"They feed on anything mammalian that moves."
"How does that work?"
A set of servos lifted Sternwood's head so he was looking up. A sudden flurry of movement had started up in the canopy. "I think you're about to get a practical demonstration."
A huge fleshy petal, purple at the edges, but soft pink in the center, extended downwards, reaching to enfold one of the female Eloi. As it closed around her, she neither struggled, resisted, or cried out. Her companions looked but also registered no protest, or attempted to save her. Once totally enshrouded by the petal, the Eloi form could be seem for a few seconds and then it slowly shrunk away as though absorbed by the flower, or, as Sternwood had put it, disgested by it. After maybe a minute, the petal unfurled slightly and a few fragments of bone dropped from it to the carpet of moss, that swiftly moved to cover and conceal them. Slide looked sharply at the remaining Eloi. "You don't have a problem with that?"
The boy and girl shrugged. "It is the way if the Mulch. There can be no question."
Sternwood sniffed. "What can you do? It's how they fuel their ship. What you need to concentrate on is not getting caught."
Another, very familiar voice from behind him took Slide totally by surprise. "Having to wear these damned suits all the time gets really tired when you've been here as long as we have."
Slide spun round, reaching unconsciously for his blaster, and found himself facing Lupo, Queen Mina, and Mrs. Rosa Coote. All four were wearing space armor similar to Slide's. Lupo raised a hand. "Hold with the weapon, demon. We've been wondering when you would arrive."
Queen Mina nodded. "For some reason, you were left behind on the Gridley ride." "Does someone want to tell me what's going on?"
Rosa Coote was terse. "There's no time for explanations, except that it would appear we've all been brought here for a purpose."
Queen Mina lips pursed. "And you can imagine how I hate being brought anywhere with a purpose. Unless, of course it's my own."
"So what is this purpose?"
"It seems that this vessel, despite its size is about to come under attack by space pirates and we are expected to feature in its defense."
"What?"
Lupo, who was very plainly unhappy, came close to snarling. "You heard what she said."
"Space pirate?"
"That's what we've been told."
"Not the pirates of the Lower Quadrant?"
"How did you know?
"Just something that came to me I was still in the Gantenbrink."
Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, now lost in space in the company of Mina Harker, Rosa Coote, and Lupo the nosferatu, following his abrupt and less then orthodox exit from Mars, finds himself thinking of fat and fires as he arrives aboard an Eloi biocraft just in time for an attack by extra-planetary buccaneers
Episode Eleven
Pirates of the Lower Quadrant
The entire pirate fleet swung majestically into the field of the gaseous display; three distinct formations, and two dozen or more small ships. Slide knew from millennial experience that Pirates of The Lower Quadrant had never been able to maintain a single, overall coordination, but they had at least all managed to arrive in the same place at the same time. He could only imagine that recent pickings had been slim, and the Eloi biocraft was viewed as necessity rather than a prize. Although not exactly acting as one, the sheer size and variety of pirate fleet was epic; discs, deltas, and asymmetrics, Treen telezeros, Adamski saucers, ancient, tri-robot fighters left over from the Cylon wars, and Pleiadean beamships, attack-customized with strap-on Steely Dans. When the alarms had sounded, Slide had expected maybe a half dozen marauders, but what he saw was closer to two hundred ships, that ranged in size from hulking, rust-stained, former Imperial Sardakar battle-barges, to tiny predator pods of the metal-eaters that were more cell structures than machines. In the middle of the attackers, Slide spotted the dark bulk of the cruiser Starhawk, which was more than enough to crystalize his immediate flight or fight response, and it was wholly the latter.
"Out of here?"
He turned to Lupo, expecting to be met with a similar negative reaction to his own, a desire to get off and away from the Eloi ship by any means necessary, but Lupo was staring at the buccaneer armada with rapt attention. He was totally absorbed and, behind the plexiglass of his bubble helmet, his eyes blazed with a chill and momentary nosferatu glee. "So the ballet begins."
For a vampire created during the Italian Renaissance, Lupo seemed to accept a space battle with pleasurable anticipation. He was the closest that Slide had ever seen him to excited.
Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Mrs. Rosa Coote, still in full space armor, helmets locked down, and with the semi-human Sternwood leading way on his rolling mechanized chair, hurried to what was known as the cortex. On any ship of steel, polymer, ceramic and electricity, the cortex would have been would have been called the bridge, but on an Eloi ship, where almost every component - from gunport to bulkhead - was more or less living cell-structure, things were done a little differently.
The centrepiece of the cortex was a misshapen ovoid, a thick, multi-vesseled,
dermal sheath containing a slopping liquid interior of sweating, and - Slide suspected - sentient ooze. The monstrous and less that appealing growth stood over thirty meters tall and maybe three times that in circumference, and it was surrounded by a complex, tree-like gantry, on the branches of which selected Eloi monkey-moved - serving/aiding, maybe controlling the huge soft-ovoid's function - although Slide doubted that the nebulous Eloi, too dumb even to prevent themselves being eaten by the orchids, were capable of any such thing, and that nothing controlled either the cortex or the biocraft, except the cortex or the biocraft itself. The primary function of the Eloi on the various gantry levels seemed to be that of entering or modifying data by massaging, kneading, and prodding designated sections of outer skin, much in the style of those old monks in the Damaged World who'd had a big bio-computer they'd called the Living Meditation, or the Vreen'agth who had called their all controlling bio-brain the Mind-Sac. Slide knew that he was in some crucial confluence of the biocraft's primary nervous system, and he didn't like it. Growths of giant orchids lined the walls of the chamber, but seemed to play no visible role in its operation, except, every now and again, one would reel and unreel a predatory tendril as though stretching.
"I feel like a parasite."
He had not addressed the remark to anyone in particular, and no one answered. This lack of response was mainly because the pirate fleet had chosen the very same moment to open fire, not with any degree of coordination, but, when one group decided to blaze away with everything it had, the rest obviously felt it was incumbent upon them to do the same. The first thing this barrage revealed was that the biocraft had sturdy and effective screens, extending well into the mid-distance, that manifested themselves with a purple, zapper flash each time a photon torpedo, a plasma blast, nova boom, or the burn from a PBA, attempted to penetrate it.
Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Rosa Coote were able to view the battle on a highly detailed repro-vision that appeared before and even around them, and provided a panoramic, if somewhat ghostly 180 degree view of the space immediately in front of the Eloi biocraft. The appearance of the display was the one acknowledgment of their arrival in the cortex. The biocraft didn't appear to have any captain, commander, first mate, or even a master at arms to greet them, brief them, or otherwise tell them what they were supposed to be doing there. This part really didn't bother anyone except Slide, and since no one else in the group from Mars seemed to share his instinct to flee - and he wasn't in the mood to discorporate out on his own - he contented himself, for the time being, with standing beside Lupo, and watching the miniaturization of the conflict unfold. The pirates were maintaining their intense bombardment, but the biocraft was so far successfully taking on the shields.