Tales From the Strange by Monte Cook & Bruce R. Cordell & Shanna Germain

Author:Monte Cook & Bruce R. Cordell & Shanna Germain [Cook, Monte & Cordell, Bruce R. & Germain, Shanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Goodreads: 22911883
Publisher: Monte Cook Games LLC
Published: 2014-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Coda and I are late getting to Sart-dayek’s lab, but luck is with us. There’s something else going on that has everyone’s attention. The crowd outside her building is big enough and hard enough to get through that I’m already formulating it as my excuse for arriving late.

Turns out, I don’t need an excuse. Sart-dayek’s attention is elsewhere—on a creature resting on her lab…table is the wrong word…it’s more like a waist-high synthetic beanbag. Its short, self-adjusting legs cause it to sway slightly. Or maybe that movement’s from the thing that’s on it, a creature in the middle of what can only be death throes. A grey paw rises off the table, stiff and arched, and for one horrible, vision-stealing moment, I think, impossibly, that it’s Coda. But Coda is safely by my side, and that thing is nothing like Coda. It’s smaller, for one thing, a winged beast, red and purple and grey. It convulses, its many furred legs thrashing.

Sart-dayek is all black and grey spikes and blobs, one eye a big red orb, the other a tiny dot of green. Biomods run up and down her spined arms and lengthen her fingers into mechs and medical devices and other things that I don’t know the purpose of.

She jabs one of her long appendage into the creature’s neck. Its convulsions cease almost instantly, and even I can tell—her blinking eyelight gives it away—that wasn’t the result she was hoping for.

“Agent Rodriguez,” she says. She speaks out of somewhere in her throat, and her English is as impeccable as always, but my name is always a stumbled fall of consonants and hisses. “You’re quite late.”

And here I was, thinking she wouldn’t notice.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“Lucky, though,” she says. “If this had gone off…”

She’s distracted before she finishes the sentence, poking the now-still creature along what is probably it’s throat. “Look,” she says.

I can’t help but lean in. Her appendages point to a series of round, fleshy pods on the creature’s upper chest, now mostly empty of a bright yellow liquid.

“A living dirty bomb,” she says, her voice full of respect. “Created to carry poison to large numbers.”

I step back, instinctively, blocking Coda with my legs. Sart-dayek nods. She knows what happened back on Earth.

“This one is safe,” Sart-dayek says. “It misfired before it got through the doors. Self-imploded, if you will. Luckily, it only managed to poison itself. They haven’t yet perfected their delivery system. They probably need a larger creature to carry such a large amount.”

“They? The Karum?” I ask. Everything’s the Karum these days, it seems.

She gives a mechanical tongue-click, thinking. “Perhaps. It is nothing I have seen before. A radiation that seems designed to…”

At the word radiation, I drop my hand to Coda’s head, dig my fingers into his fur. I don’t hear the rest of the sentence.

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