Thunk.It whirs directly into a tree, bounces back, then wobbles in the air, tilting its main ocular sensor in confusion.
That.
It’s an idiot.
I pause and click my tongue. “Here, Dummy-Dummy. This way.”
After a delay, its auditory sensors respond to my voice. It makes a little chirping noise of recognition as it flies over to my shoulder.
The neural chips of these things were once organic in nature, structures turned to silicon and circuits through some crazy alien tech. Apparently, they’re based on the brains of a species similar to cats.
Woulda been nice if they’d found a smarter cat.
The chipped paint on the side reads DME-42, so I just call it Dummy.
“We’re almost there,” I tell it, resuming my path. “Then you can sit in the sun for a while and recharge.”
The sphere makes another happy chirp.
I glance at the holo-map again. “It should just be a few more yards this way?—”
Something goes taut around my ankle. Before I can even startle, my body flings through the air, spinning wildly, and pressure surrounds me.
I struggle instinctively, but that only tightens whatever’s around me, making it harder to breathe.
The spinning stabilizes. My dizziness fades.
I’m upside down, blood running to my head. Maybe two yards off the ground, based on the branches I can see.
There’s a strange, musical clicking. I’ve met enough sapients to know it’s a voice—someone speaking in a language I don’t know. The neural implant behind my ear itches as it activates, but by the time I’m granted a vague sense of what that clicking meant, I don’t need it. The next sounds are recognizably English.
“Well, what do we have here….” The accent is at once coarse and lilting, like a gravely baritone speaking a romance language.
“Never seen a human before?” I grunt past whatever’s crushing my chest from every direction.
“So it speaks the most common of its species’s dialects. How boring.”
“Aller au diable,”I spit.Go to hellin French.
There’s an amused noise that ends with a subtle clicking. “Better.”
A man with ashen gray skin comes into view, right-side up to me.
His jaw: cut. His eyes: eight. His torso: ripped. His back half: a giant fucking spider.
I’d done some research on Arachnoids, but seeing one in person is… something else entirely.
Light gleams off the shiny black chitin of his eight spider legs, each the thickness of a human’s but far longer. Tufts of grey fur ring each joint, and a matching ruff covers the strange anatomy where his humanoid hips meet his arachnid body.
Each leg ends in two hooked claws the size of my hand, and where they grip the tree branches above us, the wicked points dig in deep.
The most intimidating detail is his size. His legs span at least ten feet, and his spider body is as long as a horse’s from where his legs anchor in his thorax back to his oblong abdomen, which is covered in dense black fur.
I count to be sure, and in addition to his eight legs, he also has two smaller leg-like limbs tucked at the front of his spider thorax, just below his humanoid stomach.
My heart thuds with instinctive fear even as I force my breathing to stay even.
The Arachnoid’s long hair hangs comically toward the ground, dark with a white streak at the front. His ears are humanoid and pointed, and his two largest eyes—as glossy and black as the others—are about the same size and position as a human’s. Three smaller eyes flank them on each side, running from his temple to his forehead.
