Mage Tank-Chapter MTB5 Addendum: Shog 2

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SYSTEM ADDENDUM ADDED BY [SYSTEM CORE 1]

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Druka snapped out of torpor in a blind fury. She raked her claws to either side and thrust forward with her horn as she’d been trained. She stabbed backward with the stinger at the tip of her tail, then swept the appendage up to whip its barbed length overhead.

Her strikes scattered the bones from her most recent feeding, but she found nothing else within her reach.

Druka’s thrumming core reduced the flow of molten power scorching her channels. The cascade of essence diminished into a steady, powerful beat. Her mind calmed, her muscles relaxed, and she went absolutely still.

Druka followed procedure and indulged herself with the memory of the two-leg’s screams. Her gut had trilled with joy as she’d slowly gnawed on the crunchy offering, her coagulants keeping it alive and preserving its warmth through hours of slowly stripping it apart. If only she were allowed to eat all of the two-legs, but the lords were marked with the Hivequeen’s scent. They weren’t for Druka, although she was certain the flavour of their agony would have been sublime.

The mild bitterness of that thought failed to cut through the placating feeling of her full bellies and the lack of threat in her space. The peaceful and pleasing reminiscing allowed her lobes to clear themselves of the injected essence flood.

Now, she proceeded to investigate why she’d been so roughly pulled from her slumber. Druka carefully opened her carapace, exposing her delicate sensory organs to the chill of the inner security zone.

Her setae tasted the air, finding the expected wash of pheromones from her sisters. It was the flavor of alarm that had awoken her, but it was quickly being replaced by alertness, caution, and investigation. Her foot pads brushed against the ground, feeling the slight tremors of her two-leg lords from deeper within the keep, steady and familiar. Her antennae felt for temperature, finding the breath of cold stone on all sides, broken by the sparse warmth of her siblings.

The Hivemaster chirruped. She and her sisters repeated the sound, and supersonic frequencies painted their assigned territory.

Everything that she heard, belonged. Nothing that belonged was out of place. A single tap from the Hivemaster signalled a roll call, and there was a rapid sound-off as each of her siblings repeated the tap, so soft as to be inaudible, only felt through their tremorsense. Each click or clatter had its own variation, made in precise order of their designated position.

A dozen, fifty, a hundred… There was a stutter at number 162.

The Hivemaster tapped for 162, but there was no reply. They were missing.

The Hivemaster tapped for a new formation, and Druka scuttled to follow the order. She crawled up the wall to her south and hung from the ceiling. They created a perfect net, every square inch of their territory within reach of a deadly limb, and a half dozen of her sisters reinforced each entrance and exit of the security zone, clinging to their surfaces. They painted the room with their chirps again, dedicating additional lobes to analyzing what they heard as the sounds bounced around the space.

There were gaps in their formation. Three more of her sisters were missing. The Hivemaster altered their formation again, incorporating swipes and strikes, covering every inch of the room with their deadly, elongated appendages.

The taste of violence aerated onto her antennae.

Eight of her sisters hadn’t obeyed the Hivemaster’s command. They were caught in the sweep, falling to the attacks of their siblings. Such things happened from time to time when a drone was ill or injured, but rarely in such a large group. Druka felt a shiver of excitement over the extra meat that was certain to be served with the next feeding, but pushed it away to join the rest of her hive as they swarmed the location, searching for the reason their sisters had rejected the call.

Druka found nothing. Her sisters found nothing.

She felt a sting along the side of her carapace. Confusion struck her mind, and her lobes went into disarray. A sense of wrongness invaded her brain, and she ran her senses around the room again.

There were hundreds of creatures around her. They smelled like her sisters, but there was something alien about them. They were wrong in a way she couldn’t place. Imposters. Something had replaced them.

She abandoned her position and skittered down the wall, trying to put distance between herself and the sea of deadly limbs. The false Hivemaster questioned her, but she ignored the deception. She needed to find her real hive. She needed to reconnect to the swarm. Several of the imposters began to fight with one another. They were in total disarray, more proof that she was amidst liars. Her sisters would never be so undisciplined.

The next chirp revealed a gap. One of the security zone doors was open, its guardians absent. It led deeper into the keep, the most vital place, towards the two-legs they were meant to protect.

Druka rushed for it. Her collective would certainly be within. They would have fallen back to defend against this wave of infiltrators. She ducked beneath stingers and ignored the pain as a claw dug into her carapace, gouging into the muscle beneath. An imposter was in her way, and a quick strike from her stinger into the enemy’s spine eliminated the obstacle. She skittered forward, leaping over a dismembered body, too panicked to notice it had been twisted, wrung to death, not gored or torn.

The exit was close. Druka pushed herself faster. She could feel the warmth of the inner sanctum. She could taste the honeyed air.

An undulating mass of blurry limbs spread out around her. They gripped and squeezed with more pressure than a collapsing tunnel in the deep, and Druka knew no more.

*****

“There’s a riot in the camps!”

Harp flinched at the bellowing shout from this shift’s Malachite leader. The squat man’s voice was like a falling boulder; not a sound one wanted to hear from two feet away. He ignored the tromping of feet and agitated shouts as the guard relayed the Malachite’s news, happy when the low rumble of his monitoring room resealing itself cut off the noise.

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Sadly, the Malachite had stayed behind, peering over his shoulder. Harp hid a scowl–unwilling to risk another demerit for insubordination–and returned his attention to the readouts before him.

It had started on the highest level. No one wanted to waste resources on the worthless territory so close to the surface, and as a result, the high camps had little security presence. Harp only knew that the pens had been broken open, exposing the contained dissidents to the crags, not that anyone cared. He’d reported the breach, as required, but the Malachite dismissed the first ping on Harp’s station as another doomed escape attempt. Execution by erosion was forbidden, but not if the fools volunteered for it.

Then the districts had been breached, which gave some of the sturdier rebels access to the surface. There was little chance the escapees could mine their way back down to the empire, so it was a small enough problem, but a problem that still required a response. The Malachite reluctantly scrambled a team.

Before that team could be deployed, several sector alerts had been triggered even deeper down. An unknown entity had entered the central cavern, where oppositional leadership was housed. The ones who’d been sanded clean of any useful intel and were slated to be fed to the chimeras on the next tremor. Then, security gates began failing, from the center of the camps all the way down to the inner zone, just above their heads.

The Malachite had activated the chimeras, juicing them with an essence trigger. Harp watched the readout in frustrated silence as the essence signatures of each chimera went dead one after another.

“What is this scrambly nonsense?” asked the Malachite, waving furiously at the readouts and practically spitting gravel onto Harp’s coat. ƒгeewёbnovel.com

Harp brushed off his shoulder and answered in an even tone. “The chimeras have lost all cohesion as a hive and have begun killing one another.”

The Malachite scowled at Harp. “Why?”

“I have no idea, sir. Intentional violence against their siblings violates the chimera’s behavioral programming.”

“None of these blinks and lights can tell you anything more useful?”

Harp suppressed a sigh. “The anomalous behavior was preceded by the sudden death of a single chimera. After that, a small group began ignoring our synthesized pheromones and emulated hive knocks. Subsequently, the phenomenon spread to the rest of the hive.”

“I’m still waiting for an answer, Quartzspeaker.”

Harp drummed a knuckle on his console in irritation. “If I’m being forced to make an educated guess, I would say that a small team of saboteurs has infiltrated the inner zone, making entry through the surface and proceeding through the camps. They are likely dissidents who have discovered a way to subvert our control over the chimeras.”

“From the surface,” the Malachite said derisively. “Am I to believe a cell escaped, survived the erosion, then returned with enough essence to–” The Malachite paused, jaw hanging like a cave mouth. “The surface,” he mumbled to himself. “Zircon Malady was up there today.”

The Malachite suddenly reached over Harp and slammed a hand down onto the console’s control orb. He fed the device a stunningly complex essence signature, and the readouts flickered to display an unfamiliar structure.

Harp studied the image as the Malachite continued muttering under his breath, the words incoherent to Harp. The displayed structure was beautiful, though Harp had no idea what purpose it served. Even stranger, a significant portion of the enormous construction was above ground. Only a small, central column ran below the mountains, though it extended through the entirety of the camps.

The Malachite’s eyes crawled over some text along the bottom of the readout, encoded with a cipher Harp didn’t know. Then, Harp’s eyes went wide as the Malachite punched the wide-area alarm trigger.

“Isn’t that an overreaction, sir?” asked Harp.

“Shut up. Get unit six out here.”

Harp went still, mind stumbling over what the Malachite had just asked of him. “Sir, I’ll need you to confirm that you just ordered me to deploy unit six.”

“I just fucking ordered you to deploy unit six, now get on it.”

Harp took a breath and began overriding the thirteen locks keeping unit six contained. He also began mentally reviewing maps of the closest emergency evacuation tunnels. Insubordination or not, Harp wasn’t going to stick around once unit six was set loose.

Just as he was disengaging the second set of locks, Harp felt a heavy hand fall onto his shoulder. He paused his work and looked back to see why the Malachite was interrupting him. Hopefully, it was to belay the order he’d just been given.

The hand on his shoulder did not belong to the Malachite.

Harp’s stout commander was nowhere to be seen. In his place was a monstrosity of tentacles and perverse, man-like limbs. It gazed at the readouts with pitch-black eyes, the talons at the ends of its long fingers tapping along the front of Harp’s chest.

After a few seconds, wherein Harp’s mind tried to interpret what he was seeing, Harp decided to flee, but the hand held him firm. Even flexing the full weight of his core couldn’t cause the oppressive hand to budge, nor did it cause the creature to acknowledge him at all.

Realizing how outmatched he was, Harp immediately swapped to pretending he wasn’t there. The creature was wholly fixated on the image of the mysterious superstructure above them, still displayed on the readouts.

Maybe it would find whatever it was looking for and leave him be.

“Is this a map?” the thing asked, crushing Harp’s brief hope. When Harp didn’t respond, it turned its dark eyes down onto him.

“It can serve that function,” Harp said, nearly whispering. The creature looked back up at the readouts.

“Show me the path to the Stonelord’s chambers.”

An icy chill ran up Harp’s bowels. The way to the Stonelord was no great secret, but Harp had access to detailed routes and defensive measures that would be treasonous to give up.

The creature looked down at him again. Harp shuddered and decided to show it what any citizen of the empire would have access to. He carefully coded in his request, and the image swapped to a grid displaying six levels of the royal sector. A glowing line highlighted the route an ordinary person might take when travelling to the petitioner’s court.

With the alarm raised, taking those tunnels would be a death sentence.

Harp kept his eyes forward, unwilling to look at the horror again. He sat that way for several minutes, barely breathing for fear of drawing its attention once more. After a time, he noticed an incessant, dripping noise. It pattered against the hard floor, each tap a chisel blow against Harp’s mind. Overwhelmed by the sound, Harp clenched his hands into tight fists and worked up his resolve. He hazarded a slow, tentative glance behind him.

The creature was gone. Harp could still feel its phantom fingers tapping against his chest. He reached up and touched his shoulder but found no invisible monster gripping him. Harp sank down into his seat in trembling relief.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm the rest of his shaking nerves, and the scent of iron filled his nose. He turned back again, scanning the small room and finding the Malachite stuffed into a records shelf. The center of the man’s body was a gaping hole, as large as his own head.

Harp stared at the corpse in horror until a harsh whistle began to chime at his console. It hissed in a regular rhythm, mingling with the beat of the Malachite’s blood as it dripped onto the floor. Harp turned back to his console, finding that the sound was an alert for the outer gate to the royal district.

The guardhouse had gone silent.

Harp sat and watched in terror as the next checkpoint along the route he’d laid out for the creature went dead. The warning had already been given. The guard was at the highest level of alert.

Harp sent another warning to the rest of the checkpoints anyway, then gathered up his few personal items. He busied his mind as he packed, composing a resignation missive that he would send on the morrow, assuming there was anyone still alive to send it to.

Harp locked his console, stood, straightened his coat, and then calmly made his way to the nearest emergency tunnel.

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