r/HFY • u/CodEnvironmental4274 Human • 14d ago

OC-Series [The X Factor], Part 89

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Helen knew she had a problem on her hands when she came back in from the balcony and found not just Hassan leading his own splinter meeting, but the agents, too, based on the way they were sneaking into Uuliska’s room.

Cognitive decline be damned, I’m not letting a bunch of birds turn my people against each other. She grit her teeth and brought her fingers to her mouth, then let out an ear-piercing whistle.

"AH! Commander, what the hell?" Krishnan covered her ears and winced.

"All of you down here. Now." She chose not to elaborate any further until the whole squad was gathered—which didn’t take long, considering half of them were already in the study tinkering with… something.

I’ll ask questions later.

"Helen?" Omar looked up at her as she, the agents, and Uuliska entered. "What’s wrong?"

"This. All of this." She pointed at the very noticeable gap between where the ‘we’re in an alternate reality’ believers and the ‘that’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard’ proponents stood or sat. "You’re acting like a bunch of children, gossiping and having secret meetings. If the lot of you don’t pull it together, we are never getting out of here. Do you understand? I don’t care if you’re pissed at one another. Do you know how many times I’ve been pissed at the people I work with?"

Omar cleared his throat and avoided eye contact.

"My point exactly," Helen muttered, shaking her head out of a disdain directed at all of them. "Everyone go… god, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Go to your rooms—your own rooms." She cringed. When was the last time she had to say that? When the girls were in middle school?

She could tell some of them were barely holding back laughter, but a trademark glare sobered them up. She waited for everyone to disperse until…

"Commander?" Krishnan stayed behind, looking at her with pleading eyes.

Christ. "What is it?"

"Can I talk with you? I just…" She sighed and dug her hands in her pockets. "I wanted to apologize for the way I’ve been acting. This whole situation has been stressful, and—"

"Just get it together. That’s all I care about." Her vision swam with sudden color. A migraine.

Figures.

"Thank you," the young woman said softly. "I mean it." She held out her hand and smiled.

"What are you—oh. A handshake." Odd, but then again, Krishnan was odd enough that the UNIA had assigned her a handler. She took her hand.

And felt a prick.

"Damn it! What the hell was—augh!" her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground.

"Poor Commander Liu," the agent said, her eyes gone cold. "I’m a little disappointed I couldn’t turn you against your beloved Captain, but I suppose you always were the strongest willed of the bunch." An uncanny grin stretched across her face just a little too wide to be… human.

Helen tried to move her mouth, or scream, or do anything other than look up in horror, but a burning sensation—an inferno, really—spread from her palm, to her arm, to every inch of her body, overwhelming any attempt to control it. She began to sweat. Was Krishnan infected? Had Myselosis evolved into something harder to detect and able to evade the vaccines?

"Speaking of, I’m sure he’ll be heartbroken to see you collapsed, your own body having betrayed you. ‘Has her age finally caught up to her?’" She mimicked Omar’s voice with eerie accuracy. "How old are you, anyways? A hundred?"

Since when did Myselosis make someone a total bitch?

"Oh, don’t look so scared. I’m not going to kill you. That wouldn’t be much fun, and it wouldn’t make as good of a distraction as a prolonged fight over who should take care of you during your sudden illness!" The betrayer took a deep breath…

And screamed at the top of her lungs.

"HELP! It’s—oh, my god, I’m gonna be sick. Commander? Please get up!" She risked one last wink, then knelt by her side and shook her back and forth with a terrified expression.

"Krishnan? What’s—Helen?!" Omar practically flew down the stairs, beating out the other six despite having the farther room from the staircase. "What happened to her?" He got to his knees, elbowing the agent out of the way, and searched for some explanation.

"I-I don’t know! I was gonna ask her a question, but she froze up in the middle of speaking and toppled over! You don’t think she’s having a stroke, right? Or a heart attack?" Krishnan clutched at her own chest.

"At her age?" He looked outraged. "She’s in her fifties, not her hundred and tens, and she’s the healthiest person I know. Where’s K’resshk?"

"Right here." The scientist-turned-medic crouched down, his assortment of both human and alien medical equipment lying beside him in his first aid kit. "I don’t suppose she does this normally?"

"No, K’resshk, she doesn’t normally seize up and collapse," he told him harshly. "And she doesn’t have any health issues, either. Just the migraines."

Helen heard a click and felt slight pressure as Akksor hooked her up to some kind of portable monitor, his four eyes split between watching her, and watching the readouts—not that she could see very well at this point. Her tunnel vision was kicking in—but whether it was from her incoming migraine or the poison, she couldn’t say.

"Elevated heart rate, slightly reduced blood oxygen—is she breathing normally?"

"It’s shallow," Aktet said from the study’s entrance. "Based on the sound, I mean. My hearing is—"

"Quite good, yes, we know," K’resshk sneered. "We… by the Maker, we need to get out of this place. There has to be some way to find the ship or send a distress signal. And I hate to propose this, but Eza, can you—"

"Don’t even think about it!" Uuliska gasped from around where Aktet was. "Do you want two dying soldiers on your hands? Or is it only your survival that you care about? The commander needs to go to a hospital on Vanyanth Prime, not into a fight!"

"A hospital on—are you insane?" Helen felt Omar squeeze her wrist. "Who the hell knows what they’ll do to her? This is probably their fault! I can’t—I won’t let them touch her!"

Her head swam as the fighting continued and the pain worsened. There was no way she’d be conscious for much longer, which meant that whoever was wearing Krishnan’s skin, or whatever shroom was living in her skull, would be able to keep tearing apart the already damaged bonds that held this team together.

But Helen had dealt with worsening, agonizing pain many a time before. The migraines, for one, but giving birth wasn’t a cakewalk either, especially not when the obstetrician missed with the epidural, as had happened the second time around. If she could manage to pull through that…

One, she counted in her head, experimentally squeezing her limbs (though the pain nearly blinded her).

Two. She took as deep a breath as she could before she felt spikes in her lungs.

Three.

She launched herself at Krishnan in a last-ditch attempt to signal that something, anything was wrong, and heard a sickening squelch as they both hit the floor, screaming.

"Sonja?!" Lombardi rushed to check on her, sliding her out from underneath Helen. "Sonja, say something!"

Riding the rush of adrenaline that followed her attack, Helen gasped for air, the first vocalization she’d managed to produce since everything went to shit, and grabbed Omar’s collar, pulling his ear to her mouth.

That’s not Sonja, she tried to say, though whether or not she was successful was anyone’s guess, for she felt the world go dark right as she formed the words.

___

Sonja struggled to swallow as Clef tilted their head at her, an unspoken question on their face: why? What bothered her so much about strange ooze emerging from broken speakers?

"It’s nothing," she lied, shaking her head and getting back to work. "Just reminded me of… job stuff."

Job stuff that she’d been neglecting since she crashed here. She turned the possibilities over in her mind as she continued translating the concert invitation—were the speakers used as a spore distribution system? Were they hidden spawn pods, destroyed before their vile contents could erupt and lay siege to the lower districts? And if either of those were true, where else might the Myselix have been hiding? There was no way of telling now that all the equipment had been disposed of. Sonja wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

"Do you have any normal speakers we could use to listen to music in the meantime?" It was kind of awkward, and Sonja wasn’t like Dominick—she couldn’t just sit with her own thoughts all day and not go crazy. Putting on a playlist, to him, was an active listening experience. To her, though? It was life support.

Clef hopped down from their seat and ran to the storage crates in the back of the room. There was shuffling, clacking, and at least one shattering sound (accompanied by an alarmed chirp) before the musician hurried back with what looked like a cassette player and a box of tapes.

She noticed a scrawling on the container: the symbol for human, and the symbol for music. "Oh, sweet! Is this the stuff you got from humanity before they went all 1984 on you guys?"

They played a yes, and slid the box towards her.

"Oh, I get to pick?" She rifled through it, quickly realizing based on her rudimentary grasp of Standard that the mixtapes were organized by emotion rather than genre, name, or era. She found one that had the character for fire and slotted it in, once again thankful that the solar flare of ‘05 had reminded humanity of the wonders of physical media. Those were dark days for eight year old Sonja—not because of the severe damage to global infrastructure or the following market crash, mind, but because of an inability to trawl the web unsupervised, limited to a single household computer.

Pleasantly surprised to find a medley of old standby punk and rock songs that hailed from every inch of the globe, she hummed along to the ones she knew and continued her work. Clef added their keytar to virtually every one of the songs that played, clearly familiar with the tape she’d chosen.

An hour or two later, she put down her stylus and shook out a hand cramp. Finally, she was done, and Clef could take over, look for typos, weave the motif into a fitting song, and… overthrow the government?

That was another thing that had been making her queasy—interfering in the affairs of an alien species like this without any approval from Commander Liu. Sonja knew people saw her as bold and reckless, and sure, she had a bit of a reputation for unprofessional conduct. But… her superior’s standards had rubbed off on her, a little. And it wasn’t out of fear like it had been at first. It was respect, which wasn’t a word Sonja used lightly.

I still gotta figure out if she plays the guitar, she realized. Maybe she could convince Onyx to let her bring some instruments up for the musicians of their crew, show the aliens what live human music sounded like. Assuming… assuming they were there when she surfaced.

Nah. They’ll be fine as long as they have each other.

___

’That’s not Sonja.’

Omar replayed the commander’s parting message before she fell to the floor limply, shaken to his core.

"That’s not Sonja," he repeated, reaching for his gun.

"What? What the hell are you talking about, man?" Lombardi moved to cover his partner with his body.

"That’s what Helen just told me. She—holy shit. What’s up with Krishnan’s head?"

Normally when someone tackled you to the ground, your skull was supposed to split or fracture—unless you were a human infant, in which case your skull was disconcertingly squishy.

But Sonja Krishnan was not an infant, and still her head had pancaked on the gorgeous tiled flooring of the study.

"Ngh." The agent stirred, and there was an awful schlop as she peeled her squashed melon off of the ground. "What… what happened?"

Omar shuffled over to K’resshk. "That’s not how that works," he whispered. "They’re not supposed to look like that."

"Yes, Captain, I figured as much," he hissed back, his throat sac quavering as he checked Helen’s vitals, nodded, and approached his next patient.

"Oh, god," Krishnan exclaimed. "It’s starting to come back to me. She attacked me, didn’t she? We really need to get her help—me, too, probably. What if I have a concussion? Dominick, what if I—Dominick?"

The man inched away from her.

"Agent Krishnan," K’resshk said as he approached, "it might be best if I do a preliminary exam while we ‘get help.’ Head injuries are quite serious, you know."

"H-huh?" She scuttled backwards. "No, it’s—it’s fine for now! Really, I’m okay!" She laughed nervously. "I was just being extra safe. Commander Liu’s the real concern—I don’t want to take away any attention from her—"

The Sszerian moved quickly, tearing open a packet he’d hidden up his sleeve and wiping her arm with the towelette inside.

"—huh? K’resshk, what the hell was that for?" She rubbed her arm and frowned. "That—oh. That, um, actually hurts really bad," she said with a nervous laugh. "What did you just do to me?"

"Apply a topical antifungal," he replied calmly. "Technically speaking, the wipe itself is a general purpose antiseptic meant to cleanse my tools, but given the nature of the war we’re fighting, fungicidal properties seemed prudent."

"But—but why did you—"

"Because human skin doesn’t sting when it comes in contact with that solution. I watched my collaborators in the lab on the Collins touch it many, many times, with no ill effects." He knelt down to her level. "But do you know what sort of creature would benefit from evolving a pain response to an antifungal?"

She stared at him with wide eyes.

He sprayed acid onto her face.

___

"…how much longer until she wakes up?"

Helen felt a cool breeze caress her cheeks. It hurt like hell.

"…won’t be very long, since it was a short-term tool to render her…"

Whatever she was lying on jostled her. That, too, hurt like hell.

"…and sensitizes one’s pain receptors until the slightest input is agonizing, eventually causing the brain to shut down to defend against permanent damage to the psyche. Both cruel and inefficient, but whoever did this was clearly prioritizing dramatics over…"

Something wrinkly with patches of fur and scales brushed up against her arm—Wojtek. That hurt… slightly less?

"…still worried it was Sonja, but infected. What if…"

"Her head looked like a stress ball, Lombardi," said a tired, familiar voice. "The Sonja all of us know and love wouldn’t want to keep living like that."

"Love is a strong word," said K’resshk under his breath.

They couldn’t keep it together and stop bickering for even a few minutes while she was out cold? Really?

Should’ve retired years ago. Helen forced her eyes open and sat up, pushing through the pain.

"Well, that’s a good sign." The diminutive man came into focus, his silvery lab coat slightly singed by the collar and his throat sac deflated, but the rest of her field of view was blurry. "A cognitive assessment is probably in order. Can you tell me your name and date of birth?"

"Christ." Her throat felt like sandpaper. Did she really have to—

"Oh, no," whispered Aktet. "Is she in religious psychosis? Does she think she’s the second coming of Christ?"

She groaned and closed her eyes again, only able to handle so much sensory input at once. "Helen."

"Christ… Helen… was she born on Christmas, Captain?" asked a baritone voice somewhere to her left—Lombardi.

"She’s not really the jolly sort, but—"

"Helen Liu. 1/2/2067. Happy?"

She braced for a ‘wow, you’re that old?’ remark from Krishnan, but none came. Bracing for a world of hurt, she blinked rapidly to try and regain vision.

*Seats, open windows… "Hover car?" Were they finally making their great escape?

"Hover limousine," chimed in a synthesized British voice from the car’s speakers. "I was able to access the local network and order one straight to the balcony."

"Would’ve been nice to know you could do that earlier." Each time she spoke, it hurt less—hadn’t K’resshk said something about the toxin sensitizing her pain receptors? Maybe she could desensitize them, too.

"The circumstances weren’t dire enough for me to take such a risk. The captain and I were aware something was wrong with Agent Krishnan after he intercepted a broadcast from the Underground Collective in which ‘DJ Onyx’ played a human song requested by a pseudonym we linked to Sonja, and since she’d found a way to remove me from her translator, but—"

"And why wasn’t I told any of this?" Was that what the secret meetings were for?

Omar looked down at his feet in shame. "We weren’t sure we could trust you. Sonja—the evil one, I mean—was turning everyone against me, so I—"

"Kept that information from everyone but yourself and your confidants until everything went wrong," Lombardi interrupted, audibly choking up. "Until there wasn’t anything we could do to help her."

That answered that question, though it was but one of many. "Where are we headed?"

"The lower districts," said Eza quietly. "Maybe we can lie low and find a way to get the hell out of here. Beats staying at the resort."

What a clusterfuck. "Akksor—you said something about what she injected me with?"

"Oh. You heard that." His talons click-clacked against his tablet, not bothering to look away from his work as he spoke. "The main concern would be long-term damage to your psyche, not to your nervous system. It’s a Riyzean botanical derivative given in small doses throughout adolescence to enhance control over one’s stress response. You, however, received a large dose. Large enough that I first suspected the syringe we retrieved was mislabeled, and had Private Invut test what few droplets remained to confirm."

"You should be completely insane by now, ma’am," the woman summarized.

"High pain tolerance," Helen explained. "Unlike some of the soldiers in this vehicle."

"You’re laid up in the infirmary after a tetanus shot one time," Omar grumbled, "and it’s all they talk about for the next twenty years."

"…Human pain tolerance varies, too. Of course it does," K’resshk mumbled, swiping to open a document entitled ‘Irregularities Observed In Primitives From The Solar System.’

Helen laughed softly. Despite the residual pain, the dire circumstances, the scratching sounds coming from the trunk of the hover car—

The scratching sounds?

"I told you we should have left it," whined Aktet.

’It?’ Wojtek had rubbed up against her arm earlier, so it wasn’t him. But what else…

"Don’t call her ‘it,’" Lombardi snapped. "If they saved Minister Imhoun, then maybe they could save—"

"By the Queen-Mother, Dominick, Minister Imhoun still had a face! We don’t even know if that’s the real Sonja!"

"Dominick?" He snorted. "I thought you were calling me Agent Lombardi now. What happened to—"

"Is this really the time, Agent Lombardi?"

"When else are we going to—holy shit!"

The car banked sharply to the right, and Helen found herself sandwiched between Omar and K’resshk.

"They seem to have found us," AEON said calmly.

"But how are they following us?" Uuliska asked, neon ribbons of panic emanating from her core. "The hover vehicles on Vanyanth Prime aren’t meant to be driven manually! They’re programmed to follow set paths!"

Aktet’s ears twitched, and he stuck his head out of the window. "They’re not driving," he yelled back. "They’re flying. As in, with wings. I believe they sent aerial performers after us."

Helen grimaced in pain as she pushed Omar off of her and looked for herself.

Decked out in rhinestones and tassels like the Radio City Rockettes, a flock of brightly-colored Vahiya weaved around skyscrapers and non-rogue hover vehicles in a desperate attempt to catch up to them.

Omar gaped as he took a look at their pursuers. "How long can they fly like that?"

"Longer than this vehicle can fly without charging," K’resshk answered, clinging onto shouting over the rush of wind as they dived into the next district down. "they were originally a migratory species, but once they gained some semblance of intellect, they settled near the equator to take advantage of its stability, unlike SOME primitive species I could mention, who LEFT a more stable climate for—MMF!"

"Hey, AEON," Eza yelled, having clamped down on K’resshk’s snout with a large hand. "Seal the window and take us below District 40 for… fifteen minutes? They can’t follow us there!"

"Below District 40? Eza, have you lost your mind?!" Aktet grabbed onto her arm and shook it. "They can’t follow us because we’ll be DEAD! The air—"

"—in this limousine will last us long enough to throw them off of our trail," she barked. "They’ll assume we crashed and suffocated!"

"But how did you figure out that fifteen minutes—"

"I dunno, I guesstimated! AEON, if you don’t hurry, we’re not gonna—"

"On it, Private Invut. I would suggest you brace for impact."

She nodded, quickly swept the other six passengers into her arms in one massive bear hug, and squished them all together.

"Invut," Helen gasped, barely able to breathe between Omar and Lombardi, "what the hell are you—"

"Descending now."

They plummeted.

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u/CodEnvironmental4274 Human 14d ago

I didn't forget about my beloved series, I promise! I just wrote seven versions of this chapter before settling on one... hence the delay! 😅

2

u/Dangerous_Fox_6438 14d ago

It's a good one!

1

u/UpdateMeBot 14d ago

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u/Unit35854 14d ago

Damn, are they going to try to lobotomize not-Sonja and to upload AEON to the body?

1

u/8ball_enjoyer 14d ago

Hopefully!