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In a one bedroom apartment off of Hydrangea Road, Lucas Turnbull tried to sleep in a half-filled bed. He tossed and turned, rolled onto his back, tried to curl himself into a fetal ball. It just wasn't the same, not without her, and not without his arm. He tried to roll himself onto his stomach again, cursing when he jammed his stump into the bed and ground the end of the bone against scar tissue. 'Enough of this...' he grumbled; if sleep wasn't going to come, he had better things to do.
Levering himself up with his good arm, he tossed the blankets off and slipped his hooves into his house slippers. They were fuzzy and pink, with little embroidered cowbells on them. Anya had given them to him for Christmas two years ago, he recalled, back when they were staying in Tundratown. He had complained to her about the chill that seeped in through the floors of their tiny apartment, and she had them custom made for him. For a moment, the loss came back so fiercely that he couldn't breathe, couldn't even think. He swiped at his eyes, wiping tears onto his singlet, before grunting another curse and stomping off towards the little bathroom, slippers making soft pomf-pomf noises as he went.
He flicked on the light, and there it was in its charging station. Twenty-seven kilograms of carbon fiber and titanium alloy, his bane and his future, a Yakmatetsu cyber-arm. Gingerly, he picked it up just below the elbow, turned it ninety degrees like he had practiced over and over again in the hospital, and slipped the end of his stump into the socket. With a WHIRR-click, the limb clamped down and latched itself in place. An unpleasant pins-and-needles sensation as the neural shunts activated, sending signals down motor nerves that had been starved for attention the last six hours.
He spun the rotary claw through several rounds, watching as the articulated clamp that took the place of the original hoof flexed and bent, spreading wide before closing into a powerful grip. He focused and bore down, listening as the servomotors whined and strained, only relenting when the autonomic systems sent a warning burst of feedback. Too much pressure and he'd start to damage the hardware.
With a grunt, he pulled his nightshirt off with his left arm, and stepped into the compact shower cubicle. A bit of soap, a quick rinse, and he stepped out again, dripping water across the battered linoleum floor. He reflexively wiped the brushed metal casing dry, he couldn’t feel the droplets of water on its outer shell but he didn't like the idea of them just sitting there drip-drying. A clean pair of drawers, denim work pants and belt, his insulated work shirt and the company logo parka, and he was out the door into the pre-dawn rain.
----
The Canal District of Zootopia was mostly an industrial district, blacktop or gravel roads crisscrossed the islands, steel or pre-ferrocrete masonry bridges networking them and leading to the city proper. Between the small plots of heavily reinforced land, the oily waters of the river coursed towards the mouth of the harbor and the sea beyond. Lucas stepped off the trolley, and joined the queue of dockworkers at the gate of Cudlow and Sons. His turn came, and he stepped forward, flashed his badge before the security scanner, then turned to face the guard for his pat-down.
"Luke! How are ya, Big Bull?" The badger guard sprung forward, wrapping his strong arms around Lucas's legs in a vertically-challenged attempt at a bear hug. The bull smiled, reached down like he had always done, and gave Angus a firm squeeze on the shoulder with his replacement arm. The metal hoof-tips clacked as they came to rest on the guard's shoulder, and he sprang backwards with a frightened whine.
"Oh, for all the Saints, you scared me half to death!" Angus collected himself, then turned to examine the prosthetic more closely. Lucas, not wanting to become the center of attention, tried to hide the metal limb behind his back, but it was little use. The badger scrabbled up his pants leg, found a purchase on Lucas's belt, and after a cursory patdown he turned his attention to the right arm again.
"Can we just, ummm, do this another time?" the bull asked, as the now curious badger pawed at his sleeve, feeling the profile of the cyberlimb underneath the coat, where the alloy gave way to flesh and bone.
"Hmm, what? Oh, yes, of course, mustn't make a fuss over you on your first day back." Angus dropped to the tarmac, made a quick note on his commlink, and said "Right, you're cleared to enter. Bossman wants to see you, once you've gotten settled in and had your coffee." Angus looked at him appraisingly as Lucas went to enter through the gate, and then said "It's good that you're back, Luke. Things haven't been the same with you gone."
Lucas halted mid stride, turned to face the diminutive security mammal. "What do you mean?" he asked, not liking the tone of the badger's voice.
"Oooch, it's nothing much." he replied, looking over his shoulder before continuing. "Folk haven't been turning up for their shifts, motion sensors tripped in buildings that are locked up tighter than an otter's pocket. It's uncanny..." He cleared his throat, before continuing, "You being the union steward, I should think--"
"Former Steward, Angus. Don't think I didn't get wind of that when I was in the hospital. Management was licking their chops to bust me back down a peg, after they had to shell out five figures for this hunk-a-junk." He waved his replacement limb in frustration, then pulled his coat more closely around his frame, and muttered "I’m lucky to still have a place here. Just wanna keep my head down and work.”
The badger frowned, and nodded. "Aye, it was wrong of me to ask it of you. You've suffered enough. Let Manderly keep looking into it, it's his responsibility now." He waved to the next mammal in line, and Lucas trudged into the dockyard.
----
After a few minutes spent in the Supervisor's office (welcome back, so sorry about Anya, make sure that your PTO records are turned in on time...) and a quick stop over at the coffee and donuts table (coffee still too weak for his liking, donuts were from a new shop on Marshland, tasty...) Lucas was ready to start his first day back on the job. He grabbed his data pad and hard hat from his cubby by the door, checking his first assignment for the day.
Not much on the docket, he noted after a moment’s study. The Black Beauty was back from its weekly roundtrip to Outback Island, and the Hippon Maru was being loaded before steaming out across the ocean once again. Better get started with the Maru first, they could finish loading and make the berth available for one of the big soya haulers from the Tri-Burrows. Lucas jabbed at his notepad, finding that the claw didn't always pick up on the touchscreen. He would have to mention that to the doctors when he went back to the Evo clinic for his next checkup. He paused, wondering if it was a checkup or a tuneup now?
As he worked, his commlink chirped, and the voice of his boss’s secretary buzzed out, telling him to take a look at the dockyard pumping station when he finished his current task. There was an unknown error from one of the pumps, and he was big enough to be able to do something about it if it didn't need a skilled technician.
Lucas acknowledged the new orders, soon he was climbing down from the ship and walking down to the far southern tip of the yards. A concrete blockhouse stood there, he could hear the whirring of electrical equipment within. Inside were most of the flood and erosion control system, a complicated network of drainage channels fanned out across the island to remove water from the marshy soil, and everything collected together here to be pumped back over the seawall.
Unlocking the door with his ID badge, Lucas squinted into the gloom, trying to remember where the sump pumps were installed. He had been inside once or twice before, as part of a donkey-labor crew. He flicked the light switch on and off, but there was no response, the echoing mechanical space remained dark. Sighing, he went to the staircase and climbed down into darkness. His destination had to be down here somewhere, but where?
Stumbling around in the dark, having to use his commlink as an improvised flashlight, Lucas wondered why weren't the lights working in here? For that matter, why was he handling this problem, rather than the yard's electrician? Lucas racked his brains, trying to remember the possum's name. John something, John Peterson maybe? They had worked together a few times before, usually Lucas did the heavy lifting at John's direction, he was always a patient and careful supervisor when working on anything that could maim or kill you if you touched it wrong.
Finally, he found the big Caterpillar drive unit, connected to it by a heavy steel driveshaft was the primary sump pump. It was a nondescript steel case, painted an olive green color and mounted over a deep well in the ferrocrete basement floor. Wide diameter steel pipes ran in to the sides of it, tracing their way up the walls and out towards the river once again. Lucas could hear water dripping in the depths of the well, and he noticed a red indicator light slowly blinking on the front panel of the pump. A stenciled label next to it said "SCREEN 1 DEBRIS", whatever that meant…
Lucas examined the pump's housing in the dim light of the commlink's screen, looking for a hatch or an access panel. He found one on the left side of it opposite the drive shaft. It was bolted shut but with a quick spin of his new gripper arm he had those off in a few seconds. He grinned, this beat the pants off of struggling with a ratchet, maybe there was some good to come from his new limb. The panel dropped from the pump's side with a loud CLANK, and a torrent of dark sludge poured out of the casing. Lucas jumped backwards in alarm, avoiding the ooze but banging the back of his head on a pipe stanchion that protruded from the wall.
His helmet protected him from what would have been a fearsome blow to the back of his head, but it still staggered him, and he groped wildly as he almost fell into the pool of slimy goop that he had just dodged. He caught himself on the pump housing with a grinding shriek of metal on metal, but his commlink tumbled from his left hoof and plopped into the mess, its light vanishing as it sunk below the surface. Groaning, Lucas got his feet beneath himself again and gingerly went fishing through the muck for it. No choice for it, it would have to be his organic hoof, there wasn't enough sensation in the gripper claw for this job.
Rooting around in the viscous muck, he felt a rounded shape and plucked it out. Not the commlink, it was an elongated hard object with a pair of jagged ridges along one side. He felt along its length, curious, probing into the inset holes with his first two digits. Lucas pulled it free from the muck, and gently shook it to get a better look at whatever it was. He squinted at it in the dim red glow of the warning light, and felt his flesh begin to crawl. Cradled in his left hoof, a fanged skull grinned up at him.
----
"Lion and Lamb damn it all!" Lucas growled in frustration, "Are you telling me that FIFTEEN mammals have gone missing so far? And there's been no effort to lock down the yards, call the ZPD, nothing?"
Lucas and Angus were in an unoccupied work building, an electric motor repair shop for the big cranes. The badger was sitting on a work stool, staring glumly at the sludge encrusted skull where Lucas had deposited it after getting him from his post at the gate. Getting wasn't really the right word; he had stomped up to the badger, picked him up by the scruff of the neck, and carried him bodily away while Angus ineffectively struggled in his iron grip. Angus had protested at being taken away from his post at the gate, until Lucas locked the shed door and showed him the grisly find.
"Well what was I supposed to do?” the badger whined in protest. ”I've sent in reports to Management, I've asked my cousin in Lone Star if they have any leads, but it's all come up with nothing." Angus prodded skull with a long screwdriver, where it lay on the workbench in the bright halo of a task light. He gazed at it thoughtfully, then said "It's got to be John Peterson. Or was John Peterson, anyrate."
Lucas flopped down heavily on a rolling tool chest, and stared in incomprehension at the grimy bone. After a few moments, he asked "How do you figure?"
Angus replied, ticking the points off on his claws. "It's definitely a chomper, so that eliminates quite a few. Too small to be Pierre Spottswood, too big to be Carol Cophias." Lucas's gaze flicked from the skill to the badger, then back again. "Must have been John Peterson. He was a possum, they're not really preds but they have sharp teeth. You found it in the machinery of the pump house, which would make sense as well, he would have likely been in there for repairs."
Lucas shook his head in disgust, and stood back up. "Ok, let's assume you're right. What could have led to his skull ending up in the sump pump? Someone came along and killed him, then dismembered his body and stripped all the flesh? Would take a lot of time and effort to do that, you wouldn't want to stick around to be caught in the act..."
Angus was studying the skull more closely, reaching out and turning it slowly in the work light's beam. He tapped at something with one long claw, and replied "These grooves, they're not supposed to be there. It looks like something was scraped along the bone, almost like it was being scrimshawed." At Lucas's look of incomprehension, he went on, "It's a sort of folk art, you carve patterns or pictures into the bones of mammals, polish it to bring the grooves into relief. Not the sort of thing you or I would do, but I have a few curios from Purrma that I could show you…"
"But this isn't any sort of art, it's just lines that go in sort of the same direction." Lucas objected.
"Well, if it's not some madmammal's handywork," the badger offered, "then maybe it's something else. You know what it looks like to me?" He set the bone down, and wiped his hands before continuing, "It looks like it's been gnawed on by something. Something BIG."
Lucas shuddered, imagining the force it would have taken to scrape those furrows into the skull. "I don't like to think about that. You hear stories about wild animals that will get ahold of a body from time to time, some poor bastard that the Mafia or the Yaks geeked and dropped down a sewer drain. But this thing, whatever it is, it's got to be stalking our workers and taking them one by one..."
Angus nodded, and then gestured to the skull. "Should we call someone? My cousin Donald--"
Lucas's bitter laugh cut him off before he could finish his offer. "You think that management is going to let a bunch of Lone Star goons in here, maybe give them all passkeys to the warehouses so they can go snooping around and looking into shipping containers? More likely that they'll just fire both of us, and keep hiring new workers as the old ones disappear."
He slouched over to a storage locker, pulled it open and started to pull equipment out of plastic cases. As the bull slowly built his trove of pilfered hardware, Angus noted the contents with growing alarm. A combination gas/oxygen meter, with a fresh carton of power cells. An ultra-bright LED flashlight, as well as a handful of plastic chem-lume sticks. An emergency rebreather, along with several catalyst recharge tubes.
"Oh, Big Bull, tell me this isn't what it looks like." he groaned, as Lucas added a handheld plasma cutter to the stockpile. "You're not thinking of going after this thing, are ye?"
"Tell me again," Lucas replied, quietly and with iron in his voice, "How many mammals have gone missing from this dockyard? How many of my friends never came back to work, and no one never even bothered to find out why?" Reaching under the workbench, he pulled a carpenter's tool belt from a peg, strapped it around his waist and cinched it tight with a whirring tug of his artificial limb. The plasma cutter went into the screwdriver holster at one hip; the flashlight went into the hammer loop on the other. The pockets were filled with the rest of the batteries and other emergency supplies, and the bulky respirator clipped to the back of the belt, hanging down over the base of his tail.
"Alright, if you must go and do this, I want to give you something." Angus reached into his jacket, pulled out a yellow and red striped ID badge in a heavy black plastic holder. He put it face up on the table and flicked it over into the pile of gear, saying "That's the fire inspector's passcard. It'll override damn near everything, let you into any building and most of the utility spaces, unless they've mechanical locks. Also, it has elevated privilege, so the building security systems won’t flag you for going into places where you oughtn’t be."
Angus grinned, and then said "Take care with that, won't you? It's more than my job is worth to have given it to you...”
Lucas picked up the card, and was securing it to his wrist, when a thought struck him. "You had this on you. You couldn’t have time to go and get it from the office. Why?"
Angus looked down at his worn boots, wringing his paws as he hesitated, in a quiet voice he said "I saw you were scheduled to come back today, and somehow I knew that you might somehow discover what’s been going on around here." He glanced up, shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Big Bull, I didn’t mean for you to get sucked into this, but you’ve got a nose for trouble. Stay safe tonight, won’t you?”
----
As his search dragged out, Lucas was starting to wonder if he really had bitten off more than he could chew. He had worked his way from building to building, inspecting utility rooms and sewage tanks, anywhere that was dark and out of the way, where this mysterious creature might have denned. His legs and back ached from crouching and crawling through spaces built for smaller mammals, he had a glowing purple spot in the center of his vision from the reflected flashlight's beam, and his cyberarm had started to give its low-power warning chime.
He was in the old dry dock, unused and practically abandoned since the Insurance Wars. Campaigns of sabotage and counter-sabotage during that quiet little bloodbath had led the Megacorps to stop sending their cargo haulers to independent yards for maintenance. Now it was a rust-streaked hole in the ground, half-heartedly pumped dry of the river water that oozed back in through every crack and pore, and filled with scrap that was too unimportant or worthless to store anywhere else.
Lucas had climbed down into the pit on a length of anchor chain that sprawled over the dock's rim, splashing into ten centimeters of stagnant water at the bottom. Around him, the rusting frames of cargo containers were scattered haphazardly. He wandered between them, listening to the wind come moaning across the wide space that he occupied, and the soft splashing of his hooves as he picked his way through the ankle-deep water. It must be past midnight, he thought, and with no ship loading or unloading he was probably the only mammal left on site, aside from Angus. The badger had volunteered to work a double shift, the better to keep an eye on his progress as he searched.
Towards the riverfront end of the dry dock, one of the big semi-circular water inlets caught his eye. He swiveled the flashlight towards it, noticing a green discoloration that marred the ferrocrete around it. Drawing closer, he saw that it was a sort of soft jelly-like material, stretched thinly across the opening. He poked it with the hoof-tip on his left hand, and it met a rubbery resistance, although it was coated in a viscous slime that ran between his digits in an unpleasant way.
He snorted in irritation when his attempts to pull the alien material free were unsuccessful, even the gripper on his cyberarm couldn't get a purchase on the slippery membrane. Reaching down to his belt, he took the plasma cutter from its holster, took aim though the smoked glass screen and pulled the trigger. The plasma arc leapt to life, and the air was filled with a sulfurous reek as the membrane crackled and fried beneath it. Lucas made a quick X-shaped cut, quenched the flame and experimentally jabbed at the burned section with his claw.
It came apart under the metal limb's pressure with a liquid squelch and a rotten odor even worse than he had smelled under the plasma arc. For the second time this day, fetid slime rushed towards him, and Lucas again scrabbled backwards to avoid it. He swapped the cutter awkwardly for the flashlight and peered into the exposed cavity. Under a ropy web of green connective tissue, he saw a jumbled mass of smooth, polished bone. Skulls, ribs, the longer bones of arms or legs. Above them, dangling from the rough concrete roof, he saw stings of pearly pods, dripping residual slime that they must have been cocooned in up till now.
A splash from somewhere in the cluttered spaces behind him caused Lucas to whirl, nearly tumbling into the polluted water as he spun to shine his flashlight over the ruined hulks of cargo containers. Flicking the beam left, then right, but not seeing anything, he eventually shut the light off and just listened to the sound of the wind and the slow splash of the water in the pit. As quietly as he could, he rose to his feet, and began to move away from the biological horror that he had discovered.
He had just squeezed through a narrow gap between a cargo pod and the walls of the pit, when he smelled it. Chat Noir, the kind that came in the little cut crystal bottles, the ones that he had bought her every Christmas and for her birthdays. Just the whiff of it that he had caught was too much to bear. He collapsed sideways, sliding down the rough wall and coming to rest in an exhausted, blubbering heap in the filthy water. He didn't want to be here anymore, not in this cursed dockyard, not in this cold and unfeeling city. More than anything he wanted to take his wife into his arms, and carry her away from all of this dirt and crime and sorrow.
As he sat there, sniffling and wiping at his eyes with the back of one grime-streaked hoof, he heard a whispered "Lucas...." echo from deeper in the maze. He held his breath, and listened, in a moment he heard it again, a faint call of "Lucas, my love..." He scrambled to his feet, dropping the flashlight in his haste, not bothering to go back for it as he barreled into the darkness, calling "Anya?" as he tugged and shoved his way through the debris. Scrabbling over and through half collapsed bundles of rebar, he heard could hear the voice, her voice, more clearly every second. "Lucas? My love? Where are you?"
As he wrenched an unhinged cargo container door out of the way with a painful jolt of cyberlimb bio-feedback, he caught a glimpse of a flowing white gown disappearing behind a corner. He staggered after it, puffing and exhausted, and found himself in a tiny alcove at the center of the maze. She was there, sitting daintily on the top of a cargo pod, her arm stretched out towards him in a welcoming gesture.
"Anya," he sobbed, staggering forward, unable to believe his eyes, willing it to be true. "Anya, love, how can this be? That night, the wreck, I saw you die..."
She silenced him with a smile, and beckoned him closer. "Come here Lucas, come to me and I'll tell you."
He reached out with his augmented right arm, tried to pull himself up to where she was sitting, but with no success. The power cells of his arm were still going, but his body was drained from a full day's work, and an evening's prowling through the yards, and he struggled to pull himself up from the awkward angle. Anya reached down, wrapped her arms around his wrist, then bent her head downwards and started to rain kisses up and down the metal claw.
"Stop that, love, it tickles!" he giggled, but she ignored him and moved from kissing to playful love-bites up and down the metal shell. He gasped as she found a sensitive spot at the crook for his elbow, somewhere in the back of his mind there was a disquieting realization, he could feel the iron grip of her hooves on the cyberarm, could feel her frenzied bites and then there was a cold, slimy sensation from his other arm.
He glanced over, saw a leathery grey tentacle wrapped around his living left arm, pinioning it to the rusting steel of the cargo pod he was still trying to struggle up. He followed it, saw that it snaked out of Anya's long white gown; with uncomprehending horror he saw the expression on her face had turned from sweet longing to a murderous hatred. Her eyes gleamed with an orange luminescence, the pupils morphing from a deer's horizontal slit to a fractally convoluted star.
"GRR-ah, it SEES us!" she hissed; as the illusion fell away, Anya's face twisted and melted before his eyes to become a living horror. It reminded Lucas of the octopus that the fisherman would peddle from their dinghies at the dockside, but those had been only twenty or thirty centimeters across, not the three meters of grey leathery flesh and burning orange eyes that had him pinned to the shipping container.
With a scream of terror and revulsion, he bucked with all his strength, the adrenaline coursing through his veins gave his tired body the vigor that he needed. He couldn't break its hold on him, but as he bucked it lost its grip on the top of the cargo container, and was pulled forwards and over the edge by Lucas's body weight. A shriek of noiseless sound echoed through Lucas's head, it was a burst of raw emotion and sensation, barraging his mind with Anger-Hunger-Red.
They both hit the water at the bottom of the dry dock together, the splash of cold water reviving Lucas's mind, but shocking his body momentarily with its chill. The beast also seemed to be momentarily frozen by its rapid transition from land to water. But it recovered quickly and was after him in a heartbeat, tentacles splashing through the water as they whipped towards his face. Lucas bellowed through a mouthful of stagnant water, and swung his right arm up to block it. The titanium alloy pincher grip dug into the oily flesh, the tentacle spasming and writhing to find a better purchase. Grappling, ripping and tearing at each other’s flesh, they crashed off together through the narrow corridors of the junkyard, a brutal struggle to determine who would be predator and who would be the prey this night.
----
Angus dashed through the entrance of the capsule hotel, turning right at the vending machines and hurrying towards the oversized chamber where he had stashed Lucas a few hours ago. The Street Doc was just leaving, making a few notes on her commlink as the badger huffed and puffed his way to her.
"Doc! How is he? -uff- I got back -gasp- here fast as I could! -pant-" He staggered to a stop before her, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. The fox doctor spread her paws in a reassuring gesture, then put them onto Angus's shoulders and firmly steered him to a nearby bench. "Sit down, Angus; he's going to be fine. You stopped the bleeding, got him away from the scene and called me, that's about the best anyone could expect outside of a DogWagon team."
She paused, ears flicking upright in thought, before resettling in a more neutral position. "Well, fine has a few caveats attached to it. That cyberarm is trashed, no getting around it. He's lost a great deal of blood, and I've got him on broad-spectrum antibiotics but it's anyone's guess what he might have been exposed to before you brought him here."
Angus groaned, made to rise and keep moving towards Lucas's door, the doctor struggling in vain to slow him down while badgering the badger about not waking their patient. It was little use, though, Angus's bulk and lower center of gravity let him slowly but surely force his way to the capsule's entrance. The privacy screen was drawn down, but Angus could see one greasy, mud-streaked hoof inside. He gently forced the doctor out of the way, grunted a curt thanks as he unsealed the door with a slap on the controls.
Lucas was lying stripped to the waist, the great tearing cuts and bite marks along his arm and shoulders sutured and covered with transparent bandages. They looked artificial under the soft LED room lights, like they were parts of a theatrical costume, just silicone rubber and fake blood. The bull opened his eyes at the whoosh of the door's opening, and he gave his friend a tired smile. An intravenous drip line with artificial blood was slowly feeding in through a cannula at the base of his collarbone, a bracelet was gecko-grip taped to a shaved patch of skin on the inside of his left wrist, monitoring his vital signs and (probably, Angus assumed) transmitting them electronically to the doctor.
"You should have seen the other guy..." Lucas groaned, before trying to prop himself up a little further in the bed with the mangled remains of his artificial limb. Angus made a half-choked "No, no!" as he knelt by Lucas's side, pressing him down again as gently as he could.
“Lie down, for all love, Luke, lie down!” Angus groaned, before being pushed to one side by the doctor. She leaned over his broad chest, examining her sutures for any signs of new bleeding, then leaned back and checked the IV drip. Angus grasped Lucas’s remaining hoof with both paws, and asked “Do you remember what happened? I heard the noise and came running, found you half drowned with that… THING!”
"Beast... Monster... Whatever..." Lucas's eyes were unfocused, his mind stretching back to the desperate fight in the dry dock. He took a deep breath, then continued. "It took Anya's shape. I thought it was her." His eyes closed, tears running down silently, too tired and injured to do anything but let them flow. “How did it know those things about her? Her smile, Chat Noir, all those things I loved…”
The doctor elbowed him in the ribs, leaning in to whisper in his ear "Don't stress him out, he's shocky as it is. He's been through a lot, and we can always ask him later."
Angus nodded to her, then told Lucas "After I went back, I found the nest. Right where you said it was." Actually, it hadn't been, he had to scramble around with the freezing water up to his balls for a quarter hour, all the while worrying that the creature had some sort of mate that was stalking him through the rubbish. But like the doctor said, best not to worry him about that.
"Don't you worry, mate." He gave a cheery pat on the remains of Lucas's cyberarm, his claws making a hollow tapping sound against the case. "Two petrol bombs up the works ought to take care of the wee buggers."
Lucas grinned at that, opening his red-rimmed eyes a crack and looking up at the badger. "We did it… Did… Good…" His eyes slipped closed, and he drifted off into an exhausted sleep. The fox pulled her commlink from its pocket, silently reviewed the sensor's data output, then tugged at Angus's elbow, silently beckoning him to follow her out into the hallway.
Outside, with the door closed again, she turned to Angus and quietly asked "You recovered the eggs, before you burned the nest? The Incubus is dead, and there's nothing to do for that, but we've invested a great deal into this project. We NEED genetic samples at least."
Angus scowled, glanced past her shoulder to the cubicle's window. "I should have never have called you, Doris. Fifteen mammals died at that fucking monster's hands, ‘twas only luck that it wasn't sixteen."
“Come on Angus,” the fox huffed, as she withdrew a slim cigarette case from her medical bag, lit one and took a long drag. “It’s been an unpleasant few weeks, but we’ve all got what we wanted from this little adventure, I think that’s worth all the trouble, don’t you?” She emphasized this last with a puff of smoke down towards him.
He pointed a quivering claw in her face, hissing "FIFTEEN. You look me in the eyes, and tell me that this was worth it..."
She straightened her posture, and looked away before responding. "It is what it is. Praetexti are dangerous animals, you should see some of the accounts that I've read about the one that infiltrated the Tri-Burrows. Your fifteen dead don’t even scratch the surface." She stared back at him as she continued “Current theory is that they use metamagical resonance to extract subconscious desires from their prey. Telepathy, Angus. They read minds, we can’t even do that!”
A message pinged onto her commlink, she glanced down, nodded. "Viable. You did good work back there. Payment will be as discussed before."
"Fuck you, and fuck your money." Angus muttered, then caught himself and quickly followed up with "No, wait, I take that back. Give it to Lucas; tell him that it's a bounty or something."
She cocked an eyebrow, one ear raised inquisitively. "Generous. Ok, from your lips to God's ears, through the good offices of Universal Omnitech." She dropped her commlink back into its pocket, ground out the cigarette on the wall and flicked the butt towards a trash can. She strode down the dim corridor, the glowering badger following in her wake. "We'll send an ambulance tomorrow morning; get him into a real hospital instead of this rathole. Actually, that's an insult to rats, this place should be reserved for Troggs. Any rate, he'll get the treatment that he needs. Maybe even a replacement for that arm. We’ve got some prototypes that need field testing…"