Chapter 2:
Tara had woken in a tiny stinking sleep chamber, and to the sounds of sex. It had taken her all of three seconds to know what had happened to her and about fifteen for her to get the bonds holding her undone. The creature leaning over her, a cup of some putrid brew in its hand and wearing a grin that had showed rotting teeth and diseased gums, had been startled by her sudden awakening and even more surprised by her being able to break out of the restraints.
She’d killed it, of course. She’d known, instinct had told her, that whatever was in that cup it wasn’t good and so she had grabbed it by its scrawny neck and forced the entire contents down its throat.
What had happened next had horrified her. The thing had begun to seizure and kick, and then it died, but not easily. All around her, from other chambers, came wails of despair and sorrow, screams of agony, and the loud rhythmic slaps and groans of sex. The smell had been overwhelming, and she had run because she had not known what else to do.
Where the hell was she?
Wherever it was, it was hell.
The streets were disgusting and stinking. The beings standing under dim lights, kicking away the odd rat and some kind of snake, with a telling ease terrified her. That they were so used to doing that…and the other things that she saw them doing, made her sick. She’d stumbled past what looked like a shootout, and she had narrowly escaped being shot to death with a laser that had bounced off the dripping stone of the world around her.
She ran up in an alley, too scared to do anything more than stand there and try to get her breath back. Her feet, bare and slicked with the filth and grease, stilled and she leaned against a wall, keeping her eyes peeled for snakes and rats.
Her mind had closed down—everything but the need to run, to get away—and had kept her from thinking too much, but now she needed to think, to try to figure out where she was and how to get out of there.
Get home.
Oh God, she had to get home!
Panic hit, sweeping away everything before it. Tara could remember nothing beyond that romantic dinner that she had been enjoying with her fiancé, Jack, on the pleasure planet, Orbital.
She had wanted to go; she could remember that. Pleasure planets were incredibly expensive, and she had winced at the cost even as she had been thrilled by Jack having planned such a special thing for the two of them. She knew that it was completely out of character for him as well; Jack was constantly concerned with how many credits they had and still needed in order to have any kind of life on their home planet of Newport.
They lived in Newport City, the first colonized section of the planet. Newport still had vast lands, particularly toward the Western rim of the planet, but most of the colonization and civilization remained in Newport City and in several larger satellite cities, all of which formed a sort of glistening horseshoe shape around the massive glacier-fed lake filled with the sparkling clean water that made the planet so desirable.
Newport had been claimed by the Federation for its under-officers many centuries before. As a result, many of its inhabitants either were in the service of the Federation or were employed in many of its civilian operations.
Her job, as a common record-keeper, had not paid very well. Jack was an oversight manager, and his job required many hours of tedious and boring choosing one of old records, some of them still on long-obsolete systems, in order to ensure that the Federation’s financial health was consistently good.
Her job was even more boring. Her job was simply to log the dead on outlying planets, plugging their life and death records into broader mainframes in order to prevent identity fraud, which was rampant throughout the universe. It was a job that she had been doing since she had turned sixteen, the typical age in which a citizen of Newport who was not well off enough to afford to pay for university, or bright enough for the Federation to give them free education, went to work.
Tara’s parents, before their retirements and then their deaths, had likewise been clerks and record-keepers. Jack’s father was a retired Federation under-officer with little rank or credit pension but who had been given a very nice and solid house for his service—a house that was right in the center of Newport’s bustling downtown section.
Downtown Newport contained all of the amenities and excitement of the city itself and Tara, who had grown up in one of the small villages inhabited by those who worked within the city but could not afford its pricey rents or home prices, had always wanted to live there.
The house owned by Jack’s father and mother had, in addition to a small and well-tended lawn behind it, a lovely former gardening shed that Jack had converted into a small one-bedroom dwelling. She had moved in with him there, not even minding that the place was small and cramped or that it was impossible to actually prepare meals within the building due to its poor ventilation.
She loved living so close to everything and living in the city. She loved Jack and their small and sometimes inconvenient but incredibly wonderful home.
The trip to Orbital—she couldn’t remember now, as she stood shivering in the stinking alley, why they had decided to go at all. She could remember discussing it with him, sitting over a cup of brewed mock-tea in a small café that specialized in that drink and in whiffs of pure oxygen. Both of those things were incredibly expensive too, and it was a pleasure they indulged in only a single time a month and long after the fashionable crowd had gone home to their lofts. The café tended to mark down prices right before closing, but Jack had always said the tea was the same no matter what time of evening they drank it. It wasn’t, of course. It was brewed strong and bracing early on and the more it was served, the more it was watered down, but Jack being by her side, and their plans to save their credits to buy a place of their own, made her overlook that small fact.
She’d protested going to Orbital, of course. The cost had been exorbitant, and she had been terrified that it would cost them not just those credits, but the time that it would take to re-accrue those credits again. Part of her had known that they could not live in that tiny little building forever and she longed, she truly did, to have one of the stunning loft-style apartments in the sky-scraping buildings that towered over the street upon which the café sat.
What on earth had happened to her on Orbital?
Damned if she knew.
Her memory seemed to stop somewhere between the sweet wine that Jack had poured into her glass and her first bite of some delicacy whose name she could not recall and whose taste had been oddly acidic and slightly alkaline.
Just as she thought she was safe and that she had a minute to breathe and to figure out what was happening, she saw it.
It was a human, or it had been at one time. As it came closer, revulsion began in the back of her throat. She’d heard of humans who had had their bodies deformed and mutated by the pressures of space and planets not their own. Newport had been so much like Old Earth in its atmosphere, gravity, and so on that the physiology of the humans there had remained largely unchanged from the physiology they had enjoyed upon their originating planet.
This human though…
Was it a human?
