Leather & the 40 Corpsicles in the Cafe Freezer (Leather in Space Book 2) by Cobb Stephen Euin

Author:Cobb, Stephen Euin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: August Press
Published: 2023-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Stretched out upon a circular table in a circular room surrounded by the twelve lay the bush-weaving groundskeeper. He or she or it was alive, though unconscious. Its body was proportioned somewhat like a chimpanzee or a gibbon, but no human would have mistaken it for either. Its head was shaped like that of an anteater, but with bigger eyes. Its body was covered with tawny plates like those of a pangolin. And there was a smattering of sparse hair everywhere.

Four felt a strong desire to beat the bush-weaver into a thick paste with a bare metal rod. He allowed himself to enjoy this brief fantasy. He imagined how the creature's tissues would change in consistency with each blow—muscle, bone, viscera—and how its circulatory fluid would spread to cover the table and drip to the floor all around its periphery. A powerful curiosity rose within him to discover the color of that fluid; as well as its viscosity, smell, feel, and abundance.

Only his enthusiasm for the mission prevented him from searching the room for a metal rod. Not yet, he assured himself. There will be time for that later. Then he frowned. Though the others will insist on sharing in the joy.

Using machines, tools, and devices unknown to human science, the twelve examined their newly acquired alien. After some hours of study—once they felt they understood it sufficiently—they altered the artificial cells of one of their team members to match the bush-weaver's appearance and its physiological structure, its organic functionality, and its outward chemical and thermological properties. They did not, however, alter the structure, nature, or data content of this team member's brain.

For this transformation, a team member was chosen at random. This proved to be number Four.

The bush-weaver had been chosen because he seemed unimportant, and so was not likely to be watched too closely, and yet he had the run of large portions of the enemy's home. That they had already learned to speak the bush-weaver's language also weighed in its favor.

The transformation required many minutes and was done without any of the twelve touching Four. Instead, they instructed the millions of maintenance nanobots inside Four's body to rearrange the artificial cells that composed him; and, in places where they were needed, to devise new kinds of artificial cells.

That the bush-weaver was smaller and thinner that Four—indeed almost frail by comparison—meant that the transformation required setting aside over half of Four's mass, but for the nanorobots this was easy.

When it was complete, Four looked around at each of his fellows, but had trouble recognizing them. His new eyes operated within three noncontiguous portions of the visible spectrum and assigned a color to each that was at odds with the colors used by his old eyes. It occurred to him that the color discrepancy might not be in the eyes themselves, but in the new nerves connecting his eyes to his brain. He decided that exactly where this happened was unimportant. What was important was that he learn to

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