Chapter 5: Chapter 5 Uz’En Precursors
"Hey! Who are you?" cried a man, as he came up the path towards them. Several cloth bags were tied to his side, probably in order to get things from the surface.
"My name is Dustin, and this is Olivia. We were chased down this tunnel by giant robots, and I'm pretty sure it was collapsed."
'Well, that's not good. Look, if I were you, I'd go over to that tunnel, over there, and head back up to the surface. You don't want any of the taskmasters to find you. They'll put you to work, and you'll never be able to leave."
"What? Why not?" asked Olivia.
"They put their eggs inside of you, and if you leave, the eggs will hatch and eat you from the inside."
"Then why are you leaving?"
"They just refreshed my egg. I only have a limited amount of time to get back before the egg hatches. See ya!"
They watched the guy jog off towards the other tunnel, and disappear."
"Eggs? Really?" muttered Olivia with a shake of her head.
"I guess it would work for these people. I wonder if there's any Uz'En down here."
Continuing down the path, to the ground floor, they watched as the workers mined glowing crystals out of the rock.
"Do you think the crystals are radioactive?" asked Olivia.
Dustin scanned one and jerked back away from them.
"They're not radioactive, they're alive!"
"Really?"
"They eat the mineral around them and emit a glow as waste," said a worker. "We have to keep mining them, because they die after a while and have to be replaced. The master's aren't very smart. Are you new?"
"Yea, but we better keep moving," said Olivia, raising her hand in thanks.
The guy nodded and went back to carefully chiseling the orb out.
Dustin sent out a swarm of nanobots, too small to see, to search for Uz'En. If there were any down here, he didn't want to leave them.
"Maybe we should get a sample of these things?" asked Olivia, looking at the soft blue glow of a cart full of the orbs.
Dustin touched one of the orbs for a moment, just long enough to get a sample, then jerked away from it. For some reason he felt an intense desire not to touch them.
As the nanobots started to return to him, he was getting conflicting results. Some of them said that the people around him were Uz'En, and others said they were not. It didn't make sense.
"Hey," he said, pausing next to a guy who was in a corner, obviously in pain. They were out of sight of anyone who might be looking. "Are you okay?"
"My egg hatched. You should probably get away before it gets out and comes for you," the man panted. His brow was stained in sweat and his breath was ragged.
"Let me save you," said Dustin reaching for him.
The guy looked at him incredulously, then looked like he would laugh if he wasn't in so much pain.
"Sure, whatever. I'm a goner anyways."
Dustin touched his chest, and sent a stream of nanobots into his body. There was a huge parasite ravaging his gut, eating everything it could. He had the nanobots take care of it by killing it, and then eating it.
(DUSTIN, THIS INDIVIDUAL IS READING AS A UZ'EN, BUT ISN'T A UZ'EN.)
'How is that possible?'
(IT MAY BE THAT THESE INDIVIDUALS ARE SIMILAR TO UZ'EN, OR A PRECURSOR.)
'Would a PED work on him?'
(THE CHANCE IS VERY HIGH.)
With a nod, Dustin slapped the nanobots into a PED and forced him to go into a change. He turned blue for a moment, and his eyes widened, before he returned to normal.
"There. You're good now."
"What did you do?"
"Fixed you."
The guy opened his mouth, then shut it back. Shaking his head, he ran his hand through his hair.
"Look, there are tons of us down here. We're bred as slaves. Do you think you could save us all?"
"That's what I'm here for," said Dustin with a nod.
The guy nodded and waved for them to follow him. On the other side of the tunnel he took them down, he crouched, and the followed his lead. Pointing at a hulking figure, they watched as it grabbed a man who approached it willingly. It shoved a tentacle into his belly button, wiggled around inside him for a moment, then retracted it. He fell to the ground, holding his belly for a moment, writhing in pain, before crawling to his feet and moving away.
"It sucks out the old egg and puts a new one in. If you can't get back before the egg hatches, they leave you to die. You only get a day before the egg tries to hatch, but sometimes it's less. Everyone generally tries to get their eggs changed out twice a day, to make sure that they don't risk getting an early hatcher."
"That's horrifying!" whispered Olivia with a grimace.
Dustin was just staring in horror. The hulking figure had turned and it looked like a giant tick with tentacles coming out of its chest.
"Why does it have to be bugs?" he whispered.
"Dustin," said Olivia, grabbing his arm, but he was already moving.
(INITIATING BLADE HANDS.)
(EVOLUTION COMPLETE.)
He walked up to the thing, and it turned to grab him. Before it could lay a hand, or tentacle, on him, he swiped at it with his blade hands. Its skin was surprisingly thin, slicing easily. Eggs spilled out on the floor, as well as newly hatched worms.
People all around watched in horror as the thing gurgled and fell to the ground.
"Who wants to get the damn eggs out of them?" he asked, changing his hands back to normal.
"Can you?" whispered a woman, stepping forward.
"He removed mine," said the man, stepping forward.
They quickly crowded around him, quietly waiting for him to get to them. Sending the nanobots to replicate, he started making PED's for them all. It wasn't long, after he fixed them, that they spread out, sharing the news. He was going to be here a while.
Chapter 6: Chapter 6 Sending them Home
The nanobots had taken over, removing the worm eggs, and possibly the worms that had already hatched, depending on the situation, when the ground started to rumble, and everyone scattered.
"This can't be good," said Olivia as the wall next to them split open, revealing massive claws breaking through the rock. Whiskers proceeded out of the hole before a massive nose sniffed the air.
Backing up, they watched as the creature pulled its thickly muscled body out into the open, then shook itself. As far as they could tell, this thing didn't have eyes. It sniffed around, until it found the eggs that had spilled from the dead taskmaster. They watched as it ate them, the dead worms, then started on the taskmaster itself.
"Must be the natural predator of those things," muttered Dustin to Olivia.
The thing paused, then turned towards them, sniffing. They retreated far enough away, that it returned to its meal.
"If it eats the eggs and larva, then it's no wonder the people ran," said Olivia.
As they sat watching, nanobots were returning to Dustin, with the news that they either didn't find any Uz'En, or almost everything they found had been Uz'En. Knowing that these things weren't exactly Uz'En, intrigued him. He started to investigate, and found that the response from the nanobots were determined by the type of nanobot. Some of them were able to detect the Uz'En precursors, and others couldn't.
"How do you intend to get all of these people out of here? We don't have a lot of time, before the pods you sent out, run out of supplies for that first group," said Olivia.
"I'm going to have to build another ship," he said, looking out over the open expanse of the cavern. "If all of these people are actually Uz'En, I can't leave a single one of them."
"Is there time?" she asked.
Dustin laughed. "I've gotten much faster at some things, since you left."
Raising an eyebrow, she kept her mouth shut.
Dustin turned his back to her, only a little disappointed she didn't respond to that, then sent his nanobots out in force. There was no longer a reason to hide them, and as Olivia pointed out, there wasn't a lot of time left.
"Those who have PED's, listen. Grab everyone you can, who is like you, and come to the place where you received your device. There is a ship there that will take all of you away from here. There's no time to waste, so hurry!"
He turned to her, as she stared at him, and shrugged.
"I upgraded a few things," he said.
"Why haven't you used that before?" she asked.
"Do you know how many people I had, asking me if I could spy on them with these things? If I ever did that on our home world, there would have been a mass panic and I would have had to flee."
She nodded slowly as she decided he was right. She didn't have a clue when it came to everything he had to go through, and it was one of the reasons she had left, he knew.
The shell of the ship and the immediate interior, where the people would be, were finished very quickly. The beast left through a second hole, once it was done with its meal, and the people started to pour into the area.
"You," he said, grabbing a man he remembered from just a while ago, "tell everyone to go inside, that they'll be safe in there. And if they don't have a device yet, they will get one inside."
The man nodded, and took a stance by the door, shuffling people inside.
"Will it be big enough?" asked Olivia, as more and more people arrived.
Before Dustin could respond, screams broke out, and group of the taskmasters arrived. Dustin didn't even blink before they were surrounded by swarms of nanobots. The people who had panicked, calmed down, and cheers broke out as they fell to their knees, then died.
Olivia followed him around, bored as he sent nanobot swarms throughout the caves, killing the taskmasters and freeing the people with his nanobots.
"This is why I didn't think you needed to come along," said Dustin as they loaded the last of the people up.
"I'm waiting to see how you get them all back home. There's a fleet outside this cave, waiting to blow us up."
"Oh, we're not going in the ship," he said, with a smile.
After giving a few commands, the ship began to shrink. The nanobots condensed themselves, until it was only the side of a modern bus.
"Wait, how did you do that?" she demanded.
"Everyone who went inside, was given a PED. I put them all to sleep, then forced them to evolve into ants."
She gaped at the ship as it flew up to the ceiling of the massive cavern, then began drilling its way out.
"It has boosters that will let it jump almost as soon as it gets far enough out of the atmosphere. Hitting a bus, that is cloaked, will be far more difficult, then they are expecting."
"Except, they have some way to detect nanobots, and that entire thing is made of them."
He glanced at the ceiling as the ship disappeared from sight. He hadn't remembered that.
With a shrug he said, "It's too late to stop it now. They either make it, or they don't."
Olivia shook her head.
"So how do we get out of here?"
"I thought we would look around for a bit, and see if there were any people that couldn't make it."
She nodded as he headed out. They had to dodge around several groups of those digging creatures, as they were busy eating the dead taskmasters. They finally came to a new section of caves, that were just as massive, but had obviously been mined out, because there were no glowing clumps of orbs. Instead, houses had been built out of slabs of rock. The orbs were used as lights, so they didn't have any problems making their way through the town.
Doors had been left open, in the people's rush to leave, and the few houses they peeked inside of, they found things scattered on the floor, food left on tables, fires left burning in fireplaces.
"What do you think they burn?" wondered Olivia.
"Maybe stuff from the surface?"
"Looks more like, wood, maybe giant mushrooms?"
"How would you go from wood to mushrooms? Why not some other kind of plants?"
Olivia held up a small mushroom, and he just shook his head.
"There must be a place around here, where they grow. Let's check it out."
He looked over her excitement, suspiciously. Every since that day she returned addicted, or mind-controlled, by those mushrooms, she had a very unhealthy interest in them. He knew that one of the first things she had done, after leaving him, was to search the world for them. But he knew that they were all dead. He had nanobots search them out and make sure of that.
Trailing her, they left the town behind and entered an even older section of caves. There was only one path leading into this cavern, but a soft green glow highlighted what was inside. Mushrooms. Giants as tall, or taller than buildings.
Dustin could see where they had been chopped down like trees, then taken bit by bit, back for use.
Olivia was ecstatic.
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