Maze-Born Trouble by Ginn Hale

Author:Ginn Hale [Hale, Ginn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, mystery
ISBN: 9781935560500
Publisher: Blind Eye Books
Published: 2016-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

5.

Stowing away on Dr. Gim’s mobile clinic proved as easy as Lake remembered—he slid in between high-grav surgical machinery and reinforced crates of medical supplies.

Though his plan turned out to be not particularly original.

Three Maze-born women all smuggling fresh spider milk joined him for the journey down into the humid darkness. Lake tapped out Morse greetings against the eldest woman’s extended hand, paying her respect and acknowledging that he hailed from Mrs. Saari’s territory. Her flesh felt dry and thin like tissue paper wrapped around the solid stone of her thick bones. She smiled at Lake, flashing teeth as dense as limestone cliffs.

As the clinic descended, Lake felt the gravitational waves around him growing more pronounced and the electromagnetic fields snapping into clear definition. Perceptions that up on the Arc came to him as vague—often hazy as if a fog drifted through the station—focused into sharp definition. Lake’s skin tingled and shivered with the sudden rush of sensations. Just beyond the sheen of the hyper-glass walls of the infirmary, dense, iron-heavy tunnels surrounded them, as did the large, ghostly forms of the GM-roaches that maintained the shafts and laid down the chemical trails that conducted electricity through so much of the Maze.

Lake smiled at the supple, tough insects. If any creature could really represent Sisu Station, it had to be those engineered, three-foot-long, blind and exquisitely communal creatures. Two hundred years ago, when drones and nanobots had burned out in the electromagnetic onslaught of Sisu’s synthetic sun collapsing into a black hole, the genetically modified roaches had endured.

Like the few surviving colonists, they’d thrived despite being abandoned and all but forgotten by Federalists. Over the years the roaches had transformed the mineral bulk of the fused, captive asteroids into vast caverns of oxygen and water, in the same way that their ancient termite ancestors still built towering habitats in the deserts of Earth.

As a boy under the dominion of the Loviatar cult, Lake’s duty had been to tend the colony’s nymphs. The young roaches had smelled like popping corn and their papery, vestigial wings tickled his skin when he carried them against his chest out to the feeding streams of chemical runoff. He and all the children in his crèche had considered themselves lucky to have been chosen as caretakers for young roaches. When giant, older roaches greeted, groomed, and sometimes fed him fungal droppings, Lake had felt genuinely loved—truly part of a caring family.

Not until Nam Yune had combed back his hair and offered him a cricket bar had he experienced the same kind of affection from a human being.

Even now Lake couldn’t help but let out a low, nearly subsonic greeting hum to the surrounding adolescent roaches. The roaches nearest the descending clinic hummed in return. The vibrations of their songs brushed Lake’s exposed skin like warm velvet.

One of the younger women sitting beside him gave Lake a friendly nudge, and she too offered up a low brief hum. Then she placed her right hand in Lake’s left palm and tapped out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.