Lurker Read online

  “Talk about terraforming,” he said, realizing the horror list of what the Hadarak were capable of kept getting longer and longer. Maybe the gravitational crunching would put a stop to it, but he was pretty sure this goo could consume the outer layers of a planet. The crust for sure. And even if it didn’t have enough material to reproduce a lot, Paul was reading a fair amount of ‘fat’ in the material, and by that he meant compounds locked in a gelatinous state that didn’t appear to be part of the lifeforms.

  “Ships taste good, don’t they?” he asked the creature colony, using his telepathy to try and establish some rudimentary communication, but all he got in response was similar to minion minds. Very compartmentalized and focused forward with blinders that limited creativity and curiosity. That made them reliable to a fault, but give them contact beyond their expected methods and they…

  Paul shifted his focus and tried to order the goo to change shape…and right on cue, it began to bulge out a bit and tuck in here and there, working its way towards a cube.

  “Ha,” he said, pumping a fist. “How’s that for hacking?”

  He tried sending a movement order, but nothing happened, and that wasn’t surprising. It didn’t have gravity drives, and the ability to form arms and legs in the space didn’t mean a damn thing if you couldn’t lock onto something for leverage. So he tried to get information from it instead, quickly realizing with horror that it was eating itself to death. Those ‘fat’ reserves was all it had to live on unless it found something else to consume, and in the coldness of space it was having to burn a lot of energy just to keep from freezing solid.

  So yet again, the Hadarak had living weapons they considered to be disposable, but this was even worse than the regular minions. Minion goo would literally only live a few days past its birth if it didn’t have any more material to consume. It was a fire and forget weapon, or would the Lurker be back to pick it up and store it for later? To that end, how did it plant the seed in Morgan’s ship anyway?

  No internal sensors had seen it happen, and no external sensors could see inside once it rammed the Borg vessel, so whatever had happened occurred in the literal and figurative ‘dark’ without any witnesses. How and where it could come through the Yeg’gor, Paul didn’t know, but without the ability to navigate it wouldn’t be able to touch ships with shields unless the Lurker took them down first. That was how Ace was containing his sample, inside a shield matrix that didn’t let it touch any matter, and ramming a ship was a good way of getting past the shields.

  But it was the planetary applications that scared Paul. Hadarak had been known to destroy them, but in the course of feeding on the magma layer or searching for inhabitants and letting the minions do the cleanup work after they landed on top of the largest cities. But if Paul was right about this minion goo, if put down on a planet that had sufficient crust material to sustain massive colony growth, it could consume everything on the surface of a planet given time.

  Assassin was a good description for the Lurker, for it seemed it didn’t just apply to single powerful targets like Ysalamir. It seemed it could also assassinate planets, or at least the outer layers of them, if it wanted. The question was how fast…

  Paul got closer to the goo, using his shields as a scoop that stopped the tendrils that shot out towards him, then collected the rest as he gently rammed it, keeping the mass miles ahead of him with a solid energy field separating the two. He extended his IDF around it then made a microjump further out into the system until he came to an asteroid field with an uninhabited rock some 170 miles wide…onto which he sent the goo flying, with it reaching out and grabbing hold of the rock even before its central mass would have hit.

  “Alright, let’s see how fast you eat,” Paul said, deploying some of his drones into a grid around the entire asteroid to get maximum sensor penetration while he kept an eye on the star just in case the Lurker came back out to play. “And please don’t be as fast as I think you might be...”

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