Dead Drift: Episode 2, page 1
Dead Drift
Episode 2
Lara X. Lust
Misty Vixen
CHAPTER 01
Royce came awake again under significantly better circumstances this time around.
He found an attractive, naked woman laying on him, her huge, bare breasts pressing against his chest. He also found that the gravity still worked and his ship was making all the right sounds. For a moment, he simply laid there, appreciating being able to breathe still.
How much time had passed?
The ship was still in motion; he knew that, and he was still decently tired. If the ship had stalled, something serious would have gone wrong, something Royce dreaded he wouldn’t be able to undo. There was no telling how difficult things would be if a hull breach occurred or total atmospheric decompression. Royce shuddered.
Even as he was thinking of checking the time, a chime sounded somewhere overhead. Claire inhaled deeply and shifted. She pushed herself slowly up and then looked at him with tired eyes. A look of fatigue swept her face.
“What...oh right,” she murmured. “We had fun.”
“A lot of fun,” he agreed.
“Uh...something woke me up. Is it time to get up, or…?”
“Time to get up,” he replied, getting out from under her and tossing the blanket back. “For me at least. You can keep sleeping if you want.”
“No...I should probably be awake for this,” she replied. “Also…” She reached out and grabbed his wrist suddenly. “I’m feeling needy.”
“Oh, are you now?” he replied, looking back at her.
“Yes. Very.”
“It’ll have to be a quick one.”
“That’s fine.”
Royce chuckled and got back into bed, leaning in and kissing her. Claire had an appetite, for sure. He’d been within women like that before, but it was nice to find a sexy woman that appreciated sex. He wouldn’t turn her down.
Five minutes later, and they were getting back into the shower and she was putting the showerhead up under herself, cleaning the mess.
Royce frowned as he saw her do that, something coming back to bug him again. He was definitely missing something, and it had something to do with her. She didn’t have any STDs. He knew that much. The scan he’d run in the infirmary would have revealed it.
So what-
“Oh,” he muttered.
“What?” she asked, replacing the showerhead.
“Uh. I should have asked: are you on birth control? Because I’m not,” he replied.
She smiled awkwardly, not quite meeting his eyes. “...no.”
“What!? Claire! Why didn’t you say anything!?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was...distracted! You could’ve just said: oh hey, I’m not on birth control, you should pull out,” he replied.
“I was distracted too, you know,” she said.
“You don’t seem too upset about it.”
She sighed. “I’m not. I...want to get pregnant. By you.”
He looked at her for a long moment. She still wasn’t meeting his gaze, but when he didn’t say anything, she did. “Okay, look, I’m not crazy or anything,” she said. “I’ve always felt comfortable with the idea of getting pregnant, whether I have to go it alone or not. And, obviously, I would like for the father to be, you know...a good guy. And that’s you. So if you get me pregnant and then we decide to part ways, that’d be okay by me. But I’d also be happy if we stayed together. Or maybe I’m infertile. I don’t know. We’ll find out.”
Royce stared at her for another moment in silence.
“Come on, don’t give me that look. I don’t like that look. I’m not a psycho or anything. I should’ve told you, yeah, but I really was distracted, like you. I’d just been through a shipwreck and I thought I was going to die like a few hours ago. Okay? And shouldn’t we be trying to make more of us anyway?...I’m sorry if I made you mad.”
“No. You didn’t,” he said, relaxing and then hugging her. “I’m not mad. I was just...caught off guard. Pregnancy can be a pretty big deal and you just sorta sprang on me that you’re looking to get knocked up by me. Within a few hours of meeting. But...I don’t think you’re crazy. I’m also not ready to commit to much of anything yet, because we hardly know each other.”
“I know, like I said, if you want to part ways when this is over, I’ll accept that. Although…”
“Although?”
They parted, and she smirked up at him, running a finger down his chest. “I’d make an excellent wife, you know.”
“Wife?”
“Girlfriend? Mistress? Fuck toy? I really like you, so I’d be willing to do a lot for you. And yes, I know, we barely know each other, but I’ve met hundreds of guys at my station or traders coming through, and no one has ever made me feel like this before.”
“You’d really want to live here, with me?” he asked.
“I like it here,” she replied. “Though if I can convince Jena to also be your girlfriend and I did get pregnant, or we both did, well...we would need a slightly bigger ship, I think.”
“You are already making plans about a life together that involves another woman,” he murmured. “You’re a little crazy.”
“Maybe a little, but you don’t want to lock that down?” she replied.
“...okay, fair point. Come on, we need to get to work. That was the ten-minute alarm that woke us up and we’re just about out of time. I gotta get to the bridge and get stuff rolling,” he said.
“Okay.”
He washed up first, then got out, dried off, took a leak, and headed back into his room. Thoughts swirled in his head. As he went about finding a fresh set of clothes to pull on, Claire’s words rang in his ears. …convince Jena…
Growing up after a galactic apocalypse had already wiped out some ninety percent of all human life tended to have certain effects on a person. Living in a situation where you could be killed fairly easily tomorrow or the next day had more of them.
Such as relationships tended to form fast.
They could also crumble quickly as well, but the biggest thing that Royce had taken away from living the life that he’d lived was: find happiness where you could. When it came to you, you took it. There was certainly a strong happiness in hooking up with an attractive woman, anyway.
There was even more happiness in hooking up with multiple women.
And there was certainly happiness in settling down and even pretending to ‘play house’, as some people called it. He’d certainly taken some women onto his ship for weeks or even months at a time when he’d had a successful run and credits to burn. It wasn’t out of his personality to spend several days fucking hot 20s-something women in his room.
Plus, he simply could not deny the fact that there was a powerful, primal satisfaction in the idea that he might have gotten Claire pregnant. He’d didn’t really see himself as a father, but he also didn’t necessarily not see himself as one either. Royce couldn’t deny that it felt good, though.
And she was right: they needed more humans.
It was basically impossible to get any kind of count, but from the last he’d heard, they were down to less than a million now.
A million seemed like so many, but it was nothing compared to what they had once been.
What was a million to twenty billion?
Or however many they had been. He’d heard stories of the number being higher years ago, and maybe that was true, but he had no way to prove it. It was all rumor and hearsay.
And, of course, that meant that there were at least hundreds of millions of the infected out there. On ships, on stations, on planets and moons and asteroids. Gnashing teeth and bottomless stomachs of foul, putrid flesh and horrific, gaunt faces came to him in a flash. They were out there.
Waiting in the dark.
Royce tried to shake off the grim thoughts as he finished pulling a fresh set of clothes on. He laced up his boots tight and then glanced briefly at the bathroom door, the shower still running. He could hear Claire singing faintly.
Maybe that was why it didn’t really freak him out, why the thought of her staying around and getting pregnant (and bringing her friend) was so appealing: the thought of life and connect was the best way to keep away the thoughts of darkness and death.
The cold loneliness of deep space.
He finished up and headed out of the bedroom, made quick strides down the central corridor and into the bridge. They’d stopped moving, the autopilot bringing them to a halt a safe distance away. There should be no one around because if there were, it would have warned him. Theoretically.
First thing he did as he stopped was to check the sensors. They were indeed within sight of the sensor array, and it was still there and basically intact, though clearly abandoned. No running lights and there were big holes in the hull in some places.
Second thing he did was to take a look at the diagnostic. It had finished running while they were sleeping. He frowned as he quickly identified the problem areas. This wasn’t going to be fun.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
His in-system engines were not in as good of shape as he thought. Something had gone wrong while he’d been flying to the sensor station. It wasn’t enough to seriously screw anything up, but it had definitely gotten worse during the flight.
And he wasn’t sure if he had the parts to fix it.
And he was working against a timeline he didn’t know the details of.
With a sigh, he began running a more det
While his own scanners were running, the door behind him opened up. A familiar voice cracked the anxious silence. “Hey, what’s happening?” Claire asked as she walked in.
He glanced at her in the reflection of the window, then turned around in his chair. She was wearing one of his t-shirts.
“What?” she asked when she saw him looking at her. “My clothes are dirty.”
“You wearing anything under there?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Prove it.” She smirked and lifted the t-shirt, revealing her nude, pale body, then dropped it. “Good lord, do you have an amazing body.”
“Thank you. So do you,” she replied.
He turned back around and checked the scan. “We’re here, and it looks like no one’s in the immediate area. My engines are acting a little screwy. The in-system ones, not the FTL ones. I gotta figure out what to do about them. And...okay, my scan is finished. Looks like no one’s alive on the station, which works out just fine for me.”
Royce brought them in closer and ultimately chose not to dock, instead bringing them alongside one of the big holes in the hull.
He shut down the engines and opened up a comm link, then stood.
“It’s gonna be just like before. Sit here and wait. You’ll be able to talk to me. I’m going to go try and power up their array and get a sweep of the whole system. That should tell us if people are alive, how many, and where they are. Once I figure that out, provided my engines can manage it, we’ll go get them,” he said.
“What if they can’t?” she murmured, getting unhappy again as she took his seat.
“I’ll fix them as fast as I can. As it is right now, they should be able to get us to at least one place. It really depends on how far it is. I’ll figure it out once I have all the pieces, all right?”
“Okay. Thanks. Again,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Claire.” He leaned in and kissed her, then headed out of the bridge.
Marching down the corridor, he came to his armory and suited back up. He ran the checks, grabbed the guns and ammo and other supplies he thought he might need, then connected the comm link with the ship and made for the cargo bay. He thought back to the kiss, smirked to himself, and returned to the comms.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yep. Or, uh, loud and clear. Am I supposed to be saying something? Like over? Or out?” she asked.
“You don’t have to,” he replied. “That’s more of a military thing. How are you feeling?”
“Nervous. Scared. But better than I have in a while, to be honest.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, coming into the cargo bay and pulling out the portable generator. He was almost certain he was going to need it, so he might as well lug it over there now instead of having to come back for it.
“I guess...besides Jena, you’re the first person in a really, really long time that I feel just...comfortable around. People put me on edge, you know? Like they’re gonna make fun of me or chastise me at any moment, and I have to be careful of what I say. Even strangers. But I don’t feel that way with you,” she explained.
“I’m glad I make you comfortable, Claire.”
“Do I make you comfortable?”
He considered it as he got into the airlock. “Yeah, you do.”
“That’s...I’m glad. That’s good to hear.”
He started cycling himself through.
CHAPTER 02
A space walk was not the same as a ship-to-ship transfer.
Not even close.
He came out of the airlock, disengaging his magnetic boots, and for a few seconds simply drifted out into space. The weightless state played with his equilibrium. He’d done this so many times before, but today, after everything that happened, the entire thing bared a deep, surreal eeriness.
Eyes adjusting, he peered into the blackness before him.
Royce just stared. At the infinite, star-speckled darkness. The impossibly distant suns. The twisted galactic clusters lightyears away. The sheer immensity of it all…
“Are you okay?” Claire asked, jerking him back to reality.
“Yeah, fine,” Royce replied, activating his boosters and beginning to drift towards the station. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re just breathing really heavily all of a sudden, is all.”
“Oh. Being out in open space is...a little intense, when it’s just you in a space suit. Have you ever done it?”
“No. I kinda don’t want to, either. It sounds really terrifying and I know people who have totally lost their shit and almost died just from suiting up and going out there,” she replied.
“I can understand that. It’s very disorienting and I think there’s supposed to be the potential for some kind of effect on your mind, like realizing just how big space is and how little you are? It’s...humbling, to say the least. But even after you get used to it and do it a hundred times, it’s still pretty wild.”
She giggled suddenly. “Sounds like you’re talking about sex.”
“You’ve really got sex on the brain, huh?”
“You don’t?” Claire teased.
Royce paused. “Well, I do now, thanks to you.”
“Is my pussy really that good?” she asked. “You seemed like you were just in heaven.”
“Oh, I was, and yes, it is. You are an amazing fuck.”
She giggled again. “That’s awesome.”
“Okay, I gotta focus now.”
“Right. Shutting up.”
The line went silent, though he could still hear the occasional noise of her shifting around in his seat. He thought it might bother him, but in truth, having the line open like that, knowing he could speak and someone would hear it and respond, was deeply comforting.
Royce focused. There was the hole. He navigated in through it, carefully using his boosters while hauling the portable generator behind him. It looked like the hole led into the utilities sector, meaning it probably was blown out by a power overload.
Not a good sign.
That tended to do a lot of damage, and not just structural. It wasn’t a crucial piece of the exterior, but it was still too close. Any further and cataclysmic loss of cabin pressure into the vacuum of space would have killed them all… Focus, focus, focus, Royce thought to himself.
He came into a medium room that held a number of big pieces of equipment welded to the walls, most of them long since burned out and scoured by the blast. The door out of the room was open. Royce considered his options for a moment, then activated the portable generator’s magnetic function and stuck it to a wall.
His memory and spatial awareness meant that he would remember how to get back here from anywhere on the station or, worse case scenario, leave out another hole or airlock and come back to this one.
For now, it was secure, meaning he could focus on searching the area. Pistol in hand, he activated his magnetic boots and headed through the door. A corridor awaited him. A corpse floated in it, frozen, missing an arm. It floated near the top of the hallway. The skin was covered in gray frost, glimmering faintly as distant stars bounce light off its frozen skin.
Royce aimed and fired, putting a round in its skull, just to be sure.
You could never be too careful. One well-placed bite was all it took to kill you, even with precautions. Vaccines and tech didn’t mean anything when your arteries were torn open or exposed to the vacuum deep space. Besides, these things got stealthy from time to time.
He’d run into way too many infected playing dead.
There were a few more doors down in what had once probably been thought of as the basement. He poked through everything he could find, getting doors open and finding more destruction, though at least it wasn’t as bad as the original room. That made Royce feel slightly less nervous.
He found a water filtration system that was dead and cracked, an oxygen plant that was still in surprisingly good condition, a gravity generator that wasn’t ever going to work again without a major overhaul, and a power core that was in very poor shape. Useful things, he thought. Off to the side, he discovered another round of semi-functional planar devices, transformers, radios, and PDAs.
