“We need to get out of here,” she hissed through the cacophonous alarm. “Now.”
“Why?” Ciangi whispered. “What’s going on?”
“Feeding time,” Mimic answered.
“Alright, I don’t need a tutorial on why I don’t want to be around for that,” I murmured. “Let’s go.”
We edged backward, keeping to the sides of the halls. As we went, the horde of mini-mimics we had left behind came skittering along, carrying a huge canister of I-don’t-know-what on top of them as if they were a rolling platform. We didn’t whisper a single word until we were out of the cave.
“Whoa,” Gonzales said, looking down at the mountain.
I followed her gaze to see that what once had been a surging mass of black skittering creatures was now just plain rock. It was quite jarring and it just made the scale of the number of mini-mimics sink in in a way that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
“Wait here,” Mimic said, her face grim.
“What do you mean, wait here?!” I objected. I didn’t like the tone in her voice oe the expression on her face.
“Give me five minutes. I need to get something. Oh, and I need your helmet.”
If this were any other circumstance, I might have argued with her on it. Demanded an explanation to make sure she wasn’t doing something ludicrous. But even I knew that now wasn’t the time. There was something in her eyes that said there was no questioning her.
So, I didn’t. I handed her my helmet and she walked back into the cave without another word.
“Well…now what?” Gonzales asked.
“If we’re going to stand here, I’m going to take some readings.”
“Good idea,” Bahn offered. “Maybe even deploy some mobile units if you’ve got them.”
The blond let out an un-adorable smirk. “As if I’d ever go planet-side without them.”’
“I dunno,” Gonzales countered, hands on her hips. “I seem to remember an entire story arc where Bahn had to build some handhelds for you.”
“That doesn’t count. I wasn’t probably equipped for all that.”
“You don’t get to just decide what counts and what doesn’t.”
“Says who?”
“Says--”
The engineer was cut off as Mimic stepped back onto the landing. “I have returned.”
“Indeed you have.” Bahn said, eying her carefully. “And you are not alone.”
“No,” she said, eyes hardening. I looked to my helmet in her hands that had been bent entirely out of shape until it was almost like a sphere and something was moving frantically inside of it. “Not anymore.”
Memories in Gridlock
“So…this is what you looked like?” Gonzales said. “When Higgens first found you?”
“Actually, it was more of her finding me.”
Mimic paid no attention to either of us, staring intently at the mini-mimic she had brought onto the ship. Bahn had it contained in a small field not unlike the containment unit Giomatti had tried to keep her in. I was a bit worried about bringing it onto the ship, but I knew that I needed to trust her. Mimic had put her stock in me for so long, this was the least I could do.
“I need you to put on the ship’s shields,” Mimic said finally.
“Wait, what now?” Ciangi asked. “We’re on the ground. And there’s no one attacking us. And an energy spike like that will definitely alert that alien, goopy thing we saw that we’re here.”
“I need the shields on now,” she repeated, her tone much more tense than before. “I need to talk to it and I can’t since it’s already receiving a signal.”
“Wait, signal? What signal?”
“It’s something I’ve been hearing since I was in that cave. At first, I thought it was the children using a language I didn’t understand. But now I know exactly what it is.”
But Gonzales wasn’t having any of it. “Wait, children? And you know what what is? When did you lose your ability to speak normally?”
“Shields. Now.”
It wasn’t a request and I didn’t think I had ever heard her use that tone of voice before. “Hey, let’s just do what Mimic asks. She’ll explain when she’s ready.”
Gonzales shrugged but thankfully didn’t seem to be in an argumentative mood. “Fine. I just like to know why I’m doing something as I do it. That’s why I’m an engineer.” She crossed over to the console and pulled up what I recognized as the security command board. A few seconds later, I could feel the hum of the engines change and the pitch shifted ever so perceptibly. “The shields are up.”
I opened my mouth to give Mimic the go-ahead, but she was already nearly doubled over, her face almost pressed against the containment field. She was murmuring something, but her voice was so low and her words were so fast that I didn’t have a hope of understanding it.
“I know that we’ve seen quite a bit in our short time together,” Bahn said, carefully grabbing his data pad from a console and typing something in. “But this strikes me as decidedly odd.”
“Yeah, I’m creeped out a little,” Ciangi admitted.
Then, as if Mimic had been studying comedic timing, her human face melted away, leaving only the black, shiny surface that comprised her true form. Little tendrils spiked out of the darkness, almost like a cross between audio waves and tentacles.
“Okay, change that to creeped out a lot. Is that necessary?”
“I’m sure whatever Mimic is doing needs to be done.”
“What about a tentacle face is necessary in this situation?” Gonzales asked, although she looked more amused than horrified.
“I don’t know, I’m not the shapeshifter. We’ll have to ask her when she’s done… doing whatever it is she’s doing.”
“I’m talking to it.” That was distinctly Mimic’s voice, but there were no lips on her onyx face. No tongue. No eyes. Only the polygonal obsidian and angular tendrils.
“Um, how are you talking to us?”
“Through my mouth, as is customary to your species.”
“Um…where is your mouth?”
“I’m a shapeshifter. It’s wherever I want it to be. I need you all to be quiet, you’re scaring the baby.”
“The bab-- Oh. Right. Shhh.”
We fell into a very tense silence for several moments before Mimic finally began to speak to us again, although I still had no idea where her voice was coming from and I tried not to think about it.
“That creature, the alien we saw, he is part of the reason my people were in space to begin with.”
“Come again?”
“He crashed here, millennia ago, knocking several mountains greater than the one we were on into the atmosphere. A few of my people were on those chunks and I suppose you could say the rest is history.”
“So what, you guys just drifted through space until you were caught in the gravitation pull of that asteroid belt?”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
“And what, that little baby shifter told you all that?”
“Of course not. It has no idea what gravitational pull is. I was merely pulling context from its mind.” She stood, but she kept her fingers splayed out to either side of the containment field, as if still connected to the mini-mimic. “My people have a sort of…communal memory. Some things must be learned, but some things are engrained into our DNA. I can tap into these memories, while this youngling is too premature to do so.”
“But if you have communal memory, why didn’t your people know this?”
“Perhaps they did once, but through the centuries, it proved to be irrelevant to our evolution and was phased out.”
“Wish I could phase out some of my memories,” Gonzales muttered. I sent her a look begging her to lay off the quips for now. She rolled her eyes, but then nodded.
“So, these mimics kept the memories because they were still relevant to them. Which makes sense considering that the alien is still here.”