A brand new update for The Serpent’s Garden is here. We stay with Sabein, stuck on a ship that’s not only not dead, but is now on a collision course with her station. The good news is, it’s already in terrible condition, so it’ll take a while to get there. The bad news is that gives the intruders more time to hunt her down and kill her.
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Meanwhile, though we don’t hear from the lady herself, Red One’s actions in Meer Colhara have sent shockwaves through the Calnian forces. They’re not dismissing her aid of denigrating her, but they also just watched her commit genocide and use a weapon that they didn’t know existed. Her actions, though she saved countless lives, are definitely something they need to consider and her motivations even more.
After all, if she’ll destroy a species for her friends are there any limits on what she won’t do? There are, but the Calnians aren’t privy to what we know. They can only act on the information they have and what they have terrifies them.
In the snippet below, we check in on Sabein for a terrifying situation of her own. She’s intent on sabotaging the vessel, but the enemy know she’s there and the same ideas she has to stop Pillar of Silver Leaves are something that they can figure out. It’s a race against time between the Calnian and her enemy; for the full chapter check out the link above and enjoy!
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Sabein was gambling her life that whatever she’d trapped in there couldn’t tear through a pressure door, but she wasn’t going to wait around to find out, or for its friends to show up. The Off-Worlder hurried to the thruster bank. She was quick to internalize schematics and maps and barely needed to glance at the schematics to know where to go. Thiswas one of the main secondary thrusters, located on the explorer’s port ventral side. It was in working order and strong enough to alter the vessel’s heading even if it was fighting several others at once. She didn’t know how much time she had, but if she sealed the doors to thruster control, she should be able to-
The woman froze, staring at the thruster. Most of it the hardware was external; only the primary connections were on the inside of the hull, but those were all that she’d have needed. She knew what she was doing. She could bring the system online and push Pillar of Silver Leaves off course, only…
…only something was on the thruster.
If there’d been any doubt whatsoever that her opponents had known where she was headed, this killed the last of it. They’d left a little present for her. Not a bomb, not a servicer or comm setup. They’d left… she didn’t know. She couldn’t even guess what it was. Describing it was hard enough.
The center of it, the biggest piece, looked like a standard portable terminal, or at least part of one. The rest… it was extending out of the terminal like a cross between a centipede and a silknetter’s web. Filamentous lines were winding around around data cables and power conduits, questing like inquisitive fronds seeking the sun as they connected themselves to new parts of the thrusters and the chamber’s computer systems. Some were the size of her fingers. Others were as thin as strands of silk.
She stared agog, unable tell what she was looking at. Her eyes were pulled in half dozen directions as she tried to understand what she was looking at. The cables and the computer were obviously technological, but the other parts, the segmented spine that had grown from the computer terminal to the thrusters – or perhaps the other way around – looked like a coral colony or a headless, eyeless centipede. It couldn’t be alive, but the way its long limbs moved, brushing up against the walls or seeking out additional parts of the thruster array was too fluid for any machine she’d ever seen. Sabein had once seen pictures of nela worms, carrion feeders that lived within dead bodies. Once the corpse was hollowed out with only the skin and bones remaining, the worms would slither out in search of new decaying flesh, only this thing was burrowing into healthy components. It wasn’t eating the computers and systems, it was infesting them.
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