Station 332: Cymic Parasite Breach Book Two Read online

  Station 332

  Cymic Parasite Breach Book Two

  Darcy Coates

  © 2016

  Cover © Deranged Doctor Designs

  CHAPTERS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  1

  “Diamonds, huh?” Charles watched the glittery sand-like shards rise in a flurry around their landing ship.

  “Yeah, they’re sure pretty,” Jay said from the seat opposite her.

  “I hate diamonds.”

  Jay twisted to look at her, a delighted grin spreading over his stubbled face. “What, really? A girl as pretty as you doesn’t like diamonds? You continue to surprise me, Charlie.”

  “Screw you,” she spat back. “They’re ugly, overpriced lumps of carbon. And please, keep calling me Charlie. I’d love an excuse to force-feed you your own genitals.”

  Jay was wise enough not to retort, though his grin widened further, exposing more of his large white teeth. Horse’s teeth, Charles thought to herself as she flashed him her middle finger.

  Their ship hit the swirling surface, its landing struts digging deep into the bed of clear dust. The engines powered down, and Charles unhooked her safety belt, stood up, and stretched with a relieved sigh. The moon had made for a difficult landing, and her muscles were sore from being held in the seat for two hours.

  The door leading to the pilot’s quarters opened, and Robin jumped out, her face looking even more haggard than normal. She tied her steel-grey hair in a short ponytail as she glanced between her two team members. “Suit up. We’re going to do this job quick, okay? Get in, and get out. If they ask us to stay for tea, you have my permission to punch their faces.”

  Charles laughed as she pulled her suit out of the overhead compartment and started shimmying into it. She’d first met Commander Robin an hour before boarding their ship, and she thought it was a damn shame she hadn’t known her longer. The older woman hated her job with an intensity that Charles could only respect.

  They were on a routine response mission. The station they were visiting, Station 332, had sent a distress signal nearly a week prior. A week stuck with Jay and Robin on the cramped ship had sent Charles half insane—and she certainly wasn’t looking forward to the trip back—but she enjoyed visiting different stations, even if the moon’s surface was made out of stupid diamonds.

  “Okay,” Robin said, checking their suits’ signals on her monitor, “you guys know the drill. Play it cautious. If you need to use your weapons, keep their safety locks on, yadda, yadda, yadda. Let’s get this over with.”

  They sealed their helmets in place then crowded into the ship’s tiny airlock. Jay gave Charles’s butt a playful slap, and she jabbed her elbow into his stomach in response, even though both of their suits were too heavily padded for either of them to feel much. Charles couldn’t see it through the tinted helmet, but she could easily imagine Robin’s eye roll as the older woman began stabbing at the buttons on the console to release the airlock and open the outer doors.

  They spilled out into the powdery diamonds. Charles sank up to her knees and wobbled, trying to keep her balance in the shifting surface.

  “It’s like snow!” Jay’s voice came through her helmet’s communication unit. He sounded delighted, and Charles glanced behind herself to see him flat on his back, swinging his arms and legs to make a snow angel.

  “Get up, ass,” Robin snapped. She was already five paces ahead of them, stomping towards a large, dark shape a dozen meters away. “If you slow me down, I’ll be delighted to ditch you here.”

  Charles raised her eyebrows at Jay then jogged after her leader. The diamonds were dense, and by the time they’d reached the front doors of Station 332, they were both panting.

  “Why haven’t they opened them already?” Robin groused. She pressed the flashing red light beside the doors, requesting entrance. They waited in silence, but the light didn’t turn green, and the doors didn’t open.

  “They know we’re here, right?” Charles asked.

  “I sent an alert when we were an hour out. They damn well better not have fallen asleep.”

  Jay finally caught up to them, stray diamonds falling off his suit. He glanced at the two women then at the door. “Want me to manually open it?”

  “No, I think I’d rather stand here for a few hours first,” Robin said, her voice dripping with scorn. “Idiot.”

  Jay chuckled and pulled a tiny square kit out of one of his suit’s pouches. He extracted a screwdriver and began working the top off the grey access box.

  They often didn’t know what sort of situation they were responding to. Central’s communication system was frustratingly crude. It used localised wormholes and refracted light to send messages across light years in a matter of minutes, but that limited messages to a very small selection of presets: supplies low, assessment requested, and emergency assistance required.

  Supplies low meant exactly what it sounded like: the station’s crew was going to run out of food, water, oxygen, or mechanical supplies before the scheduled bi-monthly restocking. In response to this message, one of the refuelling ships would be dispatched to drop off whatever they needed.

  Assessment requested was used when one of the crew was requesting a transfer or if the station was deteriorating beyond what the assigned team could repair and they wanted approval for a renovation. Two council delegates would be sent to assess and approve those requests.

  Emergency assistance required was the least-frequently used signal, but it was also the most difficult to prepare for. It could mean almost anything: one of the crew had been injured, a lifeform beyond what the assigned team could handle had landed on the planet after hitching a ride on an asteroid or space junk, one of the crew members had gone insane from the solitude, or any other dangerous problem that the crew needed outside help to deal with.

  Normally, Central tried to send highly skilled and efficient teams who had a history of working well together to respond to emergency assistance requests, but Charles suspected Central had been scraping the bottom of the barrel when they’d dispatched her. An abnormally high number of assistance requests had come in during the previous week, and all of the reliable response teams were already halfway across the known system.

  Charles had never worked with her companions before, but she’d been told Jay was their mechanic—as she watched him fumble to remove the access box’s protective cover, she had to wonder just how much experience he had. Robin was their pilot, leader, and medic. Charles had a background in defence, so she supposed Central had sent her as a fighter, even though she’d had only twelve weeks of active duty before being reassigned. The team was far from ideal.

  The box’s lid popped off, exposing a mess of multicoloured wires and circuits. Jay began tracing one of the black wires, gave up on it partway along, and tugged on a red wire instead.

  “Any time this decade will be fine,” Robin said.

  “Yeah, yeah, calm down, Princess,” Jay said fondly. “This part can’t be rushed, but feel free to heckle me into electrocuting myself if it makes you feel better.”

  Jay finished tracing one of the green wires and pulled its end out of the socket. He then plugged it into the vacant gap next to it, and the thick metal doors slid aside with a quiet whoosh.

  “You’re welcome,” he said as the women filed past him and into the station’s airlock.

  The small room had only two doors: one leading to the outside and one that would grant them access to the station. Shelves to their left held the equipment the station’s team needed to maintain their moon, and a large plexiglass window would have let
them see into the control room if the station lights had been on.

  “Ha, you were right. They fell asleep,” Charles said.

  Jay had closed the doors behind them and was already working on the panel beside the interior doors. Without a reply, Robin stepped up to the plexiglass window and pressed her helmet against it.

  Charles shifted uneasily as she waited. With the exterior doors closed, the only available light came from the backup lamp set in the wall behind her. It cast a strange greenish glow over the room. The more she thought about it, the more their situation unsettled her. Though it wasn’t unheard of for a station’s crew to sync their sleep schedules, it was against protocol… not that every station followed protocol, of course. But the station’s team would have known when to expect their response crew, and she would have thought at least someone could have waited up for them.

  “Airlock pressurising,” Jay’s voice crackled in her ear. Charles heard a quiet hissing as the moon’s toxic atmosphere was pumped out and replaced with oxygen. Robin still hadn’t moved from the window.

  “Aaaaand… done.”

  Charles and Jay removed their helmets, placed them on an empty shelf, and unzipped the restrictive space suits. Robin finally pulled back from the window and took off her own helmet.

  “Something up?” Charles asked.

  “Turn your guns on,” she said.

  2

  Jay and Charles glanced at each other. They grabbed for the small handguns tethered to their suits and pressed the power buttons.

  “Should we open the door?” Jay asked as Robin hung up her suit. The older woman’s creased face looked far more alert than Charles had ever seen it. Robin nodded, Jay re-plugged a cable, and the interior doors parted, letting them into the control station.

  Charles did a double take. Part of the control panel had been smashed; the metal was dented inwards, and its little buttons and light covers bugged out of their holes. The chair was overturned, and something dark was scuffed over the tile floor. Charles stepped in front of her team and raised her gun. The hallway beyond the control centre was dark and empty, and the only thing she could hear was her companions’ breaths.

  “We need to search the building,” Robin said, her voice a barely audible whisper. “We’ll start with the sleeping quarters.”

  Charles nodded, led them through the open doorway into the hall, then turned left. Virtually every station was arranged in the same format: the kitchen and living areas were to the right, the work areas could be found through a hallway straight ahead, and turning left would take them to the sleeping quarters and bathroom.

  Charles pressed the hall’s light switch, but the ceiling lamps stayed dead. Either the power had cut out, or the lights were broken. As she heard plexiglass shards crunch under her boots, she assumed it was the latter.

  Two dozen paces brought them to the bedroom door, which stood ajar. Charles nudged it open with her foot, slipped a hand inside, and pressed the light switch.

  One of the lights spluttered, flickered, then died in a shower of sparks, but the second bulb turned on, casting strange shadows over the scene before them. Three walls each held a plain bed with a storage unit fixed above it. Two of the beds were made, but the third had its blankets mussed. A large object lay in the middle of the room.

  Jay swore under his breath then gagged. Robin only paused for a second before pressing past Charles to approach the decomposing body.

  It was a man—Charles thought it was, anyway; the body was so bubbly and saggy, it was hard to be sure. He’d fallen on his back, his legs twisted awkwardly under him, arms flung out to the side. His remaining eye was milky white and bulged out of its socket, and his jaw hung open, almost as if it were dislocated, to display white teeth poking out of darkened gums. A pool of tar-black blood spread around his head like a toxic halo.

  Charles stood frozen as Robin knelt beside the man. Her twelve weeks of active duty had shown her only two deaths, and both of those had been quick and low-impact; they’d been followed by prompt funerals, a moment’s silence at that night’s dinner, then a return to regular work. She’d never once imagined what would have happened to the bodies if they hadn’t been cremated, and the corpse in front of her was both horrifying and riveting.

  “Oh—” Jay gagged again. “No—don’t touch it!”

  Robin pressed the tip of her gun to the side of the corpse’s head, raising a flap of sagging skin. Behind it was a clear hole that went through the head.

  “He was shot,” she said. Charles was surprised to hear the older woman’s voice was impassive. Robin lowered the gun and dipped its tip in the black stain around the man’s head. The liquid stuck to the metal barrel, and when she pulled it back, long strands of the black substance dribbled from it.

  “Is that blood?” Jay sounded nauseated.

  “It must be. He’s been dead for a while, probably since shortly after the distress signal.” Robin rose and wiped the tip of her gun on the floor. “That bed isn’t made. I’d guess he was attacked while he was sleeping.”

  “Jeeze,” Charles said, shaking free of her stupor.

  “Don’t let your guard down; we’ve still got to find the other two crew members.” Robin approached the room’s second door, which led to the bathroom. She twisted the handle, but the door didn’t open.

  “Want me to…?” Jay offered weakly, but Charles pushed past him, raised her right leg, and gave the door a hard kick. It burst open, hitting the wall and bouncing backwards as Charles turned on the light.

  A second body lay on the ground, propped against the sink. A blend of dried dark-red spots, white shards, and grey clumps was splattered across the shower’s glass door, and the corpse’s decaying hand clutched a gun.

  Jay swore again.

  “Two down,” Charles said weakly. “One to go.”

  Charles had intended to lighten the atmosphere, but Robin glared at her. The older woman approached the corpse and gave it a superficial examination.

  “What do you think happened?” Jay asked. He hadn’t entered the bathroom but stood well back, pressing his thumbs into the bridge of his nose.

  “This one went insane and shot his companions before finishing himself off,” Robin said, backing out of the room. “It happens.”

  Charles rubbed her tongue over the inside of her mouth. It tasted acidic. “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Once. Come on. We only need to confirm the third team member’s death, then we can get out of here and let Central send a purging crew.”

  Jay laughed weakly. “Purge? If it were me, I’d just write the whole station off.”

  “They can’t. This station links the communication systems between Cyrus and Mandola. They’ll need a new crew to maintain it.”

  “I doubt anyone will want to work here after this.”

  “They won’t know,” Robin sighed. “Central will move a new team in here and tell them the old crew was relocated. It happens all the time. There could have been a mass murder in your own station, and you wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Charles, stop gawking, or I’ll lock you in with the body.”

  She waved to her leader, not taking her eyes off the wall. “No, hey, come back here. He left a message.”

  “What?”

  Robin reentered the room, and Charles pointed. On the wall, written crudely in dark-brown blood, was the phrase, “They take our skin.”

  Charles rubbed at her arms. The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees.

  “Don’t try to read a deeper meaning into it,” Robin said, apparently guessing what was going through Charles’s mind. “He was crazy, so he wrote a love letter to his delusions before finishing himself. Come on. The quicker we go, the quicker we can get out of here.”

  Charles let Robin lead her out of the bathroom, past the corpse on the bedroom floor, and back into the hallway. Jay was waiting for them, his face a pasty pale grey. “Where next?”

  “Living
quarters,” Robin said. They retraced their steps down the hallway, past the damaged control room, and then through the door at the opposite end of the hall. When Charles pressed the switch, none of the lights came on.

  “Flare,” Robin instructed, and Charles fumbled one out of her suit’s satchels, pulled the tab, and held it above her head as it hissed and spat. The dingy red light threw writhing shadows around the overturned furniture, broken TV, and shattered glass bowls.

  Jay nudged Robin and Charles then pointed to the wall behind them, where a dark liquid had sprayed across the grey-green paint. Robin nodded. “Spread out. There’ll be a body here somewhere.”

  Charles went left, circling the overturned lounge chair, flare raised high in her left hand, gun in her right. Something had shredded the cushions, and their pale stuffing had spilt out like a puff of cotton candy. She’d just opened her mouth to point it out to Robin when a quiet snap from farther in the station startled her.

  The three of them froze, turning towards the source of the sound. “Was that a door?” Jay hissed, panic clear in his voice.

  Charles thought she could hear footsteps approaching them through the kitchen, whose closed door stood not far in front of her. A click to her left told her Robin had taken the safety off her gun.

  Charles tossed the flare behind her so that the light was at her back. The hairs on her arms stood on end, and her throat felt tight as she took a deep, stabilising breath. She pulled the door open with a snap.

  3

  A woman with dishevelled hair and a face whiter than the tiles behind her stood on the other side of the door. Her large brown eyes squinted against the harsh light.

  “You… came…” Her voice cracked, and suddenly, she was crying. Her body shook with heaving sobs.

  Charles grimaced and glanced at her companions for help; Jay started forward, gun already pocketed, his arms spread to envelop the woman, but Robin grabbed his shoulder and tugged him back. She hadn’t lowered her gun, and the shadows that caught in her creased face gave her an intense, manic look.