I fired with her, putting two rounds into the head of the next arach. The bigger slug and closer range saw the second round hit what it was meant to, so I put a short burst to the chest of the third. I was moving on to the fourth soldier, weaving his way through the fallen humans, when I remembered I was supposed to be calling for help.
“T’Kit!” I managed, firing a second burst to put the soldier down, and switching targets. “Help! T’Kit! It’s a king! T’Kit! A king!”
I didn’t know what to expect, but it was not the swift and sudden explosion of the large doors in front of the shuttle, or the veritable swarm of wasps that came flooding into the hangar space. I looked from the sudden flare of sunlight and back towards the king, just in time to see him vanish into a cloud of shadow. When it cleared, he had taken the form of a large, black spider and fled back through the door leading to the rest of the building.
I had the Blazer up and was firing into the cloud and his vulnerable rear, before I’d decided to move. It seemed to have no effect, but I kept firing until he’d completely disappeared.
“T’Kit, there are prisoners, and…” but the vespis team leader had arrived, and wasps had reached the arach soldiers around the stairs. None of them were coming after Alice and I, which left us only one thing to worry about.
The door rattled, and we remembered what was on the other side. Keeping our weapons pointing outwards, we slammed our backs against it. It wasn’t locked. If enough of those critters got to it, chances were one of them would trip the handle. As soon as I thought it, I heard the snick of the catch releasing, and the door bumped against our backs.
“Shit,” Alice said, bracing one foot against the railing that ran the perimeter of the small landing.
Shit about summed it up, I thought, as several hefty impacts made it jolt against our weight.
“T’Kit…” I gasped, as the door jolted again. “We can’t hold them.”
I didn’t know what the things we’d seen inside the pre-fab were called; I only knew that they terrified the living shit out of me with their undecided forms, their multitudinous legs, and their reaching fangs. The thought of them left me weak at the knees.
T’Kit looked at the images crawling through my mind, and recoiled in disbelief.
“You jest!” she snarled, and I shook my head.
“You know I don’t,” I said. “How could anyone joke about these?”
“You must hold them a little longer,” she commanded, and beside me, Alice gasped, so I guessed T’Kit had relayed her command to the Odyssey agent, as well. “Hold them, or the humans die!”
Humans?
The door bounced against my back, and I felt what might have been a narrow foreleg brush against the back of my calf. I stomped down, and shoved back against the door. Something crunched and a shrill squeal went through my head, setting my teeth on edge. I kicked the door, driving the flat of my foot as hard as I could against it, barely aware of the vespis warriors flying to the foot of the stairs and removing bodies as swiftly as they could take them. All I could think of was the weight building up against our backs.
One by one, the bodies were cleared, and, one by one, the arach fell, stung to submission by vespis warriors who darted in and back, their more modern weapons forgotten as they employed age-old fighting techniques to take the spiders down. Alice stood beside me, as one of the red-gold protectors of the queen came and hovered in front of us.
“We can’t…” I panted, and it held up a forelimb.
“A hundred wingbeats more,” it said, and I tried to work out just how long that might be.
“Not long,” Alice said. “Their wings beat so fast.”
A slender leg reached around the edge of the door frame, the clawed forefoot probing my hair, my shoulder, my upper arm. I smothered a scream, and pushed harder. Glancing sideways, I saw that Alice had it worse. A half dozen of the limbs were probing along her back and side, even as she tried to push the door more to closed.
It was never going to happen, and, all the time we struggled, the vespis warrior watched us. At first she was alone, and then she was joined by a second of the bodyguards. They hovered side-by-side as more vespis gathered behind them, a row of yellow and black, the lesser warriors, those who only came when called by duty.
“No so much lesser,” the vespis guard reminded me, “just of more use to the hive than I could ever be.”
I blushed at the reprimand, just as Alice yelped.
She kicked back with her foot, and gasped. From in front of us the wing-beat thrum of the waiting vespis grew in pitch. I caught the twitch of the first wasp’s head and then it darted forward hooking its forelimbs under my arms, even as the guard beside it did the same for Alice.
“We are sorry.”
I caught the thought from the wasp that had grabbed Alice and wondered what she was sorry for.
“The bites.”
Alice had been bitten?
“Will she survive?” Delight’s voice intruded, as the wasps flew us out of the hangar.
The bodyguard’s response was not comforting.
“Perhaps… These little ones are new.”
New, or not, little, or not, the creatures were shown no mercy. No sooner had Alice and I been lifted clear, than the other warriors attacked. The bodyguards did not wait for us to see the results. They took us back to where the drop-ship was waiting, and Delight spoke, again.
“Grab Alice,” she said, and I obeyed, following the brief imagery she’d flashed in instruction, and wrapping myself around my old colleague.
“Give Mack and the queen my
