The nuclear mushroom cloud had slowly dissipated, but not before apparently igniting the layer of thin subsurface methane and oxygen permafrost that the complex had cracked for their own environmental needs. Now the former site of Umbrella Corps’ frankenfactory was the center of an expanding ring of spreading fire, shrouding an increasing portion of the planet in ashy smog.
Nanami wondered how far around the planet the conflagration would spread before it suffocated itself.
Nanami sighed and slumped into the back parts of the ship. The computer could handle things well enough on its own; right now she had other things to attend to. Fresh clothes(she wanted to replace the second shirt she’d lost today to acid), a shower(god, but she wanted to try to get CLEAN!), quality sack time(preferably without nightmares)-
She opened the hatch to the rear rooms to reveal, as her new senses were telling her, her new companions starting to twine around each other.
Sex Her hindbrain reminded her of another priority.
Ranma and Kodachi started at the interruption, even though surely their own connection and told them of Nanami’s approach. Reluctantly they broke their embrace(though their hands still remained clasped and their tails remained wrapped around each other), and looked at her.
Ah, young hybrids in love. Nanami thought, feeling the waves of desire wafting off the two.
“What now?” Kodachi asked the question, her features softening and becoming more human from the armored dark-skinned form she and Ranma had previously been battling in. Nanami couldn’t tell if it was a deliberate act or an instinctual powering-down.
Well, we have hot victory sex, Nanami thought, her hands starting to reach to tear off what remained of her bullet- and acid-ruined shirt, before shaking her head. Damn it, she was a biologist! She knew all about pheromones! Strength of character, strength of character! Get your mind back on target!
“Thanks,” She replied to the two others’ chemical invitation, “ but I’ll settle for a cold -Hold on.” Yes! There it was! That unmistakable scent! Enhanced senses, don’t mislead me!
With newly acquired predatory instincts, Nanami stalked her prey and homed in on it. Picking up on what she was after, Ranma and Kodachi trailed after the hunter, following her lead. Once she was certain she had it cornered, she pounced!
“Ah-ha! KNEW it had to be here!” Nanami’s hand streaked out and grabbed the refrigerator door, yanking it open, and basking in the heavenly light beaming from within. “Executive transport. Figured the bigwigs HAD to have some good eats tucked away on it somewhere! Wow! Bottled beer! Not canned! Auslander Golden Brau!” Nanami flourished her kill in triumph for all to see.
Savoring the moment and the brand, but not caring about the niceties of civilized drinking, Nanami eschewed searching for a bottle opener and simply bit the cap off, trusting in her mutant teeth to get the job done.
(CHOMP*Pfstumpfr!*ptui!) “Cheers.” She toasted.
Ah! Alcoholic bliss!
Ranma’s stomach gave a gurgling roar as he breathed in the aromas wafting from the food locker, and stared into it like a pilgrim gazing on the Promised Land. Kodachi caught it too and licked her lips. Sex could wait; mutant metabolism hadn’t been fed in nearly a whole day, perhaps longer. The spike of hunger through their shared network was intense, to say the least.
“Be my guests.” Nanami graciously allowed and stepped aside as the rest of her pack moved in and started to thoroughly ransack the late Damon Carthy’s icebox. Ranma was quickly happily devouring a whole rack of ribs, either not noticing or not caring that he had also eaten the bones in it as well. Kodachi, rather more cultured, demolished an entire wheel of Brie, before moving on to assault a selection of cold cuts. Nanami risked losing a hand and rescued a shank of meat from the feeding frenzy, alternating her drinking and eating.
Once the sounds of stone age slobbering and gobbling had died down somewhat inside the galley of the starship, the three took a breather, their hunger(for food at least) satisfied, their bellies full, and some of the excitement of the day bled away. Nanami looked down at her visibly distended stomach, and gave a ladylike belch.
Maybe we should worry about rationing if this is a typical feed for metabolisms like ours. Check in on that later.She made a note to herself.
“Before we get on to other things, or whatever you were planning on doing, we gotta decide what to do next.”
“You promised you’d tell us what was done to us.” Ranma reminded. “We got the time now. Start talking.”
“Well, seeing as we aren’t in mortal fear for our lives right now, I could. Where to begin?”
“From the start.” Kodachi interjected.
“Whow girl...that could take a while.”
“We aren’t going anywhere.”
Human advancement, overcrowded Earth, expansion into space, the invention of star drives, the resulting diaspora, the rise and fall of corporate states and their colonial empires, the reciprocal fall and rise of nationalist movements, discovery of alien life, the discovery that it never was friendly, border wars, brush wars, corporate wars, xeno wars.
The Bugs; xenomorphs, Aliens; the fatal infatuation that Humanity seemed to have with the organic killing machines, the theories that they were either an naturally evolved ‘super predator’ or deliberately engineered destroyers of life.
“’Cockroaches of space’, I call ‘em! Every time we think we’ve killed them for good, some blockhead figures he can make a profit off them, by taming them or trying to get something out of them, finds a way to bring them back, and then loses control of them! Oh, the authorities come in and burn them out, but not before a lot of people get killed in the process, not that anybody learns from the incident; some damn fool thinks he can do a better job of containing the Bugs and it all starts all over again! Of course, it doesn’t help that the Hunters keep spreading the damn things!”
“The Hunters?” Ranma asked, already having suspicions.
“The Yautja. We also call them Predators.” Nanami emphasized the ‘P’ in her pronunciation, “They’re big into proving themselves top of their evolution by hunting anything anything else. They seem to like stocking worlds with the Bugs for the challenge.”
“Ah.” Ranma and Kodachi remembered the solitary being they’d encountered in the halls of the Repository. They also recalled, with a chill, their first encounter with the ‘Bugs’.
Nanami caught the shiver. “Yeah, they were on Earth, doing their thing, before we began expanding out into space. That’s where yo- your original selves- likely got infected with the Bugs. The original yous died in the encounter, the government at the time hushed up the incident and buried the evidence, but kept the records, and cell samples. Century or so later, we encounter the Bugs when they ate a freighter crew and a colony of ours, we run into the Hunters, and some corporate slimebag remembers hearing rumors about encounters with monsters way back when, starts digging, and finds the old files.”
Ranma and Kodachi grew noticeably tense; the history was hitting close to home now.
Nanami continued on, “The Bugs do more than just incubate in their hosts; there’s an exchange of genetic material- the Bugs get DNA to help them adapt to their new surroundings and prey, but the host also gets changed. Not that it does them any good, though, because the Bugs invariably kill their hosts hatching out. From what I heard, Carthy and his scumbags would take your genes out of storage, tamper with them to get some desired change, clone you up, remove the incubating drones formed from the DNA passed to you in the original infection, see what the result of the changes to both the new drones and the cloned you was, then dispose of the clones.” Nanami shuddered. She’d been kept away from the cloning end of things and had been sequestered away to work on pure Bug biology, being told only that the Bugs were obtained from ‘cloned Human tissue cultures’, but she’d heard stories through what passed for an in-shop grapevine.
“So, we’re part...them.” Kodachi said distastefully.
“And so am I. Ironic, no? I went into science to study ways to kill the Bugs, and now I’m part Bug myself. But you and I are also part a lot of other things too; the Company was testing a lot of other things as well and they thought they’d mix them up a bit to see what happened. Whatever part of Bug is in us, it’s a small part in among a lot of other things, including very human consciousness, that has to count for SOMETHING.” Nanami emphasized they were all in the same boat.
“All I know is that I feel human, I know who I am, and I know who Kodachi is, and what she is to me.” Ranma declared, earning a look of affection from the hybrid girl. “And you’re human too.” He finished, looking at Nanami.
“Well, thanks.” Nanami saluted him with her beer bottle before taking another swig.
Kodachi still looked uncomfortable. “Do you suppose any others of those Bugs may have survived? I-I felt them before, but I am uncertain about some of the things I’ve been feeling since, since we ‘awoke’.”
Ranma nodded. “You seem to know more about them than we do, and maybe sense them. I can tell.”
“I don’t feel anything now, aside from you two. Then again, I couldn’t sense you before, but that was before I got my genetic makeover, and the other parts they grafted into you must have been masking you from my Talent. Then afterwards I could sense the Bugs a whole lot clearer. No, the ones outside the ship I could feel falling off, and then I felt them die in the backblast from the engines.” Lord, but frying Bug feels glorious! “Nanami-sama, do you think anybody else made it out alive?”
“I don’t know if there are any other survivors. There was more than just the shuttles down there; there were escape pods as well. It’s also possible that the facility had an emergency beacon, some way to let the Corporation know something had happened to their little shop of horrors. They might send somebody out to investigate; if so, we don’t wanna run into them, or we’ll be back to square one.
We could run straight to the authorities, but which ones? The corpostates might not have the power they used to, but they’re still pretty damn influential. We turn to the wrong authorities, we could find ourselves stonewalled, turned over to the corporates anyways, and set up for vivisection.”
“No thanks.” Ranma flatly refused.
“Amen to that. Likewise, I don’t want to give up our little secret just yet and reveal the three of us ain’t exactly human anymo--”
“Please, Nanami-san, I feel human and I will not be regarded as a ‘freak’.” Kodachi reminded her.
“BIOLOGICALLY human,” Nanami corrected, forging on; “People just won’t understand. It’s a hostile universe after all, and people can get pretty xenophobic. That could easily be turned against us if it came down to a matter of credibility.”
“So, we don’t go to the cops directly.” Ranma nodded. He had enough memories of evading the local authorities while training with his father, and of the absence of the law in Nerima to have no great loyalty to the idea of trusting the police or government. “What other options?” “I suspect, Nanami-sama, it would be suicidal to take on the company you worked for directly. So, what other options?”
“Damn straight it would be suicide. As for other courses? We can head for a colony where we can blend in, and where I can try to find a way to leak the information we got to somebody I can trust.”
“You know of such people who can be trusted?”
“I have a few ideas. At least one, though he may be a little difficult to get ahold of. He’s in a rather similar situation to ourselves.”
“He’s an alien hybrid clone?”
“Ha-ha! No, he’s on the run.”
“Why can’t we head for Earth?”
“Thinking of getting back to the old ancestral homestead? No, Ranma, that’s not a good idea. I doubt you’d recognize your old stomping grounds. Also, since some clusterscrew almost infected Earth with the Bugs a few years back, the authorities have been VERY intense about about any incoming traffic. The corporates are still pretty thick around Old Earth, and they tend to get antsy about their own security. No, until we’re sure we’re not going to get wasted by Traffic Control or a corporate ambush, running for Earth is not an option---Damn, I’m starting to sound like Makato! I mean, I just used to WORK for a corporation, and now I’m talking like one of his radicals! That’s it, I need sleep!”
“So, we going someplace, or just drifting around more?” Ranma prompted.
“We set course for a colony world. Someplace we can tap into the public news nets and get some idea of whether there’s any fallout from today. I’ve been out of touch with the rest of the human universe too long in that place getting the mushroom treatment I don’t know for certain what’s going on. Once we do, I’ll have a better idea how we should proceed. I really want to get what evidence we have, and the T-Virus vaccine, to somebody who can use them to do some serious hurt to Umbrella and anybody else they were working with.”
“Great. Well, it’s better than nothing, and I could do with some peace and quiet for now. So this ship just flies itself and we wait?” Ranma sighed as he leaned back. Nanami noted that at some point his skin had reverted to a softer, more human tone and color, his tail had retracted, and his eyes had shifted from black to a startling blue. Again, she wondered if it was deliberate for her benefit or an instinctual shifting from a heightened alert state.
“ You can wait, entertain yourselves, or study what passes for a library on this ship, and try to learn more about this screwed-up world you’re both stuck in. I suspect, though, Carthy’s tastes in reading material probably run to blackmail-drama and snuff-porn. Me? I’m going to find the shower on this thing and try to scrape what’s left of that hellhole off me, then I’m going to find out what sort of beds corporates sleep on between the stars.”
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(Posted Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:36)
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