Let it make the first move. Assess its attack. Learn its weakness, she thought. This may be the biggest thing I’ve ever faced, but let’s face it, not by much.
An orifice opened up in the bottom of a knob and three fleshy tendrils shot out at her. They were fast, like they’d actually been fired from some sort of organic cannon, living harpoons at the end of pulsing tethers. Her enhanced reflexes allowed her to just manage to dodge all three of them, but while two of the harpoons stuck in the ground, the third twisted in mid-air behind her to whip around her waist. The tendril constricted so tight that it probably would have crushed a normal human. Her replacement armor, thankfully, wasn’t so third rate that it crushed or dented under the force, but she could still register the squeezing pain.
Stacia raised her knife and prepared to make a chopping, sawing motion through the tendril, but she stopped as it retracted and pulled her up into the air. It instantly pulled her up high enough that, if she fell and turned the wrong way with her head down, the drop would kill her. Her enhancements, in that situation, should kick in and right her in the air like a cat. Her internal threat assessments, however, were telling her that the ground was the last place she wanted to be. She couldn’t run from this. She couldn’t hide from it. And the lower parts of its legs were covered in a heavy carapace that she doubted her knife could get through. The carapace looked to thin out the higher it got, though, until the creature’s disproportionately small torso looked completely vulnerable.
That’s where she needed to be. She needed to get on top of the situation, literally.
The two other tendrils yanked themselves out of the ground and retracted all the way back into the knob. The one that had her stayed out as the fifth leg swung through the air, reversing itself so that it was held up over the top of the creature like a scorpion’s tale. The motion swung her through the air and took her breath away, yet not so much that she didn’t see what it intended. The fifth leg was going to position her so she was directly over that garbage-disposal of a mouth and then drop her in. Her armor might have been able to resist the tendril’s attempt to crush her, but she wasn’t so certain that it would do the same for her versus those mandibles and arm-length teeth. Even if her armor was strong enough, her head was still exposed. Going into that mouth was a guaranteed one-way trip.
She wasn’t going to let herself get that far. As the tendril swung her over the creature’s body, Stacia made several hacking and sawing jabs at the flesh around her. She only managed to cut a quarter of the way through the tentacle, but apparently, this thing wasn’t used to its prey fighting back like that. The tendril let go, dropping her directly over the main body. Stacia wasted no time, aiming her fall at the point where the body met one of the legs, and stabbed it as she landed. The creature made a weird, warbling screech as she pulled the knife out then thrust it in again, and again, and again. Pale blue blood sputtered all over her as she must have hit something vital. The creature whipped its fifth leg back down onto the ground to give it more support as the leg she attacked went completely limp. Even though it still had four legs on the ground, the creature’s torso shifted to an unbalanced angle beneath her and threatened to drop her to the ground. Before she could fall, though, she dove at several bulbous black protuberances near its mouth that she assumed were eyes or some other kind of sensory organ. Whatever they were, they looked like its weakest point. She stabbed one, and it exploded all over her with a viscous, white jelly-like substance.
The creature didn’t screech this time. Instead, it simply shuddered, its body dipping like it could no longer support itself and was trying to sit down. She popped two more of the five in all before the entire creature shuddered and gave out.
Then she was falling again. The creature’s body just barely missed being impaled by one of the trees. It slid partway down the side before getting caught on one of the tree’s polyps. Stacia briefly caught hold of one of the legs to break up her fall before she tumbled the rest of the way. The knife hit the ground next to her head, burying itself halfway to the hilt.
She stayed there on the ground for several seconds, assessing the damage to herself. Armor damage was negligible. No notable damage to her head beyond a few small scrapes and bruises. The implants in her head told her that she was strangely close to dehydration, but that was something she figured she could fix easily.
All in all, compared to some campaigns she had fought in, that had been easy. Easy enough that she didn’t trust she was safe yet.
Sure enough, when she sat up and looked around her, she saw nine people standing a respectful distance from the creature’s corpse. All of them were clad in the same shoddy battle armor as her. One of them stood behind the others, some kind of rolled-up leather parchment in his hand and his eyebrow cocked quizzically at the dead creature. The other eight all had heavy weaponry, the sort of high-powered assault rifles and cannons that were not supposed to exist on a prison world, with each gun pointed directly at her head.
The man with the leather finally tore his eyes away from the dead creature, gave Stacia a perfunctory nod, and then opened up the leather to read what was printed on it in a voice that almost sounded bored.
“On behalf of Lord Commander Alena Lexton, greetings and welcome to Leviathan. We hope you enjoy your stay and wish you a long life before someone or something horrible slaughters you. Now come with us to swear fealty or we’ll blow your head off.”
Chapter 4
Hobbes
Stacia wasn’t in the habit of taking orders from random people she didn’t know, but the man had been so polite in his threat to blow up her skull that she decided it couldn’t hurt to do as he said. As soon as she made it clear that she had no intention of resisting them, the eight soldiers with the guns lowered their weapons. The stoic expressions on their faces had given way to wonder and respect as they all took a moment to appreciate the massive beast they had just witnessed Stacia take down. That was sloppy of them, and it took much effort to keep her disgust of them from showing on her face. Their armor clearly marked them as former Galactic Marines, sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on the planet just like her, but they had obviously been out of the service long enough to forget their training. They should have never lowered their weapons in the face of a potential threat. And if Stacia had just proven anything, it was that, even when armed with only a single knife, she was still a threat.
I’m pretty sure I could kill all of them in under forty seconds, Stacia thought. Except for the one with the leather parchment. The way he held himself suggested he hadn’t forgotten as much of his training as the others. Even though he didn’t appear to have a weapon, Stacia pegged him as the biggest threat in the group if for some reason this all devolved into a battle.
She went to grab her knife, but one of the soldiers aimed her rifle again and shook her head. Stacia stopped and let the leader grab the knife first.
“All arms on Leviathan are property of Lord Commander Lexton. You will be assigned better weapons after you’ve sworn the oath.”
Stacia had no intention of swearing to anything, yet again she came to the conclusion that it would be more advantageous to watch and wait. She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d been expecting, but already she could say that this wasn’t it.