Aberrant

Chapter 5

A rearing, segmented body. A screaming face cast in metal.

Jinx stumbled back, almost dropping her scanner. Olsen and Rolli fell back with her, cursing. The whine of panic-induced tinnitus momentarily drowned all thought. Then her brain re-engaged.

"Don't raise your weapons," she ordered breathlessly.

More movement—high in the corridor. Multiple feet. Multiple life forms.

Their welcoming party had arrived.

And with it, the resonance of an approaching storm.

The electric hum in the corridor increased, crawling across her scalp. She had to fight to stop her heart rate going terminal as a weird pressure built at her temples and more images of death skipped through her mind; nasty, meaty ones she could not recall the origin of.

Gut going loose, she struggled against competing urges: to run or be ill. Instinct warred with knowledge. As adrenaline surged, she battled to remember that the crawling things in the dark with her—on the walls, on the roof—were rational beings, not mindless predators. Even the freakish thing perched on a panel mere metres from her, looking like a visual commentary on torment, was an intelligent being. The roaches had signed a treaty with five other sentient species. They were at the port because they needed assistance, not because they needed a human to snack on.

Even knowing that, she found herself calculating the time it would take to reach, open, and re-enter the airlock behind her.

Ten seconds max.

Way too long.

Olsen summed things up on a low breath: "Fuck."

The ghoulish exoskeleton hovering over them rotated its artificial eyes toward the officer. Jinx willed Olsen to stay still and quiet. The cyborg above them was a twisted mix of insectoid and humanoid morphology. A composite-plated abdomen hunkered between four multi-jointed legs, but the exskel's thorax mimicked a desiccated human torso. The archives in her mind gave her a name for it: an andropod. A rare Xykeree exoskeleton, first seen during the Arterus peace negotiations. It was believed the aliens had created the form to facilitate communication with anthropoid species like humans and their genetically engineered alterant offshoots.

Staring at it, Jinx decided she'd have preferred a bug exskel to liaise with. The andropod's earless humanoid skull was harshly metallic, a stark contrast to its light-absorbing body. Two clusters of sensors formed large eyes but sat too high to look human. Where a mouth of some sort should have been, an oval hole gaped, its purpose not immediately clear.

The overall effect was a screaming, silver mask.

Under it, two robotic forelimbs curled, their three-digit hands clasped, as if the creature within the tech pleaded or contemplated prayer. Those hands, that mask... They made Jinx's insides clutch, made her wonder what kind of expressions the Xykeree usually saw on human faces.

She chose not to follow that thought.

The andropod took a slow step down the wall, its movements a sly slide of lubricated mechanisms. Olsen jerked up his rifle, and Jinx had to move back and grab his arm to stop him doing something understandable but totally stupid. Rolli stood motionless, transfixed by the nightmare creeping towards him, his weapon aimed at the deck.

The andropod stepped down from the wall to stand little more than a metre away. Its attention, too, was clearly fixed.

On Olsen. On his quivering rifle.

Jinx tightened her hold on the officer's arm. The Xykeree's expression might have been a frozen mask, but it was easy enough to read. The alien inside the disturbing tech was assessing its human visitors and deciding how to greet them.