Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

chamber beyond. The smell of death emanating from the blackness was overpowering, and Maya winced, fighting back the compulsion to cover her mouth and nose.

Don Luis stepped up close behind Maya and placed one hand on her elbow, the other on the small of her back. An involuntary shudder ran down her spine. He nudged her forward. She told herself that Don Luis hadn’t brought her this far, talked to and gushed over her this much just to lead her into a death trap. He could have killed her ages ago if he’d wanted—or at least tried to—and so she collected herself and took a hesitant step forward. Her foot pierced the curtain of dark as if it were nothing, yet her toes, then foot, then shin disappeared so fully from her sight, she looked like an amputee.

She felt a cold creeping up her leg and felt Don Luis nudge her again. She set her one foot down on the other side and stepped forward with her other, bringing the black to her face like a handful of cupped water from a pool.

Cold. Darkness and cold. Then she opened her eyes on the other side of the curtain in a small, round chamber of stone. Don Luis was beside her, plucking an unlit torch from the inner chamber’s wall and lighting it. It turned out that the room was the source of the stench, not the curtain of black, and thanks to the flickering torchlight, Maya was able to see what caused it.

There, in the center of the round chamber, chained to the floor in a dozen places, sat a living creature the likes of which Maya had never seen in all her long years.

It was the size of Carbine’s old Mini-Mech and resembled an emaciated sea urchin with noodle-like, prehensile spines, each ending in a tubular mouth or sucker instead of a sharp point. The creature appeared near death, or extremely tired, for the spine tubes that protruded from the upper hemisphere of the thing’s body all drooped limply across its mass and reached as far as the floor.

It looked defeated and deflated. Maya saw it try to writhe, even managing to weakly lift a few of its spine tubes off the floor and point them in their direction. The alien appendages probed the air and behaved as if they were sniffing. The mouths at the end of the spine tubes opened and closed rhythmically, like a fish scenting the water.

Maya couldn’t see well in the dim, fluctuating torchlight, but her eyes caught the blur of rapid movement every time a tube mouth gaped open. Her eyes narrowed, and she leaned forward unconsciously to get a closer look. She noticed a long, skinny, needle-like probe shoot in and out of the nearest mouth nearly as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

The flashing needle in the spine’s mouth added to the sniffing quality of the creature’s behavior; each tentacle-like appendage looked like a large snake with a stiletto for a tongue. They behaved autonomously, yet were connected, like a pack of wolves working together to hunt prey.

Maya wondered how this creature would look and behave if it were at its peak strength, and shuddered, banishing the thought from her imagination. The creature was the very definition, the anthropomorphic manifestation, of hungry. It seemed to possess a hundred mouths and nearly nothing else.

“What is it?” she dared to ask, her voice muffling the slithering sounds of both the needles rapidly sheathing and unsheathing and the wiggling of the tentacles themselves.

“This is our Progenitor. The Hunger. It’s not every man that gets to meet his maker.” Don Luis stepped forward, away from Maya and toward the creature.

The limp, tired appendages that only a moment before had seemed on death's door now leapt off the floor and snapped at Don Luis, the torchlight flashing off their needle-probes in the dark. Maya gasped.

“A bit more common is the man who kills his maker. God is dead, so they say. And while I haven’t killed my god—can’t kill my god—I have dominated it and surpassed it.”

Maya listened to Don Luis gloat and wondered at what he meant by “can’t kill my god.” She decided it best not to ask too many questions, lest he realize his slip of the tongue.

“As you can see, it is a little angry over this fact.” Don Luis waved his torch at the reaching spine tubes, and they recoiled from the heat.

“I was dying, like the rest of the rabble that survived the Storm, eking out a miserable existence in what was left of the world. Between the bandits, the Drop-trash, and then the advent of the Harvesters, my prospects for longevity were not good. Not good, that is, until I stumbled upon this thing before you. I had been crossing an open bled of desert when a sandstorm began to rise just east of me. It looked bad; it looked like it was growing, and it looked like there was a very good chance that it would soon be coming my way. It would have killed me for sure. I was already malnourished and weak. Dame Fortuna would smile on me that day, as she has every night since, for not far from where I was lay a small outcropping of rock, an archipelago of stony hills; a good place to seek shelter, for it was probable that I would find a cave or at least a crevasse in which to hide.” Don Luis stared ahead into the room, through and past the creature bound there, reliving in his mind’s eye the events that he related to Maya.

“I made it to the rocks just minutes before the sandstorm made it to me, and a cave I did find. I crept into its darkness without regard for my safety. To remain outside would have surely meant death by exposure. What I found inside I thought worse, at first…”

Maya allowed herself to look as intrigued, as she actually was. Don Luis continued