Chapter 19: The Six-Legged Beast

January 25^th, 2279

At first, Perlas didn’t dare to move, after all, the Axxi were horrible fighters. Violence on their home planet was restricted to few incidents in their far past when two arachnoids would grab each other with the claws and kick their shells, which was as tiring as it was useless. They never turned their later developed weapons onto each other, and were shocked to find out this was not the norm when meeting their first aliens. This however, gave them much motivation to cover the systems they had spread to in a dense network of defenses, the young Axxi taking turns in maintaining the automated deterrence as their first year of training, just like Perlas had started.

Far below him, on the sublevel of engineering, several of the fuzzy creatures were moving around. One was clearly accessing the systems, often pausing to think. One was looking for something below, and one – the one who had made him retreat back into his box – was using his weapon to seemingly scan the room. The core must have been blinding him, as he kept changing position to try again. Perlas could hear his heavy steps on the grating of the engine room.

He had no idea how they had gotten aboard, especially since Perlas was serving under a leader so cautious that it seemed unlikely he had allowed anyone to dock or land. Even more so, as the Rubicon’s hull had no entrance points besides two long, covered exits and the shuttlebay. And they would not have been able to enter through the sensor array’s opening, even less so through the closed torpedo ports and absolutely not through the bright hot engines.

He knew he had to move eventually. A race that was able to get into their ship that fast would surely soon figure out how to scan the room he was in, no matter how close he was to the singularity that was powering their quantum entanglement engine. And if they spotted him, they would open fire and his crisp hearing had told him exactly how quickly the crew went down before disappearing in a loud bang that reminded him of the eggs on his home planet popping when their hatchlings figured out they had claws.

But there were factors to his advantage. They were on his ship. The ship whose layout was in no large parts born from his own thoughts after making the basic Nio design workable. He was also small and could move in every direction up or down the walls – and even swing from the threads his legs could produce, although the crew’s disgust with his traces had largely prevented him from doing so, which luckily didn’t matter anymore with a missing crew. He was ashamed to admit to himself that a small part of him felt it was just that they had gotten overrun, as they had treated him so poorly for no reason other than being an Arachnoid. But Perlas was an Axxi, a race that had long made its peace with admitting that pain led to indifference towards others and had moved past denying that in every soul, no matter how bright, there was a darkness to control. And they had gotten pretty good at it.

He also knew where to go. His metallic shell was his first issue; it would make noise when hitting the ship’s hard surfaces. But his box was well-isolated with cushions of threads and the bubble wrap, so he slipped out of it and removed his rattly leg coverings. Then, he realized he left dots of threads wherever he went, which would lead even the dumbest alien directly to him. He had no choice but to put on the rubber socks he had been experimenting with the days prior to prevent leaving traces of thread. In their latest iteration, they were magnetic, allowing him to walk up walls still, but they slowed him down somewhat and he would have to be careful not to fall, as they could not fully replace millions of years of Axxi evolution, but it was doable. His eyes were an issue, though, as they were many but stuck to a small head close to his body, which made it hard to peak around edges, as Axxi usually hunted by lunging forward. Apex predators on any planet generally didn’t need to look around corners ‒ they were the reasons others had to. As he carefully stuck his round hairy head out of his birdhouse, he saw the scanning fuzzy creature turn about and leave engineering, maybe to get a better scanner. The guard was playing a tree, unmoving and looking ahead and the third fuzzy was still figuring out the controls of the interface he had found and would soon be very disappointed to realize he had spent a lot of time learning to control the waste management system instead of the engine control right next to it. The details of the way they lived still seemed to pose some questions to the intruders, but they also evidently had gotten the main systems under control.