The Salvage Diaries: Whispers
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Chapter 11: The Ether Beckons
The launch was a violent, industrial shudder that rattled Jazmyn’s teeth against her skull. The gentle hum of the station’s life gave way to a predatory roar as the Peregrine’s heavy engines clawed at the vacuum. Inertia dampeners systems groaned, struggling to compensate for the sudden acceleration that stole Jazmyn’s breath and pushed her body into the crash cot’s gel by a weight that felt like an iron slab.
On the holo screen across the galley, Meridian Station shrank with terrifying speed. The lights of the docks blurred into a jagged streak before the station became a mere pinprick against the infinite black.
Then came the lurch.
It felt like being shoved through the eye of a needle at Mach speed. Outside, the stars vanished, replaced by a thick, swirling ether-fog that looked like curdled milk. Jazmyn’s stomach did a slow, nauseating flip as the physics of the fold settled into a steady, high-frequency thrum. She closed her eyes, but sleeping during FTL had never been one of her talents. Instead, she pushed some trance music to her audio. Low-quality, but repetitive enough to ignore the scratching inside the wall right next to her.
Hours later, she had lost count of the back-to-back jumps. Long ones chased short ones that chained when any other navigator would have let the ship drift. The Peregrine no longer smelled like a cleanroom, fresh sweat permeating the air along with the sourness of lost stomach contents. The violent pressure eased just enough for the magnetic restraints to release with a clinical click.
“Spatial fold sequence complete. We are riding silent for the final approach,” Eva Rostova’s voice announced over the intercom. She sounded like a conductor announcing a routine stop, untouched by the strain of the trip.
Jazmyn unclipped her restraints and sat up, only to double over as her stomach protested the shift.
“Damn corpo snacks,” Torvin cursed in the next cot over. He pressed his massive hand against his mouth, but couldn’t mask the rancid burp. “Scheiße, die wollen raus.” He slipped off the crash cot, lumbering toward the latrines, where a line of corporate troopers already formed faster than Jazmyn could blink.
Kaelen Rix slunk past, disappearing in the direction of the med-bay, his movement the jerky gait of a man who spent too much time in low-G and not enough under a proper spin. Jazmyn caught Jax’s eye and tilted her head. Jax didn’t ask questions, just fell in behind her, Pixel trailing them like a nervous shadow.
The indicator on the med-bay door glowed red again. Jazmyn rapped against the plasteel, not bothering with the comms. A moment later, Riley’s face appeared in the gap of the sliding door, her expression tight with the kind of hyper-vigilance you only find in people who grew up expecting the airlock to fail.
“I know there’s a head in there,” Jazmyn said, her voice sounding like gravel in a blender. “And the line in the galley is three deep with grounders who haven’t found their vacuum legs yet.”
Riley pulled them inside, the door hissing shut with the kind of airtight seal that would never find its way onto the Drifter. Here, the air was cool, scrubbed of the sour smell that was taking over the galley. Pixel and Jax made a move for the bathroom door, but the lock light was a stubborn red.
Pixel hammered on the panel. “Hurry it up! Some of us have a biological deadline!”
The structure that dominated the rear wall looked less like medical equipment and more like a piece of the ship’s propulsion system. Thick data umbilicals snaked out from the bio-pod hung up on the gantry, weaving a fiber-optic spiderweb into the bulkheads. Behind the transparent lid of the bio-pod, under the respirator and the thick suspension gel, the “Prince of Aether Dynamics” looked disturbingly young. Just a kid, not much older than Pixel. The purple contusions from the crash were all over his face, map-markers of a trauma that should have ended him.
Thorne’s medic, Anya Rael, according to her magnetic name tag, stood over a diagnostic terminal, her face illuminated by the emerald glow of a dozen spiking wave-forms. She looked like she was trying to solve an equation where all the variables were dying.
“The guy in the pod’s twitchy,” Jazmyn said, keeping her distance from the pod’s perimeter. “You’d be smart to stay clear of whatever Rix cooked up over there.”
Rael didn’t look up, her fingers dancing across the glass. “His neural net is pulling a staggering amount of power. At this rate, his brain is cannibalizing nutrients from the surgical remediation sites along his spine just to maintain the synchronization with the nav-array. If I don’t adjust the protein ratios, he’s going to start burning his own muscle mass for fuel.” She swiped across the console, bringing up the pod’s overrides.
“Keep your hands off the dials,” Jazmyn snapped, her hand dropping to her holster.
The medic froze, her hand hovering over the controls for a moment as her eyes met Jazmyn’s. Then she backed away, palms up in the universal gesture of I’m not looking for trouble.
The bathroom door slid open and Kaelen Rix stumbled out, looking like he’d just spent ten rounds in a high-G centrifuge.
“Better not have left a floater,” Pixel grumbled, dodging past him into the head.
Rix didn’t respond. He leaned against an examination chair, his hands trembling as he yanked a sterile sheet away. Beneath it sat the REC, strapped down like a piece of very expensive luggage.
“How the hell did you get that thing in here?” Jazmyn asked.
“Helps when it walks on its own,” Rix said, his voice a dry wheeze. He pulled a data-wire from his pocket, thin as a hair, and slotted it into the interface port at the base of the android’s skull. He swiped across the glass with practiced ease.
The REC’s right arm jerked, the metal joints whining in the quiet room. At the exact same microsecond, a dull thump echoed from inside the bio-pod as Neril’s physical hand struck the glass from the inside.
“I’ve got to write something to cache this,” Rix muttered, sending the REC through the next step of its wakeup procedure.
Jax stepped out of the bathroom, wiping water from his forehead with the back of his hand. He caught Jazmyn’s eye and jerked his thumb toward the small room. She didn’t need the invitation, but still took it.
Inside the small room, the air scrubbers whined as they worked overtime. Her stomach gave a sharp, nauseating roll, but it was an empty protest. She’d had nothing since a single cup of lukewarm synth-coffee at the station. The water from the tap felt like liquid relief, but the face that stared back at her from the mirror did not appreciate it. The years of pulling scrap out of the ether should’ve have inoculated her against the churn. She’d spent her life in ships that rattled like tin cans in a hurricane, and she had thought nothing could top Glitch’s erratic piloting.
She was wrong. A navigator with a destination and a grudge had just blown right through her expectations.
When she returned to the med-bay, the REC was already upright. Its optical sensors had shifted from dark hollows to a steady, unsettling glow in Aether Dynamics’ signature blue. The chassis hummed with low-frequency vibration signaling a clean bootup.
Jax hung back, arms folded, sizing it up as if inspecting fresh equipment dropped from command. “Got any teeth?” He jerked his chin at the android. “Tell me its combat spec.”
“I loaded the standard targeting assist suite into its memory banks,” Rix said, his fingers still twitching over his data pad. “But I build rigs for deep-space miners, not the UEAF Marines.”
The REC’s head pivoted with a series of microscopic, hydraulic whines. It looked at Rix, then at Jax. The vocalizer cycled, white noise then a sharp electronic chirp, then finally a compressed simile of human voice.
“Everything is going according to plan,” the machine said. The voice was smooth, devoid of the strain wrecking the body in the pod. “So far.”
Jazmyn looked at the broken man cradled in the bio-gel, then back at the matte-white android he now controlled. “You want to share that plan with the rest of the class?”
Before the REC could answer, the ship-wide intercom crackled to life, the audio cutting through the sterile quiet of the med-bay with the weight of military authority.
“All squad leaders, get your arses to the galley for the pre-deployment brief,” Thorne’s voice barked, sounding like a man who was running out of patience and oxygen. “Five minutes. Don’t be late.”
The REC turned toward the hatch, its movements finally fluid and unnervingly human. “I’ll share it with everyone,” it said, its mag soles clanging against the deck plates as it walked ahead of them.
In the galley, Commander Thorne had already claimed the space. He stood before a holographic table that bathed his face in flickering cyan light. His gestures were brisk and efficient, the movements of someone who expected the universe to comply with a well-drawn slide deck. A handful of troopers held the periphery, their eyes tracking the salvage crew like a muddy boot print on an otherwise pristine deck.
“Nice,” Neril’s voice came through the REC’s speakers, flat and synthesized. The android’s cobalt sensors locked onto the holo table. “Did they scrape the private correspondence with my fiancée out of my cache, too?”
The projection was a topographical nightmare. Amid the jagged landscape of a deep void sat a ship that was nothing short of a flying fortress. Sleek longboats and compact void hoppers flanked an armored exploration barge, securing a base camp with more firepower than it took to topple a colony. An energy fence ran the perimeter, kinetic turrets dotting it like rosary beads. Cyrus Deveron’s people had gone in prepared for a siege. And yet, seventeen days ago, the the comms had gone dead.
Thorne looked up, his expression a mask of Alpha Centauri arrogance. “Deveron,” he said, his eyes returning to the display as if the android were a piece of malfunctioning furniture. “It was my understanding that when this data was pulled, it was still unclear whether you would ever wake up, much less retain the capacity for speech.”
“And yet, a rescue mission wasn’t a priority until I woke up to demand it,” Neril shot back. The REC stepped toward the table, the corporate troopers parting like it was a live grenade. Jazmyn moved with it, claiming the spot next to the machine.
Thorne swept his hand across the interface, zooming out, and Jazmyn felt the shift in the room. The map was different from the one she’d seen at Meridian Station. On a rocky outcropping a few kilometers from the main camp, a secondary site was labeled with cryptic, redacted black boxes that bled into the topographical lines like ink spills.
“The map back at the station was missing the DLC,” Jazmyn said, pointing at the redacted outcropping. “What’s the story with the mystery assets?”
“Sensitive hardware,” Thorne’s voice was clipped, a sharp bark intended to end the conversation. “You were shown what you needed to see to fulfill your contract.”
Jazmyn met his stare with the flat, unimpressed look of someone who had survived the worst the galaxy could throw at her. “I hope we can be better friends in the future, Commander. Because there’s a pissed-off poltergeist in your ship, and what he says, goes.”