Page 4 of The First Omega Made (Scales and Tails of Fate #2)

Sarge

It was my best hope to do something in such a way as to destroy my corpse—finding out what I was would be an extra blow.

After all, he’d known me far longer than he’d known Serjio Vaskez.

Spelling be damned because Mater Terra’s Latin history had been all but wasted over the centuries.

Or maybe Serj was just illiterate… Either was possible.

The asteroid had a bit of atmosphere—mostly nitrogen and sulfur dioxide.

Because of this, Noel and Vil wore goggles, as it would sting their eyes and make it difficult to see.

Everything had a bit of a haze to it as we trudged over the low-gravity surface.

A surprising lack of dust kicked up as we walked, just slow falling pebbles.

For what it was worth, Gorm seemed to enjoy it as he bunny-hopped through the rubble, following Vil’s lead.

With feral grace, he forged ahead, body low to the ground in that ever-familiar pose he took on when his electrosensitive pores were actively searching for unfamiliar muscle movement and neurological signals.

At first glance, the surface we stood on had been rocky and crumbled, but as we neared what should have been an entrance, it became increasingly clear that the asteroid was the ship, a weaponized and colonized space rock. Add three space popes , and it’d be a fucking human paradise.

Gorm wielded a plasma cutter, holding it at the ready as Vil, all blue-scaled and dark-haired, crouched around, searching. His mask’s hose flitted idly, as if in a breeze—not that I could feel it. The suit I wore limited my sensations almost as much as my failing body did.

“Man, I feel like something should be out here, you know?” Gorm hopped over a rather large rock and used his tail for balance, enjoying the play far too much.

Noel, for his part, lifted his shirt and let his wings free, taking advantage of the present atmosphere enough to get some stretches in.

Watching the appendages fold out of his back unnerved a lot of people, but for a creature like myself, it was a metamorphosis, a fluid form that shifted into a true form.

I appreciated it. In fact, I found the display almost arousing. Almost. If my dick still worked, maybe.

Noel darted midair and came crashing down beside Vil in too fast of a maneuver, some unspoken mental hoodoo going on between the two.

Vil’s tail flicked, Noel’s stroked his with a slither, and they nodded.

Vil took off. Whatever Noel saw was likely something Vil needed to confirm.

Noel had not been around in a few hundred solar rotations.

Gorm, for his part, made his way to a rock formation and kicked around at the surface of it, eyes trained on every crevice until he aimed his plasma cutter and struck.

His first shot fizzled out, and a second left molten rock and smoke. The third? Rocks tumbled and liquid metal spat back at him as a reward for his tenacity. “If you can’t find a hole, make one!”

Merriel snorted in our headsets. “ Nice. ”

“Keep sassing, bro. I’ll make you a hole and totally fuck it.” Gorm sawed at the aforementioned weak spot and cackled.

“Where would one fuck a ship? I don’t even have a fuel port.

” Merriel had a matter station where the very occasional transitional matter rod fit into place.

Its degradation fueled the ship and was an antiquated system—but remarkably efficient when well maintained.

The systems were notoriously fickle, and Gorm was a genius when it came to ours.

“In the exhaust pipe, likely?” Puzzled silence came in response to Noel’s statement.

Vil laughed, but it took the rest of us a few seconds to recall Mater Terra technology and the pollutants that they purposefully bled into their atmosphere so often they necessitated functional parts to do so in almost every combustion engine.

“Dude…” Merriel’s fearful whisper made me snort a laugh.

“Then again, there’s always the C: drive since he doesn’t have a D: drive.” Vil laughed, but nobody else did.

“Nah, man, nowhere to park your dongle.” Merriel’s antiquated addition seemed to amuse Noel, but I neared Gorm with my plasma gun in hand. I didn’t have the power in my device to cut whatever alloy they used, but I could shoot things.

As we waited, Gorm busied himself while Vil and Noel took turns flying around—playing more than anything. Both remarked how there seemed not to be any life. There’d been no life but the Kanoiks at the base where we found Noel.

When the hull finally breached and Gorm pulled back, he stared into a dark abyss, letting his eyes adjust. I kept my distance out of habit because whatever ooky space spooky popped out was far more likely to kill me than our resident immortal lizard…

At least I hoped he was immortal. The ship was worthless without him—maybe it wasn’t the best idea to have him running in first.

Two crewmen—so green I’d never learned their names—followed up behind and stared in after Gorm.

Their idle chatter, as evidenced by their animated faces behind their solar screened masks, yielded no sound, so they were likely on another channel.

I swapped over to their channel long enough to hear them taking bets on who’d lose a limb first.

Progenitors. Ugh.

I swapped back just in time to hear Vil and Noel chatting about going down. Vil first, then me, then Noel. I startled and jogged up, readying the night vision on my visor.

The inside was dusty, dank, and unforgiving. A particularly sentient species of slime mold had colonized half the structure, pulsing in the slowest of waves as I scooted to the edge of the opening and let Vil catch me below the ten-foot drop.

The place stretched out into empty hallways, but there was glass! One of our guys aimed his plasma gun at a thick panel and chipped away at it to test the composition. The other guy joined him, so it must have been a good haul.

When we turned our back on the two, from the corner of my eye, a ripple went through the slime mold, a slow pulse that riveted all directions, likely reporting to the main body of some disturbance. As to what the slime mold genuinely was, I had some ideas.

“Guys, I think we need to put a pause on this and go back. Let’s send an ROP instead.” We should have sent a remotely operated probe from the beginning, but only having audiovisual cues didn’t do that much good.

“Why?” Vil stomped by me and I eyed the ripple along the slime.

“I don’t like the way this slime mold looks. I think it’s a faniculum. Merriel, you have any data on these guys?” I pointedly looked toward the rippling mass spidering out over the walls and earned a chuckle from the hapless operating system.

“Just that they’re carnivorous and infectious… Guess that tells us what happened to the last residents. Haunted by gross foot fungus.” Everything had to be haunted with Merriel. In a way, it was almost as endearing as Noel’s—

“Space slime.” Noel kept his distance, his tail flicking idly. “Nope.”

He glanced at Vil, and the two appeared to be sharing one of those telekinetic conversations. Vil shrugged.

“Threat is low priority. Continue exploration.” Noel rolled his head from side to side, likely cracking his neck. The mic didn’t pick up on it.

“Well, it’s as good of a way to die as any,” I muttered under my breath.

“Bonerkill, dude.” Merriel clicked his nonexistent tongue. I’d learned not to broadcast everything I said over air, but Merriel always listened. It was a bug we’d never managed to break because Merriel just changed his code and eavesdropped all over again.

I sighed heavily, wasting precious air in my oxide decomposition chamber pack.

I instinctively checked the device on my hip.

Liquid oxygen was too volatile and bulky to tote around.

Pelletized oxides distributed through water and electrified produced an abundance of useable oxygen if done the correct way. Storing it was easier, too.

I checked the salinity of my pack—verifying the chamber had enough time left. I twisted a knob to adjust my oxygen output and continued after them.

It felt like a small eternity as we followed Noel and Vil, the two instinctively aware of something deeper in the base. I swore to the progenitors themselves—the devils my people knew them to be—that if they found another Naleucian, I’d throw myself out of an airlock.

When we finally came across a sign down a corroded hall, I stared at the barcode sigil of a language. “Merriel, translate.”

I didn’t need him. I could read it easily. Armory.

“No clue. I don’t have a full codex of Didexicul Revulon. I know what it is, but not how to read it.”

Vil and Noel stared at it, blank-faced. Noel, in his ever-present wisdom, kicked at the door, denting it in its frame with a loud crunch.

Two more consecutive kicks had the door falling off its hinges and clattering onto the dirty floor.

He peered in, dust and spores kicking up around him. “Armory.”

I could have told you that. I didn’t, though. My host didn’t know the language—but I did. I placed my hand over my chest, hand spread as my true body squirmed.

There was no reason for me to know that dialect of Revulon. Not one several hundred solar rotations long gone. Not one that humans lacked the intelligence to comprehend.

After all, the Revulon built their war bases on the ruins of the Naleucians, and considered my kind their mortal enemies. A parasite. Colthraxians were the bane of the universe and long considered extinct or forgotten.

Untrue. I exist.

There were more of my kind, maybe? We’d long ago vowed to stop taking lives. The host we kept was our last. As a species, our existence was wrong. It was immoral for us to continue on.

Even if I had someone I cared about.