Vol.4 Ch.12 – Ah Yes, Man-Made Horrors Beyond Our Comprehension
Chapter 12: Ah Yes, Man-Made Horrors Beyond Our Comprehension
Elaine opened the door to the armory and was relieved not to hear any incriminating noises. Then she reflected how weird it was that this was her first instinct now, after seeing Rachel uh... practicing skinship with Jeanne in here last time. But this time Jeanne was not only fully clothed but already clad in her armor, so similar to the one Elaine and Mare wore but snow white and, presumably, far more advanced.
“Ah, perfect,” Jeanne said. “Shall we—Mariana?”
“Hi,” Mare said, her voice just barely above a whisper.
“She's with me now,” Elaine said, not elaborating further.
“I see,” Jeanne said, surprised but more excited than annoyed. Apparently the angel had noticed just how lonely Mare was as well.
“We also need a suit and a gun for Aurora, if there is a suit for her.”
“You're worried about her wings?” Jeanne asked.
Elaine nodded. “I know you can summon your wings through the armor but I'm not sure how it works for her.”
“Yes, you're right, this is a special situation,” Jeanne said. “I can have one made that works for her but I don't have that in stock.” Aurora seemed to shrink next to Elaine but Jeanne quickly added: “But until it's done I have this.” And she threw Aurora a wristband.
“What is this?” the girl asked.
“Shield bracelet,” Jeanne said. “Creates a barrier around you when you wear it. I normally have to charge a lot of Credits for this but it's my fault you have to wear one so I'm giving you this for free.”
“Thank you,” Aurora said.
“Keep in mind,” Jeanne said, looking at Elaine rather than at Aurora, “it's not as tough as our armor so she has to stand back a little. But if it ever looks like the barrier is failing, you can simply channel the Winds into it.”
“Got it,” Elaine said. “What about a gun?”
“I have my...” Aurora began, then realized that the thigh she usually had the holster strapped to was bare.
“I took the liberty of running your gun through our replicator to save the blueprint,” Jeanne explained, pulling the gun and its holster from a drawer in her desk. “It's interesting tech that we've never gotten to play around with.”
“Is it that strong?” Elaine asked.
“It is a fairly powerful little thing but mostly it's useful because its ammo comes from a tiny 3D printer so we'll never have to worry about running out of ammo,” Jeanne explained.
“May I have one, too then?” Mare asked. “That sounds useful.”
“Sure,” Jeanne said, then pulled out another one, this one without any signs of wear or tear.
“I've got to bring Alexis here for one of these,” Elaine muttered.
Jeanne gave a soft smile, then said: “Shall we?”
**
“You know, the fact that we had an outpost of Caulder's cyborgs this close to our base without us noticing is really concerning when you think about it,” Elaine said as they approached the abandoned building Aurora had had her last stand in.
And she was right. Despite all their monitoring equipment they had missed their biggest enemies setting up shop basically next door. The abandoned building was practically within throwing distance of the compound.
“To be fair, we didn't even know that this compound was home to the Stollos Cypher,” Aurora said.
“Does Caulder talk about him?” Jeanne asked.
“'The one that got away', he calls him,” Aurora confirmed. “If he knew that my team had been scouting out Stollos' compound he would have sent an army.”
“Is it really a good idea for people who were at the Siege of Ohio to be here?” Elaine asked.
Aurora hesitated, then shook her head. “If he could see through the eyes of our ship he would have seen you already. You passed it when you entered the building.”
“We what?” Elaine asked. “I don't remember any vehicles here. In fact, I don't see one now.”
Aurora suddenly sounded queasy. “It's... not exactly a vehicle. And it hides under an elaborate camouflage system.”
“Can we take the word 'hide' to mean that it's alive?” Mare asked slowly.
“It's alive,” Aurora confirmed. “Though I'm sure it very much wishes it wasn't.”
“Great,” Elaine said. “So, how do we find it?”
“Follow me,” Aurora said, then led them around the building and pointed at an empty spot. “Here it was.”
The grass next to the building was brown and flattened.
“So, it's not hidden well enough that I can't see it standing right in front of me, right?” Elaine said.
“No,” Aurora said. “As I feared, it has accepted that its charges have perished and switched to the next set of guidelines.”
“Which are?” Jeanne asked.
“Head to the nearest settlement and scrounge up whatever bodies it can find,” Aurora said.
“What will it do with the bodies?” Elaine asked, certain she didn't actually want to know.
“Eat just enough to regain its strength and then take the rest back to Caulder's pocket dimension,” Aurora said with a wince.
“So if we board your 'vehicle' we could let it transport us right to where Caulder is?” Jeanne asked.
“No,” Aurora said quickly. Too quickly.
Jeanne turned to face her and Aurora explained:
“It would attack us on sight. At best we would be incapacitated, at worst we would be dead. Neither of those options would let us attack Caulder.”
“You used to pilot this thing, right?” Jeanne asked. “Can't you make it listen to you?”
Aurora rubbed the back of her head, a haunted look on her face. “If I still had my 'conscience' then yes. But like this? No.”
“What's your conscience have to—“ Jeanne began but Mare interrupted her.
“She doesn't mean an actual conscience, stop prying. It's a euphemism Caulder used.”
Aurora gave a timid nod and Elaine understood.
“When you say conscience you mean the thing that disabled you after you betrayed him, right?”
Aurora nodded again.
“Okay, so it only recognizes people under Caulder's thrall,” Elaine summarized. “No point trying to use it as transport then. The nearest settlement is Carlton but I'm pretty sure Marcus' team cleared that place out early on.”
“They did,” Jeanne said, then turned back to Aurora. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry.”
“No, I should have picked my words more carefully,” Aurora said. “And it doesn't matter that it's been cleared out before. It's not intelligent. It just uses map data to find the nearest settlement, it only starts looking for signs of life once it reaches a settlement.”
“Alright, off to Carlton then,” Elaine said.
**
The trek to Carlton took them only a few minutes. Elaine could have sped the trek up by summoning Alexis' horse Aenbharr but she didn't really see a point in it. It was a short enough distance to walk. She also didn't want to patronize Aurora and Mare by implying they couldn't keep up with Jeanne and her.
And so they walked. The closer they got to the settlement the more obvious the signs of the creature's passing became. At one point there had been several cars abandoned in the middle of the road and the thing had smashed them out of the way. It was apparently wider than a single car lane. Another time there had been a tree that had fallen onto the road. The thing had climbed over the tree but the tree had splintered under the weight. Just what kind of beast was this? With Caulder they couldn't take anything for granted. That man's mind was sick.
Finally they found the creature. Or rather, they found the absence of a creature. A perfectly invisible silhouette of something smashed through a storefront, wood and glass flying everywhere.
“There it is,” Aurora said.
“Is there any way to make it visible?” Elaine asked. “I want to know what I'm supposed to be dodging.”
“Their camouflage is very loosely based on a chameleon,” Aurora explained. “It's not mechanical, nor electronic nor magical. It's just a special ability of their skin cells. Either we cover it in something visible or we inflict enough damage to it that it can't spare the computing power to keep the camouflage up.”
“Alright,” Elaine said, then summoned up her crystal powers. But this time, instead of the perfect little crystal chips she normally summoned she went for the laziest, sloppiest possible application. Carbon dust, like a graphite pen's shavings. She summoned up an enormous cloud of the stuff and then, when the crunching of glass and wood signaled the creature's emergence from the fishing shop she hurled the cloud at it. And immediately wished she hadn't.
Elaine was not a fan of H. R. Giger. It wasn't that she had any sort of issue with his work, she simply did not like it. She didn't like looking at it, she didn't like thinking about it. Unfortunately with Caulder's work she'd had to, many times. Caulder's creations often looked similar to Giger's drawings, combining the visceral, the sensual and the technological in a way where it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. However, the comparison never quite took until this moment.
Sprinkling the beast with carbon dust hadn't simply made it visible, it had given that thing the same disconcerting carbon pen black color as Giger's sketches. And it looked horrid.
The thing looked like nothing so much as a heavily pregnant pterodactyl, a flying dinosaur that walked on the claws it had on its leathery wings. Its belly was distressingly swollen, with multiple portholes set into it. The belly on the thing was so enormous, in fact, that it walked less like a normal pterodactyl and more like a bull with wings for forelegs. Its maw looked like a razor-sharp beak, able to pierce whatever flesh it decided it wanted. All of that would have been disturbing enough but there was also the fact that it looked like a Giger sketch.
The beast had bony armor set all over its body, armor that was clearly made of an enlarged human ribcage, with a single prominently highlighted spine running along its back, the bones clearly visible through the thin layer of flesh, so clear that Elaine wondered if they were even covered with flesh or if the uniform black of the carbon dust simply made her assume so. Most distressing, however, was its head.
Because its beak was attached to a skull that was very clearly human, the beak like an enormous grotesque gas mask fused onto the mouth, with a sensor array that looked like a cross between a horn and an antenna coming out the back of its head. The creature's legs, similarly, were clearly human, making the creature's gait even more unseemly thanks to the human feet that pattered their way through broken glass and wood.
“Oh my god I fucking hate Caulder,” Elaine muttered.
“At least it's just one person suffering this time?” Jeanne tried.
“If you think that's only one person then you don't want to see what it looks like inside,” Aurora said.
“How do you even enter this thing?” Elaine asked.
“You don't want to know.”
“Is there anything you can tell us about it that won't turn our stomachs?” Elaine asked.
“Yes,” Aurora said. “Killing them is a kindness.”