Vitalis Omnibus (51 page)

Elsa glanced at Kira, turning the floor over to her. Kira sighed. “Call a general meeting, we’ve got a lot to talk about and everybody should know about it.”

“Where’s Fiona?” Jeremy asked, gasping slightly as he ran up. He frowned when he saw she wasn’t gathered around the two forms on the ground.

“That’s part of what we need to talk about,” Kira said.

Elsa reached down to pick up Coral. Tarn hurried over and helped, hoisting the former maintenance worker between them. “Dissect that thing,” Elsa said. “We’ll go put Coral in a safe place to sleep the toxin off.”

She looked around as Tarn led her towards the closest rope ladder. Was there a safe place anymore?

Chapter 15

Fiona strained until her eyelids popped open enough to allow a sliver of light through. The sliver was enough to blind her with pain and leave her senseless. She couldn’t even force enough thoughts together to draw a breath. When the sliver of white hot steel in her forehead faded she focused on breathing.

She wasn’t nauseous but she felt weak and tired. So damn tired. Her eyes were closed, it would be easy to let go and fall asleep again. She couldn’t do that though. She wasn’t sure why, but she knew she couldn’t. She risked opening her eyes again, only a sliver this time, and found she wasn’t permanently blinded after all.

What she saw made no sense to her.

She stared out of a tunnel that seemed perfectly round aside from the flat floor. The entrance was a hundreds of feet away but it still blasted her with light that made her head swim. Where was she? What had happened? Fiona fought back, digging through dark memories that kept trying to slip away from her grasp.

She remember a woman. It wasn’t Kira. Kira wasn’t even a human to Fiona, she was more of a force of nature. The new woman she remembered was powerful. She was the same height as Fiona but she seemed so much bigger. Stronger, certainly, and beautiful in her own way. Her hair was short and she almost seemed masculine. She remembered wondering if the woman would be willing to fill a void in her life. Jeremy had tried, but he was too preoccupied to meet her needs. That and, well, he didn’t have Fiona’s drive.

She groaned as the name came to her. Elsa. Elsa wasn’t just an unlucky survivor, she’d been sent to help them. She was special forces, one of the leaders of Marine FIST team three. She’d been separated from her team when Mother Vitalis had fought back and scattered some of the screamer pods the Marines used for orbital insertions. Elsa had been guided in by Tarn. It was also obvious that Elsa was interested in Tarn, and Fiona couldn’t blame her. She’d decided to keep working on Jeremy instead.

They’d been training together, she and Elsa. Tracking something, perhaps? What kind of animal would they hunt? She thought of various animals, from prowlers to toads to other smaller creatures that prowled through the jungle. None of them seemed fitting until she thought of the ocean. Something about the water seemed right to her. But her memory of meeting Kira and Elsa and swimming wasn’t right. Oh, it was right, it just wasn’t the right thing.

So why did water click with her? Treetown had a stream to the east of it…

Images flooded through Fiona’s mind, making her gasp aloud. She saw the Marines die as they were eaten alive from the inside, then Wesley made the mistake of getting too close. He died next. They were newborn spitters, and they were different. They weren’t like the other ones. These resembled humans and they’d emerged from the Marines that they’d though rescued from the failed attack. The Marines had served as hosts, allowing the spitters to grow large enough to fend for themselves.

She and Elsa had been tracking one…and now she was here. Where ever here was. Fiona tried to reach up to her head to wipe whatever obscured her vision from her eyes, but neither arm moved very far. She picked up her head and stared at them, then gasped again. Her arms were tied up with vines, the other ends went behind her and were crushed between heavy rocks. Her feet had vines going in the other direction. She was a prisoner.

Fiona kept looking, trying to make sense of her surroundings. The cave was large, but less than a dozen feet tall and, in the room she lay in, twenty feet across. She picked her head up as best she could and felt aches all over her body.
Dried blood marred her skin in many places, making it look like she’d been bitten many times. Her wrists and ankles were chafed by the vines and her stomach had a deep ache inside of it. Fiona’s heart slammed against her chest at the last realization. Was she a host? Were the spitters crawling around inside of her abdomen chewing up her organs?

She stared at her stomach, her eyes tearing up. She blinked and cleared away some of the tears, both wet and dried. The rock between her spread legs was stained. She wrinkled her nose, surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. There was more than just filth there, there was blood as well.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Fiona whispered. Every woman upon entry to the Marines has her cycle halted. No pregnancy during active duty. No cycles either. They were expected to perform and have no hormonal problems that would interfere with their performance. It was sexist, but that had been part of the appeal as well for her. So why did it look like she’d had the mother of all heavy flow periods while she’d blacked out?

Something twitched in her stomach. She gasped and fell back, shocked at the feeling. Propping herself up as best she could she stared again. Her belly was swollen, there was no doubt about it. More than that, she thought she saw something move against her skin.

Icy tendrils spread down her spine and arms. Fiona was panting and she couldn’t stop. Was she a host? Was she just seeing things in the dark? A motion inside of her made her jerk. No, there was no imagining it. Something was alive inside of her.

“I don’t want to die,” Fiona whimpered. “Not like this!”

She sobbed, alone and in misery on the cave floor. Occasionally a tremble of something inside of her would make her twitch and send fresh tears running down her cheeks. The Marines that had been infested, she remembered, had been out of their minds. They were barely lucid at the best of times, yet she felt fully conscious.

“Mother Vitalis… Kira…somebody, please help me!” Fiona cried. “Don’t let this happen to me. Don’t let them eat me while I’m still alive! Anything…I’ll give anything. Just not this!”

A shadow passed over her, stopping her desperate prayer. She turned her head and saw a man walking towards her carrying something. He was obscured by the light behind him, offering only his silhouette. He was big though, big enough that he could save her! She didn’t understand the smaller things that travelled behind him. Children? Maybe she wasn’t sane after all.

“Tarn? Is that you?”

The something the creature carried was tossed to the ground beside her, making her try to jerk away from it. “Eat.”

Fiona stared at the creature that had spoken. The word, though recognizable, had been mangled. She turned her head to the mass beside her and saw the torn open remains of some animal that had been caught. The portion given to her was so damaged she couldn’t even identify what it had once been. The smell of the savagely butchered meat reached her nose, making her stomach clench. The thing inside of her responded. It seemed to spin on itself and kick at her belly from within. She imagined a baby would do feel the same. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.

“Eat!” It growled at her again.

“I can’t eat, you fucker!” Fiona screamed. She yanked with her arms, only to have her strength fail her a moment later. “I’m tied to these fucking rocks, you piece of shit!”

It knelt beside her, moving enough so that the light shown on it from the side. It was one of the hybrids. She gagged, her chest refusing to draw air as she remembered what had happened.

She’d been bitten by the spitter. It had poisoned her and taken her captive. Her memories were blurry and confusing, but she remembered a distant pain and a heavy weight on her. Then she remembered more pain, still distant but overwhelming. She’d thrown up from the agony, it had been so bad. Then more pain had come, later. Pain that she instinctively knew how to rid herself of. She’d bore down and pushed it out, forcing the agony from her before she passed out again.

One of the creatures hands brushed across her belly, making the murderous beasts within flutter.

“Nononononono,” Fiona chanted until the new breed of spitter brought a piece of raw flesh to her mouth. She tried to close her lips but it had already pushed it in. The juice of the meat forced her body to betray her. She chewed and swallowed it, then opened her mouth and turned her head like a hatchling trying to beg its mother for food. The spitter obliged, feeding her more of the meat until she felt sated.

Fiona slumped back onto the cruel rock floor. She stared up at the ceiling, tears runnings from her eyes. It was impossible, what had happened. She felt the spasms as the life within her began to receive the fresh nutrients.

Movement drew her eyes towards the spitter. Two smaller creatures had accompanied it into the cave. They now pushed up to her, one climbing up and over her. She stared, disbelieving, as the swarthy but almost completely human-looking toddlers each crawled onto her sore and swollen breasts to nurse.

Now she prayed for death to take her, but she knew it wouldn’t. Vitalis had changed her beyond what she’d believed possible. She wasn’t a host, she was a mother.

Fiona screamed until she passed out.

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Part 7: Matriarch

Chapter 1

Fiona’s nostrils flared as her breath rushed through them. Her teeth were clenched, fighting past the pain that she couldn’t find a way to get used to. Every time it was the same, the tearing and the agony of childbirth. Not her children, they were his. During a particularly hateful moment she’d decided to name him Adam, for he was the father of a new species.

She wasn’t Eve. When she’d enlisted in the Terran Coalition of Worlds Marine Corps she’d been rendered medically infertile. Every woman underwent the treatment, it was part of the enlistment process. When their active duty service ended the procedure was reversed. Welcome back periods, PMS, and the chance to have babies. Fiona was officially MIA, her genetic ability to reproduce had never been turned back on. Vitalis didn’t care. When Adam had taken her the very first time something had awakened inside her body. Something she hadn’t even been aware of. Now she was the Vitalian equivalent of the virgin mother.

Adam wasn’t human. Not entirely. He was an evolutionary nightmare. A species that possessed both animal and insect genetic material had destroyed a human research settlement on Vitalis. They walked on four legs and looked like a giant beetle covered in hair. Their name, spitter, came from the toxin laden saliva they could project over a dozen feet that paralyzed within minutes.

An unfertilized spitter egg had been implanted in a human host. The egg took the DNA from the host to create the fertilization, begetting a combination of Vitalian nightmare and human. The only problem was the new breed couldn’t reproduce. Every infected human host had been a man and thus the resulting offspring had been male.

The second lump of squirming flesh slid free onto the floor of the cave. It was always two, for some reason. This was her third birthing and every time it was fraternal twins. The newborns looked human at first glance, in a swarthy and ugly way. Their teeth were already grown in and they had thick bristly hair that grew all over their bodies. She stared at the mewling newborn as it thrashed on the ground and eventually righted itself. It was a female, making to total four males and two females she’d given birth to. She knew she should hate it; to squash it and destroy it. But she couldn’t. Her exhaustion was overwhelmed by a need to nurse and protect the newborns.

Adam reached down and pulled the bastard child away. Fiona was too weak to struggle. Behind her captor the other four children were gathered. The two eldest were nearly fully grown even though they were only two months old. A male and a female, the female’s abdomen was swollen as she neared the end of her month long gestation period. The next two looked like pre-pubescent teens after only a single month of age. They were both male and the most troublesome.

Unlike their father, the monsters had faces that were almost human, if not quite proportional. They lacked the mandibles Adam and the other hybrids possessed, but still had vicious fingernails that doubled as claws. Her offspring possessed five fingers and toes and, anatomically, were fully humanoid. The eldest stood closer to seven feet tall than six feet, the only other glaring difference between them and a full human.

“Rest,” Adam croaked at her. “Eat.”

Fiona had strength enough to flip him off. The birthing had exhausted her. One of the firstborn shuffled forward with the remains of a lizard they’d captured while hunting. It pulled off strips of raw meat and fed them to her. Blood ran down her face as she chewed on the spicy meat. She’d tried refusing to eat in the past; it didn’t go well for her. She had three or four days after giving birth before Adam would return to impregnate her again. That was the only time she had real control of her body. Otherwise her body demanded sustenance, no doubt because of the rapid development of the fetuses.