Page 6 of The First Omega Made
Gorm waltzed down the hall, tail swaying past Noel.
A delighted Nexus shouted out after him, “Unca nekky!”
“He’s wearing undergarments, Nexus. He’s not naked.” Noel’s correction fell on deaf ears.
That kid’s got a snowball’s chance in hell.
Chapter Four
Sarge
I sat in the pressurization chamber, fastidiously hooking up my suit, checking for leaks as it pressured up. My sensor registered it as being 97 percent functional. Even new, it only registered ninety-nine.Good enough.It was one of the few things Vil made sure was maintained. He even had a backup for me. He valued me that much, and it hurt to think that if given half an excuse, I’d extinguish the life I’d made. He’d never understand.
It was my best hope to do something in such a way as to destroy my corpse—finding out what I was would be an extra blow. After all, he’d knownmefar longer than he’d known Serjio Vaskez.Spelling be damned because Mater Terra’s Latin history had been all but wasted over the centuries.Or maybe Serj was just illiterate…Either was possible.
The asteroid had a bit of atmosphere—mostly nitrogen and sulfur dioxide. Because of this, Noel and Vil wore goggles, as it would sting their eyes and make it difficult to see. Everything had a bit of a haze to it as we trudged over the low-gravity surface. A surprising lack of dust kicked up as we walked, just slow falling pebbles. For what it was worth, Gorm seemed to enjoy it as he bunny-hopped through the rubble, following Vil’s lead. With feral grace, he forged ahead, body low to the ground in that ever-familiar pose he took on when his electrosensitive pores were actively searching for unfamiliar muscle movement and neurological signals.
At first glance, the surface we stood on had been rocky and crumbled, but as we neared what should have been an entrance, it became increasingly clear that the asteroid was the ship, aweaponized and colonized space rock. Add threespace popes, and it’d be a fucking human paradise.
Gorm wielded a plasma cutter, holding it at the ready as Vil, all blue-scaled and dark-haired, crouched around, searching. His mask’s hose flitted idly, as if in a breeze—not that I could feel it. The suit I wore limited my sensations almost as much as my failing body did.
“Man, I feel like somethingshouldbe out here, you know?” Gorm hopped over a rather large rock and used his tail for balance, enjoying the play far too much.
Noel, for his part, lifted his shirt and let his wings free, taking advantage of the present atmosphere enough to get some stretches in. Watching the appendages fold out of his back unnerved a lot of people, but for a creature like myself, it was a metamorphosis, a fluid form that shifted into a true form. I appreciated it. In fact, I found the display almost arousing.Almost.If my dick still worked, maybe.
Noel darted midair and came crashing down beside Vil in too fast of a maneuver, some unspoken mental hoodoo going on between the two. Vil’s tail flicked, Noel’s stroked his with a slither, and they nodded. Vil took off. Whatever Noel saw was likely something Vil needed to confirm. Noel had not been around in a few hundred solar rotations. Gorm, for his part, made his way to a rock formation and kicked around at the surface of it, eyes trained on every crevice until he aimed his plasma cutter and struck.
His first shot fizzled out, and a second left molten rock and smoke. The third? Rocks tumbled and liquid metal spat back at him as a reward for his tenacity. “If you can’t find a hole, make one!”
Merriel snorted in our headsets. “Nice.”
“Keep sassing, bro. I’ll make you a hole and totally fuck it.” Gorm sawed at the aforementioned weak spot and cackled.
“Where would one fuck a ship? I don’t even have a fuel port.” Merriel had a matter station where the very occasional transitional matter rod fit into place. Its degradation fueled the ship and was an antiquated system—but remarkably efficient when well maintained. The systems were notoriously fickle, and Gorm was a genius when it came to ours.
“In the exhaust pipe, likely?” Puzzled silence came in response to Noel’s statement. Vil laughed, but it took the rest of us a few seconds to recall Mater Terra technology and the pollutants that they purposefully bled into their atmosphere so often they necessitated functional parts to do so in almost every combustion engine.
“Dude…” Merriel’s fearful whisper made me snort a laugh.
“Then again, there’s always the C: drive since he doesn’t have a D: drive.” Vil laughed, but nobody else did.
“Nah, man, nowhere to park your dongle.” Merriel’s antiquated addition seemed to amuse Noel, but I neared Gorm with my plasma gun in hand. I didn’t have the power in my device to cut whatever alloy they used, but I could shoot things.
As we waited, Gorm busied himself while Vil and Noel took turns flying around—playing more than anything. Both remarked how there seemed not to be any life. There’d been no life but the Kanoiks at the base where we found Noel.
When the hull finally breached and Gorm pulled back, he stared into a dark abyss, letting his eyes adjust. I kept my distance out of habit because whatever ooky space spooky popped out was far more likely to kill me than our resident immortal lizard… At least I hoped he was immortal. The ship was worthless without him—maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have him running in first.
Two crewmen—so green I’d never learned their names—followed up behind and stared in after Gorm. Their idle chatter, as evidenced by their animated faces behind their solar screenedmasks, yielded no sound, so they were likely on another channel. I swapped over to their channel long enough to hear them taking bets on who’d lose a limb first.
Progenitors. Ugh.
I swapped back just in time to hear Vil and Noel chatting about going down. Vil first, then me, then Noel. I startled and jogged up, readying the night vision on my visor.
The inside was dusty, dank, and unforgiving. A particularly sentient species of slime mold had colonized half the structure, pulsing in the slowest of waves as I scooted to the edge of the opening and let Vil catch me below the ten-foot drop.
The place stretched out into empty hallways, but there was glass! One of our guys aimed his plasma gun at a thick panel and chipped away at it to test the composition. The other guy joined him, so it must have been a good haul.
When we turned our back on the two, from the corner of my eye, a ripple went through the slime mold, a slow pulse that riveted all directions, likely reporting to the main body of some disturbance. As to what the slime mold genuinely was, I had some ideas.
