Planet Leviathan

^{Chapter 9} Wet Lisa

Stacia was awake before Skin, which gave her some time by herself to examine the piece of leather Lexton had given her in greater detail. Stacia supposed it could be fake, if Lexton had planned in advance to double cross her. However, she wasn’t sure what Lexton thought she could gain by that. She wanted Stanton eliminated, as long as it couldn’t be directly tied to Lexton herself, so it would actually be to Lexton’s advantage if Stacia continued on her mission. The rough map on the leather, though, gave directions to some place called Roo-Soh, and it was clear that Lexton was familiar with it. So Lexton knew exactly where Stacia was going. No wonder they hadn’t been followed in the night. Lexton would probably go directly to Roo-Soh and set a trap for Stacia, not to be sprung until after Stacia had completed her objective.

Stacia thought about this and tried to come up with a plan as the sun rose over the edge of the horizon. Skin yawned and smacked her lips.

“I don’t suppose we know how we’re going to eat?” Skin asked.

Stacia absently reached into her pack and pulled out some of the rations she had arrived with. There weren’t enough for one person to eat for more than five days, but Stacia could force herself to go without eating for a while if she had to. Skin wouldn’t have the same training and enhancements. Besides, the young woman looked like she desperately needed some meat on her bones.

Skin immediately shoved the food in her mouth, thought for a second, and then spoke around a mouth full of crumbs. “Thunk yuh.”

Stacia nodded, trying not to let Skin see her smile.

“Roo-Soh isn’t actually that far away,” Stacia said as she put the leather back in her pack. “We should be able to make it by this time tomorrow, I think.”

“And then you kill this Stanton person?” Skin asked quietly. Stacia only nodded.

“What then?” Skin asked.

“We’ll come to that when we get there,” Stacia said. “We don’t want to count our chickens before they’re hatched.”

“What’s a chicken?”

“Something that gets hatched.”

“Oh. Uh, okay.”

Stacia stood up and made sure she had everything she needed packed. “Let’s get going.”

“Do you need me to carry one of those? They look heavy,” Skin said, pointing at Stacia’s two 808s.

“They are, but not too heavy for me.”

“Can I carry one anyway?”

Stacia smiled. “I suppose. Just don’t shoot me by accident.”

“Uh, I’ll try not to. If I do, please don’t kill me.”

“For the last time, Skin, I’m not going to…” Stacia trailed off as she looked around at the matted-down grass that had been their camp. “Uh, Skin?”

“What?”

“Did you move the body of that Elite that we brought with us?”

“No. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. But it’s gone.”

Stacia stared at the spot where she was sure she had dumped the body. She hadn’t wanted it stinking up their camp, so she had given it some distance, but not so much distance that she would have lost its location in the tall grass. There was something different, though, about the spot where Stacia had placed it. There was a path, leading both to and away from the spot, where the grass was completely gone. All that was left there was the bare dirt.

“Skin, don’t move,” Stacia said. “I don’t think we’re alone.”

“Is it a Wet Lisa?” Skin asked. Stacia could only shrug. She still didn’t have the slightest clue what that meant. Given the size of the planet’s fauna that she had met so far, though, she was surprised that, whatever had taken the body, it hadn’t tripped all her mental alarms already. There shouldn’t have been anything that could get this close without her noticing.

Stacia’s gaze followed the paths going from where the body had been. One seemed to clearly be the creature’s approach, given that the grass-less trail came in from deeper on the plain. Going the other direction, Stacia saw the missing grass go around their camp in a wide circle. The grass was too high for her to see the ground, but she could clearly see the pattern it had been making. It was circling them, spiraling inward. Finally, she found the place where the path abruptly ended, with no sign of… wait.

As she watched, several stalks of the grass noiselessly toppled over and vanished from view. Then a few more.

The Wet Lisa, whatever the hell it was, was right there, and it was trying to create a circle around them. Looking at its pattern, the circle of missing vegetation was about to be complete. Stacia had a feeling they didn’t want to be inside that circle when it was.

“Skin, run!”

“Run where?” Skin, who hadn’t quite made the connection yet that something bad was about to happen, stood in place, looking frantically around her for a danger she couldn’t see. As the Wet Lisa got closer to completing the circle, Stacia noticed something else: the island of grass at the center of the circle was getting smaller. Whatever was on the outside of the circle was beginning to creep in.

Stacia tried to use her tactical implants to get some idea what she was dealing with, but they were coming up with curiously little data. The implants kept trying to say that they must be surrounded by insects, some kind of locust-like creature, but there was absolutely no sound. The thing or things didn’t give off any heat or any smell. The only thing her implants could discern was that the air around them had grown slightly moister.

Resigning herself that the tactical implants would be of little help at the moment, Stacia ran up to Skin, grabbed her by the waist, and slung the woman over her shoulder. The noise of Skin’s “oof!” was drowned out by the sudden rustling of all the grass around them, the sound of a heavy wind even though the air was completely still. Quicker than she’d expected, the last of the grass around the perimeter fell, connecting the circle. The vegetation dropped and disappeared quicker, closing in on them. Whatever these things were, Stacia’s sudden movement had alerted them that they’d lost the element of surprise and now was the time to take their prey.

Stacia got the best running start she could, then jumped over the ever-widening dead space around them. She looked down for just a second, and finally her implants, now with some sensory data they could analyze, gave her an idea of what she was dealing with.

Stacia was a professional. She had dealt with more weird alien creatures, diabolical plots, and just plain strange occurrences than she could possibly count. But this one was so off her radar that she almost misjudged her landing and fell on the other side of her jump.

Wet Lisa was a puddle.

This? This is what everyone’s so afraid of? Stacia thought. But even as that crossed her mind, the neural implants were doing their job, analyzing everything they had seen, everything she could sense, everything she had been told. The scenario that suddenly formed in her head was terrifying.

Wet Lisa (or was it the Wet Lisa? Wet Lisas? She still couldn’t be sure if she was dealing with a single creature, one of many, or an entire colony) was a peculiar bright green color, completely flat, no visible appendages or sensory organs at all. But there was no doubt that it was alive in some fashion, because it was moving of its own will. Where it touched the grass, the grass immediately dissolved into it. It was like living acid, taking any shape it needed to surround its prey, and it grew with everything it ate.

And it had suddenly switched directions, no longer going for the center of the circle but the two juicy humans that had just jumped over it. Considering it was nothing more than a shimmering green puddle, the damned thing could move fast.

“Skin, can this thing be killed?” Stacia asked.

“I… oof, that hurts!” Skin said as Stacia bounded over a large stone in the ground and jostled the passenger draped over her shoulder. “I don’t know! No one ever said anything about that!”

Stacia risked turning around for just a split second to get an idea of the creature’s speed. It was almost as fast as her, but not quite. Stacia could probably outrun it if she had enough time and energy, but she had no idea what kind of stamina a puddle of goo might have.

She did notice that it flowed around the rock she’d jumped over rather than sliding over it. Her neural implants immediately took that information and began calculating, processing…

“Hey, I think I can shoot it,” Skin said. Stacia had almost forgotten until now that Skin still held one of the 808s.

“Wait, I don’t think—” Before she could finish, Skin squeezed the trigger, and a flurry of bullets fanned out behind Stacia. Skin screeched, still not used to the kickback.

“Uh oh,” Skin said. Stacia didn’t need to ask her what had happened. She felt the weight on her shoulder lessen as Skin dropped the weapon. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m…”

Stacia stopped dead and turned around to face the Wet Lisa. She watched the 808 fall and flatten the grass, which the creature immediately swarmed. The grass appeared to melt into the Wet Lisa. The 808 didn’t do anything.

“Stacia, what are you doing?” Skin screamed. “We need to—”

“Stay. Completely. Still,” Stacia said. With a final lunge, the Wet Lisa flowed forward and around Stacia’s metal boots.

Nothing happened.

The Wet Lisa continued flowing toward them until they were completely surrounded by a twenty-foot wide pool of the green slime. Everywhere it touched the grass, the vegetation disappeared into the puddle of primordial sludge. And yet, as Stacia stood in the middle of it, the Wet Lisa did nothing to hurt her.

“Wait, what’s happening?” Skin asked.

With her free arm, Stacia reached up to her head and yanked out a single strand of her hair. Holding it over the slime, she watched the Wet Lisa bubble and bulge slightly underneath the hair, as though it could sense a piece of juicy human. Stacia let go, and the hair dissolved instantly in the creature.

“Organic material,” Stacia said. “It can only absorb organic material.”

“What does that mean?” Skin asked.

“It means that if I set you down in this slop, you would melt into it. If I put my face in it, that would get eaten, too. But the inorganic polymer/metal alloy of my armor? It can’t do anything about that. Right now, to this thing, I’m a meal in a can, and it doesn’t have a can opener.”

The green slop made some kind of pulsating move at her toes, like it was trying to find a way to grip and slip up the boot until it could find a crack in which to slide and take the meat within. But apparently, the Wet Lisa hadn’t evolved for that.

“That explains that silly wall around Hobbes,” Stacia said. “As long as it’s metal, it doesn’t matter how high it is. The Wet Lisa doesn’t have any way to get over it.”

“So what does this mean?”

Careful not to jostle Skin too much, Stacia plodded through the Wet Lisa to the dropped 808 and then bent to pick it up. The footprints she left behind in the goop closed up quickly, and the slime where she stepped fled from her boot. Holding the 808 in her free hand, Stacia inspected it to see if the Wet Lisa had left any damage or remnants of itself. There were a couple of small bits in the handle, where the faux-leather grip wasn’t completely made from synthetic materials. But otherwise, the weapon looked completely fine. Just to be sure, she had Skin yank another hair from Stacia’s head and place it where the gun had been bathed in the creature. The hair didn’t react.

“It means that you’re safe,” Stacia said to Skin. “As long as you don’t touch the ground.”

Stacia took a few more steps. The Wet Lisa both gave way to her and followed, keeping itself around her at all times just in case she might drop something tasty in it.

“Are you going to be able to carry me all day?” Skin asked.

“It doesn’t look like I have any choice. I’m certainly not going to drop you in it, so don’t worry about that.”

“Do you think it will go away when it gets dark out?”

Stacia thought that was a possibility. Although this was an alien planet with alien biology, the Wet Lisa’s green color implied to Stacia that it might by photosynthetic, using the energy from the sun to sustain some of its functions. That would explain why no one ever seemed to be worried about these things at night.

“Probably,” Stacia said. “But we’re going to move carefully. Do you think you can get into a more comfortable position on me? Maybe ride on my shoulders?”

The next few minutes probably would have looked comical, had anyone been around to witness it and had a dark sense of humor. Stacia did her best to rearrange her gear on her back even as Skin crawled around on her, trying to get into a more sustainable riding position without her actually being able to touch the ground. There were a couple close calls, one where Skin slipped and caught Stacia’s armor just before her toe dipped into the slime, and the other where Stacia herself almost lost her balance. Once they were finished, though, they’d managed to create something that was almost a saddle using the two 808s on Stacia’s back and her pack.

“You probably look like you’re riding a horse,” Stacia said.

“What’s a horse?” Skin asked.

“It’s something that goes good with steak sauce, if you’re desperate.”

“Oh. Uh, I still don’t know what any of that means.”

Stacia finally started trudging off across the plain, the Wet Lisa surrounding her, on her way to Roo-Soh. The creature was almost like a pet, if the only reason the pet stuck around was to eat its owner’s face at the earliest opportunity.

“This is going to get old quickly,” Stacia said.