Zeta Hack: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 3) Read online

  The robber’s scream cut off with a wet gurgle, and I twisted my neck away to tear out the front half of his neck. Hot blood sprayed over my hair, face, and upper chest, but I didn’t care. The liquid tasted delicious, and I wanted to drink from it until my stomach was full.

  My ears filled with the sound of a thousand atmospheric engines firing, and I felt my chest vibrate with the air coming from my lungs.

  It was my roar.

  Adam.

  I ignored the voice in my head and looked down at the blood soaked corpse at my feet. I was so hungry. This man had plenty of flesh, and I would devour his body before consuming the rest of any who would stand in my way.

  Adam! Stop!

  My body froze with an unseen power. I snarled against my invisible prison and tried to rip free by pushing with my legs. That didn’t work, so I tried to move my arms and cut free with my claws. It was as if I was wrapped in a cocoon of titanium, and I felt my chest begin to constrict with pressure.

  Adam, please find yourself. Fight the beast. Come back to us. We must escape this place. We need to be free.

  Part of me knew the woman who spoke in my mind, but that part of my consciousness didn’t care enough to bother responding to her. I wanted to break free of these bonds. I had to fight. I needed to eat, then kill, then eat, then fuck, kill, eat until I was master of my territory.

  You are a man. Not an animal.

  You are an honorable man. Not a mindless beast. Come back to me. We need you, Adam. I love you, and you love me. Please remember.

  There was a human standing in front of me, and my vision focused on the pale soft creature. It was female, with long dark hair, cream skin, red eyes, and aggressive looking fangs. My anger suddenly defused, and I remembered her name.

  Eve.

  “What?” I gasped as the monster retreated into my stomach. It was still mad and wanted to kill, but it loved Eve as much as I did. It knew she was just as powerful and dangerous.

  “Welcome back,” she whispered with a smile. “Now we must run.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I looked around. The robbers were all sorts of dead, and the floor of the bank was splattered with gallons of blood.

  A lot of it was covering me too.

  “Hey, you! Nora!” I heard Z shout, and I turned around to see the hacker grabbing the front of the teller’s uniform. “This security system on a closed circuit? Or does it stream somewhere?”

  “Uhhh,” the woman started to say, but she couldn’t turn her head from me, and it was obvious that she was terrified.

  “Don’t worry about him. He just saved your damn life, but they are going to throw us out of the airlock. We need to hack your video systems. Where is the room?”

  “Back here,” Nora said as she pointed in the back room. “We’ve already triggered the alarms though. Security will be here in a few minutes.”

  “Wait here for half a minute,” Z said to us. “I’ll see what I can do. Get ready to run.”

  “Understood,” I said with a nod.

  Z made a surprisingly athletic leap over the bank counter and then dashed into the back room of the bank. The employees looked up from their prone positions on the ground, but no one moved to stop her.

  “Shit’s got a remote feed! Damn it!” she shouted fifteen seconds later. “I’m gonna try something super shady.”

  “Let us move to the front door,” Eve whispered to me as she tugged on my arm. Then the beautiful woman raised her voice and spoke to the crowd. “We apologize for the violence. You all saw what happened. My friend had little choice but to defend us.” No one but Nora looked at us as we spoke, but the teller gave us a small smile and wave before we turned to the door.

  “Go! Go! Go!” I heard Z shout, and Eve pulled me out the door of the bank.

  We stepped into the street, and dozens of people turned to gawk at me. No one screamed, fortunately, but their mouths hung open with a mixture of surprise and horror.

  “This way,” Z said as she yanked on Eve’s right arm, and the vampire yanked on mine.

  “What did you do to their computer?” I wheezed.

  “I put a chaser virus that has a mission to delete their video stores on their server. It will either work awesomely, and delete the last hour of their video, or it will work terribly, and delete all the info on their server.”

  “Those are the only two options? It will not simply be ineffective?” Eve asked as she looked over her shoulder behind us.

  “Nope.” Z shrugged. “It’s not an elegant virus. Anyway, I think we need to get some food, buy some supplies, and then hire an engineer in the next five minutes so we can get the hell out of here. If they don’t throw Adam out of the airlock for killing those assholes, they are definitely going to do it to me for hacking their security footage.”

  “Where is the closest--” I started to say, but I was suddenly dizzy, and I felt the street spin vertically as if I was doing a cartwheel.

  “Whoa! Hold on kitty-boy,” I heard Z say, but it sounded like she was shouting at me from fifty meters away.

  “He needs to eat,” Eve whispered.

  “No shit. I’d imagine that turning into a walking tiger might burn a few calories. How are we going to take him anywhere? He’s covered in blood. Oh, and he looks like a giant walking tiger.”

  “Adam, can you shift back into your human form?” I heard Eve ask, but it sounded like I was swimming underwater.

  Damn. I was so tired. Or was it hungry? Maybe it was both.

  “Yeahhhhhh,” slurred my words and relaxed my thoughts. I’d never been to Earth, but I’d seen videos of the oceans there, and I pictured a pristine beach with turquoise waves massaging the shore in a singsong voice.

  I was swimming in the water. It was so warm and comforting. I just wanted to sleep in the sun and never wake up.

  But I knew my friends needed me. This was just hunger. I could deal. This was just exhaustion. I could push through it. I wasn’t going to leave my friends to take care of me. I was the one who protected them. I clenched my jaw and fought against the warm hold on my fuzzy mind.

  “I’m okay,” I said as I fought against a yawn. “Where are we?” I looked around and realized we weren’t on the main street.

  “We dragged you into an alley a block or so from the bank, but we really need to get moving,” Z said as she looked over her shoulder.

  “Your jacket is covered with blood,” Eve said as she helped me stand. “I believe you should throw it in the trash, and then we can walk to a bathroom to wash your face. They will be looking for us, and we should travel on the tube for a distance before we find a place to eat.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I said as I pulled off my jacket. It was the one I’d been issued by the scientists who experimented on me. It had sleeves which could be removed to become a vest, and most of the garment concealed armored plates. The armor had been through hell and was in need of replacing, but part of me didn’t want to let it go.

  “Wipe your face off with the inside,” Eve said as she helped me try to clean the blood off my chin. She shook her head once we finished and then tossed the jacket into a metal trash bin that occupied the alley with us. “You will need to go to a bathroom with a mirror.”

  “Ahh I forgot the R-credit ca--” I started to say, but Z interrupted me.

  “I took it from your vest when you fell. Let’s get going. I’ll poke my head out of the alley first.”

  The blonde woman sprinted to the end of the alley and leaned against the corner to check the street. She beckoned for us to move forward, but the toes of my boots kept scraping against the cobblestones, and Eve had to help me walk.

  “There is a public restroom two hundred meters down this way.” Z pointed in a direction that I guessed was away from the bank. In fact, this street was paved with concrete instead of cobblestones, so I knew it was a different avenue than the street with the bank.

  “Let us continue,” Eve said as we stepped into the street.

  Z m
oved under my other arm, and the two women tugged me down the sidewalk toward the bathroom. There were fewer people here than on the other street, and the only people who looked at us gave us the kind of eye roll one gives for public drunkenness.

  I heard the scream of a siren behind us.

  “Fuck,” Z groaned. “Thought we’d have more time. We need to get out of here. I definitely don’t want to see Adam thrown out of an airlock, he’ll probably come back all fucking angry and kill everyone in the station.”

  “I’m sorry. My legs are having problems.” I hated saying the words. I didn’t want to be weak. I needed to protect my friends, but they were often nursing me back to health.

  “We are family, Adam. One cannot carry all the weight. Sometimes each of us will grow tired, and we will need help. You are not less of a man because you need us to care for you.”

  “Yeah, Captain. You just killed five robber assholes with two shots. Don’t worry, I think you are a fucking badass.”

  “Ha, thanks,” I said, but then I missed one of my steps and almost fell on her.

  “Whoops!” she said as she pushed back on me. “Here is the bathroom.” We took ten more steps into the entrance marked by the flashing blue icon. There was a hallway, then a door for each sex. They pulled me into the women’s one, and I didn’t argue.

  “I’ll watch the entrance if you can clean him up,” Z said.

  “That is fine. Perhaps you can find a way over to a street further away?”

  “That’s moving away from the tube though.”

  “True, but also away from the security team attempting to find us,” Eve said as she leaned me against the long sink which ran the length of the tile bathroom.

  “I’ll look for one,” Z replied, and then she stepped out of the door.

  Eve ran some paper towels under the faucet and began to wipe my face. The water was cool, and the sensation made me wake up a bit. I knew the reprieve would be fleeting. I always needed to sleep after I changed back into my human form, and the starvation wasn’t helping my willpower.

  “We will get through this. It is nothing compared to what we have already overcome,” Eve said with a big wide smile.

  “You always have a positive outlook,” I grunted and lifted my chin up so she could wipe the towel across my neck. I wanted to help her, but I felt like I would fall if I took my hands off the counter.

  Then my shoulders started shaking, and my vision started to spin.

  “I have you,” I heard Eve whisper in my ear, and I felt her arms around me. She was warm, and her embrace made my eyes close.

  “Bad news, we have ten armored guards walking this way. Good news is that there is another door at the end of the hallway. I popped it open, and it leads into the depths of the station. I don’t know how long it goes, but I can lock it behind us.”

  “That is a good plan. Can you help me lift Adam?”

  “Yeah,” I heard Z say, and I felt her hands grab my other shoulder. I tried to help them by pushing off the bathroom floor with my feet, but I couldn’t put any strength into the movement.

  I hardly had enough strength to keep my eyes open.

  “Here is the door,” I heard Z say. “I’ll lock it after--” there was a whistle in the distance, and Z spat a colorful curse.

  “Hurry, we must pull him into this room,” Eve said.

  “They have whistles? Who has whistles? It is ridiculous--”

  “Z! Please close the door!”

  “Got it! Closed!”

  I felt my shoulder fall into something soft, and the blackness behind my eyes began to spin like a deep dark whirlpool diving into an even darker sea.

  “Fuck, they saw us. What do we do?”

  I heard voices shout in the distance, and I heard Z shout back. Then I heard pounding on a metal surface that I guessed was our door.

  I wanted to get up, I wanted to run, I didn’t want to get caught, but I didn’t have the energy to even open my eyes.

  Sleep finally took me.

  Chapter 3

  “How long is he going to sleep?”

  “I don’t know, Ma’am. It appears to be something akin to a hibernation state. His heart rate and brain activity are much lower than a normal human.”

  “You sure he isn’t dead?”

  “He isn’t dead. Just in a deep sleep.”

  There were two voices: a woman had asked the first question, and a man was answering. Their voices were enough to pull me from my sleep, but instead of the words I meant to speak, a long moan came out.

  “Looks like he’s awake,” the man said.

  “Weee arr frrreenndds?” I said. My tongue didn’t want to work, and neither did my eyelids.

  “Good. I want to talk to him,” the woman said.

  “Don’t think he’s going to be doing much talking,” the man said.

  I finally muscled my eyelids up so that I could take in my surroundings. I was in a hospital room, and there were dozens of computers connected to my body via tubes attached to my arms and chest.

  My eyes focused on the man. He was tall, lean, and his hair was buzzed close to his scalp in military fashion. His features were sharp, and he looked slightly bored. He wore a white coat and held a datapad in his hand.

  The woman was more interesting. She had a long mane of red hair. It was tied tight against her skull under a beret, but the back was loose, and the fall of hair was like a curly flame descending her back. She wore a uniform of black, but there was white and silver trim on the shoulders and seams. The outfit was tight around her body and the styling reminded me of the other Victorian costumes outfits I saw earlier on the street.

  “Good morning, Adam.” The woman smiled, but the expression wasn’t exactly friendly.

  I was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

  “Good morning,” I replied after I moved my lips a few times to get them warmed up. “I’m not floating outside of the station.”

  “Ha,” she grunted and shook her head. “No. Not yet, at least.”

  “Where are my friends?” I asked as I tried to sit up in the chair. The handcuffs were too tight, though, and I just pulled at them ineffectively.

  “They are okay. For now.” The woman turned to the man in the doctor’s uniform. “Leave us.”

  The man nodded and then pivoted on the balls of his feet. He exited my room, and I saw that the door he opened was probably fifteen inches of thick solid metal. Beyond the doorway was a hallway lined with steel bars. I was in jail, and I felt the beast inside of my stomach begin to growl.

  The door closed, and the redhead in the sexy uniform stretched out a leg to hook on a stool. The seat slid across the tile floor, bounced off my bed, and then she sat on it.

  “You smoke?” she asked as she reached into her pocket.

  “Been a while,” I admitted. The practice was common in the Jupiter Marines, and everyone in the Yakuza did, but my habit had stopped once I was imprisoned, and I’d never really craved a cigarette since.

  “Hmmm,” she fixed her green eyes on me as she put one in her mouth. She lit it with an old-fashioned match, puffed a few clouds of smoke out of her nose, and then pulled it from her lips with a pinch of her gloved fingers. I thought she was going to offer me one, but she just stared into my eyes for a few moments.

  “You’ve violated our laws,” she finally said. Then she took another inhale of her smoke. The tobacco smelled high quality, but I wasn’t feeling any pangs of desire.

  “I’m not dead, so what do you need?” I asked.

  “You think I need something from you?” she raised an eyebrow.

  “Now I’m starting to think you like playing games.”

  “Ha.” She shook her head, and a half smile came to her lips. “I think I like you, Adam. Where are you from?”

  “All over,” I replied. I didn’t feel hungry, and I wondered if part of their treatment had forced nutrients into my stomach.

  “Your accent sounds like it’s from the Sol System. I’m going to gue
ss Jupiter or Saturn.”

  “You’ve been there?” I asked.

  “Am I correct?”

  “As I said, I’ve been around.”

  The woman stared at me for a few moments and then took another hit from her smoke.

  “Interesting ship you’ve got.”

  “Yep,” I replied.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “She found us,” I smirked and started to wonder what Eve and Z had told the woman.

  “Hmmm. That sounds awful close to piracy.”

  “I think you know I’m not a pirate,” I said to her.

  “No, but your friends weren’t very forthcoming with information.”

  “They are here?” I asked, and the woman just chuckled.

  “I’d like to offer you a deal,” she changed the subject.

  I considered giving her a smart ass response, but I figured that the woman had probably gotten plenty of those from Z, so I didn’t say anything. The redhead was waiting for my response, but when I didn’t answer she continued.

  “Your friend with the data port in her skull did quite a number on our surveillance files, so I wasn’t able to see exactly how you dealt with the robbers, but the eyewitness testimony was convincing enough. You’re ex-military. I’m going to guess some sort of special ops from Sol. The people you killed weren’t exactly skilled, but you did it quickly, without your own firearm.”

  “That what the witnesses said?” I asked.

  “They said many things. Some of them didn’t make a lot of sense.” The woman’s smile faded. “I need some trash taken out. It involves going to some places in the station where my team isn’t exactly welcome.”

  “Sounds like a hit job,” I said.

  “It’s hard work maintaining a station this size. Most of our population are miners. Queen’s Hat sits between a dozen different rhodium mining locations. It was originally crafted by the Nebula Gammon company for mining, but a union strike and work uprising kicked them out eighty or so years ago. Since then, the station has worked as a Parliamentary Democracy.” The woman took another puff from her cigarette and then gestured through the smoke with her fingers. “The issue with democracy is that people are stupid. They give in to their addictions, their desires, and their fear. Nebula Gammon didn’t have to deal with the repercussions, since they punished such criminal activity via airlock.”