Blaedergil's Host by C.M. Simpson (reading well .TXT) 📕

they hadn’t released the fucking thing, before they’d developed the cure. In all the stars, surely no one would have been that stupid.

But I remembered Andreus Corovan shooting me in the gut to prove a point he’d already made, scientists taking on werewolf DNA out of sheer desperation... and I couldn’t be sure.

“I need your head in this world, Cutter. We can deal with Corovan, later.”

“Just stay the fuck out of my head, and we’ll get along fine.”

Delight snorted.

“Kiddo, you don’t get along fine with anyone,” she said, “and that includes Mack, which makes the way he looks at you an utter fucking mystery.”

The way Mack looked at me? Man, if the guy ever looked at me as more than a serious case of the shits, I’d be surprised. For some reason that thought made Delight laugh, and I decided I didn’t want to know why.

“What do you need to know?” I asked, changing the subject.

“How about you map me a path to the lowest lab?”

I mapped, and we crawled, and occasionally we stopped so I could log into the security feeds and see exactly what was prowling the corridors ahead.

“We shoulda asked them what other experiments Corovan was funding,” I said, watching as something that might have been a woman skittered along the ceiling below the duct. That it could sense us was obvious, and I was worried about what it would do when it came to the next vent, until it dropped into the center of a small group of plague carriers.

The ensuing fight was not pretty.

“How much of her humanity do you think she had left?” Delight asked, as we watched her rip through the plaguers, sinking six-inch fangs into necks and shoulders, as they stopped moaning long enough to scream.

We also watched them tumble, like puppets with their strings cut, seconds after each bite.

“Point to note,” Delight said, and I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.

“Second outlet to the right,” I said, forcing my mind to focus on where we needed to be going, “and we’d better hurry, another one of those security bots is heading our way.”

It was only fair. The bots were automated, doubling as cleaning and security, and tasked with clearing any large blockages out of the ventilation shafts. I guess we registered as a pretty huge blockage, so it was only logical they were coming after us.

It still felt personal, though.

“Will you stop your bitching and move your ass?”

I moved. I wanted to keep bitching, too, but I had to move fast, and I couldn’t do both at once. I figured I’d save the bitching until I hit the lab floor. That was the plan, anyway.

First, we had to deal with the half dozen mutated plaguers waiting in the middle of the lab proper.

“Guessing this is the wrong lab,” I said, to which Delight replied, “You’re not helping,” as she fired her Glazer to take out the first two coming towards us.

I rapid-fired in her wake, glad these things were conforming to human norms, and not getting up after a shot to the head.

“What gave it away?” Delight asked, and I spotlighted the diagrams on the wall, each one detailing a different path of the mutation.

Spider-woman in the corridor hadn’t been alone, and I wondered what had happened to not only set her free, but to see the men and women working her transformation infected with the same mutagenic process.

“You know this can’t have happened overnight,” I said, thinking of the scenes I’d managed to hack while preparing for the mission. “Why didn’t I see any signs of this?”

“That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it?” Delight quipped back. “You need to go back through the feed and find out when this happened... or maybe find whatever loop was inserted to make you see a normal lab when you last checked. It was either one or the other.”

We watched a door open across the lab from us, and waited. If there was even one scientist left in any state to explain what the fuck was going on, we didn’t want to shoot him before he got a chance to tell us what in all the stars had gone wrong, and when.

I wanted to know the when. The when was very important.

Our hopes that the newest arrival was going to be in any way helpful were dashed, as he swung his head towards us, and sprinted in our direction, two extra sets of arms and an extra set of legs bursting out from under his coat. I watched his face contort, his jaw-line altering to accommodate fangs, and his eyes stretching wider than any human eye socket would allow as they became an inky-black, multi-faceted mass. He didn’t look like he was coming over to say ‘hi’.

I started firing and I didn’t stop until the shape had stopped moving, and I couldn’t work out where its head should have been. That, and Delight wrapped her hand over mine, and her touch jolted me out of the nightmare fear that had engulfed me.

“It’s dead,” she said. “You’ve killed it. Geez, remind me never to take you to an arach negotiation.”

“Arach?”

“Never you mind.” She glanced at the fallen mass that had been a living, breathing beast only seconds before. “I need to know where to go next—and Tens needs you to give him access to these computers so he can strip-mine the data in here, while we keep looking. The more my people know coming in, the better.”

I couldn’t take my eyes of the critter on the floor, the way its ten limbs sprawled awkwardly in death, and the way its flesh had turned a dull, light-eating black. I was breathing hard, like I’d run for miles, and my hands were shaking. I was still pointing the Glazer at the fallen heap, for the stars’ sake.

“Hey!” Delight said, her whisper sharp and clear, as she clipped me upside the head with the flat of her hand. “Get your head in the game! Computer. Tens. Access. Now!”

I looked for