[Pioneer Dominique Reynolds]

After Dokchara had fully healed, we picked a direction and started moving. Nothing good could come from staying around the crash site, there weren’t even any weapons or tools we could realistically salvage as the ship had been spread across a massive amount of land. Despite Dokchara knowing about the existence of the farm on this planet, the exact whereabouts were unknown and we didn’t have any sort of map to work with.

The planet wasn’t uninhabited by any means, there were at least a couple billion Grahtonian residents spread between the cities, but in the grand scheme of things and on a planet similar in size to Earth, there was a good chance that we could walk around the entire planet and not come into contact with civilization. If scouts were sent out to look for us, we might be able to hijack a vehicle, but that would come with the caveat of having every movement tracked. In reality, we weren’t even sure what a search party would look like; for all we knew, we could already be under the eye of a satellite.

Despite all the what-ifs we could think up, it had been unsettlingly quiet. That’s not to say that there weren’t the expected animal noises of a jungle, but there had been no clues of us being followed or efforts being made to locate us. Considering not even the Grahtonian investigation force knew of what was hidden on this planet, we might not even be seen as a massive priority until someone who was actually clued in on the schemes at play was made aware of us being on this planet.

This train of thought was interrupted by a disturbance in the back of my head, a small buzzing feeling. I’d been scanning the surroundings every few steps, making sure we didn’t miss anything like railroads or cable lines, but the scan I just made returned with a dead spot at the very edge behind me. One that wasn’t there before, and I would have noticed passing by it, meaning that it was either a strange malfunction or something that didn’t want to be seen had just closed in from behind.

I turned just in time to see a flash of light preceding a projectile that shattered trees into showers of splinters and superheated the air around its path, forming a line of explosions between our distant admirer and myself. I didn’t have the time to brace myself, there were no cues to react to before I could actually make visual contact with the attack since this munition was traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

The bullet, which was actually just a tungsten cone about the size and length of my arm, embedded itself in my chest and imparted all of its momentum onto me, sending me flying and tumbling for the second time in the last few days. I hadn’t been able to get a visual on the enemy, but they had signal shielding and some pretty impressive firepower, and now I was separated from Dokchara who was unarmed and likely lacking understanding of what just happened in the blink of an eye.

After almost twenty seconds of tumbling, I was able to get control over my momentum. I got up, pulled out the bullet, and started running back with all the force my augments could muster, almost reaching a land speed record as I flew through trees and rocks like they were mere suggestions. While I still wouldn’t be able to detect that weapon before it fired, I at least knew what to expect and had a direction to work with. I could probably at least deflect the shot with my hands since they were much sturdier than most of my body.

Of course, that would only be necessary if Dokchara wasn’t locked in a wrestling match with the Graht who was bearing that signal jamming I had noticed earlier. The gun that had given me a short vacation, which looked like one of those railguns out of a video game except about the size of the Graht’s body, was bent along the barrel and laying on the ground. It seemed like the Graht had tried to stab Dokchara but instead got his knife snapped in half on Dok’s carapace. I don’t know how Dokchara managed to get the drop on him, but I wasn’t going to complain about my friend being uninjured and… wow, he just took a bite out of the Graht. Dude, how hungry were you?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I slowed myself down to the point where I would break a few bones at most and clotheslined the Grahtonian, bringing him along with me until I slammed him into a tree and finally got a good look at this guy. He was a bit taller than most Grahtonians I’d seen and wearing a jungle camo padded bodysuit. His jamming wasn’t effective at point blank and I was able to get a scan of him. It seemed like he had a watered down version of the serum as his density and the regeneration of the bones I broke were a bit underwhelming.

I was surprised to see that he actually had implants in his head, I thought that the regenerative abilities would make that basically impossible to do. They were quite extensive, too; one of his eyes had been completely replaced with a high-power camera that directly interacted with his brain, giving him aim assistance via muscle control instead of relying on external systems. I also found out what the buzzing in my head was, he was sending a live feed of everything he saw to a satellite and I’d managed to notice that thanks to the complete lack of other signals in the deep jungle.

This was all neat and stuff, but I was still left with a problem. The Grahtonian hadn’t even bothered pleading for its life, the only sounds he ever made were grunts of pain. This one had been trained to not squeak, so I was left with a dead end unless I had a way to read his mind.

…

Could it be possible?

His implants had radio transmission and the security seemed like an afterthought, so I technically would be able to get into his head, but is that really safe for me? Would I even understand what I saw, or would the shape of one’s mind be too different for me to comprehend the forms of thoughts and memories? I had brief training on remotely accessing computers and taking data using my mind as a computer, so how different would it be to access an organic hard drive instead of a conventional one?

I may as well try…

And when I injected into the transmission, what I saw was a mess of references, networks of interconnected, unorganized pipes compared to the clean, uniformly shaped and parsable form of a man made storage disk. The ones and zeros of binary were replaced with the yes and no of individual neurons, communicating intention to each other to form larger pieces of thought. Maybe there was a pattern, some form of organization, but it was foreign to me… though looking at myself, there were uncanny similarities in the connections that formed.

This fragment of his mind would make sense if it were just a bit different, maybe if I cut these connections and strengthened a few on this side, bridging the missing links that made the encoding of this memory familiar to me.

I could see a picture, a snapshot of the past that didn’t belong to me. It was his memory, and I’d changed it to match what I understood. The memory itself wasn’t anything interesting, just a blip of time from his training, but there were thousands of these for me to go through.

Each time I did it, it got easier to do. This wasn’t something that I could have automated, it was too delicate and required too much understanding of myself to rely on a machine for, but I was getting more proficient with each cut and paste that I made. More memories of training, a few about his family that didn’t care much for him, signing up for the military, excelling amongst peers, getting recognized, getting chosen… all discarded, I didn’t have use for another man’s life.

Now the more recent ones. Being deployed to this planet’s space station like a bunch of others that were in the same program as him, not knowing why those specific planets needed highly accomplished agents guarding them. Seeing Moqangos being transferred from ships with no identifying features to the station and then down to the planet. Being alerted to our intrusion, heading down to the crash site and following our tracks using a sparse network of vibration sensors underground.

I backed out to find the Grahtonian foaming at the mouth, unresponsive to any attempts at getting a reaction out of him. He still had positive life signals, but it seemed that he was otherwise completely comatose. I also noticed Dokchara standing behind me, staring at me. How long had I been in there?

“W-What did you do to him?”

“I uh… browsed his memories?

Anyway, I got our next plan of attack. There’s a space station that's used to channel Moqango prisoners. If we can get up there, we should be able to find out where they’re being taken. Maybe we can even contact the Mayflower and get some help.”

“...What’s going to happen to the Graht?”

“Well… He tried to kill us, right?”

kr-squelch