Cybertrash

Anya sat up from the hard orcish excuse for a bed. The room was large enough to fit four orc bunk beds, but not much more. Thankfully for Anya, since Orcs are significantly larger than humans, that meant it was still more than enough room for her to set up camp. Anya stepped across the room to a small cooking station she had set up. She looked in her bag to confirm that, indeed, she had run out of the rations she had been living off of for the past week.

Food on the junkbelt is not particularly scarce, most of these old broken-down ships still have working nutrient assemblers. Most civs don’t make it very far outside of their atmospheres without solving that kind of technology. And if the generators weren’t working, you could usually find emergency rations. This particular ship, being an orcish battleship, had plentiful reserves to satisfy the high Orc metabolism. Anya however, had a refined taste for food that won’t kill her, and orcish food has a tendency to burn holes in human stomachs. If she ever wanted to eat again, she was going to need to get off of this ship.

She pressed her ear to the door, listening for any evidence of the cybertrash that had been outside her room for the last couple of days. She had hoped they would give up and leave, but the unmistakable metallic skittering and clicking sound on the other side of the door proved otherwise. Unfortunately, from the sound alone it was unclear how many of them were waiting for her.

Anya considered what the monster on the other side of the door might look like. It was easier to kill them when they didn’t still resemble a humanoid. The last time she dealt with cybertrash, she was cut bad by spiderlike legs that protruded from the neck of a human head wearing a lifeless face expression. She felt the scar it left on her right thigh and relived the pain. Then she brought her attention back and felt the much more immediate pain of a hunger knot in the pit of her stomach.

As Anya began to pack her things, she noticed her pistol arm was shaking bad. She knew it was the hunger and not the fear. It had been a long time since the anticipation of a fight made her nervous. Regardless of the origin, an unsteady firing arm was not a good sign. She took a deep swig from her water pouch and hoped it might help until she could find food.

She took a metal pipe from her pack and held it in both hands feeling its weight. Between the bloodstains and the sharply frayed end, this tool gave off a very menacing aura. It’s too bad appearances won’t do much to defend against cybertrash. Still the pipe was handy to fight them off if they got close. She slowly and quietly undid the door lock, placed the pipe and her pistol atop the bunk next to the door, and climbed up. Then, using the pipe, she reached out and opened the latch to the door. Slowly the door creaked open from its own weight.

She put the pipe down and held her pistol aimed at the crack in the doorway ready to blast a hole through anything that crawled through. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, she began to hear the all too familiar clicking sounds approach the door. The door slowly pushed open and a blob of flesh and wires skulked in carefully. Anya saw the thing was holding up what appeared to be an organic eye mounted to one of its much more mechanical limbs. The eye drearily swung around scanning the room for Anya. As soon as the thing began to look up, she pulled the trigger and a red tunnel appeared through the middle of the monstrosity’s excuse for a body.

The creature began to writhe and crawl helplessly into the corner, while another, immediately clamored into view from behind the door. This one looked more humanoid, although still unlike anything Anya wanted to have a conversation with. It crawled on four limbs which were worn down to sharpened bones. The mechanical head was somehow spun all the way around looking directly up at Anya when it entered. She fired her pistol at it, but it missed and burnt a hot red hole in the ground behind the trash as it dove under the bunk she was on.

Anya grabbed her pipe, and darted around each side of the bunk ready to bash the thing when it crawled up the bunk. After looking back and forth, she realized nothing was climbing up. As she was considering what to do next, she began to hear a mechanical whirring sound and the bed began to vibrate. Then the bunk began to fall away from the door as she realized the pest must have cut off one of the legs of the bunk.

She held tight to the pipe, and dove to the ground as the bunk bed collapsed into the bunk next to it. Spinning around, she managed to swing the pipe directly into the head of the cybertrash. The frayed end stuck into the mechanical neck and pried the head from the torso. The monster fell onto its back. Hoping that was the end of it, she stared at the monster as it flung itself around to try to get back upright. Noting that removing its head clearly didn’t kill it, she readied to swing at it again. But as soon as the mechanical horror flipped itself about, instead of running toward her it ran toward the wall and began shredding apart some refuse in the corner of the room. She might not have removed its brain, but must have at least removed its only eyes.

She lowered her guard and watched the thing helplessly try to find her, crashing into walls and bunkbeds. For a moment she felt sorry for whatever life the thing had before it became this monster. Then, as one of the sharpened bone limbs got a little too close for her comfort, she quickly grabbed her things from the floor and walked through the door. She shut the door tightly and left the cyber demon to torture itself in its new blindness.

After the adrenaline wore off, she felt the knot in her stomach return. Eating the cybertrash was not an option unless you wanted to risk ending up like them. If they still had any flesh left, it was usually riddled with nanobots. Even getting scratched by them, you usually needed a radiation bath just to make sure you didn’t get infected. Since a radiation room wasn’t something Anya wanted to add to her list of needs, instead she set her sights on the transporter room.