Parasite║LGBT+ Romance 🏳️‍🌈

3: The Transporter

20:11, Firstsol 12th M5, 2226

I shoot up the three methane-slippery rungs to the hatch and throw myself in, slamming it behind me. The misted silica window clears a little to reveal the silhouette of a slim figure slumped on a makeshift bed, possibly asleep. Possibly ill.

As if acutely aware of the implication, my guts writhe with hunger. The homeless woman had barely been a bite. I need to feed. I'm getting weaker. If the lone miner in the cab is ill, perhaps they won't notice if I feed a little. I'd only take a little from them.

Monster, filth, parasite.

The miner leaves me in the pressurised airlock for long minutes. I bang on the hatch. They sit up with a start, then shuffle to the console and hit the hatch mechanism. It opens with a pop and I step inside.

The entire cab stinks of shade. The miner — perhaps a man — gazes up at me with red shade-eyes. A gaunt face bears the shadow of a sparse beard. Slender arms adorned with Japanese tattoos fold over his chest, as if he's furious that saving my life has interrupted his shade-sucking.

Faded clothes hang off his skeleton, his shirt and trousers a mix of Edge neons and darker tones decorated with intricate embroidery that are fashionable on Earth. He slumps back onto the mattress he's constructed from two foam cabin benches, and extends a long pale leg onto the console dashboard with a groan. His ankle is purple and swollen.

I hold up my medical bag and point at the hairless leg on the console. "How'd you do that?"

He closes his eyes, I guess falling deeper into shade-brain. Perhaps he thinks that I'm a figment of his imagination. I'll wait until he sleeps, then I'll feed a little. He won't notice. I won't take much. Then I'll find an ammonia cannister and flee back to the hov. He's so shade-addled he won't even remember seeing me.

Like he can hear every thought in my parasite brain, the miner sits up, his previously shade-glazed eyes sharpening. He draws a long rattling breath as if he's just breached the surface of the shade ocean he's been drowning in. He has the look of those with a meatware malfunction: the look of the dying.

He grunts, "The 'porter's broken."

Transporters are designed to run the length of the planetoid day-in, day-out, laden with tons of ore destined for Earth, each carrying a bank of backup fuel cells. 'Porters never break. He's lying, or mocking me.

"Which mine are you from?"

The man laughs.

"Is your meatware not fixing your ankle?" I shrug off my counterpressure suit and smooth out the creases in my shirt. "Are you eating enough?"

"My ankle's fine. And I eat enough." He looks me up and down with a furrowed brow like I'm a splatter of tholin grease on a hov window. "Are you eating enough?"

Does he know what I am? Does he know what I feed on?

I try to suppress a shiver. "How cold is it in here?"

"Fifteen degrees."

"Fifteen? That's too cold for our meatware! Megumi Kida says—"

"Fuck Megumi Kida. I'm saving the heat supply." He eyes my medical bag. "Doctors often wander around the sandflats in a storm, do they?"

"I'm going to the Spaceport. I'm needed on Pluto."

"So you said."

"The storm wrecked the two ammonia stations between Eris-1 and the Spaceport. You got a spare cannister I can buy?"