"Oh my god," X muttered to himself, quietly suffering. The coast guard team, Reploids and humans in black armor and matching uniforms, showed every sign of enjoying the trip. They had volunteered to man the small gunboat X had borrowed from the coast guard. X had known better than to think he could steer it himself. His knowledge of naval matters was somewhere on the bottom of the ocean and so was his ability to cope with it.

Fortunately, the heavy weapons battalion practiced with naval weapons as well as land based ones, so the Hunters had provided that much of his backup. A mixed crew was manning all the weapons diligently, ready to take care of any Maverick who dared pop up. Last but not least, two girls, one from his own unit and the other from Zero's, were accompanying him.

Everyone on the ship was female, except for him. X had been a little embarrassed when he'd had to make the request for only female crew, but everyone had complied cheerfully when he'd explained. The only real issue had been whether or not he should be along. Signas had finally decided that the others could keep him safe, as long as they stayed awake, and it would be worthwhile to see exactly what effect this Maverick weapon had on a male.

They knew, from the testimony of the girls, that the sound would take a few moments to affect the women. They would have enough time to shut down their audio receptors… except for X and one of the crew, who were going to be monitored to see exactly how they reacted.

Still, when X finally heard the music, it almost got him. The sound was so beautiful… it made him feel so wonderfully peaceful. And it promised things. It promised peace and love, if only he followed it… X walked towards the rail, and started to climb over…

Until rough hands jerked him back, and he cried out. Why were they keeping him from it? From that loving warmth?

There was a quicksilver pain across his face, then another. And someone was shouting in his ear, almost drowning out that glorious sound.

"X, turn off your audio receptors! Turn them off! NOW!" X wavered, blinking in pain. Yes, he was supposed to do that. He wasn't quite sure why anymore, but…

He mentally deactivated the circuits, then blinked as clarity returned.

"What happened?" He glanced around, and saw the other crewmember who had kept her audio circuits on lying on the deck, asleep. The woman across from him shrugged, and her reply came as a text message on their communications circuit. The humans in the crew were all wearing ear protectors and holding datapads to let them send and receive messages.

She passed out and you starting trying to jump overboard. Michele managed to grab you, and Spice slapped you a few times. Didn't really bring you out of it, though. We were going to tie you up if you didn't shut off your audios. She grimaced, then looked towards a nearby island. It must be coming from there, sir. The tanker passed by close to it, too. X nodded, his eyes narrowing.

Alright. He glanced down at the girl, who was being shaken awake. We'll start circling around the island, with one of you sometimes checking to see how loud the sound is. It was the best idea he had for how to find the one making it.

It didn't take them too long to locate the source of the sound. It helped that once they were alert for it, brief exposure to the music wasn't enough to make the girls pass out. X didn't dare activate his own audio sensors.

The source was a cave by the shore. It was full of water, but the ceiling was too low to admit the boat. X looked down into the water, and grimaced. It was brackish and full of weeds. Swimming in it would not be fun. Walking on the bottom would be even less fun, and wearing their armor, they would have to. Reploids were buoyant enough to float without armor, but they sank like rocks with it on.

X and the two girls started into the water, while the rest of the team stayed on the boat. X was confident he could deal with whatever was here with their help. They were the best female Hunters HQ had to offer.

The bottom of the seafloor was as gooey as X had feared. Seaweed clutched at them, but couldn't hold on. They slogged through, eventually coming out into the cave, their legs coated in mud. X coughed at the horrible smell.

Then frowned, realizing the smell was only partially from the mud. The two girls were grumbling, helping each other pick seaweed away from their armor. One of them had long blonde hair, which needed even more attention. X ignored them both in favor of sniffing the air, even when one of them carefully pulled seaweed away from his armor.

X's sense of smell was better than the average human, although nowhere near the level of a dog. He frowned, trying to separate the different scents. There was fish, oil, rot… and a peculiar smell that X associated with Reploid bodily fluids. Oily, but sweetish. He grimaced. It was a smell he'd encountered many times before, but he never liked it.

Let's go. X text messaged the two girls, who left off their grooming. The one from Zero's unit ignited a beam sabre while the other readied her arm cannon. They slipped deeper into the cave, watching warily for enemies.

Enemies were hard to find, but dead bodies weren't. They found the first one not too deep into the cave. A male Reploid with his throat torn out. X recognized the armor color… it was one of the crew from the tanker.

The cave became stranger further inside, as well. Phosphorescent fungi gave off a great deal of light, and strange crystals imbedded in the walls also gave cool illumination. The floor of the cavern was wet and slimy, providing treacherous footing. They gradually found more bodies, and it was clear many small vessels had fallen victim to the Mavericks, the victims dying unnoticed. They found the remains of several humans. X hesitated, then knelt down beside a relatively fresh body as the girls stood guard. Unlike the Reploid bodies, it looked partially eaten. But why would a Maverick want to eat humans? Although technically, they could…

X shuddered at the thought, and stood again. The cavern widened into a much larger chamber, and they finally found the source of the singing.

X was astonished and repulsed. There were two Mavericks, lying in a pool of water at the center of the cavern. It was spring fed and clear, lapping around the scales of the two creatures inside it.

They looked like women, but only partially so. Their upper bodies were those of women, but scaled and diseased looking. One was wearing a collar of cloth, and shreds trailed down between her full breasts. The other was wearing the remnants of armor, and as X watched, she reached up and clawed some of it away, ripping it free. Their skins were fish belly white, and their eyes were a luminescent green as they looked at him.

One slid beneath the water, and X gasped as a long, sinuous tail emerged from the water. It was perhaps three times as long as the rest of her body, and it reminded him of a water snake.

"Who are you?" One of the girls demanded, activating her audio receptors. But the two Mavericks showed no sign of understanding, and the girl swore, turning off her receptors again as they started to sing.

Retire them quickly and neatly. X instructed the other two. This looked easy, but he was willing to bet it wouldn't be. As he watched, one of the creatures eased herself out of the pool, moving surprisingly quickly. Her snake-like lower body adapted to the ground easily, propelling her swiftly across the cavern floor. She opened her mouth to sing again, and X caught a glimpse of pointed shark teeth. Her mouth was full of them, more than one row. Careful of their teeth.

The battle was vicious. The scales on their bodies seemed to protect them like armor, and the one with the cloth collar lashed out with her lower body, coiling the girl from Zero's unit in her tail. The girl slashed down, raising a terrible wound on the unprotected tail, then screamed as the Maverick bit her on the arm. Then X's buster hit the Maverick in the side, and she reared back, nearly tearing the Hunter's arm off but letting go.

The other Maverick was clumsier, and her lower body seemed somehow malformed to X. It wasn't as long as the first, or as agile. And neither of them had any weapons beyond their teeth and long, sharp claws. X and the girl from his unit overcame the clumsier Maverick just in time to see the girl from Zero's thrust her beam sabre through the first ones chest. There was a terrible smell of burning flesh, and the Maverick slumped, taking the sword with her.

X blinked, and suddenly sniffed the air. The smell wasn't right. It wasn't…

Everyone, turn on your audio receptors. The creatures were dead, and X didn't want to speak this way any longer than he had to. He walked over to the dead creature, kneeling down beside her as the girl from his unit staunched the other one's bleeding. The wound was deep and painful, but not life threatening.

X sniffed again, smelling burnt pork, then tentatively touched the scaly flesh. He shuddered as he realized that his senses weren't playing a trick on him. At one time, this "Maverick" had worn regular clothing. And she wasn't a Maverick at all.

But what had turned a human into this?

When Lifesaver looked over the two bodies, he confirmed X's tentative hypothesis.

"This was once a human." Lifesaver lifted up a hand, then let it drop back to the examination table. "I could use the help of a specialist in human autopsies. This isn't really my field."

"You'll get one," X promised, turning to glare at some Hunters that were peeking into the repair bay to get a glimpse of the gruesome remains. He didn't appreciate the morbid curiosity, although it was probably inevitable. Everyone had heard about how this human had nearly torn off a teammates arm with her teeth, and resisted several hits from X's buster without any armor. Added to that, she looked like something out of a horror movie. It was guaranteed to make anyone curious. "Do you have any idea who she is?"

"And how would I know?" Lifesaver gave X a scalding look. "Check her dental records?" X tried to maintain his patience, reminding himself that the medic had a lot of things on his hands.

"How about her fingerprints?" He said reasonably, and Lifesaver shrugged.

"This isn't a crime lab, X. I don't have any equipment to take fingerprints and send them for identification-"

"Lifesaver, WHAT is your problem today?" X finally burst out. "Send someone down to admissions! We take fingerprints and do security checks on every human we allow into this building!" That was routine. Lifesaver stopped, a startled expression on his face.

"Oh. I hadn't thought of that. Rory! Go down to admissions." One of his assistants, a older human, immediately nodded and dashed off. "I can tell you more about the Reploid."

"Thank you," X said wearily as Lifesaver took him to the second corpse. This one had been opened up and examined, unlike the first. Lifesaver knew his limitations, and conducting a human autopsy was beyond him. Exploring a Reploid, though, was right up his alley.

"I believe she was originally an old Sim model, class B." Lifesaver threw up the schematics of an original of that line, then the schematics of the female he had examined. X nodded… he could see the similarities. Although there were plenty of differences. "What happened to cause this, now, that's hard to say. It appears the nanities in her body began restructuring her to an alien template. Also, the semi-organic components have undergone a strange growth and mutation. Her lower body in particular is mostly organic. We've been able to locate no virus or agent that would account for these changes."

"And her vocal weapon? How does it work?" X asked intently. Lifesaver grimaced, raising an empty hand.

"We don't know. We've checked her over thoroughly, but while her vocal unit is capable of producing sounds that will carry over vast distances, there is nothing unusual about it. I can't explain the effect it had on you." Lifesaver poked one of the scales. "I can't explain these, either. They seem to be some kind of unknown, organic polymer. Her teeth and claws are also made of an unknown substance."

"Hm." X looked at the body thoughtfully. "Do you think you could figure out who she is?"

"We already have." X would never have credited Lifesaver with a sense of drama, but it seemed he was wrong. Lifesaver threw up the data onto the screen, and X blinked as he saw a pretty Reploid with dark purple hair smiling from the screen. She wasn't stunning, but her face was friendly and had character. "Her name was Wyna. She was built to be a caretaker to an elderly woman. She served there until the woman died, and inherited a share of the estate. Since then, she's been traveling. We got this picture from the old woman's son." X nodded… there was a happy old woman in the picture, with a face like a wrinkled apple but wearing a wide smile. A middle-aged man was also in the picture, most likely the son who had sent the picture to Lifesaver.

"Interesting… do you think the second one could be a friend?" Lifesaver frowned, but nodded.

"It's possible. We can't say for certain, though. Apparently, Wyna kept only sporadic contact with the surviving family and they knew nothing of her personal life, so they could tell me nothing about that."

"Well, tell me if you find out anything about the first one." There was nothing more to be learned here. Lifesaver nodded.

"Just find me someone to do an autopsy on this one, before she starts to smell worse than she already does." X winced at that, but nodded. Both the bodies had a fishy odor, and the first was worse. "Maybe we should send her down to the morgue, instead of doing it here."

"I'll ask about that right away," X promised. He wanted answers very badly.

Elsewhere…

The two female Reploids from the tanker ship were standing by the rail of a new ship. They had been accepted back by their company, and placed on a new vessel doing the same job. Not many people enjoyed being almost completely inactive, so it hadn't been hard to find a place for them.

The crew of the vessel was not familiar with either of them, so the way they had nothing to say to anyone but each other did not seem strange. Nor did all the time they spent at the rail, looking into the water… although it was a bit peculiar, when one of them used a spear to try to catch fish. But everyone had hobbies.

This night, though, the ship was blown off course. It was a very stormy night, and no one noticed the quiet splashes off the stern of the ship. Who would jump into the ocean in a storm?

But they did notice the empty control room the next day. It didn't seem worthwhile reporting it to the Maverick Hunters… the two females had obviously been traumatized by their experiences. A pity, but only worth reporting to the port authorities, who received it as a slightly odd missing persons case, and nothing more ominous.

And so things went on.