Jenn didn’t know who the hell all these people were, and honestly, she didn’t really want to know. She had been discreetly cataloging the people she would have to rely on keeping her alive and, while reassured by their varied abilities and general capability, they all seemed… unstable. To say the least.
There was the constantly-distracted, finger-death-waving old man who had a slingshot that outright punched holes through multiple people in a single go.
The other old man with the long-white mustache/beard combo who moved like ice on glass with that brutal piece of metal rebar that he insisted on pretending was some sort of walking cane.
There was also the quiet woman who shot solid-lightning bars out of her finger tip that literally exploded flesh in a shower of sparks. Not to mention that she herself was somehow crackling with electricity half the time which she then sent into Jack for some reason. Weirder, he seemed grateful for it. The woman was also scarily perceptive, she was already looking at her by the time Jenn had barely even thought about looking her way. She shivered at her glare. No more looking at that one.
The person that the perceptive woman named Yuma was closest to was the opposite in that regard to the main weirdo, Jack seemed completely oblivious to anything that wasn’t a direct threat. Even if it was, he seemed relatively unconcerned. Which made sense because the six and half foot tall, barefoot, shirtless, rag-wearing, covered in both old and new gore, who seemed to happily absorb the clearly destructive amount of electricity from Yuma and seemed to heal outrageously fast. Bullets? No problem. How about a sword through his windpipe? Oh whoops that only ruined his little one-liner when they had found the group. Him being that tall didn’t even make sense, the Cryo-Pods weren’t that big, so that must have happened at some point after?
Not to mention that was only the damage that managed to get through his big ol’ fuck-off pink shield that came out of some sort of liquid-pink gauntlet that only had one oversized finger at the end of it. The same giant finger she had personally seen him punch directly through someone’s SKULL. And not even the particularly weak points of a skull either. She had also noticed that temperature seemed to change around him uncomfortably often. That had taken a little while before she was sure it wasn’t that she was going crazy imagining it. She could forgive herself for taking a few extra minutes to make sure that wasn’t happening. That might have been preferable compared to running alongside groups of people that basically had superpowers and almost zero hesitation to commit gross violence at the flip of a coin.
What made it all too ridiculous and thus less stressful, through virtue of overloading her base biological stress response, was the oversized severed man-machine head that latched onto Jack’s shoulder with miniaturized crab legs. Oh yeah? Did she forget? It fired lasers out of its eyes and it seemed to possess the ability to give her the entirely unsettling feeling that it knew what she was thinking at all times and could endlessly finish her sentences for her, forever. If it wanted to.
“Wondering how you got mixed up with these weirdos, new meat?”
She froze, well as much as she could while desperately trying to keep up the ridiculous pace everyone else was. It did it again.
“It’s like they are barely Human anymore.”
It winked at her, “Better hope I don’t repeat that to the big guy here, he doesn’t like non-Humans.”
It narrowed its slightly-hypnotic, spiraling eyes, “In fact, you look like you might have some crab in you.”
She saw Jack perk up at the mention of crabs and, there it was again, the air temperature rose alongside Jack’s head twitch. Some sort of unconscious response, it was clear that he wasn’t even paying attention to her or the machine-head.
“No no! No crab, 100% Human, I promise.” She was sure she was about to be lasered before Jack bopped the head on the top of its… head. Jack didn’t give off the hint that he even took notice, there was absolutely not even the slightest pause in telling his story.
She hoped that no one had heard the conversation but she felt the brush of the woman’s eyes pass over her, Yuma she had heard it said. She was listening.
So the woman could notice her, the machine-head could predict her, and the pink-finger guy to drill a hole into her head. Though she was pretty sure that any of the surrounding people could kill her, and would, if she made herself a problem. Not that she had any plan about it, but her brain still scrambled for pathways to survive in worst-case scenarios. She reminded herself that they were Humans and she was a Human, so there was nothing to worry about. Still, being surrounded by strange strangers who would easily kill her in ways she didn’t know was possible was deeply unsettling.
Floating on a giant crab? Mind-rapes, mycelial hive-minds, rat-people death-runs, hybrid crab people?
What in the fuck is going on in this ship? Jack really hadn’t been kidding when he said that the worms weren’t near the worst thing on this ship, that’s if he was actually telling the truth. It seemed like too much to believe but everyone around them seemed to be taking it at face value. Parts of the story that the old-man and ‘Wasty’ or ‘Trash’ or whatever the computer-head’s name was seemed to reinforce his story. So either they had practiced telling such a complex lie to this degree… or… it was still hard to believe. She was trying to listen to Jack’s story as a way to get up to speed but when you can barely follow the start of it, following the rest was exponentially difficult.
Were there supposed to be more crabs in the labs? So he killed a giant crab and floated on it? Is that why it had been so deserted in the Cryo-Labs? She was almost a little embarrassed about that. Her squad had thought they were hot-shit cutting through a dozen scattered crabs. How would they have fared against mind-raping semi-immortal mushroom people? Or some apocalyptic rat-crab battle with a brain-popping super crab hybrid?
Wait, was that a kid?
Oh God above he just spit on a child and the kid started melting. What in the absolute fuck is that. He just melted a kid with a stream of spit like it was nothing. He didn’t even hesitate. Worse yet, no one else did anything about it.
----------------------------------------
Suicidal ambushed increased in frequency and silent-savagery as they drew closer to the Bridge. Jack was forced to shrug off Jonah and take point, the Bridge was still an unknown and they couldn’t afford to lose strength.
A chorus of screams rippled out from the Clan, except for the ones directly around him. He paused for a moment, expecting an attack, but then started moving again. One of the Clan fell further away from him and started to clutch her head as blood streamed down her face from her nose. Psy-attack.
“Everyone stay close,” he said ‘everyone’, but he meant Yuma and Jonah. The other’s could do it or not. They ran around the corner and saw a cowled human-like figure standing with both hands outstretched. They were short though, perhaps just past his waist.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“It’s a child?”
It moved its head like it was saying something but Jack couldn’t hear it.
He walked up to it. The small figure looked at its hands as if confused. Was it a child? He spit a stream of viral fluid onto the figure, ignoring the calls of surprise from one of his companions. After writhing seconds, parts started to slop and decay as skin fell to the ground and a writhing mass of worms burst from the loose skin and latched onto him.
Jack turned around, covered in bursts of his own partially-siphoned blood.
Yuma was giving him one of her looks…
“What?”
“It’s too bad that we can’t use the water.”
Jack looked down at himself, saw nothing wrong, then looked back up, “What are you talking about?”
One of the Clan, Jack had learned his name sometime earlier, asked a question. Then, he remembered.
Hendrew, was it? And some people give me crap for my name.
“How- Why did you melt that thing if you thought it was a child?”
Jack and Jonah stared at him like he was stupid, “A child here? Are you deficient?” “Better safe than sorry.”
They looked at each other over their overlapped responses and gave each other a questioning grin. You’d have to be an idiot not to have a melt-first-questions-maybe-never attitude on the ship. The Clan had recovered at this point, though woozy. Two had died.
The ship’s deck rumbled beneath their feet that roughly bounced everyone for a beat.
----------------------------------------
He was curious about the ship he had been tracking as it entered the outer reaches of the solar system entirely too quickly. Lucky for the ship, this system was quite large, otherwise they’d have already covered the span of it and plunged. Unluckily, the automated defenses had been unable to stop it, which meant that he’d had to do something. Why did this kind of crap always happen on his shift? He sighed and looked back at his supervisor. Slothful. Slothful. He liked that word, he had just learned it. He had debated waiting until it was the next shift’s problem, but that would inevitably fall back to ‘why wasn’t this detected sooner,’ and thus, back to him. Sighing again, he fortified himself.
“Sir? A moment?”
He watched as his oversized supervisor came over to leer over him, arms crossed.
“What is it?”
“An unidentified ship just entered the system.”
His supervisor rolled his eyes and scratched his mandibles, “What code are they broadcasting?”
“They aren’t broadcasting anything.”
“Then shoot them down.”
“The automated squadrons already attempted that, but their mass is substantial as well as their automated defenses.” He already knew the next question so he answered it ahead of time, “Their speed is too fast for our higher-yield weapon systems.”
Finally his supervisor took a closer look at the readout.
“What is it?”
“Perhaps Human,” then, having forgotten himself for a moment, quickly added, “sir.”
“This doesn’t look like any Human ship I’ve seen.”
“Ancient Human?”
He saw the flash of interest in his supervisor’s eyes. He was slothful and obnoxious, AND he would throw you under a ship’s exhaust if it meant he was 10 minutes early to dinner, but he was also extremely qualified, at least when there was something that promised substantial personal gain.
None of the earlier malaise was visible after those two words.
“Current trajectory?”
“They will clip our local star.”
“System-wide effects from the impact?”
“Predictive analysis shows a minor increase in solar activity, but that could vary depending on the power system aboard. We just don’t know what’s on there. Depending to what extent gravitics are used, or what type of gravitics are on board, it could be dangerous.”
“If it's an old ship then that’s doubtful. Any sense of those being employed?”
“Some sir, but I’m not picking up any exotic gravitics, but the measurements don’t make much sense, some things are wildly outdated while others are barely able to be scanned by our systems.”
That hit something in the supervisor. New tech was valuable, especially offshoot Human tech. This was rare. Exceedingly rare. Rare enough that shooting them down would be criminal in nature. At least to the potential of moving his family from incredibly wealthy to his own personal multi-stage empire level of wealth.
“Can we slow it down?”
“Grav-gen 5 is on Oleon’s moon.”
“What about the ones in high orbit?”
He gave his supervisor a look at that. Those would be able to do it but the cost of spooling those up for an object not directly threatening the planet would be unthinkable. They were for relativistic missiles. Even then, at its speed and mass it would be an extreme strain on those systems.
His supervisor winced, unnecessary usage like that would be directly taken from personal assets. Credits until those ran out, then flesh to make up the remainder. Knowingly forcing his entire family into slavery for hundreds of years to pay off the debt was unconscionable, especially since he would be included in that price. Still, it was a consideration and likely the only factor that stopped him from stopping and trying to loot the damn thing at this very moment.
“Has it shown any signs of life? Any adjustments in its maneuvers?”
He had a bad feeling in the center of his being at the last questions.
“Slow it down with 5 and push it into a terminal trajectory, burn it up in the corona. Keep an eye on it.”
He felt the feeling evaporate, his relief enough to nearly show on his face.
As if changing his mind the supervisor almost immediately countermanded his own order, “move over.”
The sick feeling redoubled and he stood up in puzzlement before it swiftly settled into firm dread.
He lowered his bulk into the recently vacated seat and he saw him plug in his personal SI to run calculations. He watched his supervisor’s face and saw some information register that activated nearly visible waves of greed to vibrate the air around him. At some point he was sure that he would be standing the rest of the shift but in a start his supervisor wiped and modified some of his station’s logs and walked away.
He sat back down and waited for his supervisor to lecture some other poor drone before pulling up his stealth-cloned backup of his workstation to see what his supervisor had done. He sucked in his breath and quickly hid any sign of his surprise. There was no way he was going to be blindsided by whatever his supervisor had done. He knew that if it blew up it would come back to him. Best case? His supervisor’s house forces looted the ship and he was stuck paying the bill. Not a chance he was going to let that happen.
His supervisor was a near-wastrel, black-sheep from a wealthy family and his personal SI was a top class one. The intercept route it had calculated was insane, well beyond his, or his SI’s, ability to figure out. The best he could guess was that he was trying to have grav-gen 5 perform some intricate gravitic maneuvers to put it right on the edge of their star’s gravity well. It would bleed speed and likely cause damage to the unknown ship but the course was predicting that it would send it… where the planet’s major grav-gens would pick it up as a threat to be stopped and would be able to slow it down without incurring costs. At least until an investigation was performed sometime in the next 5-10 solar cycles in which they would discover that it was manufactured in his own workstation in which he and his family would be sent off to some slave-mining facility at the edge of the system while his supervisor left to found some new empire with his face on the flag.
In his own copy of his workspace he could fiddle and adjust without worry. Any of the alarms that would have notified his supervisor at his adjustments went nowhere on his segregated and disconnected copy.
Damn him. He was trying to loot the thing and leave him on the hook for the bill. He tried to see if he could get around it but that was impossible, his SI wasn’t powerful enough to get around the blocks undetected and then his supervisor would instantly know. He might have a chance once the program reached out to activate the planet’s grav-gens, but not before.
He started to leak liquid. It would be tight and he would have to be ready the moment the command went out. He, and his family, was NOT going to be paying for his little looting expedition.