Mimic Changes the World Read online

  “I think I see where they’re orchestrating this! I’m gonna take it down!” That was the voice of the enemy leader again, but it hardly registered in my brain.

  “Higgens, get down!”

  I felt someone tackle me, which only served to push me farther toward our shielded windows. My gaze breaking away from our runaway scrubber, I saw that the stylized armor leader had finished recombining his gun into none other than what looked like a very nice rocket launcher.

  Well, that wasn’t good.

  Before I could even breathe, he fired the missile at us. I saw the conglomeration of energy spike out of his weapon, striking through the air like a hurricane.

  But it didn’t get very far.

  There was the sound of rapid-fire crunching, like someone was crumpling metal too fast for its own good, and suddenly, a black, spikey mass vaulted out of the ship. Of course Mimi had been on the sneak team—who better than a mimic for infiltrating a ship?—but there was no way she could reach it in time.

  Everything seemed to slow down as she charged after the blast, almost too quick to see, but then two spikes shot out of her, stretching forward well beyond her body, until it made a sort of wall.

  And then the energy hit that wall, and everything seemed to explode.

  Smoke and dust went everywhere, obscuring my vision for a second. All thoughts of the scrubber escaped me for a moment, and I lurched to my feet, calling Mimi’s name.

  “Mimi! Mimi!” I knew that she had literally taken the entire blast from my fighter exploding before, but that didn’t put me at ease at all.

  I ran to the windows, trying to see, but there was so much smoke. I was about ready to turn right around and run back to the remainder of the firefight, when those two black spikes poked through the shattered window, their edges blown to red-hot and jagged little bits, then Mimi pulled herself the rest of the way in.

  “Oh my God! Are you alright?!”

  Slowly, although in reality it probably only took a minute or so, she returned to her human form. She still had all of her limbs, but she was covered with both soot and a sticky sort of blackness.

  “I’m fine,” she wheezed. “That stuff just always vibrates me real hard. It feels like my brain is scrambled.”

  I crushed her to me, incredibly grateful. Then I heard just about the only thing that could pull me away from her.

  “Hey, where did the scrubber go?”

  “I’m on it!” I cried, carefully extricating myself from my love. “Mimi, you stay here!”

  “Higgens, where are you going?”

  But I was already vaulting over one of the consoles and blitzing out the door. I had something I could do now, and by golly I was going to do it like no one else in this place could.

  I zipped through halls and corridors, taking the same shortcuts I did when I was a kid and needed to get away from people fast. Sliding down this railing, jumping over that counter, slipping between two walls that were never fused quite the way they were supposed to. I raced and raced and raced, never daring to slow down, and when I finally dropped out of a venting shoot, I landed just in front of our would-be escapee.

  “What the hell!?” he cried, stumbling backward and nearly falling over. He was even shorter up close, which really wasn’t supposed to be possible, coming just up to my hip.

  I was so startled by it, I didn’t react right away, and apparently, that was an invitation for the guy to stab me in my thigh!

  I let out a cry and jumped back, trying to figure out what had happened, and he raced off. I recovered and pulled the blade from the side of my leg, relieved to see that it was small—shorter than my pinky and about as thin. Racing after him, I quickly caught up with his shorter strides, and tackled him before he could reach one of our ships.

  “Get off of me! Get off!” Strange, his voice was also different from what I would have imagined, but I didn’t let that shake me. Instead, I held on for dear life and spoke as quickly as we could.

  “Hey, hey, hey, relax. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise!”

  “Yeah, well the fact that you killed my entire landing party speaks to something different!”

  “We didn’t! I swear we didn’t. But look, we did this because we need your help. All you gotta do is help us with one single thing, and then we’ll let you go.”

  He stopped fighting me at that, and I realized that it almost felt like I was holding a younger, much smaller version of myself when I used to have fits. “You serious?” he said cautiously.

  “As the grave. Please. We’re desperate.”

  I felt him relax completely and I slowly lowered my arms. I was still on the defensive for being stabbed again, because I really hadn’t enjoyed that part of our interaction, but thankfully, the scammer just stood and turned to me.

  Huh, he was about the same height as me when I was sitting down. Was the scrubber somehow a child and no one had mentioned it before? But his stature seemed far too stocky and fully formed for that, and now that I thought about it, his proportions were…different.

  “Aja Dela at your service,” he said, extending a hand. “And what can a girl like me do for a lot like you?”

  6

  Beauty in the Imperfections

  In the end, it was definitely a mission well done. No one on our side died, and only two of the crime family’s forces met their end. We, along with their comrades who were now our prisoners, had a funeral for them, and cremated their bodies as the rest of the soldiers indicated.

  Our brig was suddenly much fuller than it had ever been, but we made sure they had food and water while we decided what to do with them. The general consensus was to keep them in our custody until we were done with the coup, then release them far away from the damage.

  The one surprise out of all of it was Aja, who apparently was not a young man but a middle-aged woman with gray hair and gentle wrinkles in her face. She was indeed shorter than anybody else I knew, with bowlegs and soft sort of joints.

  “I thought you were a man,” Lim said, perched once again on the top of a chair. I didn’t think I had ever seen her sit normally in the short time that we had known each other.

  “And now why would you go and think that?”

  “Um, because I’ve met you,” Babel interjected. “I mean, it was in passing as you dropped off a part, but you were definitely a man. And taller.”

  She laughed at that. “Do you really think I deliver parts like some sort of parcel boy? That was one of my assistants. Probably Rolph, if he was a tall one.”

  “But why the secrecy?” I asked.

  “I’m a criminal who makes a living doing very illegal things. I’m not exactly a fighting expert like some of y’all, so I like to keep myself as far removed from the action as I can. Obviously, that hasn’t been working out so well for me lately.” She cleared her throat and looked us all over. “Anyway, what is it you all need of me?”

  We all exchanged glances and it was Gonzales who spoke first. Funny how she had become a bit of our spokesperson when it came to all of this human interaction. “We…we want you to scrub all the serials from our stolen government ship so we can get back planet-side and overthrow the coup that’s currently trying to do their own overthrowing of the government.”

  “Wow, well, that’s certainly something. Well, what have ya got? A multi-man fighter? A freighter?”

  “Um…a brand-new military warship.”

  “Wait, what? I thought those things weren’t done.”

  “They mostly aren’t. We just procured one a little unethically,” Eske murmured.

  “So, do you think you can do it?” Gonzales asked, looking down at the gray-haired woman. We had all gathered in the comm center once again, and I found myself looking over my shoulder constantly, looking for a missile coming our way. I wasn’t looking forward to the nightmares that were going to come from that whole situation.

  “I dunno. You’re asking me to scrub every serial from a ship that’s probably got a million parts. N
ormally, I’d have a team to help me with all the grunt work, and although I’m guessing some of you could maybe help, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “…what’s wrong with you?” Babel asked curiously, his hands signing almost abashedly.

  “Well, that’s rich coming from you.” She laughed heartily, and I found myself liking this woman. She reminded me of the bawdy, confident sort of bards in adventure stories I had read when I was a child. “I’m a dwarf.”

  “A dwarf?” Ciangi murmured. “I thought we invented a way to fix that in utero.”

  “First of all, curly-que, there’s nothing about me that needs to be fixed. Secondly, I was colony-born and my parents weren’t too keen on the government fiddling with the makeup of their child before they were even born.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrow. “I’m sure your parents had much of the same, yes?”

  My eyes opened, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Aw, come off it, lad. I can tell a different soul when I meet one. You don’t look at me like the others. In fact, I’d say you hardly look at anyone but your white-haired lady friend there, and the gun-happy girl.”

  “Oh, am I the gun-happy girl?” Gonzales chirped, seemingly pleased as punch.

  But I wouldn’t let myself be distracted. “Our doctor was injured in an equipment explosion that took out several of our systems at the colony. There was no one to do the pre-screening and genetic testing until I was too old for any alterations.”

  “There ya go. Maybe if our government did a little less genetic meddling, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. Anyway…” She clapped her hands. “There’s no way that I can scrub your entire ship in the time you need.”

  “Seriously?! But y—”

  “Ah-ah-ah, hold your metaphorical horses there. I said there no way that I can scrub every individual part, but I’ve been tinkering with a new sort of system, something that would kinda, uh, let me think of how to put this into layman’s terms…kinda cloak the ship in a different serial that would just mask the ones that they have now.”

  “Really?” I asked, intrigued. “You think that would work?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. Like I said, I’ve been working on it. It still needs some final touches, but if y’all are who I’m thinking you are, then I’m sure we won’t have a problem brainstorming a proper solution.”

  “And just who do you think we are?” Bahn asked.

  “Well, judging by the white-haired lady who hasn’t talked but her dirty face keeps changing shapes, and the para-military folks, and all the chatter I’ve been hearing in the underground, I would guess that y’all are the alien and her crew.” She let out a little laugh. “And her crew definitely got an upgrade from the last numbers I heard.”

  “Well, you heard right,” Gonzales said, offering her hand. “The white-haired lady is Mimi, I advise not pissing her off. That’s Ciangi, Bahn, Higgens, and I’m Gonzales. We’re the original crew. Eske is our plus-one who joined us about halfway. Watch the legs on her because I’ve literally seen her kick someone unconscious.

  “And everyone else is new to our crew, but I guess you could call them the founders of our rebellion.”

  “Rebellion?” Aja asked, looking around pensively. “What exactly have I missed while I’ve been busy?”

  “By busy, do you mean your indentured servitude from your gambling habit?” Gonzales asked, raising a brow.

  “You say potato, I say potahto.” The woman stood, which actually made her shorter than when she sat at the table. Aja fascinated me, there was no two ways of saying it. I had never met someone else who had skipped the genetic screening most people did to make sure their babies were both happy and healthy. After centuries of losing children, humans had learned how to cure most things before a child was even born, but I couldn’t help but look at her and think of my own journey, wondering if there were certain things that didn’t need to be fixed.

  “So, how about you take me up to your ship and we all get tinkering? This whole mission is going to involve lots of trust, so we might as well get started off on the right foot.”

  “Really? It’s that easy?” the leader-man challenged. I really needed to learn his name. “No demands for credits, or the ship when we’re done, or power?”

  Aja just looked up at him with a wise expression. She reminded me of someone’s mother, patiently enduring a child’s naiveite before she explained why they were wrong.

  “You say that you’re taking down a coup to save the government, but from what I’ve learned with working with the crime family, most of the government is already infiltrated. So, if you’re saying you’re going to bring it down, I’m all for that.”

  “Why?” someone else asked curiously. “What’d they do to you?”

  “Son, I make a large part of my living stealing necessary medical parts for people who have been deemed not a productive enough member of society to earn them. I recognize that breather I configured for you, boy. If I recall right, you were in a building collapse in the slum, the cause thought to be the federal raid that was trying to find you because you’d been spying on their illegal search and seizures and warning people.”

  “Oh, huh,” Babel said, obviously surprised. “That’s right.”

  “And I recognize your eye too…Gonzales, was it? What I was told was that it was needed off-planet for a colonist who was raising hell with some of those contracted ships who liked to force their workers to work twenty hours at a time. Obviously that tale was embellished a little, but that pretty much makes me think that the stakes you lived through were higher.”

  “Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty accurate.”

  “And there are a hundred more stories just like it. Day in and day out, I deal with people who are down on their luck and have been punished for it by the powers that be. So, anything that takes them down is alright in my book.”

  “That is good to hear,” Mimi said, the first time that she had spoken since she’d taken the RPG blast. “Come, we have much to do and so very little time.”

  7

  Some Assembly Required

  It turned out a whole lot went into inventing a new system to scrub out important ship markers, but our whole ship dedicated itself to the task.

  Obviously, all the certified engineers and hackers put themselves to the task of working on the actual logistics, but everyone else also played a part.

  People like Eske and I, who had medium to fringe knowledge, ended up as the monkey wrench runners and testers, doing the grunt work to save the time of Aja and the other project leaders. People who had no technical knowledge whatsoever took turns either taking inventory of supplies, guarding the prisoners, or grabbing food and water from the meal generators in the cafeteria and bringing them to us.

  I got to know Aja over the few days that we worked with her, and I had to say I hoped to be like her when I grew older. She was endlessly fearless, and her failures didn’t faze her. She would just log what was wrong and move right on to the next try. She was precise with her instructions to others, and rarely ever yelled at anyone—although every other sentence out of her mouth did seem to be razzing someone.

  I could tell she grated on the nerves of others in the same way that Gonzales did. It was clear that she didn’t care about ranks or labels or any of that and talked to most everyone as if they were her assistant. I appreciated the candor, but it was quite obvious that others did not.

  “Hey, you, buzz-head, come ‘ere.”

  It took me a second to realize that Aja was talking to me. I was so used to having my long ponytail that I still forgot my head had been shaved just a couple of weeks earlier. While Ciangi’s crown was already covered with little blond ringlets, and another rebellion soldier had given Eske a wig, both Bahn and I were looking particularly short-haired. I supposed I would get used to it eventually, but by then, it would probably be long enough to put right back into a ponytail.

  “You needed me?”

  She nodded and headed toward th
e door. “Walk with me, I wanna have a talk.”

  I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly need to speak with me for, but I complied anyway.

  We walked in silence for a while, heading to a lower level of the ship that was hardly used. It was mostly supposed to be storage for a year’s worth of supplies for an entire crew, but considering we had less than fifty people and no way to gather said supplies, the space was mostly empty.

  “So, tell me about all these folks here who are hustling around like they’ve got a fire under their behinds.”

  “I don’t know most of their names, actually, but Gonzales you’ve met—”

  She shook her head, cutting me off. “That’s not what I mean. Every person out there isn’t like you or me, with maybe the exception of that tall black woman who looks like she might be secret nobility, an ancient warrior or both.

  “Their genetics were all fiddle-faddled with to fit into a society that looks at us like we’re something to be cured. People like that tend to treat people like us different, so I’m asking, what kind of people are they?”

  “Well, Gonzales, Bahn, and Ciangi have always been kind. Even before we all got wrapped up with Mimi. They were the few people on the ship who bothered to learn my name, and they never treated me differently or looked down on me for working maintenance.”

  “Uh-huh, who else?”

  “Well, Babel and Lim seem alright, but I have to admit to you, I’ve only known most of these people a week longer than you have. And, um, I’m not always the best judge of character.”

  “Nonsense! I don’t believe that for a second.” She reached up to sling her arm around my shoulders, which effectively made me nearly double over to meet her gaze. “In order for you to have survived this long, you’ve gotta have a certain ability to read people. Sure, maybe a folk or two slipped through your radar, but I bet in general, if you’re real uncomfy with someone, you’ve got a reason why.”

  She nodded and let me go. “Like I can tell you’re a good kid. I almost feel bad about stabbing you.”