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.”