The Salvage Diaries: Whispers
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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.”