Crepitus

Not even twenty meters from my face, the Cynx stares me down like some sort of snake eying a field vole. And as my scattergun twitches in my hand, it smiles – if that’s what you can call it. Its skin is white and furry and slimed with a layer of glycocalyx that oozes from its pores. A stomach filled with oily-black lye. It looks like a mockery of something quite familiar, some sort of perversion of reality that only occurs in a fever dream. A wolf.. a snake… a ferret… a dragon. That’s what it would look like if you described one to a blind man and asked him to draw it. The four limbs, for example, are not disquieting. The pair of forearms at each elbow, however…

I shiver as it coils up in a way that all preconceived notions of biology says is wrong. It’s so, so flexible, and yet so armored, held together with peptidoglycan and chiton. Beneath its skin you can just make out ingrown tentacles writhe around, moving its body without the constraints of skeletons or muscles. The skin looks so thin, but it’s so tough; crosslinked sheaths of armor as flexible as they are durable make it more bacteria than animal.

But I’ve got an exoskeleton of my own. I’m full of wires and every orifice is full of tubes -- I’m more hoses than man. My suit keeps me alive. It filters my air. It keeps me hydrated and pumps my stomach and gives the proper does of painkiller with mechanical precision. It feeds me. It breaths for me. It shits me. I’ve been told that simply wearing it increases my odds of survival by a factor of twenty seven point five times. But there’s another part of my brain; the lizard, reptilian, ancient part of my brain, that’s getting in the way, telling me ‘run!’ It’s fighting back. And it’s winning.

A bolt of electricity arcs from the cynx’s gun to the poor bastard Xingyang standing next to me. One second he’s there, and the next he disappears in a flash and a cloud of blood. The lucky bastard got off easy.

I’m not so lucky. I thought the Cynx missed and left me alive for the moment, but I’m wrong. In that instant that Xingyan died, a bolt of current arced from him to me. My heart stops and I die just as instantly. If only my suit would let me. Onboard computers reboot and race to action. Machinery whirs to life. Half the suit's fried – I can hear the capacitors popping in my helmet. But the engineers are a lot smarter than I give them credit for. My suit is triply redundant, and each redundancy is triply redundant again. Auto Injectors administer epinephrine, pain killers and medication. Before I have time to realize I’m dead my suit begins to pump my blood for me in between attempting to start my heart. Most of its more advanced life saving systems have been fried, and it resorts to more... primitive and simple measures. My suit begins a little petite mort, and spasms as actuators pump my chest plate in and out, performing CPR.

It used to be that there were medics in the military, soldiers that saved the lives of soldiers so they could go home to see their families. No such luxuries exist out here. There’s no point to it. Cryo keeps us young. Relativity keeps us younger. You make it this far out into the black, any family you had is decades dead by the time you return. So now instead of medics we have suits. If it’s something where you can be fixed as soon as you get back to base, where you can spend a week or two in the infirmary before getting thrown back on the front line, then your suit will save your life. Broken legs, evisceration, degloved hands, missing eyes? Not really life threatening after all. But with the mortal wounds… 200 hundred years ago you’d be instantly taken out of the fight, a medic would save you for the sake of your family, and you’d be discharged. Now you get to keep fighting for next 2 hours past your expiration date  with only a 20% decrease in combat efficiency before you take your last breath and collapse in a pile of brass . Come hell or high water, the suit oxygenates and ventilates. When those stop, then your suit allows you to die.

No time to worry about dying though: something’s about to kill me.

I point my shotgun at the monster and fire, working the pump like a madman. The Cynx’ eyes and bones spill from its head and the monster writhes around, still keeping its Dalia smile. Five pumps instead of a heart, and a brain in its thorax: I can’t kill it, just delay it.
My suit tells me it wants to administer further medications

Belay that! I order

The suit doesn’t perform its more… drastic actions, but it continues to give chest compressions and attempt other methods to restart my heart. There’s a sickening crunch as the suit breaks snaps my ribs but with all the painkillers I feel nothing.

I run behind a rock and hide as the Cynx continues wriggling around in an attempt to adjust to its new life without eyes .For now, I’m trying to hide as I tell my suit to begin whatever actions I had delayed. Even with the painkillers pumping through my veins, I writhe in cramps and pain as the probe in my stomach snakes its way deeper into my body. Can’t let a little thing like pH get in the way of good medicine. I try to vomit, but I can’t with the tube in my throat. But my suit is smarter than I am. The probe retracts back up into my stomach, pumping out the contents for me and replacing it with saline. Coffee ground emesis sprays from the stomas on the side of my suit. Satisfied with the extent of its dirty work, the probe extends again, deeper inside and pumps my body full of drugs.

My heart starts. I’m alive again. And I’m about to die. Maybe I’ll finally get to see my little Annie after all...

The Cynx has found me out. It can’t see me. It senses me. No. These things’ eyes have back-ups, right underneath the skin, pushing their way to the surface on a conveyer belt like sharks’ teeth. It charges toward me with an open mouth and useless eyes dangling from their optic nerves. I feel the ground rumble as it approaches me. Now a second one! I can feel the ground rumble behind me. Louder. Angrier. No! it’s not another cynx behind me at all! In my moment of doom, an even bigger monster rushes toward me. It’s a charging gorilla. It’s a pink elephant. It’s a five armed octopus. It’s something even more alien than the Cynx, but we call it a Vho and right now I call it a friend.

Charging in a slapping hop on its three arms and two legs (or is it three legs and two arms? You can never really tell), the Vho grabs the cynx by the maw and pulls its jaws apart. There’s all manner of bloodcurdling noises as the two roll around atop each other like the clash of some mythical gods. Crackling and snapping of bone, blood and sinew. The violence of action. It’s an ecstasy of flesh and domination even more primordial than sex itself. And in the end the Vho hoists the screaming cynx over its body with two of its arms and wrings it like wet rag. It’s armor pops. Pulpy orange blood and viscera burst from its sides covering my alien rescuer as the Cynx skin pops tail to head like a Dutch tear. The Vho’s skin flashes in patterns that almost seem to be laughing.

Throwing the carcass aside, he lends me a (hand? Foot? End affecter? Waldo!) waldo, helping me to my feet. Its skin is back to normal now, pulsing like a heartbeat between the color of coral and clay. As I stand up, I see another human strolling up to me. Encased in a bulky suit like mine, he looks more like an ape. As he approaches me, he stops to grip and remove his helmet’s mask, puling two wet slimy feet of plastic tubing out of his mouth with it.

Wiping the vomit from his teeth, he smiles and says “Oi! How’s your day going so far, Kappy?”

“That’s Commissar Kapwepwe, Sergeant,” my vocalizer projects from the speakers in my helmet.

“You never could take a joke. Hey Friday, you alright?”

The Vho walks over. I notice one of its arms has a large gash. It’s hanging limp and dripping biohydraulic fluid.
Patterns flash across its polymer skin as it communicates and the translation software projects “Nothing that can’t be healed” in a robotic but agreeable voice. Friday -- I guess that was what Sergeant O’Brian was calling his alien partner-- twitched in intense concentration and then produced a smiley face emoticon across its his skin. He hummed through his spiracles in a way that was strangely calming. like a purring cat.

“You know it’s against regulations to remove your respirator in a combat zone, enlistee. Keep it up and I’ll NJP your ass.”

“Big if,” he says as he readies to deep-throat his mask.

 Friday ‘laughs’ again. What good even is a Commissar out here? Command’s scared of people running in terror from the Cynx? Don’t blame ‘em. But what High-Com can’t be assed to ask is ‘where would they run to?’ Out here, death is cheap. I have nothing to threaten these people with.

I checked my ‘Senses. Our next best hope for extraction would orbit above us soon. They’d send me to the infirmary, slice my abdomen neck to groin like the zipper on a jacket and suck out whatever fluids got into the wrong place. a few hundred stitches here and there, a scathe on each of my broken ribs to mend them together. But I’d be fully healed in a week. That’s one of the things they never tell you – CPR is pure blunt trauma. I wasn’t too worried about that though: the most painful injuries are often the ones you don’t see. One of the other things that they never tell you is surviving an arrest hurts. It hurts like hell.

Good thing I’m already there.

“Telemetry says a Vho sky chariot in low-orbit will be in a pick-up window in fifteen minutes. Grab your Gauss-gun and be ready to hold the line till we can get the fuck off this rock. I’ve died once enough today already.”