Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten

by Richard M. Heredia

  They noticed me then and, as one, turned.

  I tried not to stop right there in my tracks, and took a few half steps forward just as Katie came into the room behind me. “It’s all set for tomorrow at eleven at the park,” I stated factually, my tone even on purpose. “So, if Sandy and the rest of you can pick me and Katie fifteen minutes before that, I guess that would work.”

  “That sounds perfect Estefan,” said Ramona sardonically.

  Ah shit, come on, baby doll, don’t get all fucking stupid on me now, I thought. I was all the more put off by her remark, because of everything we had agreed to earlier. I mean, how was she going to react at seeing Katie and I make love? She shouldn’t have let something as trivial as Tirza get to her like that. Otherwise, our perverted triad was doomed to fail.

  Come on, girl, get it together dammit!

  I was about to say something just as disparaging when we were all frozen in place by a series of booming thuds coming from the stairs.

  Thinking my brother Martín had fallen down the stairs, I was immobile one second, a flurry of movement the next. Only, I bumped headlong into an equally frantic Jolene. Her head hit my clavicle so hard the impact sent a jolt throughout my entire body. I was thrown back a step. I instinctively reached out to steady her before she fell to the floor in a heap. She didn’t even appear to notice my clutch. Her eyes as big as nectarines, words came forth in a torrent – one upon the next, making it nearly impossible to comprehend.

  “Your brother and sister are sick! Your brother and sister are sick! Your brother and sister are sick! Your brother and sister are sick!”

  I placed her squarely upon her feet, and then looked at Katie.

  “Oh shit, Eff, we better go get them before they throw up all over the house!” she shouted.

  We sprinted for the stairs, the rest in tow.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~ Chapter 34 ~

  (Earth Summer – 2385)

  Old-Timer Love

  Through the million, million symbiotic synapses connecting him to his walker, he told it to move forward and slightly off to the left. He wanted a better view of the devastation in the depression below. The robotic chair obeyed.

  It wasn’t an impact crater per se, but more of a conglomerate of nearly five. The thin, dusty outer crust of the dwarf planet had been battered with such ferocity in this location; the land itself had sunk deep into the icy underbelly, making it even more oddly shaped. It was a broad expanse, nearly seventy-five kilometers across at some points. It was crisscrossed with broken ridges and shattered mounts of pulverized, amorphous ice made opaque with a myriad of breaks and cracks. This was Haumea, a noteworthy Kuiper Belt object some five hundred and seventy-five kilometers across at its widest, making it roughly one-third the mass of Pluto. Unlike Sol’s one-time ninth planet though, Haumea wasn’t a sphere. It was what scientists called a scalene ellipsoid, a celestial object that was squished at its poles so the circumference of its equator was just about a third larger around than a similar measurement running from North to South Pole and back again. This was due to a postulated impact with an equally large planetoid more than one hundred million years ago, a collision that had hammered Haumea into its uncommon shape. This was also the most plausible reason why this tiny dwarf had two moons – Namaka and Hi’iaka – both of which were somewhat large for a dwarf planet of Haumea’s size to have captured with gravity alone.

  He sat there upon his six-legged, crab-like divan chair. Its crustaceous skin glistened in the light of the ghostly flames burning before it. The pointed brines and thorny outgrowths cast long shadows behind the combined silhouette of him and his chair. He squinted through the out-gassing and smoke, though the noxious fumes didn’t come his way. With gravity one-third that of Earth’s Moon, the residual byproducts of the decimated base, in the depression below, spewed and splattered directly into space, almost ninety degrees from the surface of Haumea. Still, he abhorred waste. Everything he and his drones had wrought upon this small planet, that wasn’t quite a planet, reeked of waste. It made him uncomfortable.

  It is necessary, Oöt’Aahtne, to have done what you have done here on this desolate imp of a world. A few hundred thousand lives are but a small thing. The probability the procedure has gone horribly wrong this time was too great to do otherwise. We must first form a beachhead and then we must search out the Khöol-Dhûr…

  He fidgeted with the jelled Ichthyo-mask about his face, adjusting the symbiotic being, so it felt less invasive about his boiled and wart-strewn skin. He was still dissatisfied with its mucus feel about places still smarting from rash or irritation, or the like. There was little he could do about it, since the mask was low-level acidic to begin with. It only served to cause him more pain than it should have. He’d had a bad reaction to the radiation in this portion of the Galaxy. The penultimate effect was, it had wreaked havoc upon the outer layers of flesh upon his malformed face. It was always this way for him. Whenever he came near a G-Class star, the affect was typically negative. There was little he could do about that too.

  He forcibly pushed his discomfort aside, focusing instead upon the last Human habitation upon this small world, hoping beyond hope his drones had found more Åksha-Ishtäri - a sentiment that, up to this point, had proved unfounded. Against every scientific prediction postulated by his people, Humans didn’t morph well into the forms his race had projected they would. Everything was wrong. Nothing was right. It left a sweet taste upon his cancerous tongue, nearly making him regurgitate in abhorrence at the dismal failure of his ancient race.

  He stared at the burning husk of the village below, his crooked brow furling over misshapen eyes. He urged greater magnification from the Ichthyo-mask. His different colored orbs searched through the rubble and flaming debris, as hundreds of wicked looking drones probed the habitation for signs of life – the correct signs, that is. It was hard to see, even though his mask, the flames weren’t particularly bright. They sputtered and gasped from the lack of oxygen, barely illuminating the cracked, blackened ice about the settlement.

  You know, Oöt’Aahtne, you will find no more Åksha-Ishtäri here. The procedure has gone wrong. The Priests were wrong about these Human Beings. We should’ve waited, let them mature. Their crude DNA was too young a construct. The Khöol-Da’Jûri has not performed as it should, and now something terrible has been unleashed about the Galaxy.

  These altered Humans will spread like a plague…

  I must find the Khöol-Dhûr. At all costs, I must find it or all could be lost.

  His thoughts were disrupted by the whirl and high-pitched screeching of a messenger-drone as it skimmed the frozen surface of the insignificant planetoid. A few feet from his six-legged chair, it propelled itself further from the ground, so he could look upon it at eye level.

  “Report, Lord Scout. Report,” it announced with a monotone throb over a common comm-channel.

  “Proceed,” he ordered gruffly, some of his tones, so low a human would’ve been hard pressed to understand them.

  “Attack-Drone-in-Charge is transmitting the human settlement has been neutralized,. No sign of Åksha-Ishtäri say his units, per your programing, Lord-Scout.” He grunted, sounding like huge slabs of rock rubbing together. The messenger continued. “The planetoid is now entirely under your control. All ‘augmented’ humans have been terminated as directed. The few surviving ‘immune’ humans have been placed in a secure location.”

  His grunt was cut off by a long sigh. “Very well, have those human yet alive police their dead. Have the demolition-drones free this world of every vestige of the vermin living here and bring forth the Spy-Drones. I want to begin the search for the Khöol-Dhûr at once.”

  “By your will, Lord-scout,” and with that, the messenger-drone streaked away, the many tasks he’d given it would keep it busy for some time.

  Oöt’Aahtne, old, even by the accounting of his people, urged his chair forward once again adjusting the bothersome Ichthyo-mask ab
out his huge, grotesquely shaped skull, his expression dark, foreboding. He would have to work fast, if he were to make the way clear for Vanguard in time. He had to properly prepare this bashed-in sphere of ice before that time. He had to attend to the defenses, he and his drones, would begin to grow in the next few cycles. He had to fill the craters, level their ridges. He had to sow the ice with the soils of their home world, transform it, change it, and make it viable without proper gravity and atmosphere. Overseeing the terraforming processes were always the most tedious - every planet, every asteroid, every comet was different. They had different chemical compounds, abundant in this, but wanting in that. The list was typically endless. And still, he had to program thousands of drones to seek and discover the location of the Khöol-Dhûr. Since he had unearthed how bad things had gone this time around, its’ whereabouts were of the upmost importance. Though he had so much to do in preparation for the fore-runners, he would not rest until he had the Khöol-Dhûr in his hands – all three of them.

  We should’ve never chosen a race with only double-helix DNA. We should’ve known better!

  *****

  Estefan came from the Dermal-Cleanser with only a towel wrapped around his waist, his feet upon the marble floor resounding loudly. He wasn’t wearing any Anti-Grav, so floor had to bear all four hundred and fifty pounds of him. He walked before the washing consul and looked into the holo-mirror, his reflection digitally relayed back to him in life-like clarity. It had taken him about two years to get used to the full functionality of such a device. Once he stood before it, he could flick a finger toward its edge and actually make his image rotate. It was much like the playing the Sims back when he was a kid. The fact it was him gazing at the back of his own head was unsettling, but he got used to it, eventually.

  He looked the same as he had now for more than two hundred years. Before that he had appeared older. His face had once been more chiseled, lined. His jaw had been more angular, his cheek bones sharper. There had been the beginning of crow’s-feet at the edge of each eye. His skin had shown the vestiges of weathering.

  All of that was gone now. Each year after he’d turned one hundred and fifty years old - though he guessed he’d only aged to around thirty-five - he had appeared younger. Until he was nearly two hundred, the regression had stopped. Ever since, he looked precisely as he did right now. His face was forever trapped somewhere in between a man’s and a boy’s. To others, he looked no more than twenty-three, twenty-five at the most. His skin was perfect, his eyes completely white around his irises, his teeth just as brilliant. His jawline has softened; most of the angles about his visage had rounded, smoothed almost. He did appear young until one gazed into those eyes. That’s where the illusion faded. There was too much behind Estefan’s gaze. He had seen too much, he had done too much. He had seen people killed, maimed, tortured and raped, men as well as women. Some of it he had done himself, in his younger days, when the struggle for Angel Free Town hadn’t been quite finished. He had taken drugs on occasion and drank to excess on many occasions. He had fucked his first cousin, his step-sister – sometimes at the same time. There was too much behind his eyes. They were a dead give-away. He was an Old-Timer, one of the oldest.

  He saw the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow, which was more like a “48-hour shadow”, since his facial hair grew at a glacial pace. He waved his hand across a sensor upon the top of the washing consul. It connected to his ‘Swarm. Promptly, it began to form a shaving-bot. He stood still letting the many-bladed, robotic device shave him. It hovered about his face, whizzing back and forth, up and down until it completely it’s task. It deftly flew into a newly made opening in the consul wherein it would be cleaned and then dismantled to regroup with the rest of Estefan’s ‘Swarm at some later time.

  He paid it no mind, rubbing his face, gazing closer into the holo-mirror. He checked for nicks or abrasions he knew weren’t there, but it was a habit. It was one he had developed when he’d first started shaving, back then he used a disposable razor. Back then, he’d nicked himself almost daily.

  Absently, he waved for lotion and the Grav-canister came from the shelf to his left, settling into his hand. He flicked at the sensor and a few dabbles of milky liquid spewed forth. He released the canister and it floated back to its place on tiny Grav-lifts, nestling back into its previous position. He was rubbing the lotion on the skin of his face when Sandy walked in.

  She was nude.

  Her defined arms and legs were still her best features after her tantalizingly long toes and high arched feet. Like him, she looked near the teenage girl he had met so long ago, way back in High School, upon the breezeway crossing Avenue Fifty-four. Her flared hips and dimpled buttocks, her full breasts with their flushing areolas and pink nipples, her light brown eyes and aquiline face – all of it was the same, or very near. Her mid-length, wavy hair was tinted russet, and settled about the same visage. It should’ve been shot entirely white, scraggy and rough. The hair of a two hundred and fifty year old corpse, but it wasn’t. It was alive and vibrant; much like when had met her way back in 2017.

  Unable to help himself, his eyes darted down to her pubis and was somewhat shocked to see she’d shaved. Typically, she grew a trimmed, neat and narrow landing-strip of hair there. Now, she’d changed her mind and went bare as the day she was born. He wondered why.

  “Are you going to come out and play with us?” she asked impishly. She walked up to him, her smile growing.

  His eyes narrowed with mock suspicion. “I just cleaned up, my love, and the Null-ship will be here within the hour,” he replied. They had been waiting for nearly a week and a half for the ship no Human Celeste could sense, no amount of sensory could detect and, for the most part, no one could see. Null-ships were just that, complete null. In fact, they’re more like ghosts, he thought to himself.

  Soon the Aegis Synod would begin its’ trip to Europa. Once there, they would retrieve the Shadow Spark and hide it, forever, from humanity.

  “But, honey, it’s just girly-girls out there right now and I need a bit of man in the mix, you know?” she pouted with an exaggerated bat of her eyelashes. “Would you mind if I got you a little dirty? It’s the good sort, the fun sort of dirty… What do you say, huh?”

  “We don’t have enough time to do it properly.”

  Sandy huffed and reached for his hand, but, at the last second, she took him by the wrist. “I’m not talking about the Deluxe Package, my dear. I just want a little tussle. You know, I want you to mess up my hair a bit.” The cast of her face was innocent, but the intent behind her words made it seem naughty at the same time. Besides, she’d had the hair upon her head implanted with Stim-grō ages ago. It was never messed up.

  He chuckled as she led him from the Grooming room and into the large chamber, serving as his private quarters. He saw Katie and Tirza immediately, sitting in the middle of his huge bed, naked. They were facing one another, their bare rear ends upon the bunched satin sheets, kissing. Tirza’s legs straddled the larger woman’s at the top of her hips. She had her knees bent, touching along Katie’s sides, her feet flat on the bed behind the other woman. Estefan’s cousin had scooted forth as much as possible, so her knees were bent as well. Her feet were flat upon the sheets too. She had her arms around the tiny woman’s waist, her fingers digging into Tirza’s pliant flesh. In between them, their breasts came together, nipples rubbing upon one another with each movement. Tirza’s hands moved along Katie’s shoulders as they craned their heads one way, then the other, enjoying the taste of the other.

  Katie’s hair was dirty blonde today and splayed down to the middle of her back. Tirza’s was no different than it had been when Estefan had dated her centuries earlier – dark to light brown and then back again, wavy, about her shoulders.

  From a distance, Estefan could see them pull closer together, their vaginas mere inches apart. Their need was strengthening. He knew before he felt it. He would begin to bugle below the towel he was wearing. His vision seemed to n
arrow and all else in the room faded away. Only the tug of Sandy’s palm clasped about his wrist kept him from drifting away completely.

  She guided him to the bed. His eyes never left his two wives as they held each other, unaware he and Sandy had approached the bed.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” asked the wife at his side. Her eyes drank in the nude forms of her Sisters-in-Marriage.

  He nodded, his manhood swelling painfully, distracting him. He doubted he could speak at the moment.

  Sandy let go of him, turning to face him squarely. Her other hand came up to his waist where the towel about him was synched. Her eyes were watching his as he continued to watch Katie and Tirza.

  They had rearranged their legs so they were scissoring the others’. This enabled them to move closer, so now they were plastered against each other along the full length of their bodies. Estefan could see the intimate brush of their womanly parts through the tangle of their limbs. Every once and a while, one of them would swirl her hips, making the contact there more vigorous. The other would shake with ecstasy whenever this happened.

  Sandy grinned wolfishly, flashing her fingers over a glowing sensor on the towel and it dropped onto the floor without preamble.

  Estefan didn’t notice.

  Sandy didn’t waste any time. She dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth as far as she could. Above her, Estefan gasped with shock, grasping at breath she had stolen from him with her unexpected move.

  She couldn’t take all of him as Ramona and Katie could, but, after hundreds of years of love making, she had perfected other methods. Estefan was never dissatisfied with her oral performances.