The Alien Warrior King's Accountant - Loki Renard Page 0,24
than I can count. He claims he didn’t know this was our ship. He says…”
“What is it?”
“He says he smelled human.”
“That’s not possible,” King Tyrant declares.
“Mantids have an unerring ability to catch the scent of a human across a galaxy. The concern, sir, is not this single interloper. It is the possibility that a swarm could catch her scent. It would be wise to return her to Earth as soon as possible. The hull cannot tolerate sustained attack from thousands of these creatures. The bulkheads will only hold them off for so long.”
“So I need to kill a bug for my human.”
“That’s… rather an understatement, sire. Again, I would urge you to return the human.”
He would say that. Any reason to get rid of me he’d take, I bet.
“If I return the human, we won’t have one Mantid to worry about, or even a swarm. We’ll face annihilation from DICK — and not the fun kind. I will deal with the prisoner.”
I expect Tyrant to tell me to stay behind, or maybe to take me back to my work. But he doesn’t. He walks out the door, and I am left to trail behind him. In the beginning, I couldn’t move through the walls, but maybe the technology inside me has shifted my biology and I’m able to do it now, because I walk through what once were solid walls as if they were thin veils of nothing at all.
I am getting good at this. I…
“Get up here!”
I am grabbed under the shoulders and pulled upward, away from Tyrant, through the floor and into an upper level of the ship. Terrible has me, and he is glowering at me with a furious stare.
“If you had walked through that last wall, you would have ended up in the same room with the Mantid.”
Oh. Terrible has saved my life, and stopped me from walking straight into a situation which would kill me in multiple ways, because the last veil is the bulkhead itself. Though, looking down, I’m not sure I could have gotten through it. Unlike the other walls which accepted their status as mere suggestions with a happy meekness, the bulkhead seems to be made of thicker stuff. I see Tyrant force his way through it, and it absorbing him like silly putty.
The floor Terrible has pulled me up to looks over the ruptured bit of hull and the sealed bulkhead. I don’t know how Tyrant is standing there without being sucked into space. Physics of some kind, probably.
I don’t have a lot of time to consider all the technical ramifications of the matter. I’m focused on what Terrible somewhat arrogantly called their ‘prisoner’. It doesn’t look like a prisoner to me. It looks like a dangerous invader.
A mantid, I learn, is a creature which emits an acrid stench which I can detect even at a very great distance and through a semi-solid floor. It has two legs, big, thick haunches with sharp prongs emitting from them at regular intervals. The head is grotesque. The alien has eyes like a praying mantis, and clawed arms with sharp protrusions instead of hands. They are not made to grasp and hold; they are meant to slash and trap.
When it sees King Tyrant, it fans out the smooth surface of its back and reveals four large and ethereal looking wings which fan the air furiously with a dry, rattling sound.
I am torn between disgust and fear as I stare down at it, very much aware of the impossible size of the thing. It looks like a bug, if a bug were sentient and as large as a horse.
“Hungggrryyy…” it hisses. “Give flesssh of hummannn…”
Every word is drawn out in a scary, sibilant hiss.
It wants me.
It can smell me. Sense me. Taste me.
I should have stayed back in Tyrant’s chambers, but it’s too late now.
“Why did you follow us, human?”
I almost forgot about him, but Terrible is standing over me, his bright eyes turned pure obsidian black, the iridescence of his body similarly hued. He looks like a pure charcoal beast covered in the occasional pulse of rainbow light.
“I….”
“Be quiet!” he snaps as soon as I even try to start speaking. “It will smell you all the more if you speak. Stay still. Do not move. Try to breathe as little as possible.”
Some of those instructions I can follow, others not so much, but I do my best to make myself small and evade the ire of the predator standing over me as well as