Episode 8 - Symbiosis

  Chapter 77 - Operation: Baise (4)

  Like the steady, inexorable grinding of machinery, the lichens come to life under the falling rain.

  We dance between their bulging masses as we catch up with the retreating trailers. I rub my face shield with the waterproof fabric of my environmental suit as the pelting rain falls so heavy a film of water obscures my vision. Nothing clears it for long; the rain comes harder and harder with every passing moment.

  The trailers are running in an all-out panic now. The symbionts throw their heads and horns, shoulders heaving into harnesses. Behind them, metal habitats bounce over rocks and divots in the road, crashing and shaking. Men hang from cockpits and cabins at the fore, hands shielding eyes and rubbing face masks as they look over their shoulders back at us. I see two men exchange waves and point in our direction as we catch up; they’ve seen us.

  A huge pale orange holobiont crashes across the road between us, one fleshy limb raising and falling with no more coordination than a child flailing its limbs. White hyphae spread where the limb contacts the ground, branching and splitting the mud beneath our feet. The force of its rapid growth opens cracks in the concrete, throwing up boulders of rubble.

  Pooka leaps. I grab Addie with all my strength to hold her steady as we jump up and onto the fleshy beast to continue our escape over the contours of its surface, just as we had run over their sleeping forms less than an hour earlier.

  Pooka’s hoof catches. His panic is my own panic, and we tumble from his back as he trips - is tripped, I can feel something wrapping and grasping around his hoof. Human and symbiont both scream as he crashes neck first into the flesh of the holobiont, and Addie and I both roll across the surface of its back.

  “Addie!” I cry, stretching a hand to her as the two planks of wood we saved bounce ahead of us. A ridge in the holobiont's folds catches one, and white hyphae climb. I try to stand, but my ankle is already locked, my other wrist immobilized. I look down with a panic, and the white strands are wrapping me too, almost pulling me down into the mountainous flesh and insensate, branching whorls of the lichen’s body.

  Addie stretches back to me. Her hand is only a few feet away. But the strands are crawling over her as well, some climbing up her back. In just moments, they will consume her and drag her down into the creature.

  Pooka kicks, equine roar bellowing from deep in his throat. He’s holding back. He’s viscerally terrified in a way I have never felt before. He feels one thing at a time, and at the moment it is fear. The strands only tangle him further. The rolling mass of the lichen shifts, and he tumbles on his wide belly, unable to get his legs under him. We both dissolve into each other, my mental faculties scattering under the weight of fear for our lives - to die here, or to die if we reveal too much of ourselves and someone, somewhere tugs our leash.

  We want to live.

  I want to take the risk they understand. I want to save people for once. I want Addie to rescue the memories she thought that wood carried. The rain in front of my eyes turns to white crystals as I concentrate on Pooka’s certainty, and that are immediately whipped away from me on the gusts. Then, something roars over the sound of our panicked cries.

  Captain Lyall Moreau crashes into the holobiont between Addie and me. His eyes flash brightest blue, his gleaming dark silver and black fur coat lies flat against his skin, dripping with water that pools over his shoulders and down his torso. His environmental suit is torn open, shreds of rubber and buckles hanging around his waist and wrists, his face mask hanging from his chin below the elongated shape of his muzzle and flashing white teeth.

  He snarls, long claws slashing at flesh, revealing the fibrous interior of the holobiont, like split bread which does not bleed. He tears, growling and pawing at the hyphae crawling up and over Addie. Spittle flies from his jaws as teeth gnash under wild eyes that roll, more beast than man. He frees Addie, lifting her under one arm, and bends his knees - then with one giant leap launches and disappears into the rain with her, ?leaving me alone.

  Fuck.

  FUCK!

  I gasp for breath desperately as I claw at myself with my free hand, trying to peel the white strands back from my ankle. I can feel them wrapping around my chest now, and a tight feeling like my clothes are being drawn off my body by the pull of a million hands wrapped around me.

  Fuck it. I’m dead. One way or another. Let’s fucking do this.

  Lightning cracks down from the sky as Pooka changes shape, shrinking suddenly to an Aquila that slips between threads wrapped around his much larger prior form. My breath condenses in my facemask as I exhale from my nose. The temperature drops, but he barely needs any energy from heat here - there is so much around us in the storm. I’m covered in water, we must be careful not to freeze me like I froze my hand the last time we used our powers. Pooka swoops through the air close to my head, claws catching my hair as he grasps for me - as if he wants to drag me free like Moreau did for Addie, red eyes gleaming like beacons for me to follow.

  Stolen story; please report.

  He shifts the energies of the surrounding air, not creating his own lighting, but carving paths of least resistance through the turbulent chaos of the wind and water above us, expending minimal of his own energy. With a crack of unleashing static, lightning snakes through the path he has created, striking the holobiont mere feet from me. I shut my eyes just in time to avoid being blinded by the flash of white, tucking my face into my shoulder.

  I can smell the crackle of ozone through my respirator when I uncover my eyes. Black burns branch outwards from where the lightning struck, but the small flickers of open flame are quickly smothered by the falling rain, wisps of smoke battered apart by droplets.

  It’s too wet. The flesh of the fungus is too swollen with water to catch alight. I don’t even know if the creature feels pain. It certainly still seems content to continue its slow wrapping of my body. My entire leg is bound now, my free arm the only thing propping my torso up so I can look around. I scream as I pull at my wrapped shoulder, and feel my joints wrenching with pain in my desperate fight.

  It needs fuel. The fire needs something to burn to come to life until it can catch on the holobiont's flesh.

  I unzip the front of my environmental suit, snaking my arm within the rubber down to my pockets. There is a familiar weight I had slipped in a moment of impulsive mischief - a small brass container with rare hydrocarbon fuel within. I flick the lid open and wedge it under my arm while my hand scrambles on my suit again, withdrawing the pair of needle-nose pliers I always keep on my person. I use them to grab the lighter free again, crushing the mechanisms of the lid and flint wheel with the jaws, and the chemical taste of fumes fills my mouth through the filter of my respirator.

  I let anger fuel me. Of course, the Captain would fucking save his own first. Like father, like son. It doesn’t fucking matter. Pooka, to me! I’m pressed belly first against the lichen, my torso sinking deeper every second. My back aches as I lift my torso upwards to give myself some clearance, and then I throw the lighter with all my might.

  Pooka dives, claws splayed and beak open as he screeches. I can feel the currents of the air shifting as he exerts energy again, changing the resistance of the very air to channel the massive static roiling above our heads. Lightning strikes the lighter midair, and this time… bright fire explodes.

  It’s brilliant. It’s glorious. The heat that washes over my face fills me with a sense of triumph like I have never felt. The creature does not cry. It has no mouth. But it writhes, pulsating and unfolding as the flame builds higher.

  The hyphae around my legs unravel as the holobiont withdraws, and I’m dumped unceremoniously to the ground, landing with a splash in water that is several inches deep now. I can feel the heat of the fire building now that it has caught. A second crack of lightning sends some rubble nearby smoking. Pooka screeches as he dives after the retreating holobiont with claws splayed and slashes at its flesh, leaving scratches that pale in significance compared to the growing flames.

  I scramble desperately away, my feet barely keeping me up as I place one after another and run, lifting my knees high to clear the water that is now everywhere around me and trusting that my feet will find solid ground again with each step. As I run, I can feel it growing higher around my ankles. I turn over my shoulder to look back as the flames leap higher, static continuing to crackle as Pooka dives again and again through a world of violet pale plasma and fire.

  I crash into a furry chest and almost bounce back off its unforgiving frame. The Captain looks down at me, lifting a dark lip over his teeth with a curl of confused disdain. He grabs my shoulders with elongated fingers, tipped with clawed nails longer than the distance between the joints of a finger. His grip is rough, callous, and he holds me in place to study me in shock.

  “You are no Equus!” he huffs, his voice booming even over the rush of wind around us.

  “No,” I yell back at him, but between the roaring winds and my respirator, I’m not sure my words reach him.

  Pooka spirals upwards, watching the giant lichen withdraw. Behind him, the ground is soaked and rising, with floating debris beginning to build now. As he gets higher, I can see with his eyes the hundreds of lichen bodies, climbing on rubble, unfurling leaf-like structures or crusts shifting as the creatures explore the surface of the world they have woken to.

  There are no eyes or mouths, just fleshy edges and white fibrous appendages exploring blindly, dragging anything organic in them into their masses for absorption and consumption. No thought, no malice. Predators with no concept of their prey. All around them, the rain falls, the sky grey and streaked with flashing lightning. The mud at our feet is pale with the sheer number of spores that have been mixed into it, churning upwards with the rising tide and obscuring the ground beneath me.

  The water rises higher. It’s lapping over the top of my boots now.

  I look around the Captain. The trailers are not far away from us - nowhere near the distance I would have hoped. I can see one with wheels stuck in the mud, a team of symbionts at the fore pulling and digging giant ruts as they drag it free… but not fast enough.

  “What do we do?” I yell over the wind. Moreau’s elongated ears twitch, and he hunches, bringing his head down to my height. I repeat my question for him.

  “The water is the biggest risk,” he growls, dark lips pulling back over black gums. “I’ll fight holobionts all day if I have to, but it’s no good if the water level keeps rising.” I can see his pink tongue between the gaps in his teeth, and behind them… square human teeth in the dark of his maw. As I watch him this close, I can almost see a seam along his jawline, like an uncanny mask where the human ends and the symbiont begins. When his fingers move, there is a lag, a clumsiness where the human and the clawed paw do not quite line up. Only their eyes are unified, bright cobalt blue and perfectly overlaid. Both pupils are round, but one has no white sclera.

  I grin, reaching for Pooka, who completes another dive to continue chasing off the holobiont that threatened our life. The flames still smolder, but the rain has dampened their licking tongues somewhat now. Instead, dark smoke billows as the fire has worked deeper into the holobiont's body, like some kind of rot. The creature seems driven by instinct rather than ?the raw pain we feel, flopping along clumsily without limbs or joints to coordinate.

  We’ve never tested just how far we could call if we tried. “Go help the trailers get loose. I can handle water,” I say.