The Beast Arises

Wire went down two levels and then, oddly, walked into the seedy basement section of the terminal where derelicts and low-life individuals congregated. Wire vanished briefly into the dank, concrete underlevel of support pillars, garbage and oil drum fires.

Uneasy, Kalthro decided it was necessary to act before Wire began to suspect anything. He left his vantage point, dropped down the east wall of the terminal on a micro-filament cable, and waited for Wire to emerge from the north end colonnade of the underlevel.

When the man in the long brown storm coat reappeared, Kalthro pounced. He brought the man down cleanly, broke his back, and snapped his neck.

The corpse was face down on the filthy rockcrete floor. Kalthro got up and rolled the body over.

‘You don’t need to pay a poor man to wear a thick coat on a night like this,’ said Esad Wire from behind Wienand’s agent.

Kalthro turned. He was very fast indeed. The snub-las was already in his hand. He was, as Wienand had boasted, a superlative operative, the best in the Inquisition’s employ.

But, as he turned, he was no longer facing Esad Wire, Sector Overseer, Monitor Station KVF (Arbitrator).

Beast Krule met him with a smile. He touched Kalthro’s right forearm and shattered the bones there. The snub-las dropped out of a useless hand. Then Krule put his right fist in Kalthro’s face.

It went through. Clean through. The knuckle points fractured out through the back of Kalthro’s skull, jetting tissue and blood with them under considerable pressure. The operative’s body hung off the fist, twitching. Krule jerked his hand back, and it came out gore-slick and steaming.

Kalthro crumpled onto the floor beside the dead vagrant in the brown coat. More steam rose. Blood pooled, dark and glossy. Then it began to clot and then freeze in the desperate temperatures.

Krule looked down at the body.

‘Not bad,’ he allowed. He wiped his bloody hand clean on Kalthro’s jacket, recovered his coat, and picked up his bag.

Then he walked away into the frozen night towards the maglev terminal entrance, whistling an oddly cheerful refrain.

Rob Sanders Predator, prey

Capturing…

Competition is a universal constant. Territoriality, a quantified given. Empire building — an expectation. The galaxy is quietly expanding, but there will never be enough room for all the species who aspire to its dominion. The appetites of sentient beings tend to the absolute — like our own. This is not base predation. I talk not of the hunter and hunted. This is not survival of the fittest. I have made it my life’s work — and that of the life thereafter — to study the grand design of such selection and speciation. It is both wondrous and dreadful.

The apex species of the galaxy compete not for resources or sustenance. They all take more than need demands. They compete because they can. This is intraguild predation, the predators that kill their competitors — the predators that prey on each other. They are the wolves that take down the lion.

We partake in a techno-evolutionary arms race: a galactic test of our suitability to rule, to prosper, to exist. Our success, however, is our failure. With every step we take along the path of enlightenment, dominance and superiority, we plant the seeds of our own destruction. In attempting to annihilate the other sentient species of the galaxy, we force them to adapt. To learn from their mistakes on a genetic level. We create competitors with the evolutionary gifts to wipe us from the face of the known universe.