Hounds of Orion

As the lights dimmed and the wall screen hummed to life, the once corporate and serene environment was replaced with one of anxiety and a twinge of fear, when a monster appeared on the monitor. It was a still image of a creature in a high walled enclosure, with height lines marking the walls. It was a solid mass of bulging muscle underneath a coat of shiny black fur. The beast was hunched over, supporting its weight on its knuckles, its head cresting at the seven meter line. Four large tusks protruded from a maw of jagged teeth as it stared death into the camera with blood-red eyes. But the worst part for Cameron, was that he could swear the creature was… smiling.

“May I present to you Simiiformes Stygius,” Proxy began, speaking in a tone devoid of all emotion, “Or as we here at Syl-Tech call it; The Stygian Silverback.”

The screen dimmed before brightening once again, showing another slide, this one of the Silverback’s anatomy with side-by-side figures depicting, bones as wide as an adult human, and overlapping suite of a fibrous taught muscle, respectively.

“An amalgamation of the Silverback Gorilla from earth and cocktail of local predatory fauna,” Proxy continued, “These creatures were the result of genetic engineering seeking to fill a need, primarily, how can poorer planets who can’t afford A.R.M.S. pilots protect themselves? We at Syl-Tech sought to solve that issue and in our search, we settled on the concept of a biological A.R.M.S. unit so to speak.”

Another slide transition came in dead silence as most were too shocked to speak. The new slide depicted certain organs and steroids that were used in creating the beasts, as Proxy continued his spiel, the concept sounding more absurd and terrifying with every item listed.

“Its hide is fireproof, plasma proof, resistant to all forms of bladed instruments, and houses bodily fluids that are toxic to human touch. It’s grip strength is strong enough to crush diamonds, and has enough bite force to chew through tungsten. Lastly, it has been engineered to function without brain activity for up to two minutes, meaning that even if it were to be decapitated, the creature could theoretically take vengeance on it’s killer before fully expiring.”

“By the stars,” One of the mercs off to Cameron’s left said, loud enough for all to hear. “Can the fuckers breath underwater?”

“That was a planned feature for after beta testing,” Proxy said matter-of-factly, looking back toward the screen that showed a series of graphs and pie charts.

“If you’ll look here, you’ll see the average cost of your standard Alpha class A.R.M.S. pilot. Naturally this is just a standard rate, but variations can apply depending on contract length or complexity. If you’ll look over here, you’ll see that because of production costs and sustainability thanks to cryogenics, we can offer our product at a thirty percent discount while maintaining a sixty percent higher profit margin when compared to your standard mechanical units. At least, that was the plan, until about two days ago.”

There was one final slide that appeared, this one showing a large hole in the creature’s enclosure, leading to the outside world. Blood splatter coated various spots along the wall, staining its white color to a sickly scarlet hue.

“One of our monitors, the people in charge of keeping the creature fed and contained, accidentally opened the barrier, revealing the outside world. Now up till this point, the Silverback had only seen the inside of it’s enclosure from birth till now. It wasn’t aware of anywhere else, we can only assume that seeing the outside for even the briefest of moments caused it to go into a confused tantrum, as only a few moments after the mistake had been rectified, it was banging on the walls, attempting to get out. We sent in a team of animal experts to hopefully tranquilize the beast, but as you can see, the results were… unsatisfactory.”

The slide show ended, with the final image fading to a dark black as the lights came back on, and Cameron looked around, seeing a myriad of emotions on display. There was shock, trepidation, anxiousness, and a cold, calloused, calm that was shared by a few pilots, one of them being Logan who leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, speaking aloud for the first time since Proxy had entered the room.

“So, just so I understand this correctly,” He began, his deep growl of a voice sounding even more annoyed than usual, “You and your organization decided to undercut the fleet and Alpha class pilots by creating a giant fucking demon gorilla, and whore it out to poor free space planets, but before you could do that, one of your employees screwed up and showed the abomination that its little terrarium wasn’t the only place around, and it decided to go for a little stroll. You all tried to tranq it, but instead of just having a giant hole in your building, you have a giant hole and five corpses. So now, you call in the very people you were trying to undercut in the first place to clean up the mess that was made in the process of trying to steal our livelihood. Am I missing anything?”

“Only that there is a time limit on this contract,” Proxy said, not bothering to correct Logan’s statements. “The government of Qal’Gar has done us a favor by keeping news of the containment breach out of the local media due to the fact that the island is uninhabited as far as we are aware. But the warned us that this would only last so long before they would intervene with their own forces. Should that happen and Syl-Tech’s involvement become known, our credibility in this sector will be non-existent as will be your pay. As of this very moment, you have approximately twelve hours to find and terminate the creature in order to complete the contract in full.”

A series of groans and jeers erupted from the crowd, but Logan simply stared at the faceless representative, before, with a shrug, he stood and stretched with Cameron following his lead.

“Sounds about right,” Logan said unenthusiastically, grabbing the briefing packet and pushing his chair in. “Well we ain’t got all day. Let’s go hunt us a monkey.”

“Gorilla,” Proxy said in a casual neutrality.