Zeta Hack: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 3)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  So many people. Not all of them are good, but most are. It makes me happy to walk amongst them. I am forever grateful that you saved me, protected me, and cared for me.

  “You were the one who saved me,” I said, and I realized that I was scratching my neck where my explosive control collar had once been.

  “I’ve updated your transponders with a map of the station,” Z said as she handed them back to us. A few other people were using the other info terminals or talking to the green uniformed clerks, but we still stepped closer to each other so that there wouldn’t be a chance someone would eavesdrop.

  “I’ve labeled your maps, so you know where Persephone is. We can exchange our rhodium for R-credits at the bank. There are almost a hundred in the station. Closest one is here,” Z said as she pointed at the flashing yellow dot on her opened transponder map.

  “R-credits?” Eve asked.

  “Jatal steered us to the right place. Rhodium makes this place run. The currency and trade of this station seem to be based around the metal. I don’t know what the exchange rates are, but we’ll find out in a few minutes. We need to take the B tube down three stops. The entrance is over there.” The hacker nodded her head down the long platform, and I could see the traffic was flowing in the direction.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we moved out of the booth and into the multicolored flow of traffic. It was a five-minute walk to the nearest tube entrance, and we elbowed our way through the throng, getting on so that we could have a somewhat secluded spot.

  “I am not used to being around so many people,” Eve said once we found our spot on the transit pod.

  “Me either, honestly,” Z said as she crossed her arms over her chest and shot a dirty looking group of miners a frown. The men were gawking at us, and as soon as they saw us notice them, they turned to whisper to themselves. I could have heard them if there weren’t eighty other people in our car also whispering private conversations.

  Our group had gotten a bunch of mixed looks while walking. There were plenty of women wearing outfits similar to Eve, or even more risqué, but the dark-haired beauty seemed to have a ten-meter aura of attraction around her, and I lost count of the number of men and women who had stared at her with desire. Then they noticed Z, and I saw them also appreciate the blonde woman’s appearance. Finally, the spectators would look at me, and they either glanced away quickly or smirked at me with a nod of approval.

  “How about you?” Z asked as she elbowed me in the stomach.

  “Huh?” I asked. My head had been spinning, and it felt like my consciousness was floating a meter above my head. It was starvation, and I really wanted to lie down somewhere and close my eyes.

  “Ahh, never mind,” Z sighed. “This is our stop. We’ll make a left when we get out, walk sixty meters, and the bank should be on our right.”

  “Got it,” I said as the transit pod came to a stop.

  We pushed out through the throng of multi-colored people, made our left, and walked up the street toward where Z said the bank would be. The Avenue looked like it could have been found in any city on a moon or planet. Most stations chose to keep all their surfaces made of the dura-steel or other high polished material that would last through endless space abuse, but this street actually had stone-like cobblestones, gutters, and smooth concrete sidewalks. People actually rode old fashioned bicycles past us, and I almost did a double take when a horse-drawn carriage passed us.

  As we walked, I kept looking up at the sky to confirm that we were, in fact, in a station.

  “Everyone is dressed so weirdly. It’s like the old Earth movies about Europe in the 1800s,” Z whispered as she nodded to the women wearing elaborate dresses with tight corsets and billowing skirts. The streets here were much less busy than the harbor area, but there were still enough citizens walking by to make for interesting people watching.

  “I like their clothes,” Eve said as she smiled at the women. The group had been looking at us, but when they saw Eve glance in their direction, they turned their heads, whispered amongst themselves, and continued on their way.

  “Of course you do. It’s what a vampire would wear,” the hacker said with a chuckle.

  “It is?” Eve asked.

  “Fuck yeah. A black one, with a low cut to show off your perfect boobs. Then you need dark red lipstick. The guys will go crazy. Ha!” Z chuckled, but her face paled, and she stopped walking.

  “You okay?” I asked as I reached out to hold onto her shoulder.

  “Yeah. Really fucking hungry. Sorry,” Z blinked and wiped tears from her eyes.

  “Don’t apologize. We’ll get some food in a minute. The first place we can find,” I said as I wrapped her arm around mine so she could lean on me.

  “That has steak. First place that has steak. I’ve been dreaming about it for a month.”

  “But we have only been in hyperspace for seventeen days,” Eve pointed out.

  “Oh, I know, but I hadn’t grabbed a good job in almost a month before Adam hired me. Me and…” she paused and swallowed painfully. “Well, I’d been living off of cheap tofu and noodles for a while. The barbecue at Cynthia’s place was the nicest meal I think I’ve ever eaten. Well, until I ate the leftovers with you two on Persephone. I’m just excited about a big ol’ Porterhouse. I’ve never had one.”

  “This looks like the place,” I said as we came to the building with Section B Bank and Currency Exchange printed on the glass of the front doors. The building was built of gray brick, and it made me feel as if I’d stepped into a backwater planet’s bank, instead of a giant space station that was home to millions of people.

  The interior was a bit more modern than the exterior had led me to believe. In the center of the main room were a trio of green velvet couches with arched backs squatting around a decorative coffee table. On the left side were stained glass walls separating private office rooms. On the right side was the line to visit the tellers for daily banking business.

  The counter where the half dozen tellers stood was still made of seasoned brick, but the clerks behind the counter wore holographic imagery glasses that could scroll financial stats for them, and their terminals looked like the latest tech. There were also smooth metal walls that streamed various real estate and employment ads in a variety of languages.

  The line wasn’t long, only five people, and the three of us were soon standing in front of a woman with straight black hair and wide set eyes.

  “What can I help you with?” she asked.

  “We are looking to convert rhodium, Nora,” I said after I read her polished name tag. The three of us were standing in front of the window, and Z was leaning into me so that she could split the window. I guessed she was a little excited about the process of getting money.

  “How much will you be converting?”

  “Should be around eighty grams,” I said as I handed her the plastic bag.

  “I’ll weigh it real quick,” Nora said as she pushed the bag into a small glass cube device. Within a few seconds, the machine had sucked all of the polished gray dust out of the bag and was feeding the numbers to the teller’s visual feed.

  “Says 83.4 grams. So, after our conversion fee that will be 80,345 R-credits. Do you have an account with us? Or do you have a card you want me to put that on?”

  “Can you give us a card that can hold the funds? I’m not sure we’ll need an account,” I said.

  “Sure, give me a moment. You just want one card? If you open an account, I can issue three cards that can pull from the--”

  “One card is fine,” I said.

  “I would really recommend an account,” the woman said. “It’s quite a bit of R-credits, and if I don’t have it linked to an account, someone could steal it from you.”

  “Okay, how long will it take to set up an account?” I asked.

  “About half an hour, we’ll need some identification and--”

  “We’ll be fine with just the one card with all the R-credits on it,” I said hastil
y.

  “Very well, I’ll--”

  “Hey, Nora,” Z interrupted. “How much is a steak around here?”

  “A steak?” the teller asked with confusion.

  “Yeah. Like a big one. From a nice restaurant.”

  “In District B, you are talking Goodman’s. It is a kilometer down the road on the tube side,” Nora said as she nodded the direction we had been walking. “It’s about thirty or forty for their largest one, but I’ve only eaten there a few times. On my birthday.”

  “Forty R-credits?” Z asked, and it looked like her blue eyes lost their focus. “And we are getting 80,000?”

  “80,345,” Nora clarified.

  “Okay. Thank you.” The hacker was actually panting, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

  “I’ll set up the card. One moment please,” the teller said as she reached for a piece of plastic from under her counter.

  I glanced at Z, and it looked like the woman was about to burst open with joy. Then I glanced to Eve, and the vampire gave me a half-smile.

  This is good, Adam. We should be able to buy a nice meal, plenty of food for Jatal and us, and then hire an engineer and pilot.

  I nodded at Eve and then turned back to watch Nora work. She inserted the plastic card into the slot at her terminal, keyed a few buttons, and then handed us the card with a big smile. “There you go, don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I reached for the card, and I saw that my hands were trembling a bit. Fuck, I needed to eat.

  My fingers had just pinched the card, and then I felt the wave of air hit the back of my skull a fraction of a moment before I heard the gunshot.

  “This is a fucking stick up! Everyone get your goddamn hands in the air!”

  I spun around to see four men and one woman standing in the lobby of the bank. They each wore bright red handkerchiefs over their foreheads and mouths to disguise themselves. They wore tall felt fedoras, black armor vests, and jeans with leather chaps. They were all armed, but the weapons were double barrel shotguns that looked to be made from narrow diameter pipes.

  “We’ll be taking all your rhodium, jewelry, cash, and cards!” another robber shouted, and the group stepped toward the line with their weapons raised.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Z moaned under her breath as she raised her hands. “We just got paid, and now we are gonna get robbed by these jackasses?”

  Then one of the robbers shot a teller in the face, and the man’s head exploded in a spray of brains.

  Chapter 2

  Everyone but Z, Eve, and I screamed when the robber killed the bank teller, and they all fell to their knees and covered their heads with their arms. There were six employees behind the counter, two that I saw peering out of the stained glass windows of their offices, and another eight customers. Our teller window sat on the other side of the building from the exit door, and there was about fifteen meters of space between us and the gunman who just murdered the teller.

  “Get your hands up! I’m not gonna say it again,” the man who fired his shotgun into the ceiling screeched as he jumped up on the counter of the bank.

  “Stash the card!” Z hissed to me as she slowly lowered herself to her knees.

  Eve was following the hacker’s example and was also mid kneel, and I moved to push the card into one of my jacket pockets. My motion caught the attention of one of the robbers, and they dashed toward me with their makeshift shotgun pointed at me.

  His gun is unloaded. They didn’t trust him to actually carry a gun with shells. The other four have ammo though.

  Eve’s words came to my mind a few moments before the man reached me, and I tried to force my shoulders to relax when he jabbed my chest with his shotgun.

  “What did you do? Why did you move your hand?” the man demanded as he pushed his weapon into my chest again.

  “Sorry,” I said as I raised my left hand again.

  If the man searched my vest, he’d find the card, and I honestly didn’t know what my reaction would be if he tried to take it. I had no doubt I could dispatch him with ease, even if his weapon were loaded, but there was virtually no cover between the other robbers and me. The rest of them would all blast me with their shotgun, and I doubted I’d live through the experience.

  “What did you put in your pocket, eh?” He demanded as he tapped his weapon into my chest again.

  “I didn’t put anything in my pocket,” I said as I stared into the man’s eyes. “Just rob your bank and be on your way.”

  “I saw you put something in your pocket!” I could tell the man’s adrenaline was surging, and his eyes looked all sorts of insane. Yep. This was definitely the kind of guy that you didn’t want to give a loaded weapon to.

  “No, you are--”

  “Don’t fucking tell me what I did or didn’t see!” He raised the gun from my chest and pointed the barrels in my face.

  It wasn’t loaded, but it still didn’t matter to the animal that raged in my stomach. It only knew the most carnal of emotions, and it was demanding that I rip the man’s head from his chest.

  Or it would take control and do it for us.

  Adam, please do not change. There are cameras everywhere.

  “Pull it out of your pocket. Slow like,” the man hissed at me as he pushed his empty gun into my cheek hard enough to push my head around.

  “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” The woman in the crew had walked over to us, and I could see her holding a bunch of R-credit cards in the hand that wasn’t gripping her shotgun.

  Her gun is loaded, but she has never been in a gunfight. She is the leader’s woman.

  “He put something in his pocket. I think it was a card.”

  “He’s mistaken,” I tried to say as calmly as I could, but the tiger was clawing in my stomach, and my starvation was making it hard for me to resist its power. It wanted to kill these fools and feast on their dying cries.

  “Looks like you are lying,” the woman said as she put the R-credit cards in her vest pocket.

  “He’s not lying. Look, just rob the bank and leave us alone. We don’t want any trouble,” Z said from her spot on the floor.

  “We are calling the shots here, bitch!” the woman bandit said a moment before her arm whipped out to backhand my friend.

  The beast screamed, and my vision blended with yellow, red, and all shades of hatred.

  The man still pointed his empty shotgun at my temple. I reached up with my left hand to grab the barrel and twist it away. His eyes opened wide with surprise when I pulled away his weapon, but then they almost exploded out of his skull when I drove my right fist into his stomach. My hit lifted his feet off the ground, and I felt a bunch of popping come from inside of his body.

  The woman saw me move, but she turned in slow motion, and my right hand blocked her shotgun from aiming at me. The robber that I probably killed had let go of his empty shotgun, and I swung it around to hit the woman in the head with the stock of the weapon. Her skull exploded like a rotten tomato, and I yanked her loaded shotgun out of her dead hands before she could drop it.

  The robbers were screaming, the crowd was screaming, Z was screaming, and the monster that lived in my soul was screaming. I could feel my spine shifting and my muscles elongating. I didn’t want to change, I didn’t want the security cameras to see me, but my human logic was fighting against a hungry beast that had just seen one of his women get hurt.

  The monster in my DNA filled my mind. It needed to kill and feed.

  I flipped the makeshift double-barrel shotgun around in my grip, dropped the empty shotgun, and clutched the front vest of the woman whose skull I’d obliterated with my left hand.

  But it was now my left paw.

  The other three robbers were turning toward us, and I shuffled to the left a few steps so I stood between my two friends and the closest shotgun wielding man. I expected him to fire, and I raised the woman’s dead body with a hope that it would soak up most of t
he buckshot. His weapon went off, and I felt a few of the metal pellets rip into the flesh shield I carried. None of them penetrated her body to hurt me, and I raised my newly acquired weapon to aim at the man.

  He was the one who had killed the teller, and my spray of buckshot caused the front of his chest and face to erupt in a spray of crimson. The robber tumbled back against the counter of the bank as everyone screamed, and I twisted the shotgun to my right so that I could hit one of the remaining two men.

  They both fired their weapons, and I shifted the woman’s corpse over my chest to catch the buckshot. I felt a few pellets rip through the woman and smack into the plates of my jacket, but none of them penetrated the armor.

  My replying shot hit the closest man on my right, and he shouted with dismay as he fell. He managed to pull the second trigger on his shotgun, but his arms jerked up as if attached to a string, and the blast peppered the ceiling of the bank.

  The last robber standing realized that I was out of shots, and he was taking his time with his aim. The man stood about twelve meters away from me, so I whipped my right arm back and threw my empty shotgun at the man. The weapon spun in the air and actually looked as if it was going to miss the man, but then it kind of bent its trajectory and smacked him full in the chest. Its impact caused his own weapon to flinch upward, and his shot passed a good three meters over my head.

  “Fucking freak!” he screamed as he cracked open the action of his weapon. The two empty shells popped out of the makeshift barrels, and he reached into the pocket of his jacket to grab two more.

  But I was already sprinting toward him, and I felt my face complete its shift into its tiger form.

  There was no pain during this shift, and the small, human part of my brain riding in the backseat wondered if the lack of pain meant that the control over my shifts was starting to slip.

  Then I didn’t care, my teeth were at the man’s throat, and I felt his scream resonate through my mouth as I crushed his esophagus in my jaws. His hot blood filled my mouth, and it tasted like sweet vengeance. My vision blurred for half a moment, and instead of killing some random faceless robber, I was devouring the blond scientist who had spent years experimenting on me.