Ellan stood against the opposite wall, having just reconnected the plug to lock the interior doors. She smiled at Charles. It wasn’t a nice expression. “Hello, pretty.”
Charles didn’t hesitate to raise the gun and open fire. Five rounds hit Ellan squarely in the chest and face, but she didn’t even flinch. Instead, her grin widened as the front of her suit split open. Black tendrils poured out, moving at an incredible speed. They picked up one of the tall metal shelves and hurled it at Charles. She ducked, but the shelf’s corner grazed her shoulder, sending her tumbling to the ground with a gasp of pain.
Another black tendril darted towards her. Charles was too slow; a tendril snatched the gun out of her hand and flung it against the opposite wall with enough force to shatter it and leave a chip in the concrete.
“You shot my sisters,” Ellan hissed.
Charles felt her breath freeze in her chest as she watched the bullet holes in the other woman knit together. Skin fused to skin, leaving Ellan’s face smooth and blemish-free. “They were the firstborn of my colony, and you shot them.”
Charles struggled to keep her face impassive as she crawled backwards, placing as much distance as she could between herself and the inhuman woman. She’d been in a lot of stressful situations, including a couple of close calls during her short military service. Once, her teammate had fumbled and dropped a ticking grenade at her feet, and during another incident, her crew had forgotten about her and nearly left her on a remote planet with no oxygen. But for the first time, she was truly terrified. Not of what the monster was, but of what it could do to her.
It wants to steal my skin. Turn my body into its home, absorb my memories, mimic my mannerisms, use my face as a mask. Would it hurt? Would I feel it as its black tendrils wriggle through my flesh, melt into my organs, infiltrate my brain? How long would I be aware?
I’d rather die than find out.
Charles twisted to look over her shoulder, hoping to see something to defend herself with, but there were no guns within reach, just empty boxes and emergency oxygen units that had been scattered across the ground when the shelf hit her.
“I dealt with the others quickly,” Ellan continued, gliding towards Charles. The black tendrils sprouted out of every gap in her suit, writhing around the woman’s legs and carrying her across the room. “But now it’s just you and me, my pretty. And we’re going to have a little fun before I welcome you as my sister.”
Charles lunged for the external door, grabbing an empty box in her left hand and an oxygen unit in the right. The emergency oxygen units were palm-sized and designed to fit inside a mouth. They were meant for evacuations, where the user needed only a couple minutes of oxygen to get to a safe location. Charles pushed the unit into her mouth and bit down on the plastic wings to break the seal, and clean air filled her throat as she reached for the door.
Ellan was fast. The beast’s tendrils shot towards her, and Charles threw the empty box at them, praying that the surprise would buy her the precious seconds she needed to get outside.
If anything, it only enraged Ellan further. She growled—a deep, inhuman rumble—as she knocked the box aside and sent a cluster of tendrils at Charles.
She ducked as the black mass smashed into the door in front of her. The whine of twisting metal blended with Ellan’s roar as the thick metal door burst out of its bracket and ejected onto the sand-like surface of the moon.
Okay, I’ll take it. Charles bent double and barrelled through the opening. The tendrils grazed her back as she slipped under them, then she was free, dashing through the drifts of diamonds. The ship waited for her just two dozen paces away, its black highlights contrasting beautifully against the sparkling ground.
A cold, black tendril wrapped around her ankle. Charles tried to hop out of it, but it tightened and tugged, sending her collapsing into the hard ground. The creature wrenched her backwards and whipped through the air. Her back hit the station’s door with a thud that winded her so thoroughly that she thought she might never breathe again.
Ellan’s face appeared in front of her. The woman’s sweet, innocent visage had been twisted with malice and fury. The whites of her eyes had turned black, and her skin seemed to be cracking, showing tiny hints of the darkness that lived inside.
“Not so fast, my pretty.” Her voice was barely human anymore. It was mixed with a grating, guttural growl that made her almost unintelligible.
Charles blinked her watering eyes, struggling to draw breath through the emergency oxygen unit in her mouth. She thought she must have cracked it when she’d been grabbed; the air wasn’t flowing as freely as it should have. She could see something brightly coloured out of the corner of her eye and twisted to look at it.
Dozens of cables snaked through the external door’s access box, which Jay had never had the chance to close.
Feel free to heckle me into electrocuting myself…
It was a wild hope. She had no idea if Jay had been exaggerating about the electrocution, but it was her only chance. Charles stretched her arm out and grabbed a fistful of the cables, tugged them free of their sockets, and shoved their ends into Ellan’s face.
Thank goodness for non-conductive suits, Charles found herself thinking, her mind numbed with shock as Ellan bucked, writhed, and began splitting apart.
The human skin broke into odd sections, fraying at the edges, peeling away as the monster inside tried to free itself. The wail was deafening, and the smell that crept around the edges of the breathing unit made Charles gag. The black tendrils pinning her bubbled, their moist surface blistering and popping, and then the creature dropped Charles.
She hit the ground hard and skittered backwards, breathing as deeply as her aching ribs and damaged oxygen unit would let her. Ellan lay still on the sparkling diamonds, deformed so much that almost nothing human remained. Little puffs of dark steam rose from where the black flesh had burst.
She looked ridiculous. Ridiculous and repulsive and terrifying. An involuntary moan rose in Charles’s throat, but she smothered it. If she was reading the light hiss correctly, her oxygen unit was leaking air, and she didn’t have any breath to spare. There would be time enough to have a hysterical fit once she was inside a controlled environment.
Charles jogged towards the waiting spaceship, her boots sticking in the thick ground. Her oxygen unit ran out of air halfway there, so Charles held her breath. She was dizzy by the time she reached the door and pressed the button to open the airlock.
As she stood inside the tiny room, punching buttons to pressurise and filter the toxic air out, it was impossible not to remember how she’d stood there with her team members barely an hour before. Central had been desperately short on choices when it had cobbled them together, but Charles thought it had done a remarkable job, regardless. She wished she could have served with her partners for longer. She wished they’d met a kinder end.
A quiet beep announced that the airlock had pressurized. Charles spat out the empty oxygen unit and began gulping down the clean air before pressing another button to open the door leading to the main part of the ship.
The shuttle looked different now that it was empty, as though it were a room she remembered from a previous life, where she no longer belonged.
Robin had been their pilot, but Charles had also gone through the mandatory training for shuttle piloting. I might not be as graceful in the takeoff, she thought as she buckled herself into the pilot’s seat and powered the ship on, but I can do well enough to get off the hellish planet and back to Central.
The ship rose off the moon in a flurry of the tiny, sparkling diamonds. Charles leaned towards the ship’s window to watch the station disappear from view. She could still see Ellan’s fried body just outside the station’s door. Little wisps of black smoke rose from it like phantom tendrils stretching towards the sky.
Charles still had no idea what sort of creature had taken over her friends. It was clearly aggressive, intelligent, and extremely adept at mimicking its ho
st. She hated to think about it, but it seemed increasingly likely that the problem wasn’t isolated to Station 332. All of Central’s more experienced teams had been dispatched on their own emergency response missions by the time she’d been drafted to visit Station 332. What were the odds they’d encountered their own aliens?
“I hope they fared better than we did,” Charles muttered as she turned the ship towards the wormholes that would take her back to Central.
“Yes,” Robin murmured in her ear, and Charles grabbed for the gun strapped to her suit even as she realised bullets would do nothing but slow the monsters down. “Let’s hope.”
The End
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Station 332: Cymic Parasite Breach Book Two Page 3
