Astronomicon: Behemoth

Chapter 27 - Biological Imperative

Megan walked to the nearest cat-person, lying in its version of an E.V.A. near the base of one of the alien trees. She felt sorry for the creature, no doubt trapped like she was in this bizarre, alien environment. Like her, it was probably struggling to survive and escape from this place but instead ended up dead.

She traced the lamp beam along the creature's short, broad body as she approached. While it was essentially humanoid, the proportions were clearly not human. She had to take a few more steps before she was close enough to see in through the creature's glass visor. She stepped gingerly over a dropped branch; it looked too much like it was formed from animal flesh for her liking, then she turned back to the dead cat-creature.

For a moment, her lamp beam reflected off the glass and then she could see its face, its ugly hateful face. She stared in disgust at its features. There was a resemblance to an Earth feline but that was mostly due to the shape of the eyes, their vertical slit pupil and the fur covering most of the rest of the face. The rest of the face shape bore little resemblance to any Earth creature she could think of.

Her overriding emotion was hatred, and anger. She hated the creature for being destructive, for attacking the friendly lobsters, for killing several of them and for shooting at her crew. Its very existence made her intensely angry. The more she stared at it the more she felt driven to destroy it, to destroy all of them. Part of her brain screamed that her reaction was simply not logical but that felt unimportant.

She was so absorbed by staring at the cat-creature that she failed to notice Ekono walking up behind her. She did not look up and see him casually aim his sidearm at the creature's visor. The deafening bang that followed shocked Megan out of her trance, punched a jagged hole through the visor and caused the creature's head to explode, spraying the remaining visor glass with dark red blood and fur.

Megan knew she should reprimand Ekono for his actions, but she felt such an overwhelming sense of satisfaction at the pointless vandalism of the creature's corpse that she decided to let it go. She was more worried that she felt irritated that Ekono had done it instead of her.

She was silent for a few seconds before she gathered her thoughts enough to talk to him.

"Ekono, in the video of the first encounter, your bullets were bouncing off their E.V.A. suits. Why do they go right through now?"

"It's important to learn from experience, Commander. We're using different ammunition this time. I filled the clips with armour-piercing rounds. The cat suits can't resist those."

"Can you sort me out with a pistol and those bullets?"

"Of course, Commander. I can do that as soon as we get back to the Arcadian."

"Now, is there anything we can do to help the injured lobsters?"

"We know nothing about their biology. We could probably cause more harm than good, Commander."

"Commander, we've got company!" announced Bettino via the radio.

"Hostile?" Ekono demanded.

"It's more lobsters. Lots of them!" Bettino replied.

Megan twisted around just in time to see a column of at least ten lobsters flow into the room, scuttling fluidly around the parked buggy, between the trees and branching off in pairs towards injured and dead lobster casualties.

"Step away from any injured lobsters," Megan ordered quietly, carefully getting to her feet.

"Are they going to blame us for this, Commander?" murmured Bettino.

"Look, there are talking to the survivors. I hope they'll tell them what happened."

Megan watched in fascination as the newly arrived lobsters efficiently searched the orchard, dragged their dead together, treated their injured and helped them join a circle around the three dead bodies. The lobster that appeared to be the leader, although Megan could not be sure it was the same one as last time, moved inside the circle of its companions and faced the bodies.