Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

"Sitara, you're scaring me!"

With an exasperated gasp, I realized that she was probably immobilized by fear. I'd laid it on too thick. I said, "I'm coming, honey."

"What about our things?" she asked, sounding plaintive.

"We don't need that crap. I've filed claims that will make us wealthy for life. I'm almost there!" I yelled aloud, "just be ready to go!"

I rounded the corner between the main arterial corridor and the one that led to that small outlying building where humans had installed their food and laundry facilities. The far wall of the corridor had been built to be translucent, as it looked out over the broad sweep of bare soil that led up from the distant beach a kilometer or so distant. I'd been running flat out, but now I fell to a stop.

The broad slope down to the beach was teeming with... Well, it was teeming with life.

They were the same low, six-legged things I'd seen the soldier shoot at the front of the building. Here there were no soldiers. Just dozens of the things, the monsters. They tearing towards the complex. No, not dozens. Hundreds. Some of them were already close enough that I could see two huge fangs sticking down from the upper jaws. What was happening to Readyworld?

I began to run in earnest. Lena would be in one of the rooms off of a side passage that was only twenty meters from here. I covered the distance at a dead run.

When I got to the food prep area, I found her standing at the room's sole window, a man-made square cut into the smoothly curved interior of the alien architecture. She was frowning at what she saw, and chewing slightly on her lip. It was something I hadn't seen her do since the hell of our last year on Yotoyo's Sphere. She had fashioned a sling for Sonia out of bedding, it seemed, and had the infant tucked tightly up against her chest.

"Lena, let's go!" I said, between breaths, holding onto the door-frame.

She gasped, and ran to me. "Oh, Sitara! Where did those monsters come from?"

"I don't know. We gotta go! Now!" I grabbed her hand and began to run back the way I'd come. When we got to the corner, it was my turn to gasp in surprise; several of the lithe predators that were causing the evacuation were just beyond the transparent wall. They'd crossed a space of hundreds of meters in less than a minute. But what had really caught my attention was the pair of far stranger creatures that were standing about three meters in front of us, out on the packed soil between the corridor's outer wall and an adjacent building. Those two stood erect, wore artificial fabrics, and carried tools and weapons.

Lena and I stood frozen in shock. We were staring at aliens.

The first analog that struck my mind when I saw them was the mythical Centaur, the creature with the body of a horse and the chest, arms, and head of a human. But rather than a horse-like form, these things were shaped more like long-legged spiders on the bottom, with a too-slender upper segment rising from the front. The upper body was crowned with a pair of spindly articulated limbs and a squat head that set into the upper body, rather than connecting to it by a neck. All told, they stood about a meter and a half tall, with a leg-span of maybe three meters across the diagonal. Their arms ended in hands that had way too many fingers. Each of the aliens was wearing a light-weight cloth that was colored in geometric shapes that matched the colors of Readyworld's soil. The alien's low heads were encased in gray helmets that had a shiny black visor on the front. Between the helmets and the visors, there wasn't much to learn of their facial features.

In addition to wearing backpacks and carrying what seemed to be projectile weapons, each of the creatures was holding a long knife in one hand.