Paskal is still at work when Eurus calls. Although he knows he made plans with his wife, going on a mutant hunt with a Cell? That beats almost anything.
Many policemen are brought up with stories from their dads and uncles about what Cells are like. Anderson leans back in his chair:
“So the double date - you up for tonight’s pool night, still?”
“Sorry, Ron, I’ve got a date with Eurus tonight,” Paskal jokes.
“Going huntin’ with a Cell? Nice, man. Can you take a plus one?”
“Sorry, don’t wanna push my luck.” A beeping from his desk’s comm device and another in his right pant pocket makes him pause before running off. It’s a picture from his wife in a homely outfit with some details only meant for husbands, with the message:
“Home early today. Double date incomin? ;)”
Paskal texts back: “Sorry, baby, rain check. Getting to ride along with a Cell.”
“:’(“ she replies.
Before going off, Paskal scoffs and smiles, thinking about going home to his wife. But a chance like this likely won’t come again so home can wait.
Paskal goes to the armory and gears up as well. Nothing as fancy as a Cell gets but enough to keep him safe from small arms fire. He straps in his pistol and takes off in his black cop car.
When he arrives, Eurus is already waiting for him at ground level of the hub OG, his statbike parked neatly on the dusty Martian surface. Completely deserted and pitch black if not for the lights of the vehicles still humming. Paskal parks too, gets out and Eurus says:
“You took a while. Been waiting here an hour.”
“Sorry, I had to gear up and everybody drives like my nan when within sight of a cop car. It’s totally annoying.”
“Very funny.”
“Right?”
Eurus pushes a button on his statbike and it releases its headlight. He hands it to Paskal.
“Thanks?” he says.
“Only one of us can see in the dark,” Eurus turns to Paskal, “The other one needs to stay behind me.”
“I still need to take you to the location of the last distress signal, man.”
They start moving in the red sand of Mars’ surface. No detectable sound for the human ear, except for their own steps. For Paskal the air is silent. For Eurus? The darkness feels loud and alive, echoing with the distant sounds of beasts and people. The air is damp and cold. All the moisture and cold air sinks for several miles before settling at the bottom. Paskal’s breaths slighty steam the air as he keeps up with Eurus’s brisk pace.
After having been on the move for a few minutes, they arrive at the spot of the disappearance. The GPS spot they arrive at looks like bomb had been set off in an operating room. Blood, guts, remains of police uniforms and their police issue firearms on the ground and walls painted brown by degrading blood. The guided light of the makeshift flashlight Eurus gave Paskal is doing the harrowing sight no favors, simply highlighting the gore wherever the beam of light falls.
“Their guns are unused, “ Paskal says.
“Yeah, probably they didn’t see their attacker until it was already too late. Can you pull up other spots of disappearance? And put them on a map?”
Paskal activates his tac-screen and displays the surrounding area with said spots. Immediately a pattern emerges:
“They never got to the middle of OG-1. If you pull up motion trackers’ final seconds of display, you’ll probably see that they were attacked from the inside of the building…,” Eurus says.
“Maybe… they were attacked very fast, from very close, from just outside their peripheral feed. But why haven’t we been attacked yet? You think the beast’s out there?” Paskal asks.
“It could be hunting… we need to go deeper. It might got a nest here and if we’re lucky, we can get the jump on it.”
“We should get some backup,” Paskal says.
“We’ll never find it this way,” says Eurus, “This creature uses cloaking and stealth to hunt its prey. It won’t just attack a large group of armed humans. You can ask to have a perimeter put up, though. It will try to run. And from this point on… speak and move more softly.”
Paskal calls for backup and describes what must be done.
They walk inwards into the building. Human carcasses and howler corpses lying around here and there - trophies and warnings for trespassers, not an uncommon trait in super-predators. The closer to the epicenter of the megastructure they get, the more smelly and putrid their surroundings become - the creature had been active for some time, with a higher than anticipated bodycount.
“Shh,” Eurus says.
He can hear very faint breathing a few dozen meters away.
“You hear that?” he asks, “Only me from this point on. The mutant’s close.”
Eurus can smell it now, too. It has a very sulfuric, nauseating odor. He adjusts his eyes only to see infrared and what he sees would traumatize the average man just with its appearance.
A very bulky, deformed humanoid. Its body is hairless, severely scarred and very muscular and bigger than even a Cell. His legs resembling those of a tyrannosaurus and his jaw capable of crushing steel, he is carefully watching Eurus. Eurus says into his transmitter:
“I can see the monster. It’s looking right at me and is waiting for me to wander closer…”
Eurus stops talking. He hears another raspy breath drawing air. There are more than only one or two of them, he realizes. One is in front of him and the other is approaching Paskal from the outside.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
“Paskal! Go hide, “says Eurus. His voice, while calm, is still distinct from the noise in the background.
Paskal runs to take cover under a wreckage of old industrial equipment and Eurus takes two grenades and throws them at each of the beasts. They gulp the grenades up and as the grenades explode, the beasts splatter Paskal and the walls with their insides. Then he quickly throws out several flares to light up his surroundings, and at least temporarily blind the nocturnal beasts. Though Paskal can’t see the beasts directly, their cloaking flickers the air around them thanks to the flares, allowing him to barely gauge what’s happening.
He takes his gun and starts firing at the one behind him but at the same time Eurus is rushed by two more mutants. They kick him across the room and he’s rushed by yet another one as it tries to bite his head off, but they’re too slow to try anything again. Eurus' physical enhancements kick in with nitroglycerine-enhanced adrenaline and now he’s almost as fast as a speeding bullet.
As one of the mutants jumps closer, he can see and hear several more of them approaching from the building, all invisible to Paskal, but the sound they all make is deafening, the roars guttoral and primal. Paskal is in trouble, lest the beasts are defeated, and Eurus knows it. Paskal crawls out of the wreckage and into a small space between the foundational pillars of the skyscraper, so that the beasts can’t get to him. He can catch a glimpse of what’s going on with Eurus.
He sees the optical distortions from the phantoms closing in around Eurus, but at the speed at which he moves is a sight to behold on its own. It’s as if Eurus was executing a careful ballet of carnage and destruction. He puts his revolver in its holster and unharnesses his bull rifle and begins killing the beasts one by one. He is surrounded, but to Eurus this simply means that he can fire in any direction. Even for huge lumbering beasts such as the ones attacking them, a 50. cal bullet is enough to turn their brains into cake. Moving like a fiend, he dances through the room, jumping and kicking himself off walls, a 30-kg gun in one hand and a power sword in another. Each movement accentuated by a crack of his machine gun or a slice of his sword, one by one thinning the beasts’ herd. As the beasts die, their skin stops deflecting light and each of their lives ends in a picturesque gore. A small hill is slowly erecting as the number of corpses in the room skyrockets by Eurus’s hands.
Just as one of invisible beasts is trying to sneak between the foundational pillars, where Pharao is hiding, Eurus jumps between them, having not forgotten him, presses the barrel of his bull rifle in its mouth and squeezes the trigger. A loud crack of sound and light emits from its jaws, exploding the back of its skull, liquifying its brains.
As his euthanasian symphony swells, exiting its overture and reaching its climactic peak, the pit is turned into walk-in version of a Jackson Pollock painting with the bits and pieces from the beasts he makes a note to examine the creatures after they die by his hand. Even while in combat he sees the obvious markers of genetic enhancement – grotesque muscles, minds lost due to hormonal imbalances caused by the monsters’ size and shape. There are also obvious markers of human origin in these creatures. There was a time when these souls belonged to a human. They’re the result of embryonic experimentation gone awfully wrong. This reminds Eurus of his own origin. He is a creation of the same types of people who created these beasts. Before his earliest predecessor was successfully molded into a super soldier, countless women and their progeny had to go through medical trials and tests. Had they failed, he wonders, would he be the one needed to put down?
Right in front of Paskal’s face, one of the phantoms flickers out of their camoflage as Eurus stops it in its tracks with his bullrifle from a distance.
Paskal crouches lower, pressing himself into the gap between the pillars. He tries to focus on his breathing, but each sound—each burst of light—tugs at the edges of his composure.
The room is chaos. Thunderous cracks of gunfire split the air, blinding flashes light up grotesque forms who then pop into existence as they perish. Eurus is a blur of motion, faster than Paskal’s eyes can follow.
“What the hell are those things?! I can’t see anything—Eurus, what’s happening?” Paskal calls out, clear panic in his voice.
“Stay down. I’ll handle this,” Eurus tells him over the sound of carnage.
Suddenly a booming roar is heard from a few hundred meters away from deep within the maze of underground tunnels making the beasts stop and run away.
“There were hundreds of them…” Eurus says.
“Hundreds?! What the fuck!! What if they come back, man? Jesus! Christ! You alright man? You’re covered in blood,” Paskal says, panting.
“Not mine.”
“Great. That’s real great, but then right now we’ve got bigger worries. You said hundreds? How are we supposed to deal with that?” Paskal says.
“I’m going to track down the entrance to the nest and come back tomorrow to exterminate it. You can go home and rest. Let the patrols use your heat vision devices to kill any strays, some might breed more” Eurus says.
Paskal would like to protest but knows that he might very well find himself as dinner for any number of those beasts so better leave Eurus to it. Eurus runs deeper into the building and Paskal starts making his way back to the patrol car. About half way out he sees the first patrol and is spotted by them, too:
“Detective Paskal?” they call out.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he says as he’s walking closer, “What the hell are you doing wandering in here? Get your thermals and tell the others to get theirs too!”
He lights up his cigarette and the cops ask:
“He leave you behind?”
“Yeah, I would’ve slowed him down. I barely made it out. If a Cell ever invites you - for your own sake, don’t go.”
“If you say so man,” both clearly not planning on heeding this advice.
“What are you still doing here? You’ve got a fetish for being mutie food? Get some heat cameras here, knuckleheads, the beasts are invisible and very much alive. Also backup. Lots and lots of backup. Whatever you do, don’t wander back inside.”
Paskal knows that no man can resist the temptation to try to keep up with a Cell. He now also knows however that such an attempt is pointless. He finds his car and flies out of there, leaving the few patrols behind.
Covered in blood and sweat, he can’t wait to get home. With the evening rush hour over, his ride is quite quick. He arrives at his tower, DT-16, in a few dozen minutes and parks near his flat.
He arrives at his apartment and when he opens the door, the smell of some excellent food hits his nostrils. His wife, Eyleen, is the chef at one of the best restaurants in the Solar System. When she’s home, dinner is godlike.
“Hey, kid,” she says.
Eyleen is cooking away but she finds a few seconds for a welcome-home-kiss.
“Hey, baby,” he says as he kisses her neck, “whatcha makin’?”
“Pork ribs with sticky sauce,” she says.
“You’re gonna kill me with those. Might have to put you away for manslaughter.”
“Might have to put you away for harassment if you don’t clean yourself up. You smell like a thousand old farts.”
Pharao takes a shower and as he finishes up, the sticky sauce ribs are served. Eyleen uncorks a bottle of red wine - imported from Terram!
“What are we celebrating? A 2459 vintage! Did you win the lottery?”
“They’re opening up a new place under the Knive franchise and they’re giving me the head chef position there.”
“Congratulations! So, where’s it gonna be?
“5-SOC, but it’s worth it, we can make some money..”
“So we can spend all our money on transport?”
“..and buy a new apartment”, Eyleen says, “the pay’s really good, and we can move out of this dump.”
?I thought you liked the smell of cum, piss and garlic,“ Paskal chuckles.
?To think I didn’t open the wine alone...“
----
Cell HQ is a state of the art mechanized complex, with normally 200 inhabitants or so at once. There are machines keeping the place tidy, providing security, medicine and the place is one of the biggest armories and developers of advanced weaponry in the Solar System.
Even though Eurus is one of the last Cells ever made, his apartment is one of the highest in Papülonis. He can actually see the Sun set from his balcony. Eurus is one of the most advanced Cells and though he can’t manipulate electromagnetic fields at all as opposed to his brethren, his genetics, nanofiber titanium-infused muscles and wolfram skeleton, makes him one of the heaviest but fastest Cells ever, weighing 370 kg. Among his abilities are also chameleon-like camouflage, super-hearing, his blood is corrosive to almost any material, superhuman reflexes - he perceives time much-much slower than a regular human and he can regenerate full limbs given a few days and good rest. Eurus has three lungs and two hearts. He can lose one of each without losing any combat effectiveness.
Cells have apartments because some like to entertain guests or even keep wives. Some like it because it is the direct opposite of their formerly mandatory lifestyles. Soon he goes to rest. Even though Cells need no sleep, their minds are optimal when they do.
