The floor Terrible has pulled me up to looks over the ruptured bit of hull and the sealed bulkhead. I don’t know how Tyrant is standing there without being sucked into space. Physics of some kind, probably.
I don’t have a lot of time to consider all the technical ramifications of the matter. I’m focused on what Terrible somewhat arrogantly called their ‘prisoner’. It doesn’t look like a prisoner to me. It looks like a dangerous invader.
A mantid, I learn, is a creature which emits an acrid stench which I can detect even at a very great distance and through a semi-solid floor. It has two legs, big, thick haunches with sharp prongs emitting from them at regular intervals. The head is grotesque. The alien has eyes like a praying mantis, and clawed arms with sharp protrusions instead of hands. They are not made to grasp and hold; they are meant to slash and trap.
When it sees King Tyrant, it fans out the smooth surface of its back and reveals four large and ethereal looking wings which fan the air furiously with a dry, rattling sound.
I am torn between disgust and fear as I stare down at it, very much aware of the impossible size of the thing. It looks like a bug, if a bug were sentient and as large as a horse.
“Hungggrryyy…” it hisses. “Give flesssh of hummannn…”
Every word is drawn out in a scary, sibilant hiss.
It wants me.
It can smell me. Sense me. Taste me.
I should have stayed back in Tyrant’s chambers, but it’s too late now.
“Why did you follow us, human?”
I almost forgot about him, but Terrible is standing over me, his bright eyes turned pure obsidian black, the iridescence of his body similarly hued. He looks like a pure charcoal beast covered in the occasional pulse of rainbow light.
“I….”
“Be quiet!” he snaps as soon as I even try to start speaking. “It will smell you all the more if you speak. Stay still. Do not move. Try to breathe as little as possible.”
Some of those instructions I can follow, others not so much, but I do my best to make myself small and evade the ire of the predator standing over me as well as the furious hunger of the one in the bulkhead below.
The alien intruder seems to be particularly aggressive. I thought I might feel sorry for him, but then it occurs to me that I probably shouldn't feel sorry for a creature capable of eating through the hull of a ship like this. It’s dangerous, in an entirely different way from the way Tyrant is dangerous. This is just hunger incarnate, a mouthpiece attached to a barrage of other pieces designed to feed the mouth.
“There are no humans here,” Tyrant declares. “You must have gotten a false positive from when we travelled near their system. Their stench travels thousands of miles into space.”
“Humannnnnnnsss…” the creature repeats again, ignoring Tyrant’s lie.
Diplomacy doesn’t work on those who simply repeat their demands over and over again.
“I will give you one chance to vacate this ship, before I destroy you,” Tyrant declares, abandoning his attempt at conversation.
I am worried for him. Tyrant is huge, but this creature’s body is longer and stranger than his, and if I know anything about insects, it is that they have powerful exoskeletons which repel attackers.
The Mantid does not take Tyrant up on his offer. Instead, it attacks him with a furious roar. But Tyrant is not easy prey. He fights back, his iridescence becoming a beautiful glow which becomes brighter and brighter, ironically trapping the Mantid in his luminescent presence. It is blinded by his light, batting and biting, and screeching with a sound like a furious dinosaur.
I watch, appalled, but unable to look away as Tyrant wraps his massive arms around a weak point — the creature’s neck. Its biting mouthparts slash and snap together, some kind of nasty viscous dew dripping from their serrated edges.
But the battle is over as Tyrant hauls and twists with mighty effort, pulling the creature’s head from its body, a gory trophy left in his arms as the body of the beast reacts by a spasmodic batting of its wings, uncontrollable and so loud it drowns out every other sound in the cosmos. Without a head to direct it, it tumbles about in the bulkhead, bashing into the walls with a loud clanging sound which makes my own head ring in sympathy.
Then, it is gone, flashing out through the hole it chewed through the hull and spiraling into the depths of space.
Tyrant hauls the head over to the same hole and throws it out. The last I see of the creature is its oversized eyes looking at me with pinpoint fury one last time.
“Get repair crews on this hole,” he announces to nobody and everybody all at once. “And start deploying swarm repellent from the nacelles.”