“Eh. It’s probably a trap.” Jayce shrugged.
Dommik leaned back and checked his wrist-con. No response from his friend or Gunner.Watch your bloody, rusted asses,he thought to himself as he breathed in the second-hand aroma. Jayce offered a suck of his cigar, Dommik took it and breathed the fumes in. His mouth filled with its heat, but his body began to destroy the carcinogens. Once the tingles started, he let it out. He handed the cigar back to Jayce.
“I should check on him.”
“Eh.”
Cyborgs filtered in and out of the lounge, most sat alone, some were in pairs, talking. There were less than a dozen total. Dommik surveyed the scene and nodded at those who surveyed back. His console buzzed and a message appeared. It was from Bin-One saying his ship received a message.
He connected his wrist-con back up to his ship’s servers and scanned the database and comm files, thinking Stryker or Gunner was blocked from his personal, internal server.
It wasn’t them. Dommik felt his metal pieces pull apart, demanding he shift.Calm down.
Kat was in medical.
He teeth descended again and he was at Jayce’s throat in the next instant. The sharp points like needles waiting to plunge into flesh and bone;. through metal and electricity. He tore his head back, pulling on the man’s spiked hair.
“You didn’t tell me Kat was in medical,” he growled from his throat, venom at the ready, wanting release.
“Thought you knew,” Jayce said calmly, smoke escaping his lips. “Doctor sent the message before I found you.” The poison dripped from several of Dommik’s teeth and trickled down the other Cyborg’s neck. Jayce held inhumanly still as he was locked within a centimeter of agonizing pain. No one stopped the scene from happening.
What’s wrong with me?Dommik thought.
He released the Cyborg and stormed out of the lounge.
Chapter Nine:
---
Kat was silent as the medical tube ran over her body with lights and a series of mists that dried instantly on her skin. Dr. Cagley had had her change into a thin, tied back gown, as the full-body physical took place. She couldn’t wait for the results or for her heart to stop racing.
She had told the doctor all about her parents, her upbringing, and her grandmother. Before the conversation had come to a close, she was half-way through a body exam. Being poked and prodded and asked numerous health questions.
‘How long have you been in space?’
‘Are you on any medications?’
‘Have you had sex recently?’Shehadthought about sex recently but she didn’t say that. In fact, she thought about it a lot. The dangerous appeal of her boss left her panting in bed at night.
There was something dark and fulfilling about being trapped in her small section of the ship, being denied access to nearly everything, and being visited by him on occasion.
It brought back the weird nostalgia of her childhood with eroticism. He was a becoming a bruise that wouldn’t heal and she couldn’t stop pressing her finger into it to test the pain.
Her eyes wandered around the medical room, it was pristine, and symmetrical in everything except the sparsely placed decorations and mundane prints on the walls. It warped her reality and she had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t on Earth. There was one oddity to the room and that was a picture of a young girl with long light brown hair.Her daughter.Kat returned her attention to the doctor.
The Cyborg woman, who didn’t look a day over twenty, stood at her side reading a screen Kat couldn’t see.
Shivers ran up her body. She blinked hard once and tried to relax only to be pulled from the stasis immediately.
“You’re perfectly healthy.”
Kat’s eyes sprang open and the tube lifted up to release her. “I am?”
“Yep, I don’t see any abnormalities or any sign of the parasite showing itself,” Cagley answered.
She leaned forward and dropped her feet off the table. “So, you can’t tell me whether or not I have it?”
Cagley sat down and faced her. “No, I can’t, and while the machine was running I was looking up this parasite. What I can tell you is that it has never remained dormant for this long and every case associated with it had one thing in common, each subject had eaten the Nargeo plant, a species of plant that relies on outside life to grow. A parasite in its own right, a weed. It no longer exists on Gliese but it remains in private collections for researchers and scientists. If your grandmother had this parasite, she would be the first case since your parent’s generation. Which, to be honest, is highly unlikely.”
