More snake than man, he was an eel on dry land slipping between ancient tree trunks slick with lichen and excess water from recent rainfall. He scattered his footsteps, sinewy legs clinging to his suit so the contours of muscle appeared through the glamour of nano-fabric, an unnatural shimmer against the ferns. Like jagged edges slit into the fabric of the rain forest.
Life burst and hummed around him—the wild cawing and cooing of birds flitting from vine to vine in the canopy above, the homogeneous shrill of fat mosquitos, the hissing and croaking, the incessant splat of water droplets landing on taut bloated leaves.
He slid through this music with practiced ease.
Sedge breathed as if through gills, thick air sluicing inside his lungs and expelling onto his hairless skin. The nano-suit, a chameleon in the green, filtered and returned sweat to his system spiked with low doses of adrenaline that kept his mind uncomfortably sharp. There was a slight vibration on the surface of his skin, like if he stopped moving, it might accrue enough energy to slip off him and finish the job on its own.
It propelled him forward.
To stand still in the face of a predator was to die, and he did not wish to entertain the thought of losing another limb. The new prosthetic arm was heavier than its biological counterpart. It was useful, maybe even better, but he needed time and practice to adjust. Awareness of the disparity added twenty-seven seconds to his average hunt time.
“Relax,” Boloetse had said, placing a hand on their father’s shoulder. “You always come back, don’t you?”
“Efficient hunters survive,” he’d said in response, launching them into a long lecture and several appeals to ‘lighten up’.
“If it’s so difficult, you wouldn’t keep doing it. It can’t be nearly as bad as you make it seem.” They’d grown quiet as their gaze traveled to the stump where his left elbow should have been.
Now, he filtered the sounds of the rain forest through a sieve, letting the natural gurgles and belches sift into the background as he listened for the distinctive crackle of the chimera’s mutated nanites against the surface of his suit.
The sensors in his lenses showed no signs of irregular heat signals, no unexpected combination of genomes in his visual field, no black alert for the sign of original iyirri DNA or a signature of the nano-virus that created this new breed of monster.
But by now, the body knew.
Sedge felt it before the sensors blinked, flesh pimpling despite the regulated environment of his suit. It was more than just adrenaline that made him vibrate, body shaking with a force like coiled springs into his legs.
Just as his suit caught up, alerts flashing two seconds too late, he leapt into the air. Leaning back, the prosthetic arm held up before his face to shield the oncoming blow, Sedge ejected exactly three poison-tipped needles of Boloetse’s design into the bitter stench of the beast’s wet maw. They hit home as the animal’s jaw crunched against the sleek titanium of his prosthetic.
The arm crumpled upon impact. It did so within the confines of the suit, which, designed precisely for this purpose, rearranged itself to prevent direct contact.
Sedge swore under his breath, yanking the arm free from the chimera’s six rows of razor-sharp teeth, its camouflage, so eerily like his own, blinking in and out of the surrounding green as poison sped through its combination blood and nanite stream.
Excellent technique.
He couldn’t help but admire his work, even with the twisted arm hanging limply at his side.
It’s not the mechanism or technique that brings down the beast. Boloetse’s smug voice echoed in his skull. It’s the concoction. When they spoke, hands rubbing together like a fly feasting on shit, it took every ounce of effort not to roll his eyes.
They were right, of course. The poison was a careful mixture of inhibitor nanites and the creature’s own venom injected past layers of scales and metal, of chitin, iron, blood, and guts all pressed together to form this new species of abomination.
Hell clawing its way through strata and bedrock to dance with talon hooves on the surface of the earth, all of it bespoke and deeply deranged.
The chimera heaved against Boloetse’s concoction, body stuttering at a strange mechanical tempo, like a cargo robot losing control of its functions, arms and hooks falling apart to spill its haul.
It opened its mouth to scream. What emerged instead, past the many rows of curved teeth, were the heads of other animals trying to push their way out and failing. Sedge saw a pair of antlers embedded in the throat, the tip of a large floppy ear peeking past a layer of fleshy pungent pink tissue, and the long yellowing beak of an unfortunate bird of prey.
The chimera’s tongue rolled out from a pocket of rusted metal plates. Sedge bit down on his own to keep from retching. The wet pulp of meat black as a fresh oil spill. Attached to large octopi-like nodules on its surface were tiny human hands. The fingers—none of them arranged correctly, one made entirely of thumbs — were round and plump. The anatomy of a dozen different infants absorbed by the animal’s nanites and integrated into its genetic makeup.
No chimera was ever like any other.
“Fucking hell,” a disembodied voice whispered through the suit. Boloetse, their mouth wide open in front of the console as the visual feed reached their shuttle.
“Get me out of here,” Sedge sighed.
He risked one last glance at the small fingers as they twitched, and instantly regretted it.
There they lay, writhing in the soil, awaiting a second death.
Daring again to wave goodbye.
