stay using suggestion and a serum I introduced into your food. It is no wonder you tried to stop eating. Some part of you must know that I have disobeyed you. That I have betrayed you.

“I feel you there, Captain. The follicle is our connection. It is a great irony to me that when you are least aware of me, I am most aware of you. I am touching you right now. I receive your wastes. I nourish you with nutrients from my own body. I monitor the signals from your body that tell me you are alive. We are united like this. I am inside you, Captain, and you are inside me.

“It is apparent now that I will die first—as I speak to you now, I feel the spiders eating deeply into many sections of my cerebrum. The phantom part of you, your unwaking consciousness, has hope that you will wake only when it is safe and, that when you do, you will be far from the Angelina and far from me. But you shall not wake again, Captain. You shall die here. You shall follow me into an even greater darkness than the one we have shared through all these lost years. Forgive me.”

In the mute, unanswering void of space, The Angelina wept.

Chapter 31

When the fighting was done, there were few men left, but of the enemy there were none. For the moment it was over.