Chapter 20: Chapter 19 - There is Another .- -. --- - .... . .-. who .-- .... --- can serve . My Purpose.

Duolin Oneka, the second male prime minister of Prophrecia, puts his feet up on a plush red pillow and yells down a receiver. “I don’t CARE what you think is best for this administration, we can not allow the Glaswegian Knights to operate in the area, national security is at risk here!”

The voice on the phone responded, yelling,

“Sir, with all respect, there are authorities higher than you and those authorities names are: basic, logic. I will not have lives at stake here!”

“Rehearse that in professional language and come back to me.”

Duolin circled back to his steward, “have the Supreme General on call with the R.O.M. Also who the hell let Ms. Pelag in on the Juj? I want tabs on her movements.”

“Should I cancel Madam Warner's meeting with the madam of the HD?"

With feverish intensity, Oneka rubbed his face with one hand, staring out of the window, sighing loudly, he did not care for the boy with the clipboard hanging over him, the secretary was paid well enough to tolerate disrespect.

“Right, just, let her know I’ll be waiting on her report. And, remind her none of this data can leak.”

“I’ll remind her, again.”

--

Noisemaker cradled their head as it burst out in another ache.

Their finger-claws pulse a preparation pattern on triangular palms, veins pulse, a boat’s wake passed on the water, palps tongued the air. Scents pulled in, a myriad thoughts and throbs. ‘Parent, why are you going, - where are you going – where are we going -’ saturating the air.

The boat was smelled before it was seen, thick flatulent whisps of yellow smoke from tall chimneys. A funny looking thing, or maybe that was only adrenaline-altered perception, tall of bow, a thick and sturdy shelled sort of vessel heavy with a forest of crates all marked “G-coal” behind which a small structure sat, the cockpit? Not all knowledge of human tools was available to Noisemaker, even after weeks of uncovering the memories. As the thing approached, Noisemaker felt themselves recoil, it was like some enormous weight was pressed right against every funny-bone in their body. Lightning jolted their nerves. The feeling, it was definitely coming from the ship.

The sensation abated, Noisemaker decided to ignore it, they lept forward but were stopped by Leader’s fingers, which were fatter than what Noisemaker remembered from when they’d last been in the sleeping pit, holding the engineer’s shoulder, Leader shouted over the crash of the boat “we need to take all the larvae with us, they can fight now. We need success more than safety.”

Noisemaker nodded, launching themselves, thirteen beastly vines sprouted along the hull of the ship, they pulled themselves up with their arms, one among them twice as long and fat. The mother’s eyestalks looked onto the deck from over the gunwale like wet obsidians glinting atop pale fingers, four humans were operating some kind of winch, only one of them was facing Noisemaker, facing the two eyes, the human ignorantly stared right into those gemstone eyes without expressing any surprise, any consideration. Noisemaker could, alone, swallow them whole, one-by-one. They pulled themselves up over the edge of the boat, slowly, flopping their belly against the deck, they were obscured in the shade.

On the shore Winglings were in pairs, preparing to lift the shelled ape-like warriors, Wings themself was pressed up against the wall of the house where they’d been waiting like a living lamppost.

Leader gave an invisible signal and a sound like an orchestra of only violins immediately overpowered the boats’ engines, the deck of the ship thumped and banged as cow-sized beasts of bone were delivered from the air, the lanky fliers heaved for breath, aching from the exertion.

But by that point each crewhand or deckswab or whatever had been leashed to the floor by saliva-crystals, a serpent the length of a bus unfurled its hare-lips and used oral limbs to pull the poor saps inside of stomach walls, from which muffled, gurgling screaming could be heard for roughly ten or twelve seconds. Coiling and knotting their body in on itself, Noisemaker felt such pity for the helpless creatures now trapped inside, at least they would quickly asphyxiate in the folds of the digestive system, the worm scanned the site for threats to the family.

When the man in body armour emerged from the roofed structure of the ship, towing a shotgun, they pointed it at a Wingling and blasted open a hole in Noisemaker’s leg while the lightning fast tendons of a three-fingered hand pushed the human’s neck much closer to the floor than it was ever designed to withstand. Responsibility is a greater pain than any flesh wound, though the mangled leg burned a crunching pain as a helpful engineer child coated the openings with hive-material. The bleeding abated but the leg had to be held up awkwardly.

Further gunshots sounded from behind the cargo, hopefully hopefully hopefully these humans could not possibly be equipped to fight such a terrifying threat, a sudden, overpowering force. Yes. Hopefully. The thought that their children were beastly horrors was a comfort to Noisemaker.

Warriors walked throughout the deck, between the crates all strapped down by great wires, Winglings bounded in a flight-assisted sprint to rapidly discover and acidify the other guards of the ship. Every deafening gunshot made Noisemaker vomit into their throat, and they could taste blood and melted fat and cerebro-spinal fluid. The gurgling screams of melting men rang out, and gunshots too.

‘Leader. Secure the children, protect them.’ Command pheromones.

But it stopped being so concerning, a thundering buzz ceased overhead and Arms was suddenly dropped from a height by four and six struggling foragers, including the near-adult Wings. The truck-sized beast fell through the air silently, then a cannonshot noise occured as Arms crushed into the deck, breaking into the below-deck operations of the ship and the entire ship lurched to one side from the impact. With Arms, alone, in a basement of gunfire exploding outwards in a cacophany, amidst clouds of dust knocked up by the fall and the futile violence. Arms themself was near-blind from that morning’s fight with the machine creature, and they could not risk their sensitive tongue for all the flying bullets, they could only foolishly walk in the direction of pistol and rifle, bullets embedding into the armour, small calibres bouncing off of the enormous arm which lifted up and, like a gorilla toying with fruit, Arms awkwardly placed their giant fist against the chest of the nearest human, pushing her up against the wall, squeezing juice out of it like the Gojifruit from the forest with a sound like a watermelon dropped onto stone. Arms hesitantly crushed the guards that had not fled, in places they popped like eggshells and ripped like wet meat. The great boney hemisphere of a head shifted to face the two or three neon-adorned engineers, all fleeing away from an enormous churning engine. Noisemaker crept to the edge of the hole, watched as a metal mouth in the machinery, blackened from fire, slid open and a burlap sack full of shifting G-coal fell into the fire.

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With a blink of eye-stalks, the world fell away, like curtains drawn over a theatrical performance. Stars danced on the sheets of blackness where there had just been a boat. Noisemaker turned in confusion, it was like they had suddenly been launched into space watching the ground below get smaller and smaller. Staring at the world through a peephole that got longer and longer. A sensation was trickling through every fold in the brain like Leader’s mind-magic, it hummed down the notochord, pooled in the ganglia. Only, of course, it was a trillion times more… enormous.

A sensation of having your open wounds plucked like guitar strings. A sensation like being born. Thrown down a rabbit-hole gullet, hurtling and spinning through the air, unsure of where is up or down in the momentum of pain. Every nerve alight. Every single tissue in their body now sentient, now entirely conscious, only through pain is there awareness of each and every contour of the organism, each organ, a three dimensional mapping of the body through pain. It was like opening your eyes for the first time in when previously you were blind, a new existence of heightened stimulation which could never be recovered from, like not realising you had spent your whole life sat down and being put in a standing position in an oubliette. Noisemaker was a speck whirling in a vast vortex of sensory immensities, an ant suddenly with the understanding of a man, and worst of all was some kind of whale in the room with the ant, an eye the size of a continent shifted in tectonic drift, rippling outwards a calamitous psychic upheaval only with its craterous pupil turned to face exactly into the eyes of Noisemaker, thousands of miles of silent void all ignored by this enormity in favour of one specific creature. Like being an ant suddenly realising that the mountain you’re looking at, whose vastness led you to believe it inanimate, that thing is a human, a singular creature, and the human is looking at you, and the human is looking at you and this thing, this enormity, understands your language and has plans for you. The sudden awareness of this cruelly gargantuan sentience ached, mightily.

The word, like a migraine’d eyeball staring at an incandescent bulb, scorched into Noisemaker’s brain, scrawling itself into each screeching nerve.

“Oh?”

The engineer woke up, stroking the canyons they had made in their neck with their claws, a patrol of warriors, foragers, and engineers, little Spider among them, were all tending to the sleeper. Not far away a similar entourage was tending to the convulsing body of Leader, the many keeping those hands, like human hands, away from Leader’s open eyes. Having been forcefully taught how to ‘feel’ the weight of a psychology, Noisemaker tensed their ocular muscles at the bubble-ish creature, hot-white on the floor. Noisemaker listened to that faded and molecular mind, tiny in comparison to that fucking thing at the bottom of the world, they glowed, but were unconscious, but still clinging to life. Sweat and ‘concern’ ran slick onto the floor. Noisemaker was afraid, afraid that Leader would die and be gone.

Noisemaker looked to the surrounding area, ‘We have to move below deck, in groups, warriors at the spear-head to perform as defilade, moving down the tight corridors, foragers will sit at the rear acting as ranged-support.’

The words flowed out of olfactory pores in under a second.

“We…” A relatively-little warrior said, dried blood smattered against its head and shoulder plates, oily black blood running between its armour. Time was moving so slowly for Noisemaker. “We’re good, we’re… secure.”

Noisemaker didn’t even realise they’d retracted their eyestalks when they unfurled them again, taking in the sight of a shore getting farther and farther from their little boat. The light ached on the eyes.

‘Where?’

Wings dropped down from the ship’s radio pylon. They were.. so incredibly tall. Tears of ‘fury’ trickled down their chin as they clattered, “we took the liberty of getting to safety. Away from the city.” Then with a bit of spite in their voice, “that’s what you wanted, no?”

Two channels had been carved down their beak by acid, and this time Noisemaker really was feeling such an incredible and powerful weight from a sentient mind. Vastness or psychic power or whatever, that was cheap, that was, stupid. Noisemaker did not really care about weird psychic monsters, the grief in Wings’ voice was making their skin turn inside out. What good is a hurricane, of what importance is an earthquake. Those things don’t matter to anyone, just the grief of loss is what people remember.

The grief could only be cheapened by adjectives or long words, it was a coiling discomfort that tightened across Noisemaker’s chest.

They chewed their lips, ran air over their voicebox, made every motion as if to speak but all they did was let the air stale in their mouth. They had to say something, but what?

Wings walked away wordlessly, eyes glassy.

Noisemaker hated themselves that they had to cheapen the mood, the pain that many seemed to feel, for whoever had been injured or become a casualty or whatever threatening thing had happened, they crept to the radio pole on which Wings had been perched and they tied their body in a knot around it, squeezing to apply pressure and then popping the metal off of its mount. Electricity crickled loudly. Wings had watched the entire affair, Noisemaker felt so much shame. They thought to explain that they were preventing their location from being tracked, but their lips didn’t move. Wings tossed something into the sea. They then began to preen the little ones, licking the fluff, scraping dirt from between armour plates, cleaning eye-stalks. They seemed so much like everything Noisemaker wanted to be in that moment, such a fulcrum of kindness and authority, the larvae were shaken to see the dead forager bobbing in the sea, but clearly let themselves depend on their protector, their Wings.

A gasping dying breath. “AGH!” and Leader came to life again. “Wow.” They laughed loudly. “Engineer, where are you.”

‘I’m right here,’ they spoke quietly, creeping closer, “I’m right here.”

Leader kept their marble eyes open, unblinking, they were shivering intensely. Noisemaker handed out one palm, an offer of comfort. Leader just looked away, ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’ They hardened their gaze. ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

Noisemaker let the hand drop to their side. They sighed. They looked at the large hole in the boat that Arms had made, Arms appeared to be trapped in the engine room, Noisemaker began erecting a slope to facilitate climbing but then the quadruped reached up their obelisk arm, pulling a tonne of torso up onto the upper-deck with one swing, stumpy back legs thumped hard. Where Arms had been stood there was something. Something strange. Perhaps not the strangest thing the boat had in store, however. It was a human.

They looked up at Noisemaker from behind a gas mask with a yellow visor, like ski goggles. They picked up a silver suitcase, turned around, and entered into a room below deck.