Space Piracy for Fun and Profit

Female POV

CMNF

***

Space zombies had to be one of the worse weapons ever devised. Combat drugs were normally designed with serious safety protocols in place to give someone a boost for a few minutes, perhaps an hour, without long terms negative effects. It was truly amazing and terrifying what those drugs were capable of when the user's long term wellbeing was no longer a concern, I thought with clinical detachment as I watched that thing that had been Corporal Taylor reach its arm stump through the shattered fragments of the door. He had taken his own lower arm off with a vibo-blade in his final moments as Corporal Taylor in some desperate last attempt to stop the spread of the infection from where his hand had been bitten.

I could clearly see its radius and the ulna, the two bones of the forearm sticking out of the stump as it howled in rage, unable to reach me for the time being. The wrist and its bones were missing from the left hand. No scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, or hamate. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. I realized my subconscious mind was trying to force me to think about my medical training, force me to think about anything other than the things on the other side of that door, force the terror out before it got me killed. I tried to take a deep breath. Hold it for a few seconds, slooooowly breath out my nose. 'Be calm or be dead', those words echoing into my head, the first and last days advise spoken by the orientation instructors back in the day.

I stood on the opposite side of the door observing them. I was almost naked. I had been bathing when the outbreak first started. I had lost the towel I was using earlier on and had never been able to make it back to my quarters. They displayed none of the normal reactions I would expect from men seeing a woman in the nude. They continued to force the door. Howling, a look of murderous psychotic rage in their eyes.

My breasts bounced as I walked across the room to the comms station. The normal human male response would be to notice, to look down at my bouncing mammary glands. Instead their eyes stared at me like some type of predatory, staving wolf watching its prey. It was some how worse than being ogled by the male gaze. Whatever made them human was gone, what was left was a soulless rage filled monster that wanted nothing but to kill.

The only thing I had on was Corporal Taylor's holster with his gun and knife. I turned the video monitor on and started to give my report. At any other time, I would have tried combing my hair down over my exposed chest or maybe covering myself with my hands. I was too overcome with fear and exhaustion to worry about someone seeing my breasts. I had never thought of my self as an exhibitionist. It just didn't matter anymore.

Plus, I had been trying to run from these things for hours in the nude. My breasts were 32DD, they had the size and firmness of ripe melons. There were so many times and places where that might be a good thing, trying to run for my life without a sports bra on was not one of them. My chest hurt from the bouncing, More than once I had thought I had given myself a black eye.

From what I could tell, someone had taken some mix of combat drugs, stripped them of every safety protocol they had before integrating them with some type of chemical cocktail that induced an artificial, rapid onset, hyper-aggressive rage state. Something was also causing an uncanny valley effect, the faces on those things no longer looked complete human. Instead they seemed to be unsettling enough that they deliberately induced an emotional response of terror, an automatic flight response to their presence.

His blood was clotting blueish green, instead of the normal human red. Same as the other infected. Whatever this was, it was not the stranded Viral Zombie Fever, VZF didn't cause a person blood to change colors or become aggressive in mere minutes after infection.

There was no way any pirate band would have skill sets, funding, and equipment to put together such a bio-weapon. It was a brilliant strategy. We would all be dead but the material resources of the mining colony would be unharmed, free for the taking.

I quickly recorded my observations into the data log and distress beacon. I might not make it out of this, but news of what had happened here would I thought, still trying to slowly control my breathing.

More pieces splintered off the door as they continued to hammer away. It was a miracle of modern engineering that it still held together at all.

Even now, I could not bring myself to look down to my lower leg. To see if the wound was bleeding red from a cut from the debris I had stumbled over or bleeding blueish green from a bite from one of those things. The door started to give way. I stated laughing as I drew the late Corporal's gauss pistol in one hand and vibo-blade in the other, I had spent the last ten minutes terror-stricken, wondering if I was bleeding red or blue-green blood, in a few moments it likely would not matter either way.

To be continued...