Last Call (Stranded in the Stars Book 1) (15 page)

The cruiser was slowly sinking into the ground.

Even now he could feel the shift of sand beneath his feet as it was being pulled under by the caverns of old wurm tunnels below, resulting in a large but rather slow pit of quickening sand.

He held onto Allie as he approached the exterior where a large triangular hole had broken open. The tough metal split outward as if something had violently forced its way out.

Stopping in front of the gaping hole, he peered inside and saw a corridor of debris that outstretched into a tunnel on the opposite end, leading deeper into the ship. Long, metal tubing hung limp from the walls and ceiling. The tubes no longer vital to the ship’s life like they had been at one point, operating on electrical currents, controlled by the ship’s core.

Jack pressed his free hand on the dingy plating, trying to make a connection with the vessel but found only silence. His nanobots rejected by the lifeless structure in bringing it alive. It had been inert for over half a decade.

The girl had been alone longer than he originally had thought based on the ship. He looked down at her, “how old were you when you crashed here?” He asked, curious about her past.

She looked at him in confusion. “Based on the colony’s planet rotation, I was seventeen cycles.”

The cycles on this planet were longer than an average Earth day, he estimated that she was in her mid-twenties. “This ship crashed here about seven cycles ago, standard Earthian time six and a half years. You’ve been here a long time.” Jack was proud of her survival instinct before but now he was impressed. She had been here for a quarter of her lifespan. One mystery solved.

Allie let go of him to run her hands through her hair, her eyes wide and sad with the knowledge. He fell silent as she processed the information.

“There’s no seasons here. I knew I had been here a long time but I was never able to accurately track it. I tried at first but I stopped when it didn’t seem to matter anymore. No one was coming,” she continued. “Eventually the days began to blur together.”

“I came.”

She looked at him sadly. “Not by choice.”

“Maybe not by choice but instead by fate. If I knew you were stranded here, I would have come by choice. I would have been here years ago. If I knew you existed, I would have slaughtered your Warlord before he ever laid eyes on you and gifted you with his head.”

Allie stood before him awkwardly and obviously unsure about how to respond to his omission. “He was never my Warlord.” She eventually stated.

Jack turned back to the ship, “I’m going to harvest the palladium first. It will be abundant near the core. On our way out I’ll retract the metal since that can be taken from anywhere.” He stepped into the dank corridor, hearing the girl quietly follow him in.

The atmosphere abruptly changed and he would have likened it to the strange magnetic fields surrounding the area but that would have been impossible. He felt like he was in a pressurized bubble. A chill clung to the air where just steps back he had been enveloped in warm direct sunlight.

The temperature shouldn’t have plummeted so dramatically and he knew the girl would be uncomfortable as it was uncomfortable even for him. He pulled out her cloak and draped it around her shoulders, securing it in place.

“It smells terrible in here. It was foul outside but this…” She trailed off. Jack couldn’t smell anything. Just the sweat on their bodies and the waning scent of sex from earlier; her essence dried over the crotch of his pants.

Allie had her hand over her nose, her eyes pinched tightly closed. He could sense her growing wariness.

He rummaged through his pack and pulled out a flashlight and handed it to her. “You’ll need this. We won't have much light going forward.” She let go of her nose, wrinkling it, and took the light from him.

“Thank you.” She held it to her chest as he replaced the pack on his back.

Jack moved deeper in, keeping a hand running along the wall of the passage and keeping his connection with the vessel. He mapped out the ship’s interior layout and coursed the quickest path to the reactor. There were several barriers in the way but nothing he couldn’t take care of.

They would be climbing steadily upward as the nose of the battle cruiser had all but been decimated in the dirt from impact. What remained of the cockpit was now buried in layers of dead ground.

Lucky for me, what I need is in the middle-rear of the ship.
      

The light from the entrance had all but diminished and continued to fade as they made their way steadily deeper. He heard Allie click the flashlight on behind him and a second later a bright ray of white light pierced through the dusty gloom. It made the space around them a monochrome, stale grey that had contrasted deep black shadows. Dull reflections bounced off the dirty chrome of the wires and walls.

He looked behind, the natural light was but a dot of color at the end of the tunnel, obstructed by the hanging pipes off of the ceiling. He watched as Allie followed his gaze and shivered.

This place looked like somewhere the thing from earlier would inhabit, as creepy and messed up as its broken, wide grin.

Jack switched his vision partially to night while he left his other eye on infrared. There was nothing alive in this place but he knew it never hurt to be careful. He started to move forward.

They steadily made their way through, stopping now and again for him to dislodge or destroy obstructions in their way, breaking through rusted out panel doors and to help Allie over dangerous sections. The ship was larger than his own by quite a bit, it was meant to maintain weaponry as well as a large crew where his could comfortably be operated alone.

The flyer wasn’t big by normal battle cruiser standards, this one would have been an outlier to the usual World Eaters the military used. People lived and died on World Eaters. Regardless, he was pleased at the progress they were making.

He heard a startled gasp behind him, the direction of the light no longer pointed forward. The beam had landed on a pile of human remains. He walked closer but didn’t need to use his scanners on them, the pile was large enough to be from several bodies.

“They’re in a pile. I never left bodies on this ship that I found, let alone in a pile.” She whispered, a hitch in her voice. He moved closer to them and kneeled down. His arm resting over his knee while he unsheathed his dagger to move the bones apart.

“They were placed here deliberately. It looks like they were discarded.”

“I would never. Not with the dead.” She breathed.

“I know, sweetheart. If I thought you could do something like this, I would never have slept next to you.” Jack laughed lightly, hiding his growing concern.

“Don’t laugh about this. If it was deliberate, who did it?” He could tell her question was rhetorical but he answered anyway.

“It doesn’t matter, these bones were moved here long ago. Whatever did this is long gone. We’re alone on this ship.” He got up and moved away, disturbed. “Let’s keep moving, I want to be out of here by this afternoon and we’re almost to the core.”

He placed his hand on her arm and led her quickly away. Jack did not want Allie to see what he had.

That there were long perforations in the bones as if something ate the meat off of them and then continued to chew them down, that some pieces had entire chips bitten off while other had long claw marks along their sides as if sharp teeth had been scraped across them.

He concluded that it could have been done by the creature from last night. He was unable to get it out of his head, perusing the images over and over. The broken and sharp teeth came to mind, the similarities convenient. He filed away the new information to investigate later.

The reactor and the circuitry was just beyond the wall before him now. He dropped his hand away from the girl and felt around the cool metal for any weaknesses, locating several soon after. Jack shrugged out of his pack again and sheathed his dagger.

“Stand back.” He ordered, hearing her move away.

He placed his hands over the frail metal and forcefully transferred his nanorobotics into it like he had earlier but programming them this time for deterioration. It wasn’t long before he was able to transfer enough into the wall before him; watching the metal visibly rust away.

Jack moved his hands and let the bots do their job. The place his hands had just been crumbled into a small gap. The rust fragments falling away. When it was wide enough for him to thread his fingers through, he gripped the edges and broke apart the decaying wall, helping it along.

Taking the opportunity to store some of the larger broken pieces away, he strapped them to the outside of his pack.

Allie had moved forward to shine a light on the disappearing wall and he sensed her heart beat increase.

“It’s like magic. How did you do that?” She stepped back as he tore off a large chunk and set it aside.

“I transferred some of my biomechanical cells into it. They’re programmable and always a part of me wirelessly until they dissipate. They can fix, destroy, scan, or take over other things.” He said. “They can’t take over inanimate objects like this wall but they can take it apart.”

“Can you transfer them to people and change them?” She asked cautiously. He knew why, referring to inserting them into her days prior.

“Yes and no. They can’t change organic material that has a different genetic makeup other than mine. Eventually they would be attacked and destroyed, my nanocells don’t last long outside of my body.”

“What about the yes though?”

He looked over at her. “If I wanted to impregnate a woman then they would align with the female’s egg, altering the genetic code but also altering their own over the maturation period. Any child procreated by a Cyborg is born with their own naturally designed nanocells.” He continued, “It was a byproduct of our production. Unknown until after we were created.”

“There are Cyborg children?” Her mouth had dropped open.

“Yes but they’re not Cyborgs, the children are human but genetically enhanced. They also always look similar to the original host of the nanocells. They’re a secret, so few exist that the council is not aware of their existence. It’s a secret we all keep.”

“Why?” She asked.

“That type of technology requires a lot of money and a lot of time and resources. To create nanocells that are compatible with a human is very difficult and very expensive. I’m a very difficult, expensive machine to create. Could you imagine what would happen if they had inexpensive access to that technology? I prefer not to find out.” Jack turned back towards the collapsing wall. “We Cyborgs have a tense relationship with our creators. We’re free because we’re men and women and we earned our freedom. With blood and pain. Some would prefer us decommissioned or enslaved, we try to kill those people off when we can.” He stated ominously. The hole was now big enough to walk through. He and Allie moved into the armored core.

Jack bent down to work on powering up the reactor, slowly feeling the beginning vibrations of electrical currents pulsating outward. The ship coming to a half-life state of being. Several minutes passed before Allie spoke again.

“Does the council still make Cyborgs?” She asked.

“They do but very few. We call them Neoborgs and they’re not readily trustworthy. The Neoborgs are not created for war like the originals were; like me. They usually have unique purposes. Mainly it’s just a creation to enhance humanoid knowledge or new processes being tested, new information. Neoborgs are built mainly for intellectual enhancement and theory.”

He felt a hand on his forearm as he turned away. “Jack…” The girl whispered. He looked back at her, concern and wonder painted her face. He felt enchanted and leaned down to kiss her when she spoke, stopping him in his tracks.

“Could I be pregnant?” His internal systems felt like they were crashing around him and he was suddenly aware about how inappropriate this conversation was deep inside a dead machine that was littered with bones.

He looked at her stomach before lifting his gaze back to her face. A look of concern clouded her eyes as she waited for his answer, he watched as she began to notice the stifling metallic rust around them.

“You’re not pregnant.”

A small smile lifted her lips and he felt compelled to kiss her again. “Oh. Good. I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

Without turning back towards her he lowered his voice in authority, “Keep an eye out. I’m going to need to focus on retracting the circuitries. Any other time this would not be an issue but the ship is scrambling with my electrical signal and I can only surmise that it will be more powerful now that I’m next to the reactor and it’s powering on. If you see anything, hear anything, yell.” Jack warned as he ducked under a metallic band-like barrier, losing his view of the girl. “This shouldn’t take me long. When the ship starts to power off, you’ll know that I’m done.” He kneeled down and looked at her from under the barrier. “Kiss me.” He demanded.

He watched as she stepped closer to him, gingerly bending down with that small smile on her face. Right before their lips met, he grabbed the back of her neck and roughly took her mouth and was rewarded with a gasp.

He slipped his tongue between her lips to mimic their loving from earlier. He pushed his way in, sliding his tongue along hers then retreating; assaulting her until she was barely holding herself up, panting from the blast of passion. He made his kiss a wicked promise to her for later.

They came apart as seamlessly as they had come together. Jack watched as she took a step back and straighten her makeshift tunic. “You smell good.” He teased, unable to contain his grin. He could sense a blush spread over her skin.

“Stop smelling me.” She demanded, her voice pitched and indignant.

“Never.” He laughed, “How else would I know when you want me?”

“Maybe you could ask.” She stewed.

He shifted so he was fully facing her, still kneeling but spreading his legs apart, revealing his hard-on. “Do you want to fuck me, Allie?” He asked, laughing. “Because I sure as hell want to fuck you.”