Terror World by Cath Lauria

Author:Cath Lauria [Lauria, Cath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Media Tie-In, Horror, Science Fiction, Space Exploration
ISBN: 9781839082023
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Corinus Lifhe

The moment the fight between Grayson and Divak broke out, Corinus got a headache. It wasn’t merely the fact that the Martian and Thassian were thinking vile thoughts and having vile feelings toward each other – even among Centaurans, there were rivalries that sometimes erupted into violence. Corinus understood that, had dealt with that in his youth, just like all of them learned how to. It was more the fact that these thoughts were coming from two separate species, all while Corinus was trying to deal with the stubborn blank spot that was Six living rent-free in his mind, along with surges of near euphoria from Dizzie that should have buoyed him up, but instead made him feel like he’d eaten something that disagreed with him.

It was too much. It was just too much, and he couldn’t handle it anymore, but he couldn’t turn it off either. All his usual tricks for filtering out others’ thoughts and feelings weren’t working right now. Mason Bane’s five bickering brains, all of them very active now whereas on the ship they’d been largely passive, didn’t help. Four of those minds had the vocabularies of precocious human toddlers, but that just made them more annoying.

Corinus waited until Dizzie and Six were ensconced in the far corner of the lab trying to get power to the tables that held the equipment before reaching into the bag at his waist and pulling out the drug that would turn off his telepathy for a while. Now, to inject it right into his third eye and–

Oh, wait. He’d have to take off his helmet for that.

What does it matter? Almost everyone else in the expedition has done the same. You can put it right back on. You’ll be fine. You don’t want to wait until you get back to the other ship for this, do you? You’ll be useless for the rest of the day.

With a sigh, Corinus unsnapped his helmet and gently set it aside. Then he reached up and, very carefully, inserted the needle into his skin and pressed the micro-syringe to the soft, painful pulse-point of his third eye. Within seconds, it was like a cloud had been pulled across his mind’s vision, blocking his view of everyone else’s too-bright, repugnant thoughts.

The relief it gave him was so visceral he slumped down onto the floor, his back legs collapsing completely and his front only barely holding his head and torso upright. He hoped Dizzie and Six were too busy to come looking for him now. For the first time in their partnership, he hoped that Dizzie had forgotten about him, just for a while.

The blankness stayed with him through the rest of their work that day, making the setup of the lab into a slightly clumsy process. Dizzie and Corinus had only brought the barest bones of their own equipment along with them from the ship on this initial foray, but what they had they found places for, as well as planning where the rest of their equipment would go.

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