Eve.
How long had the creature been manifested?
How much longer before its host was killed by the strain?
How desperate was it getting?
What fools had been experimenting with neo-mitochondria again?
She sighed and looked around her, shaking her head as she visually took in her answer.
"Lab technician that got unlucky," the man had said, and that was bull. She had discovered this little collection of neo-mitochondria long enough ago to forge an identity to get herself taken as a bodyguard for an inspection. Obviously, this wasn't the first Eve host.
The woman had been wondering how it was going to be possible to actually destroy Eve and the neo-mitochondria samples without getting caught at it, and soon made into an experiment herself. Now she had something of an answer. With the havoc this break out would cause, she could easily slip in and destroy Eve's manifestation and the samples, and arrange for the blame to fall on those creatures unleashed in the base.
All she had to do was get out and into the halls.
"If you don't mind," Garrison said. "I'd like one of my bodyguards to go with your security staff to guage their performance."
"As long as they don't get in the way," Carthy said.
The woman withheld a smile as Garrison turned around to face his bodyguards.
"Aya," he said, predictably. "See what is happening."
"Yes, sir," she said crisply before turning to leave on her assignment.
The other bodyguard frowned as she left and folded his arms over his chest, as Garrison nodded at him. Garrison turned about a fingered the star-shaped cufflinks of his suit.
*****
Ranma and Kodachi had woken up looking mostly human, but that was already changing as they crawled through the air-ducts, lengthened and compressed, like human serpents driving themselves through the ducts to find a safe place to leave.
Kodachi paused a moment in the dark, metallic tunnels as a brief image came to her. A...memory...of being dragged, sharp claws in her shoulder and she had called for Ranma-sama...but...
She shook her head out and pressed on, feeling that Ranma had found what might have been a good exit further on. She joined him quickly and jumped down out of the duct.
She felt...odd as she dropped and her body reformed nearly completely into the humanoid form she had started with. Her skin was dark and grey like the wall in the shadows behind her, and she couldn't see them, but her eyes were opaque and somewhat luminescent.
"I remembered..." Kodachi said to Ranma.
"Shh," Ranma said, peeking out of their corner to look up and down the coorridor.
Kodachi nodded and focused on trying to dig through her memories again, but a host of conflicting images came down on her.
She was something...weak and soft, but, at the same time cunning, adaptive and vicious. She was travelling through the hive, slick black shell rendering her unseen in the mottled tunnels. She was something scaly and primal, making love endlessly, endlessly.
The images conflicted each other, and more sure pushed the more confused and stressed she became. Her hands, fingernails black like the skin that she bore in another time, reached shakily up to her head.
"How dare they...defend...baby...intruders...I'm...dead...protect...martial..mar..." something clamped down on her progressive degeneration into madness. She felt herself calmly as the conflict eased and she let go of pushing at her memories.
At first she thought it was Ranma, acting in her head, but his presence was still a worried and insistant emotion coming, weakly at the moment, from the outside. She saw him holding her and heard halting words of comfort that she slowly remembered the meaning of.
"I must defend my mate," she whispered to herself finally, looking to Ranma calmly. "I must survive."
The conflicting memories and imperatives were still there, but for the moment they were muted, and a common ground had been paved in at least one small place.
"We'll get out," Ranma told Kodachi confidentally. An assurance that was belied by the nervousness Kodachi felt pouring off of him.
"Of course we will," Kodachi agreed firmly, though her hope of that was no more firm than Ranma's, and she was certain that he could feel it.
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(Posted Sat, 04 Sep 2004 20:44)
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