Survival [III]

Leo rolled his eyes so hard he nearly strained something, leaning his elbow against the cold carbon armrest of the command throne.

Down on the mezzanine, Elena was still hyperventilating with rage.

Her knuckles were white where she gripped the fiberglass-lined seat cover, and she was glaring at the green glyph floating over her manicured fingers like she could execute it with pure pedigree-fueled spite.

Every few seconds, she shifted the cover and scratched at her chest without seeming to notice.

'Told you,' Leo thought. 'Fiberglass.'

"Yelling at the blue rectangle isn't going to turn you into an Admiral, Elena," Leo said, his voice flat and dry as it cut through the drone of the cooling fans. "The system doesn't take complaints, and it sure as hell doesn't care about your family's investment portfolio… Take a breath before you pop a blood vessel."

"Shut your filthy mouth, you peasant!" she snapped, her voice screeching against the corrugated steel bulkheads.

Her icy blue eyes flared with hysterical vitriol as a mottled crimson flush crawled down the slender column of her throat.

"Don't you dare speak down to me! You think because this malfunctioning scrap heap stuck you in that oversized chair, you're suddenly my better?! You're a stray! An opportunistic, vulgar little mechanic who probably rigged the simulator feeds back home! You belong in the bilge scraping grease, not lording over us like some petty dictator!"

Leo's jaw tightened.

The muscles along his temples jumped as he deliberately looked away, staring out through the thick blast-quartz canopy into the uncaring black.

'One of these days,' he thought with the bitter taste of bile rising beneath his tongue, 'I'm going to snap.'

Back on Earth, she'd had the Sterling name, an army of private attorneys, and a father whose political connections could squash a student's academic standing with an offhand remark over scotch at some exclusive country club.

But out here…?

Earth was gone… Ninety-eight percent of humanity had been chewed up and spat into the dark.

'Her family's probably dust by now… Their banks don't exist anymore and their private security contractors are drifting through the vacuum as frozen meat.'

Out here, there was no high society, no council seats, and no trust funds. More importantly, Leo held the master bio-clearance.

The ship's neural core was hardwired to his pulse. 

Every liter of recycled oxygen, every scrap of salvage, and every pressurized seal answered to him and him alone.

She hadn't realized it yet, blinded by all that inherited arrogance, but the hierarchy had flipped the exact second the light turned white.

'I don't even need to bark at her,' Leo thought. 'The void's going to break her pride piece by piece… I'll just let it do the teaching.'

He exhaled through his nose to steady his breathing and looked down at the rest of the crew platform.

"Alright… Enough screaming. The system ran a talent and class extraction on every single one of us. If we're going to keep this tin can from cracking open like an egg, I need to know what we're working with… What did everyone get?"

For a moment, the only sound was the hollow hiss of the dying oxygen scrubber.

Harper was the first to speak up, still hunkered behind her plastic shipping container.

She wiped a lock of messy dirty-blonde hair out of her eyes, her bare shoulders shivering against the draft as she tapped the dull bronze symbol hovering near her elbow.

"Mine's called Kinetic Tuning. It says it's a Vanguard-class combat talent… Boosts physical output, recoil dampening, and gives me an instinctive read on weapons and tubclass says Armory Technician." She offered a crooked strained grin toward the dais. "Guess if we find some guns, I'm the one pulling the trigger…"

"That's actually huge," Leo muttered, nodding with real relief. "We're going to need someone on the trigger sooner rather than later."

"Mine is Logistical Computer," Jin-Ah said next from behind her scorched service panel.

Her sharp face was pale, but her dark eyes were tracking lines of scrolling green script that only she could see.

"Specialist-class. Subclass, Systems Integrator… It increases my data-processing speed by forty percent and gives me passive insight into power-grid bottlenecks… I can manage the ship's energy routing without manually typing every command, provided the captain grants me console authorization."

"Granted the second we get the sub-stations booted," Leo said. "Camila?"

Camila held the yellow insulation foam tight over her bare bronze chest, her hazel eyes flicking nervously toward the panoramic window before she looked up at him.

"I got Biosphere Harmonizer, Leo… Subclass, Hydroponic Cultivator… The description says I can speed up the growth cycles of plants, purify contaminated water, and make edible nutrient paste out of raw biomass."

 She let out a breath that sounded half like a laugh and half like a sob. "I guess I'm making dinner if we ever find any dirt."

"Food and water," Leo murmured as his chest loosened another fraction. "That's vital… That leaves—"

"I awakened Tactical Cartography," Ms. Tachibana said smoothly, stepping forward on the lower tier of the mezzanine.

She kept the frayed yellow maintenance flag draped carefully across her front with goosebumps prickling her porcelain skin, but her tone had recovered a thin layer of the poise she used during lectures.

"Subclass, Astrogation Officer. It grants an innate awareness of stellar drift, gravity wells, and spatial anomalies within a two-hundred-kilometer radius… I can calculate jump coordinates and avoidance maneuvers without relying entirely on automated beacons."

Leo's eyes cut over to Elena.

She held his gaze for a long sour second, then looked away and spat the words out like they tasted rotten.

"...Mechanical Attunement… It's a support-class." Her lip curled. "It says I can sense structural faults and stress fractures in machinery by touch. Happy now?"

"Ecstatic," Leo said.

"Combat, systems, life-support farming, navigation, and..." Leo let the pause hang as her face twisted into a fresh scowl, "...maintenance. Attitude aside, everyone rolled something that keeps the hull together."

Then his gaze drifted past the central coolant manifold, settling on the far corner of the crew deck.

Chloe was still there.

She was curled into a trembling ball against the intake grate, her bare knees locked tight against her ribs and her knuckles white where she gripped her shins. 

Her dark bangs fell over her face like a curtain.

Unlike the others, who'd all engaged with their interfaces, Chloe hadn't moved an inch.

"Chloe," Leo called down gently, softening his voice so he wouldn't startle her. "You okay over there? What did the extraction give you?"

…No answer.

The girl's delicate shoulders just hitched in a silent shudder.

"Chloe?" Leo pressed, leaning forward over the edge of the armrest. "Come on, talk to me… We aren't going to make fun of it. Whatever it is, we need to know so we can figure out what to do."

"I... I can't..." Her voice was a fragile papery rasp, barely carrying over the hum of the vents.

"You can," Leo said, trying to project a calm he didn't feel. "Look around… We're all in the same mess. We're all stark naked, freezing, and stuck in an iron box. There's no judgment here so just look at the screen and read the title."

Slowly, Chloe lifted her chin.

Her skin, already fair back on Earth, had gone an unnatural translucent chalk-white, and the veins beneath her temples traced faint cerulean paths under the surface. 

Her dark hair was plastered down with cold sweat but what made Leo's spine stiffen was her mouth.

Her upper lip was trembling, pulled slightly back over her gums, revealing two sharp elongated canines that had pushed past her lower lip, needle-thin ivory points pressing against her chin.

"Chloe...?" Harper muttered as the playful bravado drained from her face. 

She leaned around her crate. "Your teeth… what's wrong with your face?"

"I... I didn't want this..." Chloe wept, hot tears cutting clean paths through the grime on her pale cheeks. "The screen... it called me a monster... it said..."

A crimson spark flared deep within her green eyes, washing the iris in a feverish blood-soaked scarlet.

Her small frame stopped shaking entirely, going rigid as an iron bar.

Leo's breath caught.

'Vampire...? A biological mutation class?!'

"Chloe, stay where you are!" Ms. Tachibana commanded, taking a reflexive step toward the girl, her knuckles whitening around her flag. "Breathe! Try to resist the—"

Chloe didn't hear her.

A guttural animal hiss ripped past her fangs, it was a sound with no humanity in it whatsoever.

HSSSSS!

Her pupils dilated until they swallowed the crimson irises, locking dead onto the only source of concentrated thrumming warmth on the elevated bridge.

…Leo.

"Wha… what the?!" Leo scrambled, his palms sliding on the leather of the throne.

She moved with terrifying speed.

There was no hesitation and no modesty, and no sign of the shy timid girl who'd spent the last eight months hiding behind knit sweaters in the back of Room 402.

Her pale slender body launched across the deck like a released steel spring as her bare feet slapped against the cold plates with a sickeningly swift cadence.

Tap-tap-tap-tap!

"Leo, look out!" Harper screamed, lunging to grab her, but her fingers only brushed air as Chloe cleared the central walkway in three impossible strides.

"Stay back!" Camila shrieked, backing into a junction box.

Elena gasped in horror, stumbling backward until her spine hit the reinforced partition. 

"What is that thing?! Kill it! Kill it!"

Chloe leaped straight for the raised captain's dais with her fingers hooked into claws and her jaw gaping wide, fangs glistening in the crimson emergency strobes.

Every instinct Leo had screamed at him to throw up his arms and brace for an impact that would tear his throat open.

He shut his eyes and ground his teeth together—

CLANK!

A heavy hiss echoed from the ceiling directly above the dais.

Before Chloe's hands could reach Leo's chest, a thick hydraulic cable dropped from a recessed maintenance track overhead. 

It was coiled with braided synthetic carbon and ended in an articulated three-pronged clamp.

Moving with blinding pre-programmed precision, the metal tendril snapped around Chloe's bare waist like an iron band and stopped her dead in mid-air.

SNAP!

"Ah—!"

The breath was knocked from her lungs in a sharp wheeze as she was hoisted two feet off the deck. 

Her bare legs kicked wildly at empty air while her heels drummed uselessly against the plating.

[Warning! Hostile bio-signature detected within command perimeter!]

[Threat restrained… Master Captain, you're welcome.]

The ship's synthetic voice rang out from the overhead speakers, lacking any sort of emotion.

Leo sat frozen with his chest heaving, staring at the thrashing girl suspended right in front of his knees.

Chloe was completely out of her mind.

Her head whipped from side to side as she hissed like a cornered feral cat, her claw-like nails scraping deep screaming gouges into the matte coating of the hydraulic arm. 

Her pale back arched violently, her hips twisting in a desperate struggle to break free… she was unconcerned that her bare body was twisting in plain view of everyone on the bridge.

"AI!" Leo gasped, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his forehead. "What the hell is this?! What happened to her?!"

[Query acknowledged, Master Captain.]

The voice came out low and resonant, vibrating through the dais.

[Diagnostic scan of Crew Unit: Chloe Ivanson complete.]

[Anomalous Awakening Detected!]

[Talent: Blood Sovereign (Dormant)]

[Grade: S-Rank (Bio-Metamorphic)]

[Status: Frenzy State… Cause: Catastrophic racial transition combined with severe caloric deficit.]

"Frenzy state?" Ms. Tachibana called out, clutching her flag to her chest as she reached the bottom of the dais stairs, her face pale with terror. "Is she going to die?!"

[Affirmative.]

The AI didn't even pause.

[Subject's biological core is burning cellular reserves at 400% of standard metabolic rate to fuel skeletal and dental restructuring.]

[Time until total cellular collapse: 4 minutes.]

"How do we stop it?!" Leo demanded, gripping the armrests so hard the carbon creaked. "Is there an antidote? A sedative?!"

[Negative. Medical stores: Empty.]

[Required: Immediate ingestion of fresh oxygenated mammalian blood to stabilize the newly formed blood-core.]

[Warning! Void Beast ichor contains lethal cosmic radiation and will cause instant cellular necrosis… Only uncontaminated blood from a human or terrestrial mammal is viable.]

'Uncontaminated blood from a human...'

Leo's heart dropped into his stomach. There were only seven living beings on this derelict piece of junk.

Six of them were women whose bodies were already shivering, dehydrated, and running on fumes.

And only one of them was a healthy broad-shouldered male with a higher blood volume.

'Me,' Leo thought, swallowing the lump in his throat. 'I'm the only damn option.'

He looked up at Chloe.

She was still thrashing against the cable with her breath coming in ragged whistling rasps. 

Drops of crimson foam were beading at the corners of her mouth as her capillaries started to burst under the strain of the transformation.

Her bare thighs twitched, and a sickening feverish heat radiated off her skin across the short distance between them.

If he didn't do something right now, she was going to rupture her own organs and die right in front of him.

"Damn it all," Leo grunted under his breath. "AI, release my wrists."

The clasps clicked open.

Clack!

He detached his neural link from the throne's interface, and the holographic screens drifted into standby.

Standing up on the cold steel dais, he took two slow deliberate steps backward into the open space between the captain's chair and the co-pilot's console.

"Leo, what are you doing?!" Harper yelled from below, her eyes widening in horror as she realized what he meant to do. "Are you insane?! She's not thinking! She'll rip your throat out!"

"If I don't feed her, she dies in three minutes, Harper!" Leo barked back without taking his eyes off the thrashing girl. "We don't have medical supplies, and I'm not letting someone choke on their own blood on day one!"

"Let her die!" Elena screeched from the bulkhead, her face twisted in revulsion. "She's a monster! A freak! If you let that creature touch you, you'll doom us all!"

"Shut your mouth, Elena!" Ms. Tachibana snapped, her educator's authority flaring through the panic.

Her dark eyes were full of worry as she looked up at Leo.

"Leo... please be careful. If your authority terminates, the ship destroys itself… You're carrying everyone's life."

"I know," Leo muttered with his jaw set like stone.

He looked up at the ceiling track.

"AI… Release her. Right now."

[Override confirmed. Executing command… For the record, this unit advised against it.]

The hydraulic clamp snapped open.

Clack!

The moment her bare feet touched the deck, Chloe didn't even pause to find her footing.

With a feral desperate snarl, she launched herself through the air like a pouncing panther and slammed her entire body weight straight into Leo's chest.

THUD!