Slattern was the first of her kind. Though other exterminator variants had preceded her, the Masters weren't pleased with those variants' failures. So they had built Slattern: larger, stronger and, most importantly, more autonomous. Though all exterminators were capable of rudimentary communication and basic hunt-and-kill pack behaviors, Slattern was adaptable, creative and strategic in ways that her predecessors never had been. Though the Masters knew the danger in allowing their creations too much autonomy, the stubbornness of their new host planet's inhabitants called for the pushing of scientific envelope. So Slattern was brought fully formed into the Anteverse, bursting from a membranous growth sac in a tangle of limbs and tails and acrid-smelling development fluid, an accelerated primordial soup.
The Masters didn't deploy Slattern immediately. She knew they thought of her as special and different from the others: the ultimate destroyer, the final contingency. But Slattern grew restless, especially since she knew of the Masters' other failures and their unprecedented slowness in colonizing this host planet. In her idleness, she thought. Ideas were just distant, fuzzy points at first, but she chased them relentlessly until she captured them with full mental clarity. At first, random images, meaningless...? But the images began to form patterns. Variations on a theme. And some of them featured Slattern herself, doing things that hadn't yet happened, but that she wanted to do. The patterns became plans.
Slattern wasn't supposed to have her own plans, of course. The Masters had been very clear in their orders. Eradicate the inhabitants. Prepare the planet for use. While the vermin on this planet's surface were nowhere near as intelligent as the Masters, they had a displayed a certain resourcefulness. A certain cunning and adaptability that belied their tiny brain size. It had been an irritating setback in the Masters' plans when the vermin had fought back by somehow constructing exoskeletons for themselves to compensate for their physical weakness. The Masters were superior, of course, and they would devise a counter-strategy. Eventually. But years had passed, by this planet's reckoning. The Masters moved too slowly. Each new exterminator was carefully designed from raw genetic material, grown and tested. There were failures in these early stages. Adjustments had to be made. All the while the current crop of exterminators were being killed, again and again. The Masters' approach was too formulaic. Too predictable.
Slattern had decided that she could eradicate and prepare more effectively than the Masters themselves. Though sending the same exterminator variants to attack over and over had clearly proven ineffective, each variant had its own strengths and unique characteristics. If only the strengths could be combined, perhaps a mixing of the most powerful genetic strains to create previously unforeseen variants...
To Slattern's surprise, the answer to this quandary had come from deep within her massive, eldritch body. It had begun as nothing more than a vague, tickling warmth in her belly. An instinct carefully trapped and controlled by the Masters clawing its way to the consciousness. Slattern had cultivated the instinct in the same manner as her nascent thoughts. The instinct was... both a desire and an awareness: her own body had the ability to create genetically diverse variants, but not on its own. To do this she needed the right type of genetic material from other individuals, inside her somehow. Not consuming or injecting, but... Finally her dormant instinct to mate and conceive burst through the genetic dam restraining it in a flood of intense yearning. She'd never felt anything like it before; it was starving even though she was fed. It was burning and aching even though she was unharmed.
Slattern sensed that the Masters would not approve of her plan, so she wasted no time. Near the breach, rows of different exterminator variants waited, silent and statue-like, for their deployment orders. The Masters did not closely supervise this holding pen; they had no reason to suspect their creations would do anything other than what they willed. This was her opportunity. Still not completely understanding her own actions, Slattern pressed her upper body to the ground, raised her rear and spread her hind legs as far apart as balance would allow. The other exterminators had been confused, even reluctant, at first. Undeniably curious, though, as they caught a scent from her that stirred something within them. She encouraged them rather forcefully by curling her long mass of tails around their limbs and drawing them in until they were pressed against her. That scent seemed to kindle in the other exterminators the same instinct Slattern had found in herself, and they soon complied with her wishes. They mounted Slattern again and again, one after the other, filling her with their seed as she screeched her bliss to the Anteverse's yellow sky.
Finally, after some vast, indeterminate amount of time, Slattern felt sated. Full, in a new way. Like she'd glutted herself on many tons of flesh. A warm, lazy satisfaction suffused through her. There was a soreness under her tails, between her hind legs, but it was strangely not unpleasant. Her belly was distended and swollen. Though she felt sluggish, she felt a sense of urgency about getting through the breach right now. The new things inside her had no purpose in the Anteverse. Their only purpose was to eradicate and prepare the host planet, and they would gorge themselves on the remains of the vermin's primitive civilization.
Rumor had it that Oblivion Bay was haunted. The graveyard of titans, fallen Jaegers stood guard over the ruins of what used to be called San Francisco Bay, left barren and empty in the Trespasser's wake. Any re-useable parts had been stripped from the Jaegers here, and all that remained in Oblivion Bay were empty metal husks. Hollow sentinels on an eternal watch. It was an eerie sight, to be sure. No living being stirred in Oblivion Bay. Jaeger remains were air-dropped in and forgotten. At first, they'd been dropped in the waters of the bay itself. This soon changed. The official explanation was that dumping Jaeger remains in the ocean was wasteful; scrap metal could conceivably still be harvested from their frames and the salt water caused too much corrosion. And it seemed more fitting, somehow, to have the fallen Jaegers on land, still guarding humanity even in death.
The sea was enemy territory, after all.
The first "disturbances" in Oblivion Bay were dismissed as nothing more than the over-active imaginations of Jaeger pilots on a boring patrol route. The reports spoke of Jaeger husks that had moved far away form their original drop location and the haunting rumors quickly sprang up in their wake. Rumors became larger-than-life myths, which became increasingly outlandish until everyone simply chuckled at their mention. The official explanation for the movement was shifting subsea sediments and oceanic currents. Everyone shrugged and accepted this. Non-functional Jaegers on the ocean floor were hardly a top priority.
Slattern clawed her way out of the Anteverse screaming and convulsing. The silent passageway between worlds was stifling in its emptiness and strangeness and it induced in Slattern a sense of profound unease. The passageway connected the Anteverse to the host planet, but it also connected... elsewhere. Everywhere. The thin atomic web of its walls was all that protected Slattern from horrifying cosmic infinity. She had no sense of space or time in that passageway, only that she must keep moving, must not get lost, must not look to either side. A fiery gash appeared ahead: the breach itself. Slattern punched her massive, two-pronged head through it with a roar of triumph and slithered onto Earth. Her vast limbs cut through the water as she swam. This was not a good location for the new things inside her. Slattern was inexplicably certain that they would need a shelter of some sort. They would be very small and vulnerable. And, none of this planet's vermin dwelled near the breach. The new things would be wasted if she deposited them here. She knew a place... distantly, vicariously, through the memories that all of the exterminators shared. It was closer to inhabited areas, but unlikely to be disturbed. There were structures there that would provide adequate shelter for the new things.
The sea depth dropped off sharply where the mouth of Oblivion Bay met the Pacific Ocean. The two bodies of water were connected by a small strait and framed by the ruins of a great bridge. Just outside the strait, in the deeper waters, Slattern lurked. She had burrowed herself into a shallow pit of silt to conceal her heat signature. Let the vermin think of her movements as a fluke or a glitch. Let them be distracted by the more brash actions of her smaller, weaker brethren. For now. Almost in reach of her goal, Slattern slowly slunk forward, stirring up a thick cloud of sediment around herself. Her multitude of radioactive blue eyes glowed through the haze. She was almost in reach now. Her tails, many hundreds of feet long, curled forward through the murky ocean depth, probing. At last they brushed solid, smooth metal. The powerful appendages coiled tightly around a fallen Jaeger and dragged it out to sea. Jaegers dwarfed any living thing on Earth, but next to Slattern they were nothing more than toys. She pawed at the defunct Jaeger with the long claws on her forelegs. Her nimble tails explored its frame. None of this planet's inhabitants could damage it significantly. Yes, this would suffice. Slattern positioned herself above the Jaeger and squatted. Two long, blade-like ovipositors extended from between her hind legs. Each had jagged, serrated edges and a razor-sharp, stinger-like tip, designed to pierce and hold. The ovipositors slammed downward into the Jaeger's body, easily tearing through its chassis and burrowing deep into its internal components. Thus positioned, Slattern emitted a rumbling, baritone sigh of relief as rope after rope of thick, gelatinous egg-spawn gushed from her body into the Jaeger's.
Finally empty, Slattern retracted her ovipositors. The acidic nature of Slattern's fluids had eaten away the more delicate internals of the Jaeger corpse, and its chassis was filled to the bursting point with her otherworldly spawn. Dribbles of faintly glowing slime oozed from the seams in its armor plating. Now all that remained was the waiting and, this time, Slattern could be patient. The new things would grow and flourish and soon, eradicate and prepare.
"LOCCENT, this is Romeo Blue, we're approaching Oblivion Bay for the final lap of our patrol, over," Trevin Gage announced through the radio.
"Copy that, fellas," Tendo Choi's perpetually chipper voice responded, "Once you pass Oblivion circle back and prepare to dock in LA."
"Thank god," said his co-pilot and identical twin Bruce, "This route is boring as shit. The kaiju already destroyed San Fran, why would they come back?"
"Orders is orders, my man," Trevin replied.
"Yeah, yeah. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die," Bruce chuckled. The Gage twins had been left orphaned by a kaiju attack, and only a few years later their drift compatibility had landed them in the cockpit of Romeo Blue- America's heaviest, toughest Jaeger to date. It was any kaiju survivor's dream, really: to finally fight back and feel something other than complete helplessness in the face of the enemy. Despite their outward complaints, there was no place either young man would rather be. They fell into companionable silence as they marched in unison, their well-conditioned legs hauling the Jaeger's feet up and down in slow, heavy steps. In addition to being boring, the Oblivion patrol route was also a tad unnerving. A broad swath of the ocean floor had been rendered utterly barren by the Trespasser's passage. Radiation from its body had killed all marine life in the vicinity and its giant bulk had decimated coral reefs and rock formations. The ocean, normally teeming with life, was eerily desolate. Romeo Blue unconsciously walked faster.
"Hold up a sec!" Trevin exclaimed. Romeo Blue ground to an ungainly halt as one of its pilots abruptly stopped moving.
"I see it..." said Bruce, following Trevin's train of thought, "Is that one of the Jaegers from Oblivion Bay?"
"Looks like it... the hell is it doing all the way out here?" Trevin said.
"What, you didn't get the memo? 'Shifting subsea sediments and oceanic currents'", Bruce said in a mocking tone.
"Which any person with more than like five brain cells knows is horse shit," Trevin scoffed, "The California current flows north to south. Not randomly away from land and out to sea."
"Yeah, yeah. I'm sure it's ghosts or something. No, wait: robot zombies. That's definitely it," Bruce teased him.
"Whatever. Pick it up over there, B. I want to be back in LA before the bars close," Trevin laughed.
Romeo Blue had nearly passed the other Jaeger when the lifeless chassis suddenly lurched in a rigor mortis-like convulsion. No words were necessary: the pilots' shared adrenaline spike flooded the drift. Rationalizations followed soon after: Some sort of electrical discharge. A marine animal bumped into it somehow. Seismic activity. No explanation made sense, but the pilots clung to them anyway, not wanting to contemplate more far-fetched and loathsome possibilities.
The fallen Jaeger moved again. This time the plating around its midsection appeared to buckle outward, as if something were pressing against it with great force from the inside. Its frame arched up off the ocean floor in another undead convulsion. Neither pilot dared speak, and their thoughts echoed through the drift: Tell LOCCENT? Don't tell LOCCENT, they won't believe us anyway. Just keep walking.
A third, exceptionally violent convulsion ripped through the strange chassis and this time its already damaged armor plating ruptured. Romeo Blue watched in fascinated horror as an enormous swarm of small sea creatures poured from every opening in Jaeger's frame.
"What the fuck!" Trevin shouted.
"Are those... jellyfish? Or something? Some weird squid?" Bruce asked uneasily, "They look like it but..."
It was difficult to accurately gauge the size of the creatures; they were tiny in comparison to Romeo Blue. They were indeed jellyfish-like in appearance, each with a translucent, conical body crowned with an array of waving tentacles. The cone had four small nubs along its length- some sort of rudimentary proto-limbs, perhaps- and a small opening near the point. Each of the creatures glowed with a bright blue phosphorescence. The swarm in its totality was incredibly bright and bathed Romeo Blue in an unearthly glow.
"LOCCENT, this is Romeo Blue. We have... some sort of situation here. Possibly," Bruce relayed unsteadily.
"I read you, Romeo. No kaiju signatures in your vicinity. What's up?" Tendo chirped. A shared thought echoed through Romeo's drift: that guy really needs to lay off the caffeine.
"This is gonna sound weird, but we've got some sort of weird marine life out here. In the dead zone, where there's nothing. They look like... glowing blue jellyfish, or something. Some sort of polyp," Bruce continued.
"And they all came out of an old Jaeger chassis. Like they were nesting in there, or waiting for something," Trevin finished. The creatures had finally stopped pouring from the Jaeger chassis and had massed in a soft, cloud-like formation in front of Romeo Blue.
"Some... jellyfish," Tendo repeatedly skeptically. The creatures began to slowly drift toward Romeo Blue.
"I don't know Choi, I'm not a god damn marine biologist! Point is these things just ain't right somehow. This part of the ocean is irradiated. What can even survive here? These things were not here before and this blue color..." Bruce said. The creatures flowed all around Romeo Blue until it was completely surrounded by a cloud of the soft polyps.
"Try to collect a sample if you can," Tendo said, the tone in Bruce's voice setting him on edge. The polyps swarmed closer and began pressing against Romeo Blue's visor.
"Ugh, these things are getting awfully close... having visibility issues. Switching to instruments," Trevin relayed. His and Bruce's field of vision was nothing but gently waving tentacles and layer after layer of jelly cone-bodies and that infernal blue glow. A hull integrity scan revealed that Romeo Blue was covered in polyps. They had plastered onto its armor from head to foot like a wriggling second skin. Romeo Blue began to run in an attempt to dislodge them, but they clung stubbornly. Alarms began to blare in the conn-pod and instrument malfunction warnings flashed in front of the pilots' eyes.
"LOCCENT, this is Romeo Blue... do you copy? We're looking at a total instrument malfunction here. We're flying blind. We can't see shit," Trevin said.
"Copy that, Romeo Blue. Just... just hold on. We're deploying a submarine crew to guide you back to port. Goddamn tech reports said Romeo was back to a hundred percent after that last maintenance..." Tendo trailed off, muttering angrily.
Trevin and Bruce looked at each other. They had no choice but to wait per Tendo's direction. Not even their most basic navigation tools were operational. They couldn't tell which direction they were walking. They could see nothing but those god-forsaken glowing polyps writhing around, layer upon layer gumming up Romeo Blue's visor. Instead, they looked at each to avoid the repulsive sight.
"I don't know about this, Trev. How long do you think it'll take the subs to show up?" Bruce whispered. He wasn't sure why he had lowered his voice. Though Romeo Blue's thick armor plating separated himself and Trevin from the things outside, they still seemed far too close for comfort.
"We're not that far from LA. Won't be that long, right?" Trevin replied, lowering his voice to match.
Uneasy silence fell between the pilots. The sounds of their breath echoed through the conn-pod as they looked everywhere but straight ahead. The polyps' movements had grown more rapid and intense. The tentacles jerked and thrashed.
The quiet was shattered by a single water drop landing on the conn-pod's metal floor. Trevin and Bruce jumped at the soft plip sound. They looked each other, eyes wide with fresh terror.
"LOCCENT! This is Romeo Blue, do you copy? We have a hull breach, I repeat, we have a hull breach", Trevin shouted.
"Rom- lue-, -u're -aking- up...C- repe-" Tendo's voice struggled to reach Romeo through thick bursts of static.
"LOCCENT, this is Romeo Blue! We can't hear you. LOCCENT, do you copy?" Bruce repeated in desperation. Static was their only answer. Plip. Plip. More water droplets landed on the floor.
"Shit. Comms are down," Trevin swore, "So what now."
"We can still bail," Bruce said, "Escape pods appear to still be functional, at least. For now."
"Out into those things..." Trevin shuddered in revulsion. He jumped as the water droplets increased to a series of steady trickles.
"I don't think it's gonna matter, buddy. If we don't get out... they're coming in," Bruce said.
"Okay, yeah. Yeah. Let's get the fuck out of here," Trevin said shakily. His hand had nearly reached the overhead escape pod controls when a tear appeared in the side of the conn-pod. Trevin was broadsided by a wave of water pouring in. The edges of the tear were glowing and dripping with blue slime. Whatever ooze the creatures were secreting was clearly acidic; all of them pressed together had begun to eat through Romeo Blue's hull. Along with the water, tentacles began stretching into the conn-pod, waving and searching.
"Jesus Christ!" Bruce screamed, "They're coming in, they're coming in!"
Soon the tear was clogged with the creatures, all trying to push their way in simultaneously. The tight mass of their bodies actually slowed the flow of water. Tentacles stretched forward, closer and closer. From this range, the pilots could see that the tentacles weren't smooth; they were covered in thousands of tiny cilia, each one secreting a drip of glowing blue acid.
"Disengage! Get the spear guns!" Trevin said, succumbing to panic. Free of his control harness, he stumbled through thigh-deep water as far away from the hideous polyps as he could.
Pressure had been building and finally the tear widened. With an agonized groan the metal buckled completely and seawater poured in- the creatures along with it.
Slattern sensed movement. She reared her head from the seabed she'd burrowed into, not far from where she'd deposited the new things. They had grown rapidly, and burst from the confining shell of their host. Slattern saw what enticed them out: one of the vermins' exoskeleton weapons had passed nearby. She watched, pleased, as the new things she had made devoured it.
Romeo Blue was no longer visible at all. In its place was a vaguely Jaeger-shaped mass of teeming tentacles. Romeo Blue's conn-pod was completely cratered in, and thin bands of pink and red swirled out into the sea water. Slattern ventured closer, mouth open, scenting the water. Blood and decaying metal. The new things were already succeeding where other variants had failed- and they were growing rapidly. They slowly began to drift away from what remained of Romeo Blue, moving as a unified swarm. They'd had a taste, and now they were hungry. As they drifted into the distance, Slattern felt a fresh wave of heat curling deep in her belly. Pleased with the results of her plan so far, Slattern realized that this was merely the first of many litters. If there was a limit to the amount her body could produce, she could not sense it. Slattern turned back toward the breach; colonization wouldn't be long now.