A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [111]
They hadn’t met much resistance when my Skikka used the Crown on me, have to say. It took a little longer for them to penetrate Smik’s integument. While he was struggling to pull off the Crown, I did an end-run around him and got the care cage’s door open. Smik had finally let go of Fern. I grabbed her, ducked into the cabin’s bathroom, and locked the door behind me, though I didn’t really expect Smik to come after us, not with the Crown working on him.
There were four red spots on the back of Fern’s neck. My heart staggered a little, and my eyes squirted. “Baby, baby, baby,” I said.
“Mommy, it’s all right. I took it off before it could bite me.” She showed me a small square metallic thing pinched between her fingers and thumb. It had all kinds of little legs, which were twitching and jerking but couldn’t reach around behind it to get at her fingers. Four slender tentacles with bloody tips flopped around.
I grabbed a sample box from a side compartment of my suit and held it out. Fern dropped the thing in and I sealed it shut. Only when I was sure it was immobilized did I hug my daughter.
“Mommy, stop! You have your strength on!”
“Oh, crap! I’m sorry.” I opened my arms and checked Fern for damage. She pursed her lips at me and laughed. Not even a bruise.
I don’t know everything about my daughter, but I do know she’s super tough, like her daddy. Which is a good thing, if you got me for a mother.
My Skikka said there are definite steps to a successful invasion. Infiltrate. Insinuate. Turn the invaded into your own people, and then reproduce with them—harder to fight family. Absorb and colonize.
Pest control works backward from that. If you can interrupt the invasion in its early stages, it’s a lot easier to stop.
Once the Crown subdued Smik, I put a whole bunch of restraints on him. I had to take the Crown off and hide it, because it’s forbidden tech, or it would be, if anybody else knew about it. But it had pretty well quieted Smik down.
Then I called security.
They found a lot more little colonizers in a hidden pocket nobody knew he had. I found out his species was called A’kla, and there were only a few of them in the solar system. We’d only made contact recently. The chief engineer said he was a great engineer, and she was going to miss him. The doctor was excited by the bug I gave him, and even happier about the collection security extracted from Smik.
The colonized didn’t get off so easy. The bugs he slapped on them had worked their way inside, set up residence in the brains, got the bodies to acquire the materials they needed to be comfortable in their new homes. They’re all messed up, but it works okay as far as keeping them alive. The doctor is conferring with major medical clinics on Terra, Luna, and Mars to figure out how to treat them, so there’s hope. Meanwhile, they are pretty much just weird and creepy shadows of their former selves, and that includes three of the poor kids in day care.
My job was done, and they didn’t know how to compensate me, since it wasn’t exactly metal mites I fought. Fern and me are taking it out in trade. I finally took off my suit, and now we spend most of our time in passenger territory.
I watch my daughter play and wonder about her daddy, my Skikka, what part of himself he put in her while I had the Crown on my head. She’s much more fun than the people the A’kla invaded. But I worry about her teen years.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
P.R. Frost enjoys attending science fiction conventions in her spare time, where she can be found filking and hanging out with costumers.