Perdition's Child

Chapter 17

Once she finished setting it up, Quara set her spying devices to record to the ship computer and stream to her personal com so she didn't have to stay there to monitor it. "They're spyders; aren't they adorable? Vega helped me reverse engineer these babies from the military prototype Rex, uh, borrowed for us." The spying devices did, indeed, look like spiders. Mehk was impressed, you'd have to look very close to notice they had a suspiciously uniform plastic smoothness. "They draw their power from the wireless extranet connection. I can control them manually, and they have a primitive AI that will make them run for cover if something disturbs them, just like a real spider."

"Awesome, spider cameras." Irika did not sound remotely pleased. "I was thinking there weren't nearly enough reasons to fear and hate arachnids, thank you for your contribution..."

Mehk had nothing in particular against bugs, but he quietly resolved to squish any that looked remotely like these on sight from now on. "That's amazing, Quara. How many are there?" Just in case...

"Six in service. There were seven, but one got chewed up by a kitch before it could make it into the building. We'll work on a solution for that kind of thing on the next batch." She paused to dig through one of the many pouches on her harness. "Before I forget, here's one of my old, outdated coms. Not that you'd notice, judging by that museum piece you were lugging around before. It's fully functional since we're trusting that your brush with the enemy has knocked some sense into that soft head of yours. Use common sense, don't tell all your alleged pretty girls about our mission, and try not to let this one get stolen by terrorists, m'kay?"

"What do you mean 'alleged'? I'm supermodel material among my species."

"Are you really?" She sounded openly curious.

"Absolutely," he lied, "You're in the presence of a god among men." he took the device. It was a much newer model, smaller and sleeker than his clunky old one. Maybe it was outdated on a prominent space station, but they probably didn't even sell models this new on Lequin. He suspected he was going to accidentally crack it in half before he'd had it a week. "Thanks."

"Let's get back to base, the commander told me to tell you guys we have a war meeting a little later." They walked(or in Quara's case, slithered) back to the parking garage.

Irika waved him off. "I'm taking my bike back, you can go with Quara in her car."

He hesitated, wanting to go with her and get another taste of her terrifying but exhilarating city biking, but she'd already climbed into the seat and he was just standing there awkwardly. He turned and followed Quara to her car hoping neither of them had noticed. Irika was probably still annoyed at him about tackling her... And that had been pretty weird, he'd be better off staying away from her for a little while in any case. Not that the alien was ugly, at least once you got used to the differences.

Mehk cut that thought off abruptly, drawing himself back to the real world with a start.

He lucked out, Quara had been staring at her com and missed the moment, so he could get his much-needed nap instead of being subjected to off-color taunting for the trip back. It took him a couple minutes to doze off though, since he kept wishing he'd spoken up to go with Irika, but finally he dropped into the darkness.