Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 33 - Entanglement
- Bert-Oliver Boehmer
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
Most realities showed Linuka halved along her spine when she rolled right. She rolled left. The iiṇawr’s grotesque cleaver hacked down, splitting soil and steel-plate with equal ease.
The marines pelted the creature with their automatics, trained instinct, useless against the bark shell turned armor by eons of evolution. An unseen fist pinned her down. Her suit’s hardened torso plate showed cracks, and her exhale burned a hole into her chest. A ricochet must have struck her, not with enough force to pierce her equipment, but to unseal her suit.
The microbes responsible for turning the planet purple now seeped in. It didn’t matter. Groaning to the side, failing to avoid muddy runoff from the warrior’s blade, risen straight overhead, realities not revealing a safe next move, she awaited quick death.
It came. She closed her eyes, but the blinding light still stung her retinas, the helmet visor’s lumination enhancer too sluggish to filter out the blazing beam piercing through the iiṇawr’s center. Hot gel buried her, gooish unspeakable splattering her visor shut.
Glued to the ground, struggling to raise her hands to her face, the sticky mass refused to be wiped off. The strip beam had ripped the innards out of the alien warrior with the force of a planet crust shaver. This too now seeped into her suit. Linuka gagged. She couldn’t breathe.
Inhale. Draw a breath!
Her fingers felt the visor seal slider through her glove. She pushed it open, ripped the visor up, hard. Whatever this world’s atmosphere had for her to die from, it also had oxygen to keep her going one more breath, one more attempt to unstuck from her lying position, rising out of the pool of heated liquefied organs that had propelled a cleaver-swinging iiṇawr just moment before.
The breath she drew was merciful, but the clamor of conflict shocked only secondary to the eye-watering stench. All the dead bio-matter from all the worlds around all the stars must have come here to rot. The marines fasted before combat, and Linuka was glad she had adopted the habit. The retching produced only a little excrete running into her neck guard, joining the extra-galactic gore.
Vomit met entrails. Her true first contact with the Võmémééř.
A shadow. She held out her hand. An armored arm. A firm grip. Even without looking, she knew this to be Cha Dzeeny lifting her upright. His stare was of dismay, filtered only through the smeared visor of his suit. Was she looking that terrible?
“I’m good,” she said. Linuka was no stranger to blatant lies, but this was the pinnacle of her deceiver career.
“Your suit is compromised. We need to get you an emergency mask.”
“I inhaled what’s there to inhale and got infected by what’s here to infect. Let’s not waste time. We got a war to win.”
Linuka dragged her feet out of the slimy pond. Standing on firm, reeking ground, she observed the aftermath of their descent. Fire columns grappled skyward, marking buildings hit in the strips beams’ crossfire, creating draft clearing the mist, illuminating the canyon floor littered with dead naw. Linuka didn’t need the brutal light sources to navigate. She knew where to go.
She pointed along the canyon center, away from the vector of their approach.
“It’s that way.”
“The diin, Shaajis?”
Linuka nodded. Having traversed space, time, and realities, her family had cast out a wide net of world lines weaving through the multiverse. She was certain the eon-old lineage of galactic raiders had done the same. Linuka and the diin were close to sealing their causal connection. The fabric of existence pulled them together through an undefined gravity.
In other realities, she heard the Linukas say ‘destiny’.
Deep. In this reality, she said, “Follow me.”
The atmosphere was oxygen-rich, allowing shallow breaths through her mouth, but they couldn’t be shallow enough to take the bite out of the almost palpable aroma of decay. Fitting for the alien menace, growing best in soil smelling of death.
“Please slow down, Shaajis, scanners show several more lifeforms ahead.”
“More iiṇawr?”
“It looks like we got the warriors with the fire support from Ghost-1. These blips are small. But even the naw can be dangerous. Your father…”
“Don’t tell me the story where he almost lost his leg when the naw bit him.”
“He told you?”
“Only a hundred times.”
“Specter-6, contact arc 2 flat!”
Cracks echoed through the canyon. Streaks of tracer rounds found their target in a dark alley between alien structures.
“Contact down.”
The v-formation the marines had taken on with no need for words, Cha Dzeeny at the V’s apex, shadowing Linuka’s path, moved deeper into the canyon.
A square patch of meticulously groomed soil was ahead, framed by a flat metal outline. The stench got stronger, the topsoil dark as Tẽlchi’s night, imbued with whatever made it desirable for growing a diin.
Cha’s helmet visor must have helped him spot their target in the darkness.
“This is it?”
Linuka sensed his disappointing as if he were a Traaz. No advanced technology, not even a basic gardening tool in sight. No grandiose palatial keep. Not even a foil roof for shade. The future lord of the Võmémééř—sticking out of a patch of dirt.
Cha and his team had broken laws, their oaths, left loved ones and families behind, and traversed inter-galactic space for… this.
The seedling was meager, reaching barely higher than Linuka’s knee. A thin gnarly center, with little twigs branching off at irregular intervals. If this were a regular plant, it would be utterly unremarkable.
Linuka kneeled in front of it.
The world lines were so close she could hear them hum. Would they touch only when her hand grabbed the diin? What could go wrong at this point? Why did the multiverse hesitate revealing the finale?
The hum had a body. And wings. She saw it coming from the corner of her eye. The handgun resisted her pull, sticking to the smeary holster. Would the iiṇawr still protect his ward, even in death?
Uurmi chemicals a hundred times the potency of adrenaline made her rip the holster off the suit belt, aim, shoot through the fabric, hitting the naw center body. The alien splashed open, fell like a rock, landing next to her. She stared at the worker, motionless, having given its life for a creature who would never have known about its existence.
She put the gun down next to what she assumed was the naw’s head. The main body had a white liquid pouring out of the burst-open center. Just spins before Linuka would have twitched away from the alien fluid. But here on this rancid world, she didn’t care. The naw blood puddled around her knee, joining iiṇawr organs.
Her father had had the privilege of seeing Diin Ṛũl’s end—a colossal alien leader, dwarfing the spires on the Assembly moon. But did Father bathe in the blood of his enemies?
She smiled.
“Now you, little twig.”
Linuka’s gloved fist closed around the tiny diin body. Their world lines tangled.
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