Forever Thrilled, Part 22
Chapter 7: Spiral Dogfights, Reprise
Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien pass through the South Pole Diaphragm Gate and enter a chilly, dark world. Background radiation in the ultraviolet, giving a faint, enhanced visibility of about two hundred meters. Otherwise, they’ve got to use radar (preferred), sonar, or lidar.
Remembering her ‘holding pattern’ in the Strange Hail layer, she prepares two pogo sticks with sacrificial ends to push back in case some predator tries to smother her by pressing her into the inner barrier. Also, she prepares a type of dead woman switch; that is, she programs instructions to erase the info from the alter-Universal aliens if there is no sign of life from her, LateralSys, or KillBitch. It might be of vital importance, it might change the fate of two Universes, but she’ll be damned if she lets some opportunistic predator steal it from her.
Apart from that, she doesn’t know what more to do as she has no clue what they’ll run into. She certainly doesn’t expect the same things as the first time, even if she’s refreshed her mind with these encounters.
Not knowing the best way up, Na-Yeli makes a large circle around the South Pole, setting her radar to maximum sensitivity, hoping to see any dangers lurking in the distance. Nothing shows up, not even the faintest bleep, apart from a few bounces off the inner and outer barriers. Either there really is nothing for the first twenty-or-so kilometers, Na-Yeli thinks, or each and every one of them has evolved stealth capabilities. The latter is not exactly a hopeful prospect, yet has to be their working hypothesis.
Well, like the previous time, she might as well choose a longitude at random. More likely than not, the opportunistic predators—lazy data thieves—will come to them, anyway. She just hopes to notice them in time, preferably to avoid them—outrun them if she can—and only confront them when there’s no other choice.
“Hey, crew,” she says, “are you all online and ready for it?”
—you bet— the communication AI signals —and the hypersounders can’t wait, either—
“Do keep in mind that this is not just spectator sports,” Na-Yeli says, refraining from rolling her eyes, “as we might need your help anytime. So please remain on immediate standby.”
—immediate standby— the communication AI echoes —all of us—
They don’t need to wait long. Within a minute after leaving the area around the South Pole diaphragm, two opportunistic predators are confronting them already. A sleek mixture between a zeppelin and a cigar speeding towards the Moiety Alien. A triple-triangle-winged creature whose tri-sails change angles and flapping frequency with a fluency that impresses her, coming at Na-Yeli & Co.
Na-Yeli sighs, as it makes too much sense. Attack the incoming returnees as soon as they enter the final layer so you’ll have the first shot at them. So it’ll be the local top dogs that’ll come for them first. No rest for the wicked.
The Zeppelin-Cigar lobs a kind of cloak or cape at the Moiety Alien, who has no trouble evading it with its quintessential shrink/swell technique. The triple-triangular-sailplane creature seems to be an ensnaring device all of its own, as its three triangles open up—broadest sides first—to clean her from the sky like a flying vacuum cleaner. As they swoop down, Na-Yeli moves almost vertically up and avoids the gaping equilaterality.
And so it begins, Na-Yeli thinks, it’s going to be a long, hard slog. She watches her aft cameras intently, seeing if she can outrun the triplane, but unfortunately, after it’s turned around, it does seem to close in. The Moiety Alien is trying to zigzag away from the Zeppelin-Cigar, not quite shaking it off yet. Their catching antics make Na-Yeli ponder. Apparently, they prefer to capture their prey alive rather than killing it and hoping to extract the treasure trove or the cached info later on. It should give them some leeway in their upcoming confrontations.
Wondering if she can scare off the tri-planar creature with a light bomb as it creeps up on her, she sees it turn around and move away from her. A quick peek at where she last saw the Moiety Alien, she notices that the Zeppelin-Cigar is also heading away, and very quickly at that.
What, Na-Yeli thinks, they’re fleeing while we’ve barely begun? It’s as strange as it is sinister. Then she sees—a flock? a school?—indeed, a group of winged fish approaching. At first, they seem out of their element, like a school of flying fish launched in the air by a massive breaker. Then Na-Yeli realizes these flying fish are not as stubby as they seem—she was merely watching them almost head-on—but rather long, the length of their fins more than making up for their narrowness.
They swarm upon Na-Yeli & Co with swift, sinuous movements, a gracious overture to the next exchange of hostilities. At the speed they’re encroaching, Na-Yeli can already determine there’s no way she can outrun these sleek sine waves, these fish out of the water. So it looks like fight instead of flight, as freeze is certainly not an option. Then, the most forward ones open their jaws, revealing rows of serrated teeth that look as sharp as they are imposing.
A Piranha Pack, Na-Yeli thinks, chasing the competition away. Speeding towards them, showing no signs at all about a subtle approach. Well, I promised this, is the last thing the slow CEO thinks as she recedes to make room for KillBitch.
KillBitch appraises the situation in a flash, move-gestures to the Moiety Alien—what she hopes means—‘cover my back, and I’ll cover yours.’ The Moiety Alien is straight above Na-Yeli, guarding the top half of the sky, Na-Yeli below it, guarding the bottom half. Then, they also begin to make a swirling movement to confuse the incoming Piranha Pack. But these simply attack as if they’ve seen it all before.
The Moiety Alien easily evades the barrage of snapping jaws trying to devour it, but KillBitch is not so successful. One flying piranha bites her in the ankle but doesn’t get a good grip as KillBitch manages to kick it off. A second one bites in the elbow and resists her efforts to dislodge it. It only lets go after KillBitch—with some very concerted effort—manages to get a lightbomb down its throat, subsequently triggering it. Both bites manage to pierce her extremely sturdy exoskin, a testament to both their biting strength and the sharpness of their teeth. While neither of the punctures got all the way through to her actual skin, it seems only a matter of time until they do.
KillBitch makes a quick assessment and doesn’t like her chances, not at all. The Moiety Alien can probably evade their attacks ad nauseam, but it can only cover her back. Over time—and probably sooner rather than later—the Piranha Pack will exhaust her. Too many of them to launch her stack of mini-torpedoes at, and she’s too slow to outrun them. She desperately needs a different tactic.
Before the Piranha Pack has turned around for their next attack, she gestures to the Moiety Alien that she’s going down to the inner barrier. These pogo sticks do come in quite handy. As she dives down as fast as she can, she prepares a weapon that’s a cross between a baseball bat and a morning star; that is, a baseball bat with a number of extremely sharp spikes at its business end.
Before she crashes into the inner barrier, she makes a sharp turn, putting her feet that are already strapped into the pogo sticks down, and positions herself on the spaghettifying barrier. As the sacrificial bottoms of her pogo stick slowly disintegrate to their atomic constituents, KillBitch scans the near horizon for incoming flying piranhas. There they are, coming at her at top speed in her top left corner.
In the air, this pack is as close to unbeatable as it gets—superb maneuverability, unsurpassed speed, and the terrible jaws from hell. But because they can fly, they supposedly don’t have that much mass, and that is what KillBitch—whose muscles are used to twenty times the gravitational force of this environment—is about to find out.
The most forward one—the leader of the pack?—comes straight at her, jaws open so far she can almost study its complete alimentary canal, its razor-sharp teeth a whiter shade of pale in the faint, deep purple background luminosity. KillBitch doesn’t step aside but remains standing as tight as she can while swinging her improvised morning star at the incoming monster with all her might.
She hits it in the side of its head just before it bites into her, and the force of the impact slams it off course. It passes right by her, heavily wounded, yet KillBitch has no time to check its fate as the next one comes in. She can return her swing just in time to connect with that one as she feels that her instinct is correct—the flying piranhas are relatively light, meaning she can slug them off.
Indeed, it’s becoming a slugfest as she’s like a player at bat who has to hit all the incoming balls from a dozen pitchers. She can’t hit them all; many get through and bite her, but because of her superior leverage from the bottom, she can shake those off. In the meantime, the inner barrier area around her becomes cluttered with dead and wounded flying piranha bodies, as her exoskin begins to resemble a colander, and she’s bleeding from a lot of small wounds.
In the meantime, the Moiety Alien tries to lessen the amount of incoming flying piranhas by luring as much of them away from her as it can. It reduces the incoming amount of predators from the Piranha Pack to such an extent that KillBitch can almost hit them all. Inevitably, some of them do connect with her, and a few of them find enough grip that she needs to get them off her, which takes a huge amount of effort and precious time. And if she can’t shake them off before the next attack wave arrives, they’ll finish her off. As two of them—one in her left forearm, another in her right upper thigh—are holding on too well, it looks like game over.
Desperately, she lifts her right leg, the pogo stick loose from the inner barrier, and lets herself fall over, pushing the piranha lodged in her right leg straight into the spaghettifying barrier. Immediately, it panics, lets go of KillBitch, wriggling away from under her push, then gets up and flies away from the inner barrier as fast as its wings can carry it.
Interesting, KillBitch thinks as her right knee bounces on the inner barrier, but only for a fraction of a second as she rights herself on her pogo sticks. In the same movement, she overcompensates to the left and pushes the piranha stuck in her left arm into the forbidding barrier. It invokes the same reaction, panic and letting go of her to escape being spaghettified, then fleeing with all due haste. She can barely get up in time before the next deluge of flying piranhas arrives.
As the next wave comes at her, she notices that all the attacks are aimed at her head and upper torso; none of the Piranha Pack dare to dive much deeper. The one getting her in the thigh must have been an outlier. Somewhere deep within—possibly an evolutionary instinct—they know that the inner barrier is very dangerous. They probably could survive contact with it if it’s short enough, but that could come at the cost of some exquisite pain (if evolution did its job right).
KillBitch is saturated with adrenalin, this is the fight of—and for—her life. Exhaustion is breaking through her adrenalin high, but she must keep fighting. She’s bleeding almost everywhere, even if these are nearly all minor wounds. Still, more bites are coming in faster as her highly advanced immune system can heal, which threatens to be the proverbial death through a thousand cuts. Yet, the attacks seem to lessen both in number and ferocity. Slowly, the reason for that begins to get through to KillBitch: more and more of the flying piranhas are now attacking their own wounded and eating their own dead.
She slugs off the next wave, which is decidedly smaller than the previous one. Then, out of the blue, the attacks cease. Presumably, the rest of the Piranha Pack figure it’s easier to devour its own wounded rather than attack a superior opponent. KillBitch doesn’t wait to find out exactly why, but jumps up, kicks in her ion thruster, shape-shifts her morning star and left arm into wings, and leaves the battle area as fast as she can. Ultimately, their mission is to get the message through, not to decimate all opponents. The Moiety Alien follows her, and the moment she estimates they’re at a safe distance, and—at least for the moment—no new challengers seem to come forward, she recedes to let the Slow CEO resume command, waking to the enthusiastic cheers and hollers from the hypersounders and the communication AI.
—supercool, 11 out of 10— the communication AI signals —killbitch is the best—
“Well,” is all Na-Yeli can manage, “she’s certainly the most exhaustive.”
Initially, Na-Yeli is so exhausted she’s flying primarily on autopilot, hoping her radar and other warning systems—and the Moiety Alien—will attend her on any incoming dangers, as she’s too fatigued to notice them herself. It must’ve been a hell of a fight, as she’s never felt so utterly worn out. As it is, they’re still alive, if not exactly kicking.
Luckily for them, nothing much happens as they make their way North, giving Na-Yeli time to gather her thoughts. For one, she assumes that the Piranha Pack was basically a hyper-evolved school of predators that were not after any secrets but just out to devour her and the Moiety Alien. So hyper-evolved that they out-compete all the true opportunistic enemies trying to get at her. Thank dog for small mercies.
Also, like any self-sustaining biome, it’s impossible to have large predators everywhere. There must be some sort of supporting community of flora and/or fauna that is no threat to Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien. So, while there was a huge concentration of predators around the South Pole’s Diaphragm Gate—even if these must sometimes leave their preferred trapping area in order to forage—the predator density should thin out beyond it. QED, of course. But it does give her time to recover, which she sorely needs.
Even the hypersounders and the communication AI seem to understand that, as they’ve been uncharacteristically quiet ever since the attack of the Piranha Pack. She’s slightly tempted to tease them about why they’re so silent but prefers the tranquility. She signals a thumbs up to the Moiety Alien, who answers in kind. Then they fly through the ultraviolet near-darkness in a quasi-serenity, all senses alert for what might come. It’s not until they reach the equatorial area that the quietude is broken.
Something ghostly appears on her radar, vague hints of something big coming at them fast. Incoming speed is unclear; she’s not sure if she can outrun it. She tosses a few lightbombs that, even if it doesn’t scare the incoming monstrosity off, will at least reveal it.
What the abrupt light flashes reveal is not a flying monster but a vast, airborne net towed by something well above them. The huge net is finely meshed, too fine for Na-Yeli to fly through it. Its ropes—which are closing in ever quicker—look like solidified haloes of thorns or thick branches of thorn bush. Before Na-Yeli can produce a laser cutter, she’s caught up in the humongous web. One of the exquisitely sharp thorns cuts both through her exoskin and her actual skin. It contains a mix of powerful sedatives, of which at least one is targeted at her immune system. Before she knows it, she passes out.
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Author’s note: Na-Yeli & Co are in the ‘Spiral Dogfights’ layer today and—just before New Year’s Eve in my neck of the woods—may be out before the end of the day/year.
To be completed in early January, promise! Many thanks for reading and all the best with your New Year’s Eve celebrations!