Monsters Inside by Steve Cole

Author:Steve Cole [Stephen Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2005-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Issabel’s true massive, muscular frame rippled with power. The sticky flesh was the colour of maggots. The swollen black eyes leaked a milky slime, tears that dropped sizzling to the desktop. Then it started raging, smashing its great three-fingered fists against the walls, kicking in cabinets with its waxen legs in the mother of all tantrums. It was bigger and paler than either Ecktosca or Dram Fel Fotch, and its face was scored with thick black wrinkles.

Run, you idiot, Flowers told herself. Run before it sees you.

But then the creature pressed something under Issabel’s desk and a square of light appeared in the wall, a shadowy shape in its centre, shielded in part by a swathe of smoke. Flowers felt with a dreadful calm that she had to stay. There were too many mysteries here. She had to try to learn what was happening.

‘My cousin is close to death, Don Arco,’ the wrinkled Slitheen hissed at the screen. ‘I felt it. I felt his pain. What has happened?’

‘The shuttle en route to you with the genius girl on board has encountered difficulties, Ermenshrew,’ came an alien voice – by the rough and rumbling tones, it was another Raxacoricofallapatorian. ‘It diverted to Justice Delta, where it collided with a monitoring platform. Clem Sel Hetch was piloting the craft.’

‘I should have insisted he use the pathways to reach us,’ said Issabel – or rather, this Ermenshrew who’d been living inside that stooped old body. ‘Uncle Hipp Sel Hetch travelled here this morning to assimilate the equations I salvaged from the ruined datacore –’

‘– and he’s already told me that they suit our purpose,’ said Don Arco, the creature on the screen. ‘But you know full well that while our glorious bodies may brave the pathways, these human animals are less robust.’

‘Yes.’ Ermenshrew sniggered. ‘I have witnessed the results of my daughter’s cavalier experiments.’

‘A search is being mounted for the vessel. While Clem Sel Hetch still lives, there is hope.’ A pause, as Don Arco shifted closer. ‘Now to business. If the Doctor’s expert is dead, will it now delay the operation?’

‘I will not tolerate delays,’ she said darkly.

‘Well said. You’ve all waited long enough in those hateful little bodies. Final-phase replication is now in progress.’

‘Oh good,’ she purred.

‘My second cousins are ready to replace the plantation managers on Justice Epsilon. On Beta, the Governors of all borstals are to be replaced by my youngest stepsons – great kids but a little wild, the responsibility will be good for them. On Gamma . . .’

Flowers listened with mounting horror as the litany of replacements went on. There were impostors in positions of power all over Justicia, on every world – and had been for some time, it seemed. Her head crowded with questions. Just how far did this alien corruption spread? What were these ‘pathways’ Ermenshrew had mentioned, and where did they lead? And as for this ‘operation’ that was stepping up a gear . . .

She looked at the figures in her

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