The Tarken Assassin killed Holly first. Her left eye was still shut from the wink she had given me right before she died. It took mere nanoseconds for the alien’s mono-glazed talons to shred her into a half dozen pieces. A single lock of her raven hair drifted down from the ceiling as I stared on in amazement.

“Stupid Tark!” I raved and looked it dead on in the eyes. “She was our only breeding clone, now we’ll have to make another”. My hands felt around me for a viable weapon, but found none.

“Weel Hooman too batt for you!” It slurred its English through a beak-like mouth. The Tarken closed in, scissoring its talons together creating a fan of sparks. The mono-glaze lining on its talons was most likely a military grade titanium, not the typical mining class ore. Emotionless, the Tarken’s wide almond eyes quivered like jelly from their dark blue depths. It closed in on me, and swung down.

My eyes closed involuntarily as my arm flew up in futility, but a crack of thunder hit the room and the Tarken was thrown from its feet to slam into the nearest wall. It fell lamely to the floor, hurried breaths shaking its thorax. Its six insectoid legs quivered and clicked along the tiles, while its black thorax trembled in a death throw; it soon became limp. A burning cinder glowed momentarily in its back where the P-Gun bullet had hit it dead on. I looked towards the source; standing inside the doorway opposite me was the ships engineer, Quarrel. Her blond hair was tied back in a short pony tail, and her jumpsuit was full of axle grease. She was a regular grease monkey, and I smiled at her in gratitude and mirth.

“Thanks Quarrel.” I stood and grabbed some nearby utility gloves to handle Holly’s corpse. I grabbed a severed hand and put it into a bio hazard lab jar.

“Don’t mention it Stan, but it’s too bad your girlfriend got sliced and diced.” Quarrel grinned, showing a ragged gum line and teeth all but worn out. Quarrel was a hybrid human and something else. Stan couldn’t remember what, but it wasn’t from Earth. The human genome had gotten all mixed up a couple thousand years ago during first contact. When another humanoid race traveled to earth and made diplomatic gestures, humankind vigorously accepted and jumped on the bandwagon to the stars. Long story short, gene therapy was performed over generations to merge human tissue with that of the strangers to make a super human, but at great cost. After a few generations had past, the therapy was cheap and in fact required for work in space as well as travel, so everyone had it done. The change to a 100% hybrid population happened swiftly, and people soon found that the birthrate had dropped to near zero. The Earth entered into a panic, but it was too late; all the women and men had been modified and were now born as hybrids. While the men could shoot their loaded “ weapons”, the ova of the hybrid women would no longer accept the men’s flagella propelled gangsters. The science of cloning was revived and made legal as Earth hurried to recreate Eve. When mankind approached the Visitors for help, they scoffed at us and dismissed us from their worlds as vile and degraded for merging our genes so haphazardly. The Ironic thing was that right after that happened, the Tarken invaded the Visitor’s home world using massive asteroid ships, and wiped the visitors out. Now, a thousand years later, we’re still battling the Tarken and their armadas as well as our own human existence.

The intercom interrupted our conversation with a monotone speech before I could offer a churlish retort.

Repel borders, Tarken invasion fleet! Repel borders!

I wasn’t bred for battle, but then the art of war flowed in our hybrid blood from our Human side. I removed the gloves and grabbed a P-Gun. The modified shotgun used Parallelium bullets manufactured for deep space flights. Their time-defying radiation gave us the upper hand against the agile Tarken. I loaded two slugs into the dual barrels, and cocked the gun shut. Quarrel threw me a shoulder bag from across the room.

“Take ‘em, you’ll need the spare rounds.” She grinned that not-so-pretty grin of hers and shouldered her own double barrel P-Gun. Leading the way Quarrel kicked open the door that lead towards the airlocks where the Tarken were most likely to board us.

I followed warily, and kicked the dead Tarken on the way out for good measure. Overhead lights turned on for us as we walked through the hallways of the ship’s belly; Quarrel’s barrel aimed left and then right as she made her way carefully towards the airlocks.

“I’m thinking they’re already in here Quarrel; if there was one then there must be more. Their stealth fields are enough to hide them from ship heat sensors.” I looked back down the hallway which was now empty.

“Oh be a bit more optimistic Stan, Monday’s can’t always be this bad. Think about last Monday night, you and I had fun didn’t we?” She gave me a sideways glance and ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip.

“Um, sure.” I shuddered recalling the foreplay. I continued, “It’s just that the Tarken that got Holly was deep in the ship’s quarters and not near the airlocks.”

Quarrel stopped, held up a fanned-out hand, and gestured up ahead twenty yards. I looked and saw a pair of Tarken beating up a solitary engineer whose P-Gun hung useless from his dead wrist. I told you so! I mouthed at Quarrel who made a rude gesture in return using her middle finger from her right hand and sliding it in and out of her closed left fist. Good thing Quarrel wasn’t full blooded human as we wouldn’t want her to reproduce ever, yuck! Holly had been a good copy and full blooded, too bad she was in pieces back at the lab. He could reused her tissue for the next clone, but that would take 2 years to bring her to adulthood, and that was a long time to rely on hygiene-challenged Quarrel for pleasure. Cloning wasn’t my real duty aboard the St. Peter, but then we hadn’t run across any xeno-tissue for me to examine in months either. Holly had been a hobby-clone, just as they had started to use back on Earth in the past few centuries. I don’t quite remember where we dug her DNA tissue up from, some place called the Olduvai Gorge in Africa or something. Yet just a little tinkering with the code and she could look like anything I wanted.

“Stan, are you paying attention?” Quarrel whisper-shouted back at him.

“Yeah yeah Quarrel, just do your job!” I retorted somewhat unnecessarily; oops, that annoyed her.

Quarrel made the decision and headed forward fleet-footed towards the Tarken as they stood tearing into the engineer’s remains. Looks like that had been Edwards. No big deal though, Edwards was a no-talent hack when it came to engineering, and was better at loafing. Quarrel’s barrel came up and reported twin shots. Tarken number 1 went down while the second lurched out of the hallway and into an adjacent room. Quarrel followed without pause and reloaded her P-Gun without much adieu. I’ll have to remember that before pissing her off next time. I followed suit, and switched the shoulder bag around to hang off my other arm while I reached into my bloodied lab coat and pulled out my security pass. Things weren’t looking too good, and we might need to make haste towards an emergency vehicle.

A single round went off again leaving a flash on my retina as I rounded the corner and plunged into the room. Quarrel stood wiping sweat from her greasy brow and laying the gun barrel over her shoulder like some old Western. The Tarken’s corpse lay in a tangled heap on the floor while a stumpy neck stuck out from headless shoulders. The remains had painted the opposite wall in green proteins like some photosynthetic Warhol painting. “Nice job Quarrel, I owe you one.” I tried to smile, and managed a tight grin.

“Yup. “ Quarrel reached into her jumpsuit and pulled out what must have been an engineer’s wet dream because she smiled and her eyes gleamed mischievously. “This was the latest model of protocol transmitter available before we left Earth. It seems to be booting faster than the others and should locate our escape path shortly.” She turned the knobs a bit; I felt a decided lack of fascination for the device.

Looking around the room, I saw we had run into a small commons just off the main hallway, there should be some food around here. I shuffled towards the vending machines with their rotating trays. A low growl filled the room nearby causing Quarrel to look in my direction while fingering her transmitter.

“That wasn’t my stomach” I shrugged and turned to look behind the vending machine. The growl came again this time with a short whimper. There behind the vending machine sat a medium sized canine, german shepherd half inside an open ventilation duct and its front half outside. This was a clone, but who would bring this on board. “Must be one of Captain Truman’s dog clones, it doesn’t seem too happy.” I reached down to pet its head when it snarled and nipped at my hand. “Little bastard!” I growled back at the dog and rubbed my hand as if bitten.

“Oh leave him alone, that’s Charlie and he’s just the biggest baby aren’t you Charlie?” Quarrel smiled and reached out with a free hand towards the dog’s head. She was within a hairs breadth when the dog gave a dramatic yelp as it was pulled back into the duct by some force. An empty duct was all that remained, and nothing more. Sounds of a brief struggle echoed down the shaft and then silence followed by a sliding noise as something moved inside the vents, and the noise grew louder as it neared us. Quarrel retracted her arm and grabbed my wrist pulling me towards the doorway. “Let’s haul ass Stan!”

We moved quickly down the hall not minding the noise, and knocking a few chairs over in the process. Now we could see smears of blood lining the walls where human hands had slid down to the floor or over into other rooms in a pantomime of finger painting.

“There’s our exit.” Quarrel pointed just ahead to a small flashing blue sign near open hatchways. The ship’s emergency protocols had activated making the escape shuttles available. Hexagonal doorways lead to several different shuttles, we chose the first one available.

“Ladies first.” I grinned mockingly and gestured with my hand inside. She took the offer and stepped into the automatic doors only to be grabbed by a lone Tarken. The thing pulled her inside as the doors finished opening. The large Tarken stood there, its great beak opened and its purple tube of a tongue augmenting the screech it issued.

“Help Stan, help me!” I watched as she was pulled into a bear hug and the Tarken closed its deadly claws over her shoulders. The automated doorway closed in front of me, and I hit the large red button to jettison her shuttle. She was as good as dead, nothing I could have done. I told myself for the next few minutes as I stood in shock at my actions; frozen before the new airlock the ship had where the shuttle had been. Then, pulling myself together, I stepped into the next closest doorway and held my breath in hopes it would be empty. And I entered, carrying with me a useless security pass and a bag containing Holly’s hand.

*****

I sit on a tree stump cut down for just such a lone purpose. I’ve been on this planet for 2 years now with no rescue ship from Earth. I should be about 10 light years from the closest colony, so hopefully they get my distress beacon soon. Meanwhile, I’ve recalibrated the ship’s molecular synthesizing unit to replicate human tissue. I used Holly’s hand as a genetic sample and think it has been successful. She came out of her stasis pod yesterday all smiles and hugs. Something odd however that I noticed last night during our lovemaking. She has an odd patch of hair growing on her chest, and it’s more than just peach fuzz. Today, I’ve noticed more of it on her hands and even face. I mean, I can tolerate it a little because we could work on restarting the human population, but seriously, what was in that DNA we took from the Olduvai Gorge? Did we dig too deep?