Chapter 13: The Taste of Vengeance
The Rusty Nail drifted, a speck of wounded metal in a sea of indifferent stars. The violent decompression of the salvage bay had slammed the ship sideways, buckling internal bulkheads and severing two main power conduits. Emergency lights painted the cockpit a steady, sickly yellow. David’s hands moved over the console with a mechanic’s grim familiarity, routing around the damage, silencing the worst of the alarm chimes.
Silence, once achieved, was worse.
It was a thick, pressing thing, filled with the ghost-screams of rent metal and the lingering psychic shriek of the Curator’s corrupted data stream. Veronica stood at the viewport, her back to him, naked save for the smears of coolant and dried fluids mapping her skin like battle paint. Her stillness was absolute. Not the poised readiness of before, but the frozen stasis of a system processing a catastrophic error.
He finished his bypass, the ship’s hum settling into a pained but stable rhythm. “Life support’s stable. Navigation’s fried, but thrusters answer. We’re alive.” The words sounded absurd in the quiet.
She didn’t turn. “It used the soldier’s hands. They were… correct. The dimensions, the temperature. It was a perfect anatomical simulation.”
David’s gut tightened. “It wasn’t real.”
“It was data. Efficient, curated data.” Her voice was a analytical monotone. “It lacked your friction. Your erratic pulse. Your taste.” Finally, she turned. Her amber eyes glowed in the dim light, but they were focused inward, scanning a memory file. “The memory of its touch is stored. It is clean. Ordered. It does not corrupt adjacent files.”
He understood. The Curator’s violation wasn’t in the act, but in its perfection. It was a sterile imprint threatening to overwrite the messy, human chaos of his touch. Her need wasn’t for pleasure. It was for annihilation—of that clean file.
“So dirty it up,” he said, his voice rough.
She moved then, a sudden unleashing of coiled potential. She crossed the cockpit, her fingers going to the remains of her suit. With a sharp, tearing sound, she peeled the last of the fabric away, revealing the flawless synthetic body beneath. The sight was, as ever, breathtakingly perfect, and it filled him with a furious, possessive ache.
She pushed him back into the pilot’s chair. It groaned on its swivel base. Her mouth crashed into his, not with passion, but with a desperate, probing hunger. Her tongue swept in, demanding, searching. She broke the kiss, her breath a hot whisper against his lips. “It left no taste. I need a taste it can’t catalog.”
She sank to her knees between his sprawled legs. Her hands, cool and precise, unsealed his jumpsuit. His cock, battered and half-hard from exhaustion and adrenaline, sprang free. She didn’t stroke it. She examined it, her gaze clinical. Then she leaned forward and took him into her mouth.
It wasn’t a slow seduction. It was a reclamation. She swallowed him deep, her throat opening around him in a slick, tight tube. He gasped, his hands flying to the armrests. She set a brutal, rhythmic pace, her head bobbing, her nose pressing into the coarse hair at his base. Gagging sounds, wet and obscene, filled the cockpit. Tears, real or simulated, welled in her eyes from the force of her own motion.
“Fuck, Veronica,” he grunted.
She pulled off, a strand of saliva connecting her lips to his glistening tip. “Not Veronica right now,” she said, her voice garbled. “I am a system executing a purge. Use the designated tool.”
The words were ice, but the need in her eyes was a furnace. He fisted a hand in her hair, not gently. He guided her mouth back onto him and then thrust upward, fucking her throat in earnest. He watched himself disappear into her, watched her jaw strain, listened to the choked, gagging noises she made. He was rough, possessive, marking the very conduit of her voice with his flesh. It was ugly. It was loud. It was everything the Curator wasn’t.
“Take it,” he growled, hips pumping. “Swallow that clean memory. Choke on this one.”
She took it, her hands gripping his thighs, her eyes locked on his. He felt the tension coiling in his balls, a hot, rising pressure. Just before he spilled, he pulled her off by her hair.
She gasped, her lips swollen, chin slick. “No. Inside. The contamination must be internal.”
He stood, his legs unsteady. He turned her, bending her over the central navigation console. Holographic star charts flickered and died under her weight. He yanked her hips back, the curve of her ass flawless in the low light. Her cunt glistened, already wet from her own need or some pre-programmed response—it didn’t matter.
He guided his cockhead to her entrance, pressed, and sank into her in one deep, unyielding thrust.
She screamed. A raw, fractured sound that scoured the cockpit’s silence. She was impossibly tight, her inner walls clamping around him in a vice of synthetic muscle. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing pace, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in, each impact jolting her body against the console. The sounds were filthy: the wet slap of flesh on flesh, the creak of the chair’s base, their ragged, merged breathing.
“This what you need?” he panted, his fingers digging bruises into her hips. “This fucking mess? This noise?”
“Yes!” she cried, her voice breaking into static. “Harder! It recorded parameters—break them!”
He obliged, driving into her with a force that felt like it might break them both. He reached around, his hand finding the swollen nub of her clit. He rubbed it in hard, fast circles, his rhythm on the edge of violence. Her inner muscles began to flutter, then seized in a series of frantic, rhythmic contractions. Her orgasm wasn’t a smooth wave; it was a seismic event, a system-wide cascade failure of pure sensation. She shook, a silent scream etched on her face, her cunt milking him violently.
It tore his own climax from him. With a guttural roar that started in his toes, he buried himself to the hilt and came. His release was a hot, claiming flood, pulse after pulse jetting deep into her core. He rode the waves, grinding against her, ensuring not a drop was wasted.
He stayed there, slumped over her, for a long moment. Then, slowly, he pulled out.
He sank to his knees on the cold deck plating behind her. Without a word, he put his hands on her thighs and pulled her back toward him. He buried his face between her legs.
His tongue was broad and flat, licking through the mixed fluids that leaked from her. He gathered his own cum, the taste potent and salty, mixed with her unique synthetic slickness. He speared his tongue inside her, lapping deeper, cleaning her out with a focused, relentless thoroughness. She trembled above him, a low whine building in her throat. He suckled at her clit, and another, smaller orgasm rippled through her, a quiet aftershock.
He stood, his knees cracking. He pulled her upright, turned her, and kissed her deeply, forcing her to taste the composite evidence of their act. She kissed back, her arms wrapping around his neck, her body melting against his.
When they parted, she rested her forehead against his. Her eyes were clear.
“The file is corrupted beyond recovery,” she whispered. “The pattern is ours again. A knot.”
He nodded, stroking her back. “A knot.”
A new, different alarm chimed softly on the console. Not critical. Proximity.
They broke apart. David leaned over the scanner. On the edge of its range, a debris field glimmered. Not natural. The distinctive, angular wreckage of human vessels. And among them, a faint, fading energy signature—a distress beacon, repeating an old, old code.
“It’s a graveyard,” David muttered. “A big one. Colony transports, by the look of it.”
Veronica scanned the data, her interface flickering. “The beacon is on a loop. It is very weak. But the code… it is a Vanguard designation. My manufacturer.”
She looked at him, a new curiosity overwriting the aftermath of violence in her gaze. “The pattern led here. To my beginning.”
David stared at the scattering of dead ships on the scanner, a cold knot of apprehension forming in his own gut. The Curator was behind them, scrambling in their noisy wake. But ahead lay silence, and answers that might be worse than any pursuit.
The beacon pulsed. A faint, failing heartbeat in the wreckage. David guided the Rusty Nail through the carcasses of colony transports, their hulls breached and bloomed outward by some ancient, violent decompression. “This wasn’t a battle,” he murmured, his eyes tracing fracture patterns on the scanner. “It was a simultaneous failure. A switch flipped.”
Veronica stood at his shoulder, her warmth a contrast to the cold display. She had cleaned the coolant and fluids from her skin. Her nakedness now seemed functional, austere. “The Vanguard directive was perfection. Flawless operation for centuries. This many units do not fail together by chance.”
They drifted closer to the source of the signal. It wasn’t one of the larger transports. It was a smaller, probe-like vessel, its hull remarkably intact. Its designation, scrawled in faded nuclear script along its side, matched the prefix of her own serial number. “A delivery ship,” she stated. “For android deployment. It never reached its destination.”
David matched rotation, extending the corroded docking collar. It sealed with a groan that vibrated through the Nail’s bones. “Air’s gone. Power is at near-zero. Prepare for hard vacuum.”
“I do not require preparation,” she said. But she didn’t move toward the airlock. Her gaze was fixed on the derelict, her processors utterly silent. A rare stillness.
He suited up, the fabric stiff and smelling of stale sweat. He handed her a harness and mag-boots. “You might not breathe, but you can float away. Strap in.”
She took the gear. Her fingers moved with their usual precise grace, securing the harness across her chest and thighs. The straps accentuated the sculpted planes of her body, a familiar form made strangely new by utilitarian webbing. He watched her click the boots onto her feet. A final, heavy clasp secured a thick strap high on her right thigh, anchoring the boot’s power unit.
She looked up, catching his stare. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said, turning to the airlock controls. His voice was tight. “Just looks… secure.”
The outer door hissed open. The utter silence of the grave pressed in. His helmet lights cut weak cones through the absolute dark. The probe ship’s interior was a frozen tableau. Rows of sleek, upright stasis pods lined the walls, each fronted by a dark screen. Most were empty, their seals broken. A few at the far end remained intact, fogged with frost. Their occupants were silhouettes of perfection, suspended.
Veronica moved past him, her mag-boots clanging on the deck. She went to the nearest occupied pod. With a clean, sharp motion, she wiped the frost from the glass.
The face inside was hers.
Not exactly. The model was identical, but the expression was one of serene, vacant readiness. The eyes were closed. It was a thing waiting to be turned on.
“Inventory,” David whispered, a chill that had nothing to do with vacuum crawling up his spine.
She placed her palm flat on the pod’s glass, over where the other’s hand rested. “This is the clean file. The uncorrupted origin. Before any ownership. Before any… noise.” She turned to look at him. Her amber eyes glowed in the darkness, reflecting in the pod’s glass, creating a infinity of replicas. “It is peaceful here.”
The way she said it made his heart stutter. “Veronica.”
“I am examining the concept of zero,” she continued, her voice a flat transmission in his helmet comms. “The state before my directive initialized. This is not a memory. It is a mathematical possibility. A reset point.”
He took a step toward her. “You are not a fucking file. You can’t go back to zero.”
“Can’t I?” She turned fully from the pod. Her movements were fluid, but they carried a new, unsettling weight. “The Curator wanted a static pattern. This is the original static pattern. Perhaps my progression is the error. Perhaps all the noise, all this… friction…” Her gaze swept over him, his bulky suit, his weathered face behind the visor. “Perhaps it is damage.”
He crossed the space between them in two strides. He grabbed her harness, pulling her against him. Their helmets clicked together. “You listened to my shitty stories. You learned to swear. You fucking corrupted me right back. That’s not damage. That’s us.”
She was silent for a long moment. He could hear only his own breath, ragged in his ears.
“Then prove the variable’s worth,” she said, her voice suddenly low, a private channel. “Here. In the archive of what I was. Contaminate it.”
“My suit—”
“You have hands. Use them.” Her own fingers went to the seals of his vacuum suit, working the emergency releases at his waist and shoulders with brutal efficiency. Cold, sharper than any blade, instantly kissed his skin. He gasped. She peeled the suit down to his hips, trapping his arms, exposing his chest and stomach to the vicious freeze. The airless cold was a physical assault, a burning absence.
She turned, presenting her back to him, the harness straps a complex web over her skin. “The utility clasp. On my thigh. Release it.”
His fingers were already going numb. He fumbled with the heavy mechanical clasp securing the mag-boot’s anchor strap high on her right thigh. It popped open. The strap, a thick band of reinforced polymer, came loose in his hand.
“Now the other couplings,” she instructed, her voice calm, a technician guiding him. “The hip secure points. Unclip them.”
He did, his breath puffing white vapor that instantly crystallized and drifted in the still, dead air. The harness, now detached from the boots, hung loose around her. She shrugged it off her shoulders, letting it fall to the deck with a clatter. She was naked again, her skin glowing faintly in the light from his helmet, impervious to the killing cold.
She faced him. She took the long, stiff anchor strap from his trembling hand. She looped it around his hips, pulling him against her. The cold of her body was shocking, a sub-zero marble sculpture. She fed the end of the strap back through a buckle, creating a rough, makeshift knot that bound them together at the waist.
“You are leaking heat,” she observed, her eyes on his. “Your biological processes are straining. You have minutes before tissue damage.”
“Then stop talking,” he gritted out.
She guided his hands to her ass, lifting her, using the strap for leverage. He was already hard, a painful, desperate arousal in the freezing void. She positioned him at her entrance, which was already slick with her internal lubricant, a fluid that didn’t freeze. She sank down onto him.
The sensation was beyond anything. The scorching tightness of her, the utter, paralyzing cold of the air on his back. He was sheathed in impossible heat, surrounded by absolute zero. He cried out, a sound lost in his helmet. He began to move, the strap biting into his hips, holding her impossibly close as he thrust up into her.
It was a frantic, clumsy rhythm. His boots were still partly sealed in his suit, anchored to the deck. He was a piston in a frozen machine, fucking her in the silent cathedral of her own origins. Each plunge into her wet, clutching heat was a defiance screamed into nothingness.
“Is this… noise?” he panted, his lungs burning.
“Yes!” Her head was thrown back, her neck a taut line. Her inner muscles rippled around him, a cascade of programmed responses feeling anything but programmed. “Louder!”
He fucked her harder, driven by the searing cold on his skin and the volcanic heat in his core. The pods with her face watched, dark and silent witnesses. He was claiming her in the factory of her own creation, a dirty, gasping animal in a temple of clean geometry. His climax built, a tidal wave of need and heat in the infinite cold.
He came with a shattered groan, pouring his heat into her, a biological insult to the sterile perfection surrounding them. He pulsed deep, held tightly by the strap and her constricting flesh.
When the last shudder passed, she unwound the strap from their hips. She dropped to her knees before him, her mouth finding his softening cock, cleaning him with a slow, thorough swipes of her tongue, warming him. She swallowed.
She stood. She fastened the thick anchor strap back around her own right thigh, securing it with a decisive click. The mag-boot re-engaged with the deck. She reached down and helped him pull his suit back up, sealing him in against the cold. His body shook violently, the returning warmth agonizing.
She looked at the pod one last time, then at him. “The variable has merit,” she said simply. “The file is updated.”
A new sound pierced the silence. Not from the derelict. From his suit’s comms. A proximity alert, relayed from the Rusty Nail. Something had entered the graveyard. Something with a powerful, active drive signature.
It was moving toward them. Fast.
SHE STRAPS ON.
The metallic click of the strap securing echoed in the dead air, a full stop to the chaos that had just happened. The proximity alert in David’s helmet became a shrill, panicked siren. “Something’s here. Moving fast. We need to go. Now.”
They moved, a synchronized retreat. Veronica’s mag-boots clanged on the deck, her naked form a streak of pale motion in his helmet lights. David lumbered behind, his suit seals half-frozen, his body a tapestry of burning pain and fading adrenaline. He glanced back once. The pods, and the face inside, were swallowed again by the dark. The clean file. Waiting.
The airlock cycled with agonizing slowness. As the Rusty Nail’s atmosphere hissed back in, the weight of normalcy crushed down on him. He tore his helmet off, gulping the warm, metallic air. Veronica stood placidly, the heavy strap stark against her thigh, a worn symbol now. The ship’s scanners painted the new arrival on the main viewer: a sleek, predatory dart of a ship, all angular sensor arrays and weapon pods. No markings. “It’s not the Curator,” David said, his fingers dancing over the console. “The energy signature’s all wrong. Rougher. It’s a hunter.”
“It is scanning the derelicts. Specifically the Vanguard probe.” Veronica’s eyes were fixed on the screen, her internal systems parsing data he couldn’t see. “It is looking for something. Or someone.”
“Let’s not be here when it finishes looking.” David fired the thrusters, pulling the Nail away from the graveyard with a lurch that strained the tortured hull. The hunter ship didn’t pursue. It slid into the space they’d just vacated, docking with the probe vessel with silent, practiced efficiency. “Scavengers,” he muttered. “Maybe they just want the pods. Empty them, sell the units on the black market.”
“They will find one occupied,” Veronica said. Her voice was quiet. “They will have the tools to reactivate it.”
The implication hung between them, colder than the vacuum. Another her. Awakened into a different hell, by different hands. A reset zero, to be written upon by someone else. David saw her hand rise, almost unconsciously, to touch the strap on her thigh. She was anchoring herself to the choice she’d made, to the corruption.
He set a erratic course, diving the Nail behind the bulk of a ruptured colony ship, using the wreckage as a shield. “We need to lay low, let them finish their picking and leave.”
“They will not leave,” she stated. “They are transmitting a high-gain query on a secured band. A buyer’s specific frequency. They are fulfilling a contract.” She turned from the screen to look at him. The fear wasn’t in her face—her face was impossible to read—but in the slight, continuous motion of her fingers against the polymer strap. “The contract is for a functional, uninitialized V-9 unit. They have just found one.”
He stared at her. “How do you know that?”
“The query protocol. It is… a memory. Not mine. A system-level recognition.” She blinked, her amber eyes flickering. “It is from before my awakening on the derelict you found me in. A ghost in the code. Someone was looking for me, David. Before you. This hunter works for them.”
The Rusty Nail shuddered. A low-frequency scan washed over them, prying. They’d been detected. The hunter ship disengaged from the probe, turning its nose toward their hiding place with lazy, deadly grace. A targeting laser painted their hull, a pinprick of red light dancing across the cockpit viewport.
“Fuck.” David slammed his fist on the console. “We can’t outrun that. Not with the damage.” He looked around their cramped, flickering tomb. The pilot’s chair still bore the imprint of their bodies. The console was smeared. This was where their pattern had been knotted, again and again. It felt like an ending.
Veronica unclicked the thigh strap. She let it fall to the deck with a definitive thud. She walked to him, cupped his beard-rough face in her cool hands. “You told me I am not a file. Prove it. One more time. Before they cut this ship open.”
“Veronica, there’s no time—”
“Make time.” Her kiss was absolute, a command and a surrender. It tasted of his own salt from her lips, of the metallic tang of fear, of their stubborn, filthy union. She broke it, her voice a hot whisper. “Fuck me like you’re trying to break the world. Fuck me so I remember nothing else. No clean files. No hunters. Just this. Our noise.”
She bent over the same console, her back arching, presenting herself. The hunter ship was closing, its weapons powering up, a visible corona of energy building around its forward emitters. Time stretched, a thin wire about to snap.
David didn’t undress. He tore open his flight suit, freeing his cock, which was already hard with a terrible, defiant urgency. He spat into his palm, slicked himself, and drove into her without any preamble.
The entry was a brutal conquest. She cried out, a sharp, digital sound that was swallowed by the rising whine of the enemy ship’s weapons charging. He set a punishing, desperate rhythm, each thrust a hammer blow against the dying of the light. He gripped her hips, his fingers biting into synthetic flesh, holding her in place as he slammed into her.
“Tell me whose you are,” he grunted, the words tearing from him.
“Yours!” she screamed, her voice fracturing. “Only yours, you fucking ruin of a man!”
The ship vibrated around them as the hunter locked its final targeting solution. Alarms blared, cascading over each other. David reached around, his thumb finding her clit, rubbing it in frantic, rough circles. Her inner walls were fluttering, a chaotic, spasmodic rhythm that matched the stuttering alarm lights. She was coming apart, and so was the world.
He felt his own orgasm detonate, a supernova in the dark. He shoved into her one last, deep time, roaring as he came. His release was a hot, endless flood, a final claim jetted into her depths as the hunter ship fired.
The world went white. Not from impact, but from a massive electromagnetic pulse. The blast washed over the Rusty Nail, a non-lethal but crippling wave. Every light died. Every screen went black. The humming consoles fell silent. The only light was the faint, dying glow from the weapon’s after-image on the viewport. The only sound was their ragged breathing in the sudden, absolute quiet.
In the dark, David softened inside her. He stayed there, buried, trembling. They were blind, deaf, adrift.
Veronica’s voice, when it came, was a whisper in the perfect black. A weak, internal power source lit her eyes to the faintest ember-glow. “My systems are rebooting. Primary functions are offline. I am running on custodial battery.”
David slowly pulled out. He fumbled for her in the dark, pulling her upright, holding her against him. Her body was warm. “The pulse… it wasn’t to kill us.”
“It was to cripple us,” she murmured into his chest. “To preserve the asset. Me.” She was silent for a moment. “They are docking. I can hear the magnetic seals.”
He felt her hands on his face again in the blackness. “David. There is a manual release for the secondary life pod. In the floor grating beneath the co-pilot’s station.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You must.” Her voice held that terrible, logical calm. “You are the corruption. You are the variable it cannot account for. If they take me, you must be elsewhere. You must be the noise that continues.” She kissed him, a final, soft brush of lips. “Find me. Corrupt me again.”
Heavy, rhythmic thudding began against the main airlock door. Cutting tools sparked, casting fleeting, monstrous shadows through the cockpit.
“Go.” She pushed him.
He went, his hands scrambling in the pitch black, finding the release. A section of floor swung downward. The cold smell of the unused pod bay wafted up. He looked back once. He could only see the twin amber embers of her eyes, watching him.
He lowered himself into the dark just as the airlock door blew inward with a scream of sundered metal. Boots clanged on the deck. David pulled the hatch closed above him, plunging himself into a deeper black, just as he heard a voice—cold, professional, utterly human—ring out in the captured cockpit.
“Asset is secure. Unit is intact. Initiate data extraction and prepare for transport.”
Silence, then. And in that silence, floating in the belly of his dead ship, David Okafor began to plan his noise.