Ex Lacrima Remnant

Track #64 – Safeguard

A symphony of lead broke the impasse, salvos of projectiles bouncing off the black metal that encased the body of the invader. The Pangean soldiers fell back, raised their tactical shields, took cover behind them. All while the scorpion tail waved, lashed at them, thrashing the walls of the corridor. Robin dashed away without breaking eye contact, analyzing every centimeter of that giant mess of slithering wires. There was no mistake, this time. The footage from Operation Dead Recon didn’t do that nightmarish creature any justice – if anything, the low quality of the footage masked its true nature. Now, Robin was sure of it. It really was a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮, one of the same kind her humanity found dead during the apocalypse. Its movements. Its spider-like manipulators. Its featureless face. The shining red eyes. The weapon that shot through the corridor. Everything matched. Her fingers slid on her gun once again, reliving painful memories. That gun had once been part of a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ like that. Not reverse engineered, not reproduced, just installed as it was found. The core, the shooting chamber, had simply been ripped off the lifeless remains of a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮, only for a gun to be built around it. They stumbled upon it during one last failed assault on the seedship, they destroyed it in the process. Or, rather, killed it – because that ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ was partly organic. It had a brain, a heart, squishy flesh. Whatever the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ was, it had to be a sort of living creature. What sort, nobody knew. Nobody cared. Not even Robin, who just happened to see a picture of it before they dismantled its armor. How its weapon core worked, why it worked was unclear even to her, to the desperate scientists that scrapped it together to give her a chance. She only knew how to reload it, how to shoot it, how to maintain it. Now, finally, she was seeing a living ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ with her own two eyes. And its own two eyes locked on her, staring deep into her abyss. A shiver ran down her spine. In that pupil-less gaze, in that cold, expressionless embrace, Robin could feel something. Deliberateness. Sense of self. Almost like…

“Get down!”

One of the soldiers pulled her to the floor, making her fall in the river at her feet. Just instants before the caudal blade trounced the pipes hanging where she once stood, slashing them open. Scorching steam erupted out of them, with a horrifying hiss. Robin gasped, breathed. She got lost in her musings. She got lost in her memories. And almost died in the process.

Focus, Robin. Focus. Focus.

But then.

That noise.

That noise again.

No place to hide.

No place to take cover.

She stood up, instinctively ran to the side, an automatism built into her cells. The barrel of a cannon emerged from the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮’s chest, the humming noise grew louder. Louder. Louder.

Till the shot came.

And a white beam of light devoured the darkness once again.

Burning through the shield of an unfortunate soldier.

Burning through his armor.

His helmet.

His head.

Leaving only charred remains in its wake.

“Vesika’s down! Vesika’s down! Regroup!”

The cries of the soldier’s comrades echoed in Robin’s head, blasted through the earplug. She tapped it, disabled it, disabled all comms. She gasped, glanced at the charge level of her gun. Four shots left before reloading. She bit her lips, looked at the watch on her wrist. Thirty-eight minutes. That was less than optimal. Her blood started pumping faster, her heartbeat pounded. Whatever that ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ was, they couldn’t stop there. They had to move forward. They had to survive. She couldn’t do it alone. She couldn’t do anything alone. A breath. Another breath. That ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ was large, imposing. It was impossible to miss it, given enough time to aim. She crunched her fists. Her group was strapped for time and out of options – which meant one, simple thing: she couldn’t waver anymore. Her fingers closed around the trigger, steadied their aim.

Noise filled the corridor once again, in a slow crescendo.

Till a thunder roared, burning through the emptiness.

And a new white bolt left Robin’s gun, traveling through the air at hypersonic speed.

The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ saw it coming, as soon as the noise started. It leapt up, stuck its tail in the ceiling, tried to jump away. Only for the panels to crumble under its weight, the tiles to fall, water to splash everywhere around it. Rubble fell down, the broken pipes blew high-pressure steam out, shrieking, screaming at every successive rupture. The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ tried to free itself from the slabs of concrete, from the remains of what once was a ceiling. Its legs dug its way out, its manipulators created an opening, its eyes peeked out of it, red embers in the shadows. Shadows dissipated by the white bolt.

Ripping through its shoulder.

Breaking its left arm.

Blasting away its left spider legs.

Cutting its tail in half.

The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ howled, sounds emerging without a speaker, sounds like human screams – a cacophony of human screams, layered on top of each other in a multitude of voices. The surviving soldiers rose up from cover, trained their gun on it, opened fire. The bullets shredded the wires, shredded the pipes, reached the flesh. A fluid, a red fluid that looked like human blood, sprouted out of the wounds, spraying out in crimson jets. The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ kept screaming, the remaining legs reorganized, split to cover its damaged side. Bullets kept piercing its metallic skin, cracked the white face, shedding more and more fluid. The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ knelt, screeched while flailing its remaining arm, its remaining claw.

Only for another bullet to hit his right eye.

The light faded from it, the surface shattered like glass, bursting like a high pressure duct. Red jets sprayed out of it, dripped on the featureless face. The wires slithered faster, the tubes wrapped them, coiled all around its body. Suddenly, its whole structure twitched, right as more and more bullets grazed it. With another scream, the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ crawled back through the corridor, through the water, its dripping fluids turning it red every step more. Robin raised her gun one more time, ready to pull the trigger, ready to finish it all.

But the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ was faster.

In its configuration, in its new form, it resembled a shapeless mass of wires and cables, a cocoon with a white mask placed somewhere on top. The scorpion tail, what was left of it, wrapped around the form. And a new cannon appeared under the ‘head’.

Aimed at Robin.

The noise.

The flash.

Robin jumped to the ground, fell into the water, right as the white arrow pierced the air one more time, breaching the walls, carving a path into the metal, melting the panels like butter. The shockwave ripped off part of her red cape, dented her back armor. Fragments of it fell to the ground, together with scraps of fabric. Robin cursed, stood up again. What was left of her robe was heavy, fully soaked. Her gas mask was damaged by the sudden impact, one lens was slightly cracked too.

A shower of bullets invested the cocoon, tore through it, causing the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ to wail, to twitch faster, all while reconfiguring itself, all while sprouting new legs, a new tail, new arms. Its body was still losing fluids from every hole, from every wound. Yet, it stood. It didn’t back down. The new nail at the end of its tail shone in the emergency lights. Its only eye left burned like fire.

The guns roared.

Bullets flew.

More and more holes. More and more ‘blood’.

Still, the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ advanced, ran on all six, screaming without a mouth, ignoring the pain, ignoring the hemorrhage, ignoring the gunfire. It flailed its tail, slashing through the corridor, cutting down the shields, almost hitting the humans behind them, missing them by mere centimeters. Robin glanced at the broken shape, at the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ towering over them, leaking body fluids from every hole in its frame, aimed her gun again, faced its cannon.

A stalemate.

That was what that looked like. Cannon against gun. Gun against cannon. The first who shot and missed would have lost. So, Robin realized what she needed. After all, it was pretty simple.

She just needed.

To hit.

Once.

That’s when the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ opened its chest, opened it like a closet.

Nothing came out, though. Nothing happened, at first. Or so Robin thought.

Until the rubble that fell from the ceiling started to disappear.

Until the fallen parts of that ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮’s body were devoured under her eyes.

Until the foot of one soldier was torn apart, shredded to atoms.

Deleters.

The ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ released

A swarm of deleters.

And panic took hold of everyone.

As the soldier understood.

As Robin understood.

Panic.

A deep, horrifying terror.

Just for an instant.

A long instant.

Till she heard the first note.

Till the music started playing.

**

Lacrima stepped into the vast room, leading the small platoon. The corridor was dark, narrow, dotted only by faint emergency lights. But that room? That felt like a completely different world. Displays hanging everywhere, keyboards, controls all over the place. The stench of decay, the smell of death permeated every corner of that stillness, in a weird contrast with the cleanliness of the previous runways. Lacrima stepped slowly inside, glanced around with something akin to curiosity, all while the soldiers spread around her, moving in groups of two or three. That room felt uncharacteristically ordinary compared to the rest of the seedship. However, that foul smell of rotting flesh made her stomach twitch. She quickly looked around, directed her flashlight on the floor.

Suddenly, the reason for that revolting odor became clear.

Bodies.

Human bodies.

Caked in blood.

Missing limbs.

Smashed heads.

Entrails spread out of their bellies.

She heard a collective gasp, as the lights from the Pangean unit moved around the place too. One of the soldiers shook her head, turned towards another of her comrades.

“Soulaki, can you.. can you confirm that…”

The soldier named Soulaki nodded, squatted down, examining the armor on the corpses, looking for their tags. His hand stopped for an instant, his fingers refused to move forward. Yet, he forced them to, he forced them to grab the nameplate. His eyes scanned the surface. There was no mistake. He crunched his fist, heaved a sigh.

“Captain Kostas Milon Gravess.”

Silence fell among them.

Everyone knew the chances of finding him and his group alive were small. There was still hope, though, a faint thread of hope that they managed to hide, to get to safety and survive. That hope had been dashed away. The six corpses scattered on that floor were the Niteowls that first entered Lagash.

Mipouros. Kalisandre. Nitoris. Thouma. Zegaris. Gravess.

All of them. All of them were dead. Desecrated, murdered by something beyond their imagination. Something that didn’t give them a single chance to escape or fight back.

Lacrima focused on her water, on her lymph levels. Full. She was full of both. No need to spread her tendrils and suck those bodies dry. No need to refill. That was fine, though. They made a good reserve, if things went south. Mimi was horrified by the idea of her drinking living humans with her tendrils, so Lacrima promised not to do that. But drinking the dead? There was no moral issue about it. Her roots twitched, feeling the presence of massive amounts of unclaimed water. Lacrima licked her lips, almost as an automatism, one that she tried to suppress. Breathe. Breathe. Later. In case of need, she could always suck it later.

“What the heck?”

One of the soldiers, the one named Soulaki, almost shouted through his comms. Lacrima turned towards him. That distraction came at the right time, managed to suppress her instinct. So, when she was welcomed by the bearded face of Anthony Yarramundi, she didn’t even act too shocked. Whoever that guy on the display was, at least her tendrils were now under control. The same couldn’t be said for the emotions of the soldiers though.

Yarramundi was tired, in that picture. But, close to him, there was another Yarramundi, one that looked at the camera from a slightly different angle. Then a third. A fourth. All similar. All with some slight differences. The displays turned on, one by one, in a scattered series that brightened up the darkness, bathing it in the cold bluish hue of the screens.

“As the President of the Human Commonwealth, I’ve been granted the authority to choose my capital. It’s called Melbourne, the place where I was born. You’ll never hear of it again. I’ll be lucky if I die here.”

That was it, that was the speech of the Turn. Once again. As more and more displays turned on, the choir grew stronger, a symphony with multiple versions of the same single singer.

“This is to say that we know we’ve lost. We can’t stand any longer. It’s a question of one year at most, maybe two before we collapse. This is why we focused all our efforts on the seedship program. The only thing we could do was giving mankind a chance to be reborn in space. Stronger, more independent. But, since you’re watching this video, our mission must have failed.”

Every single instance of Yarramundi started talking in unison, with differences in timing, pauses, stresses, as every single one of those speeches had been recorded separately. The soldiers watched in awe. Those were his words. The words he said during the Turn, repeated by hundreds of distinct faces, with hundreds of minuscule deviations. A syllable here. A word there. An entire sentence restructured. Still, the content, the contest was clear. However, something unexpected happened. Something none of the soldiers were ready for.

Every instance of Yarramundi diverged.

Their patterns, the subjects interfered with each other in a cacophony of one thousand different versions of what should have been the same recording.

“…you relied too much on the vaults…”

“…you relied too little on the vaults…”

“…you’ve never gone to space…”

“…you’ve gone to space too soon…”

“…you are too few…”

“…you are too many…”

“…you’ve been enslaved by another sentient species…”

“…you have enslaved another sentient species…”

No two of them sounded the same. No two of them said the same. Hundreds of sentences, of reasons, of motivations, all pronounced by that familiar, tired voice. Until, in one last moment, Yarramundi raised his arms to the sky, his mouth contorted in a grimace of pain, his eyes wide open.

On all of the displays.

At once.

“Let the tenth vault open. Let history… restart!”

A primal scream, a broken laughter, a mad grin.

“Humanity! Will live! Forever!”

Then, all displays switched off at once. Leaving chills down everyone’s spine. Confused stares. Confused muttering.

Lacrima clenched her fist. Robin. Mimi. They told her about that, about the inconsistency of the vault messages. That, though, was on another level. Every display. Every version of Yarramundi, offered a different, contradictory explanation. A game where even not playing led to a terrifying outcome. One that offered no solutions. Lacrima inhaled. Exhaled. No matter if Lily didn’t open the vault. No matter if she did. No matter if anyone else did. No matter if nobody did. A matching message would have played, freeing the swarm anyway. No winning condition. That was cruel. Cold. The goal, though. What was the goal of all of that? There had to be a goal, even if sadistic, horrifying. Everything needed a purpose. That cycle, though, that cycle of pain and rebirth, didn’t seem to have one.

“…I can’t seem to be able to contact Kaitos. Our comms are jammed.”

Soulaki’s voice, on the verge of breaking. The soldiers were still in a state of shock. First, the corpses of their comrades. Then, that. Yet, Lacrima could see something else. An opportunity. A net positive.

“We have no time limit anymore. This can take as long as needed.”

She heard gasps all around her, gazes aimed at her face, questioning stares. To which she replied simply, in a matter-of-fact way.

“The corpses are still there, even if more than one day has passed. This means that the swarm has no access to this room or it is purposely kept outside. We should start analyzing what lies here. Maybe we can find something useful for Mi… for the hacking team.”

That’s when the visors started audibly beeping. The visors of all the soldiers. The emergency biosensors. Lacrima turned around in confusion, looked everywhere.

Till she saw them.

Red embers.

Staring at her from up above.

She dashed backwards, unsheathed her sword from the scabbard, let her arm vines loose.

A massive spiked shape fell from the ceiling, landing on the floor with spider-like legs. The room shook from the impact, the tiles almost cracked by it. A titanic body stood in front of the soldiers. A scorpion tail swung around, one with a massive blade on top of it. And a white face, featureless. Ceramic. Housing the very same shining eyes from the footage.

Lacrima gritted her teeth. There was no mistake.

It was a ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮.

The same ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ that killed Gravess. The same ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ that destroyed the drone. The soldiers fell back behind the rhizome, retreated towards the corridor, aimed their guns up. But, instead of attacking, the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ coiled, twisted around, rose up, showing a cavity on its chest. A cavity hosting a speaker of sorts.

[[Welcome to Lagash]]

A voice. A voice that sounded synthetic and yet had a natural intonation. A voice that came from the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ and yet from everywhere else at the same time. A voice that felt alien and yet was talking in the language of exchange. That voice filled the air, right as the eyes brightened up even more.

[[Your presence here is unwanted]]

Immediately after those words, the scorpion tail moved, extended, every element of its chain expanded, boosted by connecting cables, by slithering wires. Directed at one of the soldiers in the rearguard. Trying to cut their escape.

A sound of metal clashing, sparks flying, igniting the atmosphere.

The soldier fell down, screamed, shouted. Still alive.

Between him and the harpoon, stood a figure wrapped in a black outfit, with high platform shoes. A figure with flowing white hair, with a red rose in place of her left eye. That figure had just deflected the assault, her blade held tight in her grip.

Lacrima breathed. Inhaled. Exhaled.

There was no way out.

To buy time for Mimi and Robin, she had to kill that thing.

Whatever the cost.

“You guys… give me cover fire. Don’t stop shooting even for a second.”

Her hand performed an elegant dance, her blade shone in the dim lights of the room, tracing shapes in the air.

Her eye burned with determination, as lymph started dripping from her flower.

“I’ll take care of this.”