Mind Games

by Dragon Cobolt

  I flushed and…

  Fuck it. It was hot.

  I tried swinging my wrench over my shoulder and felt my clothing shifting and adjusting - placing the wrench into my inventory. When I held the pistol near my hip, a holster formed around it. When I closed my eyes, I could see that the wrench took a different amount of space than the vile, and so did the pistol. In fact, my inventory now looked like this:

  W

  R

  E

  N

  C

  H

  PISTOL

  N x1

  I frowned. “I wonder how I get more boxes free…”

  “Huh?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m looking at my inventory and-”

  “Oh!” Lucas chuckled. “Stronger you get, more of your inventory gets opened up. The nanites can make as many carrying straps as ya want, lassie, but after a certain point-”

  “Yeah, yeah, makes sense…” I said, slowly.

  I tried reaching backwards – I could grab onto the wrench with ease, the nanites actually shoving the wrench up into my hand with a thought. I dropped it towards my back and the nanites wrapped it up before it had fallen more than an inch. I flicked out my other hand and the nanites launched the pistol into the air and into my hand. As it landed, the ‘readied weapon’ box showed: XD-98 FerroKinetic Pistol.

  I grinned. I not only had a backup weapon, I could fucking hot swap as easily as pushing a numeral key on a keyboard . As I held up the pistol, I saw a tiny, glowing holographic haze flare to life around the handle and the barrel. A number popped up – it agreed with my count of the bullets. What was more, seeing that, the interface popped up an ammo count beside the name for the XD-98.

  I had seven bullets out of fourteen.

  My grin and my feeling of excitement slowly faded. What had Dubois been shooting at?

  I was afraid I was going to find out.

  ***

  “They’re called the Tesc,” Lucas said as I grabbed onto the next rung of the maintenance shaft that he had determined was the safest, fastest way to get from Cryonics to Engineering. A timer ticked away in my interface every time I closed my eyes to blink– we had an hour and ten minutes before Virgil Station slewed out of the L3 point and started on a steady course back towards Earth. Apparently, there was jack and shit the United Nations could do to stop it. Not because they lacked heavy lifters or shuttles or even really big guns.

  No, it was worse. Lucas had explained that the whole station was stealthed . It was covered in a radar dampening, light absorbing, heat sinking material that prevented anything but the most lucky or the most close observation from spotting it. And the United Nations Navy didn’t have any reason to be looking close in for Virgil Station - even the creepy fuckers in the Cadre Omega were looking.

  The station was doomed. And not a single person on Earth knew it.

  Because of course .

  “The test?” I asked, my brow furrowing as I pushed myself up. My left leg was starting to cramp. Climbing a mile of station was nothing to take lightly - and my interface helpfully flashed up a small ‘fatigue at 25%’ indicator. I hooked my arms, shifted, and leaned back against the inside of the shaft. That let me relax. The ache in my leg faded slowly and stubbornly, in time with the slowly reducing percentile, while Lucas sighed loudly.

  “The Tesc. It’s short for Tesseract.” He sighed again. “The boffins who made this place were doing some weird shite with gravity. That’s why this bloody place doesn’t need to spin, and why it needs station-keeping thrusters despite being gravitationally locked with the bloody moon.” He grumbled. “It’s an arse for a technician like myself, but...what can you do?”

  “Quit?” I suggested.

  “And get sent into TempleSoft’s mental rewiring chambers? Fat chance,” Lucas said.

  I frowned. TempleSoft was apparently the corporation that owned this place. I filed that unsettling detail away for later. Lucas continued.

  “The Tesc came through when some boffin switched on some bloody device. They’re aliens or something,” he said. “They take people. Kill em. Change em. Do... things to em.”

  My mind flashed back to the dead woman in Cryonics. The look of ecstasy on her face, frozen there forever by her snapped neck. I shuddered convulsively, then forced myself to start moving again. Another rung. Another rung. I bit back the urge to check the timer every second. If I needed to hurry, I was pretty sure Lucas would tell me. I found that if I thought really hard about wanting to see the map when I closed my eyes, the map would come up immediately: I brought it up and reviewed my plan. Going straight to Habitation was a fools game. We’d need the parts to fix the engine, and the suit to let me go outside in the first place.

  So, we head straight for Engineering.

  I snorted, loudly.

  “What’s so funny?” Lucas asked.

  “Just I thought that we were going, but it’s just me ,” I said, frowning.

  “Oi, I didn’t ask to be kept in a bloody broom closet for the whole bloody week,” Lucas said, sounding annoyed. “If there wasn’t a food dispenser in here, I’d already be gnawing off me own arm. Now, listen. The Tesc doesn't always kill. They do if you try and kill them right back – but if you’re cornered, and you don’t have any choice, well...”

  My frown grew more focused. “Well, what?” I asked.

  “You know...” he coughed, awkwardly.

  “No, I don’t. I have amnesia,” I said. But I was coldly certain that I knew exactly what Lucas was suggesting. And part of me tingled all over at the idea. But I was so keyed up, so eager for something to happen after the fight with the drones, that I think I’d have gotten off at the idea of kissing a pig. Another part of me just remembered the poor girl with her neck snapped and her cunt dripping with Tesc seed. Fortunately, life contrived to get me distracted from that mental image by bringing my face nose to nose with the hatch leading into Engineering. I closed my eyes and muttered a very soft ‘thank god.’

  The suit I wore squirmed.

  Maybe it was nervous too.

  Getting the hatch open required punching in Lucas’ pass key. I tapped the buttons a few times – and the alarm light came on. I scowled. “Lucas, your key-”

  “The bloody computers are trying to lock me out,” he said. “Try again!”

  I tapped in the combination again, frowning. The door hissed open, revealing a narrow, industrial corridor. I dragged myself in, my legs buzzing with the exertion that I had put them through. I rubbed my thighs with my hands – my ears perked up. The Engineering section of the station already sounded far more active . I could hear hissing and burbling, crackling and humming. The walls were grated and had machines behind the grates. But the ceiling had four lines of tubes – and each one was painted a bright red, with clear warning signs laid out.

  Danger.

  Steam.

  I started forward, my XD-98 held in a lowered grip. I didn’t want to just blow away some other survivor by accident. But as I came to the first corner, I heard the sounds of footsteps and a quiet sing-song voice.

  “Sold, sold, sold, sold...” it was a female voice – but underneath it, I could hear a rasp rasp rasp sound. It was like metal grinding against metal – but it came high, then low, then middle, then high. The sound was growing fainter. I peeked around the corner, wishing I could remove an eye and use it to peek, so I wouldn’t need to risk my soft, squishy head. But I had no options. The corridor beyond was as dimly lit as the one I stood in – red lights shone through grates and diffused through thin clouds of steam that emerged from machines whose purpose was entirely beyond me. That red light partially illuminated a humanoid – feminine – figure.

  They were naked, and I could see the faint drip of their sex between their legs. It pattered on the floor in a silent fall, the juice clear. Some part of my brain said arousal , not anything else. That fact was tucked away in the back of my brain – adding to the exquisite horror of the rest of her body. She had the breasts an
d ass of a Vegas show model, both firm and perky. But her skin had turned a dull gray under the demonic red of the emergency lighting surrounding her. Her shoulders had been augmented and expanded by a pair of almost machine-like growths that smoothly fused with her skin. Each one fanned outwards, creating a kind of skeletal pair of inverted wings, which were folded up behind her back. Other pieces of biomechanical fusion dotted the rest of her body, from the sleek tubes that she wore as dreadlocks to the digitigrade mech-walker legs that had become shapely and oddly sensual despite still having bare metal and flesh rubbing against one another.

  The final detail was her tail, emerging right above that perfect, heart shaped ass. It was long and segmented and tipped with a sleek metal barb that reminded me of the catching claws on the security drones. That was what produced the rasp noise – scraping along the wall and grinding against the floor as the woman walked.

  “Oh they all sold, didn’t they?” she whispered. “Daddy, do you think I’m pretty now that I’ve sold out too?”

  She moaned, sounding almost ecstatic.

  “Yess, writhe Daddy...” she purred. Her tail slashed at the air, as if she was impaling some invisible being before her.

  Some instinct surged through me. I stepped around the corner, lifting the pistol. My body knew precisely how to stand. How to aim.

  I pulled back on the trigger and the XD-98 let out a strangely muffled churr noise. A bullet thudded into her back - then three more as I pulled back again and again and again .

  The bright flashes revealed more grotesque detail of how metal and woman met and became one. They drew attention to the rubbery, eraser-like hardness of her nipples, and to the fact that her face was achingly beautiful, even when framed by mechanical dreadlocks and bearing a pair of camera-like irises instead of eyes.

  She stood there, blood dripping from the holes in her back, more blood flowing from around her eyes like tears.

  Then she beamed – her teeth razor sharp.

  “A new toy!” she cooed. She sprang at me with alarming speed. I staggered backwards, fear locking my legs. I tripped – which saved my life. The woman stopped a foot away from me and let her tail thrust between her hips, the segmented sections grinding against her sex like a perverse combination of deadly lance and sex toy. The barbed tip plunged through air, where my chest had been moments before. I leveled my shaking hands at her and shot her in the chest again. The bullet thudded home and I saw her flesh mold back around the hole. She giggled, then coughed. She moaned, then opened her mouth, her long tongue lolling out.

  Like a slut showing her partner that she had all his cum in her mouth, she showed me the five bullets I had fired into her, cupped in the slippery, wet, gray bowl of her curled tongue. She thrust her tongue out, the tip arching down towards her chin. The first gleaming bullet tumbled forward, then bounced off her chin, while another slipped left, sliding out of her mouth. It glistened as it struck her breast and sizzled - steam wafting from it. Still hot.

  The bullets rattled as they struck the floor. Once her mouth was empty, her razor teeth gleamed once more in the blazing red light of the maintenance tunnel.

  “Sorry, I don’t swallow,” she purred.

  She grabbed my pistol, then tossed it aside. Then her digitigrade legs whirred as they bent almost in half. She was leaning over me. Her clawed hand cupped my breast. Her touch lit me on fire . My skin burned and my nipple ached as I moaned quietly. She leaned forward and her cold lips pressed to mine. I could taste a kind of spicy, peppery flavor and a metallic tang on her tongue as it plunged into my mouth. I moaned as I realized I was tasting my gunpowder on her lips. Her tongue grew longer. Longer. Longer. My eyes went hooded and my toes curled against my nanites as my throat bulged. The fullness of her tongue made my head spin as I realized that her tongue was starting to thrust in and out of my throat, as if she was throat fucking me with a cock.

  I grabbed at her shoulders.

  I pushed. Weakly. So weakly.

  She drew back, her tongue still deep in my mouth - it was nearly as long as her arm now, stretching out past her gleaming black lips. Drool dripped down her chin, oozing from around her tongue. Her eyes glowed and whirred as they focused home.

  Stop... I thought. I tried to breathe and realized I couldn’t.

  I was dying.

  I was dying and I didn’t even care . Her tongue had blocked up my throat and my nose flared, trying to breathe in, but all I felt was pleasure as I serviced her. My back arched and I realized I was cumming – the sensation was shocking , fast and eager. It burned through me and I quivered as I spurted my juices along my thighs. My nanite clothes whisked it away, leaving me feeling faintly unsatisfied with being dry as a bone. My vision was growing dimmer and darker around the edges – infernal red light making the woman into a demon from hell as she spread those biomechanical wings wide.

  Her teeth bit down. Her tentacle-tongue squelched softly, then snapped free. My eyes bugged as I felt the tongue squirming deeper down my throat. Penetrating me further. Wriggling.

  “Yessss,” she purred, her lips parting to show that she still had a tongue - it wasn’t even a ragged stump. It was as if she had an infinite amount, endlessly returning. “I’ll make you part of me. How do you feel about being a tit?”

  Revulsion burned through me – and the pleasurable haze of her hypnotic eyes and sensual body faded. I scrambled at my throat with one hand. In the corner of my vision, I could see my health beginning to count down: 99, 98, 97, 96. It whirred down faster than one a second - almost blurring. Before I knew it, I was at 70/100 and falling.

  “Oh, yes, struggle, I love it when they struggle,” the Tesc woman purred.

  Machines.

  Flesh.

  Steam.

  Water .

  I lifted my arm. I aimed the pistol at her. She laughed, then opened her mouth, like a woman accepting a cock.

  I angled my pistol up.

  The last two bullets went off and smashed into the steam pipe overhead. Gouts of hissing, screaming water shot from the pipes, slamming down into those spread biomechanical wings. The woman screeched and sprang backwards, but that only got her further into the cloud. She started to spasm and jerk and twitch, her arms jerking and moving in jagged motions. I felt the detached tentacle in my throat deflate slightly and rolled onto my belly.

  I vomited up what felt like a mile of machinery. I coughed, hacked, and spat blood from where it had cut my throat and mouth. I closed my eyes and gasped in air, breathing desperately as the screeching stopped – leaving only the crackle and spark of electricity. I looked back and saw that the steam had condensed into a puddle and the pipe had shut off the flow – detecting the sudden loss of pressure. The Tesc woman still sparked a few times, her body twitching. I panted, then pulled my wrench. After checking to make sure that I was using the rubber handle to insulate myself, I hooked the woman, dragged her out of the puddle, and checked her neck.

  “You okay, lassie?” Lucas’ voice made me almost leap out of my skin.

  “Yes!” I rasped. “I need to find a medical...facility...” It hurt too much to continue talking.

  “There’s one near the engineering bay you’re heading for...what are you doing?”

  I might have no memories. But my rig had the skills - and that had included the maintenance and modification skills to recognize the weakness to water that a technological device might have. But it also included the first aid to be able to check her pulse - the pulse that she had, throbbing and slow. And I recognized what technological item had been incorporated into one of the limbs of her wings, now that I was no longer being strangled by her. The woman whimpered as I stepped behind her, grabbed the wing, then ripped the item free. She whined loudly, her back arching, and I blinked as I saw her pussy spurt juices onto the floor before she relaxed back onto the ground – eyes still closed.

  I hefted the shotcannon that she had fused to her body.

  It was slicked with a kind of slime, and when I cocked
the chamber open, I saw only a red glow from the interior. It shimmered and rippled with a kind of unearthly light. It was a TempleSoft D-Phase Shotcannon (Corrupted). As I held it in my hands, I saw that the ammo indicator that the XD-98 had used was there. But rather than a value, it simply said that it had 1/∞. I snapped it shut, then turned and fired a blast down the corridor. My ears rang and I swore loudly – the reverberations made being strangled seem pleasant.

  When the sounds faded, I checked the shotcannon’s ammo. It was now 0/∞, but after a few seconds, the glow returned to its center, throbbing back to life and it was now registering as 1/∞ in my ammo count.

  “Infinite ammo, huh?” I asked, my voice still a wet rasp. I noticed that my health, which was at 22/100, wasn’t

  “Well, uh, I hear the Tesc co-op our tech,” Lucas said – his voice clear despite the ringing in my ears. One of the advantages of having a direct neural link, huh? “Makes sense they’d do it to our bloody guns. Gonna finish her off?”

  I looked down at the unconscious Tesc woman. I hefted the shotcannon up, frowning as I did so. I wasn’t sure if this would even work . But if she wasn’t awake, maybe her ability to absorb damage would be dimmed? Then my brow furrowed.

  “Why do they look...humanish?” I asked, lowering the shotcannon.

  “She’s...well, there aren’t many pure Tesc left,” Lucas admitted. “That was Maria Festios. She was one of the engineers before...well, one of the Hellhounds got her.” He sounded bitter.

  “Can she be helped?”

  “Not by us, lassie,” Lucas said.

  I frowned. Then I shook my head. “But not by no one.” I held the shotcannon to my back - but the nanites didn’t grab it. Instead, it simply dropped to the ground with a clatter. I scowled, then checked my inventory.

  W

  R