The Last Omega in the Galaxy (Scales and Tails of Fate #1)

Chapter One

Vil

Captain’s log, day 64 since human contact. Space is dark, or is it the absence of something for the light to hit? I exist between stars in search of—

“Captain!” A metallic voice drew me out of my notes, Sarge’s gravely tones barking through an air shaft as he hunted me down. “ Fucken hybreeds .” The second muttered words drew me fully out of my musings as my first mate approached my office door and barged in.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Cap’n! Put on some damn pants!” Sarge shielded his eyes and barged his way in, kicking about dirty articles of clothing and misplaced electronics. My office , as it were, was also my living quarters.

“My room, my rules!” I sprawled out in my zero-gravity chair, fat cock laying on my thigh lazily. He hadn’t perked up in weeks for any fun, so I’d been giving the old hog some outdoor time. Sarge was the only man on the ship that really minded any sort of indecency.

My shimmering viewscreen tilted out of my face as Sarge bent low, picking up armloads of clothing to throw down the laundry chute before toeing trash into a corner. “I can see that.”

He wrinkled his rounded nose as something scuttled by. Probably a Venusian lyret, kinda like one of those house geckos that North American humans got in the Autocratic State of Amphetamines. Or was it Florida? History had been rewritten too many times. Anyway, like one of those sticky meth lizards with a bushy squirrel tail and formic acid bites that stung like the devil.

If I didn’t eat it, Gorm would later.

“Captain, please? Do we need to make port or something? Are you in a hormonal cycle?”

I glared at Sarge. He was one of the few pure humans I ever knew to keep our kind company and like it. I didn’t count him as human though. Too comfortable with us. I secretly thought it was because he had a fetish for the high percentage hybreeds, but he’d never fucked any of us. I mean, he’d watched… But still, he favored our low percentage doctor though. Their weird relationship flourished…kinda. Our entire ship had a free-use polyamory kind of weird sexual vibe to it.

Hybreeds were horny bastards by nature.

He combed a hand through dark hair, his shaggy top the same obscenely dark mahogany as his handle mustache. He reminded me of one of those space-themed human rock stars from a half millennia ago. Freddy Mercury… Minus the autoimmune diseases and drug hab—maybe a drug habit. I never could tell with humans. The hollow thump of his grav boots on my enameled carbon steel floor unnerved me as I scratched my long, lean stomach and gave him puppy dog eyes.

His gaze didn’t meet mine, instead traversing to my holoscreen. “Human conta—Vil, I swear to the Progenitors. If you don’t get off your ass and put us on a course, I’m going to start a mutiny. And I am human!”

“A sexy mutiny?” I perked up, ignoring his burgeoning humanity, leaning forward a little as the synthetic plasticine fabric of my grav lounger creaked against the smooth scales that traversed my chest down. My tail twitched with interest.

“The kind of mutiny where you put that tail away, or we have hybreed sashimi for dinner.” He glared at me and I snatched my tail up, holding it to my chest where it squirmed, all smooth and cool.

He’d do it. Had before. It hurt like a bitch to grow back. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Would. We’re near broke, supplies are running low, and Merriel has managed to synthesize cannabis again, so he’s stoned out of his gourd while Gorm tries to restore him to a backup.” Sarge, my second-in-command, sighed raggedly. Babysitting an entire interstellar salvage vessel of my kind had to be hard on him. We weren’t known for our social skills, but we were smart, quick and strong . As for Merriel, our ship’s intelligence system, he was… special.

I groaned and scrounged in a drawer until I appeased his lordship, king of prudes, and put on a set of shorts. He wasn’t getting anything else out of me. I scratched the base of my tail, the polite phrase for my ass , and followed in suit, my larger feet and scaling posture a stark contrast to his own.

As I entered the cockpit to our ship, I got a pleasant view of a neon-green, scaled ass clad in a hideously pink set of shorts, bent over a command terminal. Much swearing and fidgeting came forth amid his roving tail, picking up one tool and bringing out another. All the while, the industrial metallic surroundings shone slowly oscillating colors, every viewscreen in the room pinned with rolling videos of lava lamps. “ Duuuude…hehehe. ” The dulcet tones of my glorious ship’s operating intelligence barked over the speakers. I slapped my palm to my face and sighed.

“Merriel. Why?” I cursed the day I bought the discounted system some time ago. Every day since, I’d understood more and more why his family didn’t keep him.

I got no answer but slouched over to Gorm as he leaned into the console more. “Cap’n, that you?” A rather humanoid upper torso slid free of the gap between panels as a mask slid from his face. Aside from the color and slitted pupils, he was indistinguishable from a human. Well, that and the height. Depending on what percentage Progenitor we were, we all had greater height. Still, at six foot nine, Gorm held his 28 percent with pride.

He had nothing on my 64 percent, but then again, only a dozen or so of us were that high of a percentage. Not enough genetic diversity for hybreeds to intermix much when the Progenitors only left three specimens for humans to start their stupid breeding experiment.

A somewhat inebriated giggle rang through the speakers again. Sweet Progenitors’ mercy…

By the time I could muster a few words, they sat unsaid on my tongue as Gorm leaned back in and jerked a cable, shutting it all down. Standby mode activated as the holoscreens flickered off and emergency lights blinked on. My eyes adjusted, the slits in them a little violating when they moved too suddenly. “Now to enter the bios…”

I left Gorm to his thing while I slipped into my nearby captain’s chair and pulled out a tablet, searching for open salvage jobs, construction, mining gigs, or abandoned stations. A quick glance at the window made me hesitate. We were too close to the old zone . Too much debris from my past. Too many terrible memories.

Of all my crew, only I was old enough to remember the Mater Terra, Earth . The last days when we were all being shipped off, and my brothers sat with me while we watched the burning Earth grow smaller and smaller through a small porthole window, were ones I didn’t want to relive.

A garbled choke of sound barked over the speakers before words formed and Merriel’s voice perked up. “Hey, guys, what’d I miss? Whoa. It’s been a few days.”

“Stop. Synthesizing. Drugs.” Gorm extracted himself from the panel and hooked it back into place before kicking a terminal.

“Aw, man, again? Then stop letting me get bored. It gets tedious just hovering around in space doing nothing. Oh… What if I could program a way for me to jerk off? What would I jerk off to? Ship porn. Nah. I still like humans…humanoids. I’d fuck it all.” Merriel yammered on as I kicked the console. “Sorry, Cap! Won’t happen again. Well, okay, it will happen again, but I’ll try pretty hard not to for a while.”

I rolled my eyes and took a long breath. “Just search for wreckage nearby that is sanctioned for harvest.”

At least he’s honest.

I kicked my feet up and scanned the empty horizon. Thousands of stars surrounded us, and the view did absolutely nothing for me save for the holoscreen overlaying the glass, pointing to distant pinpricks in the window with labels of their location and life status.

“Can we go a system over? The only thing in this area is that haunted AF asteroid.”

Haunted? Part of my brain perked up as Merriel shuddered, making the ship vibrate around us for effect.

“Yeah, man. I remember when I was first commissioned into a ship after my fam died and my contract expired… There’s this asteroid with an SOS call that hasn’t stopped reaching out for help in over a hundred years.” While Merriel was technically almost as old as me, he was frozen, emotionally and mentally, at around seventeen. Once human, his parents had uploaded his consciousness to the cloud after his passing. Shortly after, they banned the process due to the high expense of preserving those lives, and the way sanity leaves an entity after death. Those few that had survived had been repurposed, as it was illegal to “store” them or otherwise sentence them to senescence or death.

Existence without purpose with awareness was madness. Merriel’s purpose? To run our ship. Really, he wasn’t much good for anything else. He’d been a stoner kid when alive and no better since.

“Oh, sweet… Haunted asteroid.” Gorm perked up and oddly, I found myself interested too.

Details for the place, the orbit and trajectory of the asteroid caught in a huge loop around Jupiter, made me chew my lip as Gorm glued himself to the display while I thumbed through the mysterious SOS calls.

Every day at sporadic intervals, an SOS message beeped out, meant to echo and ride waves; it wasn’t strong enough to produce reliably. The weak signal could push one word. SOS. “Need more, dude. Gimme what you got.”

Merriel hemmed and hawed around for a moment before tossing up info onto the screen. One of the great parts of an early model human-consciousness AI was the lack of ethics and morals around hacking. Merriel happily snooped and hacked any sort of dirty info for me.

Officially, they’d abandoned the facility twenty years after the planet’s evacuation. It was a housing station for Progenitor DNA and failed subjects to be contained. Logs said that a kanoik had taken up residence on the asteroid. By this point, with enough resources, the thing had reproduced more than a few times. The camel-sized, scaly, dark-shelled, pincer-clawed bastards had a tendency to sting and drag their victims off to these little nests they made where they liquified their prey into little drink boxes of nutrient slush.

I shuddered.

When you were a creature that could regenerate from as little as a finger—the prospect of being digested was horrific. I’d been down that path before. It was shit. Literally. Worse still was regenerating inside a creature and…yeah. Only hybreeds over a certain percentage could regenerate. Mostly those of us over twenty. I’d seen some in the teens able to do it but also some in the thirties that couldn’t. I was special in that I could regenerate from far less. They could regrow limbs.

I couldn’t die.

I’d tried.

I scrolled down and stared at what appeared to be the logs of someone in cryosleep, third stage. During the first stage of cryosleep, they typically sedated the being, and in the second, being frozen, it was impossible to wake. The third was the precursor to the thawing state, when awareness returned.

My stomach bottomed out as I read the logs. A chill prickled my skin as a new one blipped up on screen.

I selected it.

Cryolog-00198331

Today will be different.

Cryolog-00198330

Today will be different.

Cryolog-00198329

Today will be different.

I scrolled the logs, and for the past 300 years, the message had been the same. An error. A continuing message stuck on a loop. I closed it out and caught sight of the filename.

N03-1.

I didn’t like the name of that file at all. As I, myself, had been N01-5-2 a long, long time ago.

“Set course. There’s at least samples or cryogenic freezing equipment there to salvage.” I pushed the thought from my mind as I shook my head.

Gorm choked from behind me, provoking me into a rapid swivel in my chair so I could stare at his sharp features and dark-green hair hanging in loose dreads. Our eyes met. “It says there’s a kanoik there!”

“And? I’ll go first. Happy?” I crossed my arms over my chest, the gesture uncomfortable and tight.

He grumbled, and Sarge rested a hand on my shoulder, his breath shuddering as he gathered the courage to say something. “I’ll lead the group if there’s this much to say about it. I won’t make you set foot in one of those labs again.”

I shook my head. The aversion was just that. Nothing more.

I hated labs.