mc776 | Nanophlogiston chapter 32 (Reply)

The gods weren't nearly as smart as they thought they were.

Chief was right: they really didn't know there were any other people here. With only what the Tyrant told them and the armies of Worthless that the first god was sending, and the rest of us hiding well out of sight away from the chaos, there's no way they could have seen anyone else.

From their interactions at the city battle we were able to work out some basic communication methods. They weren't anything like normal people: instead of telepathy, somehow they broadcast and received everything through radio waves. There was no way this could have evolved in natural organisms: indeed they could only be gods from the stars, though ones that could be killed as we found out the hard way later at the Meeting Circle.

It was at that fight against Billion-Sons that we learned that their primary mode of communication was sound waves. Our dogs didn't notice any radio signals when we fought him, notwithstanding he was clearly engaged in some dialogue with Glorious-Army who only appeared capable of telepathy through the power of the Tyrant wand.

At least they had some passive telepathic capacity, though. Our vocal language was only a complement, not a primary, and it was highly unlikely the others would even recognize our speech as speech. But how would we reach them? We could not fully trust Glorious-Army's information at face value, who was apparently cut off from his people for many years, living entirely in the Tyrant's artificial hallucination before Billion-Sons took him out.

Which meant we had to ask Billion-Sons.

...

Chief and I and a few other hand-picked Meditators missed the funeral dirge. We were too busy doing an emergency dissection. We had to know everything we could about this enemy if there were more of them coming.

There wasn't a whole lot left to analyze, at least as the organs went. In accordance with all right thinking and reason we'd torn the slayer to bits: first in rage, then to be extra sure the monster wouldn't be getting back up again. Last I heard he had not. During the frenzy I think a couple of us might've eaten some of the goo inside; those most at risk I'd directed be kept under watch back at the Meeting Circle.

We managed to piece together most of the skeleton, though. The outer structure made enough sense: a head, a compact, slightly flexible, tailless thorax, and then the limbs. The limbs were fused into two main groupings: two extremely powerful composite arms on top, branching off into smaller bladeless manipulators (one of them on each composite arm seemed out of line, possibly from an old injury); and two even more powerful composite legs that stuck straight down from the trunk and lifted the entire body off the ground, like a dog or a sheep. It was not clear how the god balanced on this. At the end of these bottom-legs were thickly rimmed orifices of some sort: the slayer had used them to shoot fire and hot air, in blasts so powerful they sent both the target and him flying if aimed low enough.

The entire skeleton was made of an unknown material, at once like wood and carapace and star-stone. It was too light for star-stone, though some of the shiny bits could have been star-stone on the surface only and some other thing beneath. While the soft tissue between the joints could eventually be pierced with significant effort, the plates were nearly indestructible; it took some of our best minds and far too many rocks to crush a single torso plate enough that, had it been applied in life, should have been enough to break the spinal cord.

Some of the junior apprentices excused themselves and one even vomited when we started pulling out some of the insides. The thing had a second skeleton: not a developing section of plates and joints waiting to be exposed in the next moult, but a wholly separate structural system somehow embedded inside the muscles which in turn were connected on their outside - in a word, utterly reversed from normal human anatomy. I dared not even try to imagine how they would shed such a thing, and was glad my imagination was never built for solving this sort of problem.

All of it was heavily lubricated by an eerie red, sticky blood, some as bright as the warrior spiral-paint used by our village, some almost as dark as the western horizon at dusk, that oozed out of the porous flesh like a wet sponge and turned a sickly brown as it dried.

The dogs really liked it, though, and they didn't get sick, so I guessed these gods couldn't be all that bad.

...

After throwing many rocks, sticks, mind-controlled Worthless and poor old Never-Forget-The-Towers at the strange vegetative pods the gods had planted outside their hive, we learned the following:

each one could only kill within a certain range of angles;

they only hunted by sight;

they could see in the dark but not through water;

they could only hunt or shoot up to maybe 5 degrees up or down from where they were situated;

if one got knocked over for any reason they would not be able to get back up in the sand, and it would take a minimum of three minutes before a god would emerge from inside the hive and set it back up; and

there was only one line of them, behind which one would be able to move with impunity (provided that one avoided the death-wands on the intact side of the wounded god the hive had planted itself beside).

There was also an opening in their defences to the northwest at high tide.

The Grand Battle-Virgin's orders were less simple than I'd hoped: gather as much intel on the invading gods as possible, and if they had sent anyone into our forest, take hostages and attempt to force them to open their radio lines and have whoever or whatever they had sent engage the Chief Meditator in hopefully eventually peaceful negotiations.

I didn't like it at all. How did we know this wasn't actually a trap set up by the Tyrant who had called down these gods in the first place? For all we knew this captured staff might not house a trapped god at all but a very cleverly disguised Tyrant speaking through it from his haunt in the city.

But we had lost so many just taking down Billion-Sons, and these others clearly had the power to burn down our entire forest if they wanted to, so our only hope was to figure out what they wanted and give it to them - the only trick was to stop them long enough not to shoot us on sight. And who knew what they wanted: it could be to kill Billion-Sons, or to seize the Tyrant's riches for themselves, or invade, lay waste to our villages and vampirize the life-force of the land. For all we knew we could be fighting to save the very planet. The risk that this was a farfetched plot by the Tyrant was of secondary concern; if we could defeat or make peace with these gods, it might not even matter whether they had been brought here by his manipulations, and if they were going to destroy all of us then it certainly wouldn't matter.

And so the two of us went in, slipping past the gap in the death-pods, tipping over a couple of them from behind ("Just like cleaning out a mouldy rain-barrel!") to keep that janitor-god busy, then slipping under the legs of that enormous beehive and... what?

"Second-Star-From-The-Right, do you remember anything about this from our briefing?"

"They didn't tell us shit. Get to the hive, get intel, figure it out from there."

"'Get to the hive'", I repeated. "Are we supposed to be in the hive? Watching exits? Trying to talk to it? What?"

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"Not at all! Look, our scouts already saw the slayer come out of the broken god over there, and it was very clear that it was still alive and capable of defending itself. The hive might be related."

"It doesn't look a thing like it! It's five times as tall and twice as wide and doesn't have any limbs or wands or eyes or anything!"

"I don't know about that - I think I see some structures near the top. And we've got the legs down here."

We all started calling it the "hive", as though it were a structure that we knew housed a swarm of little flying gods. In fact we had no idea whether it was its own god, or an inanimate structure, or a beast of burden, or possibly even a predator or the body of some vast central intelligence that was the true director of the gods' actions. The only thing we were certain of is that it reminded us all of a beehive. If a beehive were as tall as the tallest hill, made entirely of smooth shining dark brown stone, and had descended to the earth in a roaring storm of fire.

We were underwater under the hive, right underneath the... foot? mouth? anus? blowhole? from which its fire had been spewing. Around it were three arms or legs, forming a ring like the tentacles around a polyp's mouth-anus. They were made of the same brown stone and appeared to have no joints whatsoever. These legs extended into portions that were buried by the ruined sand.

Neither of us had the slightest inclination to go inside that thing.

I poked one of the legs with a twig. It did not move. I noticed that there was already seaweed and small baby polyps on the leg, and crabs scuttling about on and off of it. This thing had clearly not moved at all in the nearly two days since its arrival.

Still, neither of us had the slightest inclination to go inside that thing, whether it was a mouth, or an anus, or a head, or a--

I remembered how we marvelled at the slayer's brow. It was a huge long thing that extended well beyond the snout, like a decorative crest. It must have made it inordinately difficult to look up except through the most deliberate effort...

"Let's climb this thing and watch them from above."

"What!? They'll see us right away!"

"That's the point. They haven't seen us yet. But remember how their eyes are always a bit... askance at the earth because of that brow?"

"Well, yes, but we'd still be out in the open..."

"As opposed to being down here where this thing could start spitting fire again at any moment?"

And so we climbed. Our back legs had surprisingly good traction against such a smooth surface, and we barely had to ooze them at all to maintain a proper grip; upon closer examination, however, it turned out the whole surface was pitted and scarred, like an old moulted piece of shell rolled around vigorously in coarse sand. I supposed if it couldn't even defend itself from crabs...

About two thirds of the way up we began to wander towards the inland, eastern side of the hive. About 10 feet below us we saw a long bump or ridge, beyond which was a long grey rectangular tongue or ovipositor or something extending into the sand below. We crept a little closer until our eyes could adjust to what exactly we were looking at: it was an opening, and the tongue was a flat ramp leading out onto the beach.

Inside we could hear people talking. We left our own minds on block, and dared not to get any closer lest whoever or whatever was in there feel our residual presence; but it was clear enough that there were two sound sources taking turns making patterned sequences of sounds that it must have been two of the gods talking to each other.

The voices began speaking more quietly, but more quickly. Then suddenly they stopped. The deeper, gruffer voice then began speaking at the same quiet volume, but the sounds were in rapid staccato--

A piercing echoey noise, at once like a bird and a child's howl of fright, nearly caused me to let go and fall to the ground. It, like the first two voices, seemed to be coming from inside the opening, though I could feel it all over the hive.

There were shouts from others within the hive. There were footsteps but no one came out. We couldn't tell how many.

Then whatever had made that shriek sounded again, this time in patterns that suggested language. I looked at Second-Star and she flicked her arms in agreement. We turned off our blocks, probed our minds just inside the door and got ready to get the drop on whatever came out.

And then we heard the hive's mind, a dark and terrible voice, like what Chief would use to demand a cornered Naked raiding party to surrender but far worse: "...we are not attacked, we will not kill you."

Whatever was inside was very, very angry. If it saw us now it would kill us very, very dead, along with whoever came to retrieve our bodies.

But we still had the advantage. It was definitely distracted by whatever else was going on in there. Our blades were enough to cut them up once we found their weak spots; it was a long shot, but maybe--

"Fool, if we wished you harm you would be dead by now! Call off your backup before you get us all killed!" The hive was still scared, but no longer panicked.

We stayed exactly where we were. A second passed and nothing happened. I began to speak--

"Imperious wretch! The compassion of your servant, and that of the child they bear, is all that stands between you and death!"

Wait, what?