Mind Games

by Dragon Cobolt

  Three Brood were left.

  I let the shotcannon rest on my shoulder.

  "Run," I said, my voice flat.

  The Brood turned and ran off, as quickly as they could scamper, leaving behind piles of corpses and smoking bodies and severed arms. I shivered and stepped off the body I had been on, breathing slowly out.

  I looked around.

  And not since I had been roundly fucked by Jules had I wanted to smoke a cigar quite so bad - the need tingling through me, a half remembered thing that I was fairly sure Beatrice did quite often.

  "Damn," I purred. " Damn I'm good."

  ***

  The elevator doors opened.

  The other four gaped at me as I stood there, blood dripping from my face. I reached up and casually flicked a chunk of chiten from my shoulder.

  Jules shook his head slowly. "W-What are you, Beatrice?"

  I looked back at where I had left the pile of dead Brood, then back at him. I smirked. "Their worst nightmare, I think. Come on. Let's get you guys to Physics."

  "Us?" Tracy asked – her voice tremulous.

  "Yeah," I said, stepping into the elevator, then tapped the button for physics. As the elevator started to rattle down, I leaned against the wall and tried to not notice how scared of me Jules looked. Then he forced that expression down and smiled wryly at me.

  "Where are you going?" he asked.

  "Corporate once I drop you off," I said. "Tracy said that one of her coworkers helped get me - or Beatrice, or whatever - on the station. The computer says that I was here to wait for my brothers to die of old age to get the fortune. But I'm starting to doubt that story for some reason. I want to know who gave me this cyber-rig and why . "

  "Fair enough, lassie," Lucas said. "A-And, ah, maybe while you're down there, you can get me out of this closet and get me to the portal too?"

  I nodded. "Can you get to the security cameras for physics?"

  "Sure can."

  “And Lucas?” I asked, grinning. “How many mods did I just earn?”

  “Heh…” He chuckled. “So many it’s going to be a bitch to get them down to you.”

  ***

  The elevator ride passed in uncomfortable silence. Once the doors rattled open, though, we had something to take that silence and make it worse. For the doors opened into a corridor from hell. The walls were splattered with blood and the stink of rot was even more intense here. Firearms and spent shell casings lay on the floor, while dozens - hundreds? - of dead Brood were mixed with the corpses of Templesoft security and their drones. I walked slowly forward, shaking my head quietly.

  "This is what Lucas told us to expect," I whispered. BUt it was one thing to be told 'it's a right mess in there' and another thing to see it.

  "This must have been where the first incursion started," Jules said. "If it wasn't my off shift..." He choked himself off. Amanda was quietly sick, vomiting in the elevator. The hybrid, who had been set down near the dried blood, slid her tongue against the floor with a slow, eager lick, her eyes glinting with malice.

  "Come on," I said.

  We made a queer band as we walked through the carnage and past the work spaces and labs that had been smashed and ripped and torn to shreds. It was clear that this place was less hard nosed than Engineering. There were no actual prototypes here. Just computers, all of them designed to run simulations of physics problems. There were a few labs for doing actual experiments, but those had been smashed up the worst of all. But while the security forces had wheeled out the heavy weapons here, the Brood had hit back with...stranger things...

  We walked past a bulbous gun-like biomechanical throne, one that had been fused to a quartet of Brood, turning them into a kind of legged wheel for the thing. They were canted to the side, the weapon split almost completely in half by an equally slagged artillery laser that some enterprising security officer had fired off before being raped to death, his eye sockets still bubbling with Tesc cum.

  "The amount of this battlefield that is basically an orgy is really fucking creeping me out," I whispered.

  The others nodded.

  Then we came to the central lab and I whistled quietly.

  The portal that had been used to open the hole to the Tesc dimension didn't look scientific in the least. It looked, rather, like the collar of my nanite suit, ballooned to a size large enough to make the runic inscriptions on the inside easily seen, rather than faint impressions. Its cyclopean size combined with those runes made it seem like some ancient artifact, one that should be steeped in blood and sacrifice, not in scientific equipment. Corpses had been heaped around it. Most of them wore scientific gear and bore faintly shocked expressions, even as their bodies peutrified.

  I breathed out, trying to breathe shallowly and through my mouth. "Okay,'' I said, turning to face the others. "What do we need to get this to work?"

  Jules - his eyes hardened, his shock worn away by endless horrors - pursed his lips.

  "The powers off," Tracy said, quietly.

  "The computers are slagged," Jules said, nodding.

  "So, we need power and a new computer rig," I said, nodding. "And a Tesc's biological matter. Which we got." I kicked the hybrid. The hybrid snarled at me. "Don't snarl at me, Danielle. We're going to fucking fix you if I have to drag you into the Templesoft lobby and start shooting people until they get fucking doctors."

  "I'm touched ," she purred - her eyes flaring with hatred. "I'm sure they'll listen to you immediately, you fucks leeve."

  I ignored her, looking at the others. "There should be computers in Corporate, right?"

  Tracy nodded. "Not as strong, but...we don't need a full supercomputer for this, you have the basic calculations, right Jules?"

  Jules nodded as well.

  "B-But how do we stay safe?" Marisa asked.

  "I got an answer to that, lassie," Lucas cut in.

  "For fuck's sake, my name is Beatrice!" I shouted at the ceiling.

  "Sure about tha?" Lucas asked, his soft accent somehow making those words feel and sound even worse. I shuddered and closed my eyes, trying to not break down at the thought. I shook my head.

  "Call me Bea," I hissed. "Okay. So, what's the solution?"

  Lucas led us to them while Amanda started to clear out bodies. Jules, Tracy and I all whistled in almost the exact same tone as we found what Lucas had spotted with the cameras. A pile of Brood had piled up around a corner. There, four automated turrets had been set up by a terrified looking engineer. With the corpses piled before him, he had quietly taken out his pistol, shoved it against his temple, and pulled the trigger. His corpse laid there, sprawled. But his turrets continued to tick from side to side, whirring so softly that we hadn't heard them till we got close.

  "They used all their ammo!" Tracy said. “The poor guy must have thought he was about to...end up like…”

  I stepped over the wall of bodies, grunting as I hopped down. I grabbed onto the ammo container, then popped it open.

  Thousand of fresh rounds gleamed within. I slapped the container closed again as the turret whirred left, then right, then left. I looked at Tracy.

  “Normally i’d say something about how there’s silver lining,” I said, my voice slightly grim. “But at the moment? I’m just kind of depressed.”

  I stood and the lot of us began to ship the turrets out to protect the scientists.

  Once we were done, I got ready to set out for Corporate...and for some fucking answers.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The elevator door opened on gold and gilt and blood. I stepped out, shotcannon in hand and looked around the corporate section of Virgil station, my lip curling slightly. I wasn't sure what disgusted me more: The gaudy art-deco designs of the walls, with angelic figures holding aloft the ceiling by upthrust palms, like recreations of Atlas...or the bodies. It looked as if a good fifteen people had been caught by the Tesc and flayed against the walls, their bodies spread out, their skin stretched. Nails had been driven through palms and ankles, but
their faces were turned away from me, as if ashamed of themselves.

  The floor itself was covered in maroon carpet.

  I hoped it had started maroon.

  But I doubted it.

  "Testing, testing," Jules said, his voice buzzing inside of my head. I could see his face from his ID badge, flashing up in the same corner of my HUD that Lucas spoke from.

  "I can hear you, Jules," I said, walking cautiously past the flayed bodies and through the double doors that led away from the elevator lobby and into the first area of corporate. Since this was where visiting bigwigs came first, it was designed to be just as impressive as the elevator lobby. A curving wood panel desk that had clearly been made to be staffed by concierges, like at a massive hotel, bisected the room, while huge, vaulted windows showed space, and Earth beyond. Except now, the light of the sun had shifted and the clouds had moved, and I could see that the ground wasn't green and brown, as i might have expected.

  Rather, the planet was wreathed in red. What I had mistaken as a hurricane was in truth a firestorm the size of a continent, sweeping slowly across that hellish landscape. I shook my head slowly and turned away from the windows. The rest of the room lacked the gory decorations of the lobby, but a stranger thing started to nag at me.

  "Where are the statues?" I muttered.

  "What?" Jules asked. "We're not getting any of the security footage. Lucas, have you?"

  Lucas chuckled, his face replacing Jules in the corner of my HUD. "If I had, laddie, I'd have sung out."

  I shook my head and walked over to one of the gaping holes in the decoration that had clearly once held one of those art-deco abominations. It didn't look as if the statue had simply torn itself free and marched off (not that impossible, not here.) Rather, I could see a few dozen massive gouges that had been left on the wall, and a series of deep furrows on the ground. I knelt down, tracing parallel lines, trying to do some guessing. I held up my palm, to compare the lines to my fingers.

  Whatever had left this track had to be either five buzz-saws moving in perfect unison.

  Or, alternatively, it had to be the biggest goddamn Tesc on the station. If they had captured the middle of the station, then spread outwards, Corporate would have been the least well defended areas. The people here were white collar assholes, not security. They'd fall fast. So, the Tesc would have had plenty of time to...work...

  "What do we know about the Tesc...ecology?" I asked. "For lack of better word?"

  "Almost nothing," Jules said. "They don't have the concept of linear time in their dimension. I'm not sure if we could even say they have ecologies . Or evolution. Or any kind of interactions that we could recognize. But, well, I was...under the Telepath's control for some time. I made...some observations."

  "You don't need to-" I started, wincing at the pain that roared over that crackly speaker.

  "Lassie, do you want to die?" Lucas asked, his voice pragmatic. "Seems ta me that not knowing shite is a great way to end up in some."

  "Lucas, you asshole ," I muttered as I hopped over the counter. Checking behind, I found a few key-rings, each one with a glittering golden key on it. Ostentatious dickheads. I took each key, shoving them into my inventory, where they took up a single square in the grid. I crawled along the ground. My knees rasped on the carpet as Jules sighed and started to speak - narrating over me checking drawers, rummaging through cash registers, picking through anything that might be of some use.

  "The Tesc take human bodies and manipulate them," he said. "I don't know how, but that much is obvious. Certain human females are turned into Brood Mothers. They are able to... birth ...through some kind of dimensional process the Brood. Broodlings assist them. Likely, the combination of modified human tissue and Broodling structure allows for more complex support 'machinery'. If you can call it that." He sounded sick. "With that support, they can make Worker Brood, which make more complex human hybrids and Warrior Brood. The question is, where do Telepaths and anything more complex come from?"

  I grinned. "Jackpot."

  "What did you find?" Lucas asked.

  I stood from behind the counter, holding up another one of those PDAs - similar to the one I had found back in the Weaponized Tesseract labs. I tapped through it and found that it had a recording as well. The recording crackled on and holographic recreations of two women appeared, standing and sitting at the countertop. One had her rump resting on the countertop, and the other was putting her feet up. The holographic display was fuzzier than the old PDA, making it way harder to tell faces, but their voices were clear enough.

  "Huh, it's recording," the girl sitting with her rump on the counter, who I decided to mentally name Rump Down, said. "Got anything you want to say for posterity?" She giggled.

  Feet Up sighed and rolled her head back so that it hung over the edge of her chair. "Ugh. I'm so freaking bored ."

  Rump Down shrugged. "Be glad we're not getting more work. I hear that there was another freak out down in Cryonics."

  "What?" Feet Up put her feet down, sitting up, and thus ruined her nickname. "You're kidding. That's the third this week . Do you know what it was?"

  "Corporate keeps that shit hush hu-" Rump Down sprang to her feet as a recorded harrumph rang out. She turned around and a vague-half shape appeared at the edge of the projector, clearly at the outer range of its recording capacities. That figure remained at that distance, but despite being a blurry mass of pixels and random geometric images created by the holographic display, it still managed to somehow seem to be disapproving.

  "Miss Murdoch, Miss Loesser," the disapproving figure said. "I want you both to get ready. A new high roller is coming through for the SDP project, and I want her to be impressed ."

  The vague shape vanished away.

  "Dickless there doesn't remember that the P in SDP stands for project , does he?" Rump Down whispered - but then the holographic display faded away. As it vanished, I frowned, then thumbed through some of the non-holographic recordings on the PDA. I found the name for the last person that had come into the station. It was, shock of shocks...my name.

  ***

  The actual offices beyond the main lobby were all well appointed and rife with ancient paperwork. That actually struck me as somewhat odd - in a space station, with nanotechnology and artificial gravity, why the fuck would you use paper. But it became clear the instant I picked one of the papers up. It was written in a strange series of runic letters that ran together quite unintelligibly, not English at all. With that cipher, and the fact that paper was utterly unhackable no matter how good you were at computers, then all the records in all these offices were safe.

  But there were more pressing things to worry about than my own frustration at not finding any hints about my past, present, or future. For instance, the narrow corridors bore scratches and abrasions that spoke of something large and long writhing through them. The carpet was mulched by claw-marks. A few paintings had once hung on the walls, the slightly pale rectangles giving testament to where the artwork had remained. They had been snatched away, leaving behind tattered wallpaper and shattered wood panels.

  Something big had stolen every fucking thing that shone or glittered or gleamed.

  I checked my shotcannon power supply and summoned a tiny sparkle of lightning along my palm. Both worked.

  The offices gave way to large meeting rooms. These had been just as pillaged as the lobbies, with paintings and statues and even gold gilt scraped away. The first of the meeting rooms had held a large mahogany table, and it had been crushed in half by some errant footstep. The ceiling lamp that hung over the room was knocked askew, but still provided enough illumination for me to spy another one of those holographic recording PDAs. I snatched it up, then tensed. My ears heard nothing but the faint rumble of the air recycling systems - which had gotten louder the further that I moved away from the elevators and the need for a good impression grew less and less important.

  The PDA tapped on and fuzzy figures appeared, several seated a
t the now destroyed table, their arms resting on nothingness.

  "So, Miss Montenegro," a voice - Dickless, I recognized him despite the fact he was no longer a growling collection of geometric shapes and fuzzy pixels. There wasn't enough definition on the recording to show his expression, though I did get a faint sense that he was a slender man, not heavily built or fat. "That's the basic program."

  "I...still cannot quite believe it," my own voice came from the figure at the other end of the table. Her hands held up some glowing rectangles. The way they wobbled, I realized they were papers. No, not papers. They were slightly too stiff for the papers I had seen scattered around this place. What were they? My old self put the papers down. "Immortality..." she chuckled.

  "And more," Dickless said, gesturing to the side.

  One of the other glowing figures held out their hand. A glowing haze of pixels appeared around their palm and the recording device dutifully replayed the resounding crash of a lightning bolt going off.

  "Oh..." my old self said. "Oh yes. I can see why you call it...ah..."

  "An unbeatable deal?" Dickless said, voice pure sugar. "If you sign there, there, and there, we can take you right to the SDP Project rooms and we can begin with the work."

  My old self bent forward and started to sign. They stood and the holographic recording shut off - but not before I saw that they were heading to the left. My heart sprang into my throat and I hurried towards the doorway, shotcannon at the ready. I saw nothing but two curving corridors - one head towards the SDP and the other one headed for the Lounge. From the direction of the Lounge, I could hear that sound. That low, rumbling, grinding sound. My ears perked up and I felt goosebumps slide along my arms.

  "That's...not the air recyclers, isn't it?"

  "What, lassie?" Lucas asked.

  "Have either of you gotten the fucking cameras on? And it's Beatrice , Lucas," I whispered, aiming my shotcannon towards the curving corner leading towards the Lounge. That slow, steady, in and out rumble continued. The sound of breathing . Now that I was attuned to the idea of it, I realized I could feel a moist wave sliding down the corridor. Something moist and hot clung to my face and cheeks and I felt my cheeks turn red with the sticky heat. It was like being breathed on by a lover and a jungle, all at once. That faintly sweet scent – so close to decay and fruit that it made me simultaneously nauseous and hungry - filled my nostrils. Thick. Cloying. I shook my head and backed towards the SDP rooms.