Aberrant

Chapter 13

A roar of sound: her blood surging. Harsh clanging: her boots pounding across metal decking. The whine of weaponry. Flashes of black bulkheads and laser light.

Her blood iced. She resisted the instinct to reject the memory and let the images come.

Plastic wrapped biowaste. A storage alcove. Broken pieces of curved metal and composite.

Scuttling sounds all around her.

She pressed a fist against her chest, her heart echoing a ragged, remembered beat. She hadn't collapsed in the hold. She'd run. She'd lunged out of the door and...

She'd got disorientated, had ended up near the med bay. In an off-limits section of the ship.

The smell of burnt plastic—acrid, overwhelming. Deformed plex. Metal and composite plates and ... jointed limbs scattered across the deck with dislodged circuitry. Biomatter—yellow, nonhuman—smeared up one bulkhead.

The remains of a Xykeree.

There'd been another explosion. Recent. The mess not yet cleared away.

"Shit." She turned and slumped back on her locker. She stared at the storage units across from her, her mind racing. Whatever had happened to that exskel, it hadn't occurred during any pirate attack. It had happened while the Bullhead was docked.

Either that or her recall was mixing war imagery with nightmare.

She could be losing her grip on reality.

Her stomach flipped.

Inhaling sharply, she steadied her hands and unclipped her scanner to check its logs. Again, she found no strong evidence of explosive use, but about the time she should have been leaving the barge, the device had detected high levels of combustion residues and other molecules, like ozone, consistent with a violent electrical discharge.

She closed her eyes, rolling her head back against her locker, gut unclenching. She wasn't crazy. Just scared and confused.

But what did the data mean?

She reviewed the readings again. Were roach exskels prone to malfunctions? Fuel cell issues, maybe? But what did that have to do with her finding human biomatter on the barge? And if she hadn't collapsed in the hold when the scorp had come at her, when the hell had she blacked out? Where and when had she found the blood? The shifting pieces in her mind weren't settling—weren't fitting.

And her time for finding answers was running out.

She checked her coms. Five new vid messages from Dem. One text from Lenton: Air droid approved. But even with supersonic speed, the droid wouldn't get pictures back for at least an hour.

Nothing to do but wait. Wait for images, wait for blood results, wait for her brain to glitch ... then fail completely.

"Fuck." She resisted punching a storage unit. Instead, she yanked off her ruined shirt and jerked open her locker. The jumble of her stowed gear only reminded her of everything she needed to tie up—terminally—so she could leave the planet. And what brilliant explanation was she going to give her friends for that?

Not the truth.

But after today's loss of consciousness, Soh and Dem would insist she have a thorough med check, something she'd so far managed to avoid. Her job only required blood screens for toxins and communicable diseases, and her parents hadn't believed in routine medical checks during her childhood, not trusting doctors.

Things might have been different if they had.

"Damn it." She blinked up at the ceiling, her breath too short. "Screw this." She needed to do something—anything other than wait around replaying the nightmares in her head.

Jerking up the strap of her lime-green civvy singlet, she looked at the shirt in her fist, the sad remains of the top half of her uniform. Not something she'd wear again. A few bloodstains remained on its torn sleeve. Evidence some poor bastard had had an even crappier day than she'd had so far.

But who? And how had they ended up on a Xykeree vessel?

If the victim were a local, he or she could have a record on Enforcement's database. ID that individual, she might find out what kind of outlaw she was dealing with, who had attacked the aliens, and maybe why. All she needed was a bio profile to compare against official records. That's what would eventually happen when her warrant got approved in two to three weeks' time.

She'd be long gone then. On her way back to Sylus 3. To her parents. To the clinic.

Or alone, heading into the cold dark.

Her pulse gave a hard beat. She stared at the shirt in her hand.

Fuck waiting. Fuck everything.

She ripped off a chunk of soiled fabric and stuffed the sample into one of the evidence bags she carried in her pants pockets. After tossing her scanner and the rest of her shirt into her locker, she messaged Dem, telling him she was going off-duty. Then, with a tap on her com, she activated a discreet program that disrupted the unit's location-related functions.

No one needed to know where she was going. What dumbarse thing she was about to do.