A number of times their little group hurried past a robot guard. Stake watched each one warily, but none of them gazed back at him with sputtering eyes.
When they reached the infirmary, Ploss was already there waiting for them, along with several other human guards. He had been warned not to trust the robots. Ploss was a powerfully-built Choom with his head shaved to stubble and his ear-to-ear mouth compressed in a long stern line. Also waiting for their arrival was Dr. Zaleski, whom Ploss had contacted and ordered to his post. The medical chief looked more haggard and sickly than ever, either from having been roused too early from sleep… or with dread.
“The assistant warden’s on the way,” Ploss rumbled, watching over the proceedings as Zaleski and a med tech assigned to the night shift immediately tended to Flaquita, now stretched out on an examination table. “Until he gets here, I’m in charge. You.” He pointed at Stake. “Tell me what happened to the warden.”
“I will, but I hope you’ll have my memories downloaded, so you’ll be sure to believe me.” Stake gestured toward Flaquita. “His memories, too.”
“It’ll be done. Until then, tell me!”
The assistant warden, a small and reserved white-haired man named Conant, arrived early in Stake’s story and didn’t interrupt him.
When Stake had finished, he turned to gesture toward Dr. Zaleski and said, “That’s all I know. If you want more, I suggest you talk to this man.”
“What are you saying?” Zaleski said.
“Trust my instincts,” Stake said, looking from assistant warden Conant to security chief Ploss. “I always do.”
Ploss faced the medical chief. “What do you know about this, Zaleski?” he demanded.
“When I questioned him about the deaths here,” Stake said, “I could tell he knew more than he was saying. I’m certain Cirvik confided in him. He had to have had at least one person trying to help him figure out what was going on when this started.”
“You’re out of your mind!” Zaleski cried. “All of what you just told us… who could believe it? You just made it up to cover up your murder of the warden!”
“My memories and Flaquita’s will back us up on what the warden said and did.”
Ploss narrowed his eyes at the assistant warden. “Cirvik didn’t tell you any of this? About this monster?”
“Of course not!” Conant said.
Ploss returned his attention to Zaleski and stepped in close to him; close enough to catch hold of his lab smock and jerk the man onto his tiptoes.
“Hey, easy there!” Conant protested.
Ploss ignored his nominal superior, growling at Zaleski, “Maybe you don’t get it – this prison is in chaos right now! We’re on auxiliary power for no reason we can understand, the warden tried to kill one of my men, and a monster tried to kill this prisoner in his cell… after it’s already killed a bunch of other men. To top it off, we haven’t been able to communicate with the home office… we can’t get any kind of signal out at all. So if you know something, you sorry little junkie, you’d better spit it out now before I lose my patience. And I’ve never had a whole lot of that.”
“What do you mean, ‘junkie’?” Zaleski stammered.
Ploss said through a wall of clenched teeth, “We all know about you. If you want the home office to know, too, I can arrange it. Now tell me about this monster we’re fighting or I’ll throw you in the nearest trash zapper.”
“Let’s not lose control here,” Conant advised. “We have to work together to sort this out.” But he was such a mild and rational man that no one even listened to him.
“You said we can’t get a signal out?” Hurley broke in.
Ploss looked over at him. “Right. If what Stake says is true, and this monster can affect our systems, it might be blocking transmissions. Maybe all those animals out there are doing it. Surrounding us… making us all prisoners in here.”
Stake said, “If these things really want to they can probably shut down the auxiliary power, too. Right now they might just be trying to threaten us.”
Ploss gave Zaleski a shake. “You hear that? We could all of us die soon… including you. So talk!”
“You have to understand,” Zaleski choked, and not only because his collar was knotted in Ploss’s fist, “I was afraid of the man! You know what Warden Cirvik was like! What could I do but keep what he told me to myself?”
“What did he tell you?” Ploss let the man down and loosened his grip a bit.
Zaleski shifted his red-rimmed eyes from Ploss, to Conant, to Stake, and admitted in a fatalistic croak, “Cirvik had a deal with the devil.”
TWELVE: DOCTOR’S REPORT
“It’s not so much a being, as a colony,” Zaleski said to the little assemblage. He told them the entity that had been killing the prisoners was an amalgamation, a collection of numerous creatures, not all of them heterogeneous. They were symbiotically linked, a united democracy. “I’m reminded of the extinct Earth animal known as a Portuguese Man o’ War, which was not a jellyfish but a colony of zooid organisms. Though in the case of that animal, the zooids weren’t able to exist separately from the colony. That isn’t the case here.”
“But why take on an anthropomorphic form?” Conant asked.
“Not sure why that artful collage. Maybe it was to get Cirvik to relate to them more easily, as another humanoid being. Or maybe it was a form they chose to frighten him, and anyone else who might witness the thing.”
Ploss made a scoffing sound. “This prison is full of Punktown criminals. I’m not sure any form it chose could be frightening enough.”
Zaleski continued, “But as I told Cirvik, I believe the main reason it adopts that collaborative form is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. One animal on its own is not so powerful, perhaps not even so intelligent. But it seems to me that, telepathically or otherwise, in a cooperative state they enter into a hive mind.”
“I knew you were more analytical than you were letting on,” Stake said.
His pride puffed up by what he perceived as a compliment, Zaleski stated, “I was chosen for this position because of the diversity of the inmates and my extensive knowledge of nonhuman anatomy.” He returned to his point. “It was this possibility, of the conglomeration building in intelligence and strength the more individual animals joined it, that caused Cirvik a lot of fear. What if all the creatures in this pocket were to conjoin? All the creatures inhabiting the interstitial matter beyond this pocket? Cirvik thought if they could do that – combine into an entity made from thousands or millions or billions of individual lives – the final product would be like a god. A god that might cross into our reality and annihilate us.”
“But he decided to keep it to himself,” Conant marveled, full of horror.
“We’ve known about these animals going back to the days of ships crossing space through artificial wormholes,” Ploss said. “Before long-distance teleportation took over. Yeah, sometimes you heard stories that they thought these critters might be causing small electrical disturbances, but I never heard of any outright attacks. So why this? Why now?”
“Maybe because the wormholes in which the animals were formerly encountered were temporary – open only long enough for the ship to pass through – not a permanent structure like the pocket our prison occupies,” Zaleski said. “Or maybe they’re only now, themselves, discovering the process of combining their forms. Even from what Cirvik learned, I still can’t tell you much. The things are a complete mystery. No living specimen has ever survived in captivity. Even their remains in death can’t be preserved; they fade out of existence. So no one has ever learned much about them.”