Aberrant

Chapter 2

The beep of a single alarm.

Shrill. Incessant. Deliberately offensive.

Impossible to ignore.

Breaking the surface of her dream, Jinsin Koel came to gasping. She dragged in chilled air—a sanitised mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and way too little water vapour. The drone of air scrubbers and the noise from the nearby budget laundry poured into her skull, driving back the last of her nightmare.

"Shit." She hauled herself half upright, T-shirt damp on her spine, sheets in a heap beside her bunk. The panic of her dream—fire, sirens, whirling lights—replayed, until the beeping that had woken her drilled back into her consciousness.

She turned to the nearby tech-littered desk to backhand her discarded wrist com—only to freeze part way into the assault.

It wasn't her usual hellish alarm sounding.

Incoming call.

"You are kidding me." She snatched up the device; got an eye-load of herself in the dimmed screen. Bloodshot brown eyes outlined in yesterday's ink. A blue-streaked tuft of black hair standing upright and a clump plastered to her forehead. Her face looked like the rear end of a zormet bug: pasty and moist. Seeing the caller ID, she decided her supervisor could just frigging deal with it.

It was her first day off in sixteen days. Why the hell was Demtong calling her?

"What?" She ditched diplomacy; she was off-duty no matter what. Despite her best efforts—a dozen shots of synth tequila in some trance-club dive—she hadn't achieved dreamless oblivion that past night, just more pain. Her eyes felt like they'd been left out in the planet's arsehole sun for a week. Her throat was as desiccated as the landscape outside Tirus 7's post-war dump of a spaceport.

Cez Demtong's florid face appeared onscreen. His brassy hair stood on end, as if he'd been pulling at it since waking. His cat-like eyes bulged out of his round skull, implants from a feline-human alterant. Retirement gifts from his past job as an Enforcement officer, along with the old laser burns puckering each temple. "You're on duty. Report immediately to Dock 12."

"Yeah, like that's happening. Droe's on call today."

"Four words, Koel: Xykeree goddamn battle barge."

Jinx jerked up straight, fumbling her com. "Roaches?" Her stomach rolled, no after effect of backworld liquor. "Tell me you're joking."

"Legal has just approved landing under some damn humanitarian code. The ship's damaged, needs immediate repair. One condition of safe harbour is a customs inspection. I need you, Jinx, not that zork-snorting prick Droe."

"Humanitarian code? Dem, those cyborg cockroaches butchered billions. Their fleet nearly ended humanity. Screw Legal. Let the bugs float away in their barge and die."

"Formation War's been over fifty years, kid, and the long-range coms are down, have been for a year, so we can't get a read on this from upper management or Coalition military heads. We're fucked, running blind on standard protocols. That means, until we're told otherwise, those aliens are to be considered ordinary space-faring folk just like you and me."

"If we were flesh-eating psychopaths."

"Best get that shit out of your system now, CI. You'll be boarding their vessel in twenty minutes."

"Jee-zus!" She punched off the connection; dove into the carnage of her room to hunt down her entire customs inspector uniform, not just the token pit-stained shirt she'd been fobbing her supervisors off with for the past two years. Her job was routine crap most days, an endless line of try-it-on morons, cargo holds, and illegal tech and pharma. But verbal abuse and falsified shipping documents would be the least of anyone's problems today. A Xykeree battle barge? What the hell?