Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten (44 page)

Leda walked closer toward us, stopping a few feet away, putting a hand on her hip.  “You are not going alone, Estefan.  We are
all
going with you.”

From the cast of her face, I knew there was absolutely no changing her mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Summer – 2018)

An
Uneasy Decision

“I agree, Steve, there is no other way I can accept you going to meet with her, unless all of us are there with you,” stated Ramona, after she’d recovered some of her composure.  “After everything we’ve been through together I think it’s only fair.”

I sighed in total agreement.  Things were complicated enough already.  I certainly didn’t want to make the situation any worse by letting my newfound abilities fuck them up even more.  “I better call her and get this over with then,” I announced, which made every single female face about me grimace.

“Right now, Estefan, do you have to do it right now, this very moment?” asked Ramona.  Her voice was neutral, but her eyes were flashing.

I looked over at her.  She hadn’t come any closer.  She just stood there with both hands of her hips, her head tilted toward me
, extenuating her point.

“Why put it off?  What for?  You know and I know what for, I
have
to call her now and agree to meet with her.  After what Jacob told me, I have too.  I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell her what I knew and something bad came about, because I didn’t speak.”

“You think it’s going to make a difference, though Eff?”  It was Leda.  This surprised me, because she usually stayed out of conversations between me and my girlfriend, specifically, the intense ones.  She noticed my quizzical expression and went on.  “For Lisa, I mean…  There’s really not a lot we can do for her.  For all we know, she might already be –.”

“Leda, shut up!” yelled Sandy.  “Just don’t say it!”

Leda’s eyes widened at her friend for moment, and then hardened.  “I was only… I mean, I didn’t mean to be mean.  I just -.”

Now it was my turn to cut her off.  “Everyone deserves to know the truth.  No matter how hopeless…”

Ramona breathed heavily through clenched teeth, moved toward the couch and abruptly sat.  She staring at the TV, purposefully, rigid with fear and anger.

Leda shrugged and nodded turning toward Sandy, mouthing a silent “sorry” to which Sandy smiled.  It was a worn, tired version of the brilliant one she usually flashed.

“Imma call her from the kitchen where it is quieter,” I declared, pulling my cell phone from one of my pockets as I made my way out of the room.

From behind, I heard Ramona say, “Go with him Katie, please.”

Maybe she hadn’t meant for me to hear or maybe she had.  I didn’t know and didn’t care.  This was about Lisa, and not about the fact, at one time, I had loved Tirza very much.

I walked into the kitchen with the cell to my ear, having accessed Tirza’s contact information, which dialed her number automatically.

She answered on the second ring.

Fuck, she had been waiting alright.

“Estefan, oh my god, I didn’t expect to hear from you so quickly.  I thought, Ramona would… well, you know delay you or something,”
she said in a single breath.

“Where do you want to do this?” I asked
, not really in the mood to mince words or bandy about various topics.  Even though the day wasn’t particularly old, I was rapidly losing my fight against the mental fatigue, besieging every side of my consciousness.

A short, stunned silence ensued.

“So, you’ll meet with me then?”
she asked smally, sounding more like herself with me than she had in many, many months.

“Yes, conditionally, but, yes, I will meet you all the same.”  It was evasive, but I wanted her to ask why, so I could explain what the girls had decided beforehand.  You know, get that shit out of the way.

“Conditionally…?”
she repeated, opening the very door I wanted her to open.

“It cannot be alone, Tirza.  Ramona won’t allow it to happen any other way,” I stated clearly.  “She agreed to let us meet, but under no circumstances can we meet in private.”  I chuckled
apologetically into the tiny microphone on the cell.  “Sorry,” I added as an afterthought.

Another spell of utter quiet from her followed.  I knew she was thinking, weighing what I had told her against her own thoughts on the matter.

“I guess that will have to do,”
she said in a rush. 
“At this point, it really doesn’t make a difference, right?”

I shrugged into the phone, but stayed quiet as Katie come to the threshold of the kitchen, leaning with her shoulder against the door frame.  I saw her smile thinly at my glance.  I knew she didn’t like being someone else’s babysitter.  But, we both knew how jealous Ramona could get at times.  The fact she hadn’t come herself, spoke volumes to the changes going on within her.

“So, when and where do you wanna meet?” I queried, looking away from my cousin.

“I don’t know…”
  Her way of letting me know she was thinking. 
“How ‘bout tomorrow at the Highland Park Rec. Center?”
she offered only moments later.

“Sounds good,” I began, “Does eleven o’clock work for you?”

“Yeah, that’s perfect.”

“Okay, then, Tirza.  It’s settled.  Take care until I see you, ok?”  I tried to keep any sort of emotion out of my tone, and just barely managed to do so.

“Yeah, yeah, you too… Oh and Estefan…?”

“Yeah?” I replied with a question.

“Thanks for meeting with me, really, as a friend – it means a lot.  Thanks.”

I heard her voice on the verge of cracking, but I wasn
’t entirely sure.  Maybe, I had imagined it.  Instead, I let it pass.  “No problem, Tirza.”

“See you tomorrow, Effy.”

“Bye,” I said as I heard her say,
“K”,
and we cut the connection simultaneously.

I gazed over at Katie with a half-hearted smile.  She returned it.

“Looks like it’s all set for tomorrow at eleven, at the Recreation Center,” I informed her, putting the phone away and walked up to her.

She looked up into my eyes, her own suddenly filled with pride, narrowing.  “You handled that perfectly, cousin,” she muttered, her voice husky.

I let my orbs search the hazel cast of hers and unearthed precisely what I had expected when I heard the tone of her voice.  “You want to kiss me, don’t you?” I prompted feeling a devilish sort of wedge develop along my lips.

I soooo needed a flirty moment at the time!

She rumbled with chuckles, in the hollow of her chest.  “You know it…”

“You think we should risk it?” I suggested, coming closer.

She let her head bump against the frame of the entryway, which made her body arch slightly toward me, inviting.  Her breasts pushed against the fabric of the top she was wearing.  “Aaaah, Eff, you don’t know how much I would love to feel your lips against mine, even for a second…”

“…But…,” I continued for her.

“…We
can’t
take the risk.”  She seemed to deflate before her, though her nipples were rock hard and she squeezed her thighs together.

My little cousin wanted some… Heh, heh, heh…

“Tonight then, Kat,” I countered.  “Tonight, ok?”

“Absolutely.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t resist.  I quickly reached around her and grabbed her tight ass, and gave it a firm pinch.  Then, I forced myself to stop and walked passed her back toward the TV room, as if nothing had happened.

“Argh, you bad boy!” she called after me, but only loud enough for the two of us to hear.

I laughed into my hand, crossed the hallway and walked into the TV room.  I found Leda standing off to one side, while Sandy - having joined Ramona upon the couch – was speaking to her, fervently.  Though I stood at the portal of the room, I could tell she was encouraging my girlfriend, trying to lift her spirits over Tirza.  There was no mistaking Ramona’s sulking face in combination with Sandy’s gestures - movements that told me she was bullet-pointing.  She was attempting to convey anything positive to the girl before her.

They noticed me then and
, as one, turned.

I tried not to stop right there in my tracks, and took a few half steps forward just as Katie came into the room behind me.  “It’s all set for tomorrow at eleven at the park,” I stated factually, my tone even on purpose.  “So, if Sandy and the rest of you can pick me and Katie fifteen minutes before that, I guess that would work.”

“That sounds
perfect
Estefan,” said Ramona sardonically.

Ah shit, come on, baby doll, don’t get all fucking stupid on me now,
I thought.  I was all the more put off by her remark, because of everything we had agreed to earlier.  I mean, how was she going to react at seeing Katie and I make love?  She shouldn’t have let something as trivial as Tirza get to her like that.  Otherwise, our perverted triad was doomed to fail.

Come on, girl, get it together dammit!

I was about to say something just as disparaging when we were all frozen in place by a series of booming thuds coming from the stairs.

Thinking my brother Martín had fallen down the stairs, I was immobile one second, a flurry of movement the next.  Only
, I bumped headlong into an equally frantic Jolene.  Her head hit my clavicle so hard the impact sent a jolt throughout my entire body.  I was thrown back a step.  I instinctively reached out to steady her before she fell to the floor in a heap.  She didn’t even appear to notice my clutch.  Her eyes as big as nectarines, words came forth in a torrent – one upon the next, making it nearly impossible to comprehend.

“Your brother and sister are sick!  Your brother and sister are sick!  Your brother and sister are sick!  Your brother and sister are sick!”

I placed her squarely upon her feet, and then looked at Katie.

“Oh shit, Eff, we better go get them before they throw up all over the house!”
she shouted.

We sprinted for the stairs, the rest in tow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Earth Summer – 2385)

Old-Timer Love

Through the million, million symbiotic synapses
connecting him to his walker, he told it to move forward and slightly off to the left.  He wanted a better view of the devastation in the depression below.  The robotic chair obeyed.

It wasn’t an impact crater per se, but more of a conglomerate of nearly five.  The thin, dusty outer crust of the dwarf planet had been battered with such ferocity in this location; the land itself had sunk deep into the icy underbelly, making it even more oddly shaped.  It was a broad expanse, nearly seventy-five kilometers across at some points.  It was crisscrossed with broken ridges and shattered mounts of pulverized, amorphous ice made opaque with a myriad of breaks and cracks.  This was Haumea, a noteworthy Kuiper Belt object some five hundred and seventy-five kilometers across at its widest, making it roughly one-third the mass of Pluto.  Unlike Sol’s one-time ninth planet though, Haumea wasn’t a sphere.  It was what scientists called a scalene ellipsoid, a celestial object
that was squished at its poles so the circumference of its equator was just about a third larger around than a similar measurement running from North to South Pole and back again.  This was due to a postulated impact with an equally large planetoid more than one hundred million years ago, a collision that had hammered Haumea into its uncommon shape.  This was also the most plausible reason why this tiny dwarf had two moons – Namaka and Hi’iaka – both of which were somewhat large for a dwarf planet of Haumea’s size to have captured with gravity alone.

He sat there upon his six-legged, crab-like divan chair.  Its crustaceous skin glistened in the light of the ghostly flames burning before it.  The pointed brines and thorny outgrowths cast long shadows behind the combined silhouette of him and his
chair.  He squinted through the out-gassing and smoke, though the noxious fumes didn’t come his way.  With gravity one-third that of Earth’s Moon, the residual byproducts of the decimated base, in the depression below, spewed and splattered directly into space, almost ninety degrees from the surface of Haumea.  Still, he abhorred waste.  Everything he and his drones had wrought upon this small planet, that wasn’t quite a planet, reeked of waste.  It made him uncomfortable.

It is necessary, Oöt’Aahtne, to have done what you have done here on this desolate imp of a world.  A few hundred thousand lives are but a small thing.  The probability the procedure has gone horribly wrong this time was too great to do otherwise.  We must first form a beachhead and then we must search out the Khöol-Dhûr…

He fidgeted with the jelled Ichthyo-mask about his face, adjusting the symbiotic being, so it felt less invasive about his boiled and wart-strewn skin.  He was still dissatisfied with its mucus feel about places still smarting from rash or irritation, or the like.  There was little he could do about it, since the mask was low-level acidic to begin with.  It only served to cause him more pain than it should have.  He’d had a bad reaction to the radiation in this portion of the Galaxy.  The penultimate effect was, it had wreaked havoc upon the outer layers of flesh upon his malformed face.  It was always this way for him.  Whenever he came near a G-Class star, the affect was typically negative.  There was little he could do about that too.

He forcibly pushed his discomfort aside, focusing instead upon the last Human habitation upon this small world, hoping beyond hope his drones had found more
Åksha
-Ishtäri - a sentiment that, up to this point, had proved unfounded.  Against every scientific prediction postulated by his people, Humans didn’t morph well into the forms his race had projected they would.  Everything was wrong.  Nothing was right.  It left a sweet taste upon his cancerous tongue, nearly making him regurgitate in abhorrence at the dismal failure of his ancient race.

He stared at the burning husk of the village below, his crooked brow furling over misshapen eyes.  He urged greater magnification from the Ichthyo-mask.  His different colored orbs searched through the rubble and flaming debris
, as hundreds of wicked looking drones probed the habitation for signs of life – the
correct
signs, that is.  It was hard to see, even though his mask, the flames weren’t particularly bright.  They sputtered and gasped from the lack of oxygen, barely illuminating the cracked, blackened ice about the settlement.

You know, Oöt’Aahtne, you will find no more
Åksha-
Ishtäri here.  The procedure has gone wrong.  The Priests were wrong about these Human Beings.  We should’ve waited, let them mature.  Their crude DNA was too young a construct.  The Khöol-Da’Jûri has not performed as it should, and now something terrible has been unleashed about the Galaxy.

These altered Humans will spread like a plague…

I must find the Khöol-Dhûr.  At all costs, I must find it or all could be lost.

His thoughts were disrupted by the whirl and high-pitched
screeching of a messenger-drone as it skimmed the frozen surface of the insignificant planetoid.  A few feet from his six-legged chair, it propelled itself further from the ground, so he could look upon it at eye level.

“Report, Lord Scout.  Report,”
it announced with a monotone throb over a common comm-channel.

“Proceed,” he ordered gruffly, some of his tones
, so low a human would’ve been hard pressed to understand them.

“Attack-Drone-in-Charge is transmitting the human se
ttlement has been neutralized,.  No sign of
Åksha-
Ishtäri say his units, per your programing, Lord-Scout.”
  He grunted, sounding like huge slabs of rock rubbing together.  The messenger continued. 
“The planetoid is now entirely under your control.  All ‘augmented’ humans have been terminated as directed.  The few surviving ‘immune’ humans have been placed in a secure location.”

His grunt was cut off by a long sigh.  “Very well, have those human yet alive police their dead.  Have the demolition-drones free this world of every vestige of the vermin living here and bring forth the Spy-Drones.  I want to begin the search for the Khöol-Dhûr at once.”

“By your will, Lord-scout,”
and with that, the messenger-drone streaked away, the many tasks he’d given it would keep it busy for some time.

Oöt’Aahtne, old, even by the accounting of his people, urged his chair forward once again adjusting the bothersome Ichthyo-mask about his huge, grotesquely shaped skull, his expression dark, foreboding.  He would have to work fast, if he were to make the way clear for Vanguard in time.  He had to properly prepare this bashed-in sphere of ice before that time.  He had to attend to the defenses
, he and his drones, would begin to grow in the next few cycles.  He had to fill the craters, level their ridges.  He had to sow the ice with the soils of their home world, transform it, change it, and make it viable without proper gravity and atmosphere.  Overseeing the terraforming processes were always the most tedious - every planet, every asteroid, every comet was different.  They had different chemical compounds, abundant in this, but wanting in that.  The list was typically endless.  And still, he had to program thousands of drones to seek and discover the location of the Khöol-Dhûr.  Since he had unearthed how bad things had gone this time around, its’ whereabouts were of the upmost importance.  Though he had so much to do in preparation for the fore-runners, he would not rest until he had the Khöol-Dhûr in his hands – all three of them.

We should’ve never chosen a race with only double-helix DNA.  We should’ve known better!

*****

Estefan came from the Dermal-Cleanser with only a towel wrapped around his waist, his feet upon the marble floor resounding loudly.  He wasn’t wearing any Anti-Grav, so floor had to bear all four hundred and fifty pounds of him.  He walked before the washing consul and looked into the holo-mirror, his reflection digitally relayed back to him in life-like clarity.  It had taken him about two years to get used to the full functionality of such a device.  Once he stood before it, he could flick a finger toward its edge and actually make his image rotate.  It was much like the playing
the Sims
back when he was a kid.  The fact it was him gazing at the back of his own head was unsettling, but he got used to it, eventually.

He looked the same as he had now for more than two hundred years.  Before that he had appeared older.  His face had once been more chiseled, lined.  His jaw had been more angular, his cheek bones sharper.  There had been the beginning of crow’s-feet at the edge of each eye.  His skin had shown the vestiges of weathering.

All of that was gone now.  Each year after he’d turned one hundred and fifty years old - though he guessed he’d only aged to around thirty-five - he had appeared younger.  Until he was nearly two hundred, the regression had stopped.  Ever since, he looked precisely as he did right now.  His face was forever trapped somewhere in between a man’s and a boy’s.  To others, he looked no more than twenty-three, twenty-five at the most.  His skin was perfect, his eyes completely white around his irises, his teeth just as brilliant.   His jawline has softened; most of the angles about his visage had rounded, smoothed almost.  He did appear young until one gazed into those eyes.  That’s where the illusion faded.  There was too much behind Estefan’s gaze.  He had seen too much, he had done too much.  He had seen people killed, maimed, tortured and raped, men as well as women.  Some of it he had done himself, in his younger days, when the struggle for Angel Free Town hadn’t been quite finished.  He had taken drugs on occasion and drank to excess on many occasions.  He had fucked his first cousin, his step-sister – sometimes at the same time.  There was too much behind his eyes.  They were a dead give-away.  He was an Old-Timer, one of the oldest.

He saw the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow, which was more like a “48-hour shadow”, since his facial hair grew at a glacial pace.  He waved his hand across a sensor upon the top of the washing consul
.  It connected to his ‘Swarm.  Promptly, it began to form a shaving-bot.  He stood still letting the many-bladed, robotic device shave him.  It hovered about his face, whizzing back and forth, up and down until it completely it’s task.  It deftly flew into a newly made opening in the consul wherein it would be cleaned and then dismantled to regroup with the rest of Estefan’s ‘Swarm at some later time.

He paid it no mind, rubbing his face, gazing closer into the holo-mirror.  He checked for nicks or abrasions he knew weren’t there, but it was a habit.  It was one he had developed when he’d first started shaving, back then he used a disposable razor.  Back then, he’d nicked himself
almost daily.

Absently
, he waved for lotion and the Grav-canister came from the shelf to his left, settling into his hand.  He flicked at the sensor and a few dabbles of milky liquid spewed forth.  He released the canister and it floated back to its place on tiny Grav-lifts, nestling back into its previous position.  He was rubbing the lotion on the skin of his face when Sandy walked in.

She was nude.

Her defined arms and legs were still her best features after her tantalizingly long toes and high arched feet.  Like him, she looked near the teenage girl he had met so long ago, way back in High School, upon the breezeway crossing Avenue Fifty-four.  Her flared hips and dimpled buttocks, her full breasts with their flushing areolas and pink nipples, her light brown eyes and aquiline face – all of it was the same, or very near.  Her mid-length, wavy hair was tinted russet, and settled about the same visage.  It should’ve been shot entirely white, scraggy and rough.  The hair of a two hundred and fifty year old corpse, but it wasn’t.  It was alive and vibrant; much like when had met her way back in 2017.

Unable to help himself, his eyes darted down to her pubis and was somewhat shocked to see she’d shaved.  Typically, she grew a trimmed, neat and narrow landing-strip of hair there.  Now, she’d changed her mind and went bare as the day she was born.  He wondered why.

“Are you going to come out and play with us?” she asked impishly.  She walked up to him, her smile growing.

His eyes narrowed with mock suspicion.  “I just cle
aned up, my love, and the Null-ship will be here within the hour,” he replied.  They had been waiting for nearly a week and a half for the ship no Human Celeste could sense, no amount of sensory could detect and, for the most part, no one could see.  Null-ships were just that, complete null. 
In fact, they’re more like ghosts
, he thought to himself.

Soon the Aegis Synod would begin its’ trip to Europa.  Once there, they would retrieve the Shadow Spark and hide it, forever, from humanity.

“But, honey, it’s just girly-girls out there right now and I need a bit of man in the mix, you know?” she pouted with an exaggerated bat of her eyelashes.  “Would you mind if I got you a little dirty?  It’s the good sort, the
fun
sort of dirty… What do you say, huh?”

“We don’t have enough time to do it properly.”

Sandy huffed and reached for his hand, but, at the last second, she took him by the wrist.  “I’m not talking about the Deluxe Package, my dear.  I just want a little tussle.  You know, I want you to mess up my hair a bit.”  The cast of her face was innocent, but the intent behind her words made it seem naughty at the same time.  Besides, she’d had the hair upon her head implanted with Stim-grō ages ago.  It was never messed up.