Chapter 19: Chapter 19 Captured
"We are going to the Uz'En home world, hopefully to meet up with Olivia, and then we'll get back to work saving the rest of the Uz'En," Dustin said, guiding the ship out of the atmosphere of the fuel planet. He had left the nanobots to build a storehouse to stockpile minerals and fuel for future use.
After a moment of calibration, the ship jumped, leaving the planet behind, and appearing above the world he had moved here, for his people to live on. With a sigh of relief, Dustin spied his ship also approaching the planet.
"Dustin?" came Olivia's voice over the communications system.
"Hey, mind if we dock with you?" he asked, steering the ship towards them.
"We're kind of crowded. I have a group of people I just picked up from a mining planet."
"Why did you bring them back yourself instead of having the nanobots pod them back?"
"Not all of them are Uz'En," she said.
"Olivia, what the hell are you thinking? We only rescue Uz'En!" he growled in frustration.
"Dustin! Don't you raise your voice to her!" growled back Granny's voice.
"Granny? Is that you?" he asked, surprised and delighted.
"Who else would I be? Get your butt over here, so we can talk!"
Dustin was about to dock up to the airlock, sending nanobots to bridge the gap so Cybele could go across, when the computer spoke up.
"A ship has been detected warping into the system that matches the same signature as the ship that was disassembled on the last planet."
"Shit! How did they follow us?"
Dustin couldn't figure out how they found him, and with panic turned to look down at the planet below him. If he didn't handle this Xalkak threat, all of his people were in danger. He could just send the nanobots to devour the ship, or send it somewhere else, but something odd was happening, and he had to get to the bottom of it.
'PED, have the nanobots get Cybele onto the ship with Olivia, and have the hive mind keep the planet safe from all threats. I'm going to have to deal with these guys myself.'
(DUSTIN, I AM DETECTING A STRANGE CODE WITHIN MY OWN, THAT MAY EXPLAIN HOW THEY WERE ABLE TO TRACK US. I BELIEVE I MAY BE TO BLAME FOR THEM HAVING FOUND US.)
'I need my space worm form, capable of latching onto the side of their ship.'
(INITIATING EVOLUTION.)
Things happened quickly. The ship dissolved around them, taking Cybele to the airlock, against her obvious wishes, and a huge cloud of nanobots swarmed towards them. Dustin watched as he changed, as they formed a net of their own around the entire planet. Guided with the hive mind, he knew that they would be able to handle whatever came, but he needed to get to that ship and deal with this damn AI that was causing him so much grief.
Flying through their petty shields, he latched on to the side of the ship, feeling his body begin to tingle as the hive mind directed a barrage of energy that would damage the ship, but not him. That's when they decided to jump away.
Space worms are interesting creatures that never managed to make it near the planet Earth, for humans to find, because they preferred to stay near the center of the universe, where there was plenty of energy for them to feed on and survive easily. Their bodies are very flimsy when it came to physical interaction. And Dustin had just attacked himself to the side of a ship that was about to warp through space.
The best he could compare the experience to, was a bug clinging to the windshield of a racing car. The energy whipping against his body was excruciatingly painful, and he found himself blacking out.
As he woke again, he found himself laying on the ground of a planet that looked strangely familiar.
With a soft groan, he pulled himself up to his knees and looked around. Trees blocked his vision, every where he looked. His hands were back to normal, human hands. A black beetle with long fuzzy antennae crawled over his hand, and he jerked back, shaking his hand free of it.
Scrambling to his feet, he looked back and forth as panic overcame him.
"It's not possible. There's no way!"
He stepped away from the tree that was swarming with the black beetles, and away from the edge of the water. Ripples attested to the hidden dangers, waiting for him to slip in the mud.
Glancing behind him, he saw the figure of a large creature, with six legs approaching him slowly. A tuft of hair that stood up, stiff along its spine, seemed to vibrate in excitement as the fur that covered the beast, changed to camouflage it.
"This place died," he whispered, turning to flee.
Tree branches whipped across his face as he fled the snarl that was right behind him. There was no way this place could be real, he thought, as he dodged away from a tree that he knew had a monster under its roots with vines that could kill with a simple touch.
Giant bats flew overhead, crying in voices he could feel more than hear, and then they scattered as a giant flying rug appeared, with a deep rumble that vibrated in his chest.
Sweating profusely, Dustin dived past a tree, blocking the flying rug, and causing the beast to crash into it. Leaving the cries behind him, he continued on, until he heard something else approaching him. A large turtle, taller than he stood, it looked at him with a knowledge in its eyes of what was going on, but he couldn't trust anything here.
Turning away from it, before it tried to charge him, he jogged until he came to a clearing that he remembered well. Several trees had fallen, creating a cave under their trunks. Someone had dug out the underside, and packed the dirt around the tree trunks to form walls.
"This can not be real," he murmured to himself. "Someone is in my head!"
Screaming the trees and the clearing around him wavered, and he found himself staring out of a glass tank, at several people.
"The subject seems to be different from every subject of this race, we have encountered. If they have evolved into an advanced race, we must study them, in order to better eliminated them."
The voice was vibrating in his head. He went to cling to his head and found that he was still in his space worm form.
'PED?'
"Obsolete program is nonfunctional, and you are an inferior species that will be destroyed as soon as experimentation is complete."
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
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Sdrawkcab Now he has to figure out how to escape.
Chapter 20: Chapter 20 Best Chapter Ever
Dustin floated in panic, realizing that his PED was compromised. The AI of these people must have hacked his PED somehow, and had been tracking him and stealing information about him all this time.
That was how the Xalkak were able to arrive when they did. The AI already knew everything.
Floating in the tank, he watched, helpless as the people studied him like a lab rat. He couldn't escape, and he could feel his worm body growing weaker and weaker as the affects of the chemicals in the fluid he floated in, killed him.
Curling into a ball, Dustin couldn't imagine them gaining more information about him, specifically to kill him. Maybe if he willed himself to die faster, they couldn't get any more information. It was just lucky the hive mind was so smart, maybe they would be able to figure out how to stop this menace.
As his mind grew dimmer and dimmer, a thought occurred to him. If the AI could infiltrate his PED, which was made of nanobots, what was to stop it from infiltrating the hive mind, and using the nanobots to take over the galaxy?
Visions of his son flashed into his mind. The boy was smart, and had this king thing down, but what did he have to offer him? Because of Dustin, their whole race was doomed. The only thing he had contributed to the entire race, other than the chance for freedom, and a home, were the PED's to help them be able to change…
Dustin gave a start, causing the people on the other side of the glass to jump. His vitals had fallen so low, they had thought he was dying, but now, as they watched, he grew more and more energetic, thrashing around inside his tank. His vitals were so erratic, they were having trouble keeping track of them. And then it happened.
Dustin began to change.
He realized, as he was on the brink of death, that he didn't need the PED to change, that was something he had already been able to do. All it did, was speed the process up and force it to happen faster. Well, it was time to take off the training wheels.
Focusing on his body, he imagined the form he wanted, and willed it to change.
Dustin had more practice changing, than any other Uz'En in the galaxy. And he had more practice changing quickly, than any other Uz'En, ever.
Forcing all of the nanobots in his body to a central location, he encased them in crystal, so that the AI couldn't cause him any damage because of them, and then he began to grow. The entire genetic spectrum of millions of different species floated within him, in a more complex program than he could ever hope to write, and he took advantage of it, allowing his entire genetic makeup to rearrange itself, as it had been forced to do countless times already, but this time on its own.
It was strangely exhilarating as he opened his eyes and grinned with his new razor toothed maw.
The people on the other side of the glass had backed up in panic, and Dustin gave them a new reason to know fear as he slammed against the glass, causing cracks to form. One more good hit, and it splintered, breaking and spewing the murky liquid across the floor. Pulling himself up, off the floor, he turned his grin towards the three people, who promptly turned tail and ran. He looked like his normal human form; except he was encased in crystal like the crystal prince had been back on the death planet. Nothing could penetrate his crystal, and flexing his new claws, he couldn't wait to try them out.
He didn't allow them a chance to get far. The first man was yanked off his feet, as Dusting grabbed his shoulder, and bit through his other shoulder. The venom he had envisioned, entered the man's system, causing him to immediately start spasming and screaming. As he frothed at the mouth, Dustin dropped him and without breaking stride, grabbed the woman next.
Throwing her across the room, she hit the table hard, and slid across the top of it, knocking all sorts of expensive looking equipment onto the floor, and breaking it. She probably wasn't going to get up after she crumpled against the wall at the end of the table.
The last man had managed to reach the door, but Dustin was amused to see the light above it had turned red.
"No! Please! Let me out!"
Before Dustin could reach for the man, a small hatch opened above the man's head, and it began spitting a thick gas out.
The man reacted almost immediately, hacking and coughing, falling to his knees and then to his side.
Sliding a crystal across his eyes, Dustin walked calmly to the door, ignoring the gas, and began hitting it. As soon as a decent dent had appeared, he used his crystal claws to scratch a line in the metal of the door, in a circular pattern.
When it was obvious that the gas was having no effect, he heard another hatch pop open, venting everything in the room into space. He quickly punched forward, at the spot he had scratched, puncturing the metal of the door and causing the purge of atmosphere to stop immediately or risk venting the entire ship.
Smirking, without opening himself up to the gas, Dustin proceeded to peel the door open enough to allow him access to the hall.
A group of soldiers were waiting for him. They held guns he recognized. They were Olivia's favorite. The one that dissolved flesh. Chuckling to himself, Dustin charged them, ignoring the guns when they blasted them at him. He jumped before the dissolving cloud hit him, pushing off from the wall and propelled himself over the cloud, near the ceiling, spinning and landing behind them.
He didn't wait to see if they stopped pressing the trigger before turning to follow him, dashing off down the hall towards where he knew the bridge had to be. He could feel the flow of the electricity in the ship. The largest concentration had to be the engines themselves. The next largest had to be the bridge. And if he was wrong, he was curious to see what it was instead.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS
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BEST CHAPTER EVER!
I'm pretty sure of all of the chapters I've written up to this point, this is my favorite. MC growth for the win!
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