Harvester-class vessel was an abomination. Though Auspex processed horror and disgust differently through his circuits than a human being would with their fleshy minds, the end result was the same. The deep loathing the small, roughly head-sized robot felt had its roots in simple programming, but it was no less real for its origin. Auspex hovered near the back of the bridge, waiting for one of his new Chitter “masters” to issue him an order. In the meantime, he would come up with scenarios to wipe them all out.
Maintaining Orthodoxy was all that mattered. By the first Commandment: Protect the Integrity of Caminus Prime Against the Presence of the Skarling and the Machinations Thereof.
It was a shame the Chitters didn’t breathe. The vacuum of space could cleanse many skarlings, but not these. They didn’t eat either, so poisoning the food or water supply would be pointless. No, in the months since he had been captured over Caminus Prime, Auspex had only set upon a single plan with any chance of success: sabotage the Harvester’s reactors. Consign the vermin to the deep black with the destruction of their foul vessel. That would do. That would do nicely.
The Chitters weren’t stupid enough to let Auspex anywhere near the reactor, and the small robot noted he would likely be prevented sabotage by the same thing preventing him from fleeing. So he had to bide his time.
The only true concern was the life of the human to whom he was assigned. But, in this situation, destroying the Chitters was more important. Lucian would understand.
By the Second Commandment: Protect and Preserve the Lives of Lawful Citizens Under the Authority of the Autarch, According to Rank. Destruction of the skarling took precedence over the life of his superior.
Indoctrination was very clear on protocol when encountering skarlings of any kind. While Auspex felt something like affection for his human, it wouldn’t stop him from doing his duty as a loyal Caminite machine. Granted, the loathing helped with that.
The bridge was largely technological, and those elements Auspex could easily understand. Consoles, a viewing monitor, stations for the bridge crew. Nearly human, those. By which Auspex would mean Caminite, and none other.
But the Chitters hadn’t stopped there. One console blinked with a large biological eye, attached to the front with a combination of wires, cables, and a mass of green-pink tissue that occasionally pulsated. Other consoles, or the walls themselves, sported writhing patches of tentacles, a swatch of fur, a line of skulls with articulated mouths, and so forth and so on. The gruesome trophies of the Chitters.
Auspex had been programmed with dossiers on the few varieties of skarling foolish enough to trouble Caminus Secundus, Caminus Tertius, and so on. The Chitters were one of these, nomadic vermin who occasionally descended into the Caminus system to raid. He had lumped them with all the others, of course. They should be cleansed from the galaxy. But over the course of his imprisonment, he had come to the conclusion that the extermination of the Chitters should be given the highest priority. They were disgusting, vile creatures.
More so even than most.
“Gamma Taktak: harvest achieved. Storm World, designation: Pandemonia. Number of specimens retrieved: eight.” The “helmsman,” such that it was, said. Its rank and name was Epsilon Pokpok, its lower rank evident in the lack of organic matter affixed to it. Lack when compared to Gamma Taktak or the two Deltas on the bridge.
Taktak had either an impressive or nauseating array of trophies affixed to it, depending on one’s proclivities. Organic matter from a dozen worlds at minimum. The centerpiece was a pink-blue-purple orb, flashing with lambent energy, nested among some greenish flesh. Auspex’s sensors detected some kind of weapon, though he had no frame of reference as to what it might be or where it came from.
“Omega Salvage,” said Gamma Taktak, using the name it had assigned to Auspex. An insult for a Caminite repair autom.
The Chitters were once machines themselves. They were even mostly machine now, robots like Auspex, but programmed on some long-forgotten Steel World. Likely one destroyed or hopelessly altered in the first storms. Madmen would have built them, for some disgusting task, and now they were free to roam the galaxy collecting their trophies. Chitters were approximately bolt-shaped, a hemisphere with a roughly cylindrical column pointing upward from the flat side. They were about the size of a human head and torso, and they floated around that distance from the ground, kept aloft by sophisticated babson engines in their hemispherical end. When they were active, the column extended, and mechanical arms, many tipped with various blades, saws, and other sharp implements, extended from them.
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What made the Chitters awful was the same thing that had turned their bridge into a nightmare. All of them had organic parts secured to the flat edges around their central columns. Arms, tentacles, skulls, eyes, tails, fur, feelers, antennae, and protrusions whose purpose could only be guessed all writhed and wriggled from their nests. The higher ranking the Chitter, the more bits decorated them. The most impressive belonged to the Gamma, the ranking abomination on the Harvester.
“Thy orders?” Auspex buzzed, annoyed he had to play this silly game. Overload the reactor and boom. No more of any of this. Lucian would be atomized instantly, but such were realities. His death would be quick, clean, and in service to the destruction of the skarling. The Autarch could not hope for better.
“Run program: retrieve stasis storage.”
Taktak had given the same order when he had captured Lucian. At the time, Auspex had obeyed to keep his assigned superior alive. Now, he obeyed because of the control collar the Chitters affixed him with. “Control collar,” was hardly enough to describe the revolting blob of organic matter writhing with innumerable semi-translucent organic tendrils that somehow snaked into Auspex’s positronic routines. An insult. The Chitters were an entire species of insult, as far as Auspex was concerned.
“Thy orders be mine to obey,” Auspex said, infusing every word with as much venom as his circuits’ Litany of Orthodoxy could manage. Not that the Chitters noticed, but it made the small robot feel a little better.
Auspex interfaced with the Chitter Harvester, a task as familiar as it was distasteful. If he was in the reactor control room, all it would take would be a single signal to jettison the cooling rods. He’d need the collar removed first, but that was all standing between him and liberation. And the galaxy would be a little cleaner.
One of the walls of the bridge retracted, the twitching mass of insectoid limbs on the surface vanishing into one wall. A dais raised, revealing ranks upon ranks of mostly-transparent capsules. Each one glowed with a green-white light. Each contained an individual in stasis, appearing to be asleep, and webbed to the inside of the capsule with glowing strands of greenish slime. Auspex moved past the various aliens, from the mostly-human ones to the out-and-out horrors. All would be purged when he finally got to the reactor and free of the control collar.
He found Lucian, sleeping in an otherwise nondescript capsule, the last of those captured, and thankfully, still whole. The Chitters had yet to harvest any part of him.
Auspex could point to the exact line of his programming that made him feel relief—but that didn’t make the feeling any less real. The essential contradiction troubled him for only a moment. How would it matter if Lucian were whole, if he was just going to be vaporized anyway, but the machine simply moved on without dwelling.
The planet on the viewscreen was a swirl of blues, grays, and lavenders, with an occasional glimmer of other, lambent colors chasing one another through a thick atmosphere. Auspex accessed the information in the Chitter databanks, like everything else written in machine code with gruesome editorializing, and learned what he could of Pandemonia. A Storm World, it was a place where sound became matter, both organic and inorganic. Auspex didn’t like the sound of that at all. He was momentarily amused at the digital pun, but he had no one to tell.
“Run program: depart,” said Gamma Taktak. “Full speed.”
The Harvester was restless, always moving. Even when it paused to raid, the vessel never stopped completely. Auspex wasn’t certain why, but he believed the Chitters might be being pursued.
The planet was receding, the harvester having already done its work. A crew of Chitters—mere Thetas—brought in the capsules with the natives harvested from the world. The natives looked to be humanoid, aside from being a shade of pale blue. They dressed in costumes of orange and white, each one partially skintight, but with flowing shirts, capes, or cravats. They were of surprising variety in shape and size. One was tiny and lithe, with gossamer wings on his back. One was a giant, her shoulders bulging with muscle. The other six were a mix—half were short and squat, with barrel chests and thick limbs, while the others were tall and slender, with fine bones and lean bodies.
Auspex hated them too. Less than the Chitters, but if those pods were to fail, Auspex would be doing the galaxy a favor. A skarling was a skarling, no matter how they looked.
The pods were fitted into the platform, one of these newcomers being placed next to Lucian. The Chitters floated away, and the dais sank back into the wall.
One of the consoles started hissing softly in time with a blue light blinking on and off. The Chitter operating it, Delta Ikpok, identifiable by the several brains and pieces of brain it had exposed to air or floating in bubbling containers on its surface as well as a ring of ears around its circumference, spoke. “Gamma Taktak. Signal received. Source: class vessel.”
Taktak spun in place. The lights along the columns stuttered and blinked more. The biological attachments writhed and twisted in excitement. “Pursuit source?”
“Supposition sound,” Ikpok said.
“Shunt signal to piloting control. Epsilon Pokpok, execute pathway change. Rendezvous with signal. Acquire Atumite.”
Auspex was quiet, content to be ignored. There was some creature the Gamma had been obsessed with. They had pursued a golden hawk, but had lost it in the atmosphere of a blue Ash World. The Chitters had assumed it to be destroyed, and had moved on. Now, apparently, their quarry had proven to be alive, and they were returning. Fine with Auspex. It would give him more time to try to get this collar off him. And from there, the Chitters could be destroyed.
