Ghost Ship of C-08 (4)
“Kkreak!”
A pirate's neck came apart in my grip.
Brown blood streamed down from the head I'd torn free, trailing bits of spine still clinging to it.
The creature was a Rockwalker — an intelligent species native to mineral-rich planets, living on a diet of stone and metal. On paper, their silicon-based biology had fascinated sci-fi enthusiasts, but in the actual game they played almost exactly like ordinary humanoids. Aside from skin that was as coarse and hard as rock, the blood running through their veins and everything else about them were no different from any other living creature.
Still dripping, I swung the Rockwalker's head like a club into the skull of the cyborg beside it. The cyborg's head burst apart like a watermelon losing a smashing contest, pulverized beyond recognition.
That makes two squads.
This time my targets were the group that had headed for the research laboratory. Just like the ones who'd gone to the armory, they had strolled inside without a care in the world — and by the time I arrived, only three of them were still breathing.
The other three had already melted into pools by the acid mucus.
Tsk. Lost two.
I clicked my tongue at the sight of the half-bodied cyborgs. On the off chance it might count, I'd torn off one of their legs and eaten it, but the evolution counter hadn't budged. Apparently the system only recognized targets I killed with my own hands.
No Predation Effect, either. Corpses I hadn't killed myself had an extremely low chance of triggering it. They were barely more than samples at that point — realistically, I shouldn't expect anything from them.
I spat out the shards of steel grating between my teeth.
In the game, Amorph could chew through machinery just fine, but in reality my body refused to adapt. It was like biting through a chicken drumstick, bone and all.
“Kkrek — khek — kkeeeaak…”
Beside me, No. 26 was finishing off a cyborg.
She seemed to have gotten the hang of it, managing the hunt skillfully without my help. The cyborg had clawed desperately to tear her free, but No. 26 stayed burrowed down its throat, motionless, letting her prey suffocate.
For all their augments, a cyborg's base was still human. Deprive it of air long enough, and it died.
Before the cyborg's breath ran out, I destroyed its heart with my tail. The moment its prey went limp, No. 26 slid back out of the esophagus and pulsed a wave toward me.
｢Baby, are you hungry?｣
[zzz zzzzz zzzzz (Ones like this, I have to kill them myself)]
｢Okay.｣
[zzzzzzz (You eat that one instead)]
｢Got it. Eat up, eat lots.｣
Sorry, No. 26, but the cyborgs only counted if I was the one who killed and ate them. Making do with what I had, I gave her the Rockwalker and picked up the cyborg's corpse for myself.
I was just bringing it to my mouth when the communicator in my combat arm crackled to life.
｢Anything still breathing out there. Report.｣
｢S-situation room here. W-we're still working!｣
｢Cargo bay, boss. These bastards are loaded as hell. There's a shitload of stuff worth taking.｣
｢Boss, the mess hall's completely fucked. Not a single thing in here worth eating.｣
“Currently sweeping the armory.”
｢What about the ones in the lab? They not answering?｣
Mimicking the voice of the man who'd been in the armory, I answered — then quickly tore a mouthful from the cyborg corpse. The small organs inside my throat reshaped themselves, mutating to produce the new voice.
With the transformation complete in seconds, I pressed the communicator lying beside the corpse and replied.
“No problems in the lab.”
｢Hm? You're not the comms guy. Why've you got his set?｣
“Ah, the comms guy's busy clearing out right now.”
｢…Is that right. Understood. Out.｣
The boss ended the transmission on a note of lingering doubt.
No wonder he was the boss — the man was clever. For a pirate, he ran his subordinates with surprising discipline. Hulk Mutants usually suffered degraded intelligence as a side effect of their crude gene modification, but this one seemed built different.
Maybe he was modified with techniques I don't know about.
A smart Hulk Mutant. I'd never seen such a thing in the game.
Better keep an eye on him, just in case.
First Predator Sense, now an intelligent Hulk Mutant. The differences between the game I knew and this reality kept piling up. It made me tense — and, strangely, it made things interesting.
Come to think of it, No. 26's one of those differences too.
That pink Bubble Amoeba diligently feasting on a Rockwalker's entrails was another creature that bore little resemblance to her game counterpart. She was still the series mascot, sure, but she'd never been this clever back then.
Me, running around with a Bubble Amoeba. The forums would lose their minds.
Amorph was a species built for solo play to begin with, and honestly, I wasn't the most sociable person either — in the game or in reality.
Lost in such idle thoughts, I finished off the rest of the cyborg corpses.
The meat of the newly killed cyborgs tasted like lemon.
Something's off.
Elchen tilted his head, communicator in hand.
Before he became a Hulk Mutant, he had been a soldier.
A defeated soldier, to be precise. He'd been sentenced to Hulk Mutant conversion for the crime of losing a battle. If the Edgerton family hadn't taken him in, he would have wandered the battlefields as a mindless monster until the day he dropped.
Be that as it may, his soldier's background meant he took reporting protocols seriously. Subordinates who ignored his orders appeared now and then — every one of them had become dust drifting through space. That was why the Dvara Cartel, against all pirate precedent, maintained reporting discipline with almost military rigor.
And now the wild-animal instincts mingled into his genes were screaming a warning at him.
That last transmission hadn't been a mistake. It was a trap.
His mind made up, Elchen raised the communicator again. This broadcast was aimed at the crew in the mess hall and the cargo bay — everyone except the squad in the armory, which was still answering with its sweep report.
“Boss speaking. Something's wrong with the men in the lab. Everyone gear up and head there. Now.”
｢Yes? Understood.｣
｢Yup, boss.｣
Elchen cut the connection and summoned the Medical Team Leader.
“Doc, where are the escape shuttles and the engine room on this ship?”
“Just follow me, sir.”
Elchen was a cautious man. His subordinates losing to some monster? Unthinkable. But you never knew. As he'd always done on the battlefield, he secured his retreat route first.
I can't just let the bastard who dared touch my warship walk away.
Securing an escape route wasn't the end of it. Elchen intended to seed the engine room with bombs so he could kill the creature on his way out. A ship's engine was a facility capable of generating staggering output. Set a bomb off in there, and you'd get a catastrophic explosion.
Escape safely, detonate remotely, and the monster would be finished. Sure, every subordinate still aboard would die with it — but pirates never lacked for fresh volunteers. Crew could always be replaced.
I'll just take Garlic and the doc with me.
That subordinate, who couldn't have dreamed his own boss was plotting to use him and discard him, was dutifully keeping the Medical Team Leader under watch.
Partway to the escape shuttles, Elchen addressed him.
“Doc.”
“Yes?”
“You've fought the thing yourself, so you'd know. Does it have any weaknesses?”
“No.”
At the man's instant reply, Elchen's brow furrowed. The Medical Team Leader scrambled, unnerved by his boss's darkening expression, but the word was already out.
A coward reacts like that?
What the Medical Team Leader didn't realize was that Elchen knew perfectly well how terrified the man was of him. And despite that fear, he hadn't hesitated for even a heartbeat before giving the answer Elchen hated.
Which meant, from the doctor's standpoint, the monster frightened him more than Elchen did.
Elchen's mind went cold as a sheet of ice. He rephrased the question.
“Then what about its strengths? Anything distinctive about it?”
Seeing that Elchen wasn't going to explode, the Medical Team Leader cautiously brought out what he'd been holding back.
“It's… it's like a ghost, sir.”
“A ghost?”
“Yes. Even under bright lights, it takes people and eats them, and leaves no bodies behind. All we ever learn is that someone's missing — and always too late.”
“Ghosts on a spaceship? Don't be stupid. This happened because you lot are incompetent.”
“Th-this ship is fitted with every kind of security system — so complex even we haven't mapped them all. And somehow the creature knew its way around, slipping past them all while it killed. If that's not a ghost, what is it?”
Elchen fell silent at that. Judging by the man's manner as he spoke, he was telling nothing but the truth.
A ghost. What kind of bullshit is that?
So what was he supposed to believe — that this ship had become some kind of ghost ship? A ghost ship, in the space age. What a joke that wasn't.
Elchen mulled it over briefly, then pulled out the communicator again. It stung his pride, but it seemed he'd have to gather all his men and move as one.
The moment he keyed the transmitter to change his plan —
It was already too late.
The unknown enemy had already launched its offensive.
Smart one.
My Voice Mimicry had fooled even people of high standing, but Elchen hadn't taken the bait. Maybe that was what happened when a Hulk Mutant was less an intelligent being and more a very clever beast. His wild instincts must have smelled the trap.
Doesn't matter. Too late anyway.
We had already left the laboratory and returned to the nest in the cooling room.
My auxiliary organ was now surveying the full extent of my territory spread through the ship. I could see the pirates grumbling as they trudged toward the laboratory, plain as day.
This time, I planned to take them down a different way.
I stretched out belly-down in the nest and closed my eyes. The moment my auxiliary organ touched the nest, my senses — once confined to flesh — began to spread.
Like blood coursing through vessels, my awareness expanded along the branches. The flow that began in the cooling room rode the current of my consciousness, swallowing corridors and chambers one by one.
People say that those who take drugs slip free of their bodies and touch something transcendent. Perhaps this was what that felt like.
Every time I breathed, the branches shuddered as if breathing with me. The cold seeping from the metal plates they embraced sent an involuntary chill through my body.
At last, the auxiliary organ completed the connection.
The enemies were, for all practical purposes, wandering around inside my belly. I gave the order to the acid spores laced along the route to the laboratory — the ones carrying neurotoxin.
Activate.
The way a brain sends commands down the nerves of a body, my auxiliary organ carried my will into the branches.
Obedient to the order, the spores vomited out their mucus in unison.
From the ceiling, from the walls, from the chambers, from the corridors, from the floor — anywhere the branches reached, it didn't matter where. A paralytic venom potent enough to fell living creatures rained down through the entire ship.
I could feel the pirates panicking at the utterly unexpected assault.
They smashed the spores and hacked at the branches in desperate attempts to break free, but it didn't last. Their bodies betrayed their masters' will and toppled over like felled logs. The quick-witted ones realized the spores were the source and scrambled clear in time, but the vast majority made the foolish choice.
It worked.
I honestly expected it to fail. Nest-linking and remote control was supposed to be something I could only handle smoothly after reaching sub-adult stage.
In the game, that is.
I'd tried it on the off chance reality would allow it — and it had, without a hitch.
Of course, I hadn't gambled blindly. The odds were stacked in my favor: the nest was still small, the territory I'd spread through was ground I'd already walked and knew intimately, and my spore count was low. That was why I'd risked it. And my prediction had landed dead on.
Five got away.
More than half the squad had fallen to the spore assault. The seven who hadn't escaped lay frozen on the floor, unable to move a muscle, simply waiting to die.
I lifted myself out of the nest. The moment the slender tentacles beneath my jaw broke contact, a wave of enervation washed over me — as if the soul that had roamed that boundless space so freely had been shackled once more inside the prison called flesh.
The weakness didn't last, but the energy the nest-linking had consumed never came back. For the first time in a long while, a fierce Hunger gnawed at my appetite.
[zzzzzzz zzz (I'm hungry, let's go eat)]
｢Yeah.｣
I set No. 26 on my shoulder and headed for the laboratory.
Along the way, I passed pirates sprawled unconscious on the deck. Discarding hopeless comrades without a second glance — that was piracy through and through.
Which suited me fine. A meal that didn't fight back, when I was this hungry.
I fell upon the downed pirates, ravenous. Every time my teeth sank in, I felt their bodies flinch. Those twitches brimmed with life, like a fish fresh from the water thrashing on the deck.
Did they know? That the more they resisted, the more saliva flooded my mouth. My teeth tore through their flesh without mercy, my four arms crushed their bones and dragged out their entrails.
Perhaps because I was so famished, even the machinery lodged in my throats went down without a flicker of disgust. The silent banquet held in the corridor concluded in a veritable feast.
Two left.
Five of the seven had been cyborgs. I'd devoured eight so far, which meant I needed two more before evolution. Sub-adulthood was drawing close.
Using the finger bone of a cyborg as a toothpick, I picked at my teeth and followed the trail of the fleeing pirates.
They'd hidden somewhere other than the laboratory. The fitness room — a place the crew had once used often.
Of all places, they ran here.
The fitness room was a wide-open space; they must have chosen it hoping for clean firing angles.
The problem was that the dead crew had made exactly the same choice. The place where comrades once trained shoulder to shoulder had long since become a slaughterhouse at my hands.
From behind the shattered door drifted the pheromones and ragged breath of terrified men. They'd clearly been shocked by the blood-slicked walls and floor that greeted them the moment they'd stumbled inside.
More than twenty corpses lay within. Five more wouldn't change a thing.
I handed the finger bone I'd been carrying up to No. 26 on my shoulder, and set my foot inside the fitness room.