Page 1 of The First Omega Made
Chapter One
Doc
Murdoc Bradford.
I stared at my ID, the warped plastic a long-obsolete thing. Petroleum was hard to come by in space.
I looked different than I once had so long ago—a dark-haired and brash boy with a bleeding heart. Hell, I looked different than I had a year ago. I glanced up and caught myself in the reflection of a window—pale hair, paler eyes. The eyes, aside from the pupil, those were the same, at least until the green seeped in. A stark reminder that we could change, too. Nothing was permanent.
From a small cryo freezer beneath a cabinet, I unloaded a delicate vial, the contents within smoking with cold. The few milliliters within would thaw in minutes as I gathered a sterile syringe from the radiatory purging chamber—RPC—a rather nuclear alternative to the autoclave. I recalled disposable syringes once upon a time, but once again—no petroleum. No polymerized hydrocarbons that were safe for medical use—and a major burden on waste. Not to mention the hell that microplastics weighed on air filtration systems.
I dutifully assembled the plunger to the barrel and locked in the hub to a needle made of a synthetic titanium diamond amalgam. It was the only thing that could pierce hybreed skin reliably. Normal needles had been enough for me not too long ago.
With a careful grip, I warmed the mostly thawed tube in my palm before drawing the contents into the syringe. A small air bubble hovered in the barrel around the 1.5 mark, and I ignored it. It was too small an amount of air to do any damage. The littlebubble was far less likely to cause an embolism than a misplaced injection.
I popped the syringe by the flange into my mouth, dropped the hip of my pants to the side, and grabbed the needle.
“Doc, is this like, a good idea?” Merriel’s tinny voice rang out, ever my voice of reason and occasional conscience—I’d never claimed the ship to be a good one.
“As good as any, Jimmeny.” I took the syringe and plunged it into my hip, depressed the plunger, and hissed. With a harried capping, I disassembled the syringe and tossed it into the RPC for cleanup.
“You used to only need a top-up every few solar rotations.” Merriel’s tone held a note of caution.
“That was before Noel.” I rubbed the injection site while shuffling to the holochamber, where people assumed I went to jerk off. They were wrong, and I preferred it that way.
Once in, the walls melted, and the floor reshaped into a disheveled bed. Old worn blankets piled atop a delicious full-sized mattress. In my memory, I could still smell it—the funk of youth, real meat cooking somewhere in the house, the quiet creak of the hallway floorboards as my family’s live-in housekeeper puttered about.
I never programmed the hologram to go beyond the bedroom, so opening the door would only yield vacuous space up to the laser-array wall.
The moment the kanoik venom had burned its way into my flesh and Noel had licked my wound clean, part of my innermost biology woke. The changes it brought were frighteningly fast. My hair had lightened, skin smoothed. I’d almost earned my first wrinkle, but even that was gone after a few days.So much for being able to die of old age!
So, when I’d been given permission to draw samples from Noel and forgiven—I cultured some for myself. Being under 10percent Naleucian didn’t mean you stayed that way. It meant I had to maintain it. The gods that had come to Mater Terra so long ago and left only their genes in their wake had left us with an ever-evolving problem. Fucking space lizards.
Noel is rubbing off on me…
I’d had to maintain it for so very long that my human life seemed but a distant memory. I had a great-niece and nephews far older in appearance than myself, sucking the family trust dry. Not that I cared. I’d been cut off ever since TAOD, or TOAD as I’d like to call it, had declared that hybreeds over 2.7 percent were bearers of sin. And the very parents that had paid for and consented to my gene therapy cut me off.
“You should have died with dignity!”My mother’s words echoed in my head, praying I’d let myself die rather than continue gene therapy.
I stared at my hands, bending fingers that weren’treallymine. After the radiation poisoning, I’d been burned so much that had I lived, I’d have been a human potato. I’d lost my fingers, parts of my hands, ears, lips, legs from the knees up. Fuck all, they’d been in talks of amputating more. I barely remembered it as they kept me in semi-stasis.
It’s what I get for helping people.
As a young man working aboard an experimental vessel doing my residency post medical school, the ship I’d been on went into a nuclear meltdown. In my haste to help evacuate that part of the ship, I acted fast. I’d been called a hero. Many survived due to my efforts. Many didn’t, despite my best. The invisible heat had blasted me in a wave, skin doing unspeakable things as I shoved the last half-conscious person from the room and sealed the chamber. Had the door stayed open, half the ship would have died.
Memories between then and meeting Vil were hazy, all convoluted as my limbs regrew while I floated in a liquid stasis.I’d been permitted to go to my family home on Mater Terra during the last days of the planet’s livability to recoup. Those months were simultaneously my most painful and comforting. With every deep breath I took while folded in my blankets that had been abandoned on an inhospitable planet for two-hundred solar rotations, I felt a little better, even as the pain twisted within me.
My head ached, teeth stung, and skin prickled with itchy spasms. Scratching it didn’t even make it feel better because my nails ached, too! Didn’t stop me, though.
Fuck! Itchy—ugh.“Merriel— you know what I need.”
“Flea collar?” the smarmy voice piped up.
“Don’t be a smart-ass.” I glared at the ceiling until Merriel responded.
“16.4,” he said—tone somber.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad.” I lifted the hem of my shirt and traced my fingers down human flesh until the light transition of flesh-colored scales reflecting a tinge of blue caught on my fingernails. They tingled when I stroked them, so fresh and new, as if they were a mere few layers of unshed skin beneath. A few more layers until I’d have to admit what was going on.
