Read Online Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits by David Coy - Free Book Online

knew—found themselves;
dumped into a pit of something nasty or caustic to be stripped of flesh already
ruined by maniacal manipulation.
    The pit
was deep, and she had no intention of going down into it. She fashioned a loop
from a length of rope in her pack; and using it as a lasso, managed to pull up
pieces of one of the more freakish constructions. It looked to her to have been
a biped at one time, but had been modified into a quadruped. It was smallish,
no larger than a child of six or seven years, and she was only a little
relieved when a moment’s examination of the teeth and jaw showed it to be
nonhuman in origin. That fact didn’t diminish the empathy she felt for a
creature so abused and tortured. The limbs looked as if they had been stretched
and curved into arcs, for no other reason than it was in the designer's power
to do it. The head, too, looked to have been stretched and pushed and pulled
here and there like so much clay. The entire skeleton was covered with
attachments that made no sense to her. To Rachel’s trained eye, this couldn’t
have been the work of a scientist, no matter how alien; it was the work of an
unhuman—and unfeeling—artist, creating transmogrified organisms at will, and
for the unfathomable, amoral sake of being able to.
    The
skeleton was fragile so she wrapped the rope around it to hold it together,
then headed back to the shuttle. She’d had enough of these alien riddles for
one day.
    When she
got back she was surprised to see Jacob sitting at their table with Donna and
eating from a platter with a fork. The sight of him there, dressed in standard
contractor’s cottons with his strange head drooped over the plate, made her
want to vomit. Donna was sitting opposite him, watching him eat.
    “Hey,
Jacob,” she said. “Recognize this?” she held the skeleton out to him like a
bundle of sticks. He acted like he’d heard nothing at all.
    Donna
turned around and looked.
    “What the
hell is that?” she asked, leaning away from it. “And where in hell did you get
it?”
    “Ask
Jacob, there,” she said putting it gently down. “He can tell you more about it
than I can. Oh, I can tell you what it is all right. I can describe the parts.
What I can’t tell you is why it exists. That’s the mystery, isn’t it, Jacob?
What about that? Care to comment?”
    Jacob
continued to eat, slowly, without looking up as if there were no one else in
the room.
    “What
would he know about it?” Donna asked.
    “I think
he knows exactly why it exists, don’t you, Jacob?”
    Donna
looked over at Jacob. “Do you? Do you know?” she asked of him.
    “Ask him
why his entire external physiology is so strange,” Rachel said. “Ask him.”
    Jacob
continued to eat as if he were the only one in the chamber.
    “Well,
I’ll tell you why,” Rachel said. “This place is the sickest fucking place in
the universe.”
    “It’s
bad, I know but . . .” Donna began.
    “No. It’s
not just bad. This place is the center of evil in the universe. And Jacob knows
all about it.”
    “Rachel?
What are you talking about?” Donna asked. She was beginning to worry about
Rachel’s mental state. It was one thing to have seizures and another to babble incomprehensibly.
In Rachel’s case the two often occurred in close proximity.
    “Okay,
it’s like this,” Rachel began. “The aliens who lived here had a way with living
things. They didn’t just experiment for the sake of science. They were more
interested in art, you know, the creation of things, like playing God.”
    “I don’t
get it,” Donna said.
    “See this
thing?” Rachel pointed at it. “This thing is a fabrication. They made this
thing from parts of other fucking things. They violated natural laws and
combined one animal with parts from another to get this, this abomination.”
    “How?”
    “All that
shit in the lab is designed to do just that—to make goddamned things like this
thing here.”
    “Yikes,”
Donna said, studying her