It was translucent and papery, with a defined pattern, all in one piece, and hideously long. It wasn’t easy to tell how long, but Rick’s quick guesstimate was at least several meters in length. He gestured to his team to get back hastily with one hand, raising his pistol and scanning the room, then taking a big step backwards and closing the door again. He motioned then to retreat down the hallway and joined them at some distance from the door.
“Okay. You four are at imminent risk of being killed dead as fuck simply by going in there. I’m the only one here that can get that far safely, although ‘safe’ is a relative term,” he said, wide eyed and panting a little.
Char growled. “We are not leaving you simply bec…” Rick cut him off.
“No. You don’t understand. It’s not just ‘what is in there’, it’s also what it leaves behind. I don’t know what kind it is, but I know what it is. It’s a snake, a big one, from my world. Snakes this big eat humans on Earth. They eat other predators, they eat large herbivorous prey animals…they eat literally anything they can fit in their mouth, which can extend to much wider than their body. What concerns me, though, for you, is that that room is full of its excrement, and even on Earth, snake dung is typically full of really bad bacteria and other things that are dangerous even to us.” Rick trailed off. “You guys need to withdraw – I am far more likely than the rest of you to survive simple contact with this thing, and there is no way in hell I’m leaving it here to make Lunchables out of the rest of the people on board.”
The eyes of the others had gotten progressively wider following the revelation that a Deathworld predator that actively ate humans was within, and the rest of Rick’s little speech clinched it. Viir paused long enough to hand Rick a bandolier with several nervejam grenades, and all three Gaoians then retreated back down the corridor at a brisk pace. Vec stayed in place, however; Rick looked at him, arched an eyebrow, and said, “Aren’t you going too?”
Vec’s response was to activate the forcefield bubble that encased his head, go onto internal air supplies, and deploy the additional weapons that Rick had suggested he buy for his suit. Allebenellin suits, as a rule, even the more militarized mercenary ones, tended strongly to be a simple means of getting from point a to point b, providing the pilot with great strength. They didn’t typically come with concealed fusion blades, forcefield projectors, or the improvised taser that Rick had had created for him. It had been costly, and had had a major down side of significantly shortening his onboard battery life with heavy use unless he was able to operate with his forcefield in a charging mode, but it made him easily one of the most intimidating members of the group.
“I’m staying, boss,” he said resolutely.
Rick nodded. “All right, then. Let’s do this….okay, so, this thing is an ambush predator. It isn’t going to give us a stand-up fight, and it’ll run if it gets put in a bad spot. It can strike a lot further than it appears; the bite isn’t venomous, but it does have powerful jaws and would probably bite your actual body in two, so don’t let the business end get anywhere near you. It kills by constriction…and it’s probably strong enough to actually crush that suit with you still in it. It will be faster than you, and it’s stronger than you – the entire body is one set of muscles. Last chance, amigo. You sure?”
To his credit, Vec didn’t hesitate at all. “Right behind you, boss.”
They went back to the door, nervously looking around. Rick pulled out the scanner device that Security had loaned him earlier on the premise that it might be useful, and ‘might be’ was definitely better than not having anything at all. He waved it around, and it promptly threw up an error message; apparently, a room covered in snake poo was sufficiently organic to completely confuse the thing. Disgusted, he put it away and pulled out his .45.
Moving in through the door was an exercise in intestinal fortitude. The stench was truly unbelievable, and his boots squelched through layers of snake dung nearly ten centimeters deep in most places, and deeper in others. Here and there, the bright shine of implants left over, their owners having been digested sparked in their lights. None were active enough to still advertise who their owners had been, but it was still a sobering and piteous sight. The curved side of the cistern rose above them into the invisible, dark depths of the overhead piping. His light caught the edge of a maintenance hatch near the top, hanging open onto an access walkway, and he focused the beam on it.
“Look there. That’s how the thing gets in and out, I’ll bet,” Rick said quietly. “We need a way to force it to come out here; going in the water after it is a quick way to end up like these poor bastards.” He flashed the light around the floor briefly to illustrate the point.
Vec held up the fist with the imbedded taser. “I could try this on the tank. It might make it come out.”
“Sounds like as good a plan as any. Let me get up there to keep it from going anywhere else. I’ll give you the signal, and you hit the tank with a good charge. We’ll see if that does the trick,” Rick said. He holstered his pistol and flashed the light around looking for a way up, which he found on the other side of the room. A few moments later, he was at the entrance to the tank. Vec waited below, and, taking a deep breath, he motioned to the Allebenellin to go ahead.
It almost seemed anticlimactic. There was no dramatic flash or sizzle of energy, just the crack-pop-pop-pop of the taser discharging. Rick edged closer to the door, suddenly afraid that either it wasn’t going to work, or that the beast had already left the tank and was somewhere else entirely. Without warning, however, the surface of the water erupted, and it burst through the exit, leaning its weight on the still-barely-attached hatch. Rick opened fire, pulling the trigger as fast as he could and emptying the magazine at what he could see of the thing illuminated in the handheld light in his other hand.
Unfortunately, he missed. The snake kept coming out, meter after meter of lean scaly muscled intimidation. It used the hatch for leverage to get onto the overhead conduits, and was nearly halfway there when the hinges let go, the door falling straight down onto the hapless Vec below with a final-sounding crunch, and the snake toppling directly onto Rick. With hideous speed, it coiled around his outstretched arms, then around his waist and feet.
He strained, trying vainly to free a hand, an arm, an elbow, or even a leg, to no avail. The snake rolled him back and forth, banging loudly against first one side of the walkway, then the other, then through the open side and onto the floor meters below. The hit drove the wind right out of him, breaking ribs and one arm by the feel of it, and the snake began to squeeze.
His vision going black, out of ammo, and unable to reach either of his knives, Rick did the only thing he could think of before he lost consciousness. With an almighty heave, he got the broken fingers of his left hand to his belt, where the nervejam grenades Viir had given him hung, and activated one.
The snake’s baleful eye met his, and he smiled, as everything was consumed in quantum fire, he grated out his last words through gritted teeth.
“Fuck yo…”
~fin~
Afterword: Thanks for reading. If anyone’s curious, the snake in question is a reticulated python, well-known on Earth as being the longest species (not as girthy as the anacondas) of snake on Earth. They have a long history of eating anything they can, which definitely includes humans, even adults.