CHAPTER 10
"STICKY TECH"
"I concentrate the midnight without the benefit of ceremony."
- White Zombie; Psychoholic Slag; "Welcome To Planet Motherfucker".
The seven Bio-Viziers made landfall on a bluff overlooking the sea. Their ebony war suits humming softly with the power of strange energies. Lord Afua stood perched on the very edge. Far below white surf pounded wet rock. The spraying foam illuminated in pale moonlight.
It was about ninety feet down to the rocks. Somewhere beneath the waves the probe they'd sent was activeley pursuing the Kha'bj-te Amedha. Soon the robot would obtain a sample and their mission would be complete.
But Afua who had a habit of leaving nothing to chance, had come down with a force of his own to pursue their own sample. The Kha'bj-te Amedha left traces of itself wherever it went. And the data gathered from the probe said that the Laughing Meat had come this way as it made it's way to the sea.
Afua gazed at the restless waters that stretched on as far as the eye could see. Far below the Kha'bj-te Amedha would be swimming through the inky depths, eating whatever lived down there. The world below was quiet, and black. All was cold and pressure in the deep. Afua knew this first hand, for he had hunted beneath the waves of many strange seas.
"We've picked up a trail." Ayoola clicked through the communicator in Afua's helmet. The scientist tribe having long ago adopted the traitional hunter's dialect for work in the field.
As one the group sprang into silent action. The seven Bio-Viziers bolted down the hill that lead away from the bluff, and into a dense wood whose trees towered over one hundred feet in the air. Their war suits lent power to their stride. Allowing them to run at more than twice the speed of the swiftest Yautja. Unwise as it was, Afua gave a mental command and the air filters on his helmet opened up. The Bio-Vizier breathed in a lungful of cool night air.
He couldn't help himself. Caught up in the moment. The flexing of the genetically enchanced muscles in his legs as he sprinted. The strange ghostly purple energies flowing through his armor complementing, aiding, enhancing his every move. The beginning of a forbidden hunt. He let out a roar. A hunter's roar. One that instantly gave away their position to any vigilant ears.
But instead of dispproving looks, his comrades joined him in his revelry. Howling up at the moonlit sky as they bolted into the forest of giant trees. Soon the group was using the trees to swoop through the forest in ways their brethren could only dream.
Flipping silently fifteen feet through the air, only to land with expert precision onto an intended branch without losing a fraction of speed. Then repeating the process. Over and over. Their war suit's computer systems calculating trajectory, and velocity while working in perfect unison with the Bio-Vizier's individual moves. Within moments they were over a mile into the dark tangle of giants.
Afua felt invincible. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings and the looming threat of a thing that should not be, Afua was not afraid. They had their "Sticky Tech". The science of the Bio-Vizier's was mighty. Every day they broke new ground in the understanding and mastery of the physical laws that governed existence.
The name had alway struck Afua as funny. The name being directly based off of a Pyode Amedha language. Bio-Vizier Obasi was quite the eccentric. His main interests lying in the science of communication, and the study of languages. His knowledge of forbidden lore was unparrallel.
Sticky Tech (Obasi's creation) was one of the Order of Bio-Vizier's most recent, and greatest technological achievements. The basic concept was born out of an effort to manupulate energy in a "different" way. Energy always flows in waves, bolts, rays, things like that. But what if you could make it fall gracefully through the air like a feather?
What if you could make it flow like a waterfall? Could you make a whirlpool? An energy whirlpool? What would such a thing look like? And where would it lead? What if you could make energy move like the wind? Could you make a cyclone?
It was these questions that the basic research of Sticky Tech began with anyway. The ultimate results of this new exploratory science were astonishing. Though ironically the results in no way addressed any of the exotic questions and wild theories that had been presented at the onset of the research.
In the end they hadn't been able to make energy fall like rain drops. Nor had they been able to make it blow like the wind. Energy was a stubborn thing. But so far they had managed to coax it into a few different forms.
Just like the name implied, sticky tech was the process of getting energy to stick onto things in globs. To say that the energy had a sticky quality to it would be grossly inaccurate. But they could shoot the energy out in undulating weightless blobs both great and small, that would latch onto and fry whatever they touched until the energy dissapated.
That was the first step in Sticky Tech anyway. Building on this new discovery they had forged arms the likes of which have never been scene. Ghostly purple light hummed strangley and softly within their weapon's and armor. Whispering gently the promise of destruction both terrible and beautiful.
Let the Female Clans keep their technology and their secrets. The Bio-Vizier's had secret sciences of their own. It was only a matter of time before the Order of Bio-Viziers overthrew the Queen and the female clans, and took their rightful place as the true rulers of the Yautja Empire.
Afua listened to the sounds of the night life as they swung and leapt throught the trees. Crickets chirpped. Large beasts screached and howled in the dark canopy far above. There was a sudden dip in the wood, and the group found themselves moving downhill.
They had moved steadily downward at least sixty feet before Afua noticed that the canopy had remained in place. In fact it was higher in some places. This was a part of the wood that was older, he realized with deep admiration and wonder. The trunks of the trees here were enourmous, and gnarled with time.
Since the advent of Sticky Tech Afua had to constantly willfully ignore the fact that this science bore a striking resemblance to one mentioned in a terrible passage within the ever rotting, but everlasting worm ridden pages of the dread Book of Eibon. Had he not first read about the blaspemous forms energy can sometimes take in those pages?
Perhaps he had subconcously mentioned something in passing concerning the remolding of energy? Perhaps that was what had first sparked the basic idea in Bio-Vizier Obasi that would lead him to later on propose Sticky Tech be an area of focus for the clan's research. Was it not whispered in hushed voices around fires that the Book of Eibon was infectious in ways impossible for any mortal to forsee?
"Ten meters ahead." Baruti's voice clicked in Afua's ear. Drawing him out of the dark contemplations that seemed to spring up, and suck him in with increasing frequency as of late. The group froze on their perches. Some hanging sidways like spiders on the massive tree trunks. There gauntleted hands and spiked boots easily digging into and finding purchase in the ancient bark. They were over three miles into the forest now.
It was the pheremone detectors that had tipped them off. No visual confirmation had been given. Badru was at the head of the pack. "Sensor's picking up a seismic disturbance on the ground." His voice clicked in his comrade's ears. "Small. No more than three hundred pounds at most."
"That's a small form for the Kha'bj-te Amedha." Ayoluwa clicked.
The group rapidly cycled through vison modes. The landscape was bathed in quickly changing shades of green's, blues, purples, reds. That's when they first saw it. As soon as their visors had hit the red shift spectrum it popped up.
It was about sixty feet below them, standing in a clearing about twenty feet wide. Silhoutted in a gray light that bordered on white in some places. It was humanoid. Tall, completley hairless. And seemingly impossibly thin.
"Too frail." Afua thought. "Much too frail for the Kha'bj-te Amedha."
He didn't like it. The thing was just standing there. Rooted to the ground. Swaying back and forth lazily. Almost hypnotically. Almost like a... Flower...
"Be careful not to completley destroy it my brothers." Badru clicked softly. Bringing Afua once again back out of the reach of Eibon.
Weapons were raised. The strange energies that lived within them seemed to tense up (if it could be said that energy can do such a thing) with a terrible, sentient anticapation.
"Wait." Ayoluwa suddenly clicked. "Seismic sensors are picking up something moving beneath the ground."
"Wha-." Was all Afua managed to say before a single word boomed deafeningly in his ears. But it did not come from his helmet's communicators. Nor did it come from a voice vibrating the air outside his war suit.
"Yautja." It came from the ethreal. It came from a black, unknowable place where melevolent single celled organisms hold communion. They had been discovered! The thing below them began to shudder, and spasm, and the very trees they were on began to shake.
Baruti did not wait another second. Raising his weapon he fired at the skinny monster. The undulating globs of bright purple energy found their mark and latched on. The Kha'bj-te Amedha cried out in pain.
That gave Afua a little satsifaction, as the tree he was hanging from began to snap and crack and he was flung off, and out into the night. Just as his perch sprang into horrid life he had reflexivley pushed off with his feet with the momentum of the twisting tree flinging him.
His war suit read this and added it's own contribution. Calculating the distance to Afua's intended tree trunk, and adding the power needed to give him the extra eleven and a half feet he needed to make it there safely.
He hit the tree, latched on, and snapped his gaze this way and that. The Bio-Vizier didn't need his war suit's intruments to tell him. The trees were infected! Already they were turning white from the inside out.
Standing out in stark conrast against the red shift giant trees looking like pieces of a monolithic skeleton of some dead demon in Hell. Just then Afua saw Alomwe and Badru plummet passed him.
Something wet struck his shoulder, and was instantly vaporized in a small crackle of ghostly purple lightening. Afua looked up. The trees were growing fruit! Some horrible transparent bulbous fruit, filled with a sickly yellowish fluid. And some of the branches (which had limbered up considerably) were flinging them!
His defense systems warned him of another incoming death fruit and he leapt out of it's way just on time. Landing on a branch about ten feet down. They had to get out of the killzone and regroup!
Ayoola was about thirty feet up, still firing down at the humanoid. He was nearly struck by a gigantic swinging branch (which was more like a grotesque hand now), but his war suit's sensors warned him, and he leapt out of the way just on time. The branch struck the other tree with a deafening wet THWAP! Bark, sap, and unholy things exploded outward in a gorey cloud.
Suddenly there was a sound akin to a boulder plummeting into a lake. And then a boulbous orb of neon pink light went streaking across the writhing wood. Bright streaks of blinding pink lightning danced furiously within the undulating orbs. The strange energy within angrily struggling to escape it's prison.
Afua watched as the energy got it's wish. Their was a blinding flash like a mini-pink-supernova as the orb struck a tree (that was no longer a tree), and let out a sound akin to leaves blowing in a sudden gust of wind. The sound both soft and loud at the same time as the released energy stretched out into strange wavelengths, and plains of existence.
The Kha'bj-te Amedha tree for it's part let out a terrible howl that Afua suspected sounded strange even to itself. The bloody carnage that ensued took less than three seconds.
The pink glob of energy now broken, blinding lightening that could only be called pink in the losest of terms raced angrily up and down the massive plant monster. Within about a second the entire two hundred and twenty foot beast was covered in crackling, arching pink.
Then the energy pulled in on itself. Sucking every atom of the beast into the point where the pink orb had struck. Then the monstrosity was spat out the other end of the point. Only turned completley inside out and sizzling. Over two hundred feet of Kha'bj-te Amedha sucked in and spat out in a matter of seconds.
The creature wasn't dead. Not enireley. Surley hundreds of millions of cells had been slain at the very least. The inside out monstrosity twitched, and smoked. He thought he heard it attempt to moan, but the sound that came out was like a water being sucked down a drain.
"Insruments indicate eleven infected trees remaining!" Azizi clicked through the other's helmets over the sounds of battle.
Afua was about to ask where the humanoid Kha'bj-te Amedha had gone, when he glanced down and saw for himself. Alomwe and Badru were squaring off with the beast. The monster had grown twice in height but remained just as stick like.
The beast was sort of half crouched on the ground. Having lost a leg from the knee down, and an arm at the shoulder. Afua could see the smoldering limbs it had abandoned. The malevolent purple globs burning away at the unholy cells as they tried to escape.
The sizzling stumps had failed to regrow. The Sticky Tech having seared the cells on the perephial of the wounds. Soon the living cells would push through though. It was only a matter of time.
Badru lunged at the creature, his sword crackling with red lightening that was both impossibly deep, and blinding at the same time. The Bio-Vizier was a blur of speed and skill, but impossibly the Thing rolled out of the way and batted the Bio-Vizier away with it's remaining twig like arm. Badru went sailing off into the forest.
The humanoid thing roared and large root like tendrils erupted out of the ground around the creature. Whipping about the beast. Alomwe took a few hesitant steps back. In a few seconds the space around the monstrosity was so thick with writhig roots that the ground was completley hidden.
He had no idea what the Thing was doing. This was something new. Afua could see now that the Kha'bj-te Amedha had been in the process of becoming something strange, and terrible before they'd interrupted it.
"Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly." That voice in the back of his head said.
The roots began to wrap around the monster, but Afua was temporarily distracted. The night air was now alive with the strange lights and sounds of the Bio-Vizier's weapons fire. Neon pink globs streaked across the battlefield. Blinding lightening sucking gigantic tree beasts into tiny points as bright as exploding stars.
Folding them up in some impossibly small world where the laws of physics marched to a different tune. Then spitting them back out (inside out) into reality a twitching, steaming mountain of slop.
Afua couldn't help but be astonished by the Kha'bj-te Amedha's resilience. Sureley there was no creature born of natural processes that could ever hope to survive such a blow! More sickly yellow fruit came flying at him. The fruit had ripened. For now the terrible yellow fluid within glowed with a malicious phosperecence.
He pushed off from his perch with enough strength to cross the twenty feet of open space above the clearing. Landing on the side of a seemingly uninfected tree. His clawed gauntlets and boots stabbing into the bark for purchase. But despite the impossible display of acrobatics, one of the two dozen or so death fruits found it's mark. Exploding on his forearm.
There was a sound like a giant rotten tomatoe being squashed underfoot. And for a second that seemed to stretch on for a thousand years, the infectious yellow juices raced up his arm. Literally raced! Defying gravity!
Then his War Suit's energy field vaporized the army of unholy cellular creatures in a mini-storm of ghostly purple lightning. The thousand years ended, and Afua heaved a sigh of relief.
"Thank you Sticky Tech." He offered up a prayer to science, the one true God. More blinding pink and purple globs flew. More tree beasts were undone. The surrounding forest and ground were lit up in the glow of blinding purple patches of splattered energy globules busy burning away at whatever they had struck.
Even the very dirt of the forest floor was burning! Great pores in the ground were opening up as the malicous globules burned their way down. The battlefield was rapidly becoming thick with smoke. Worse still the ground was growing unstable, as it was continually honeycomed.
Afua was eager to end the battle with the humanoid Kha'bj-te Amedha, retrieve a sample of the unholy beast, and be gone. His comrades would finish off the tree beasts.
Alomwe was his concern now. His fellow Bio-Vizier's being like brothers to him, Afua would lay down his life for any one of them. And it looked like Alomwe needed that kind of brotherly love right now.
The humanoid Kha'bj-te Amedha now wore a great skirt of large writing roots. While Afua had not been looking they had wrapped themselves around the creature's waist. The roots had then apparently raised the creature about ten feet into the air.
The monstrosity screeched and bellowed deafeningly as it's new root like appendages struck repeatedly at Alomwe's shield. His ebony war shield and spear both crackled with arching red lighting.
Every time one of the tendrils struck the Bio-Vizier's shield there was a small explosion of blinding red light, and the red lightening would arch up the trangressing apendage. Searing away about three feet of the hellish thing.
But for every one of the tendril's that skulked away smoking and hissing, two more erupted out of the forest floor to take it's place. So that Alomwe had been beaten back to the edge of the clearing. The humanoid Kha'bj-te Amedha was in a terrible rage.
Afua watched aghast as a barrage of the ropy tendrils struck his comrade's shield. In the blinding explosion of energy that ensued the Bio-Vizier failed to see the tendril shoot below his shield and wrap around his ankle until it was too late.
The Bio-Vizier was instantly ripped off his feet and up into the air. Afua gave a mental command and his shoulder cannon instantly locked onto the Kha'bj-te Amedha. Just then, in that instant before he fired, the tree he was clinging to shifted violently.
Afua snapped his gaze to his perch. For a terrifying second thinking the tree was infected and had become a monster. But that wasn't the case. The forest floor beneath the tree was now rife with deep smoking craters.
The tree shifted again and began to fall. All two hundred and twelve feet of it. Afua was in a bad spot. He was clinging to the falling side of the tree. The ground came at him at near blinding speed. He lost his handhold.
Then in the last second before he was crushed to a pulp he pushed off with his legs. Even with his suit enhancing his reflexes and calculating his trajectory, it was a hopeless act trying to land on his feet.
As it was he hit the ground hard on his back. Though he bareley felt it through his war suit. The massive tree for it's part came crashing down about three feet from the Bio-Vizier. Afua rolled onto his knees.
The beast was about fifteen feet away. Towering over him with it's skirt of writhing root tendrils. Even though the Thing had no eyes to speak of, Afua knew that it was looking at him. Alomwe temporarily forgotten, dangled by a tendril behind the creature's bulk.
That's when the creature charged at him. He was surprised. Afua until that moment having believed that the creature with it's skirt of writing roots was immobile. The roots were indeed rooted to the ground though. The massive explosion of dirt as they carved a lightning fast path toward him being a testamony to that.
On his knees as he was, in that moment Afua would surely have been undone had it not been for the glory of Sticky Tech. The Bio-Vizier gave a mental command and one of his gauntleted fists instantly took on a turquoise glow.
He slammed an open palm into the ground. There was a sound like a distant gong being struck, and a strange reaction occurred between the ghostly energy emanating from his gauntlet and the forest floor. An intricate turquoise pattern carved intself out a path in the dirt. The light much brighter than the glow of his gauntlet.
It took the pattern of energy about a half second to finish carving itself out. In the end it was a perfect circle about three feet in diameter centered around Afua's glowing palm. Within the circle was an intricate webwork of strange shapes and patterns.
Then in the next half second the entire pattern lit up like a turquoise supernova. Blinding energy globules geisered up out of the light. All told their were nearly two dozen of them. They floated there like bubbles rising out of soapy water.
There was a blinding lightening storm within each one. But the lightening did not streak, and arch like lightening aught to. It sort of rolled. Sort of drifted across it's mini-landscape. The strange storms making a sound akin to distant windchimes.
As soon as the energy bubbles came into being they began to rapidly expand. Within a half second they were the size of apples. By the next half second their growth seemed to plateu at around watermelon size.
The humanoid Thing saw this, and to the credit of it's reflexes instantly reacted. But it was too late. The Kha'bj-te Amedha had been going too fast, and collided into some of the floating turquoise bubbles.
There was a sound like porceline shattering as the energy bubbles the Kha'bj-te Amedha collided with popped. The sound of windchimes seemd to grow ever so slightly closer with each bubble that was undone. From their point of impact the turquoise energy began to rapidly spread out across the monstrosity's tendril skirt. The blinding light consuming all as it moved.
The reaction was much slower than the bubble's birth had been. It took about three seconds for the spilt energy to spread out across the whole of the writhing mass of tendrils, and begin it's climb upward. The Kha'bj-te Amedha howled in agony.
One of it's arm's dropped off, and attempted to scurry away. It's head tried the same trick. But the strange and terrible light would have none of it. The Thing's body seemed to abandon itself, and began to fall apart in a gorey rain.
As the creature came undone the turqoise energy snaked after the fleeing pieces. Catching and consuming each one. The energy singing it's strange song as it ate. The sound of windchimes somehow reminding Afua of the laughter of demons he'd read about in the Book of Eibon.
Within about six seconds of the Kha'bj-te Amedha's initial impact into the bubbles, the monster had been reduced to smoldering dust. Afua ran to Alomwe. Helping the Bio-Vizier to his feet. It was only the energy coursing through his armor that negated the effects of Afua's attack, and saved him.
"Quickly now brother. We must - " But Afua was cut off by Ayoola's voice. Having forgotten to use the hunter's dialect in his excitement. "I've obtained a sample! I've obtained a sample!"
Afua's heart leapt in his chest. Monstrous trees loomed. And blinding globs of energy streaked through the night. The forest was filled with terrible deafening chitterings, and buzzings that made the blood run cold.
"Everyone pull back!" Afua shouted into his communicator, as he and Alomwe took off running. "We must protect Ayoola at all costs!"
"Thanks for reading! Please feel free to comment, and critique. Chapter 11 coming very soon!"