Vermin
Dualalalop seeped back and forth along the back partition of
the forward control orb. The fronds that
cascaded down Dualalalop’s back quivered in anticipation. Around the bulky translucent Prime Axon, his
crew sat, hunched, and dangled intently, each one’s attention focused on the
tendrils sprouting from the ivory rib-stations before them.
“They’re late,” Dualalalop’s pheromone emitters
communicated. The chemical expression of
his frustration was captured by the ship translated into a dozen different
modes of communication, and then passed along the tendrils that wrapped around
and through the crew’s heads. “Detector
Prime, give me a full active scan.”
“Sir?” The crewmember
reclining at the Detector Tendril tapped along its breast ridge. It was a huge risk. Active scans would reveal their own location,
but so far passive scan had turned up nothing.
Either the Conglomerate’s informants had fed them false information – in
which case Prime Axon Dualalop would personally see to it they spent a
generation basking in the chloride baths on Mididianite Secundus – or the
blasted Hryrnos were running cloaked. If
they weren’t there, then active scans wouldn’t put them in any danger. But if
they were, then it would ruin the element of surprise, and the Prime Axon’s
ambush would revert to a ship-to-ship quick draw.
The Pustule Commands were on high alert, Dualalalop didn’t
need to check in with them again. “Something
wrong with your tendril,” Dualalop emitted, adding the piquant underscent that
turned the gas into a query.
“No. No, Prime Axon,”
the bony little crewmember replied. His
second limbs tapped out a hesitant reply upon its communication ridge, even as its
upper gripper limbs sent queries to the Visual and Peripheral Nerves. Each department responded immediately, and
the glossy, organic ship flared bright orange and shook with a thrumming heard
by those with audio receptors and felt by those with tactile receptors.
Instantly, a hot pink glow lit up the glistening floor down
and to Dualalalop’s left.
“Gotchya,” shouted Dualalalop. He shook a roil of ectoplasm and seeped back
to his station. “Ventral Pustules,
unleash!” His vacuoles tightened,
savoring the rush of endorphotropics.
The Hryrnos blockade runners could run or they could hide, but not
both. The Conglomerate’s embargo on the
Hryrnos had been costly, but worth it.
The Hryrnos refused to accede to their demands to join the powerful syndicate
of sentient races, ridiculously claiming that the Conglomerate was a rump
organization completely controlled by the Oonoones. They were right, of course, but as an Oonoone
itself, Dualalalop’s fronds shuddered at the effontry of pointing it out. Of all the aliens they’d ever forced to
willingly join the Conglomerate, only the Hryrnos had the cytoplasm to openly
state such a thing.
The embargo hadn’t worked out well at all. A number of Junior-Equals among the
Conglomerate traded with the Hryrnos under the Oonoones’ membrane, forcing this
wasteful blockade of the Hryrnos’ system.
After dozens of degrees of the galactic standard planetary orbit had
passed, the Hryrnos had started sending out small packet ships to run the
blockade, which had forced the Conglomerate to spend even more ships on the
effort, but the Oonoones weren’t the Senior-Equal race for nothing. They had spies everywhere, and Dualalalop
himself had met the two-body hive-mind K’k’reeet and plied it/them with
soporifics as reward for the secret to the Hryrnos secret to escaping their
home system undetected.
The spinward ejecta.
It had been so simple once it/they explained. The heat emitted by the plasma ejected from the
star at the center of the system’s poles foiled all but the most powerful
active scans. The Hryrnos had been using
the spinward ejecta as a secret dorsal channel.
But he had them now.
Coaxing the ship into the ejecta cloud had taken a bit of patience. Naturally, it resisted approaching the
radiant heat of the ejecta cloud, but Central Nervous had eased it along with a
deft touch, and so they had turned the tables on the Hryrnos. They had them under their membrane, sitting
scootpods. His fronds swept back and
forth in mirth.
But nothing happened.
It seeped to the Prime Axon’s station and sorbed the stringy
tendrils that tied it to the ship’s nervous system. “Ventral pustules, what’s going on down
there,” its pheromones hissed.
“Sorry, Prime,” a voice hooted through the tendril, “we’ve
got chem shorts all over the place.”
“Give me an active pulse.”
“Aye, aye,” came the hollow tapping reply.
This time the hot pink glow was muted and behind Dualalalop. Its vacuoles ached with anger. The spawn of an unsplit sac had slithered
right out from under them. They’d had
them, and they still escaped. The Medula
Oblongganglia were going to be furious, they might even strip it of command if
it didn’t have a viscous excuse.
“Ventral pustules, status?”
A pause. “You better
get down here,” the Pustule Command hooted.
Dualalalop pushed through the control orb sphincter and
seeped down through the branching crew vessels and valves of the living
ship. Twice, it noted small forms diving into the
canaliculi that gave the rigid bone structure of the ship its stability. Disgusting little things, they were a nuisance
the galaxy over. In the last 20 years,
they’d gone from unknown to ubiquitous.
Just one of the many little hassles of modern life, Dualalalop
considered.
Angrily, it stopped to sorb one caught out in the
open beneath the millions of vili it used to propel itself along the muscus slicked floor. Vindictive and pointless, but it
eased the ache in its vacuoles a bit. If
it couldn’t catch a Hryrnos ship, at least it could catch a few of those.
Down in the Ventral Pustule chamber its worst suspicions
were confirmed. It was the little
two-legged vermin infesting the ship. The
Immunity Teams were already on-site and had sliced a ship’s membrane open,
revealing that the spongy tissue carrying information and fluids to and from
Ventral Pustules was riddled with tunnels just big enough for the vermin. Evidence of the damage they’d done was
everywhere. They’d sliced through
vessels, siphoned off the reactive fluids that gave the Pustules their destructive
capability, and escaped…
Wait a microdegree.
What could they possibly do with the reactives?
“Ventral Pustule Command,” Dualalalop emitted. “How much
reactive fluid do you have remaining?”
“Let me check,” the rangy simian hooted. After a moment of consultation with three
different tendrils, he turned back to the Prime Axon, his tri-lobed eyes hooded
with surprise. “About half.”
“Great Mathematical Construct,” flared the chemical speech
of Dualalalop. “That's enough to melt half the ship's membranes! Well, that explains how they carve their little tunnels. Do what you can to
repair the damage, we’ll put the ship in for a full hycolonic when we get back
to Fleet Cranial Tumor Delta.”
Back in the central orb, the ship’s Immunity Chief told
Dualalalop that wouldn’t do any good. “Fleet
can’t figure out how to get rid of them,” the Chief’s bulging forehead flared in
the coruscating colors that it used to communicate. “Gas doesn’t work, nor psi-emitters, nor even
psi-emitters, and the hookhunters that catch most vermin?” The chief hung its head down in exasperation.
“Yes,” Dualalalop pressed.
“They kill them and eat them.”
Dualalalop felt queasy.
“That’s disgusting. They breed
like aaoooaa, mature in Oonoonian days, and can only be killed by physically
rooting them out by hand.”
“It gets worse,” the chief flashed. “They drink the reactives.”“No!”
“Indeed. I wouldn’t rustle your fronds about this. They drink the reactives," the chief paused and waved a shovel fingered hand to clear Dualalalop's flatulent expressing of shock and disgust. "It’s true. They've been observed in lab conditions. Even bathe in it, once you pry them out of their shells. High Cranium is concerned enough to have launched a full study. They’re desperate to figure out a way to keep them from spreading, but so far no luck. The filthy things just keep getting into everything. A few even escaped from the labs on Wooluxis Twenty-Two, and now their whole Planetary Cranial Complex is overrun with them, the poor wretches.”
“That’s awful. Where’d
the come from?”
“A couple of Silverships picked up a few dozen from their
home planet – a backwater – for pets. The clever little beasts they got out into the systems,
and now are spreading like a virus.”
“Can we just eviscerate the planet? Set up a core-fusion?”
“No point,” the chief flashed. “They can’t leave their planet without
somebody picking them up. We’d be free
of them if they weren’t picked up. Those
Silverships were always too curious for anyone’s good.”
“So we just have to learn to live with them?”
“For now, but we'll figure something out. We’re the
Conglomerate. We beat back the Great
Hive, the Co-Dependency Republic, and the Insular Reformation. We can deal with a few little primates.”
“Even their name sets my vili on edge,” Dualalop's pheromones
emitted. Its fronds shuddered as it thought, “Earthlings. Disgusting.”
