The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 34: The Steel Descent

Jazmyn and Fletcher left the Mercury behind, threading the stolen grav-car through the lower tiers as they climbed the spiraling ramps toward north New Cairo. Crossing onto the grand highway felt like a physical blow. The air thinned and filtered, smelling of the expensive static which bled from atmospheric scrubbers dotting the glass and chrome streets. Gilded Spire 03 rose before them, a needle of sealed concrete and reinforced glass, its upper floors lost in the poisoned air that choked everything else.

Jazmyn swiped her burner ID at the automated security panel, and the elevator surged upward with a silent, sickening efficiency.

When the doors to Suite 402 slid open, the air hit them with the sharp, electric tang of scorched polymer. No answer came to Jazmyn’s call, only the frantic, high-pitched whine of a cooling array running at triple capacity.

She moved through the room, hand tight on the grip of her pistol. The living area was a minimalist void of white leather and glass, dominated by a heavy-duty netrunning rig. A woman lay on the padded chair, her body rigid, eyes rolled back so far that they had turned white. A thick bundle of fiber-optic cables snaked from the neural jack at her skull into a server rack that pulsed with the angry red of a firmware-level warnings.

“This must be ‘Herr’,” Fletcher said, reaching for the bundle of cables.

“Don’t touch anything,” Jazmyn commanded. She holstered her auto-pistol, glaring across her HUD to toggle a scan.

Herr’s skin was a translucent grey, and a thin trail of blood leaked from her ear, steaming as it seeped down the netrunning chair and hit the cold tiles of the floor. On Jazmyn’s HUD, her skin took on the bright orange of a body cooking from the inside out.

“Looks like she tripped some black ICE,” Jazmyn said, tracing the umbilicals to the rack.

“Can you pull her out?” Fletcher asked, scanning the door.

“Let me see,” Jazmyn said. Her left hand settled on the server’s primary intake. The touch of her plasteel fingers against the vibrating hardware sent a jolt of feedback through her shoulder. “I haven’t done this in a decade.”

“Wouldn’t have thought your chrome was for show,” Fletcher said, stepping toward the window. He parted the heavy curtains, narrowing his eyes at the lights of the early evening outside.

“Once you’re away from UEAF’s free update cycle, ‘for show’ is the best you can hope for.”

Jazmyn found a data cable amid the clutter of the apartment and shoved her hair aside to reveal the data port at the base of her skull. The connection brought a flood of white noise, a copper-tasting surge of high-voltage data that ignited the nerves in her shoulder. She shut her eyes tight while the stolen code poured into her system, unfiltered code that burned its way through her nerves.

White noise roared behind Jazmyn’s eyes as a chaotic static tasting of copper and burnt insulation. Her left arm twitched, servos stuttering as the neural link buckled under the load.

“She was skimming UEIS comms,” Jazmyn gasped, her voice sounding thin and distant to her own ears. “She caught the United Earth spooks talking to our mark, and they slammed a feedback loop down her throat.” She paused, piping the data logs into a sandbox.

The connector of the data cable glowed cherry-red against the server’s port. Jazmyn’s HUD flickered, the display fracturing into jagged shards of encrypted code. The UEIS mainframe was purging the intercept by cooking the hardware Herr was using to listen.

“I’ve got something,” Jazmyn gritted out. The heat at the base of her skull was becoming unbearable, the taste of scorched internal insulation filled her mouth. “Names, times, locations-our data package’s still here, but...” She pulled Herr’s connection trace.

Red across the board. The wetware was already gone, only the servers keeping the hardware ticking.

“Got movement in the sky. Two AVs on approach.” Fletcher leaned closer to the window, his silhouette blocking the glare of the motorway neon. “Whatever you’re doing, hurry up.”

Jazmyn cursed under her breath. “They cooked her brain, then left a tracer for whoever tried to help her.”

“They’re setting down in the parking lot!” Fletcher barked.

“Sorry, Herr.” Jazmyn leaned into the connection, forcing a final recursive command through the bridge that surged like a current of electricity down her spine. The loop would incinerate the server’s memory banks, scrubbing every trace of the Earth agents and her own signature before they could trace the signal back to the Mercury.

Herr’s body seized one last time, her eyes going flat and dark. The server rack groaned in electronic death and erupted in a spray of sparks, the cooling fans seizing with a high-pitched metallic scream.

Jazmyn yanked the cable from the base of her skull, the jolt sending a rush of static and red warning icons screaming across her HUD. She slumped forward, her left arm a dead weight as the firmware rebooted.

“Is she...?” Fletcher’s voice trailed off, his grip on his weapon loosening.

“She’s been gone for hours, already,” Jazmyn rasped, the copper taste of firmware failure flooding her mouth. She forced herself upright, fighting the tilt of her balance. “I’ve got our mark’s schedule. Let’s go.”

They bolted for the hallway, the elevator doors already closing on the floor below.

“Stairs,” Fletcher commanded, grabbing her good shoulder and hauling her toward the service exit. “If we hit the lobby, we’re trapped.”

Jazmyn gripped her auto-pistol, her organic hand tightening as a copper tang coated her tongue. Evidence of the worst-case scenario pulsed in her internal banks. Corvan Rhys had been talking to the United Earth Information Services. The same people who had fried Siora’s local contact. The hunt had shifted from kidnap to war.

They plunged into the stairwell, boots echoing against the concrete like rifle fire. Forty floors of vertical drop separated them from the stolen grav-car. Below, the sounds of tactical chatter already echoed through the concrete silo.

“Stairs are a going to be a kill-box soon.” Fletcher punched the toggle for the roof access, the mag-lock clunking with the heavy finality of a chambered round. “We have to go up.”

Jazmyn followed him, her left shoulder dead weight. On her HUD, a red progress bar clawed through a sea of static: SYSTEM REBOOT: 12%. Her arm hung slack, the fingers locked in a rigid claw. The copper tang sharpened to a chemical burn in the back of her throat.

They breached the roof into a gale of filtered, high-altitude wind. Gilded Spire 03 stood as a solitary needle in a forest of glass. To the south, the Fishbowl glowed, a massive dome shielding the Pyramids from the caustic air. Corporate highrises circled the landmark like mushrooms in a fairy circle, their crowns wreathed in artificial gold.

“Over the edge,” Fletcher commanded, pointing toward a service gantry. “The maintenance tracks lead to the construction lift at Tower Five.”

They scrambled across a narrow bridge alongside thick tubes of the quarter’s remote climate controls. Below them, the motorway was a river of blurred neon, a hundred feet of empty air tugging at their balance. Jazmyn gripped the railing with her organic hand, her knuckles white. Her HUD flickered: FIRMWARE VALIDATING... 34%. The actuators in her elbow gave a sudden, sharp whirr-clack as they twitched back to life.

“Down!” Fletcher yanked behind an air intake large enough to swallow a man.

A black AV crested the roofline, its searchlight slicing a white arc through the smog. The beam skimmed the gantry, missing them by a fraction of a meter as they dove behind a massive atmospheric scrubber unit. The roar of the repulsors vibrated through Jazmyn’s teeth, rattling her skull.

Fletcher led them into a service conduit, a lightless tunnel that reeked of grease and stagnant air. Jazmyn’s shoulder scraped the corrugated metal wall, sending a jolt of static through her neural port.

They emerged onto the skeletal frame of Tower Five. Steel beams reached for the clouds, draped in orange safety netting that snapped in the wind, loose fabric whipping between the beams. They descended through the gut of the site, leaping across stacks of uninstalled floor tiles and crates of plumbing fixtures.

SYSTEM REBOOT: 88%. Static cleared from Jazmyn’s vision, replaced by a green diagnostic sweep that scrolled across her HUD. The hydraulics in her left arm hissed and settled, and she flexed plasteel fingers to find the grip steady and cold.

They reached street level through a delivery alley where the air tasted of ozone and wet pavement. Jazmyn led the way to the stolen grav-car, its chassis still vibrating with a low, idle hum.

She slid into the driver’s seat, her mechanical hand locking onto the steering column with a heavy clunk. Fletcher took the passenger side, his jaw set, shoulders squared against the seat. Jazmyn banked the car into the flow of traffic and glanced back at the Spire, where black AVs circled the roof in tight formation, their spotlights stabbing into the dark.

“UEIS...” Fletcher cursed under his breath, his hand still on his gun. “I knew this had the stink of another war.”

“Unless we can grab Rhys before they can use him,” Jazmyn shot back, changing the lane to pass a boxy truck. “According to Herr’s data package, he is going to be at a gala tonight. Tower Seven. Next to the Fishbowl.”

“That place is a vault,” Fletcher grunted, slumping back in his seat. “Private security, corporate sensors, and enough anti-air to level a district.”

“But also thousands of guests and plenty of noise for a couple of spacers to get lost in,” Jazmyn said. She rubbed her left shoulder, the plasteel still warm beneath the flight suit.

Siora Vanguard had drilled it into them for two days on Kepler-22b: walk into a room like you owned it, and the room would let you pass.

“I like this never-give-up thing you’ve got going, but you can’t go in there looking like you crawled out of a trash chute,” Fletcher said, his voice a low rumble over the hum of the grav-engine. “And your partner’s hobbling like he’s got a rusted hip.”

“If you want out, just say so,” Jazmyn shot back, eyes fixed on the traffic.

Fletcher didn’t even blink. “I didn’t say that.” He thumbed the side of his handgun once, checking the chamber. “If there’s a chance we stop this now, we take it.”

Jazmyn glanced at him. The tattoos on his arms were faded, but his spine was ramrod straight. Years of commanding a crew through the black had wired that discipline into his bones.

“We need threads,” she said. “Actual corpo-chic ones, not borrowed grease-suits.”

Fletcher reached for the comms in the dash, punching a direct line to Whisper. The fixer’s face appeared in a small, flickering holo screen, the overhead lights reflecting from his hair.

“Whisper,” Fletcher said. “I need your tailor. The one who did the silk for the Mars delegation.”

Whisper looked up, his wide, sleazy grin returning for a fraction of a second. “The Invisible Stitch? It’s going to cost you.”

“Just send the coordinates,” Fletcher commanded. “And tell him he’s working overtime. We have a gala to crash, and we’re looking like the cleanup crew.”

“Sending now,” Whisper replied. “But don’t come crying to me when the bill hits the relay.”

The coordinates pinged the car’s GPS. A small, discreet shop tucked into a terrace overlooking Pyramid Park.

“We have one shot,” Jazmyn said, kicking the car into gear. “And only a couple hours to recreate two days worth of corporate styling.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 33: Hard Water

The water in the Mercury’s shower was full of limescale and carried the smell of The Nile—a far cry from the aerated, silk-soft luxury jets back on Kepler-22b. Jazmyn leaned her forehead against the faux-stone tile and let the heat leach the grime of the crash from her pores.

She stepped out into the steam, toweling her hair with mechanical motions. The wet weight of her extensions was a nuisance, snagging against the plasteel housing of her left shoulder as she fought them into a manageable braid.

The bathroom opened into a suite that was a fever dream of gold-painted plaster and dust. A life-sized bust of Nefertiti stared blankly from a corner, her one remaining eye tracking Jazmyn’s movement. Outside the reinforced window, the New Cairo sky had bruised into a deep, toxic purple, the lights of the space elevator piercing the smog like needles.

Jax was sprawled on the bed. Yun had worked fast. The dried blood was gone, replaced by clean adhesive bandages that matched Jax’s pale skin. A side table was crowded with a small mountain of painkillers and a bowl of neon-colored scarab snacks.

Fletcher was overplaying his concern. Whether the Captain of the Daring Breeze was truly spooked by the mention of black-ops or just smelled the deep pockets of a Vanguard contract, Jazmyn didn’t care. She wasn’t about to question his motives.

She sat on the edge of the mattress to pull on Kira’s borrowed flight suit. The charcoal-grey fabric was worn thin at the knees but clean. As the mattress shifted under her weight, Jax opened his eyes. He didn’t move his head, just tracked her with a gaze that was still a little too glassy from the meds.

“Fixer call yet?”

“Not yet,” Jazmyn replied. She zipped the flight suit, the friction of the teeth a sharp, domestic sound in the quiet room. “You hungry? Thirsty? Need help taking a whizz?”

Jax bristled, his shoulders tensing against the pillows. “I’m not that far gone, Jazzy. Can handle my own plumbing.”

“Yun disagrees,” Jazmyn said, her voice dropping into a flat, clinical tone. She reached over and tapped the edge of the side table. “Said that street-doc missed a bleed. Another twenty-four hours and your liver would’ve been toast.”

Jax let out a short, jagged breath and looked at the ceiling. “Lucky. Right. That’s the word for the last twelve hours.”

“Better than the alternative.” Jazmyn stood up, testing the range of motion in the flight suit. It was a bit tight across the shoulder where her cybernetics bulked the silhouette, but it would do. “Go back to sleep. I don’t want to have to carry you back to the Rim.”

Jax let out a sigh and ended in a wince. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? You didn’t leap out of the VTOL yourself.”

“For getting us on the Vanguard girl’s radar.” Jax frowned at his bandaged side, then pulled up the scratch hotel blanket.

Jazmyn shook her head. It would have been easy to tell him off, to lash out and act like “The Boss” chewing out a dumb subordinate. But Jax wasn’t a greenie fresh off the recruitment shuttle. He was the one person who had been at her side since she’d left Sol, the one who got her back to her feet after the accident that took her arm, the one pillar that propped up her crew.

“I’m going to have a chat with our new business partners,” she said, turning to the door.

Jax’s jaw set. He gripped the edge of the velvet headboard and began to haul himself upright, the effort turning his knuckles into white stones. “I’m going with. I’m not letting you deal with the Concord without someone watching your six.”

“Stay put, Jax.” Jazmyn’s voice was a low warning, vibrating with a mechanical edge. “If all they want is credits, Vanguard’s got plenty to spare.”

“Like hell,” he rasped, his bare feet finding the floor with a shaky thud. “I’ve managed with worse than a bruised liver.”

Jazmyn didn’t rush to steady him. She just stood there, giving him a long, silent look that made the air in the room feel heavy. Then, her pupils flashed with an internal data transmission, as she flicked a heavy data package straight from her internal storage to the data pad on Jax’s side table.

It chirped, demanding attention.

Jax picked it up. A video file sat in his inbox, titled in harsh, system-default text:

THIRD_MOON_01.

He tapped play, and the screen switched to the grainy, high-contrast thermal feed of UEAF-standard opticals. The image was unmistakable: Jax, caught in the white-hot bloom of heat sensors, his bathrobe flapping in the wind as he aimed a rail driver across the ocean waves. His bare backside was centered perfectly in the frame, glowing like a beacon against amber path lights and purple flowers.

“I have three copies queued,” Jazmyn said, willing her voice to sound hard. “One to your mother on Ganymede. She’d probably frame it. One to Pixel.”

Jax winced. Pixel, the Drifter’s netrunner, would have the clip looping on every terminal in the ship within ten minutes.

“And the third,” Jazmyn continued, her gaze pinning him, “goes to Torvin.”

Jax’s face drained of color, leaving him almost translucent. Torvin possessed a predatory sense of humor that turned locker-room jokes into weapons. If he got his hands on that footage, he would project it onto the Drifter’s hull or beam it across every public frequency in the Junkyard drydocks.

“Jaz, come on!” Jax slumped back onto the mattress. “That’s... that’s a violation of the spacer’s code. We can bargain. Fifty-five percent of the split? Sixty?”

“No deal,” Jazmyn said. She stepped toward the door, pulling on her borrowed flight suit until she settled on a zipper-half-down compromise. “You need to keep your bony ass in that bed and let the meds do their job. Do not make me hit send.”

Jax stared at the frozen frame of his own thermal-imaged rear. He dragged his legs back onto the bed and slumped against the pillows.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” he muttered, though the edge was gone from his voice.

“I know,” Jazmyn replied, fighting to keep a straight face. The image still made her shake with laughter no matter how many times she’d looped it. “I like yours better, though.”

Three sharp knocks broke the moment.

Yun stood in the doorway, field kit in hand. His eyes flicked to Jax. “His gravity juice levels are still burning through at double-rate. Space-born physiology can be complicated. I need to measure his bloodwork before the next dose.”

“Go ahead, and thank you.” Jazmyn stepped out of the way, letting Yun inside. “Eat a scarab-snack. I’ll be back when I know if this can still be salvaged, or if your dust farm dream is going to come true ahead of schedule,” she called over her shoulder, leaving the room.

The door clicked shut behind her. Fletcher’s crew was just down the carpeted corridor. Jazmyn snatched a piece of Zalabia off the side table near the entrance. It tasted of cheap grease and dirty burners, just the way she’d remembered it from her childhood in New Cairo.

“Thanks. I’ve been craving these since Throne,” she said, chewing.

Fletcher pushed the oil-stained paper bag toward her, taking the device. “Whisper pinged?”

“Not yet.” Jazmyn cradled the bag like a precious treasure, stuffing another fried dough ball in her mouth. “I wanted to talk, find out which way the shit will fly once the blades’ll turn again.”

“The Daring Breeze isn’t a corporate pleasure yacht, and we aren’t allergic to risk,” Kira said, leaning against the wall nearby, half a ball of Zalabia leaking grease over her fingers. Behind her, Ellie sat curled in a hallway chair, box braids shielding her face, hands pressed to her temples.

“And here I thought you’d be planning your retirement.” Jazmyn’s eyes drifted past Kira to the navigator. “You’re retiring Winter, right? Flying with a burned navigator is a death sentence for everyone aboard.”

Kira’s jaw tightened. A muscle jumped in her cheek. “Ellie is fine. She takes her hypos. She knows how to keep it together.”

“Fine,” Jazmyn repeated, the word flat. She picked at the oil on her fingers. “I’ve waded through the aftermath of ‘fine’.”

“She’s been doing this since the Second Expansion Conflict,” Kira said, her voice low and sharp as a blade. “You are a guest. Don’t tell us how to handle our own.”

Jazmyn held Kira’s stare. The bird-faced pilot didn’t blink.

“Silas pulls salvage, Kira. All the ones who didn’t know how to keep it together,” Fletcher said, breaking the tension. “She’d probably want to retire navigators fresh off the assembly line.”

“That’s bullshit!” Kira took a step into the room, balling her fists.

Ellie sucked in a sharp breath of air. “Kira...”

Kira huffed. “That’s bullshit,” she repeated in a lower voice. “Void madness is not a guarantee, even corporate doesn’t pull their navs.”

“You’re right, I apologize,” Jazmyn said, breaking the stare-off. She popped another piece of Zalabia into her mouth, but the sweet dough only flooded her mouth with the taste of copper. A memory flashed before her eyes before she could shove it into the dark place where she kept things like that: bodies popped like blood balloons floating in chunks through the corridors of a broken ship.

The data pad in Jazmyn’s inner pocket buzzed hard against her hip, dispelling the images. She pulled it free. The cobalt screen showed a single line of text from Whisper:

HARD LOCK—GILDED SPIRES, UPTOWN—NETRUNNER TAG ‘HERR’.

“Whisper?” Fletcher asked, picking up his gun from the side table in the corridor.

“A location lock. I’m going to head over and see if our info package’s still there,” Jazmyn said, shoving the pad back into her pocket. She hesitated, then left the greasy bag on the table.

Fletcher stood up, picking up his handgun off the table. “I’m going with you. Kira, ready the ship and pack up the injured in case we have to burn our way out of here.”

Kira frowned. “Are you sure? We’d have to jump out of the system.”

“Hug the nav-net,” Fletcher retorted, already half-way to the elevator. The handgun bulked his jacket at the back.

Jazmyn caught up with his stride. She slotted a fresh mag into her auto-pistol before returning it to its place in her waistband. “Tell it to me straight, Fletcher. You can’t be hurting for credits bad enough to want in on this.”

“It’s not about credits,” Fletcher replied, rubbing the ink-stained skin of his arms. “Just hearing Aether Dynamics and Earth in the same sentence gives me a rotten feeling.” He thumbed the call button, and the cabin announced itself with a metallic scrape.

“Let’s not panic, yet,” Jazmyn said, although her gut clenched around the Zalabia in protest. “From where I stand, there’s still some distance between the turd and the fan blades.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 32: The Concord Split

The dry, ozone-thick air of the shop settled as Jazmyn stepped back from the counter, her hand on the grip of her auto-pistol. Jax lowered the muzzle of his energy pistol, though his thumb remained on the power toggle. The two door guards hobbled back to the threshold, eyes darting between Whisper, Fletcher and the scrapper’s weapons.

The violence paused, but the tension didn’t give an inch.

“What kind of professional are you, exactly?” Jazmyn asked, returning Fletcher’s stare. On her HUD, the proximity pins for the black AV’s showed ‘out of reach’, but that didn’t make her feel any calmer.

“I’m Fletcher. Captain of the Daring Breeze with the Free Trade Concord. The string bean behind you is Ahmose, our mechanic.” The tattooed man didn’t stretch out his hand, but offered a nod that carried the weight of a formal dock-side greeting.

The youth braced himself against a rack of antique weapons for balance. He gave a less impressive nod. “Hey.”

“Concord?” Jazmyn retorted. “So, are you a smuggler or a pirate?”

“Legitimate businessman,” Fletcher said with a toothy grin.

Jazmyn looked him up and down, then frowned at Whisper’s chrome hands. “Legitimate, sure,” she said, filtering the adrenaline spike through a steady breath. “I’m Jazmyn Silas. That’s Jax. Stardust Drifter, Void salvage and reclamations.”

Fletcher’s eyes narrowed, sweeping over the scorched fabric of Jazmyn’s suit and the mechanical lines of her left arm. “I knew you looked familiar.” He pointed at the plasteel housing. “Kazimierz’s drydock? Near the atmospheric scrubbers?”

“Only under protest,” Jazmyn shot back. She turned her head to glare at Whisper, who was currently nursing his grinding wrist servos behind the counter. “Whisper, the comms. We’re on the clock.”

Whisper scrambled to comply, his chrome fingers clattering against a stack of data-slabs.

Fletcher barked a laugh that ended in a dry wheeze. He gestured to their clothes, where soot stained the ballistic weave of their expensive gear. “Salvage must be paying a premium these days. I didn’t know scrappers could afford high-thread weave and trips to Earth.”

“You want the skinny, Fletcher?” Jazmyn sized him up. She saw the tactical calculations running behind Fletcher’s eyes, the same look Glitch would give a closing interceptor. “Aether Dynamics lost a suit. We’re here to grab him before someone makes it official.”

Her words had the effect she’d wanted. The blood drained from Fletcher’s face, leaving the ink of his tattoos standing out in stark relief against his skin.

“Aether Dynamics? Here on Earth?” his voice dropped to a low, jagged rasp.

“Which is why we came armed and armored,” Jazmyn replied. she caught the hem of her jacket and held it up, revealing the scorched, silver-grey honeycomb of the ballistic lining.

Fletcher frowned at the partially melted weave. “Looks like you came underdressed.”

Beside them, the sound of Jax’s breathing turned into a wet, rhythmic rattle. He sagged against a display case of antique pulse-rifles, his face shifting from a sickly pallor to a bruised, translucent grey. The relief from the clinic’s meds was burning off, leaving the raw cost of Earth’s gravity written in the tremble of his hands.

“Jax,” Jazmyn murmured, her internal sensors picking up the heat spike in his core.

Jax tightened his grip on Bertha, his knuckles white enough to show the bone through the skin. The planet was sitting on his chest, and by the sound of his breathing, it was winning.

“Adrenaline burned the juice.” Jax pounded a fist against the display glass. “Move it, Whisper, or I’ll start breaking things.”

Ahmose shifted his weight, his spindly frame swaying as he searched through a padded crate. He produced a pressurized hypo, the vial filled with a viscous, amber fluid. “Here, take this.”

Fletcher narrowed his eyes. He looked at Jax’s translucent skin, then at the energy weapon still gripped in the scrapper’s hands. A slow, calculating nod followed. “Take it,” he said. “Got to help your neighbor in hostile territory.”

Jax didn’t hesitate. He jammed the hypo into his thigh through the scorched fabric of his trousers. The hiss of the pneumatic charge cut sound in the dry room. He let out a long, shuddering breath and slumped against the display case, his head rolling back as the chemical cocktail flooded his marrow.

“Hostile territory’s a damn fine way to say it,” Jazmyn said. She watched the color return to Jax’s face in slow, mottled patches. “Some black-ops assholes shot our VTOL out of the sky before we could get our bearings.” She jabbed a thumb toward the sky.

Fletcher spat on the floorboards. “I take it you’re on your way out?”

“Vanguards don’t do refunds,” Jazmyn countered with a shake of her head. The taste of copper covered her tongue. “We tuck tail now, our employer will have our heads, and then Kazimierz will have our ship.”

“You’re working for the Vanguards?” Fletcher stance wavered. “That sounds like some Third-Expansion-Conflict-in-the-making talk.”

Jazmyn let out a bitter laugh. “What’s it to you? The Free Trade Concord profited from the chaos during the war. You took free nav-links from AD and still traded with both sides.”

“War is bad for the bottom line,” Fletcher shot back, his voice a low rumble of status and irritation. “Disrupts the lanes. Spoils the markets.”

“Kills people,” Ahmose muttered.

Fletcher looked at Ahmose, then back at battered scrappers. He rubbed a thumb over a tattoo of a fishwoman on his forearm, the ink blurred by years of radiation and grit.

“Tell you what. My crew’s staying at the Mercury Hotel near the pumps. It’s clean enough, and the walls are thick. We have a medic who can patch you two up properly.” Fletcher leaned in, his gaze pinning her. “In exchange, we want in on that lost corpo’s bounty.”

Jazmyn looked at Jax. His eyes were narrow slits, his chest rising and falling in a stuttering rhythm. She felt the weight of her own exhaustion-the press of Earth’s grabity on the metal in her body, the taste of ash in the back of her throat, the grit in her teeth.

“Fine,” she said, the word heavy with reluctance. “We split the take. But your medic better be worth the credits.”

Whisper fumbled beneath the counter, his chrome digits clinking against slim carbon-fiber slabs, then he slid two data pads toward Jazmyn. The hardware was fresh, the casing still smelling of factory sealant and static.

“Your burners,” he said, his servos protesting as he flexed his hands. “Static-routed through the Luna-relay. Even a UEAF scan-bot won’t sniff the drift.”

Jazmyn toggled hers on, the screen bleeding into a crisp, cobalt interface that reflected in her dark pupils. “And the other stuff?”

“I don’t stock medical-grade sedatives,” Whisper drawled, gesturing at the display cabinets in his shop. “Maybe you’d be interested in an antique gun, instead?”

Jazmyn didn’t look at the merchandize. Instead, she punched a sequence into the contact field-the informant’s comms ID. The string of digits glowed for a second before she flicked the entire data packet to Whisper’s terminal.

“Hey!” Whisper bristled, his wide grin vanishing. “What are you-”

“The line is burned,” Jazmyn cut him off, her voice a flat, tactical rasp. “The moment our VTOL hit the grit, this ID went cold. I need a name and a location.”

Whisper leaned over his screen, his metallic fingers dancing across the interface as he dissected the burned code. “Some serious obfuscation layers. This isn’t just a snitch, dollface. This is going to take time to track.” He looked up, the sleaze in his expression replaced by a genuine anxiety.

Jazmyn watched the data stream, ignoring his expression. “Can you do it or not?”

Whisper nodded, his slicked-back hair catching the blue glare of the monitors. There was a sliver of professinalism under the grease, after all. “I have to cross-reference the signal against the New Cairo power grid. It’ll take time. I’ll call your new ID the second the loc-tag pings.”

“We’ll be at Fletcher’s place,” Jazmyn said. She tucked the new data pad into the inner pocket of her scorched jacket. “If that signal blips, I want to know before the cleaners do.”

Whisper didn’t offer a smirk this time. He just watched the scrolling code, his chrome fingers tapping a frantic, metallic beat against the glass.

“Ahmose,” Fletcher commanded. “Help Jax. We’re moving.” He picked up the crate Ahmose had been carrying.

The space-born mechanic braced his shoulder under Jax’s arm, his long frame swaying under the weight, but he held. Together, they left the ozone-scented shop for the wet rot of the boardwalks.

The Mercury loomed at the end of the boardwalk like a tomb of synthetic sandstone. A holographic Anubis flickered at the entrance, its jackal head stuttering through a greeting loop that had likely been broken since the last conflict.

Inside, the lobby smelled of stale incense and heavy-duty industrial ozone. Faded gold filigree ran along the baseboards, and a fountain that once poured clear water now sat dry, its basin filled with discarded data-slugs and grit.

“Third floor,” Fletcher said. He didn’t look back as he led them toward an elevator that groaned like a dying beast.

The car lurched upward, the interior lined with peeling fake papyrus. When the doors hissed open, they stepped into a hallway where the ambient noise of the pumps muffled into a dull, manageable throb. Fletcher kicked open the door to a large suite.

The air inside was thick with the hum of a portable comms array and the scent of recycled ship-air.

“Heads up, we have guests,” Fletcher announced.

A woman with bird-like features and grease-stained fingers looked up from a data pad streaming flight-comp data. She wore a headset around her neck like a collar. “Corpos?” she asked, her gaze sweeping over Jazmyn’s ruined suit.

“Fellow Junkyard dogs,” Fletcher replied. “Kira, this is Jazmyn Silas and Jax from the Stardust Drifter.” He pointed at the other two people in the room. “The bald guy is Yun, our medic, and the bird in the chair is Ellie Winter, our navigator.”

Ellie sat huddled in a high-backed chair carved with gold-painted lotus flowers. She didn’t look up. Her hands were clamped tightly over her temples, her box braids shielding a face tight with pain. Beside her, Yun was already reaching for a field kit, as he narrowed his eyes at Jax.

“Did they take a shortcut straight out of the stratosphere?”

Jazmyn snorted a laugh. “From about twelve stories through solid concrete.”

Yun didn’t waste time with manners. He pointed to a low velvet sofa. “Sit. Let me see the damage.”

Jax slumped into the cushions with a grunt of relief. The medic’s hands were fast and cold, peeled back the blood-encrusted fabric of Jax’s shirt. The smell of antiseptic soon fought with the hotel’s musk.

Fletcher dug through the supply crate, producing a hypo with the stylized staff and snake logo of a local pharma corp. He tossed it to Ellie. She caught it with a snap of her wrist and jammed it into her neck just underneath the navigator’s implant, letting out a long, shuddering breath. Her shoulders finally dropped an inch.

“Headaches?” Jazmyn noted, her eyes lingering on Ellie. “Seems to be going around.”

“Occupational hazard,” Kira said, studying Jazmyn’s face with suspicion. “Navigating the ether leaves a mark.”

Jazmyn walked to the window and pulled back a heavy, dust-caked curtain. The New Cairo skyline was a jagged mess of light and shadow, but her HUD remained a friendly green.

“Thanks, Fletcher, we needed a breather,” Jazmyn said. She rubbed the place where the plasteel of her left arm bit into muscle and bone. Acceleration gravity was one thing, but Earth’s pull made her nerves ache in a whole different way. The singed fabric of her jacket dissolved under her touch.

“You can borrow my spare flight suit,” Kira said, already digging through the stack of duffel bags in the corner. “We should be about the same size.”

“Alright, Take five, everyone,” Fletcher said, leaning against the doorframe. “We wait for Whisper’s ping. Then we’ll know if this gig is a go.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 31: The Concrete Labyrinth

Jazmyn worked with frantic precision, bridging the grav-car’s shattered relay as red and amber circuit maps burned across her HUD. The car had been someone’s project, someone who swapped parts by the crate. Her prying blade fit into the stripped lock of the ignition housing like it had never known a key.

Click.

The grav-car lurched, chassis groaning as the repulsors kicked in with a low-frequency vibration that rattled Jazmyn’s teeth. A flicker of blue light licked along the underglow before settling into a steady hum, lifting the bulk six inches off the grit and dust. The door speakers erupted with synthetic engine sounds. Jazmyn bristled, her hand darting to the dash to rip out a handful of wiring, cutting off the noise.

“Get in,” she said. “I’m driving.”

Jax climbed into the passenger seat, and Jazmyn slammed the drive into gear. The car lurched forward, repulsors whirling up a pile of refuse in their wake. It pulled with a shuddering lag, relay sparks hissing through the chassis.

They accelerated up a winding access ramp that spat them out onto a colossal motorway that bisected New Cairo like a concrete leviathan. Jazmyn threaded the lanes like an asteroid field, her eyes locked onto the traffic, as it roared past in a relentless river of neon and steel.

“Check the sky.” Jazmyn’s eyes darted between the mirrors and the chaos in front of them. “Shooting down low-flyers is Tuesday in the lower city. But rolling up with a full black-ops squad? Someone in the city hall okayed this.”

“Clear for now,” Jax rasped from the passenger seat, his hand clamped over his bandaged side. “The Vanguard girl left out the locals were this trigger-happy.”

“I’m local,” Jazmyn shot back. She nodded down the highway, where the orbital elevator loomed in the distance. “Mom and I used to live just south of that thing.”

Jax nodded. “Point taken.”

A souped-up muscle car roared past, cutting them off. Jazmyn held her line. Dodging Void debris at relativistic speeds made this congested highway a parking garage. She gunned the engine, the grav-car surging past a transport truck with a protesting whine from the bypassed relay.

“This place was still a ghost town when I left. The Exodus had hollowed it out, killing the elevator only froze the rot,” Jazmyn muttered, her gaze fixed on the endless stream of speeding vehicles.

“Can’t say I blame folks for wanting out,” Jax said, shifting in his seat. “Place’s a dump.”

“Hey, now-” Jazmyn’s head snapped toward the side mirror, where the crumbling silhouettes of the flooded district receded behind them. The dashboard GPS pulsed a steady red warning as it attempted to reroute them toward an interchange kilometers away. “Wait. That was our exit.”

“The off-ramp to the flooded district is closed,” Jax said, tapping a flickering notification on the console. “The GPS is steering us around Pyramid Park, then street-level.”

“Screw that.” Jazmyn’s grip tightened on the steering wheel until the synth-leather groaned. “We’re already painting a neon arrow for those cleaners every second we stay on the main line.”

“What are you-”

Jazmyn’s hand shot out and yanked the emergency brake while kicking the manual thrusters into a reverse-vector. She jammed the stick into a hard dive, forcing the unstable car over the edge of the motorway barrier and into a narrow maintenance slipway that dropped forty meters toward the lower tiers. The car plummeted for a heartbeat before the repulsors caught, the descel rattling her teeth and vibrating the very marrow of her bones. They leveled out in a narrow alleyway. The cloying stench of stagnant water and rot swallowed the motorway’s hum.

“You’re going to give me a heart attack before the gravity does,” Jax groaned, knuckles white against his ribs.

“Told you I am local,” Jazmyn muttered, though her own heart was hammering against her ribs. “Still know the old shortcuts.”

She steered the grav-car toward the sound of water, weaving through collapsed overpasses and half-drowned delivery carts. In the passenger seat, Jax set Bertha across his knees as he borrowed Jazmyn’s multitool. He pried the grip panel loose, exposed the emitter port, and began stripping insulation from a stray wire.

Jazmyn kept her eyes on the road while the car drifted over cracked pavement and shallow water. Jax worked with stiff fingers, Earth gravity weighing down his arms. He threaded the wire into the coupling slot and held it steady. A sharp intake of breath hissed through his teeth, followed by a subsonic chirp from his ballistic implant as the coupling locked. The energy pistol gave a low-frequency thrum, and Jax let out a quiet sound that carried more relief than anger.

“Did you fix it?” Jazmyn asked, threading a gap between two rusted shipping containers.

He muttered a quiet acknowledgment, snapped the panel shut, and tucked Bertha into his lap. “Enough for now.”

The skyline of New Cairo vanished behind the skeletons of abandoned construction projects. The car lurched and turned, shuddering to a stop on the concrete quay that marked the new border of the Nile. The black water had swallowed the tidebreakers to their bases.

Jazmyn killed the engine and sat for a moment, her hands still shaking as the adrenaline began to ebb. “We’re here,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, tactical rasp. “Let’s go see if this Whisper is good or just reckless.”

The boardwalks groaned under their own weight in Earth’s full G, the sub-level’s flood mirroring the garish neon shop signs in its oily ripples. The taste of rot and wet stone was thick enough to coat the tongue. Jazmyn led the way through the chaotic jumble of sagging awnings and desperate merchants until they reached the one shop that was just a little too well-guarded for this place.

Two hulking guards flanked the threshold, watching them with bored indifference. Inside, a cadre of dehumidifiers worked overtime, filling the dry air with the smell of ozone and mildew. A third guard, built like a cargo loader, leaned against a display case.

Behind a polished counter stood a man in a satin jacket he would have insisted was real silk. His hair was a slicked-back helmet of grease, and his grin showed teeth too white for this neighborhood. Jazmyn’s HUD tagged the movement of his hands, the metallic click-clack of the polished chrome digits echoing in her audio channel.

“Well, well,” the man with the metal hands all but purred. The sound was a wet slide of vocal cords. “Look what the tide dragged in. Whisper at your service. What rare commodities can I tempt you with tonight?”

Jazmyn’s grip tightened around the auto-pistol hidden beneath her jacket. With her free hand, she placed the hacked credit chit on the counter. “Word is, you know how to hack Transorbital Exchange sigs.”

Whisper’s smile froze for a second before he recovered. “Hacking bank signatures is illegal, dollface.”

Jazmyn snatched his wrist, slamming the cybernetic limb onto the counter. The glass groaned under the strain, and she leaned into the cloud of cheap cologne. “You don’t look like you care about what’s legal.”

The guard by the display case lurched forward. His heavy boots thudded against the floorboards, the floor joists crying out under his bulk. Before the man could clear his holster, Jax’s Bertha hummed. The muzzle of the energy pistol pressed into the guard’s solar plexus, stopping him cold.

“Stay put,” Jax growled. The rasp in his chest sounded like grinding gears. “I’d hate to scorch the upholstery.”

The guard froze. His breath hitched, the scent of his stale sweat mixing with the ozone from Jax’s weapon. Jazmyn didn’t turn. She kept her weight leaning into Whisper’s chrome wrist.

“You’re running a scrip scam on kids too dumb to keep their mouths shut,” she rasped. “Means you’re either good or have good protection. I don’t see evidence of the second.”

Whisper yanked his hand free from her grip, and cleared his throat, slicking back his hair. A bead of sweat traced a path down his temple. “Bold claim, spacer.”

“Cut the act, Whisper.” Jazmyn tapped her gun against the counter, her voice a tactical purr. “We need clean comms IDs, new clothes, and a sedative strong enough to keep a mark unconscious for three days.”

Jax kept Bertha low but visible, his space-born frame sagging under Earth’s gravity. “And point-five-G grav juice. I get cranky when a planet sits on my chest.”

“And since you have skimmed our chit,” Jazmyn finished, “you’ll provide the kit for free.”

A shadow detached itself from a booth in the rear. A man stood up, skin the color of old paper, eyes narrowed against the shop lights. Nautical tattoos covered his thick arms, krankens devouring ships and topless women with fishtails battling for space. Behind him, a spindly figure struggled with Earth’s gravity. The youth swayed on uncoordinated legs, his stretched limbs and big head marking him as someone born outside the well.

“Boss, more company,” Jax noted.

Whisper’s hand dove under the counter. Jazmyn’s HUD beeped its alarm, and she surged forward. Her fingers locked onto the collar of his faux-silk jacket and the chrome hinge of his wrist, dragging him across the counter with a violent, mechanical snap. His chest slammed onto the counter with a dull whump, his slicked hair whipping into his eyes.

“Fletcher!” His voice cracked into a panicked falsetto. “Fletcher, stop her! Forty percent! I’ll go forty percent on the whole crate!”

The thud-clank of heavy boots echoed from the threshold, as the two door guards charged inside. Jax let Bertha’s sights settle for a heartbeat, manual aim without an implant to guide him, then squeezed the trigger. A thin lance of blue energy hissed through the dry air. It struck the lead guard’s knee joint dead center, shredding ligaments and snapping bone. The man went down without a sound, his legs buckling as he crumpled into the floorboards. Jax gave the pistol a tight nod. Bertha still had teeth.

“Skip the shooting, alright?” Fletcher’s tattooed arms spread wide, the muscles in his shoulders bunching as he stepped between them. He moved with the grounded stability of a man used to talking in front of drawn guns.

“Hurry, she’s breaking my arm!” Whisper whimpered, his face pressed into the wood. “The servos! They’ll be ruined!”

“Then keep your hand off the panic button, asshole,” Jazmyn hissed. She tightened her grip, the plasteel of her palm scraping against his chrome wrist.

Fletcher ignored the fence, his eyes tracing Jazmyn as if he was planning a jump through an asteroid swarm. “You’ve got a heavy hand for a spacer, sister. Whisper is a bastard, but he’s also my crew’s best supplier.”

“Then tell him to supply!”

“Thirty percent!” Whisper gasped into the counter. “Free comms! Just let go of the actuators!”

Fletcher stepped closer, his intense gaze pinning Jazmyn. “Allright, sister, let him go. We’ll negotiate like professionals.”

Jazmyn felt the heat of the servos in her forearm through the internal sensors. She maintained the pressure for a heartbeat longer, then released. Whisper slumped onto the floorboards behind the counter in a heap of shimmering fabric and clicking chrome.

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Chapter 30: The Hotwire Job

Jazmyn and Jax followed the boy through the market while the smell of searing meat and acrid spices battled for their stomach’s veto. The press of the crowd shoved against them, a blur of suntanned faces and synthetic rags.

“Sekani.” Jazmyn repeated the name, the irony tasting like copper. The boy’s face was still smeared with soot from the fire. “Some ‘laughter’ this is.”

Sekani glared, his jaw locking tight. He led them toward the main thoroughfare, a neon-lit canyon choked with hover-traffic and pedestrians. Jazmyn jerked him back by the arm and into the shadows of a side alley.

Above, unmarked AVs circled the skyline, their engines a low thrum in the smog. A subsonic scrape echoed in her temple as her visual suite zoomed, projecting a lime-green grid across the haze. It tagged shapes, calculating vectors and ballistic arcs: data points that meant nothing against the auto-pistol at her side.

One broke formation and dropped below the smog line, a black shape banking hard toward the market. A sweep of cold blue light washed over the crowd, catching faces, reading movement. The beam grazed Jazmyn’s shoulder and she shoved Sekani flat against the alley wall, pressing herself over them both. The light slid past, caught the alley mouth, then lifted. The AV climbed back into the haze.

“No open streets, Sekani.” She held the boy against the wall until her pulse eased. “You don’t want me to think you’re with our tail, do you?”

Jax slumped against the wall behind them, chest heaving, hand clamped over his ribs. “Got an ID on our pals yet?”

“Only on who they aren’t.” Jazmyn straightened. “Let’s keep moving.”

They turned from the thoroughfare and a heavy silence swallowed the city’s roar, pressing down with the smell of sewage and sour synth-ale. The alley spilled them into a concrete wasteland of cracked slabs and scattered trash. Layers of graffiti screamed from every surface. Near a loading bay, teenagers swarmed a battered grav-car, their shrill laughter bouncing off the walls between whipcracks of energy pistols. A pair of runts used a modified energy pistol to shoot glass bottles off a low wall.

“That’s Bertha over there,” Jax said, grip tightening on the crumbling concrete barrier. “Thieving shits. All my calibrations will be shot.”

“That’s the place,” Sekani said, looking at his feet. “Can I go now?” He clenched his fist, shoulders trembling with restrained anger.

A roar of over-tuned engines vibrated through the air as a second grav-car streaked into the yard. The driver mashed the accelerator; the car spun in tight, dust-choked doughnuts, its repulsor lifts screaming with illegal power. Underlights strobed against the grime, the group surged forward, faces alight with manic energy.

“Do you really want to go, Sekani?” Jazmyn placed a tracking ping on the two playing with Jax’s gun. “While your brother was dying on that clinic’s floor, these guys were out joyriding and getting high. If I were you, I’d give them a piece of my mind.”

Sekani’s knuckles whitened as he looked between Jazmyn and the laughing group, heat rushing to his face until his skin burned. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Those bastards! Mom fed them every day, and when the fire hit, they ran off.”

Jazmyn nodded, expression a mask of clinical assessment. “Good. Walk over there, look them in the eye, and tell them all that. And while you’re at it, ask where they took the rest of our things.”

Sekani stomped toward the group, sneakers grinding into rusted grit. “Hey!” he yelled, voice cracking. “Where were you when our home was burning? We almost died!”

One teen peeled away, squared his shoulders. “What’s it to us, huh? This city is a free-for-all.”

“I know you lifted off the corpos,” Sekani pressed, chest heaving against the thin fabric of his shirt. “What did you do with the loot?”

The teenagers glanced at one another. “We took it to Whisper,” one admitted with a shrug.

“That old crook ripped us off,” another added, lips curling. “Fifty percent off the top just to push a chit daemon? We need a new fence.”

“You-” Sekani’s shout tore through the junkyard, raw enough to make the scavenger crew spin away from their work.

Jazmyn and Jax seized the opening, slipping into the periphery where rusted husks of transport vehicles offered cover. They moved with predatory intent, footsteps silent as they stalked the edge of the crowd. The two teens playing with Bertha never saw them close. Jazmyn closed the gap, her hand snapping out to snatch the energy pistol from a loose grip. She twisted the boy’s arm with an audible pop, driving him into the dirt so hard the air left his lungs in a ragged wheeze.

Jax’s arm clamped around the second teenager’s throat in a high-pressure choke. In less than a second, both teens kissed the rust-stained earth.

“This is yours, I think.” Jazmyn tossed the energy pistol to Jax.

He caught it and went still. His fingers worked the breech open, thumb probing the emitter port, then still again. He slid in a fresh clip and the magazine clicked home-a clean sound, no implant handshake to follow. Jax’s shoulders locked, and he pressed Bertha flat against his ribs like he was holding something broken.

“What the hell,” he said, voice low and stripped of everything but fury.

The shooter squirmed against Jazmyn’s grip, a strangled sound escaping his throat. “What do you want?”

“A party invitation.” She twisted his arm, servos whining as her fingers dug into his bicep, the metal groaning as she hauled him up to his feet. “You’re it.” She pressed the muzzle of her auto-pistol into his ribs, silencing any protest.

With their human shields, they moved toward the grav-car. A girl with an updo that fought gravity with enough hair glue to flip all environmental alarms back at the Junkyard noticed them first.

She spun around. “Who-”

Jazmyn pointed her gun at the girl’s face, cutting her off.

“What the hell do you think you’re-” a young man in a synth-leather jacket began, taking a step toward her.

Jax squeezed the trigger before the jacket could finish his challenge. A bolt of energy hissed through the grav-car’s hull inches from the gravity-defying updo. A gust of ozone and melted polymer escaped as the repulsors stuttered, and the car hit the ground with a crash.

“Damn it,” Jax roared, shaking his captive hard enough to rattle his teeth. “You wiped her. Every calibration, every tune, gone.”

“Chill, Jax. We don’t need all the attention.” Jazmyn jerked her chin toward the sky, where the black AVs drew patterns on her HUD. She centered her pistol on the jacket’s chest. “Where is the rest of our things?”

The teenage mob collapsed into a jagged silence as they stared at the muzzle. A girl with bright red cheeks climbed out of the downed grav-car. She giggled as if she had heard the galaxy’s funniest joke, pupils swallowing her irises.

“Found the drugs, I suppose,” Jax commented.

“We hit the juice an hour ago,” leather jacket admitted. He kept his palms open. “Quality stuff. Felt like a solar flare.”

Bile scorched Jazmyn’s throat. Those hypos were supposed to get Corvan Rhys past security. They now sat in the veins of a couple street punks.

“The credit chit,” Jazmyn commanded. “Hand it over.”

The young mechanic to the left shifted his weight, fingers twitching toward his tool belt.

Jazmyn swung her pistol around and pressed the barrel into her human shield’s ribs. “One step,” she said.

The mechanic’s hands shot up.

Leather jacket’s expression collapsed as he fumbled a credit chit from his pocket, extending it with both hands in a desperate offering. “It’s half full.” He swallowed hard. “There’s enough left to buy a hab-block.”

Jazmyn snatched the card from him. Her HUD interfaced instantly, flooding her vision with scrolling legalese and bold warnings as the official signature dissolved into a jumbled mess of illicit code. “You hacked the transorbital exchange signature,” she said, hand tightening around the now useless chit.

The teen grinned. “We know a guy.”

Sekani surged forward, face red with jagged fury. “You had money?” he shouted. “Were you going to help anyone or waste everything on drugs?”

“He didn’t,” Jazmyn corrected. Her voice dropped to a dangerous rasp. “Whoever ran the hack has money. This idiot fell for scrip that would’ve cost him a hand if he’d tried to spend it in a real shop.” She slipped the card into her pocket with a tense sigh.

“It was Whisper,” the leader blurted. “In the flooded district. He’s got an antiques shop near the drainage pumps.”

Jazmyn jerked her chin toward the alley. “Get lost. All of you.”

The teenagers hesitated, eyes flicking toward the dead chassis Jax had converted into a three-ton paperweight. Jazmyn pushed her human shield toward them, and the group scattered into the smog. Jax made sure to wave his gun in the face of his captive before he released him.

Sekani lingered, jaw working as he looked between the retreating backs and the scrappers.

“Did they lie to us, Sekani?” Jazmyn asked, hovering over the target ping controls.

The boy shook his head. “It’s the truth. Whisper runs hacks for half the lower city.”

“Thanks, Sekani.” Jazmyn activated her gun’s safety with a flick of her thumb. “Go back to your mom, now.”

The boy vanished into the alley without another word. In the sky above, the black AVs still lurked behind the glass-clad skyscrapers. Jazmyn wiped her hands on her ruined suit and yanked open the hood of the downed grav-car, releasing a fresh cloud of scorched coolant and ionized air. Jax’s energy bolt had sheared through the primary stabilizer relay.

“Nice shot,” Jazmyn noted.

“I was aiming for the driver,” Jax muttered. He moved with a stiff gait as he scanned the horizon, weighting his energy pistol in his hand. “What’s the plan? Don’t think I’m good for much more walking.”

Jazmyn reached into a pocket stitched into her suit’s lining, pulled out her multitool, and snapped it open. “No need to. You just bought us a car.”

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Chapter 29: The Bargain

Jazmyn shoved through the crowd, her elbows catching shoulders and ribs until a flickering neon caduceus cut through the smog at the other end of the market. She dragged Jax through the clinic door, trading the smell of New Cairo slums for a solid wall of stale blood and rubbing alcohol that burned the back of her throat.

The waiting area breathed neglect. Paint peeled from the walls like sunburned spacer skin, and the floor wore the residue of a thousand boots. Even the Junkyard’s med-bay felt like luxury compared to this wreck.

Jazmyn slammed her hand onto the laminate counter. “Hey, we need help.”

The woman behind it remained motionless, her eyes locked on her console as a network of deep wrinkles mapped her face. “Pull a number,” she muttered to the screen. “Like everyone else.”

Jazmyn patted her pockets for her credit chit and thrust it under the woman’s nose, the polished card catching a sliver of light in the gloom. “We’re taking the next spot.”

The woman’s gaze caught on the polished card like a scavenger on salvage. Her gaze swept over the torn seams of Jazmyn’s jacket, then over the red that soaked Jax’s shirt.

“Of course, madam.” The woman’s spine stiffened into a line of calculation while she smoothed the front of her tunic. “No need to wait.” She peeled back a plastic curtain to reveal a room that smelled of bleach and old sweat. “The doctor will see you right away.”

Jazmyn hobbled inside and heaved Jax onto the examination chair. He slumped against the cracked synth-leather with a hiss through clenched teeth, his face wet not just from the humid heat outside.

“They robbed me.” He clawed at his ruined jacket, the fabric ripping as he wrenched it off his shoulders to dig through the pockets. His hands tore at the lining until his eyes snapped to Jazmyn, the last color draining from his face. “Weapon, credits, meds—all gone.”

Jazmyn spat a hard curse in a language she hadn’t touched since she’d left this city nearly a decade ago. “Stop moving.” She shoved Jax back into the chair. “We can look when you aren’t bleeding to death.”

The doctor entered, hard angles and deep-set exhaustion etched into his face. No greeting. No pretense. He keyed a sequence into a medi-doc unit, and the machine responded with a rhythmic servo whine as it rolled up to the exam chair.

Jazmyn leaned in, her voice a low rasp. “Mess this up, and I’ll pay in lead.”

The doctor met her gaze, fingers probing Jax’s flank, then he muttered something in Arabic and turned away. The medi-doc activated, sending a stinging mist of hypo-spray into the air while the surgical halo lights caught the edges of the tools that tipped its actuators.

Wet, hacking coughs erupted in the waiting area outside, followed by raised voices. Jazmyn’s hand closed around the auto-pistol grip, finger beside the trigger. The stench of melted plastic and scorched trash leaked through the gap in the curtain, making her gag. She yanked the plastic aside.

A line of people stumbled through the door, breath whistling through scorched lungs. Ash and grime coated their skin in thick, grey streaks. One of them dragged a limp teenager, the boy’s head lolling against his chest.

A smaller boy dashed forward, all but climbing onto the reception counter as he shrieked over the din. “My brother! He needs a doctor!”

The woman behind it waved her hand toward the row of faded plastic benches. “Pull a number.”

The boy’s voice broke with rage. “Fuck you, old hag. Some goddamn corpo flyer levels our home and burns everything we own. You expect my brother to wait?”

A chorus of disapproval erupted from the waiting area. “Shut your mouth, brat!” one grizzled man shouted while he stepped forward to block the boy. “We kept ours shut when the suits jumped the line, but you are a different story.”

The boy shoved past him, eyes zeroing in on Jazmyn. “You!” He lunged forward, a finger jabbing toward her ruined suit jacket. “You crashed into our home. This is your fault.”

Jazmyn caught him, clamping her plasteel fingers around his bony shoulder. “This isn’t how you do things in this city, kid,” she said, her voice a flat command that cut through the noise. “You want that next spot? Tell me who clepped my partner’s gear.”

The kid wavered, suddenly at a loss for words. His eyes darted to the soot-covered crowd blocking the door.

“Hey, let go of him,” a voice called out. It belonged to the woman holding the unconscious teen. “Sekani, come back here!”

“I named my price, sister,” Jazmyn replied. “What’s it going to be?”

The boy squirmed, but Jazmyn clamped her grip down, the fabric of his shirt tearing under the tension. A friendly chime echoed from behind her. The medi-doc’s synthetic voice droned its final diagnostic through the curtain.

The woman held her stare as Jax hobbled past her, gripping his side where a fresh seam of laser-welded skin crossed his ribs. He shook an air hypo like a can of spray paint, and took a deep huff. His eyes were still glassy, every bit of focus requiring effort.

“Next!” The receptionist called out.

“I know who robbed you,” the woman blurted out. “Get the doctor to see us, and I’ll tell you.”

“That’s more like it.” Jazmyn lifted her chin toward the curtain. “In you go.”

The woman hauled the unconscious teenager into the exam room, the curtain swishing shut with a waft of stale cigarette smoke. Inside, the medi-doc let out a series of beeps before its actuators resumed their work. Jazmyn released the boy’s shirt, and he made a break for the curtain, disappearing behind it. She didn’t follow.

“That was some quick fix,” she said to Jax, as she held out her credit chit for the receptionist’s scanner again. Her skin prickled from the hostile glares of the crowd in the waiting area. “You sure he touched you at all?”

The POS confirmed the transaction with a beep that made Jazmyn feel a sting right in her ledger. She sucked in a deep breath, willing her hand to stay clear of her weapon.

“Did plenty of touching.” Jax shifted his weight, a grunt of pain escaping his teeth. He clamped a hand over his ribs to still the flare of agony. “Nanofilament mesh and bone-glue.”

“That’s a glorified Band-Aid,” Jazmyn said, putting away the card. “Moment we get back into orbit, this place is getting one star.” She tossed a look back at the crowd that promised blood, then tossed aside the plastic curtain and stepped into the concentrated cloud of antiseptics and ash that filled the exam room.

The woman flinched back from the examination table where the doctor worked on the teen, her back striking the wall with a dull thud. Ash filled the hollows under her eyes. Jazmyn’s servo whine pitched up, her jaw set hard against the urge to look away.

“Start talking,” Jazmyn commanded. “Now.”

The woman wiped her hand across her face, leaving a fresh smear of soot, then fixed a wide-eyed look on them. “It was my son’s friends,” she said. “They have a place near the old transit hub.”

Jazmyn’s arm twitched, adding the whine of Outer Rim servos to the sounds the medi-doc gave off. The transit hub was a jagged warren of dead-end spurs and collapsed tunnels. Not a place a pair of beat-up spacers could just walk in and out in under an hour. Her stare pinned the boy in place. “Do you know the place?”

His chest heaved with a slow breath before he squared his shoulders and gave a curt nod. “I know where it is.”

Jazmyn fixed the woman with a stare heavy enough to crack bone. “We’ll be borrowing the kid. Compromise our location, and I’ll track your stench to the Void’s edge.”

“Be good, Sekani,” the woman said. “Do what they say, and then hurry back.”

Jazmyn seized the boy by the arm before he could reply, her grip forcing a click from the child’s shoulder. “Can you move, or am I carrying you?” she snapped at Jax as she stomped past the plastic curtain toward the exit. The soot-covered crowd parted before her, happy to see her leave.

Jax’s once-polished shoes grated against the dissolving chunks of floor. He sucked air through his teeth, leaning out of the pain to maintain his stride. “I’m fine,” he grunted. “Just don’t ask for a sprint.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 28: Descent into the Megacity

The transport settled into the docking cradle with a low magnetic thrum as its ether-fold drives powered down, letting Earth’s gravity take over. This far up the pull was still weak, but it wasn’t just the planet’s full G that squeezed Jazmyn’s chest. New Cairo’s skeletal towers clawed through the haze below, the megacity she had grown up in, lost her mother in, left on a UEAF recruiter’s shuttle.

She and Jax tracked priority signage toward a waiting VTOL, its interior reeking of sterile wipes and fresh synth-leather. It plunged through the stratosphere, toward the place that outran the memories she had buried beneath ten years of military rigor and starlight. At the center, the Space Elevator stood like a needle piercing the clouds, casting a long shadow that divided the skyline between gleaming corporate spires and half-finished projects that loomed over the shantytowns.

Jax spat a curse, driving a hypo of gravity juice into his arm. “Feels like liquid ice,” he rasped.

Jazmyn leaned over, the restraints biting into her chest. “You going to be okay for a full G?”

Earth’s gravity pulled on the metal in her left arm, sending a dull ache through her shoulder socket. Her body had adapted to the 0.85G standard that corporate landlords imposed on Outer Rim stations, and now even her heart refused to go back. Her pulse hammered in her ears, a heavy, rhythmic thrum.

Jax held up the injector. “Should be good for forty-eight hours. If we take longer, I’ll need a refill.”

Jazmyn nodded, settling back into her seat. “Let’s be fast then. Get in touch with Vanguard’s contact, then bag and tag, in and out.”

The VTOL ripped through the haze while air jets sent a low-frequency vibration rattling down Jazmyn’s vertebrae. Below, a raised motorway severed the city into two distinct worlds, separating the polished spires of the upper tier from the claustrophobic grid of the lower slums. Jazmyn stared at a cluster of hollowed skyscrapers that rose from the smog like blackened ribs.

A sudden hiss sliced through the jet whine as a dark shape blurred past the canopy.

“What was—”

A klaxon drowned her next words. Crimson emergency lights strobed against the cabin’s prestige beige synth-leather interior, a moment’s warning before the VTOL bucked. The safety harness cinched into her chest, crushing the air from her lungs as the nanny systems yanked her back into her seat.

“Emergency landing sequence initiated,” the onboard computer announced with an industrial calm.

Ozone and scorched circuitry filled the cabin while the VTOL pitched into a dead dive.

Another impact shook the VTOL, the harness strap digging a raw groove into Jazmyn’s shoulder. The sky inverted. The city blurred into a smear of ochre and grey as the ship entered a killing spin. Metal shrieked against metal, the panoramic glass webbed under the torque until it exploded inward.

The VTOL rammed the flank of a derelict office tower, shearing through skeletal scaffolding in a geyser of sparks and masonry. Shards of grit and glass sprayed the cabin, coating Jazmyn’s tongue with the dry taste of concrete. She fought the G-force until her vision narrowed to a pinhole, the hull ripping through the facade. The underbelly caught a load-bearing beam, sending a jolt through her spine and hurling the VTOL downward through the hollowed building. Each floor struck with a bone-jarring crunch, a violent cadence of rending alloys.

The wreckage plowed through a cluster of shanties, the tattered fabric igniting in a sudden bloom of fire. The scream of tearing drowned out the cries of the people beneath.

Acrid smoke flooded Jazmyn’s lungs, searing the throat with the taste of burning insulation. Tears blurred her vision into a grey haze. She whipped her head toward the other seat. A jagged segment of rusted scaffolding had gutted the fuselage, leaving nothing behind but a gaping hole and severed restraint cables.

“Jax!” The name came out a broken rasp against the chorus of combustion and shrieking alloy.

White-hot heat licked at her, but she ignored the flare of pain. Jazmyn yanked at the safety harness. The release jammed. She flexed her cybernetics, the servos emitting a high-pitched whine as the actuators ripped through the nylon like wet paper. With her metallic palm braced against the accordion of the buckled door, Jazmyn heaved until it gave way with a shriek. She forced herself through the breach, raw metal edges shredding the sleeve of her jacket down to the ballistic mesh.

Acrid fumes from the burning tents stung her lungs while she scanned the wreckage. A huddle of figures crouched around a slab of concrete, and the specific weave of a borrowed suit flashed between their bodies. Blood roared in Jazmyn’s ears as a cold weight settled in her stomach. She ripped the auto-pistol from beneath her jacket, the metal biting into her palm as she aimed the muzzle at the crowd.

“Back off.”

The hammer clicked in place, chambering a fresh round. Her finger found the trigger. The locals retreated first, vanishing into the smoke as they cursed her out in an Arabic dialect she could barely place. Jazmyn scrambled through the rubble, her shoes skidding on pulverized concrete, and found Jax pinned beneath a chunk of broken wall.

“Jax, talk to me!” The scream ripped from her throat, jagged and raw.

She jammed her cybernetic palm under the beam, servos shrieking as they strained against the weight. The rebar screeched against rebar, a shrill metal-on-metal wail that echoed through the ruins as she sheaved. The slab shuddered, then lurched, shifting just enough for her to haul Jax free by his collar.

Jax slumped into the grit, his face a blur of gray dust and wet crimson as he blinked up at the ceiling with a glassy stare.

“Are you alive?” Jazmyn asked, her throat raw from the smoke.

The question felt ridiculous, but she didn’t get to reconsider. The VTOL’s fuselage buckled under a fresh surge of fire, the wall of heat searing the oxygen from her lungs. Flames jumped to the surrounding tents, igniting the canvas in a hungry roar.

“Alive or not, we’ve got to move!” Jazmyn hooked her shoulder beneath his and hauled upward, the servos in her cybernetic arm whining in protest.

The full 1G worth of Jax’s weight pulled hard against her socket as she shoved him through the jagged breach in the wall. Chemical smoke and rot burned Jazmyn’s throat, her stomach clenching around that morning’s continental spread. Plaster and concrete rained down in rhythmic bursts, each impact rattling through her spine until they stumbled into the street.

Jazmyn collapsed onto the curb with a string of curses in English, Arabic and the universal language of a lost breakfast. Above, the skeletal husk of the high-rise vomited fire into the smog, dropping slabs of concrete and twisted girders that shook the ground beneath her sensible flats. She found the burner data pad in an inner pocket of her jacket, and punched the ID of Siora’s informant into the cracked screen.

The call connected instantly, as if the recipient had been waiting with a terminal already in hand.

“Who is this?” a man’s voice demanded.

“Vanguard sent us,” Jazmyn replied, scraping soot from her cheek. “Some punk just shot down our VTOL.”

“What is your location?” The voice had the firmness of someone used to give orders and have them obeyed, not a low-level bean-counter that would have trailed Rhys.

Jazmyn hesitated. In the smog-choked sky, silhouettes shifted within the smoke. She toggled her visuals and zoomed in on a cluster of AVs circling the burning high-rise like carrion birds. Pure black. No lights or logos.

“Your location,” the man repeated.

Jazmyn thumbed a control, severing the connection, and hurled the data pad into the rubble. Above, a single vehicle detached from the pack and glided toward the breach in the building’s facade. As it hovered over the crash site, a crimson laser ignited on its belly, sweeping the wreckage with surgical precision.

“Comms are burned,” she muttered. The burn in her gut agreed with what the sensor sweep implied. These weren’t rescue teams. They were cleanup.

Jazmyn hauled Jax upright again, dragging him into a side alley that stank of stale synth-ale and rot. Adrenaline made Earth’s gravity feel light. The walls closed in tight, as they moved away from the crowd gathering to gawk at the fire.

Jax coughed, the sound wet and rattling deep in his chest, before spitting a globule of red onto the grime. He winced and clutched his side. “Feels like I went ten rounds with a Void kraken.”

“You picked a fight with a building,” Jazmyn hissed back. “It won.”

“I want a rematch,” Jax groaned.

They pushed into the market square, where a sea of faces and merchant stalls blocked the view from the sky. Jazmyn kept her eyes forward, ignoring the capacity warnings her arm kept sending to her HUD until she leaned Jax against a crumbling pillar.

Her hand came back covered in blood.

She cursed, pushing his jacket out of the way. His shirt was soaked. The ballistic weave had kept the rebar out of his gut, but the impact had shattered a rib. Jax’s breath came in ragged heaves that rattled his chest.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“Just a scratch,” Jazmyn lied.

She scanned the crowd, weeding out the faces that looked through her until her gaze locked on a woman hunched behind a pile of scrap. The scavenger didn’t notice her approach until Jazmyn had already blocked the only retreat.

Jazmyn invaded her space, forcing the woman to look up. “Clinic. Nearest one.”

The woman squinted at her as if weighting her chances, then jerked a grimy thumb toward an overpass in the back of the market. “Past the fried noodle stand, follow the neon. Look for a green snake.”

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Chapter 27: First Class to Old Earth

Jazmyn studied the stranger in the mirror. The rough canvas of her jump suit had been replaced by a tailored suit which clung to her skin with the restrictive, silky weight of ballistic nano-weave. Flat, sensible shoes stood where her boots should have been. Hair extensions wove seamlessly into her short cut and cascaded past her shoulders as she turned her head, the unfamiliar mass brushing against her collar. She felt like a window mannequin.

A gruff voice rumbled in the doorway. “You gonna stare at yourself all day? We got a shuttle to catch.”

Jax leaned against the frame, his corporate getup smooth and uncreased across his chest. He looked comfortable in the fabric, a shark in a tailored suit.

Jazmyn suppressed a huff of breath as she studied the image in the mirror. The sharp lines of their makeover broadcasted authority and wealth. They had to be impossible to ignore to get close to someone like Corvan Rhys.

Siora studied them with the sterile gaze of a buyer appraising synth-meat on a market stall before sliding a flat metal case across the table. The lid popped open to reveal two hypos resting in molded foam.

“Once you find Corvan Rhys, administer this,” she said. “The first drug induces intoxication, the second a deep coma. It will allow you to pass through security undetected.”

Jax took the box and slid it into the inner pocket of his suit. The reinforced lining stiffened against his ribs as he shifted the weight. “You didn’t give us a ship. That would make things a lot easier.”

“I only have access to vessels with the wrong transponder signatures, Mr. Knox,” Siora replied. She tilted her head, a movement that sent a loose strand of hair cascading from her elaborate updo. “You have credits and the ID of my informant. Solve the rest of your problems yourselves.” She spun on a red-soled heel, her silhouette dissolving into the shadows of the villa.

Jazmyn bared teeth at Jax. “Alright, Jasper,” she said, her voice gaining a razor edge. “Let’s go catch a corpo.”

Kepler-22b shrank into a smear of impossible spires as the shuttle pierced the stratosphere. She moved through the dampened silence of the private terminal, the chemical scent of alien cosmetics sticking to her skin like a second layer of grease. Two days of Siora’s refinements had sanded down her jagged corners, leaving a stranger staring back from the polished surfaces.

The ship plunged into the Void, where stars dissolved into a static haze. Status screens flashed a polite warning, as the engines engaged, sending a low vibration up Jazmyn’s spine. Around them, passengers continued their hushed exchanges, undisturbed by the collapse of spacetime outside the hull. There was no violence in the transition, no metal fatigue or structural stress to make the bulkheads cry out as it did on the Drifter.

When the vector lock countdown lit up the cabin screens, Jazmyn shoved off the plush seat. The stiff collar of her suit chafed her throat while an itch burned beneath her makeup. She shifted, her shoulder colliding with crewman as he passed.

“My apologies, madam,” the man said, his hand clamping onto her arm to steady her. Though his crew uniform was pressed and clean, he looked as though he had dragged himself through a week of all-nighters, his eyes shadowed with a fatigue that made Glitch look well-rested. His nametag read Navigator Roric.

Jazmyn swallowed her retort, a coldness sinking into her marrow as memories of Void-touched navigators resurfaced, their voices a fractured chorus echoing from a dozen derelicts. She shrugged off his grip and backed away.

The man gave a curt nod and vanished into the passenger lounge.

“Checking something. Back in a minute,” she told Jax, not waiting a reply, before she followed the Navigator’s trail.

The lounge was draped in low light. The Navigator slumped in a lounge chair, a white chemical cooling pack pressed against his temple as he stared at the holo screen mimicking a window. He watched the opalescent swirl of the ether, his brow furrowed as if struggling to make out a voice in a crowd.

Jazmyn entered the lounge as the door clicked shut, cutting the low thrum of the transport to a dull vibration. “Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?” She followed the angle of his arm to the cooling pack pressed hard against his temple.

Roric gave a tight nod, his gaze avoiding hers. “The ship is locked on auto-path to Alpha Centauri.” He shifted, pressing the pack deeper into his skull as a sharp spasm tightened his jaw. “I am not required until the final leg.”

Jazmyn sank into the plush seat across from him and tapped the wall dispenser, summoning a synth-ale that hissed into the glass. She took a slow sip, allowing the chemical bitterness to settle on her tongue while she mirrored the languid, detached poise of the corporate elite.

“Are you sure you don’t want to disembark at the ACP beacon, Navigator?” Her voice carried a sharp edge. “You look like death.”

Roric’s jaw tightened, the pretense of politeness fraying at the edges. He exhaled a heavy breath and turned his gaze from the swirling fog. “Madam, my resistance to Siren-induced psychosis was vetted at the Aether Dynamics hub. I hold a Level Five with a forty percent exposure ceiling.” He offered a short, sharp nod and returned his attention to the viewport.

Jazmyn studied him, her gaze lingering long enough to register the lean frame and the slight hunch of his shoulders. He carried the distinct posture of a man raised in artificial gravity, a physical imprint mirroring Neril’s own. When he pressed the cooling pack against his skull, the movement echoed a memory Jazmyn knew too well.

“It’s just,” she said, her tone retaining the edge, “the way you hold that cooling pack, you remind me of a friend of mine. He had a close brush with the space cockroaches.”

Roric’s eyes narrowed, his posture stiffening. “You have a friend who’s a Navigator?”

Jazmyn paused to take another sip from her glass. The silence stretched, heavy with the insular nature of Roric’s kind. “He was,” she admitted, her voice dropping an octave. “Until he couldn’t stop hearing the screams anymore. Don’t think he’ll ever fly again.”

Surprise mixed with pain crossed Roric’s face. “You don’t stop being a navigator, Madam. The tech changes the brain,” he said, his voice bitter. He lifted the cooling pack, revealing the intricate metallic surface of his implant. Etched into the exposed metal, was the stylized logo of Aether Dynamics. It looked like a permanent, corporate brand.

Jazmyn studied the tech, a flood of lookup denials flashing red warnings across her HUD. “You can’t have it removed?”

Roric shrugged. “It’s fine. Aether Dynamics makes sure only those who can handle it get it. They’re very careful nowadays. Back when I trained, old Cyrus Deveron had us thrown in a room with a live Siren on day one.”

Jazmyn stared at the corporate logo, her stomach tight around that morning’s breakfast. “I saw people crack just being in the same sector as a Siren,” she said, keeping the tremor out of her voice. “How does Aether Dynamics stop that?”

Roric’s eyes flicked away for a heartbeat before snapping back. The casual tone was gone, replaced by a rigid, formal edge. “That is internal protocol, madam. Strictly confidential.”

He squared his shoulders. Silence filled the room, thick and heavy as lead.

Jazmyn felt the shut door close before she actually moved. She stood, her movements fluid even as her gut churned. “My mistake.” She turned for the exit, adding over her shoulder, “I hope your head clears before you link up.”

She stepped out into the corridor. Behind her, the lounge door hissed shut, sealing the navigator in his silence.

Returning to her seat beside Jax, Jazmyn found him observing her with a raised eyebrow and a wry smirk that looked out of place with his expensive outfit.

“Making new friends?” Jax asked, his voice laced with amusement.

“I don’t like this.” Jazmyn dropped into the plush cushions with a huff. “The Navigator’s nursing a headache just like Deveron back on Kepler-22b.”

“Is he calculating vectors on dry land, too?” The smirk on Jax’s face faded.

“No, and he is not afraid of falling into the sky, either,” Jazmyn rolled her eyes. She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Jax… What’s going on?” A shiver, despite the warmth of the cabin, traced its way down her spine.

Jax scoffed, his eyes tight. “Just our luck, ain’t it? Go out there, try to make some money, and the galaxy just decides to go to shit. But hey,” he clapped her on the shoulder with a heavy hand, “You should probably focus on remembering your Earth manners.” He gestured with mock elegance. “Wouldn’t want to spill your synth-martini on some a BioGen under-associate’s silks.”

Jazmyn chuckled dryly, her throat feeling rough despite the drink she’d had. “Don’t worry, Jasper,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of reflecting poorly on the Outer Rim’s elite in front of Sol’s bloodsuckers.” She mimed delicately holding a cocktail glass. “Pinky out, and everything.”

Jax threw his head back. His laugh was too loud, too sharp in the plush silence of the transporter cabin. Fake as a drunkard’s credit line. “I’ll give you that, Boss. You clean up damn well.”

The luxury transport vibrated with a seamless, low-frequency hum that pressed against Jazmyn’s eardrums like a physical weight. On the cabin screens, the thin line of their navigation trajectory sliced through the heavy eddies of the ether. She stared at the fake viewport next to them, her skin growing clammy under her suit. The extensions made her scalp itch, and her left hand twitched with the urge to rip them out.

To rip it all off herself and to dash straight out of the airlock.

She interleaved her fingers with Jax’s, squeezing his hand tight. “The Void is being damn weird tonight.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 26: The Loud Sky

Jazmyn skidded through the minimalist villa, her slippers losing traction on tiles buffed to a mirror finish. The house automation had dimmed the lights, plunging the corridors into an oppressive gloom that forced her to dial up her visual co-processor to avoid crashing into the spikes of an abstract statue. Jax kept pace behind her, the squeak of his borrowed loafers echoing off the sterile walls.

Neril stood at the patio’s edge above the cliffs, staring out into the inky waves of Kepler-22b’s ocean. He had traded his tailored suit for linen trousers and a t-shirt now damp with salt spray. His body had a spare hand’s worth of muscle, but the effort of standing now seemed a distant memory.

Jazmyn closed the distance, her footsteps fading against the crash of the waves. “Deveron,” she called out, the words blending into the wind.

The twin moons vanished behind a bank of clouds, plunging the ledge into a suffocating darkness that masked Neril’s features. Her HUD pinged a warning that confirmed his eyes had locked onto her.

Jazmyn reached for him. “Come on. Let’s get you away from the ledge before your Girl Friday has an aneurysm.”

“Didn’t realize you’d care,” Neril rasped, the words clear of earlier medicated haze.

Jazmyn missed a step, colliding with Jax as she flailed for balance. “What the fuck?” The words snapped from her before she could catch them.

“Keep your voice down. My head throbs and the noise is making it worse.” Neril pressed a medical cooling pack against the side of his head, where his nav-link sat behind his ear. On Jazmyn’s HUD, the metal flared with an orange heat warning.

“Going to need you to step away from the cliffs, kid.” Jax clamped his hand over Neril’s arm and yanked him away from the railing.

Neril’s body jerked with the momentum of a clockwork puppet, but he offered no resistance. Jax guided him to a patio table where he collapsed into a chair, as if the effort of standing at the railing had given him the rest.

Jazmyn slid into the seat beside him. “What are you doing out here?”

Neril’s eyes remained locked on the horizon. His fingers ghosted a sequence of numbers and letters across the damp tabletop. “There’s a drone,” he said. “Eighteen kilometers out, painting this villa with low-frequency LIDAR.”

Jax leaned in, studying the sequence for a moment before he squinted at the horizon. “I don’t see anything.”

“You won’t. It’s masked in the glare of the second moon.” Neril drew a final, jagged string of numbers onto the tabletop. “But the wind shear is consistent. The gravity at this altitude is 8.34 m/s2. If you use a rail-driver with depleted uranium core sabot rounds and fire at precisely this arc…” He looked at Jax, a lucid smile stretching his lips.

Ice coiled in Jazmyn’s gut as the realization took hold. Neril did not guess. He saw the flight path like a solid bridge of steel stretching across the stars.

“Twenty thousand credits for the black box,” Neril said. His hand paused under the wet lines of ballistic formulas. “Consider it a bonus.”

The cooling pack tumbled from his hand and skidded across the tabletop to drop into Jazmyn’s lap. Neril’s hand twitched, fingers curling and opening in a slow, broken rhythm. The medication still gripped him, stalling the connection between mind and muscle. He stopped before he reached Jazmyn’s personal bubble, pulling his hand back with a tense sigh.

“Sorry.” He pulled the damp shirt down his shoulder, exposing a medical plaster that pulsed a warning crimson. “These meds don’t taper. They drop you out of the stratosphere.”

Jax tracked the second moon’s reflection along the horizon, eyes narrowing. “Twenty thousand to drop a drone? I’ll take those odds. Got a rail driver?”

Neril hooked a foot under a heavy container beneath his chair. The case scraped across the tiles with a sound that announced a trip to the landscaping supplier before it thudded against Jax’s leg. He reached down, thumbing the magnetic locks. The lid hissed open to reveal an Alpha Centauri rail-driver, stripped down and brutal in its simplicity, chambered for heavy slug rounds.

Jax spat a curse, jaw set tight against the followup. “Nice piece, Deveron.”

Neril acknowledged him with a simple nod. “It’s scanning again. Use the fake marble monstrosity for cover.” He gestured to a sculpted planter that held manicured bushes of translucent violent flowers that cast their glow over the smooth surface. “If it cracks, Siora would finally have her excuse to replace it without upsetting Under-Associate Jackson-Bauer’s feelings.”

Jax dove behind the synthetic shrubbery, sliding the carbon fiber case into a patch of violet shade. He yanked the weapon free and braced his shoulder against a planter box while the internal capacitors began a subsonic thrum that vibrated through the natural stone tiles. He aligned his sights, as a sudden gust of a sea breeze caught his borrowed robe and whipped the fabric across his back.

Amber path lights and violet blooms joined hands to give Jazmyn a clear view of Jax’s backside. Her HUD flashed a proximity warning as it struggled to categorize the heat signature, a notification she swiped away with a silent snarl.

Jax ignored the breeze. He squeezed the trigger and the gauss rifle gave a pressurized clack, magnetic rails snapping against static friction. No muzzle flare followed. The air merely distorted, a momentary ripple in the salt spray as the slug tore forward at hypersonic velocity.

An orange flash bloomed against the horizon, a silent eruption that stained the sky. With eighteen kilometers between them, the light arrived in an instant while the shockwave remained a minute away. Below the cliffs, a dark shape detached itself from the rock, cutting a wake through the water as it raced toward the fire.

“Stash it under the Calyx-9 to your left.” Neril said, his voice flat and robotic. “The groundskeepers are paid for their silence, not their curiosity. Someone will return it to the gun safe in the morning.”

Jax clicked the case shut, the matte carbon fiber swallowing the bioluminescent glow as he slid the weapon back into the floral shadows. He stood and finally yanked the robe down, oblivious to the fact that Jazmyn’s visual processors had just recorded the most undignified tactical strike in the short history of the Stardust Drifter.

A notification pulsed in the corner of her HUD: [FILE SAVED: THIRD_MOON_01].

Jazmyn covered her mouth, hiding the smirk that tugged at her lips. She’d have to wait for the right moment, until he was bragging about his marksmanship at some oxygen-starved dive bar before she air-dropped that particular masterpiece to his feed.

“Is this how you got to be the Assistant Director of the Void Research Division?” she asked, tracking the smoke on the water. “Solving ballistics problems?”

“Do you want to know my secret?” Neril swiped a hand through the air as if brushing away a persistent fly. He leaned closer, lowering his voice, “nepotism.”

Jazmyn barked a sharp, dry laugh, the first genuine sound of mirth since she left the Peregrine. They sat for a moment like three ordinary people on a porch, the silence comfortable and heavy. Then the smile vanished from Neril’s face. His eyes widened, mirroring a sky that suddenly expanded into an infinite void. He seized the arms of his chair, fingers digging in until his knuckles strained against synthetic skin.

“I can still hear them,” he gasped. His head jerked to an unnatural angle, as if listening to a frequency buried in the crashing surf. “Outside the hull… in the hum of the air scrubbers, in the sound of the waves. Right behind the blue, a maw of needle-teeth just waiting to devour us.”

Jazmyn clamped a hand onto his shoulder and shook him hard, the jolt rattling his frame against the chair. “Deveron. You’re in realspace. There are no Sirens here.”

He jerked his shoulder free and clawed at the air, his fingers straining toward the twin moons hanging overhead. “The spatial barrier is as thin as digi-paper,” he hissed, the words wet and ragged. “Help me back inside.” He slumped in his seat, his body shuddering as he curled into himself. “I need a fresh patch. I can feel the sky opening.”

Jax returned to the table and shoved Neril downward until his forehead pressed against the wet surface, his perfect hair ruffled under a heavy hand.

“Stop looking up, kid,” he said, keeping the struggling corpo pinned flat against the table like a cockroach under a boot. “First time I had to go topside back on Ganymede, I spent two hours in the EVA suit locker.”

Jazmyn fought the laugh that bubbled up in her throat. She pressed her palms into Neril’s shoulder blades, rubbing hard enough to ground him. “We’re on a planet,” she said, her voice a steady anchor. “Nobody is going to fall off into the black.”

Neril doubled over, fingers clamping hard against his temples. “Don’t patronize me. Five years of therapy and it’s all gone, like someone opened my brain and replaced parts with burned wiring and feedback.”

“Alright, let’s go inside.” Jazmyn hauled him up to a wobbling stand. “Unless you’ve got more targets for Jax to shoot? He’d love that, just look at big puppy eyes.”

“None that wouldn’t violate the peace concord,” Neril muttered. He forced his spine straight, causing the internal servos to let out a strained, subsonic whine against the silence of the garden.

Jax moved to his other side and shouldered half his weight. The wind whipped Neril’s robe against his thighs as they began the long trek back, the fabric snapping like a flag in the breeze. “Any idea who’s been watching you?”

Neril stared at his feet, his pupils mete pinpricks under his furrowed brows. “Just… corpo business.”

By the time they reached the villa, the clarity in Nerils eyes had drained away like air from a punctured hull. His focus shattered, leaving his gaze fixed on an invisible point in the dirt as his body finally gave out, his head lolling onto Jax’s shoulder.

“Seeking vector lock,” Neril muttered, the words spilling from his mouth in a low, rhythmic murmur while his eyes rolled back. His jaw worked a few more seconds, trying to form a coherent thought before his voice dropped to a dry whisper. “Unable to calculate slingshot trajectory.”

Fatigue settled in Jazmyn’s joints like lead as she tapped a series of commands into the wall console, which illuminated a schematic highlighting the path to the master bedroom. The group moved through the villa in a tight phalanx, their slippers whispering against the polished flooring. As they rounded the second story corner, Neril’s nurse scrambled toward them, his chest heaving.

“Oh, thank goodness you found him!” Esko stammered, his voice rising an octave.

Jazmyn stepped into his space, her glare silencing him. “Keep it down,” she hissed, her hand gripping the back of Neril’s neck to guide him.

She pushed him toward Esko, who took the fallen man’s weight as they retreated down the hallway. The sterile, floral scent of the house failed to mask the briny stench of the ocean clinging to her skin, cutting through the lingering fragrance of expensive soap.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 25: The Frame Job

“End the investigation?” Jazmyn locked eyes with Siora, the corpo princess’s words still hissing in her audio feed. The domestic drone refilled her drink, and she drained the glass in two long gulps. The fish carcass on her plate seemed to mock her, the absurdity of this new job reflecting in its scales.

“Little Miss,” Jax asked, his voice vibrating with a suppressed laugh, “when you pulled my file, did you perhaps get a fake that said ‘detective’?” He kicked his long legs out from under the table, his boots scraping the polished floor next to Siora’s red-soled pumps.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Siora snapped, though a flush of color crept up the collar of her silk blouse. For a heartbeat, she looked like a child playing dress-up in an adult’s chair, then she snapped her spine straight. The corporate mask slid back into place. “The investigator is stalling, giving me the runaround because the truth is either too dangerous or too inconvenient to make public.”

“I already hate everything about this.” Jazmyn dragged her plate closer, the ceramic grating against the table. She drove her fork into the fish and ripped out a hunk of meat, the first real protein to hit her stomach since the UEAF mess halls.

“Too bad.” Siora slid a data pad across the table, the device skidding to a halt in front of Jazmyn. “Once the media circus leaves, the witness cleanup begins.” The holo-screen flickered to life, displaying an internal memo where the names Silas and Knox were underlined in a harsh crimson. “You, me, and everyone else on the Peregrine.”

“Him too?” Jazmyn indicated Neril, whose hand froze around his fork.

“He can stand in front of a lens and read a script. He’s safe.” Siora stepped behind the chair and clamped her fingers into Neril’s shoulders, her nails digging into the fabric of his tailored jacket. “The Rim is shifting. The Void is coming. Neril saw it. He told me the world would burn, but I refused to listen. Now, he is like this, and smoke chokes the air.”

Siora squeezed tighter, her knuckles white. Neril’s gaze wavered, his fork clattering against the plate as his hand fell away. His lips parted, trying to push words through the chemical fog clouding his mind.

The adrenaline rushed in, sending a cold rush down Jazmyn’s spine. Her arm gave a violent jerk, the nerves in her shoulder flaring. She didn’t remember toggling her audio, but it still did, sending the burned Navigator’s whisper straight into her brain:

“Solid body resonance detected, calculating vector lock.”

“Shit…” Jax cursed, pulling her out of her focus, his face dark as he read the memo. “You could’ve led with this instead of my service record.”

Jazmyn wrenched her gaze from his, focusing instead on the gravel path outside the windows, where bioluminescent flora cast a cold, lunar pallor across the stones. “You promised an explanation for hiring us,” she said, her tone as flat as a dead signal, “but all you’ve given us is corpo business.” She turned back, her eyes hard. “We are simple people. Say what you want and name your price.”

Siora’s eyes narrowed as she fixed a glare on Jazmyn, then shifted her weight and leaned heavily onto Neril, staking a claim. “I have identified a person that will satisfy the board, and leave them no other choice but to release Stillwater Station from the lockdown. Unfortunately, he is in the one place my people cannot go: Earth.”

Jazmyn’s fork scraped against the plate as her grip tightened, the tines bowing under the pressure. Aether Dynamics and Earth, a pairing that tasted like blood and ionized dust. Those names pulled at her with the weight of two wars and a legacy of glassed worlds, igniting a sudden, violent heat behind her ribs.

“Earth?” Jazmyn echoed. She gripped her fork, the silver tines scraping the plate with a sound that made her audio whine. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“One of our own.” Siora’s eyes blazed, the emerald irises flashing with a cold, incandescent fury. “His presence there flies in the face of every principle Aether Dynamics stands for. Everything the Outer Rim is built on.” The venom in her voice was thick enough to strip the paint from a bulkhead. “Whatever the reason, the fact that he’s there will make the treason charge stick.”

“You’re framing him?” Jax coughed, fine wine spraying from his mouth in a jagged spritz. The drops raced across the polished tabletop, leaving no mark until the drone caught them with a rag.

Siora did not blink, only waiting long enough for his cough to subside before she continued. Her voice was like a monomolecular edge. “Nobody is framing anyone, Mr. Knox. We are just handing the board a clean narrative.” She gestured at the data pad, and the holo screen flipped to the next file.

Jax wiped his mouth with a linen napkin that cost more than a week’s worth of salvage. He dropped the cloth onto the table and leaned forward, his eyes narrowing at the screen. A profile replaced the memo, showing a man with a polished smile and a gaze that projected an easy, inherent superiority.

CORVAN RHYS, DIRECTOR, AETHER DYNAMICS’ AUTO-NAV NETWORK DIVISION

The CV traced a meteoric rise through the Proxima colonies, a climb that didn’t even have the decency to dip when Sol’s armada glassed their worlds. When Aether Dynamics formed the Void Research Division, Rhys was there. When it deployed the first navigation beacons, he was on the team. And when the board forced the VRD to split three-and-a-half years ago, he got half of the cake.

Jazmyn’s mouth went dry. “Did the investigator even look at this asshole?”

“That is a good question, Miss Silas.” Siora slid her hand down Neril’s arm, and forced her fingers through his, yanking him upright. The man rose like a marionette, his eyes twitching between Jazmyn and a spot of empty air.

“Your equipment and intelligence briefing will be ready tomorrow. Goodnight.” Siora threw a final nod at the crew and disappeared into the dark of the villa, hauling her fiance behind her like a pallet truck of spare body parts.

The doors hissed shut behind them, leaving the room cold. A dull ache returned to its place behind Jazmyn’s eyes, as she tried to pin down the biggest source of her unease.

“That girl learned the corpo code fast,” Jazmyn said, waving her glass at the drone for a refill. “Every word feels like she’s hiding something.”

Jax toasted her, his smile thin and bitter. “AD’s pampered princess probably knows the bra size of every spacer ever to touch a jump drive.”

Jazmyn’s laugh came out loud and jagged, rattling the fine china. She leaned forward, the pressure in her chest finally easing. “At least she didn’t call you Jasper. I still hate that I slept with a Jasper.”

“Too late for regrets.” Jax didn’t miss a beat, his fork moving with a precision that spoke of military service. The drone refilled his glass again, and he took a long pull, his rough mug melting into a smile. “The good stuff is wasted on the suits.”

Outside the windows, the twin moons had climbed the sky, casting a spectral pallor over the alien forest behind the villa. The cliffs silhouetted against the ocean like the jagged teeth of a silent beast, the villa’s dampening keeping the sound of waves outside. Goosebumps covered Jazmyn’s good arm, and she tore her eyes away from the window.

“When she said the Void was coming,” she asked, her voice barely carrying across the room, “do you think she meant the thing that’s making spacers crack like Navigators?”

Jax set his glass down, the crystalline click echoing against the table as he leaned forward. He fixed her with a hard stare, the small muscles in his jaw tightening. “People like her don’t care about some grease monkeys out at the Junkyard.” He paused, the shadow of a frown deepening the lines around his eyes. “I might just be reading too much into this, but everything’s gone sideways since the rescue op. Like we stirred up a nest of vipers and now they’re coming for us.”

They finished eating in a silence only broken by the magnetic whine of the drone’s anti-grav unit. A neon filament lit up the floorboards, leading them through hushed corridors to a pair of guest rooms that put chain hotels to shame. Jazmyn bypassed the luxury to step under the shower, the precise heat stinging her skin as she scrubbed away the grime of the Junkyard and the phantom sensation of Kazimierz’s eyes.

She stood on the balcony, her plush robe heavy against her bare skin while the scent of brine and crushed vegetation flooded her lungs. The distant roar of surf finally broke through the silence. Above, twin moons burned like luminous beads through the drift of clouds, casting a pale glare that fought the amber glow of low-wattage path lights. She leaned over the railing, watching the shadows dance across the bioluminescent garden beds.

Jax walked up behind her, the borrowed satin robe barely covering his thighs. He looped his arms around her waist and pulled her against his chest, the smell of synthetic lavender and soap radiating from his skin.

“Want to ruin those sheets with scrapper stink?” he murmured, his breath hot against her neck.

Jazmyn leaned back into him, feeling the heat through the thin fabric. A grin tugged at her mouth. “I told you to shower.”

“I did,” Jax whispered, his voice a low vibration against her skin. “Even used that exfoliant. The one in the little bottle.” He kissed her just below her ear, sending a tingle down her arm.

“The foot stuff?” Jazmyn craned her neck to glare at him, but as she turned, a flicker of movement caught her eye.

Someone was in the garden below.

She toggled her cybernetic enhancers as the co-processor flooded her HUD with telemetry and thermal data. The scan swept across the manicured landscaping, landing on a silhouette at the edge of the cliffside patio. He stood at the railing, hand pressed to his temple, chin tilted toward a sky that gave nothing back.

A green target box snapped onto the figure, the identification algorithm cycling through candidates before locking in. Jazmyn didn’t need the machine to tell her who was out there. The villa only housed five people, and only two had the stretched physique that came with growing up in microgravity.

Jax slid his palm beneath her robe, fingertips grazing the curve of her breast. The contact drew a sharp intake of breath from Jazmyn as he leaned in close. “It made my hands super soft,” he whispered, a smirk in his voice. “The calluses just fell right off.”

Across the yard, the silhouette leaned over the railing, as if tracking something in the waves.

Jazmyn caught Jax’s wrist, her soft slippers sliding over the tiles as she yanked him to face the patio. “Get your foot-scented hands off my tits, Jax. We need to get down there before Vanguard’s boyfriend leaves his last bits of grey matter on the cliffs.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 24: Advance Payment

Jazmyn cursed under her breath, but that didn’t make the threat disappear from her HUD. She pressed her plasteel palm against her temple, where the hangover still pulsed with her heartbeat. On the holo screen behind the counter, the corporate executives still mourned on their pre-recorded loop. The sterile image clashed with the smell of synth-ale and sweat permeating the bar air.

“Jaz?” Jax leaned in, the worry on his face making her want to put the cybernetic through his teeth.

“I have to go make a call.” She pushed her chair back with a harsh scrape against the floor. “Glitch, Kazimierz is working on the Drifter. Keep an eye on him. No shortcuts, no part swapping. If that engine doesn’t purr, that bastard’s got it coming.”

“He’ll try to strip her to the frame and charge us for it, Boss,” Glitch said, his voice a rasp. “He always does.”

“Until we can afford a better mechanic, we have to deal with him.” Jazmyn’s jaw cramped as she forced a nod, the bitter truth leaving the taste of corroded wiring in her mouth. “I’ll get the money. Just keep him honest for me.”

Glitch raised his glass, toast and challenge all in one motion. “Hear you loud and clear. Watch your back out there, Boss. The Void’s been weird lately.”

Jazmyn turned away, the cadence of her boots lost in the station concourse clamor as she made her way back to the docks.

The Stardust Drifter embraced her like a well-worn flight suit, its interior a labyrinth of salvaged components and raw circuitry. Stale air, thick with the scent of recycled rations and just a little tinge of mildew, filled her lungs. In the galley, a spiderweb of cracks spanned the entry bulkhead’s console, a memento from a hard tumble through the Void.

Jax would have called it cosmetic. He lived in denial.

The loss of gravity had left her quarters in a state of chaos. In the mirror, the seamless matte finish of her AHG prosthetic stood in sharp contrast to her faded tank top. The limb remained a masterpiece of engineering, yet its intricate joints caught every stray flake of space dust and derelict filth. It twitched, as if to remind her how much of a chore it was.

Jazmyn sat at her console, her elbows digging into the hard surface of her desk as she opened the last encrypted burst on her message list. The decryption progress bar crawled across the screen, a slow grind that filled her mouth with the taste of ash. The logo of Aether Dynamics flickered as it twirled its pirouette, then the screen resolved into a video of Siora Vanguard. The corporate heiress glared directly into the lens, a hairline fracture in her polished facade.

“Ms. Silas, you’re avoiding me,” Siora’s voice snapped through the cabin, crisp and demanding. She angled a data pad toward the camera: Jax’s service record, his full name underlined beneath the sigil of Sol’s military.

UEAF AIRMAN FIRST CLASS, JASPER KNOX.
LAST ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT: BOMBING OF HAB-UNIT-01, MARS PROPER

Jazmyn groaned, the headache rushing back with a vengeance. One wrong word had been enough for this corpo bride to hook her acrylics into them.

“This is your last chance before this information finds its way to people with a vested interest in cleansing the Rim of Second Expansion Conflict combatants,” Siora continued on the screen.

Jazmyn tapped the reply toggle, her finger hovering over the transmitter, ready to cut herself off. “Don’t threaten us, Vanguard. If you want us to listen to whatever you’ve got on your pretty mind, it’s going to cost you. Twenty-three thousand credits up front, or I reflash our transponder and change my comms ID.”

She ended the recording, the silence in the room thickening until the air felt heavy. Her finger felt stiff over the transmitter button, as if her body refused to do the thing she knew she had to. Everything about this felt wrong. Panicking corpos were bad news, no matter the context. And Siora Vanguard’s voice vibrated with more anxiety than it had out in the deep Void.

A big breath, then she pressed send.

The reply arrived in minutes, its timing wrong. If the transmission had come from Kepler-22b, it should have taken hours.

Two non-refundable tickets flashed on the console, alongside a ledger authorization for twenty-three thousand credits. The amount sat there in stark numbers, a promise of solving one headache at the cost of another. Jazmyn sat upright, her mind stumbling for a second before she forced it back into gear. She downloaded the vouchers and triggered the credit transfer. The console chimed, a clean, corporate sound that echoed against the naked bulkhead of her quarters, making her stomach curdle all over again.

“Jax,” she whispered to the empty room. “You better back me up, you loud-mouthed asshole.”

The transport from the Junkyard to Kepler-22b tore Jax and Jazmyn away from the Drifter, leaving the comforting smell of ozone and dying scrubbers behind. They cut a hard line through pre-programmed nav-routes for a day before the shuttle plunged through the atmosphere, plummeting toward the gravity-defying spires that pierced the clouds like needles.

Genetically engineered algae choked the ocean world’s air, a sharp tang that burned Jazmyn’s throat. The VTOL banked over the indigo waves toward an island of manicured greens. As the craft settled on the landing pad, the twin moons began their climb, the sunset casting long, skewed shadows across surgical lawns and curated gardens. Rows of bioluminescent flowers battled the brine from cliffs with a cloying sweetness that gave Jazmyn a wicked craving for Zalabia.

“Corpos don’t roll out red carpets, do they?” Jazmyn’s words were a low rasp, barely audible over the rhythmic grit of boots on gravel. Her fingers twitched toward the cold polymer of her auto-pistol, drawing comfort from the weight of the weapon against her thigh.

“Let’s hope Vanguard remembers she’s the one who invited us,” Jax countered as he tracked her toward the villa. A monolithic slab of polished plasteel blocked the entrance, reflecting their distorted images like a dark mirror.

“Welcome… guests. Please deposit all weapons at the entrance,” a synthesized voice cut the evening air from a hidden speaker, as a wall panel slid aside with a scrape.

Jax nudged her. Jazmyn looked up and caught the glint of automated turrets, their organic curves mimicking the portico ceiling. She tapped the neural link behind her ear, a sharp spike of ozone and copper flooding her mouth. The enhanced readouts flared across her retinas, revealing a web of electrical signatures coiled in the shrubbery.

“Better do as the voice says.” She unclipped the holster, fingertips skimming the grip of the pistol, a momentary anchor before she deposited the weapon next to Jax’s energy pistol in the compartment. Her hand lingered a second too long, fingertips searching for the cold grip, then she backed away as a friendly chime applauded the compliance. The wall fused shut, erasing the seam and leaving her defenseless.

The doors slid open to reveal a corridor of sterile white and minimalist art while floor-to-ceiling windows framed the shielded forest in a silent, manicured tableau. The air carried no scent, the silence held no vibration, and the atmosphere felt like a mausoleum for a dead species. A single cerulean line bled across the polished floor, a circuit path leading them into a dining hall illuminated by surgical precision. A massive wooden table anchored the room, set with porcelain plates and food that held the unmistakable weight and luster of real organic matter.

Siora Vanguard sat across the dinner table draped in silk that shimmered like spilled oil, her dark hair hauled back into a severe ponytail. Neril Deveron sat beside her. The gaunt hollows that had marked his face aboard the Peregrine were gone, filled by synthetic flesh that lay seamless over the ruin of his implant. The man looked restored, yet his eyes betrayed the fraud. They shifted between flashes of manic concentration and the vacant stare of a navigator adrift in the Void.

A male nurse stood out of reach, shadowing Neril as the prodigy ate without acknowledging his guests. A cold current surged down Jazmyn’s spine. The Void had not stayed behind. It crouched here, waiting in the shadows of the capital world.

Siora rose, her face taut with a brittle smile. “Ms. Silas, Mr. Knox. Thank you for finally accepting my invitation.” Her voice carried a sharp edge of urgency that cut through the polite greeting. “Please, sit. Dinner is served.”

“You didn’t leave us a choice.” Jazmyn pulled up a plush dinner chair across from her.

A white service drone entered on a low-frequency antigrav pulse, the hum vibrating through the floorboards. It hovered above the table while articulated servos clicked, sliding steaming plates in front of Jax and Jazmyn. Roasted fish glistened under the soft spotlights, flanked by a garnish of greens. The scent of charred spices and rendered fat hit Jazmyn, sending a sharp cramp of hunger straight into her gut.

Siora indicated the table with a sharp flick of her manicured fingers. “Please, help yourselves. We will enjoy a good meal before we discuss business matters.”

Across the table, Neril’s fork struck his plate in a mechanical cadence. Between the nurse’s hovering and the repetitive clatter, the air grated against Jazmyn’s nerves like sand against a raw burn. The savory smell from the fish turned to vinegar on her tongue, and she shoved the plate away.

“Cut the shit, Vanguard. You didn’t track us all the way to Kepler-186f for a dinner invitation.”

Siora’s eyes narrowed, her gaze carrying the weight of a falling bulkhead. “Esko,” she snapped, the command cutting through the air like a serrated blade. “Leave us.”

The nurse bristled, his posture stiffening as he cast a final, lingering look toward Neril. Then, he backed away, and the automatic doors slid closed with a metallic hiss, sealing the room.

Siora set a data pad on the table, her manicured fingers flicking through holographic pages in a blur of light. “You are rude, and you ask questions,” she said, her voice tight. “In my circles, that gets people killed. Though in your case, it makes me wonder if cheap alcohol causes early-onset dementia.”

“Ouch,” Jazmyn muttered, the sting of the insult leaving a coppery taste in her mouth. She washed it down with a gulp from the wine glass. “Did you pay us twenty-three thousand just to insult us?”

For a moment, Neril’s eyes cleared to fix on her. There was recognition in them, and also defiance. He was fighting his sedatives. Then the chemistry won, and it was gone again.

Siora drained her wine glass in a single gulp, her hand already lifting to signal the hovering drone for a refill. “Very well, then, I’ll get to the reason I hired you. And that is a foregone conclusion since you have already spent the advance,” she said, her voice dropping.

Jazmyn felt a hot prickle climb from her collar to her jaw. On her plate, the headless fish sat silent, yet it seemed to mock her.

Siora continued without missing a beat. “We need to regain control of Stillwater Station, the currently shuttered headquarters of the Void Research Division.”

Jax cleared his throat. “And how do you expect a pair of scrappers to help you with that?” he asked. “We can’t crack a corporate space station for you.”

“Not an active one,” Jazmyn muttered, the skin on her good arm prickling with the cold start of an adrenaline surge.

“No need to crack it. The board’s investigators have designated it a crime scene as they look into the infiltration business.” Siora leaned forward, her posture tightening as she fixed them with a hard stare. “You’re merely going to help me end the investigation.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 23: The Long Shadow

Pixel caught up to her, boots skidding over the deck plates as he stopped short of the repair berths. “We had that conduit sealed. You didn’t need Kazimierz.”

“Yea, I see that.” Jazmyn poked the raw skin where Pixel’s eyebrow used to be. “Stay out of the engines, Pixel.”

A few meters away, the Drifter crew circled a noodle cart. The vendor served up translucent tubes that tasted of old engine oil and pure capsaicin, and the crew inhaled the spice while leaning against a stack of crates. Ozone from the welding stations pooled around them, a false fog that clung to their flight suits and fouled the air.

“You look like you need someone’s face rearranged,” Torvin said, lifting a bundle of soba with his chopsticks. He gestured with his chin toward the sparks still raining from the berths. “I can do that.”

“Sure, and who’s going to do our repairs afterward?” Jazmyn dropped onto the bar stool beside Jax. “The Outer Rim is corporate territory.”

Torvin shrugged, his massive shoulders barely moving under the bulk of his jacket. “The Anvil isn’t.”

“Which explains why Kazimierz runs the show.” Riley pulled her lips away from a mug of synth-coffee, the steam wetting her face.

Jazmyn cut through the noise, her eyes tracking the crowded docks, where hulls sat close enough to chafe. “Why the hell is this station so full? Colonial government running a fuel special?”

Torvin shrugged, mixing his noodles with his chopsticks. “Nav-net’s more backlogged than usual. Corporate ships get priority, everyone else just waits.”

A klaxon shrieked through the shipyard din, drilling into Jazmyn’s skull as the decking shuddered under a heavy impact. In the final bay, a salvage vessel had slammed into its clamps, the hull a ruin of scorched plating as if it had just clawed its way back from the Void.

The umbilical slammed against the dock, venting gasses that smelled of burnt insulation and sweat. Three spacers in flight suits, bleached pale by cheap soap and over-tuned UV filters, strained to hold back a fourth man. He writhed with a frantic strength, eyes blank as he twisted in violent jerks. His curses became a jagged rhythm beneath the shipyard clamor, each word lost to the industrial roar.

The crowd shrank back, eyes tracking the trio like a radioactive leak. They knew the look of a mind fractured by the Void. Jazmyn’s gaze locked onto them, as she activated her remote audio pickup through pure force of habit. The ambient roar faded into a sharp, electronic hum that isolated the distant voices.

“Let me go!” the man screamed, his neck muscles corded. “I have to go. They’re calling me.”

“Navigator snapped?” someone asked. The words came as a wet rasp, swallowed almost instantly by the filtered, industrial drone.

“Didn’t know their rust bucket had a Nav,” another spacer muttered. The crowd parted, everyone watching as the scrappers dragged their twitching mate toward the station concourse with a rhythmic thud of boots against deckplates.

One of the salvagers pivoted toward the gathering crowd, grease and sweat mapping the deep hollows of his face. “It’s Lars, our damn rigger,” he rasped, his voice a grate of metal on stone. “Nutter tried to cycle the airlock mid-jump.”

A cold weight settled in Jazmyn’s stomach that made the profit from their last run feel like a cruel joke. Beside her, Riley abandoned a half-full cup of coffee and bolted through the crowd, tracking the spacers.

“Riley! Where are you going?”

Riley pivoted, navigating the crowd backwards. “We’re stuck here, aren’t we? I have to find a way to help.”

Jazmyn’s jaw locked as she drew a sharp breath, her gaze sweeping across the table to where Torvin shoved his half-eaten bowl aside. The chopsticks clattered against the metal tray.

“I’ll keep an eye on the Doc,” he grunted, his heavy frame already turning to follow the medic into the crowd.

Jax straightened, his frame unfolding until he loomed over Jazmyn, the full head of height between them forcing her to crane her neck just to meet his gaze.

“When navigators started chasing phantoms, the Rim learned to deal,” Jax said, his voice tight. “We slowed down, hugged the nav-net, got used to the wait. But regular crew cracking like this? Makes you wonder if FTL is even worth it.” His face darkened and his eyes scanned the room for threats.

Jazmyn snorted, the sound sharp in the bubble of audio privacy. “Please. Before Void drives, half the sleeper ships arrived carrying nothing but freezer-burned meat.” She gestured to the viewports where the Junkyard glittered, a graveyard of derelict hulls backlit by the stars. “We couldn’t go back if we tried.”

Jax stared into his bowl of noodles as if he saw a ghost of Sol in the watery broth. “We could build generation ships,” he said. His voice carried the caustic bite of a breached coolant line as he added, “I imagine Sol’s colonies would greet our great-grandchildren with open arms.”

Jazmyn’s laugh grated like gravel in a food processor. “Sol would greet us with a jackboot to the neck and shears in hand, Jax. We’d be put up to work for BioGen the moment we cleared quarantine.” The thought sent a fresh jolt of nausea through her gut, and she toggled audio back, the crowd’s noise crashing in like Sol’s welcome.

Jax slurped a mouthful of noodles, his jaw working with a caution born of a previously cracked tooth. “So, how stuck are we?” he asked, his voice raspy from the steam. “Does Kazimierz have a price on the engine fix yet?”

Jazmyn inhaled the sharp scent of mystery spice and oil that was overdue for a change. None of it helped her hangover. She leaned in, her voice a low murmur. “He’s pissed at me. Wants our full tab upfront or the Drifter stays grounded.”

“Greedy pig,” Jax said around another mouthful of noodles.

“We have two weeks before he pushes her off into the Junkyard,” Jazmyn admitted, forcing the words past her teeth. “And well… the ledger is a bit light. I was going to ask if everyone could chip in.”

“Don’t tell the others,” Jax countered with a sharp shake of his head. “I’ll send you what I have, and we’ll split the rest between us.”

Jazmyn’s eyes narrowed. “What you have? You have credits sitting around to give away?”

Jax fished a data pad from his flight suit. “My dust farm fund.”

He tapped a series of commands, and a credit transfer notification pulsed in Jazmyn’s HUD. She stared at the readout for what felt like a long time, then hit “reject”.

“I’m not taking your retirement stash, Jax.”

Jax didn’t look at her. He watched the traffic on the docks, his usual swagger replaced by a tense stillness. “Think of it as a zero-interest loan to keep the ship flying, then. I owe you for messing around at the Void gig.”

The notification pinged Jazmyn’s HUD again. She swiped it off with a flick of her wrist, along with the bite-back that sat at the tip of her tongue. “While running your mouth to the suits isn’t exactly a prime career move, we still got the full pay. No need to bring that up. Any of it.” She looked around, making sure no one was close enough to eavesdrop.

Jax’s jaw locked. He leaned in close, words rasping against the static of the station. “My career died when Mars dragged Sol into a war they couldn’t win.” His shoulders sagged under the admission. “You know it. I know it. Fuck the pretense.”

“Pretense is what keeps everyone from killing each other over a twenty-three-year-old grudge!” Jazmyn started to rise, but the sudden, acrid scent of synthetic grease and brine from a nearby cart hit her. The smell curdled in her stomach and she clamped her hand over her mouth, cutting off the rest of her speech.

Jax pressed a hand between her shoulder blades to keep her upright as the room tilted. “Hair of the dog?”

She followed him deeper into the station, the distance from the docks coaxing her chest to loosen its grip on her lungs. The missing credits remained a splinter under her skin, reminding her that without her ship, the only way to settle the debt was through the kind of groundside work that left a mark, a body, or both.

The bar’s haze clung to the tongue with the flavor of stale tobacco and scorched oxygen. In a shadow-drenched corner, Glitch gripped his glass of synthetic swill so hard his knuckles whitened. He was the Drifter’s anchor, a man who remained in the cockpit while Jazmyn led her crew into derelict hulls, yet the echoes of the Peregrine crossfire still vibrated in his bones.

Pixel claimed the only open chair beside Glitch. Jazmyn seized hers from under another spacer’s hand, the magnetic locks snapping against the deck with a violent metallic jolt.

“Glitch. You look the way I feel,” she said.

Glitch stared up, eyes flat and dead. He took a deep swallow, the glass rattling against his teeth before he set it down. “I’m not built for this,” he rasped. “To be talking to someone one second, then watching them end up as a smear on the bulkhead the next.”

A flash of a memory surged behind Jazmyn’s eyes, an image she had tried to burn out of her brain with enough synth-ale to kill a man. Pseudopods rippled as they engulfed the mangled remains of a body in blue uniform. The phantom prickle of static crawled up her neck and she sucked a slow breath through her teeth, forcing her mind to heel.

“Everyone shut up!” the bartender barked. He jabbed a callused finger at the bar holo-screen as his voice cut through the crowd. “Time to pay your respects.”

On the holo screen behind the bar, a transmission flickered into life, flooding the dim lounge with a searing wash of filtered sunlight and manicured greenery. It was a pre-recorded loop, a ritual of grief replayed daily by a news cycle too sluggish to move on. On it, the Outer Rim elite gathered in a sea of polished masks and fine silk, their faces smooth and untouched by hardship.

The camera lingered on the ornate casket, then panned to Neril Deveron and Siora Vanguard, the pair of corpo heirs front and center at the ceremony. Siora looked dignified in a gown of midnight silk, a gossamer veil partially masking her face. Beside her, Neril stood rigid in a tailored suit. New layers of synthetic skin hid his injuries, but the mask did not reach his eyes.

The hollow look made Jazmyn’s skin crawl. He had the stare of a burned navigator, the kind she dragged from drifting husks out in the Void. The air in the lounge seemed to drop several degrees.

The spacer at the next table hoisted a glass, his face a roadmap of radiation burns and old scars. “To old Cyrus,” he roared, voice jagged with grief. “He showed us a way out. Brought the stars within our reach!” The greeting ignited a chorus of drunken cheers and the rhythmic clink of glassware.

Another man slapped a credit chip against the grimy bar, his face already flushed dark with a cheap buzz. “Bartender, another round. On me.”

Jazmyn took the proffered glass and drained it in one caustic swallow. She forced a smile, but the burn in her throat failed to mask the coil of unease tightening her gut. Cyrus Deveron. The name sat heavy in the room, a ghost that turned her blood to slush. She slammed the glass onto the table, the impact echoing through the hollow in her chest.

A fresh notification flashed across her HUD, the words searing in a bright, clinical blue:

IF YOU KEEP DODGING MY COMMS, THAT SCREEN WILL BROADCAST YOUR PARTNER’S COMPLETE UEAF RECORD NEXT.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 22: The Price of Salvage

The ship’s com system cut through her nightmare with a flat, robotic cadence.

“You have twenty missed calls.”

Jazmyn jerked awake, the sudden movement pulling her out of the bunk and into the restraint netting. A surge of bile rose in her throat. She clamped her jaw shut and fumbled for the release, her inner ear screaming danger, as a desperate roll sent her somersaulting into a tangle of limbs and fabric. When the mesh finally slackened, she hauled herself to the sink and flipped the switch for the vacuum intake just in time to empty the remains of last night’s bender into the stained plumbing.

“Comms! Bridge!” Jazmyn growled at the wall panel, fighting the dizzying tilt of zero-G. Her boots floated in the opposite corner of the cabin, unsecured, mag-soles inert. The plasteel of the sink whined under the strain of her cybernetic grip.

“Good morning,” Jax’s voice echoed from the bulkheads. “How’s the head?”

“Never mind my head. Where’s the gravity?” She lunged for the workbench, fingers curling around the metal lip as she hauled herself forward. She was a child of Earth’s deep gravity well. Weightlessness still turned her stomach inside out.

“Engines are down. The port unit blew a conduit,” Jax replied. The casual tone set her nerves on edge. “Pixel and Glitch went in to patch it, but they’ve been dark for over an hour.”

“Lost in the tubes,” Jazmyn mimicked, her skin still smelling of synth-ale and cheap incense. Her head throbbed in time with the pulse of the dying LEDs. “Tell me we’re not marooned lightyears from civilization.”

“We’re sitting outside Kepler-186f, and we’ll be sitting here a while.”

Jazmyn shoved her t-shirt into the waistband of her pants, a low groan vibrating in her chest. She anchored her body against the bunk and began fighting the boots onto her feet. The first mag-sole hit the deck with a heavy thud, the sudden weight nearly throwing her across the cabin. She clamped the second boot down, feeling the magnets lock on with a metallic snap that echoed through the conduits.

“I’ll be there in five.”

She wadded a towel against the faucet until the fibers became soaked, then scrubbed the residue of sleep and synth-ale from her face. In the mirror, her skin looked drained, a pallid ghost that had left every ounce of color behind in the Void.

Memory flickered in violent flashes. The slow crawl home had wrought more damage than the surface mission, the Sirens trailing the Peregrine through the long haul. Three days in, the Void had claimed Neril Deveron, his gaze going dead as his mind fizzled out. Five days in, fake-Parker died in the cargo hold, turning the bay into a biohazard zone. The expedition’s killer had never stopped screaming, banging his raw fists against his bio-pod’s safety glass.

Jazmyn stuck the towel against the bulkhead and combed her fingers through her hair, but the short strands bristled in all directions like a caricature Medusa. With low growl her chest, she peeled her boots away from the tacky deck plating with a rhythmic, sucking sound. She shouldered through the hatch and left the cabin behind.

Torvin sat behind a table in the galley as though he had weight. He hovered a full centimeter above the bench. The spill-proof bulb of his drink tilted in a silent toast. “Moin.”

“You look ridiculous.” Jazmyn glared at him, then at the dead coffee maker, her jaw tightening at the sight of the dark console. “What are you drinking?”

“Cold brew,” Torvin answered, sucking on the bulb. His knees caught the underside of the table, shifting him closer to the seat.

“Disgusting.” Jazmyn grimaced, her stomach responding with a fresh wave of nausea. “I’m getting gravity back. Right now.” Jazmyn stomped toward the hatch leading to the bridge, a sticky sound following each step.

Jax was at the bridge, sprawled across the XO chair, his long frame filling the custom seat as he watched the viewscreen. Jazmyn stopped at the top of the ladder, eyes narrowing at the grid of exterior camera feeds.

A traffic jam sat above the rust-stained planet, a cluster of vessels idling within umbilical range of the orbital station. The makeshift flotilla pushed into the field of ship-graves from the last corporate war. The wreckage of old dreadnoughts framed the station like a jagged skeletal cage, though the new arrivals held a cautious distance.

Jazmyn moved through the narrow bridge, stepping past the navigation console that had sat cold and dormant since the day she claimed the Drifter.

“What’s the situation?”

“Three hours and still waiting on a docking berth,” Jax said. He flashed the kind of easy smile that made Jazmyn consider throwing him across the bridge.

“Forget it.” She swiped the comms interface from his station to hers, her fingers flying across the console as she punched in a frequency she had known by heart for half a decade.

The heavy-set face of a man in his mid-forties filled the monitor, his frown deepening as he wiped grease-stained hands on his coveralls. “You’ve got nerve showing your face around here, corpo girlie. I figured you’d decided you were too good for us Junkyarders.”

Jazmyn gripped the handrest, her knuckles turning white against the impulse to put her fist through the holo screen. “Lay off, Kazimierz. We need a berth.”

Kazimierz grinned, yellowed teeth flashing. “You vanish for two months, snub every pal you ever had, and now you come crawling back for favors? It’s going to cost you.” He worked his console, his fingers flying across the input keys.

“It always does.” Jazmyn tapped the screen to accept the berth authorization. She closed the channel, then pressed the cool metal of her cybernetic hand against her temple to soothe the pressure building there. “Jax, pull my pilot and his pet hacker out of the engines before the thrusters cook them.”

“On it.” Jax stood, his mag soles deactivated. He moved across the bridge with the fluid, weightless grace of a space-born, drifting toward the hatch.

An hour later, the familiar tug of point-nine gravity pulled at Jazmyn’s joints while she glared at the holo screen in the orbital bay. The numbers burned against the dark background. Twenty-three thousand credits, a total that included her full outstanding tab and the price of a new engine that would never find its way to the Drifter. Her cybernetic fingers spasmed, metal plates grinding against a servo motor as she fought the urge to shatter the console.

Kazimierz leaned against the access ramp of the Drifter, his girth straining the seams of his grease-stained coveralls. He toyed with a heavy multitool, spinning the device between fingers that looked like links of sausage.

“Twenty-three thousand?” Jazmyn’s voice sliced through the industrial roar of the shipyard. “I could buy a new ship for that, Kazimierz. Where do you get off charging that for a patch job?”

Kazimierz spat a dark glob onto the grimy grating, his gaze lingering on Jazmyn’s face as he leaned in. “Listen, panienka, you spent two months playing dead, ghosting your friends, and dodging your obligations. Now your port engine is dead and you want to crawl back as if nothing happened?” He gestured his multitool toward the husks of freighters drifting in the yard. “Settle the tab, kochanie, or join the Junkyard.”

“You’re just bitter I cleared my debt with AHG before yours.” Jazmyn crossed her arms and braced her weight against a support pillar as her voice tightened.

Kazimierz shoved his grease-stained hands deep into his overalls. His gaze dragged over her skin like a physical touch. “Bitter, not bitter. Doesn’t change a thing.” He tilted his head, his smirk widening to expose yellowed teeth. “Docking space’s a premium. You’ve got some. Got a way to pay, or is this a job application?”

“You’re bleeding us dry for repairs you should’ve done three runs ago.” Jazmyn’s cybernetic fingers spasmed, the metal clicking with a sharp, mechanical friction. Her stomach tightened into a hard knot.

Kazimierz pushed himself off the Drifter’s bulkhead, his boots heavy against the decking. “Your tub sits here until the the credits hit my ledger. Call it drydock storage, panienka.” He turned his back on her and walked toward the showers of sparks in the adjacent berth.

“Up yours, Kazimierz!” The words ripped from her throat, raw and ragged. Her lungs burned as she spat the insult across the hangar bay. “Fix my ship. I’ll get your money.”

Kazimierz shifted his bulk, his silhouette blocking the pale light filtering through the overhead grates. He let his eyes wander, a slow crawl from her scuffed boots to her jawline, his gaze lingering with a predatory weight.

“And how does a little bird fly without wings?” He leaned in, the scent of stale tobacco and engine grease clinging to him. “Did that pretty face finally get you a patron?”

Jazmyn clenched her fists until her knuckles went white, her pulse hammering against the base of her skull. She wanted to rip out the screen and ram it through his throat, but the thought withered. There were a dozen ships waiting outside. This shipyard serviced scrappers. Any other berth in the Outer Rim belonged to the corporations, where the prices would bleed her dry before she could clear the dock.

She glared at him, her teeth gritting against the acid in her gut, and thumbed the “ACCEPT” icon. A cheerful chime echoed through the bay, confirming the debt. Kazimierz’s thin lips peeled back in a greasy smile, and he tapped the “PAYABLE BY” field with a blunt finger.

“Two weeks, krasavitsa,” Kazimierz purred as his eyes traced the line of her throat, a predator sizing up a meal. “Consider yourself lucky I have a weak spot for spirited little things.” His lips peeled back to reveal a streak of yellowed gums, then he turned away, a bulk of cheap synth-silk and arrogance.

Jazmyn marched away, each step a heavy strike against the metal grating. The twenty-three thousand credit debt sat like a stone in her gut. The vibration of her data pad against her thigh signaled the twenty-first missed call. Same masked ID, this time through the local station proxy. She swiped the alert away, her skin crawling with the knowledge that she was being tracked.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 21: The Butcher’s Bill

The Peregrine groaned, its internal bulkheads settling into a dull, rhythmic thrum as it shook off the asteroid’s gravity. The transfer had been a day-long funeral march. The lone survivor from the cargo hold offered no resistance, a hollowed-out shell of a man stuffed into a void suit and marched across the basalt like a prisoner of war. Moving the bio-pods had been the real labor—dead weight that challenged even the reinforced servos of the remaining RECs.

While the suits tallied their losses and plotted their legal defenses, the scrappers worked the margins of the wreckage. Pixel had extracted the barge’s data vault with the surgical precision of a scavenger, but Jazmyn’s task was quieter. She had spent the final hour scouring the broken quarters, gathering the small, jagged memory shards and discarded data pads left in the wake of the slaughter.

In the corner of the Peregrine’s cargo bay, someone had dumped Neril’s Mark II REC. It sat slumped against a stack of ration crates, a million-credit puppet with its strings cut. Its matte-white faceplate reflected the flickering emergency lights of the hold, a sightless ghost watching the survivors pass.

On the bridge, the silence was thick enough to choke on. Glitch kept the ship at a sedate, cautious crawl. His hands were light on the yoke, the nav-array sending active pings toward the closest nav-net beacon with a rhythmic, lonely pulse. It was fast enough to outrun wandering Siren rocks, but slow enough to catch a sensor ghost before it turned into a hull breach.

Jazmyn sat in the copilot’s chair. The Peregrine was large enough to have one, small enough not to need it filled. The jump drives’ vibration crept up the console, into her arm, and throbbed deep in the socket. The recycler wheezed inside the plasteel walls. It could not scrub the copper taste of blood and the sharp bite of ozone. Beyond the hatch was the spot where Eva Rostov’s blood had seeped into the floor grates, still there, waiting to be cleaned.

“Good thing you’re here,” Jazmyn whispered. The corpos ignored her, staring blankly at the displays like furniture. “Pilot dead, navigator fried. Without you, we would’ve been stuck on that asteroid.”

Glitch gripped the yoke, his knuckles white around the textured polymer sleeve. He shut his eyes and the rings beneath them darkened like fresh bruises. “I wanted this seat, but not like this. I didn’t want Eva’s blood staining the conduits.”

Jazmyn reached across, her fingers digging into the fabric of his flight suit. The ship’s low acceleration gave her body a weightless, drifting sensation that made the contact feel distant. “Focus, Glitch. Once we hit the nav-net, we lock into Aether Dynamics’ systems and go on autopilot.”

“If the tail doesn’t catch us first.” Glitch glanced over his shoulder, eyes scanning the bulkhead as if he could see the predators following their exhaust trail. “Cooking the ether like this makes us look like a signal fire in the dark.”

“They’ll lose the scent once we hit the first beacon.” Jazmyn settled back into the gel-padded seat, the fluid cushioning her body. She tried to ignore the Void, its blindness and its sounds. But her audio still picked up the scratching inside the walls, tiny claws scoring the plasteel, climbing right to the base of her skull.

The bridge hatch hissed open, breaking her out of her thoughts. Torvin lumbered inside with Neril slumped across his shoulder like a shed flight suit. The corpo prodigy looked chewed up, a thick, bloodied bandage taped crooked over the side of his head. His face had become the color of moon dust, the kind that synthetic skin fades to when it no longer knows what pixels to activate.

“Why are we crawling?” Neril demanded, his voice a dry rasp. “I can plot a direct burn that’ll put us back at the Rim before dinner.”

Glitch didn’t even look up from his holo screens. “Sir, with all due respect—”

“With all due respect, your neural port was dangling out of your skull two hours ago,” Kaelen Rix snapped from his spot at the data terminal. “I can spot-weld your hardware, but I can’t bypass your synapses.”

“Nonsense.” Neril extended a shaking hand toward the navigator console.

Jazmyn’s restraints flew aside before she even knew she had moved. She clamped onto his wrist hard enough to bruise. “Oh no, you don’t!”

Neril’s gaze fixed on her, his eyes widening as the words hit him, a look of raw bewilderment masking his face.

“Why’s he upright?” Jazmyn demanded, ignoring the glare that burned through her ribs as she shoved the navigator into a crash couch and slammed the restraints shut. The seat was rigged for a grounder, forcing the man’s long frame into an awkward, twisted angle.

Torvin shrugged, leaning against the bulkhead. “He’s been arguing with the survivors. Getting on Riley’s nerves. Doc kicked him out of the med-bay.”

“Don’t talk as if I wasn’t here.” Neril hunched in his seat. The veneer of superiority had been stripped away, leaving something cheap and sharp-edged in its place. “My head vibrates. It’s as if we had Sirens on the hull…” He leaned forward. “You… ah… Pilot. Check the external cameras.”

Glitch sighed but obliged, sending the feeds to a free holo-screen. “There are no Sirens on our hull, Sir. We are at least fifty clicks ahead of the closest one.”

“We would hear it if they were on the hull, Deveron,” Jazmyn said, reaching up to secure the nav-array’s umbilical into the overhead conduit ring.

“Neril, your link is down and your neural net’s probably stuck in a loop,” Rix said, rising from his seat “I’ll get the—”

“Spare me the fake concern, please,” Neril snapped, his breath ragged. He swiped his hand through the holo screen, cutting off the exterior feed. “You’re only here because I put it on record that your RECs are decorative scrap. What’s your board going to say when they hear that a saboteur used your invention to kill… my father’s people. To drag him in the middle of nowhere for Sirens to squat on top…”

Rix’s face drained of color, sweat gathering at his upper lip as he fell back into his seat. “Neril, you aren’t thinking clearly. I had nothing to do with any of that. My prototype is why we could launch this rescue mission in the first place. Let’s work this out when you aren’t sky-high on stims.”

“I have questions now, Kaelen.” Neril leaned toward him, pulling on the five point restraints. Blood seeped from under the bandage at the side of his head, but he did not react. “What are we going to find when we open the barge’s data vault? Why didn’t the failsafe kick in when the REC started the executions?”

The hatch hissed again, cutting the fight short. Siora Vanguard stepped onto the bridge, her face a mask of cool, high-born concern. Her eyes swept over the each person like a port authority scanner before she closed the distance to her fiance, pressing a silk handkerchief to the fresh red stain below his bandage.

“Neril, you’re bleeding again. Come back to the med-bay with me.”

“Doc Riley kicked me out,” Neril muttered, leaning into her touch. He squeezed his eyes shut, his mouth moving silently for a moment before he continued. “And Preston’s face is bad for my blood pressure.”

“And this person’s face isn’t?” Siora’s gaze shifted to Rix, her eyes turning into chips of flint.

Neril groaned, rubbing the drug haze out of his eyes. “It is, but I was hoping he’d tell me how AHG equipped the saboteur with a REC module without catching the identity mismatch. It plugs into the neural matrix.” He tapped the side of his head, where the bandage hid his broken hardware, then winced.

“That is a very good question,” Siora said, folding her handkerchief to find a clean patch of fabric before she pressed it against Neril’s neck again. “How did that happen, Kaelen?”

Rix writhed like a mouse trapped between an eagle and a snake, his voice cracking. “I’ll launch an investigation and route every finding directly to you. But you’ve got to work with me on containment. I have fifty units sitting on Kepler-186f, waiting for the product launch.”

Neril didn’t reply. His knuckles whitened against the armrests, as another crimson bead slipped from the bandage to crawl down his collar. He looked like a ghost holding its breath for a shuttle to the far side.

Siora’s hand clamped on his shoulder. “Neril? Stay with me, darling.” She pointed a manicured finger at Torvin without looking up. “You, mercenary. My fiance needs to be brought back to the med-bay. Now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Torvin rumbled. “Komm, Junge.” He picked up Neril like a bag of laundry, draping the space-born over his shoulder as he hauled him back the way he’d come from only a few minutes ago.

Siora did not follow, her hand crumpling the bloodstained handkerchief. “Kaelen, route your findings to me, instead. I will handle the liaison with the Aether Dynamics board.”

Jazmyn pointed her gaze straight ahead, a silent scoff dying in her throat. Another navigator had burned in the void, and all these corpos cared about was the impact on their bottom line. Board rooms, backstabbing—she didn’t care which mega-corp held the knife. She glared across her internal HUD, and activated a shortcut on her comms controls. Raucous synth-trance flooded her ears, a wall of sound drowning out the chatter.

Credits. That was the only word she wanted to hear. Just let the escrow clear, and numbers register in her ledger, so she could put this slime-covered rock and everything that came with it into the rearview mirror. She was a salvage specialist, and as far as she was concerned, the mission was over.

The Peregrine turned its nose toward civilization, leaving the asteroid to the silence of the void.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 20: The Graft

The barge’s heavy batteries lanced outward while the Peregrine’s rails bucked in lockstep, a single cataclysm split between kinetic and energy. The ether boiled, the ionized fog engulfing the towering Siren. Jazmyn toggled her polarized visor, her viewport blackening as the world washed out into flat, searing white. Then the shockwave washed over, a wall of thick fog that hammered the longboat until the hull plates groaned like shinies on their first trek across the Ganymede flats.

Jax kept firing the railgun into the heart of the glare, the weapon straining against its mounts until the ammunition feed ran dry with a hollow, mechanical clack that vibrated through the console mounts.

The pressure gave way to a hollow hiss in Jazmyn’s audio. The ether still flashed in a toxic rainbow. Sensors flickered back to life, scrolling through a graveyard of corrupted data. Where the leviathan had stood, there was only a smoking, iridescent crater. Jagged shards of chitin and steaming alien fluids were all that remained of the Siren Broodmother.

“Target neutralized,” Preston Hayes’s voice announced. It carried that specific, high-tier corporate self-importance that even a near-death experience couldn’t scrub away. “Proceeding toward the structure for further assessment.”

The barge’s long-range sensors pierced the ether, painting the distant dots of the scattered swarm and the wireframes of the industrial RECs, as they advanced to the towering antenna. For a long moment, they stood still. Then, Hayes’s voice cut through the ringing silence of the bombardment’s aftermath.

“Ground team to longboat. I need a high-gain signal proxy for my video feed,” he said, his voice having lost an octave. “Whoever’s in command of this mission… they need to see this.”

Jazmyn exchanged a silent look with her crew, then flicked the comms controls, opening a channel. IDs flooded in, filling up the status display: Deveron, Thorne, Vanguard, Rix. They held their breaths as the stream stabilized.

“What the actual...?” she muttered before she managed to catch herself.

The tower was a tomb. Thick, sickly greenish-yellow biomass pulsed in a slow, rhythmic heave, clinging to every strut and sensor array. Electronic panels had been dissolved into a slurry of silicon and slime, and the Aether Dynamics logo on the main housing was bubbling under an alien pH, being rewritten in a language of wet, translucent membranes.

Hot, bitter bile climbed Jazmyn’s throat. She sucked at her respirator, forcing herself to stay looking. She couldn’t turn away. Not now. Her eyes stayed locked on the signal, the feed burning itself into her retinas.

As the REC streaming the images rounded the base, the missing bio-pods came into view. They were clustered like grotesque, overripe fruit on a diseased vine, as the biomass fused them into the tower’s skeleton.

“Get closer,” Neril’s voice rasped, a desperate edge cutting through the static. “I need a look at the couplings. Each pod. Now!”

“Sir, you shouldn’t be looking at this,” a measured voice streamed from another REC, the comms ID lighting up as Lt. Reyes.

“Preston,” Neril insisted, ignoring Reyes.

The leading REC obeyed, its heavy servos whining as it leaned in, the feed sharpening. The slimy tendrils didn’t just wrap around the bio-pods, they mimicked the texture of the fiber-optics, splicing itself into the bio-pods’ conduits. The batteries still held a charge, but the monitors on all but one pod displayed zeroes across the board.

The view paused on the final pod. Pulsing biomass obscured the viewport, but through a thumb-sized patch of clear polymer, a pale, motionless figure was visible. The monitor panel flickered erratically, throwing a jagged, dying heartbeat across the REC’s sensors.

Hayes’s voice lost its corporate edge, dropping into a hollow, human whisper. “I found him. It’s Cyrus.”

The words cracked through the cockpit like a failed bulkhead seal. Cyrus Deveron remained, a single anchor in the wreckage. The others... the structure literally stood on their bones.

“Map the fused wiring,” Neril whispered, his voice a raw, jagged sound. “C… cut him out of there.”

“Neril, look at the sensor-loop,” Kaelen Rix’s tag pulsed on the HUD. The engineer’s voice was the sound of a cold slide rule. “The biomass integration is structural. If they cut, they could kill the life support for good.”

“In the Director’s current state, even a single lungful of ether would cause a massive internal hemorrhage,” a new voice said, the calm in it bordering on inhuman. The comms tag blinked Dr. Davies, another of the expedition’s survivors now in command of a REC. “He’d be dead before we get a fresh respirator on him.”

“There is a spare pod in the med-bay, we just need to bring it to the tower!” Siora Vanguard’s voice broke in, sharp and desperate.

“Yes, that’s a good plan,” Neril said, his voice dissolving into a wet cough for a moment before he caught himself. “R… Reyes, start moving toward the Peregrine. We will lower the pod to the basalt.”

Pixel’s hand clamped on Jazmyn’s shoulder, his fingers digging into the reinforced fabric of her suit. “Boss! Look! Something O’Clock!”

In the ether below, the scattered signatures of the swarm had stopped wandering and began to coalesce into a single mass. Thousands of individual pings fused into one moving wall, the fog churning with flashes of turquoise.

“They’re coming back,” Pixel whispered. “We’ve got to do something, or they’ll turn AHG’s toys into slag and be at the base camp in minutes.”

“Deveron! Thorne!” Jazmyn barked into the command link. “We’ve got incoming again! Whatever decision you were going to make, make it now. Our window is closing fast!”

“Ground units, retreat from the tower,” Thorne ordered, his voice rough. “Fall back to the perimeter. We’ll regroup for a second pass.”

“Load of shit,” Jax cursed, pulling on the yoke and sending the longboat into a bank. “Sirens won’t stop just ‘cuz they get tired from running.”

“Thorne, look at the proxy feed!” Jazmyn demanded, the G-force throwing her against her restraints. “If we don’t intercept that swarm where it is, the base camp is a buffet. You’ve got a camp full of injured three clicks of broken basalt and toxic fog away from the Peregrine’s airlocks.”

The silence on the comms carried the weight of a dozen corporate careers ending in an early grave.

“Sir, there is something you need to know,” Reyes’s voice broke in with a tone of someone used to delivering bad news. His REC had rounded the base of the tower. “The tether is online. Telemetry is spiking on an encrypted VLF band. If none of us authorizes this, then the signal isn’t for us. Someone else has put a mark on this place.”

The lead REC’s feed panned across the slime-encrusted tower, zooming in on the pod where Cyrus Deveron’s heartbeat still flickered on a dim holo screen. “The Lieutenant is right,” Hayes said. “If we leave Cyrus in this mess, we’re leaving a trophy for whoever is coming back to loot our colleagues’ graves.”

Static hissed through the audio feed as the swarm’s signal signatures coalesced on the tactical HUD. The red dots surged toward the tower in a tidal wave of chitinous hunger, cutting through the viscous fog like thermal drills through the ice of Europa. Pixel’s hands trembled around his cracked data pad, the glass straining under his glowed grip as his respirator pack wheezed from the increased demand.

“Boss…” he breathed into the channel. “What are they—”

Then, a voice came through that sounded like it had already crossed the Styx. It wasn’t the voice of a corpo looking for the best ROI. It was the voice of a man standing at his own father’s bedside, deciding when to end it. Cold. Resolute.

“Preston,” Neril said, the words falling like lead weights. “Overload the tower’s fusion reactor. Time it for the swarm’s arrival, then rupture the shroud.”

“Neril, no!” Siora’s scream erupted in the background, a raw, jagged sound of grief and protest. “We can still—”

“There is no ‘still,’ Siora!” Neril roared, his voice cracking with a sudden, violent clarity. “He’s already gone! I can give him a clean death at ten million degrees, or I can let some shadow-op scavenge his body for who-knows-what purpose. I’m not letting them have him.”

He took a breath, the sound of it wet and shaky over the link. “Do it, Preston. Cremate the site. Destroy the pods. Kill the signal. Leave them nothing but ash.”

The words hung in the air like a death sentence. Jazmyn exchanged a look with her crew, but nobody had any words. Below, Hayes’s REC tore the video feed away from the dying figures on Cyrus’s bio-pod. His wrenched open an encrusted panel, and began to tap at the flickering interface, slaving the reactor’s magnetic bottles to a terminal feedback loop.

“Jax, back to the camp. Now!” Jazmyn yelled, adrenaline spiking her senses until the cockpit felt too small for her skin. “Get us the hell out of here!”

The tower flared with a sick, sun-white glare as its fusion core groaned and magnetic containment collapsed. Jax punched the longboat’s thrusters to overdrive, hull plates shrieking in protest as it clawed for altitude.

The tower flashed once, a searing pulse that charred the biomass and the pods fused into it. The feed dissolved into static, then blacked out as sensors spiked. A violent tearing sound vibrated up Jazmyn’s spine, making her audio screech, as the space around the tower twisted inward. The miniature singularity swallowed the core of the swarm, collapsing in on itself before the pressure wave expanded outward, flooding the viewports with a myriad of opalescent colors.

When the shaking subsided, the ether rushed back to fill a deep, smoking crater where the high-tech structure had stood. The tether, the Sirens, and Cyrus Deveron were gone.

“Jax,” Jazmyn said, her voice flat over the whistle of the feedback in her implants. “Take us back to base. Load the survivors, and let’s get off this rock. Whatever Aether Dynamics wanted here, let them choke on disappointment.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 19: The Broodmother

Eight pairs of red sensors fixed on Thorne, their owner the Mark I RECs filling the slagged cargo hold with a heavy, metallic presence. One machine lifted its industrial actuators, the servos whining as it tested its own weight before the sensors swiveled back to the trooper.

Thorne squared his shoulders, his spine rigid against the red glare. His voice carried the strain of a man facing a firing squad, but it didn’t waver.

“Commander Valerius Thorne, Aethereal Dynamics Reclamations.”

Silence filled the hold, thicker than the ether outside.

“How did the board’s dogs find this location?” The REC pilot’s voice was throaty snarl. His comms ID tag flickered, then solidified on a name: Preston Hayes, VRD Administration.

“This is a VRD research site. Your goons aren’t authorized to be here,” another pilot added, its voice a sneer of digital distortion. The comms tag took a long moment to land on a name: Dr. Davies, VRD Research.

“This is a rescue mission,” Thorne said, the words landing flat against the static.

“Rescue…” Hayes echoed him, the torso of his REC swiveling to take in the state of the cargo hold. “Rescue from what, exactly?”

“Sir, the last thing I remember…” a third voice joined, a rasp of high-frequency static. The REC had lifted its actuators to inspect the heavy-duty manipulators at the ends. “The techs were biting out their teeth on these things.” The comms tag solidified on Specialist Chen, VRD Security.

The fourth REC leaned forward, its red eyes locking onto Thorne with predatory focus. “Where is Director Deveron? Or anyone with a security clearance higher than an Alpha Centaury rent-a-cop’s?” The comms ID designated the pilot Lieutenant Reyes, VRD Security.

Rix cursed, fingers fumbling over the data pad as the RECs shifted, their servos whining with lethal potential. Tension filled the hold, a heavy charge that tasted of ozone and aggression. “Gentlemen,” Rix said, the words clipped, “before we turn this deck into a scrap yard, let’s get some seniority on the line.”

He punched a panel and the Peregrine’s audio feed flooded the hold. For a long beat the crew held its breath while the low electric whine of REC servos held tension. Then a voice grated over the speakers, weak and raspy. It was Neril, though the signal dragged his words through a gravel pit.

“You cannot be serious…” he muttered barely loud enough for the mic. “This… this is Neril Deveron… Assistant Director, VRD. Let me guess… Preston?”

“Kid, you sound like hell,” Hayes’s voice boomed from his REC’s speakers, the metallic timbre vibrating the deck plates. “What happened?”

“We can talk about that when I stop bleeding,” Neril’s voice replied, strained and clipped, each word an effort. “You are to defer to… Commander Thorne. He will coordinate the recovery. Do not… do not break the chain of command.”

Irritation flared through Jazmyn, hot and jagged. The absurdity of it grated against her nerves. These barely conscious ghosts had snapped back into a corporate hierarchy while an alien swarm chewed through the hull. Her hands clenched, itching to deliver a smack to every glowing sensor array in the room, just to rattle some sense back into them.

Pragmatism held her back, because striking a reinforced AHG chassis was a sure way to shatter a wrist. “Excuse me,” Jazmyn intervened, her voice slicing through the corporate entitlement. “Can we move before the rest of your team gets digested?”

Eight pairs of optical sensors swiveled toward her, their silence radiating the cold disapproval of a breach-of-contract litigation.

Jazmyn hissed a curse that died in the filtration of her respirator. “Corporal Jazmyn Silas, independent,” she snapped, the rank slipping out like an old instinct. “Now, do we waste time on clearance levels, or do we deal with the bug currently using your friends as furniture?”

Thorne stepped into the gap, his voice regaining its command edge as he laid out the mission. He mapped out the biological signature and the missing pods, outlining a strategy where the Mark I RECs lured whatever guarded the tether into the open.

Pixel’s signal pinged Jazmyn’s HUD. “Longboat’s a go, Boss,” he said, his voice tinny and distorted by the interference. “Engines are purring like a kitty-cat. One problem: the seals are shot. We can’t get the damn thing pressurized. This is going to be a windy ride.”

“Story of my life,” Jazmyn muttered.

The eight Mark Is moved in synchronization, their frames vibrating the hold as they lurched toward secure storage lockers. Heavy weaponry emerged from the depths of the hold. Plasma cannons hummed as ionizing charges flooded the chambers and railguns snapped into magnetic locks. When missile pods whirred through targeting checks, the red emergency lights bathed the machines in a violent glow. In the crimson haze, they looked less like rescuers than a small army.

Jazmyn headed for the secondary airlock, her stride eating up the deck plating. “You stay at the barge, Torvin. Watch Riley and the troopers.” Her voice held a hard edge as she checked the seals on her helmet. “I don’t want any Void madness or mutinies breaking out while I’m gone.”

Torvin grunted and shifted his weight, his palm resting on the heavy grip of his slug-thrower. “Understood, Boss. I will keep the peace.”

Jazmyn stepped out into the light-flooded bubble of the camp and shoved into the cramped cockpit of the longboat. Asteroid grit coated every surface of the utilitarian interior. Pixel was already strapped into the technician’s seat, his fingers dancing across the data pad he’d slaved to the flight computer—typical Outer Rim gear, even corporate ships ran a mismatch of factory and custom modules. Jax was in the pilot’s seat, wrestling with a harness that refused to budge.

“Let’s get this over with,” Jazmyn said, snapping her own harness shut. Her respirator pack dug into the stiff gel of the seat, forcing her spine to an awkward angle. The cockpit felt like a coffin made of surplus military steel.

Thorne’s voice crackled over the wide-band. “Silas, you are cleared for liftoff. Good luck.”

“Going to need that,” Jazmyn said. She looked at Jax. “Don’t make me regret this, ‘Ace.’”

Jax grinned, eyes bright behind the visor. He shoved the throttle forward and the longboat screamed, thrusters fighting the viscous pull of the ether. The ship tore itself free from the weak gravity with a jolt that strained Jazmyn’s teeth against her gums. A geyser of basalt dust erupted from the pad, swallowing the ruined base camp in a blinding swirl of grey. Jazmyn clamped her hands over the restraints as G-force shoved her deep into the gel. A hot, static itch flared at her cybernetic interface, the phantom of a lost limb protesting the jagged acceleration.

Jazmyn thought back to the weeks when they had formed the Stardust Drifter’s crew. If Jax had simply raised his hand then, Glitch never would have stepped aboard. But then, flying through the vacuum was a different brand of suicide than maneuvering through this soup. Glitch was an ether-magician who sensed gravity wells by feel, while Jax flew as if he intended to punch the asteroid.

Jax shouted over the roar of thrusters, “Railgun’s got enough juice to make that bugger regret ever hatching.” The excitement in his voice grated, but Jazmyn held her tongue.

Pixel’s fingers flew across a holographic display as he tapped a series of commands into his data pad. “Patching the barge’s sensors into the nav-feed,” he muttered, voice strained. “Visibility’s zero. We’re flying blind without those sensors, Boss.”

Below, eight crimson lights moved across the basalt with mechanical precision. The Mark Is lumbered through the dust, each footfall sending a low-frequency tremor through the planet’s crust. Even from this altitude, their optical sensors glowed like dying embers in the haze.

Eight million credits worth of bait. The thought left a copper taste in Jazmyn’s mouth. This mission had long since ceased being a payday, devolving instead into an expensive way to die.

The longboat carved through the suffocating haze while sensors shrieked in a sudden, jagged spike. A colossal mass materialized from the grey, shedding shadows like molting skin. Air left the cockpit in a collective gasp, raw and involuntary.

Pixel whispered a single prayer to the void.

A nightmare outgrown its skin perched atop the boxy remains of a deep void antenna tower. It dwarfed every Siren they had faced, its chitinous shell shifting with an oily luster under the ether’s luminescence. Faint turquoise patterns traced the creature’s flanks like constellations of rot while four spindly legs anchored it to the wreckage, pinning the structure down like a spider at the center of a web.

“That’s not a Siren,” Jax said, his grin fading into a hard, professional line. “That’s the whole damn hive.”

“It’s sitting right on the pods,” Pixel noted, his voice trembling. “If we miss the shot by a meter, we’re vaporizing the survivors along with it.”

Jazmyn’s fingers dug into the console as she leaned in, the metal biting through her gloves. “Jax doesn’t miss.” She glared at the monitors, her voice dropping to a tactical rasp. “Paint the target for the RECs, let the bait draw the heat. Then we pin it for the big guns.”

The ether boiled below the leviathan. Dozens of grotesque shapes circled the tower base, their collective chitin scrape sending a low-frequency thrum through the longboat hull that settled in Jazmyn’s marrow.

Then the mist ruptured.

The Siren swarm surged upward while plasma fire erupted from the RECs, searing white beams that cauterized the haze. Railgun slugs tore through the lead wave as kinetic impacts shattered chitin into shrapnel. The RECs operated with high-tier efficiency, carving a path of viscera through the swarm, but the large one didn’t budge, observing the carnage with its unmoving, beady eyes.

“It’s not letting go of the tower,” Jazmyn barked. “Jax, tag the knee joints.”

“Watch me work, Boss.” Jax’s grin was gone, replaced by a predatory, thousand-yard stare. He wrestled the controls, fighting the longboat’s drag. “Ground team! Clear the base! That motherbugger is going down!”

The railgun bucked against Jax’s grip, kicking a streak of super-accelerated tungsten through the grey. The projectile sliced through two of the leviathan’s primary joints with surgical precision. A sudden burst of RF interference tore through the audio feed, the high-pitched scream triggering a sharp sting behind Jazmyn’s eyes.

The monster lost its grip, dragging its bulk down the tower as the internal struts buckled and groaned under the weight. The behemoth slammed into the surface, sending a shockwave through the chassis that rattled Jazmyn’s teeth. A wall of dust erupted a hundred meters high, choking the horizon in a choking shroud of grit.

“Ground team, ball’s in your court!” Jazmyn yelled.

Two RECs surged toward the fallen god, plasma bolts lashing out in blinding bursts. The leviathan recoiled, its bioluminescent skin strobing in panicked rhythms as a third REC stitched hypervelocity rounds across its joints.

The creature lashed back. Razor-claws sheared through a drone’s shoulder joint, spraying hydraulic fluid and sparks into the fog. As the first machine collapsed, another charged forward, optical sensors burning red with programmed defiance.

The monster lunged and clamped its mandibles onto the drone’s torso. The REC continued firing, shoving its plasma cannon into the leviathan’s open maw and unloading until the feedback overloaded its processors.

“Damn,” Jax breathed. “Deveron’s ghosts... they don’t know how to quit.”

“They’re prideful idiots,” Jazmyn snapped. “Pixel, get them moving!”

Pixel’s fingers blurred across the comms controls. “REC operators! Move that cockroach now or I’ll let the barge’s cannon target you!”

The remaining RECs kited the behemoth in a disciplined retreat, drawing the leaking creature toward the kill zone while armor plating tore away in molten chunks. They held the line.

“Target bracket... snapping green,” Pixel whispered.

“Target acquired,” Thorne’s voice boomed through the longboat, heavy with the grim satisfaction of a man who finally had something to kill. “Stand by.”

“Locked and loaded!” Glitch’s reply crackled from the Peregrine, the edge of a manic grin audible in his voice. “Let’s light this fire up.”

Jax jammed the flight controls hard, yanking the craft skyward while G-forces crushed Jazmyn into her seat. “RECs, clear out!” he bellowed. “Coming hot!”

“Fire!” Thorne ordered.

The sky shattered with the birth of a new sun.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 18: The Resurrection Protocol

A collective curse filled the bridge, a short-wave burst of shared misery that crackled in their headsets.

“So much for an easy payday,” Jazmyn groaned. The pods were deep in the soup, nestled well beyond the barge’s defensive umbrella and the Peregrine’s expensive fire-arcs.

“Did that REC pilot haul them all the way out there?” Jax growled, his hands tight on the console rail. “Even in point-zero-five G, that’s a hell of a lot of mass to drag through the silt.”

“If he wanted them dead he could have vented the seals,” Pixel whispered, his voice hoarse from the dry respirator air. “Why move them?”

The scanner thrummed, a low resonance that rattled the deck plates and ground up through their boots. A biological signature bloated across the tactical map, rooted over the target coordinates. It outgrew every Siren Jazmyn had encountered in all her years salvaging the void, though that said little, since every beast on this rock weighed more than what stalked the jump routes. The thing on the holo screen, however, looked like a mountain of chitin with jaws that could crack a shuttle.

“What the hell is that?” She cursed, leaning in to get a better look.

Jax tried to boost the sensor output, but the image remained a jumble of wireframes over a sonar blur. “Something big enough to have its own zip code. And it’s sitting right on top of of the missing expedition members.”

Jazmyn clamped her hand around the metal bolted to her left shoulder. “Don’t suppose Deveron will be okay with us not going out there?”

Torvin moved closer, his bulk crowding her in front of the console. “If my Pa was out there? I wouldn’t.”

“And we shouldn’t, either,” Jax said, his hand clamping around the gauss rifle at his side. “That’s people out there. The least we can do is check.”

Jazmyn chewed her lip, her mind going in circles calculating the survival chances of a five kilometer trek through the fog just to take a peek underneath whatever squatted on top of her payday. The math was brutal, and not just for her crew. This long in the ether meant survival odds as thin as an untethered EVA. A scattering of smaller blips bloomed across the display, pinwheeling inward around the central mass until the sensors could no longer tell each signature apart. She sucked on her respirator, filling her lungs with recycled air until the tremors in her hands died out.

“Commander Thorne,” she finally said into the command link, “please, come up to the bridge. We’ve got a situation.”

Thorne arrived minutes later, his spine snapped into military rigidity as his mag boots sloshed though the through puddles of iridescent sludge. Lyra Kade followed in his wake. She paused at the stairwell and angled her datapad toward the inert REC, logging the damage with the detached precision of someone cataloging a car crash.

Jazmyn stood aside and let the holo-screens deliver the verdict. Without the turret report, the silence felt wrong, hollow. As if her audio had given out in the middle of a firefight.

“Can we get a target lock with the forward array?” Thorne finally asked.

“We are in range, but the basalt is ghosting the signal,” Lyra Kade said, her voice clinical. “We’d need a signal proxy.”

“Hey, no,” Jax grabbed Thorne by the shoulder. “If you start firing the main barrel, you’ll vaporize the pods and whoever is in them.”

Thorne brushed off his grip without looking at him. “I don’t remember asking for your input, merc. Your employer no longer holds my ship hostage. As far as I am concerned, your involvement in this mission is done.”

Jazmyn’s hand twitched at her side, a suppressed urge to smack both Jax and Thorne over the helmeted head. “That’d be music to our ears, Commander, but you understand that we’d need to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” She stepped around the navigation station, pressing the hail button on the comms console.

The channel hissed with static, then Glitch’s voice crackled back, vibrating with cold adrenaline. “Uh... Peregrine here. Go ahead.”

“I’d like a clarification from Miss Vanguard if she is near you,” Jazmyn said, keeping her voice flat. “Commander Thorne, says—”

“Commander Thorne!” The voice that cut through was undeniably Siora Vanguard—cold, sharp, and loud enough to make the bridge speakers rattle. “If you have time to argue with my employees, you have time to explain how your hand-picked security detail turned your bridge into a slaughterhouse. I just watched your men shoot at my fiance! They nearly killed him, Thorne!”

Thorne’s spine buckled under the assault. “Ms. Vanguard,” he began, his voice having lost two octaves. “The deep void comes with unforeseen variables. The whispers can crack—”

“Save your excuses for the board, Thorne!” Siora snapped. “Grandfather put you in command of this mission. Clearly, a catastrophic miscalculation. This will be investigated. Thoroughly.”

Thorne’s eyes darted behind his visor, as his mouth clamped shut. The silence stretched tight as a drumhead, and even the slime on the bulkheads throbbed in time with the too-quick hiss of his respirator.

Jazmyn cleared her throat, forcing down her grin. “Still going to need that clarification, because there are several bio-pods missing from the barge, and according to the long-range sensors, they are all the way over there.” She swiped across the console, sending the scanner data to the Peregrine.

“On top of the tether,” Lyra Kade said.

“And under a big Siren,” Pixel added.

“We could use some ideas,” Jazmyn concluded.

“Excuse me,” Kaelen Rix’s came through, his tone detached and professional. “How many REC operators did you secure at the barge? I am positive that I can bring the Mark I units in the hold online.”

Lyra Kade leaned in to the comms console. “Mr. Rix, these people are in a bad shape. Waking them from stasis is not a great idea.”

“Nonsense,” Rix said, a note of corporate enthusiasm returning to his voice. “That’s their fellow division members over there, and a live test in a high-threat environment would provide excellent data.”

“These people are scientists, not troopers, Rix,” Lyra Kade hissed. “We cannot send them out on their own.”

“Then we won’t.” Jax jabbed a finger toward the viewport, where a longboat sat in the middle of piled-up chitin. “I flew those birds in the Second Expansion Conflict. Get her airborne, and I’ll give your RECs all the support and guidance they need.”

A rush of adrenaline sent a cold shower down Jazmyn’s back. Her hand twitched with the urge to clamp the petal palm over Jax’s mouth. “What he means is that we are able to provide long-range support. From a long-long range.”

Thorne rubbed his hand over his visor, looking like he’d aged ten years in ten minutes. “Enough. Rix, what do you need to get the proxies going?”

“Let’s start with an escort from the Peregrine to the barge,” Rix’s voice crackled in the channel. “I don’t care to walk through the fog alone.”

Jazmyn locked her teeth and stared hard at Jax’s helmet. “My team will pick you up,” she told Rix through the static. “I need some damn air.”

She shoved Torvin in the ribs and jerked her head to signal him to move, already speed-walking for the cargo hold, boots clicking sharp against metal. Neril’s dead REC sat in the path, bio-luminescent slime eating into its matte-white casing. Jazmyn hesitated, then almost tumbled down the steps, as Jax collided with her back.

“Sorry, Jazzy,” Jax said, catching her arm. “Didn’t expect a traffic jam.”

“Don’t follow me, Jax,” she snapped. “Take Pixel to get the longboat online, but get out of my face.”

“Pixel’s got four squads of Thorne’s best around him,” Jax countered. “I’m with you.”

Jazmyn rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She hurried ahead.

“Are you two fighting?” Torvin followed them, balancing his heavy slug-thrower on his shoulder like a fallen log.

“No,” they shot back in unison.

They skirted the main hold, its airlock jammed by Sirens and torn polymer sheeting. Jazmyn’s boots slapped through slime in the secondary hold, leaving wet prints on the overgrown grating. Outside the barge, alien entrails slicked the ground between mounds of broken chitin, as something iridescent pooled like machine oil under the floodlights.

“Why, Jax?” Jazmyn muttered over the crew-only channel as the energy fence flickered open to let them through. “You could have offered without volunteering your CV.”

“Jaz, it’s been years,” Jax replied, the barrel of his rifle sweeping the fog. “Who’s still holding a grudge?”

“I know you do,” Jazmyn said, drawing her heavy pistol and slamming a fresh mag home until the mechanical clack cut through the grey. “We have one rule for working with AD: do not remind the people with the checkbook you used to shoot at them.”

“Don’t sweat it, Boss,” Torvin said, his tone heavy with the pragmatism of a man who’d seen empires fall. “The way these Outer Rim corps recruit, half their grunts are ex-UEAF. Y’all are just cousins in the mud.”

Jazmyn kicked a loose rock. It scudded into the gloom, the solid thump echoing back through the dense gas like a heartbeat. “There’s a difference,” she snapped, “between a random-ass grunt and having flown close-air-support against ships with their logo. You don’t know how many hardliners are in Thorne’s collection of trigger-happy idiots.”

Torvin huffed into the comms. “That’s why we agreed that Boss does the talking, Jax.”

The trek between the barge and the Peregrine stretched into a grind. Ether boiled around them, thick as tar, slashing their vision in suffocating bursts. They weren’t alone, she knew because the whispers scratched at the base of her skull again, but whatever moved out there kept its distance.

The Peregrine’s ramp loomed through the haze, a tongue of yellow light tasting the grey soup. Kaelen Rix waited there, silhouetted against the internal glow, with one of the troopers and Doc Riley at his side.

Jazmyn surged forward, her boots clanging on the metal of the ramp. “Riley? You alright?”

“I’m... fine,” Riley said. Her voice ran like a thin wire pulled almost to the snap point. She reached for professional distance while a tremor moved through the syllables, betraying her.

Jazmyn gripped Riley’s shoulder, the haptic sensors in her suit relaying the tension in the doctor’s frame. “If those bastards were’t dead already, I’d make sure they were.”

Riley nodded, her eyes grim behind the visor. “Anya and the Vanguard girl have things under control inside. I’m going to check the pods before Rix starts bolting high-voltage leads into them.”

“Let’s get a move on. We shouldn’t stand out here while Sirens prowl,” Rix cut in, his voice sharp with the impatience of a man whose time is billed by the second.

Jazmyn didn’t give him the satisfaction of a glance. “Form up!” she barked.

The return to the barge retraced their first path, only heavier now. The trooper heaved Rix’s equipment crate while Torvin snatched Riley’s med-kit, leaving the soldier to stumble through dust and broken rock. Ether smeared their visors and collapsed the world into a claustrophobic haze until their boots crossed the camp’s perimeter fence and entered the bubble of light and movement again.

Rix wasted no time. Inside the hold, the sparks from his arc welder singed the glowing slime as he bypassed safety limiters and snapped new data lines into the Mark I frames. Jazmyn held the pod chamber with Riley, as the medic pumped stim cocktails into life-support lines, pulling the surviving crew out of their stasis.

One by one the salvaged RECs woke. Eight pairs of crimson optics cycled their boot sequences, burning like dying embers in a dim hold. Synthetic voices scraped over the comms, distorted and disoriented with long-sleep psychosis, until every sensor locked onto Thorne and his charcoal-black void suit flared under crimson light.

“This is a classified VRD research site. Identify yourself immediately.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

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Chapter 17: Convergence Point

Before Jazmyn could cut through the shock, Thorne’s voice boomed over the command frequency with the kind of calm that only comes to men who have already factored the casualty rate. “Vanguard. Bring those PDCs online and keep them hot. Silas, report! Status on the barge?”

Jazmyn’s jaw clamped shut so hard her teeth ached. “Barge weapons are holding, Commander,” she bit out. “But your security detail just executed your pilot and tried to lobotomize my employer.”

Thorne didn’t even pause. He was already barking at his remaining boots on the ground. “Stone, Vance, secure that breach! Kade, overwatch! We’ve got incoming!”

“Shit.” Jax rose in his seat, pointing through the viewport. “Ten o’clock! The pylon just went dark!”

Outside, the reconstructed energy fence flared a brilliant, dying violet. A Siren with a head like a slab of scarred obsidian rammed the pylon with the force of a falling moon. The field shrieked, sputtered, and vanished, plunging the landing zone into a strobe-light nightmare of muzzle flashes and orange tracers.

Something slammed into the barge’s landing gear below with a bone-jarring thrum that vibrated through the floor plates.

“They’re under us!” Pixel yelled, his hands flying over the flashing controls of the XO’s console. “Airlock sensors are red-lining! That emergency patch we threw up won’t hold!”

Jazmyn didn’t hesitate. She grabbed Pixel by the shoulder and shoved him into her seat. “Take over! Keep the 30mms walking the line. If a Siren looks at the Peregrine, delete it.”

“Where are you going?” Pixel’s eyes were wide behind his visor.

“Downstairs,” Jazmyn snarled, grabbing her auto-pistol. “Torvin! With me!”

He didn’t need a second cue. The big man racked the bolt on his slugthrower and fixed his face into a grin made of teeth with no humor. They dropped into the stairwell, boots hammering metal as they passed the dead REC collapsed in a pile of black lenses and white polymer.

At the bottom, the cargo hold looked like a broken machine. The thick sheet of polymer they’d stuffed into the airlock bulged inward as the ether pressure fought the barge’s atmosphere and the translucent plastic warped. Beyond it, shadows shifted, claws scraping along the hull in a sound like a hundred knives dragged over metal.

The survivors were still strapped where they’d left them, vibrating in time with the ship’s low hum. One of them—the man Pixel had tagged as fake Parker—stared at the straining airlock with wide, milky-white eyes that took in everything and said nothing.

“Pixel! Cycle the interior section seals! Now!” Jazmyn roared into the comms.

“Trying! The logic gates are jammed with gunk!”

“Try faster!”

A claw long and jagged as a bayonet tore through the center of the polymer patch. The hold’s air rushed out with an angry hiss, making way for ether to pour. It spewed into the hold, roiling around her boots in iridescent, oily wisps.

“Seal’s gone!” Torvin barked, digging his boots into the crate.

Jazmyn hit not-Parker like dead weight, his chest already locking up as the toxic drifts scalded his lungs from the inside. The bulkhead let out a low groan, the compartment wall descending from the ceiling.

“Go!” She caught Parker by the collar and drove her cybernetic forearm down into torque, slamming him through the shrinking gap. He skidded across the deck, boots digging jagged furrows into the growth. Behind him the bulkhead slammed shut, one loud, final report that vibrated in her ribs.

The others hadn’t made it. Already on their knees they clawed at their throats as ether flooded the hold, screams dissolving into wet gurgles. Jazmyn kept her face forward. She wouldn’t look back.

The polymer sheet tore free, the airlock opened like a black mouth, and the Sirens pushed in.

“Chokepoint!” Jazmyn jerked a finger at the hatch’s narrow neck.

Torvin slid into the gap, his bulk swallowing the corridor. No aiming—just fire. The slugthrower barked in rhythmic, bone-jarring volleys, flooding the hold with cordite bite and alien gunk.

“Keep ‘em coming, you bastards!” he roared.

The first Siren was shredded before its legs found purchase. The second stumbled over the husk of the first. Jazmyn held Torvin’s flank, her auto-pistol laying down tight, measured bursts into beady eyes and gaping maws.

“Torvin, the explosives! Plug the hole!”

Torvin grabbed a satchel of charges from his belt and shoved them into the airlock’s choking mass of Sirens rather than at the plasteel hull itself.

“Cover your ears, Boss!”

The blast was tight, controlled. It sealed the hatchway instead of cracking the hull, turning six Sirens into a steaming smear of chitin and flesh, then baking that slurry into a solid, organic plug.

The shrieking beyond shifted—not the cry of a hunt, but a shrill, angry warble.

The river had run into a dam.

Torvin braced against the bulkhead, respirator huffing. He studied the wall of dead in the airlock, then thumped his smoking slugthrower. “Built to last,” he said, his voice rough. “Even without a corpo stamp of approval.”

Outside, the shrieking of the swarm began to thin, the depleted tungsten driving the living tide back into the black throats of the cliffs. The barge’s heavy turrets lanced the lingering fog, picking off stragglers with a rhythmic thump-hiss. Soon, the only sound in the ether-flooded hold was the low, industrial thrum of the barge’s reactors and the heavy, wet whirr of Jazmyn’s respirator.

The hold was a graveyard of yellow-green miasma and shredded chitin. Jazmyn’s boots crunched on a severed Siren limb, the iridescent fluid splashing against her shins. Every breath through the respirator was a mechanical struggle, the filters laboring against the concentrated ether.

“New seal. Now,” Jazmyn ordered, her voice a metallic rasp over the comms.

Torvin didn’t argue. He grabbed a fresh roll of heavy-duty plasteel sheeting from the emergency locker, his movements sluggish in the thick fog. Together, they stretched the membrane over the mangled airlock hatch, pinning it down with magnetic clamps. It was a jagged, ugly fix, but the hiss of escaping air finally tapered off to a low whistle.

“Interior scrubbers at max, Pixel!” Jazmyn barked. “Get this soup out of here so we can crack the bulkhead.”

“Initiating purge,” Pixel’s voice crackled. “You guys okay down there? Jax is about to rip the console out of the floor.”

“Tell Jax to keep his hands on the triggers,” Jazmyn said, wiping a glob of alien gore from her visor. She looked at the bodies of the survivors who hadn’t made it through the door—now just silent heaps in the fog. “We’re functional. Barely.”

The bulkhead cycled open with a hiss of sterilized air. Jazmyn and Torvin stepped into the pressurized zone, the decontamination mist spraying them down in a cold, chemical cloud. She leaned against the vibrating wall, watching the slime wash off her boots in oily streaks.

“Jazzy, what happened down there?” Jax’s voice came in on her private link. There was a tremor in it, all bravado gone. “That blast sounded like the hull gave out.”

“The hull is fine, Jax. The airlock is a mess, but we’re sealed,” she replied on the group channel, not waiting for his relief. “Focus. I need the long-range sensors and the comms array at one hundred percent. Find out if the Peregrine is still in one piece.”

“Working on it,” Pixel chirped, though the stress was starting to fray his edges. “The interference from the basalt is mangling the signal, but I’m turning the fore sensors toward the landing spot. Give me a second...”

Static roared, then thinned. Finally, a signal punched through—cleaner this time.

“Boss? Boss, you there?” Glitch’s voice was thin, the manic energy replaced by a hollow, shaking fatigue.

“I’m here, Glitch. Give me the damage report.”

“Riley and me... we’re alright.” A shaky breath hitched in his throat. “But this was weird. The whole ship shook, as if something heavy walked past us. Then Jansen just opened fire. He shot Eva. She’s... she’s gone. Right there in the corridor.”

Jazmyn felt the air leave her lungs. Eva Rostova. The Peregrine’s pilot was dead because of a corporate glitch. “And the others?”

“Anya took a stray. She’s alive, patching her own damn wound. And Deveron...” Glitch paused, the sound of sparking electronics audible in the background. “His chrome is fried. We had to pull him out of the pod. He’s... he’s a mess.”

“Is he breathing?” Jazmyn demanded, her eyes narrowing as she looked toward the darkened bridge stairs.

“Yeah,” Glitch replied. “Half his neurals are hanging out of his skull, but Rix is shoving them back in like he’s packing for the holidays. He’s out cold, but his vitals are stabilizing.”

“And Vanguard?”

“The lady?” Glitch let out a short, jagged laugh. “She’s standing over the bodies of the mutineers like she’s counting inventory. I’ve never seen a look like that, Boss. She’s calculating whose heads should roll for the bill.”

Jazmyn released a slow, low breath, the tightness in her shoulders easing. She glanced at Torvin, busy picking a shard of Siren chitin from his boot tread. “Deveron’s alive,” she said, more to herself than him.

“Good for him,” Torvin rumbled. “Means we might still get a paycheck.”

“Means more than that,” Jazmyn replied, her focus sharpening as Siora’s position on the bridge took shape in her mind. “If the primary asset still draws breath, the failure isn’t complete. Then it won’t be our heads on the block.”

She turned back to the stairs, the UEAF training taking over. “Pixel! Forget the hull integrity. I want those sensors locked onto the edge of the basalt plateau. Glitch said something big moved past them. I want to know exactly where it went.”

Jazmyn reached the bridge and threw herself into the crash couch. The acceleration gel yielded with a wet, heavy sigh, absorbing her weight. In the asteroid’s negligible gravity, the gel was more about comfort than protection, but after the hold, she needed the anchor. Outside, the ether had settled into a stagnant, bioluminescent soup, though the telemetry on her HUD remained a frantic twitch of red icons.

Torvin stood by the master environmental board, dragging a gloved hand over the shroud of his slugthrower. “Now, this is the kind of action a man heads into the deep for,” he rumbled. “Reminds me of my last tour through the Junkyard bars. Brawling my way up the ladder, one cracked skull at a time.”

“You got kicked out of the last bar for dismantling a table that still held a guy’s head,” Pixel snorted. Wedged beneath the sensor console, his face flickered in the harsh rhythmic pulse of the data pad. A translucent fiber optic lead ran from the device to a cracked access panel and fed straight into the barge’s internal net.

“Don’t get suckered into corporate work after this.” Jazmyn fixed her gaze on a dark patch in the fog, where something sickly turquoise pulsed in time with her heartbeat. “High-velocity gigs are just the thin slice of meat in the longest, dullest stand-and-salute sandwich around.”

“Most spacers prefer the chill life,” Jax added, his hands hovering over the PDC overrides. “Problem is, getting out of a mega-corp contract is like trying to EVA without a tether. The math just doesn’t work in your favor.”

A series of sharp, metallic pings cut the chatter. Fresh icons bloomed across the main tactical screen—no longer the fuzzy ghosts of short-range scans, but high-contrast, jagged wireframes. The barge’s massive sensor array was now slaving to Pixel’s local overrides, locking on with cold precision.

Pixel scrambled out from under the console, a grin splitting his face. “Long-range is hot. The sirens already know we’re here, so we can stop playing ninja. I’m microwaving the soup.”

Jax squinted at the display, his brow tightening. “That’s Thorne’s classified assets near that cliff face.” He flicked a gloved finger toward a cluster of boxy, pulsing signatures hugging a basalt ridge.

“Why are they flashing?” Jazmyn asked.

Pixel’s fingers slid over the haptic controls, filtering out the atmospheric noise. “It’s not the hardware—those are tracking pings. The missing bio-pods, all of them, clustered right on top of AD’s gear.”

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 16: The Signal and the Noise

The background chatter from the base camp comms still crackled through the line, when a priority comms ping strobed red across Jazmyn’s vision. Kaelen Rix’s voice came through, tight with the tone you get when a shuttle is late and someone’s paying for it.

“Ms. Silas, apologies for the direct line. Neril isn’t responding to pings.”

Jazmyn wiped a smear of green slime from her forearm. She threw a final look at the closed cargo ramp. “This is a bad time, Rix. We’re knee-deep in a graveyard, and the sensors are picking up movement outside.”

The corpo engineer didn’t even pause. His tone flattened into the smooth indifference of a man who viewed people as assets. “Miss Silas, AHG only sanctioned my assistance to this entire thing to verify Neril’s debrief regarding the Mark I failures. Have you located any crates with our logo in there?”

“Fine, Rix, I’ll look.” Jazmyn toggled her helmet’s external feed, transmitting the chaos around her—the pulsating slime, the scorched bulkheads, and the ruin of the industrial REC sprawled out on the overgrown deck. “Here’s one, though Torvin’s turned it into a paperweight.”

“Paperweight?” Rix’s voice hitched. “That chassis is a million-credit asset, Miss Silas!”

“It tried to weld our heads to the deck.” Jazmyn stepped over a pile of slagged equipment, her boots making a wet, sucking sound against the growth. “It lost its asset status the second it swung on us.”

A long silence followed. Jazmyn could almost hear Rix’s brain recalculating the ROI. When he spoke again, the enthusiasm was gone. “Find the ones that haven’t been activated. I have two dozen units back at Anvil waiting for deployment, and this is wrecking my KPIs.”

Jazmyn rolled her eyes, her breath echoing dryly in her helmet. She angled her lamp onto a stack of sealed crates marked with the AHG chevron. “Found them. Serial numbers are stencilled on the housing. Stand by.”

As she read the alphanumeric strings, Rix’s link flickered on her HUD. He cut to the group channel. “Whoever is on the barge bridge, give me remote access. I need the telemetry logs for those crates.”

“Kinda busy,” Pixel’s voice came through, accompanied by the frantic, rhythmic tapping of a physical override. “The subnets are fragmented. I can give you a local node, but if you want the whole grid, I’ll have to crawl through the conduits and reset the proxies by hand.”

“Just give me the node,” Rix snapped.

Jazmyn’s hand jerked at her side, servos whining like a trapped animal. A vision flickered behind her eyelids: plasteel fingers curling tight around the corpo’s throat, crushing bone while the man tried to speak. She killed the feed and started for the bridge, each step thudding against the deck. Her mother had often dragged her through grainy monster flicks back at Sector 7. This was the same plot. The thing that walks out of the lab turns on the man who built it.

“Kaelen,” Neril’s voice broke into the channel. It was thin, vibrating with a high-frequency distortion that made Jazmyn’s teeth ache.

“What now, Neril? I’m in the middle of—”

“Does the chassis you gave me have sub-wave capable sensors?” Neril’s words were clipped, forced out through a throat that sounded like it was made of grinding glass.

Jazmyn locked her stance, eyes fixed on the REC in the center of the bio-bay, three meters out. The unit’s posture shifted—no longer fluid, now rigid. It vibrated, matte-white limbs humming under a low-frequency tremor that crawled up the floor grating into her calves.

“No,” Rix said, sounding confused. “That’s navigation array technology. Why?”

“Because I hear them,” Neril rasped. On Jazmyn’s HUD, the REC’s comms status began to flicker, as its signal frayed. “I hear them moving toward me… through the deck plates… through the stone… Kaelen. I can’t… I can’t tell which side of the hull they’re on.”

“Neril, stay calm,” Rix’s voice rose an octave. “I’ll adjust your—”

“Shut up!” Neril screamed, the sound distorting into a digital screech that nearly blew out Jazmyn’s suit speakers. The REC’s head snapped toward the ceiling, its blue sensors flashing a panicked violet. “They’re coming! Warn the crew! Now!”

Jazmyn didn’t wait for Rix to pull his head out of his ass. She sped up her stride toward the bridge, patching through to Thorne as she moved. “Thorne, we have another situation in the making. Deveron says something is coming for the Peregrine—”

Thorne’s voice was a jagged mess of static. “—can’t spare any resources for the Peregrine right now, Silas! The detachment on board will have to handle it! We’ve got shadows on the perimeter here! What’s the status of those PDCs?”

Jazmyn spat a curse. “Jax and Pixel are on it!”

She sprinted for the bridge stairwell as Neril’s REC seized. Liquid motion locked into a violent shudder, the buffer cooking as feedback roared through the frame. The unit slammed against the bulkhead with a metallic thud and pitched sideways. Blue optics flickered red, then died. Its knee servos gave, and it fell in a clattering heap down the slime-slick steps, luminescent puffs of amber spores rising where it scraped the gunk.

Jazmyn didn’t stop to pick it up. Neril was blind, Thorne was busy, and the swarm was hitting them from two directions at once. She vaulted the last three steps and dove into the stained seat of the starboard weapons control console.

The console flared to life, a tactical display of red icons blooming across the cave mouths like a spreading virus.

“Pixel! Tell me you got the guns working!” Jazmyn roared, her fingers dancing over the fire-control glass.

“PDCs are hot! Slaving the tracking to your HUD now!”

The barge groaned as the heavy turret motors shrieked into motion. On Jazmyn’s display, the world turned into a geometric slaughterhouse. She didn’t wait for the auto-lock. She grabbed the manual overrides and squeezed.

The 30mm cannons hammered the hull with a bone-jarring, rhythmic thud-thud-thud. Outside the viewport, high-velocity tungsten shredded the fog. The first wave of chitinous limbs erupted into a grey, misty spray as the shells chewed through the swarm’s leading edge.

“Contact! Four o’clock!” Jax’s voice was a calm professional anchor over the roar of the guns. “Walk the fire toward the cliff face. We’ll trap them in the choke!”

Jazmyn swung the reticle. The haptic feedback in her gloves fought her, vibrating with the recoil of a god. She walked a line of tracers across the stone, the explosive rounds turning the cave mouth into a furnace of orange fire and shattering rock. The shrieking of the Sirens was drowned out by the mechanical thunder of the barge reclaiming the perimeter.

“Peregrine, pick up!” Jazmyn bit out into her comm, eyes locked on a cluster of shadows skittering beyond her line. The fog between the base camp and the landing site churned with movement, but the heavy scout remained silent, their weapons cold. “Report status.”

She triggered a sustained burst, the tracers stitching a burning line across the dark. The swarm buckled, the living tide receding back into the black throats of the cliffs under the relentless pressure of the PDCs.

Then, the comms cracked with a breath that sounded as if it was right next to her ear. Jazmyn pulled down her comms controls with a glare across her HUD. Glitch’s comms ID flickered with an open transmission.

“Glitch? You’ve got Sirens coming up under your ass. Seal the ramp and get the PDCs going over there, man!”

Static hissed back—a rhythmic, empty sound. Then, the channel cracked open again. It wasn’t the sound of a ship at combat stations. It was the sound of a man hiding.

Glitch’s breath came in jagged, stuttering hitches. “Boss… Boss, they’re—” A wet, shivering gasp. “Thorne’s detail. They’ve gone tactical. They are taking back the ship.”

“Glitch, listen to me,” Jazmyn said, her voice dropping into the low, flat tone of an NCO holding a line. “Where are you?”

“Med-bay corridor,” Glitch whispered. The sound of a magnetic boot-sole clanged against the deck plates, far too close to his mic. “Eva’s out here with me. She’s... she’s trying to talk them down. Riley and Anya are locked inside with the bio-pod. The troopers have a thermal cutter.”

“Move away from the door, Rostova!” a muffled voice barked through Glitch’s feed. It was one of Thorne’s corporals. “That bastard’s got void madness. He slammed my team into a bulkhead like flies. If we don’t cut him off now, we won’t get another chance.”

“How the hell do you plan to get back without a navigator?” Eva’s voice was a sharp, desperate shield. “We are hundreds of lightyears from the closest nav-net node!”

“Last warning, Rostova.”

The double-crack of a service pistol ripped through the comms. Two sharp, dry snaps. A soft exhale followed, the final breath leaving a pair of lungs. Then, the thud of a body hitting the deck.

“Eva!” Glitch’s stuttering breath turned into a sob. “You shot her! You son of a—”

A boot hit the door. The screech of protesting metal followed as the thermal cutter bit into the seals. Jazmyn reached the bridge viewport, her eyes fixed on the cave mouths erupting with chitinous limbs, but her mind was in the Peregrine’s med-bay.

“Drag the scrapper bitch out!” the corporal yelled. “Clear the line!”

“No! Stop!” Riley’s scream ended in a dull, metallic crash.

Then came the report of a carbine opening up. Short, controlled bursts, then the crackle and hiss of the delicate, fluid-cooled fiber-optic bundles hooked into Neril’s pod. On Jazmyn’s HUD, the REC’s status dropped. The android in the stairwell was no longer the extension of a person, just a cold heap of scrap.

“Perimeter clear!” the corporal barked, his pitch sharp with adrenaline and victory. “We severed the—”

The audio loop cut his words short with the rhythmic thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed fire. Three shots. Surgical. Cold. Three heavy thuds hit the deck in rapid succession.

The silence that followed lasted five long seconds. Then, a new signal sliced through the white noise. It was a voice Jazmyn recognized—precise, authoritative, and utterly devoid of the panic that had just murdered Thorne’s men.

“Ground team, this is Siora Vanguard. I have the bridge. The mutineers are neutralized and the ramp is sealed.”

A momentary pause followed, punctuated by the melodic, high-frequency chime of a console confirming a high-priority override.

“Bypassing the command lockout to bring the weapon systems online now.”

The channel clicked shut. No status check. No orders. Just the clinical announcement of a coup that was already done.

Jazmyn’s hand froze around the PDC toggle. The white-out boiled outside the viewport, but her muscles lagged behind. Siora Vanguard. Neril’s fiancée. The woman who was supposed to be back at Meridian Station was now standing on the bridge of the only ship that could get them off this rock.

“Vanguard?” Jazmyn’s voice rattled in her throat. “What are you doing on Thorne’s ship?”

“Securing my interests, Ms. Silas,” Siora replied. The mechanical snick of a fresh magazine seating echoed clearly. “We will discuss the logistics of my presence once the perimeter is clear of Sirens. Vanguard out.”

The bridge of the barge felt too large, the stream of recycled air in her respirator too thin for her screaming lungs. The active comms indicators still blinked in the corner of her HUD. Siora Vanguard. The last time she’d seen the Aether Dynamics heiress, the girl was crying because of a talking-to from her grandfather. Jazmyn had told her she’d take her man if the girl didn’t woman up.

Now she sounded like a shark in a kill ring, coming for her cut of the wreckage.

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The Salvage Diaries: Whispers

[Start Here] - [Chapter Index]

Chapter 15: The Bio-Pod Housing

They ascended the narrow stairwell between the cargo hold and habitable decks—each metal step slick with a yellow-green glaze that pressed like wet fat beneath Jazmyn’s boots. Along the walls, biomass pulsed in slow, peristaltic waves, as if in time with the barge’s failing grid. Her mouth filled with saliva as her hollow stomach twisted in another empty loop. She forced a swallow, jaw locked, fighting the urge to choke up into the respirator.

The crew level was a tactical nightmare. Quarter doors hung at half-mast, their mag-locks sparking in futile attempts to seal. The yellow crust grew over old brown-black stains that mapped out exactly where the crew had bled out. Shattered data-pads, discarded tools, and pathetic remains of personal lives littered the deck.

“This isn’t a breakdown,” Pixel whispered. His scanner beam darted nervously, illuminating deep jagged gouges in the bulkhead. “It’s a war zone.”

“Looks like they turned on each other,” Jazmyn guessed. She swept her helmet lamp inside a ravaged cabin where furniture had been upended and closet doors ripped from their tracks.

“No bodies,” Jax muttered. He kept his pulse rifle at low-ready, boots ringing hollowly on the metal. “A fight this messy should have meat on the floor.”

Jazmyn’s light caught dark, cauterized lines etched deep into the composite wall. A cold fist tightened in her gut as she stepped closer. “Something hot was dragged here. Slow. Deliberate.” Her gloved finger traced a jagged, blackened groove.

Jax adjusted his beam. “The drone in the hold had a heavy industrial welder. You think they used it up here?”

Jazmyn stepped back from the wall as realization hit her. “This wasn’t a riot, Jax. It was a harvest. The REC was cracking open every hiding place one by one.”

“Keep moving,” Neril said. His REC steered away from blood-smeared walls while a tremor glitched through his voice—a transmission error his smooth hydraulic movements didn’t reflect.

They followed the drone into the bio-pod housing, where strobing red emergency lights bathed rows of sleek cylindrical pods lining the walls like upright coffins. The contamination here was advanced. Growth had webbed over pod glass, turning them into translucent cocoons while bio-monitors flickered with jagged unstable telemetry—thready heartbeats and erratic respiration teetering on a flatline.

Half the gantries stood empty, their plasteel supports bent and snapped by brute hydraulic pressure. Cut power cables flung blue sparks across the slime-coated deck, where they hissed and curled into smoke. The missing pods carved a raw, open wound along the ship’s flank. Drag scars scored the floor under a fresh sheen of growth, trailing past a shattered hatch at the section’s far end.

Jax crouched as his light cut a stark beam across the marks. “The growth is spilling over the edges of the tracks. Someone moved these pods before contamination took hold. This was an evacuation or theft.”

“Which popsicle is the one that came out to brawl?” Torvin rumbled. He kept his distance, massive hand clamped around his slugthrower.

A frantic scraping tore their focus to the corner. In a slime-choked pod, a man raked the glass with splintering nails, trying to claw a path straight through. Streaks of red smeared through the gel where his fingertips gouged the seal, while he screamed into the respirator jammed over his face.

Neril wiped the slime off the bio-pod’s lid. A data-jack stuck out of the madman’s skull, strobing with failed uplink attempts. “This should be the one. He’s the only one with active neural uplink.” He pulled up the diagnostic panel, its holo screen damaged by moisture. “Marcus Cole, or rather whoever replaced him.”

“Seems pissed we broke his toy,” Torvin muttered.

“Doesn’t seem to be in the mood for an interrogation, either,” Jazmyn added.

Neril waved Pixel closer. “Scan him, see if you learn anything,” he said, already moving on to the next pod.

“I only have the local database here,” Pixel muttered, pointing his scanner at the pod.

The REC moved methodically down the row, sensors scanning IDs and flickering readouts. It paused at a fully engulfed pod, blue lights lingering on the yellow-green shroud, a silent acknowledgment of the dead before it moved on.

“Dr. Davies. Stable. Specialist Chen. Stable. Lieutenant Reyes… flagging.” The REC recited the names like a prayer, the voice behind it getting weaker with each name he crossed off his mental list. It leaned in, as if to scrutinize the face behind the next glass. “Preston Hayes. Stable, of course. The man probably descended from Proxima cockroaches.”

Jazmyn placed a gloved hand on REC’s metallic shoulder—a spacer’s gesture, small and foolish but grounding. “Are you still holding up, Deveron?”

“My father isn’t here,” Neril replied, the android’s head drooping. “We need to keep looking.”

“Let’s sweep the rest of the ship.” Jazmyn patted his metallic cheek like she would a spacer in the process of losing his spine. “The pod batteries will keep them fresh for a few more hours, right?”

“Vertex Bio-Logic rates their backup batteries for two months,” Neril replied as he stepped away with movements becoming jerky, less fluid. The ice-cool corpo was starting to crack. “Though one is probably more realistic.”

“So, they’ll hold out a couple more hours.” Jazmyn gave him a reassuring nod.

They moved into the auxiliary cargo bay at the stern of barge. The drag marks ran the full length—deep gouges carved into floor grates that terminated at the edge of the locked ramp. Here, the growth was thicker, clinging to Jazmyn’s boots and pulsing across every wall. Spores floated in the stale air whenever her footsteps disturbed the organism, amber fireflies drifting through the dark hold.

The readout of Pixel’s scanner blanked out.

The bio-pods had vanished before the ship’s systems closed the door, but the rot was already inside.

“That explains contamination levels,” Neril said, voice dropping into flat robotic monotone. “The hatch opens directly to exterior. No airlock. The ether rushed in and stimulated the growth.” He paused then whispered, “Damn it.”

Jax traced their footsteps in the slime. “Growth of what, Deveron? What are we wading through?”

The REC shook its head, but Neril still replied after a few seconds. “We found it in the Siren nest. A symbiont of sorts.”

Pixel scooped a glob of slime with shard of broken plating. “Think Riley’d want a sample?”

“This research is proprietary. All of this is.” The REC turned on its heel, striding past them back to the bio-pod housing.

“Drop the goo, Pixel,” Torvin said, dragging him to his feet by his respirator pack. “We can’t afford to touch any of this.”

“Sheesh,” Pixel dropped the shard, wiping his gloves on his suit. “I was just looking.”

Jazmyn keyed main channel, connecting her to the troopers outside. “Thorne, this is Silas. Barge sweep complete. Complicated doesn’t cover it. We’ve got survivors in pods, one DOA, and bunch of missing bio-pods. Drag marks lead straight out the cargo hatch.”

Thorne’s voice came back cold and mechanical. “Acknowledged, Silas. Secure the ship and get its PDCs online. All your noise has drawn attention from the caves.”

“Great.” Jazmyn cursed under her breath. “Pixel, go see about the bridge systems. Torvin, watch that he doesn’t get distracted.”

Jax laughed dryly as techie hurried off with Torvin on his heels. “Having fun being the Captain?”

“Civilians,” Jazmyn huffed. “My old Sergeant would’ve eaten them with a squirt of hot sauce.”

Jax slapped her shoulder, glove heavy against suit. “Well, Corporal Silas,” he said, the old UEAF rank slipping out like a ghost.

Jazmyn’s spine locked, a decade of civilian softness failing to erase the muscle memory of parade rest. The title landed wrong—too sharp for Thorne’s shorthand, too clipped for command. When Thorne used it, rank became a filing slot, a way to clip her into a chain she’d spent years outrunning. From Jax, it read like an acknowledgment that only they knew how to die quietly.

“Don’t call me that in public, Jax,” she muttered, though she didn’t move her shoulder away.

“Not in public here, are we? We’re the only ones here who finished a full tour,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly frequency. “The kids? They see a mystery. You and I? We just see another bad LZ.”

He offered a mock-salute—the lazy, disrespectful kind common among NCOs who had seen too much—and followed Pixel toward the upper decks. Jazmyn watched the way he moved; even in the slime, he kept his center of gravity low, eyes scanning the dead zones of the corridor.

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