Serial #2

(continued from Serial #1)

Tasha’s heart thudded in her chest as she raced down the corridor. Breathless, she darted into a doorway to pause for a bit and started taking deeper and slower breaths. She needed to think. She was the sole witness to a murder. But who? And why?

Looking down, she realized she was still wearing her s-suit and rebreather. She checked her tatyou. It was nearly V-0 and she had to be at work soon. Shit shit shit. They would put her on bioremediation duty if she was late again.

Sighing, she ran back up the deck, climbed a ladder and ran straight into the muscled back of a hulking brute.

He turned slowly and stared her down. The man was nearly 2.5 meters in height and built like a mycobrick, his head brushing the top of the viscoelastic chitin bulkhead. Completely, bald, his eggshell skull reflected the light of the fluorescent biobulb above. His eyes were sunk deep into his skull and they stared at her with a beady intensity and intelligence, framed with large bushy eyebrows. He blinked in surprise, mouth opening and closing slowly like a cloud intake as if he was about to say something and just forgot.

“Sorry!” she called out as she swept around him. He was probably one of those new idiot drones they conscripted from Noscov for the ballast tanks.

She disappeared around the bend. He reached after her, a late reaction as if to tell her not to go. Clenching his fist in frustration, he lumbered after her.

Down the hallway, Tasha had reached the airlock and started putting the equipment away. Her tatyou buzzed. “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.

She heard a clang. Looking up, she saw the same behemoth that she ran into in the hallway.