| Ficbit Challenge 5
Twenty-One -
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| A scrabbling turd, the size of Mark's thumb, hit the pile of flimsies
he was reading through at breakfast. Mark (who could not possibly be more
inured to this sort of thing) simply picked up his coffee mug, tossed off
the rest of the contents, and upended it over the butter bug before it
could escape, trapping it. "That," Miles said in a tone not too far away
from subarctic, "was on my pillow this morning."
"Huh," Mark said, and turned over the flimsy he'd just finished. "I thought you and Enrique moved the last of those out of Vorkosigan House months ago," Miles went on, icily. "So where did this one come from?" Mark stopped chewing in the middle of a bite of biscuit and slowly flipped the coffee mug back over, picking the ugly brown bug up gingerly between his thumb and his forefinger. "Now that you mention it..." "Where did it come from, Mark?" Miles repeated. "Enrique counted them all before we left and again when we arrived," Mark mused, flipping the bug over and watching its tiny legs flail at the air. "There weren't any missing." "Where did it come from, Mark?" "So this has to be one of the ones that escaped during the, er, confusion... but those should be long dead by now. And those were sterile, so they can't possibly have reproduced..." "Where did it come from, Mark?" "I don't know." Mark eyed the thing confusedly. "Unless..." "Unless?" "Unless one of our escapees was from the experimental group bred to consume native Barrayaran plants. Some of those had some interesting mutations... ah ha." "Ah ha?" Miles was starting to sound like a thoroughly upset broken recording. "Ah ha," Mark confirmed, using the tine of his fork to gently lift up a goo-encrusted plate under the bug's abdomen. Miles looked a little ill. "Definitely one of our mutants. See here? That's an egg sac." "Egg sac?" Very broken. "Congratulations," Mark said dryly, dumping the offending bug into his coffee mug again. "You've acquired a thriving colony of your very own butter bugs, and, may I add, completely free of charge." "Colony?" Miles' chin jerked up as he stared at the walls of the dining room, and he broke free of the broken recording with a squawk. "You mean I have thousands of those ugly things making their butter-stuff in the walls of Vorkosigan House?" "Hardly." Mark waved that away. "They wouldn't find very much native Barrayaran vegetation to eat inside the walls. I suspect you've got no more than a couple of hundred." "Oh, a couple of hundred, that's such a relief." Miles scowled down at the creature scrabbling at the sides of Mark's empty coffee cup. "At least they probably won't be chewing through the support beams like termites." Mark stopped chewing again. Miles eyed him askance. "They won't be chewing through the House's support beams, right?" "Support beams?" Mark swallowed his bite of biscuit, picked up the coffee mug, and studied the bug scrabbling around in a coffee puddle. "Made from... native Barrayaran timber, right?" "... you unbelievable asshole." Miles shot out a hand and gestured frantically at the walls. "There are thousands of your turd bugs eating the insides of Vorkosigan House! My parents' House is being held up not by wooden support beams but by bug crap! My home is made of butter!" "Our parents' House," Mark reminded him, picking up the coffee mug and covering it with his free hand. "Look, stop panicking. I'll talk to Enrique this afternoon and we'll take care of your little infestation." "You'd better," Miles snapped, now nearly purple. "For a reasonable price," Mark added, and then found it prudent to beat a hasty retreat, coffee mug and bug still firmly in hand. |
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