Titan: A Science Fiction Horror Adventure (NecroVerse Book 3)

by Aaron Bunce

  Turbo? Lex thought, watching Soraya frown as Poole spoke. What did that mean?

  Lex swallowed hard and looked at the group in the galley. She wasn’t holding a rifle, nor was there a plan of attack or general orders. Meaning? She was way out of her comfort zone.

  “Maybe Emiko knows of a way to utilize your microbes, Poole, without us turning Jacoby into some kind of perverted dispensary, or everyone on this ship into a weird, alien orgy. That’s not fair to him. He’s not a whore,” Soraya said.

  “Well…it’s not the worst idea. But orgies…that route would be so much simpler,” Lex said.

  Soraya’s lips pressed together in a thin line, the ring of silver in her eyes catching the light.

  “You know he wouldn’t be comfortable with that. And come on,” Soraya hissed, “it’s awkward enough knowing the three of us fucked him recently. And that’s not including the vivid, knee-knocking fantasies I’ve been having lately about literally…all of you. Sex makes people crazy. This crew is a gasoline-soaked powder keg already, let’s not go and start throwing burning matches into the mix, too.”

  Lex felt her cheeks warm and knew she was blushing. It was the first time they’d really, like really brought up their shared intimacy, besides passing jokes or hints. And Soraya was obviously more comfortable and open about her sexuality than she was. Like a lot more.

  “I was joking…” Lex said and ran a hand through her hair, “but yeah, poor taste. Sorry.”

  “You ladies will be fine. When we get this sorted, you can all jump into the sack together and wrestle for dominance. And I can’t wait to watch!” Poole said with an exaggerated smile.

  “You take lead, heh? I’m more of a ‘shoot first, punch the mouthy ones’ type. It might be best if I back you up,” Lex asked, intentionally trying to ignore Poole.

  Soraya nodded and moved to the panel. A soft beep echoed, followed by the rush of equalizing pressure. Lex felt her heart flutter as the door started to rise.

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I really wish they could see and hear you right now,” she said, acknowledging Poole.

  “They will, Alex. In time, they will.” Poole winked.

  0100 Hours

  Anna pulled Jacoby into the shower and stripped him down, her newfound strength making his weight a hardly noticeable inconvenience. She unzipped his jumpsuit and pulled it down over his legs, careful to avoid the wet fabric around his groin.

  It’s not his fault. This isn’t his fault, she thought, navigating the sticky bundle over his feet and into a hamper.

  She ran her fingers down his chest, his well-tone stomach dropping away as he breathed slowly.

  [15 breaths per minute. Heart rate 35 b.p.m. Blood pressure 85 systolic over 60 diastolic.] The data fed right into her head, the computer partition of her mind swelling and creeping towards her consciousness.

  “Can you hear me, Coby?” she asked, trying not to look at her left hand. The organic circuitry was glowing, pulsing up her arm, somehow drawing his biometric data and feeding into her mind. Jacoby didn’t respond. How could he? He was dead to the world.

  “Emiko will know how to help you. She’s seen this thing firsthand… since the onset. Just hang on, Coby, if anyone can figure out how to turn this around make us all safe, it is her,” Anna whispered, “just don’t leave me here alone. Don’t you dare leave me.”

  Anna pulled her hand away from his shoulder and tapped the shower control panel, a spark shooting through her skin as it contacted the screen. She felt the partitions in her brain shift again, the incoming data firing up her arm. The ache hit her neck, followed quickly by the odd, numb creeping sensation on her scalp. Part of her brain decoded the binary message from the shower terminal, the data stream flowing like a real time ticker through her mind.

  {{_shower control module – (Touch-quadrant 3 activate/on/off)}}

  [Water control valve_]

  [closed – status_]

  [no reading – water temperature sensor_]

  [action – waiting for input]

  [Cmnd line=enter(waiting)]

  It all happened in the firing of a single neuron, a fractional, minute span of time. Anna felt the partitions shift again, the logical computer portion of her brain expanding in order to formulate the response. She simply thought what she needed the shower to do, and the strange alien workings in her brain did the rest.

  {{_shower control module – (input override-valve cntrl manual)}}

  [Water control valve_]

  [open – status=75%_]

  [108 degreess (F°) – water temperature sensor{active}_]

  [action – in operation]

  [Cmnd line=in use(operable)]

  Anna felt the spray of hot water, the steam build and flow over her face, and heard the air hiss as it pressurized the shower head. Just like she felt her other hand touch Jacoby’s bare skin…but the feedback was different. Data flowed up one of the circuits in one arm and into a logical center, while the sensory, organic stimuli moved into the other.

  The pressure in her mind shifted again, the logical center pushing in and crowding her consciousness aside with the strength of a tidal wave. She felt the data flow behind the wave—hundreds of exabytes, parsing, collating, and moving together. Anna compressed under the weight–the rich format text, emails, video chats, procurement orders, transfer requests, quarterly funding statements, medical analysis breakdowns, and so much more. It passed in a blur, moving over and around her like an ocean current. But it wasn’t just the data, the weight of it, but something else, a tether, no, a rigid and mechanic consciousness binding it all together and giving it substance. It was awake, aware, and busy, structuring the parameters that kept what was “her” and the “data” separate.

  Her moods shifted as the feed intensified–confusion, anger, resentment, understanding. They were all detached emotions, as if hers and not hers at the same time. Terabytes of data flowed in and through the emotions, rising and falling like a living bar graph.

  The logical side tried to crowd in again, pressing in until her view narrowed down to a pinhole. It didn’t like when she probed too deeply, when she tried to peel open the partitions and look inside. There was something in the data it didn’t want her to see.

  Anna reacted, a sharp impulse firing deep in her mind. She pitched sideways and gasped, heat hitting her head and face and cascading down her chest.

  The darkness peeled open. She leaned back, sputtered, and wiped hot water off her face. Jacoby’s skin was pink, his face turned away from the spattering water. How long had it been since she turned the water on? How long had…

  “What the…?” Anna cursed as she looked left. Her left arm was stretched out towards the shower access panel, the muscles in her forearm twitching as her fingers groped for the screen. A bright pulse of light fired up the mazework of circuitry fused into her skin and in response her fingers scrabbled a little closer to the panel. The shower panel glowed teasingly just past her twitching fingers, the glowing timer showing the water had been running for almost eighteen minutes.

  Almost twenty minutes? There is no way? How? What…? That didn’t seem possible, as in real time she’d only felt the passage of a minute or two.

  Anna swung her right hand over and chopped her left arm down, and with a tremendous effort, pulled it into her body. She held it to her chest for several long seconds, her fingers spasming and clawing the air. Anna sucked in one breath and then another. She focused on one thought–a memory. She was strapped into a G-tuck chair, the landscape sitting perpendicular to her orientation beyond the small porthole window. She spotted a single cloud floating by far above, right before the shuttle shuddered.

  The vibration passed up her spine and into her neck, just before her back tried to fuse permanently with the cushion. A hand fumbled over hers and she turned just as Jacoby’s fingers wrapped around hers. Anna met his brown eyes. They were filled with trepidation, fear, and excitement. Everything she felt, too.

  The shu
ttle picked up speed, and she managed to roll her head back over to the porthole. The clouds were gone, the ground falling away beneath them.

  “We did it. We escaped,” she heard Jacoby say as the memory faded.

  The pressure, the storm of data, was gone. Somehow, she’d won back control and pushed it all back into its little corner.

  [Little.] <$

  [[But growing?

  _And why?]]

  {Need to figure it out.

  [[Need to put yourself back together. Tell no one.]]} <$/

  Her thoughts banged into place like lines of code. Anna shook it all away. It was nothing, a glitch in her newfound makeup. A faulty approach that simply needed to be revised. Time…she just needed time.

  “The timer is wrong, Jacoby. It has to be. There is…no way I have been sitting here with the water running for that long,” she said, talking to her unconscious friend. But he didn’t respond, nor did she really expect him to. She just needed to say it out loud, to hear it herself. Because she was afraid of how it would sound…or what might respond in her mind.

  “I’m scared of my own head, Coby. How messed up is that?” she asked and peeled his limp body off the shower floor. She sniffled and coughed, busying herself. Anna vigorously scrubbed Jacoby clean, washed his hair, dried him off, and wrapped him in a towel. She pulled him out to the lockers and slumped into the corner, her feet sliding against the wet floor with a loud squeak.

  Anna wrapped her arms around his chest and pulled him close. He was solid and warm, but she knew how fragile he really was, despite his every attempt to be the unbreakable link they all could lean on. A tingle shot up her left arm as more biometric data formed in her mind. He was getting stronger.

  “What is going to become of us, Coby?” she whispered, shifting so she couldn’t see the ripples of light coursing up her arm. “What will they do to me when they find out I’m losing time? That I can’t remember what I see or do when I interface? It feels like a machine is growing inside my brain and every time I touch something computerized, I feel it…grow. Fight for control. Will they think I’m losing it, turning into something to fear?”

  Voices echoed in the galley beyond the shower room–low, indistinguishable. Then another cut in, this one deeper and louder. Anna jumped in response, her gaze locking on the door.

  “Or is that me? Is that what I’m turning in to? I just…don’t know, Coby. I don’t…know. Should I let go, stop fighting? Is this how it happened with you back there before you became strong and saved us? And I hanging on too tight to what I used to be?”

  The loud voices echoed beyond the door once again and Anna held her breath, listening. Were they talking about her? Jacoby? What were they saying? Had they survived the horrors on Hyde only for fear and paranoia to tear them apart? Or were they already dead? Was their escape on the Betty just a horrible, teasing fantasy? Was she…?

  “No! It can’t be that. We fought it. We survived, together.”

  Jacoby shifted and snorted, his head lolling from the left to the right. Anna squeezed him tighter. In that moment, that little noise and movement felt like a substantial thing. He was coming back to her, bit by bit. Jacoby would know what to do. She would tell him everything and he would sort it out. Better that than to have it all just absorbed and forgotten in some dark corner in her head.

  “Wake up, Coby. Please.”

  It was true. The fear of what would spill out of her mouth had stopped her before. The fear that her mind, and thus her thoughts, were not always her own.

  <$

  [Does he ever know himself, let alone you?]

  Her thoughts rattled into place.

  “No. He knows me. He’s always been there for me.”

  [He is not him anymore, but an altered logic, filtered by an ::unclassified-error:: biological ::unknown device:: type…]

  [Correction–artificial intelligence. Classify source code=unreliable.]

  “No…stop!” Anna hissed, and with concerted effort, her thoughts went still again.

  What if she tried to talk to Jacoby and her words weren’t her own? Or woke up and discovered that her memories of them, were gone, changed, or altered somehow?

  Part of her knew he would reject her, look at her like something to fear.

  “No, Coby. I know you. You’d never…you’ve never rejected me. No matter what.”

  But that was before Poole jumped into her brain and started rewiring things, growing…fusing chips and mechanical components where they didn’t belong. It was before she’d interfaced with the terminals on the station and absorbed…everything.

  “Wake up, Coby. Wake up and tell me what I should do with all of this…stuff, this information, in my head. I don’t want it. But the partitions Poole created in my brain just sort of pull in everything it can reach,” Anna grunted as a tear broke loose from her right eye and burned its way down her cheek.

  Jacoby snorted again and shifted. The movement was so much more substantial than before. He was getting stronger. Almost there. Poole’s microbial substrate practically hummed in his blood, some part of her own body resonating in response. But would he be strong enough for both of them? Would strength be enough?

  Please understand, Coby.

  Clock Reset

  “What’s wrong with him?” Shane asked as soon as the door opened fully.

  Lex followed Soraya into the galley, the others in the small group immediately filling the space with noise. Everyone, she noted, but Emiko. The nurse stood next to the table, the ladder to the hold immediately behind her.

  She looked thin, meek, as if her body were struggling against the weight of the overhead light. It was Reeds…ever since the surgery, the freaky bone creatures, and the doc’s death, she hadn’t been right. Had she even spoken?

  “Jacoby. There’s something wrong with him, isn’t there? Why are you keeping him from us? What are you trying to hide?” Shane pressed again. “You have to know how that looks? Why we would be so suspicious. After all we just went through. All we saw.”

  Soraya went left, so Lex turned right, figuring it would be less threatening if they split up. Erik and Lana pushed into one another to move out of her way. Lex gestured towards the open seats, but Lana shook her head, crossing her arms over her chest. Erik flinched badly when Lex repeated the gesture for him. He’d never looked more like a scared, little boy. With his mousy hair, if he were to put on a pair of footy pajamas, the look would be complete.

  They’re scared of us, she thought with amusement. Then considered how all of this looked and realized if the script were flipped, she would be, too.

  “We know there’s something wrong with him. You can’t hide it after that epic breakdown he had in front of everyone. We saw what happened to our friends and families on the station…saw how they acted, how they lost themselves and then tore each other apart. If that’s what this is…what’s going on with him, then we need to act now. We have even one person turn on this ship, the rest of us are as good as dead. Shit, it might already be too late.”

  Shane stood his ground as Soraya approached, his fists balled up at his sides. Lex could see the muscles, tendons, and veins pop and shift under his skin. He exuded strength and power.

  Yet the big man twitched as Soraya approached. He jumped back, squared up his frame, and set his feet again. He kept looking from her face down to her hands.

  Why is he so scared of her?

  Soraya raised a hand in response, a fresh, white gauze bandage covering the nub that used to be her right thumb. The light hit her silvery eyes then, her mouth pulling up in a smirk. Lex caught a flash, a glimmer of fear and determination. She felt pain flair in her right thumb, her other fingers growing cold and wet as they plunged deep into squelchy flesh.

  An image…a recollection formed in Lex’s mind, of a round door and a pale, infected man. She felt the muscles in her arms bunch up, the pain growing until her thumb popped free. The creature’s jawbone and skull cracked loudly, its head ripping free from its ne
ck in messy spray or gore.

  With your bare hands? Damn, girl, that is fucking savage. I love it. If he saw that, no wonder he’s afraid of you.

  Soraya sniggered and walked straight to a padded chair, Shane making a concerted effort to get out of her way. Poole danced by behind her, his feet tapping and arms flapping in some strange, bird-like dance.

  “If you think that was spectacular, you should ask her to show you how fast she can do the sign alphabet. Oh, snap, I guess you need two thumbs for that,” Poole said, flashing a double thumbs up to Lex and Soraya.

  Soraya leaned forward, her hand snapping out so fast Lex’s eyes could barely register the movement. Poole giggled horrible and flipped up onto the ceiling, just out of reach.

  Lex took a breath to speak, to chastise him for not taking the situation seriously but managed to bite off her words. Yes, yelling at thin air in front of everyone would definitely not help the situation. Think, Lex.

  “Why are you hiding the truth from us? Tell us now or…”

  Lex tensed as Shane brought his palm down onto the table suddenly, her hand flinching for a slung rifle. But it was still in the shower room, secured in a locker behind a digital lock. Not that it would help at this point. Agitated people rarely calmed down when an armed person was standing over them. Or worse, she got an itchy trigger finger and accidentally put someone down.

  “We aren’t hiding anything, Shane. I’ll talk to you. Tell you everything we know. But only if you have a seat and calm down first,” Soraya said, her silvery eyes settling onto her remaining fingers.

  Interesting, Lex thought. Not one of the people in the group showed any indication that they saw Soraya take a swing at Poole. Jacoby had developed enhanced, almost superhuman strength. And Soraya speed. Lex looked down at her hands, bending and flexing her fingers, silently wondering if she’d developed some special skill or strength and just not noticed it yet.

  “We’ve been through weird…no, that doesn’t begin to cover it. What I saw on Hyde was freaky, unexplainable stuff. And you want me to calm down? Jacoby is having fits now. Calm down? Sit down? This isn’t the time for that. Didn’t you hear me? Does anyone here listen? You were back there. You saw those things and what happened. I thought you understood. When we were in the mining operations center, we couldn’t just sit around. They forced us to move. To act. And survive. We ran, we fought. How can you expect me…us…to be calm now? We need action. To be decisive. He’s acting just like the people on Hyde, right before everything fell apart. We need to…”