Deathstalker 05 - Deathstalker Destiny

with the Red Brain again, and together they used the slow implacable strength of the surrounding jungle to reach inside the crippled ship and drag the drive out inch by inch. The explosion hadn't even scratched the container. Vegetation spun a thick cocoon around the drive container, and began slowly transporting it back to the Mission, passing the burden on from one mass of plants to the next. The lepers took it in turns to carry Moon's stretcher. They left Sister Marion's body where it lay.
    Back in the Mission infirmary, Mother Superior Beatrice had her hands full of
    something disgusting. Saint Bea was dissecting one of the dead Grendels. Owen watched from a respectful distance, and did his best to keep his dinner down where it belonged. He'd never thought of himself as squeamish before, but there was something especially repulsive about the multicolored shapes crammed inside the Grendel's scarlet silicon armor. The damned thing had been dead two weeks now, and bits of its insides were still twitching. In fact, when Saint Bea had first opened the alien up with a carefully angled disrupter beam, Owen had half expected a length of putrid green innards to leap up out of the gap and strangle her. Instead, the thing just lay where it was and smelled revolting. Owen hoped that whatever it was he'd had for dinner, it didn't taste as bad coming up as it had going down.
    "Here," said Saint Bea, offering Owen something far too blue and slippery for its own good. "Hold this for a moment, would you?"
    "Not even for one second," said Owen firmly. "The good Lord put our insides inside for very good reasons."
    "The good Lord didn't have anything to do with creating this," said Mother Beatrice, dropping the blue bits into a nearby bucket, where they made plaintive sucking noises. "There's nothing natural about the Grendels. They were gengineered."
    Owen leaned forward, intrigued despite himself. "Are you sure?"
    "As sure as I can be with the limited tech at my command. I've studied the interiors of a dozen partially destroyed Grendels, and this dissection just confirms what I suspected. The signs are all the same. They've got multiple redundancies in all systems, a frighteningly efficient mass/energy ratio basis, and organs from at least half a dozen different and unconnected species, held
    together with bioengineered linking materials. This creature didn't evolve; it was designed. And if I'm reading my instruments correctly, this thing started out as one species, and was then transformed at a later stage into what you see now."
    Owen frowned, running through what he remembered of the planet Grendel, and the infamous Vaults of the Sleepers. "No wonder we never found any trace of the planet's original inhabitants. They must have all made themselves over into Sleepers, and then sealed their Vaults behind them. Waiting… for some enemy to come and find them." Owen looked at Saint Bea. "What could be so dangerous, so frightening, that a whole sentient species would turn themselves into mindless killing machines?"
    "Can't be the Hadenmen or Shub," said Saint Bea, rooting around in the Grendel's innards with both hands. "The Vaults predated their appearance by centuries. And the insect aliens wouldn't have lasted five seconds against the Grendels. So who does that leave?"
    "The Recreated?" said Owen.
    "Whoever or whatever they are." Saint Bea straightened up, withdrawing her dripping hands with a loud sucking noise. She wiped her hands on a cloth, and then dropped that into the bucket with the innards. "I always thought the Grendels were too bad to be true. This… makes a mockery of God's creation. They destroyed their own moral sense, their ability to choose between good and evil, purely in the name of survival."
    "Maybe they had no choice," said Owen. "Maybe they did it to protect whatever species came after them; sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Don't judge them too harshly, Mother Beatrice. We don't know what kind or depth of evil they had to face. Hard times make for hard choices."
    Saint Bea snorted. "Things have come to a pretty pass, if you're lecturing me on tolerance."
    Owen smiled despite himself. "Well, thanks for inviting me to your little show and tell, Mother Beatrice. It has been truly revolting. Let's not do this again sometime."
    Saint Bea shrugged. "Brought you out of yourself a bit, didn't it?"
    "Very nearly literally. I think on the whole I'd rather be miserable."
    The door behind them crashed open,