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

Chapter Eight

Noel

“Kanoik,” the human said. Sarge, I believed. His insistence on calling the giant space lobster scorpion this odd alien name annoyed me. It was a giant scorpion in space. A space scorpion.

“Disagree.” I fastened on a mask, strapping it onto my face before dialing in the oxygen content I needed. The controls were fairly intuitive, for the technology being so advanced, so I dialed it down. I’d matured in an era where oxygen had subsided to near 17 percent. Life on Earth was suffering, but I found the standard 21 percent to be too cloying. I liked 15.

Locking in place, I took a long breath and exhaled slowly, finding it rather suiting.

“Vil likes it low in his mask, too.” Sarge’s offhand comment made me nod. I had noticed the trend with Raziel and Nirem. Our homeworld must have had low oxygen too.

I’d always wondered what it looked like, but they never showed me pictures or would say. They held it like some sort of secret, one I was unfit to know. Before I could get angry, though, I forged through the opening doors, knife in hand. Vil had tried to get me a gun, but I found the thing needlessly complicated and thought I’d have better luck with a knife. Vil didn’t doubt me, even though he churlishly lagged behind.

We wandered the asteroid, grav boots sucking at my feet unnaturally. They were right, the asteroid didn’t have any atmosphere to stretch my wings, so they’d have to wait as we climbed rubbles and ruins, things that just a few years ago, to my mind, had been new and normal. Staring at crumbling tiles under my feet, broken concrete, steel plating made me sad. My heart hurt as a small realization hit me that all I’d known was gone.

I’d had lovers before. I’d known companionship, and what I’d hoped was genuine affection. I’d had things I could call family and those I cared about. Like tissues in a box, they could be taken away and something new would pop up in its place. Disposable, just like everything else in my life. Finite where I was infinite.

Vil’s lovely presence warmed me despite the cold hollowness of space making the pressure on my scales somewhat unnerving. Unlike humans who needed pressure suits, Vil and I didn’t. We were adapted.

As we crossed the lines of rubble along the way, poking about for signs of the beast, I turned my head as a flicker of motion slithered by like a silverfish bug, too flexible, melting over rubble and between remains of things long gone.

I tapped into the communication device in my mask. “Three o’clock.”

Neither responded for a moment. A hesitant cough rang in from Sarge’s channel. “We haven’t used clocks like that in several hundred years. What direction is three?”

I froze in my steps. The thought of not understanding such a simple allegory, of it fading over time, upset me. I’d been gone long enough for common things to change. “My due northeast?”

More silence. Right. No Earth, so poles and cardinals made little sense to them.

With a ragged sigh, I pointed to my right and slightly forward toward an undulating mass of carapaced flesh. The sudden gesture caught its attention, defeating the purpose of my language.

It was too long since I’d been awake, but the Zen of a fight made me whole as the creature broached the nearest blockade of crumbled stone. Bits of rubble, barely clinging on to life, floated into the air and drifted away as the thing clawed its way toward me, and I cursed myself internally for picking a fight in zero gravity.

But blood was blood.

I didn’t let Vil move first. I had a thirst to exercise muscles I’d not moved in hundreds of years. I wanted something besides sex and touch. I wanted the drifting hormones out of my mind. If he thought himself a victim in the mating—he had no idea what an omega undertook. He had a choice to dispose of me, a right to, even.

But with me? I had lost so much autonomy. I would need Vil. I would crave him. With each part of me in tune with him, I was more or less a slave to his libido until my final resting days. As Nirem had once told me so long ago, “An omega is ablated to not only spare alphas the tether but to spare the omega a lifetime of servitude.” Even still, if they’d allowed me to bond and be loved, I’d have taken the opportunity. I was good for little else besides a hinge piece to satisfy the lust between alpha and beta.

Even so, I could fight.

I breathed deep, enjoying the scent of adrenaline from my own breath, palming the knife they’d given me.

“Noel, watch out for its—” I tuned out Vil’s instruction. Nothing the creature could do to me would hurt worse than what’d already been done. I kicked the edge of my grav boots and soared toward the creature, flight in emptiness and vacuum. The steel in my hand burned, desire to kill overwhelming me.

A swear of rebuke came over the speaker but I couldn’t and wouldn’t be gainsaid. I needed to kill. The urge rose in me, not from my training alone but from years of being told that it was my only outlet. I wanted nothing more.

The first twist of my body in the weightlessness made the world around me spin, the stars and blackness around interrupted by the Earth, so much less green than I remembered, hanging in what may as well have been my sky the size of the moon. Venus’s shape interrupted the stars, small still, but recognizable.

The collapsed structure of a memory long faded, a life I’d never get to live again, reminded me of the anger I needed to voice. And the first word came free of my lips, a swear as I cried out in vain. I kicked the heels of my boots, flipped, and swung my tail to wrap around the joint of two carapace segments. It curled in resentment and tried to sting, swinging its tail about as I wedged a blade underneath a thoracic plate and twisted.

Knowing what I knew of insectoid creatures, they’d have book lungs or gills, neither of which would fit something that could live without an atmosphere. It would have to have a central heart. Since it relied on whatever it ate for its gas exchange, likely the decomposition of it, meaning, it breathed in methane from its stomach.

Anything that made methane, by that logic, needed something that could contain pressure. And in a vacuum…

I ran my blade down the plates of its form and found a bulging plate that made a distinct resonation from the rest, the chitin thicker and more resilient. Bingo. In order to get into the abdominal cavity behind the plate, I’d have to either break the plate or get my knife just right between them.

I buried the blade as my body arched, the creature’s tail whipping around in retaliation.

“Noel! Your back,” Vil said, urgency clear in his tone. While most of my handlers or partners had cared for me, none had ever been so worried about me. It was endearing, truly. Perhaps it was the sway of an omega’s hormones on an appropriate host.

At least he cared, even if it was a biological imperative.

The stinger poised at my back and sank down with a few sharp jabs, piercing and pulsing into the meaty part of my side. I angled well to protect my abdomen because after all, we’d spent several days rutting. If he were the perfect blend of alpha and beta I hoped, I would eventually need my womb to carry his young.

Pain like shards of glass ran through my veins and brought with it a euphoria like humans referred to as coffee . I was awake, alive, and ready for more.

I’d been through surgeries, through unanesthetized procedures, extractions, and experiments. I’d been shot and stabbed. Electrocuted and poisoned. None of it mattered when I arched my back and groaned with bliss before jerking my heel into the handle of the blade. Cracking a plate while driving the knife into just the right angle sent a fine mist of yellowing bilious fluid erupting from where the dagger hit. Before unidentifiable organic matter hosted in bacterial sludge burst free, forming amorphous shapes of chunky globules in the air, I braced myself. I kicked the dagger again as the creature flailed.

Whatever fluid had come out burned my skin, but I’d live. I’d had worse. As fast as the simmering liquid made its mark, my body pushed back, forming a scaly layer of skin that shed under the bubbles, leaving paler flesh behind as it floated away in flakes. Perfect.

The creature writhed under my grip as I held on, tail still wrapped.

The swinging stinger caught my ire, and I snatched it, hand crushing it in my grip. In the end, it wasn’t as resilient as it should have been for being the entire purpose of its self-defense.

Cold temperatures and methane-based metabolism lent little to the speed of a chemical reaction. The achingly slow effect would take long minutes to complete, long minutes I wanted over. After a while, though, it didn’t matter. Ultimately, the creature was dead, twitching under me as spluttering bubbles and balls of sickly yellowish green floated away, caught in a different orbit. Then, satisfied, I watched while they bubbled in a simmering boil in the vacuum.

As I climbed off, I shook myself a little, tail whipping to dispose of the stinging fluid. A cast of my tail’s scales floated away with the clinging liquid and wide eyes locked to me with worry. Vil’s hands wrapped around my waist, fingers exploring my wounds. More swear words endeared me to the worry and, oddly, even Sarge joined him in inspecting them.

“Let’s get him into Doc to detox.” Sarge pressed a hand into my back but I held back, shaking my head.

Vil halted Sarge, brows furrowed. “You don’t hurt?”

“Oh, it’s pretty bad but I’ve had way worse.” I shrugged it off, but the doubtful look in their eyes mirrored one another. “I promise. I’m fine.”

Vil reluctantly pushed forward, a hand on my arm as he urged me deeper into the ruined parts of the building. Recent evidence of tinkering came into view, and I studied tool marks in the stone where something had been pried away. If my memories served me well, that part of the base had been a research storage lab and a safe box had been there, locked down. I traced my fingers over it, trying to recall what they kept in i— “Urine samples.”

“What?” Sarge interrupted my train of thought.

“Whatever they pulled from this spot held urine samples. It was a safe. Double-check it. Probably not really pleasant, whatever’s left inside.”

The memories I had from those times were hazy at best. Either everything I had known had changed in so many insignificant ways over time that it had become insignificant, or the trauma I held to was such that my brain was using every bit of those chemicals I’d been pumped with to forget.

Like a woman forgot childbirth, the brain let go of pain easily for our kind. The time I’d chanted into the void, sent coded messages into the ether, leaving an SOS log on my screen while nothing changed in my endless cold…it wasn’t for nothing. It was for family to find me. It was for something. It was for this .

Sarge whistled over the receiver and I wrenched from Vil’s grasp, claws drawn as I located a mass of cat-sized silverfish-scorpion-lobster things. Their shells hadn’t fully hardened, still yellowed and flimsy at the edges. A regurgitated slime lined a depression nearby, likely the mother inundating their digestive systems with the bacteria-laden digestive fluids. Their little many-eyed faces shone slick with the stuff as hungry mandibles clicked.

Mmm… Probiotics.

Sarge fired a laser weapon at one and it left a scorch mark, but nothing else. A pissed-off nymph of a creature waved flexible mandibles in the air before charging with all the strength its two brain cells and hydraulic exoskeleton-based movement could process.

All that ended as I braced one grav boot and poised the other, stomping down on the shell with a satisfying hiss and sizzle, followed by another. “Crunchy. Gross.”

Splattered bile floated by as I searched the ruins and found another, crushing that too. I hated fighting in space. I wanted to sniff the creature, get its signature, and hunt down the rest of them. But it was for nothing. I sighed as Sarge directed Vil toward another area and I followed them, noticing that neither wanted to look at me. Idly, I wondered what mistake I’d made or if I’d done my job too slowly. Perhaps I’d dispatched them too inefficiently. New laser technology just wasn’t my thing.

As we approached the full circle of the facility, Sarge put his hands on his hips and rocked his heels. We’d found the nest, dispatched it. Dispatched a juvenile. Vil had apparently taken a newly shed mother out sometime prior.

“I think we got them.” Sarge tilted his head about before tapping a button on his helmet for coms, silencing further communication. I’d have read his lips, but his face lay obscured behind the radiation coating of his visor, caught in a gleam of solar flare.

Vil wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me into his side with a comforting gesture. “We’re going straight to Doc, okay?”

The threat of taking me into the weak hybreed’s lair, which of all things was a sterile clinic, made my tail arch with displeasure.

“Won’t take no.” He ushered me with a hand carefully at my lower back before Sarge marched ahead of us.

I wanted to hiss in protest, but I’d long since learned not to talk back to orders. In fact, I wasn’t sure why I’d not tested him, as part of my brain seemed to be infatuated with him as mate and not master. I’d not even been that loyal to Raziel, and he was my patron.

Before I knew it, we’d entered the airlock and were waiting for pressure to equalize before we shed our gear. Sarge, like most humans, seemed to handle the shift with a few harsh breaths and a shake of his head, but it felt as natural as a yawn to me, coming into the correct atmosphere. And while Sarge did his thing, Vil pulled off his mask and whispered over my ear. “If you listen and do what you’re told, I’ll suck your cock until you scream.”

My tail curled at the prospect, and the pain going through my veins pulsed dully compared to the urgent need I had to rut with my mate once more.

Maybe I could get used to it.