The Salvage Diaries: Whispers
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Chapter 12: The Inversion Principle
Thorne didn’t look at Jazmyn. He didn’t even acknowledge the threat. He just tapped the holo table, cycling the display to a high-resolution render of the landing zone. The data was patchy, incomplete. The wireframes flickered where the system failed to infer from nothing.
“Sensor range is limited, so we are working with stale data,” he said, his voice dropping into a professional cadence. “Do you want to explain what exactly happened down there, Deveron?”
The android’s optical sensors pulsed a dim, rhythmic blue. It dragged a matte white finger across the smooth surface along the bright line of the perimeter fence. “The barrier failed aft-starboard from the barge. Each section is powered by an independent generator in addition to an overlapping backup,” it tapped on an empty space, creating a new marker, then another one a distance from it. “These two units must have gone down simultaneously.”
Lyra Kade leaned over the hologram, narrowing her cat-like eyes at the new data. “Quite the coincidence to experience two failures like that.”
The REC straightened, towering over Jazmyn by a good twenty centimeters. “What we experienced was nothing short of a cascade,” the machine said. “First the long-range comms drifted. Then the AHG gear refused to boot, cutting us off from the beacon antenna. By the time the perimeter failed, we were getting locked out by our own security grid.” It reached across the hologram to draw a spiked needle over the redaction squares, then crossed out one of the void hoppers. Finally, it drew a wide arrow from the direction of the caves at the edge of the map straight through the hole in the fence.
Thorne crossed his arms in front of his chest, his eyes darting between the new details. “Our window of opportunity is narrow. Each sound is bound to alert the swarm.” He moved the map, centering on a flat basalt plateau about halfway between the base camp and the antenna. “The Peregrine will set down here, allowing us to evaluate the situation at both the base camp and the… assets. Once we have a clearer picture, we will proceed on foot. Quietly.”
“The antenna is the logical priority, Sir,” a trooper with sharp features and more melanin than Jazmyn had seen ever since she left Earth spoke up. He leaned over the table, his finger tapping the redacted secondary site. “If we hit the base camp first, we’re ringing the dinner bell for every Siren on the rock. Securing the assets might very well become impossible afterward.”
Neril’s head turned slowly toward the man. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure, yet. What is your name and rank, trooper?”
“It’s Soren Vance, Sir,” the man replied. “Platoon leader, Aether Dynamics spec-ops.”
Under the table something cold tapped against Jazmyn’s wrist. She looked down, only for a rush of adrenaline to flood her veins. The matte white hand was curled into the spacer’s sign for “brace”. Jazmyn didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even look at her crew. She just pinged the local link.
MAGS ON. NOW!
The scrappers’ mag-boots snapped onto the deck plates with a synchronized, heavy clack.
Then the world turned sideways.
The Peregrine’s gravity matrix didn’t fail. It inverted. The artificial weight that held them to the floor vanished for a heartbeat of sickening weightlessness. Then it slammed back into the starboard bulkhead, flinging Vance and the other troopers like rag dolls across the galley. They smacked into the wall with the wet thud of unbraced bone hitting steel.
Thorne caught the table edge, boots skidding, body hard against the new axis. Next to him, Lyra Kade’s mag-soles engaged with a late clack.
The REC remained perfectly anchored, its sensors fixed on the groaning men pinned to the wall.
“We are going after the base camp first,” Neril said, his voice as calm as the ether outside. “After my father is safe, you are free to take any souvenirs your hearts might desire.”
The gravity stayed crooked for a minute that stretched too far. Neril held the troopers glued to the bulkhead until the message landed. When the pull corrected, the ship exhaled—a soft hum rising from the fusion reactor, almost human.
Vance rose slowly, fingers pressing once against the ribs where his ceramic plating had pinched him against the wall. He did not move toward the REC yet, but the way he settled his armor read like a countdown to the moment he stood inside a space where physics obeyed the rules.
“Suit up,” Thorne barked, the words sharp enough to cut. He didn’t apologize to his men, and he didn’t challenge Neril. He just looked at the map, his jaw set. “We land in thirty. If you aren’t sealed when the ramp drops, you’re staying behind.”
The walk to the lockers was silent. The Drifter’s crew moved first, then the spec-ops, eyes down.
Jazmyn checked the seals on her gear, the familiar, slightly metallic scent of recycled air filling her helmet. It was a smell that usually meant safety, but here, it just felt like a countdown. Beside her, Pixel was double-checking the battery charge on his data pad, his hands shaking just enough to make the magnetic clips rattle against the composite casing.
“I hate everything about this, already,” he muttered under his breath. “Why can’t they just set the ship down closer?”
Torvin pulled the techie on his feet with ease despite the bulky void suit. “You saw the map, all cliffs and spikes.”
Jax loomed over the kid, his fingers tracing the seams of the helmet with routine. “Your RATs can barely bridge ten meters in ether this thick, Pixel. We need you out there.”
Pixel hunched inside his void suit, letting out a strained noise.
“We can’t make a ruckus out there,” Jazmyn said, sorting comms ID into the crew channel. She paused before adding Neril’s, but there was no delay on the other end. “That means hold your fire and keep all scans on passive. We don’t want to draw whatever’s in those caves.”
The Peregrine groaned as it bit into the outer layers of the asteroid. Outside the viewports, the opalescent fog began to swirl, its self-luminescence casting long, flickering shadows of the ship against the jagged basalt below. The ether pressed against the hull with a rhythmic, high-frequency thrum that traveled through the handhold up Jazmyn’s arm, straight into her shoulder socket. She switched her grip to shake out the tension, then slipped another pair of mags into the pouch on her belt.
“Touchdown in sixty seconds,” Eva Rostova’s voice drifted over the comms, professional and detached. “Landing is cold. Mag-locks only. Do not—I repeat, do not—fire the RCS unless I call it.”
The ship settled with a jarring thud that vibrated through the soles of Jazmyn’s boots. It wasn’t the soft groan of a station umbilical, but the ring of a hammer hitting a bell. The basalt plateau groaned under the weight, the sound echoing out into the glowing fog like a ripple in a pond.
The airlock cycling was a series of rhythmic, industrial thumps that felt like a heartbeat. As the pumps clawed the atmosphere back into the Peregrine’s tanks, silence replaced it, the kind that only exists when there’s no air left to carry sound. Jazmyn watched the pressure gauge on the wall display crawl toward zero, her own pulse thudding in her ears.
Then the outer door cracked.
The ether poured in like waste water. The opalescent fog moved with the heavy lethargy of a liquid, spilling over the threshold and swirling around Jazmyn’s shins in slow, oily ribbons. It felt heavy against her suit, a phantom current that resisted her as she stepped out.
The ramp hissed open, revealing a narrow strip of ragged, gray basalt bathed in the ship’s harsh floodlights. The fog swallowed the light after only five meters, creating a wall of dense white that made the horizon a myth.
Behind them, a matte white figure detached itself from the shadows. Neril’s REC moved with disconcerting fluidity, its pale blue sensors fixed straight ahead as it carried six figures’ worth of heavy-duty military gear. The android had a heavy sidearm holstered at its thigh and a full-sized railgun turret slung across its shoulder like it was made of balsa wood. Its free hand gripped a bulky equipment box as if it was filled with tissues.
Jazmyn’s visor masked her grin as two of Thorne’s troopers strained with another identical box out of the airlock. Their boots skidded on the ramp until the asteroid meekly lent its pull and their steps found purchase. More filed out. Five more squads assembled under the shuddering floodlights. The last squad stayed aboard, guarding their way home or probably tending their queasy guts.
Jazmyn took her first step onto the plateau. The basalt felt like standing on the skin of a drum, every movement sending a low-frequency ring upward that the viscous air seemed to amplify.
“Troopers, advance in formation!” Thorne’s voice barked over the comms.
Green icons on Jazmyn’s HUD shifted into a disciplined wedge. “Silas’s team, with me.”
The squad moved into the white-out, their silhouettes blurring almost instantly. The gas resisted their movements, curling in heavy eddies around their limbs. Walking felt like wading through a waist-deep stream.
“Stay within an arm’s reach of each other,” Jazmyn signaled on the private Drifter link. “If you lose the man in front of you, better hope someone’ll be the Marco to your Polo.”
Vance stepped off the ramp beside her, rifle cradled low against his chest. He watched the white REC shoulder a load that would snap the spines of his men, then tracked the opalescent void beyond. The hardened line of his face had gone slack. He looked like a soldier who’d just read a handbook that skipped the chapter he needed most.