The Salvage Diaries: Whispers
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Chapter 7: The Kill Box
The freight elevator plummeted through Meridian Station’s spindle, the G-force pinning Jazmyn’s shoulders against the cold, vibrating cabin wall. Jax and Torvin held on, their faces only a little green. That changed when the cabin passed the core and gravity flipped. The floor dropped away, leaving Jazmyn’s stomach in her throat as the cabin spun to find the new “down”. Beside her, the android was a statue of matte-white composite, its feet seemingly fused to the deck.
“My father’s expedition didn’t just go dark,” Neril’s voice was a flat, synthesized hum that bypassed the mechanical screech of the lift. “It was sabotaged. First, a cascading system failure blinded us. Then, Sirens swarmed the base camp. Suppose me making it back wasn’t part of the plan.”
Jazmyn’s HUD flickered, a red G-force warning graining her vision. “A hit?”
“Someone wanted us dead.” Neril focused her with his glowing blue sensors. “I wasn’t sure at first, but when my emergency roll call was cancelled mid-broadcast… I am the Assistant Director of the Void Research Division. Only the board has more authority.”
“Kora Volkov didn’t say the job was canceled,” Torvin rumbled, a dark frown on his broad face.
“She caught us mid-salvage,” Jax said, his knuckles white around the handholds. “Probably wasn’t cancelled, yet.”
“Regardless, you are under contract now.” Neril stepped toward the door, as the freight elevator still rattled around them. “And I would very much like not to die.”
The elevator screeched to a stop, the abrupt slowdown almost toppling Jazmyn. The doors hissed open, revealing a corridor filled with equipment lockers and empty containment suits, the respirators’ green lights pulsing as they powered up. Neril stepped out, his movements fluid as he hurried toward one of the lockers. The equipment within sent a jolt of adrenaline through Jazmyn, while Torvin and Jax exchanged quiet appreciative murmurs.
A case heavy enough to make Torvin adjust his stance held a tripod-mounted net gun. The second held a plasma lance, that Jax accepted with an impressed whistle. Finally, Neril handed a bandolier of acoustic charges to Jazmyn.
“Looks like you were ready for this,” Jazmyn said, accepting it.
“That thing followed me from the deep void,” Neril replied, taking the lead through the maintenance corridors. “At the VRD, we don’t fight Sirens with bullets. We fight them with physics.”
They moved through the maintenance corridors in a tight wedge. The air here was colder, smelling of recycled oxygen and the sharp, metallic tang of the station’s plumbing. Neril moved with an unsettling familiarity, swiping a high-clearance ID at every junction before the security scanners could even cycle.
They breached the medical wing from the rear service entrance. The primary bay was a sea of white floors and glowing diagnostic displays. Medics froze, their hands hovering over bio-monitors as the armored trio and the white android swept into the room.
“Evacuate!” Neril’s synthesized voice boomed, overriding the hum of the machinery. “Clear the wing! Send all pods to the sub-levels immediately!”
The staff didn’t argue. The sight of Torvin hauling the net gun with one thick arm was enough to send them scrambling. Hydraulic clamps hissed as high-tech coffins began to sink into the floor, vanishing into the armored safety of the station’s gut. Only one remained in the center of the room, held fast by reinforced gantries.
Through the frosted glass, Jazmyn saw him. The man inside was a ruin of pale flesh, broken in all ways a human body could fail. His head lolled to the side, exposing the unmistakable chrome of a nav-link fused into the right side of his skull.
“You?” She looked at the pod, then back at the android. “You are a navigator?” she snapped, the adrenaline making the hair on her good arm stand.
“One of Aether Dynamics’ liabilities.” The machine shifted its shoulders in what could have almost been a shrug.
The words struck Jazmyn like a bucket of ice water. They were the very phrases she’d spoken to the camera four years prior, the ones she’d replayed in her mind during sleepless nights as her crew faced rejection after rejection. Now, even Cyrus Deveron’s son was aware of them. She parted her lips, a thousand questions at the tip of her tongue, but the android was already rummaging through a medical kit, scattering sterile bandages and adhesive strips across the pristine floor.
It thrust its hand toward her, a pile of ultra-compressed earplugs in the matte-white palm. “Focus. It’s in the vents. Fifty meters.”
Jazmyn cursed under her breath, snatching them. “Jax, Torvin. Protection,” she ordered, shoving the packets into their hands. “These pucks will liquefy your inner ears before the space cockroach even gets close.”
Jax and Torvin jammed them in. Jazmyn ignored the foam. She glanced at a corner of her inner HUD, accessed the sensory package controls, and switched her audio input to mute. The world dissolved into a sudden pressure wave of absolute silence.
She raised a hand, fingers snapping out the sharp, rhythmic signals of those born and raised beyond planetary gravity wells.
[Positions?]
[Two there. One each meter to the pod. I am bait.] Neril signed back, his movements fluid and precise as he pointed at the large vent in the ceiling.
Jazmyn felt a chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. No corpo kid mastered the silent lexicon of spacers that thoroughly. Not on Earth, not at Alpha Centauri. As for using them to call themselves bait? She could not even imagine.
She glared at her HUD controls, pinning the bio-pod as a green marker to the targeting assistant before she pulled two acoustic pucks from the bandolier. Throwing the remainder to Jax, she climbed onto a console to reach the vent. The magnetic locks clicked home, sending a jolt into her shoulder socket. She jumped down and followed the path Jax had laid toward the pod, her hand tight around the detonator. Across the section, Torvin braced the Net Gun against his hip, his massive frame low to the ground.
They waited in the dead, heavy silence. Neril watched the grate, his hand counting down the distance.
3… 2…
The hand jerked up, and Jazmyn pressed the first pair of controls.
The ceiling disintegrated.
A storm of dust and shattered filters descended as the Siren ripped through the air scrubber. The detonations shattered the synth-stone tiles around into a rain of shrapnel. A three-meter streak of mottled grey chitin and turquoise bioluminescence slammed into the floor, dislodging the grates around it. But the pause lasted less than a second. The segmented tail swung through the nearest consoles and the Siren scrambled back onto its spindly legs. It unhinged its jaw, releasing a cloud of corpse stench before it lunged straight for the central bio-pod.
Jazmyn’s stomach lurched. She cursed under her breath, her thumb jabbing the remaining buttons on the detonator. This was why she always suited up for the void, not the risk of either flooding the wrecks. The stench.
The acoustic charges remained silent in her muted ears, but the air turned into a shimmering wall of distorted pressure. The Siren thrashed, its turquoise flanks strobing in a panicked, broken rhythm.
The android moved like a spring-loaded trap. It intercepted the beast, synthetic skin peeling back as its white arms caught the Siren’s fore-claws. Metal screeched against chitin. The android’s arm-actuators whined at a pitch Jazmyn felt in her teeth. With a violent, hydraulic heave, the machine slammed the Siren into an examination table and flipped the nightmare onto its back.
Torvin pulled the trigger on the net gun. The recoil nearly sent him stumbling, but the weighted mesh unfurled seamlessly, reinforced cables snaking around the creature’s spindly limbs and securing it to the ground.
The Siren let out a shriek Jazmyn felt reverberate through the joints of her cybernetic arm. The android didn’t hesitate, snatching a heavy metal stool. With a screech of high-gain servos, it jammed it into the creature’s maw, forcing its jaws wide.
Jax stepped forward, the plasma lance flaring to life in a blinding white arc. He drove the thermal tip deep into the creature’s throat. White smoke spewed forth as the Siren’s internal organs dissolved into a boiling slurry.
The beast’s tail whipped out and flung the android across the room like a discarded toy, shattering a stack of diagnostic monitors. Jax didn’t let go. He leaned into the lance, cooking the predator until its thrashing slowed to a rhythmic, dying shudder.
Torvin didn’t wait for it to stop moving. He reached under his ceramic breastplate, pulling out a single shaped breaching charge. He dashed forward and jammed it into the Siren’s melting throat. Then, he gave the creature’s flank a kick that barely nudged it and dove for cover behind the central diagnostic unit.
The muffled thump sent a spray of ichor across the sterile tiles, iridescent like the ether that was the monster’s home. The Siren’s head was gone, replaced by a smoking ruin of charred chitin.
Jazmyn toggled her audio back on, the sudden rush of the station’s alarm system hitting her like a physical blow. She wiped a hot smear of alien fluids from her brow and turned around.
The central bio-pod had retracted into the floor. The android, too, was gone. Only the smoking ruin of the predator remained, as the marker fizzled out into a yellow exclamation mark at the edge of her tactical overlay.
At the other end of the section the armored doors hissed open. Commander Thorne’s squad filed in, rifles leveled and tactical lights cutting through the acrid haze. Thorne stepped over the carcass, his boots crunching on glass.
“You’re late, Commander,” Jazmyn said, her voice sounding metallic and thin. “The party’s over.”
Thorne’s jaw tightened. “And you, Silas, are suspiciously early. Again. Just like in Sector Theta. As if you knew exactly where a multi-million credit alien creature would go on a corporate station.”
“Someone did,” Jazmyn shot back, pointing at the empty floor where the pod had been. The sinking feeling in her gut was back, and she wasn’t about to suffer to keep one corpo’s secrets from another. “Neril Deveron had us off the Siren. Don’t you dare pin that expense on us.”
Thorne stared at the empty spot like her old sergeant would look at a pair of scuffed boots at lineup. “And where is Neril Deveron now?”
Jazmyn barely managed to stop herself from cursing him out. Jax stepped forward, his pulse rifle pressed against his side. “If Meridian Station can’t track the movements of a three-quarters dead man, that sounds like an Aether Dynamics problem, not a Stardust Drifter problem.”
“We did the job your boys couldn’t, protected your damn principal,” Torvin added. “For the right amount of credits, we could make finding him our problem. But for free? It isn’t.”
Thorne’s expression darkened. He looked at the headless beast, then back at the scrappers. “Go to the hangar,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Prepare for the Peregrine’s departure. I want to be off this station before the paperwork for this mess reaches my desk.”
Jazmyn didn’t wait for him to say it twice. She grabbed Jax by the elbow and gestured for Torvin to follow. They hurried back toward the docks, leaving the ruin of the med-bay behind them.