by Naomi Lucas
Kat called after him, “You can’t go out there in just a skin-suit! You’ll freeze.”
“Make sure you get all of this in your report,” he grated back at her as the hatch closed behind him. The Cyborg vanished in the white.
She looked around as the wind was cut off and everything went quiet. Two androids were inside the glass cage and cleaning it. She wrapped her arms around herself feeling her skin prickle from the heat and the cold and the betrayal of her body tingling with desire.
Eventually, the heat left her and she was just a shivering stick.
The androids finished up what they were doing. The Moluc’s habitat closed up with all traces of the furry creatures gone. Kat felt alone. She didn’t know why she stood there and waited until it occurred to her she was waiting for Dommik’s safe return.
Bastard. It wasn’t her job to wait on him or for him even if her life directly depended on his.
“It might come for you too, Kat, you’ll have to be strong now waiting for it and even stronger if it comes for you.”
She was always waiting and had been ever since her birth.
Her parents had been doctors and like all doctors had followed the Hippocratic Oath. ‘I will do no harm...I will prevent disease whenever I can but I will always look for a path to a cure for all diseases...’
They had met in the civilian medbase outside Gliese while the settlement of the off world colony went underway. It was once a military base during the great war against the Trentians but now it was a growing homeworld for half-breeds. Earthian and Trentian couples; ruled by both species and the appointed representatives that lived planetside.
Kat sighed and walked back toward the console room. The drag of the jacket flapped against the back of her knees.
Her parents had contracted a parasite from a local food source on the planet. It stayed dormant in their bodies, living and growing in their guts, invisible and alien. When her ma got pregnant with her, her parents made their way back to Earth.
Kat was going to be an Earth-born human. They wanted unrestricted access for her to go to the best universities, the best hospitals, the best ‘Earthian’ everything. It wasn’t until her mother was in her third-trimester that something went wrong. She started to form blisters all over her hands and feet.
When she was delivered, her mother never recovered, she only grew worse. First, it was the blisters, then nausea, body aches, and insomnia. Her father started to show symptoms too and it was then that a group of officials seized her parents and herself and placed them into quarantine.
Kat was too young to remember much, she only had vague memories of doctors with white masks on and her grandmother’s musings. Sterile rooms and small spaces.
The parasitic outbreak was streaming on every channel back then and doctors from all over the universe, Trentians and Earthians alike came together to save their sick people. They eradicated the species that carried the parasite, ensuring no new people would unknowingly get infected.
Many people died because there was no way to cure it once the symptoms began to show and everyone else was forced to take a vaccine.
She had watched her parents bloat and boil until they eventually popped like the blisters that started on their feet. Her child-like eyes shielded from them only by a glass barrier. Her father had curled his body around her mother’s corpse as black mucus dripped from his nose.
The doctors took her away from that world and kept her in quarantine for years. But she exhibited no signs of the dormant, microscopic parasite.
Kat had learned a lot back then, she learned how to take her own blood, run the medbay machines, test her own urine. By the age of seven, she could change her feeding tubes and run the physical exertion tests, her toys were replaced with medical equipment.
When she turned ten, her grandmother won the case for her guardianship, but there still wasn’t a cure for the Gliese parasite. Only a preventative treatment, a shot filled with nanoparticles that cleaned out the system, it worked for all illnesses but it was only temporary. So, Kat was released from her white prison and from the impersonal doctors, her medical toys and into a world filled with metal and green, blue-grey skies, and water that fell from above. A world where the temperature couldn’t be regulated and where food wasn’t served in packets.
Kat took the preventative shot right after her grandmother died. Her fingers came up to rub the spot on her arm.
Her grandma got the parasite. From Kat herself, no doubt, and it was still uncertain how it transferred to the woman. Her nana had been with them from the beginning, always on the other side of the glass barriers, a constant fixture in her young life although cold and distant and far.
It wasn’t until her grandmother had first wrapped her in a hug that warmth entered her childhood.
But Kat could never stay away from the cold, crisp, sanitized rooms of the medical facilities and when she got her GED online, locked in her paisley-splashed room, she went for her nursing certificate. She wanted to think it was in honor of her parents but deep down her reasons had been selfish. It was comforting to her in a nostalgic way. The way only childhood memories could be.
Maybe she was a little crazy, evidence with her being on a Cyborg’s ship alone, god-knows-where in space, surrounded by stark conditions that were only differentiated by darkness, and an unknown amount of androids.
A message popped up on her screen. Mia.
Kat sighed and without reading it first, began relaying her observations of the day. Complete with seeing the icy planet and the Molucs. She referred to them as Bonnie and Clyde for her own satisfaction.
The tips of her fingers swiped over the smooth keyboard, numb from the brief opening of the hatch. She slid her hands into the long arms of the jacket and brought them to her lips; eyes closed and her body tense. Her breath warmed up her cheeks.
Her body had just started to thaw when the flash of a new missive appeared on the screen, catching her eye. Without her interference, it opened up and the blur of a video-feed came on. Her eyes narrowed as a man’s face appeared through a haze of static and a struggling connection.
Kat noticed the tattoos first. Guns on both cheeks pointing toward his mouth, numbers below his eyes that looked like code and hair buzzed off in a military cut.
The man flashed his teeth. “You must be the EPED spy.”
Her first thought should have been ‘he can see me?’ but instead, she blurted, “I’m not a spy!” Kat’s hands fell from her face.
“So Dommik caught himself a girl. The word has gotten around that he had a human on his ship.”
Kat tried to exit out of the video-chat but her screen was frozen.
His laugh came through with fuzz that grated on her ears, gleeful and menacing. An android stepped into the doorway and stared blankly at the exchange. Kat looked at it, knowing it was reporting to Dommik, the lights over its face flashed. Kat looked back at the video-feed.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
The man smiled and sat back, his foot braced on his knee. “I wanted to see for myself if the rumors were true. Dommik likes to trap his victims.”
“I’m just doing the job I was hired for,” she said but now did feel trapped. “Who are you?”
The guns on his high cheekbones expanded as his smile grew wider. “Let’s just say I’m a co-worker. A fellow EPED employee. Tell me, how did you talk your way onto his ship?”
Kat pursed her lips. “You’re not working for Mia are you?” Mia had asked that same question and she kept asking it every time Kat made a mistake.
The man let out a shrill laugh. He leaned toward the camera until his tattooed face filled up the feed. His eyes were white-washed, almost as if he were blind with a moldy glare to them. “Mia has her way. She’s desperate, that one, but not desperate enough to talk to me.”
Curiosity killed the cat. ‘Or Kat in this instance.’ “Is it because of the guns on your face?”
The man flashed his teeth at her and for a moment
they were sharp and canine. “I can put guns on your face, babydoll, or I can put them elsewhere.”
She couldn’t stop the disgust on her face. She tried again to unfreeze the console even though a large, sharp grin filled her screen, at the corner of her eye. Kat could see it clearly but refused to look at the man dead-on.
“You should ask him about the roaches. Ask him about the webs.”
Kat didn’t realize it, hadn’t heard the tell-tale footsteps or the hum of the hatch opening, but the next moment her chair skidded back and her hands flew to the armrests. Dommik, in his white suit once again blocked out the view she wanted and didn’t want to see.
“See you in Ghost City, friend.”
Chapter Six:
---
Dommik turned around to see the girl swivel in the chair, her mouth parted in a gasp. Kat was still wrapped up in his jacket, hands disappeared into its sleeves, the hood still tied at her neck and framing her face.
If Gunner had seen her wild tendrils, he wasn’t sure if he could keep the other Cyborg from her. Gunner was created much like himself but with a different set of DNA and a different skeletal model under his skin. Dommik questioned who was more of freak: himself or Gunner, who had Jackal in his veins.
Marking and fucking and scavenging everything he set his eyes on.
Gunner was banned from governmental protected areas even though he worked the same job as Dommik. Stryker took his loads to port for an additional fee. It was a win-win situation for the people they work for, they didn’t have to deal with Gunner and Gunner got to keep his job and remain in the shadows.
“Roaches?” she asked, as her hands came out and untied her hood.
Of all the things she could have asked him. The invasion into his personal life, his quirks and freaks were no one’s business but his own. Dommik kept ahold of his restraint despite the anger burning through his veins while the animalistic part of him vibrated from within. Gunner had a way of making everything more complicated.
Dommik never wanted another human on his ship, had made sure he took every measure to garner the trust of the government and the EPED and now they demanded more than he wanted to give.
Her hair came free as the hood dropped around her neck.
He took a step toward her. His control splintered. He imagined her in nothing but his jacket, naked and shivering underneath as he slowly unzipped it from her body. Revealing her to his eyes, his hands, and his dick, inch by inch.
The metal plates in his body began to shift. The thing that made him something else. Something different. Dommik stopped, watching the girl’s eyes grow wide, a wince of fear and the silence that follows when all one’s air is exhaled from their lungs.
She checked him over. He stood up straighter. Kat shuffled in her chair.
The smell of her arousal hit him like a jackhammer and all thoughts of Gunner fell away. His nostrils flared.
He had scented it before with utter confusion, with the wind at his back, drifting the perfume away from him. Now he didn’t have the breeze and the snowdrifts to escape too. He only had his control. The smell grew stronger under his stare, his eyes locked at the covered crux of her sex. Her body adjusted, readying itself for his invasion, his cock jerked in response.
She wants me. Dommik burned and tempered.
“Do you like them?” he asked her, his lips flattening. He would ensure her disgust replaced the dew between her thighs. The truth often did that.
“Does anyone like them?” Kat made a face. “They carry disease and they infest. They’re resilient against most methods of pesticides.” She tugged the long sleeves of his jacket up her arms. Dommik clenched his fists. “And they’re impossible to get rid of. Why? Does this have something to do with the man on the console?”
“It has nothing to do with him,” he shot out. Why bring him up? Was her arousal brought on by his guns? Had he misread her attraction? “Hope, Katalina, you never encounter him again. He would have you on your knees and no other way.”
“He said he was a co-worker. Who is he and how did he freeze your systems?” She tried his patience. But they helped restrain his ardor. Dommik walked to the door, knowing Kat would follow him. He kept his pace slow so she stayed near.
If she wants to know about the roaches, I’ll show her the roaches.
They ended up at one of the many sealed doors around the large room. Each door held its own secret and those secrets now slept during the work shifts and now only got air time at night.
He looked back at Kat. “He has nothing to do with you but if you are so desperate to learn more, I’ll invite him over for dinner,” he snarled.
Her lips twitched. “Let me guess? I’ll be the food?” She let out a soft laugh. “Boy, would he regret eating me.” Something shifted in her voice and her brief mirth was replaced with sadness. “Invite him over for dinner, we’ll see who has the last laugh. Do Cyborgs eat?”
Dommik typed in a code and the door shot open. He stood in the doorway and challenged her to go through.
“We do eat.”
The light turned on and hundreds of creatures scurried about in confusion.
Her reaction was exactly what he had anticipated, down to the parted lips and hushed inhale of breath. She glanced at him then glanced back at the white room. Sterile and utilitarian with smaller glass enclosures throughout. Smaller cages. They did the same thing as the large ones but for an entirely different purpose. The girl walked past him, her arm brushed against his stomach and entered his ‘hobby’ room.
Kat spun toward him as the door closed at his back, green eyes that cut through his, wide and shocked. “You EAT roaches?”
Dommik let out a laugh. “No.”
“Thank god.”
The smell of her arousal was gone, filtered out through the sterilization system, and it wasn’t replaced. He felt its loss but it warred with his goal to keep her cold.
Why take what she would regret giving? He leaned against the closed door and watched as she tip-toed through the chamber.
When she made her first circlet around the room and passed him by without looking his way, he asked, “What do you think of my pets?” He rubbed his mouth, waiting for her answer. And it wasn’t because he asked her a question...but because he cared. The bugs were contained but they still created a festering image within their capsules. There were countless now within the cases and they belonged to him, not the EPED, but him.
“I don’t like them.”
“Is it?–”
“–I pity them.”
Dommik crouched in the corner and watched her. His arms settled over his bent knees. “Why?” Pity the most evolved and interesting creature in the universe?
“You have them stuck in here against their will.”
“Roaches don’t have a will.”
“Everything has a will. Why else would they eat and breed? And seek out places that protect them from humans? They evolve because they have no other way to survive.”
“I thought you didn’t like them?” he smirked.
“I don’t. They carry disease.” She stood before the tubular glass that contained the largest species he owned.
“Not all of them do, in fact, roaches can survive a week without its head. They can be submerged underwater for over thirty minutes and not die. They are the Cyborgs of the bug species. There are, in fact, Cyborg roaches spying and crawling around Earth, each its own intelligent creation of mankind.
Kat turned toward his crouched form. “You can survive without a head?”
“Absolutely. If I upload myself into another tech source first.”
“And breathe underwater for that length of time?”
“Not me, personally, but other Cyborgs can survive weeks underwater,” Dommik answered as she walked out of his line of sight and was obscured by a hundred twitching bugs. Even amongst the obstruction of the critters and the curved glass, her emerald eyes glittered like beacons and her copper curls reflected off the clear surfaces.
She looked at him through the curved glass, her features disrupted, ugly, and appealing all at once. “So. You’re telling me that you’re more roach than human? And why? Expecting me to be disgusted by that?” Her lips turned down in thought. Kat looked at the bugs with glass-filtered beady eyes. “I don’t even know you. Why do you think I would care?”
But she wants to know me. You’re obvious, Katalina, you just don’t realize it. Dommik thought about that because in it’s grim way, he was doing the same thing, and he was being more obvious than her.
Her head popped out at the side. “Why do some of these have colors? Are bigger? I’ve never known a species of roach that had a blue antenna.” She looked away from him and back at the cases. “I’ve never seen roaches look like any of these before...except those,” she pointed to the last case in line. “Those look like the ones I’d see in my grandma’s garden.”
Dommik got up and walked over to her, pleased with himself and for her observation. Girls don’t like to know about bugs, but she knew enough to know that the ones before her were not entirely right.
There were six enclosures in total and he started with the one she stood in front of. The pretty ones. With the blue appendages. “It’s because these aren’t from Earth.” He indicted them. “I found this species on Elyria when out on a mission. I didn’t think much of it at the time but as I continued to hunt, I realized something.”
There was a pause before she asked.“What?”
“That I had seen something like it before. I was almost gored that day, fuck, it took over my processors until I captured my prey and sealed it on the ship. I went out to look for the bug. Three days of searching before I found it again. I brought it aboard to run a series of tests. Do you know what I found?”
“That it was a roach?”
“It shared enough DNA that, for the first time, I couldn’t logically find an answer. Within myself or within the network.”
“What if humans brought it to Elyria on accident and the environment changed it?”