Aberrant

Chapter 4

Thick heat. Darkness.

Jinx eyed the corridor that had opened up before her. A black well rising up into nothingness. Towering, almost organic-looking bulkheads. Their surfaces resembled something woven from sticky excretions rather than moulded resin-plex.

Recalling the ship schematics, she figured she was looking at the central corridor. It bisected the vessel top to bottom, covering all five deck levels.

It smelled like a blocked organic recyce system.

Pressing a hand to her nose, she tried to suppress her gag reflex. Sealed up for months, even years, large vessels often festered. Sweat, food, and air disinfectants came together to achieve a level of vileness that could knock a person cold at fifty paces. The Xykeree ship, however, stank mainly of decomp.

Her gut cramped, wanting to reject the odour. Her subconscious rationalised it and did her no favours. A disturbing image from the data net, from a prisoner of war report, bloomed in her mind: disintegrating biomatter; a body floating in a putrid soup.

She decided she was not going to track down the source of any weird smells while on board. Screw inspection protocols.

"Reckon the roaches forgot we were coming?" Olsen leaned out into the humid darkness, his gaze going to the open hatch that allowed them access. "Door's open, but no arsehole's turned on the lights."

"I think they prefer the dark." Jinx willed her eyes to adjust and her olfactory receptors to die—quickly. "It's either that or more than their environmental system is broken."

"Either way, barrel of fucking laughs." Olsen lifted his rifle and switched on the torch mounted near the muzzle. Rolli did the same. Both port officers swept thin beams of light about, over ink-black resin-plex deck tiles and weirdly organic-looking wall panels, revealing a wide tunnel. Its terminus was lost in the gloom, but the ship schematics indicated the passage was more than fifty metres long.

"We should've brought night-vision tech." As torchlight played across surfaces, Jinx glimpsed hollows: alcoves and side passages.

"That's intel I needed five bloody minutes ago." Olsen aimed his weapon's torch upward. "Anything else you'd care to share, freak?"

"Yeah." She warily tracked the beam as it vanished into darkness. "Waving a gun about is usually considered a hostile action."

Both port officers promptly lowered their weapons.

Letting out a breath, Jinx slipped her scanner from her belt. Turning on its inbuilt light, she took a step out into the massive metal and polymer passage before her, her eyes wanting to go everywhere at once.

There wasn't much to see, despite the cool illumination of her scanner. Somewhere down the corridor's length, an alert light winked beside the bilious glow of a service screen demanding attention. Other than that, everything was dark and empty.

As Olsen and Rolli joined her in the corridor, she tried to sense something of what lay overhead and in the surrounding side passages. Faint draughts stirred the air, and dull gleams hinted at metal and translucent plex: sensor casings and covers for other tech. On the lowest panels, the complex almost grid-like extrusions criss-crossing the walls stood out starkly in her scanner's light, casting eerie shadows. Somewhere in the dark, beyond the reach of her torch, something—a muted click—sounded. The clunk of a—

She flinched as the airlock door hissed closed behind her. "Shit."

"You got nerves of steel there, Koel."

"Shut it, Olsen."

Dragging in a breath, Jinx tried to calm her heartbeat and rid herself of the visual her imagination had thrown up: multiple legs; flaring fangs; dead, black eyes. She needed to get a grip, forget everything she knew about the war and roach biology. She was there to do a job. She'd do it—then get the hell off this creepy piece of space trash.

"This is weird." Rolli took a step further out into the bleak space and turned in a slow circle, his vague gaze searching the shaft overhead. "You think they're sleeping or something?"

Jinx only just resisted the urge to pull him back. The Xykeree claimed they'd been attacked and had been forced to dock at a Coalition-governed port. No way were they napping.

She focused on the quiet again, trying to tune out her thudding pulse and the usual tink-tink-tink sounds and creaks of a parked structure. She'd heard something before, some kind of tapping just off the corridor, but there was no clear sign of crew movement or communication, no whine of systems being wound up or down. The low drone in the air wasn't the normal vibration of a docked ship. It felt more like an electrical field. The hairs on her neck prickled and pressure built at her temples.

Dizziness washed over her.

She didn't have time to block the barrage; it came too fast. It always did. A cascade of images and sounds flooded her mind, fuelled by a memory that stored everything from the mundane to the bizarre. Recalled war footage mixed with the imagined: bomb-torn streets; skittering shadows; pallid, bloody flesh. The soundtrack was an unintelligible morass of whispers.

An endless screaming.

Her stomach lurched. Terror, both newly birthed and borrowed from her nightmare, closed her throat.

Suffocation. The taste of blood. Something hard in her windpipe. Something crawling overhead...

Jesus, no.

She gripped her scanner hard, forcing its casing into her flesh. The discomfort cut through the overload, anchoring her. A concrete sensation. Not a memory, not a dream. Reality crystallised. The horrors and shrieks dropped away.

Blinking back the last mental ghost, she found Olsen and Rolli staring at her like she'd just clawed at her face or spoken in alien tongues.

"You on drugs, freak?" Olsen demanded. "What the fuck was that? Do I call Medical or put you down here, nice and clean?"

Jinx managed a glare. "I'm hung over." Those words—denial—added to the nasty taste now in her mouth. "I've got the mother of all headaches. So, yeah, go ahead and shoot me. Do me a goddamn favour."

"You zoned, and your eyes flicked about." Rolli peered at her as if he wanted whatever was in her skull. "Like you were on some bad trip."

"This job is a bad trip." Jinx deliberately moved clear of them, taking a couple of steps further into the dark. She willed the men to drop the subject, to forget whatever they thought they'd seen. She sure as hell was going to try to. Explanations ... they wouldn't change a damn thing. She knew that. She'd lived with them—had her face slapped by them: mental degradation; a hereditary disease. Fuck it. Things were what they were, and right now she had more pressing matters than her glitching grey matter.

Her gut rolled again as she refocused on the ship. It wasn't a good distraction, not after the blast of bloody images her subconscious had thrown up. She tried to shake the residual adrenaline left by the episode—hallucination, recalled nightmare, or whatever the hell it had been. She needed to chill out, take a breath, and—

Movement—to her left.

Jinx jerked about, nerves snapping taut. She aimed her scanner's light in the direction of whatever she'd just sensed: a sound ... or something.

Blackness greeted her wide stare: black air, black deck, black bulkheads. But she swore something had shifted in the darkness near her.

"You see something?" Olsen moved up next to her, rifle in hand.

"Maybe." Keeping her movements to a minimum, her pulse driving her nuts with its melodrama, she altered the settings of her scanner, forgoing the micro readings her job usually required.

She instantly got hits on the macro scale.

At least ten life forms in her immediate vicinity, not counting her human escorts.

She flicked her scanner's light upward.

And found a real nightmare clinging to the wall two metres up from her.