Story by Charles Hawkmoon. Translation VictorX.
This short story is part of the Science Fiction Storm series. All stories in this series are inspired by randomized prompts, ensuring that each tale is unpredictable and utterly unique. Here are the random seeds for this story:
Plural – misshapen – link – massage – thousand – sac – cards – flute.
“Ugh! What a pain in the neck!” Van Coup exploded. His anger still under control made him refrain from using coarse profanity. He looked at his opponents and let his cards fall on the table.
“So?” Greta asked through a puff of cigarette smoke. “Are you going to do it, or not?”
Van Coup narrowed his eyes at the slender, cadaverous-looking Asian woman. She had a beautiful face but could only move with the help of an exoskeleton.
The man didn’t reply. It didn’t matter; his crew would soon find out whether he’d keep his word or order one of them to go in his stead. He got up and paced.
“Matilda, how far are we from the Buoy?”
The synthesized voice of the onboard computer responded, “One thousand and sixty five miles, Handsome.”
“Stay on course. I’m going to change.”
Razor, the cyborg and mechanic of the crew, picked up his transverse flute and played the theme from Void Hunters.
“Very funny, Razor. How about shoving that flute…” Van Coup sighed, clenched his teeth, and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, “back into your femoral compartment.”
In response, Razor stared at him, his bug-eyed, cyber-enhanced gaze mocking as he repeated the melody in a playful tone.
“Tell him to shove it up his…” Greta was interrupted.
“Don’t speak like that on my ship!” Van Coup threatened, finger raised. The rating of his childhood idol’s films was PG-13, so there was never any foul language in them.
Greta muttered the curse under her breath, forming the word with her lips.
“Handsome, we’re now two hundred and fifty miles away and closing in.”
“Slow down and maneuver to within half mile of the Buoy.”
Van Coup descended the staircase connecting the canteen to the equipment room. A valet robot with multiple arms helped him into his heavy spacewalking suit.
Van Coup glanced at his reflection, seeking inspiration in his own image for encouragement.
He had paid dearly for the surgeries that radically transformed his appearance. Save for details only those who had known the actor Rick Hemsworth closely would notice, he was a perfect reproduction of the old heartthrob. Athletic build, brown hair, green eyes, tanned skin, and thick eyebrows — an exotic blend of Indo-Aryan and Nordic features. Rick had starred in hundreds of films that depicted the first era of human expansion beyond the Solar System. Van Coup had grown up watching those movies, and his dream was to become like the characters Rick portrayed.
He entered the airlock and requested. “Matilda, gradually adjust gravity to 0.5g, with a two-minute delay. Van Coup disliked sudden drops to zero gravity.”
The air in the chamber was drained entirely, and a red light illuminated above the hatch to signal that he was now free to exit.
Three small navigation drones emerged from the floor and hovered around him.
He ran his fingers over the curved control screen strapped to his forearm to confirm the link with the drones.
After nearly six hundred years, almost no one in the quadrant knew who Rick Hemsworth was. His film collection, part of the vast galactic network of data, resided in deep memory zones, where seldom-used data went. The Croaker crew was an exception. Two percent of Matilda’s storage was allocated to a downloaded copy of all his movies. Van Coup practically forced his companions to watch those old films in Croaker’s holo-theater between jobs.
“Go on, Captain Coup. Have some courage…” Greta’s voice crackled over the com, “if you succeed, I’ll give you a foot massage.”
The Buoy was lodged at the edge of the ring system of the planet Raja. Van Coup considered it a good hiding spot. The planet Raja, or Ross 128e, was a reddish gas giant with pink-hued rings. The fourth planet orbiting the red dwarf Ross 128 had been renamed after the first explorers got a close look at it centuries ago. The Croaker had been built in the colony of Aatma (Ross 128b), where Van Coup’s parents had taken him as a child.
The Buoy was a small, old space station that Van Coup’s crew had rescued and towed into hiding within Raja’s rings. Visiting the Buoy was routine for the crew. There, they stored contraband or inconvenient cargo.
The hatch opened, and Van Coup launched himself into space, followed by the three drones, approximately shaped like dodecahedrons and equipped with small arms. The captain sighed as he took in the sight of the beautiful rings from this angle. The Croaker had stopped beneath them, near the edge. From there, the rings stretched as though reaching into infinity, even bending to envelop the planet on both sides. Van Coup glided gently until he reached the hatch of the cigar-shaped station.
The drones did their job, and the door opened. He slipped into the airlock, and once the light turned green, he felt the full weight descend upon him. At least the station’s artificial gravity was only 0.4g, causing only mild discomfort.
The air inside was poorly filtered and smelled stale. With the low gravity, Van Coup didn’t bother to remove the suit; its weight was now bearable. He opened the door and proceeded down the corridor to the larger module, where the stash was kept. Everything was quiet, as expected.
The problem lay in the next module. Van Coup detached the combat staff from his suit and adjusted the control to heavy stun mode. Through the glass door, he saw the creature lying under the medical cot. It appeared inert. The misshapen alien was far from human. Its slender, segmented body resembled a blend of aerial-rooted trees and an arthropod. That mass of appendages could be arms, legs, or other things humanity still didn’t fully understand. The malformed head was encased in a translucent sac, floating in what looked like a soup of viscera. And the soup was in motion, indicating the creature was alive.
“I think it’s looking at me…” Van Coup whispered into the communicator. He couldn’t see the creature’s eyes, but he felt a discomfort, as if someone were staring fixedly at the back of his neck.
“Kill that thing and throw it into Raja afterward,” suggested Razor.
“Don’t talk nonsense, tin-head!” Greta retorted. “Talk to it, captain.”
Razor retorted “It’s safer to kill it right away! Remember what it did to Charlie?”
“There’s a blue smoke coming from it.” Van Coup swallowed slightly.
“Don’t worry, Greta said,” the force field can handle it.
“The smoke is…” and then Van Coup was lost for words.
The figure of Indira Chang, one of the actresses who starred alongside Rick in his films, formed in the air. She was naked, perfect, and the blue hue gave way to her yellowish skin and purple hair, styled in the thin braids she wore in Peril at Tau Ceti.
“Hello, Handsome, said the alien projection.”
“Hello, who are you?”
“Oh, you don’t recognize me? It’s me, Skatka.”
“She’s just a movie character.”
“And what are you, Handsome?”
“I am…” Van Coup jumped back when he saw Skatka cross the force field.
“Don’t come any closer!”
“Hey, Gorgeous. I won’t harm you… Quite the opposite. You’re going to want to be bad with me.”
Van Coup extended the combat staff on stun mode, touching Skatka’s abdomen, but nothing happened. She grasped the staff, gently tugging it from his hands.
“What the…”
“Coup! Get out of there! Get out!” Greta shouted through the communicator.
On the Croaker, the monitors went dark, cutting off the feed from the captain’s suit cameras.
“Matilda, missiles, target the Buoy,” said Razor.
“Cancel that, dammit!” Greta ordered.
“Shouldn’t we ask the Handsome if he actually wants to be blown up?” — said Matilda.
While the three debated whether to destroy the station, Skatka ripped off Van Coup’s suit as if it were a bag of chips. Her warm hands applied a special kind of massage to his gonads. The touch of Skatka’s hands caused a vibration, as though she were a mix between a woman and a multiprocessor.
On the Croaker, Greta and Razor stopped arguing to stare, aghast, at what one of the storage cameras was broadcasting.
Van Coup finally forgot the alien in the other chamber and faced the seductive Skatka with resolve. Before long, he reached an overwhelming climax, unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
“Oh my god!” Van Coup’s voice echoed throughout the modules and was also transmitted to his ship.
“Seems like Handsome really enjoyed that close encounter,” Matilda commented.
“Shut up, junk heap!” Razor punched the panel.
“Didn’t even hurt, Sweetie,” Matilda replied.
Van Coup collapsed to his knees, exhausted. Skatka took two steps back and lay on the floor with her legs spread. In seconds, her belly swelled like a balloon, as if someone had attached an air tube to her vagina and blown into it. Her expression showed no signs of pain as her vulva expanded, giving way to a baby’s head.
“What the devil!” Razor couldn’t believe what his cybernetic eyes saw in high resolution.
The baby rolled on the floor, wrapped in a bluish, translucent amniotic sac. Van Coup took him in his arms, breaking the covering and was doused in warm liquid down his legs.
“Focus on the baby,” Greta ordered. Matilda complied through her link with the Buoy. “Oh my God, look at that little face! It’s adorable.”
It was, indeed, a beautiful baby; his black hair was still wet and even seemed to be styled. He smiled at Van Coup, showing his rosy gums. Van Coup looked at his child, astonished, tears streaming from his eyes.
“Damn it! Look at that!” Razor shouted.
Watching the scene on another monitor, Razor couldn’t believe what he saw. Skatka’s belly was full once more, and another baby was expelled within moments.
“Matilda, missiles! Now!”
“No!” Greta retorted.
Razor wrapped his robotic hand around Greta’s neck. “Shut up, Greta! Or I’ll crush your trachea.”
“You murderer!”
“Look at that, Greta! That thing isn’t a mother; it’s a damned alien factory.”
“I should inform you that the Buoy has moved, Sweetie. It’s sinking into the ring.”
“What? How? The Buoy has no propulsion systems.”
“Fire now!” Razor cryed.
“Efficiency directive: contained fire. There is no reason to waste ammunition.”
“Report!” Greta asked.
“The Buoy has entered the debris field, Sweetie. It’s impossible to lock on the target.”
“Stop calling me Sweetie, fuck!”
“Designation set by Captain Van Coup cannot be altered. And if you continue to use profanities, I will have to activate the directive…”
“Alright, alright… Look what you’ve done, Greta! And now, huh, Miss Compassion? What are we going to do?”
“We’ll transmit everything to military command.”
“Are you crazy? Admit we had a station full of contraband? I don’t want to go to jail!”
“So what do you propose?” Greta peered at him with slitted eyes.
“I think we’d better get out of this system and monitor the news from a safe distance.”
“You’re a coward, you tin-head!”
“At least a coward lives to reach the next star.”
“Sweetie…”
“What is it, Matilda?”
“A transmission is coming from the Buoy.”
“Put it on the screen.”
Van Coup appeared at the center of the screen, surrounded by what looked like the entire naked cast of all of Rick Hemsworth’s films. The cast looked at the camera with glassy eyes. Greta and Razor felt a chill down their spines. The cast spoke in unison, their voices layered in a harmonious, almost musical tone, “We are The Plural. There is no need to be afraid.”