Perdition's Child

Chapter 18

They were finishing a strip variant of a board game in the big communal living room, which Mehk rather regretted allowing the skithtiri to talk them into, when Quara held up one tentacle to pause the game and check the monitors. "They're doing something." He took that as permission to put his clothes back on and regret letting that pair of lunatics convince him to play. He hadn't even gotten to see what the rest of Irika's spots looked like out of the embarrassing mess since she kept winning. The skithtiri sighed. "This doesn't look good, lets call the commander. Don't worry Mehk, we'll get Irika out of her clothes another time. But at least you got the consolation prize of seeing my beautiful form."

He winced at her. Skithtiri really did look like a cross between an insect larva and a snake. That was not to say Quara wasn't very pretty, but it was like admiring a colorful serpent and then having the reptile remind you that it was naked, but feel free to look all you want. He was beginning to realize she was entirely talk and no action, but that didn't help as much as it should.

The commander arrived shortly after receiving the texts, Derak and Nii'Lara close behind. The wall monitor displayed the six camera images, one of them showing a close up of a table leg, which was the one Quara gestured to one they came in. "These things really aren't built for recording sound, so I had to get the spider right up on the bottom of the table they're all sitting at. It's some kind of meeting. The whole thing is recording, so you can listen to it later, but for now I've got it on live." With that brief explanation, she turned the sound up so they could just make out Ritcha's voice. "...d this is simply a futile stalling tactic, our plans are assured. Although inconvenient, it won't take long for the backup to be ready."

Another voice chimed in, "What about the first carrier? There was a report of a person matching his description in the ninth district, and one of the uninitiated who was there said he had blue eyes and a docked tail."

Ritcha sounded regretful when he replied, "Yes, but he's not worth the trouble. Clearly his copy of the virus was defective, or he managed to corrupt it. No, my friends, we must backtrack just a bit in order to move forward. It shouldn't take more than a week with luck, so the sooner we leave the sooner we can build our chosen kingdom in the purified ashes of this corrupted galaxy."

One of the members shifted, causing the spyders' automatic survival response to make the it skitter to the other end of under the table where Ritcha located it by ear and caught it. As he pulled it into the light to examine his catch, one of the others asked, "When should we leave?"

After glancing at the spyder speculatively, Ritcha tossed it into his mouth and bit down before answering and the feed cut off.

"Oh fuck." Quaras' antennas went down like ears, the most unambiguous piece of body language he'd yet seen from a skithtiri.

Mehk cleared his throat. "Er, you didn't think to make them spider flavored, did you?"

"I don't know, do spiders taste like metal and circuit boards by any chance?"

The commander stood up and started for the room where they kept most of their guns and ammo, sending an alert to the entire merc group on his com. "Time to move, people."

With their cover blown there was no need for fancy tactics, everyone just grabbed their gear and ran. There was an extra armored vest Mehk found he could wear, but none of the pants were built with lellian joints in mind. He filched a pistol while no one was looking, since despite the camaraderie he'd built up no one seemed overly eager to give him a gun. Irika and Derak noticed, he knew, but they said nothing and then they were in the cars on their way to the restructured hotel-turned-apartment-turned cult headquarters.