The Salvage Diaries: Whispers
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Chapter 8: Ghost in the Machine
Jazmyn emerged from the station’s bowels into Meridian Station’s expansive hangar bay. The feeling reminded her of crawling through a failing wreck, that opened up right into the black. Behind massive sheets of reinforced, transparent plasteel, the Peregrine bathed under docking floods’ blue-shifted glare. The matte-black composite of her predatory silhouette absorbed the white and blue shade from AD’s corporate palette.
A ping vibrated against Jazmyn’s temple. On her internal HUD, the amber “out of range” warning flickered, switching to a friendly green just long enough to catch her attention. Beneath the shadow of the Peregrine, loader drones were hoisting a pair of bio-pods into its central bay, slotting them where medical supplies would normally be stored on this ship.
“What a damn disappearing act,” she cursed under her breath as she took in the rest of the scene. A familiar trio stood at the edge of the commotion, watching the loaders from the gangway.
“What was that, Boss?” Jax asked, catching up to her.
“Our crew acts like they’re on shore leave in a combat zone,” Jazmyn snapped, marching toward them. “I told you three to hunker down in the Drifter! A Siren was tearing through the station!”
“Was,” Pixel replied, waving with his cracked data pad. “But alarms went green station-wide over fifteen minutes ago.”
“They’re moving our gear,” Riley added. “We really are going to the deep void.”
“You making sure they don’tab ‘accidentally’ drop it into the scrap chute?” Torvin walked up to them, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
Jazmyn’s left hand twitched at her side. “What should’ve been gone down a chute, was that charge you snuck in. If the security scanner had pinged it…” She glared at the ceiling, where recessed domes hid the ever-present turrets.
Torvin just grunted, his face like a slab of granite. “Corporate gear is for corporate problems. I trust my own kit.”
Before Jazmyn could tear into him further, her comms unit pinged. A direct, encrypted text-burst scrolled across her vision.
FROM: Deveron, Neril
Workshop 4-B. Engineering sub-deck. Leave the muscle. This is about the frame-job.Jazmyn felt the familiar, cold knot of suspicion tighten in her gut. She patted the borrowed gun at her side, tracking the place where the green marker had disappeared.
“What’s wrong?” Jax asked, leaning in just close enough for plausible deniability.
“Got a ping from Deveron to come to the engineering deck.” Jazmyn kept her voice low. She jabbed the call button. “Which is weird, since I just saw his pod getting loaded onto the ship.”
Jax narrowed his eyes, following the heavy equipment loaders around the Peregrine. “The android?”
“Yeah.” Jazmyn sucked in a lungful of sterile air, heavy with the smells of hydraulic fluid. “Stay here,” she ordered, pointing a finger at Riley, then at Pixel. “If security comes with questions, you don’t know anything. If I’m not back in twenty, prep the Drifter for an emergency decouple. I don’t care if half of our stuff is already on the corpo boat.” She spun on her heel, marching toward the central elevator column.
Jax jogged after her. “You are not going alone.”
“Of course not. That’d be stupid.” Jazmyn jabbed the call button, right hand never leaving her holster. “Hang back, stay out of sight.”
The elevator doors slid open smoothly, as though anticipating her arrival. Her gaze hardened at the camera before she stepped inside. Jax followed her, and she jabbed the controls, sending the cabin to the engineering sub-deck.
Workshop 4-B resembled a graveyard: scattered with half-built drone components and trails of exposed wiring that snaked across metal grates. The air tasted sharp, heavy with ozone and industrial coolant. Through the open doorway came an echoing voice from behind towering shelves groaning under what looked like small fortunes in cybernetics.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” Siora Vanguard snapped from behind the shelves, her tone razor-thin. “There has to be a way to reverse the neural uplink tracking from the drone.”
“The Remote Exploration Chassis is a new product.” Kaelen Rix’s reply was clipped, void of his corporate enthusiasm. “And this very expensive heap of scrap metal? This is my prototype for the Mark II series.” A pause, then bitter sarcasm: “So no, it does not have a full tracking suite just because you’d like one!”
Jazmyn raised her palm briefly to signal Jax waiting outside before slipping through.
The matte-white android slumped in a heavy technician chair, coveralls pulled down to expose deep gashes across its chest and throat. Kaelen Rix guided a micro-welder over the damage, the blue arc throwing long, flickering shadows against the bulkheads.
Siora moved restlessly around the room, her fitted jacket cast aside, strands of hair slipping free from their rigid coil. A fourth figure stood by: lean-faced, with an active nav-link catching glints from the welding arc’s blue glow. He hovered at a distance, fingers hovering close to his neural port as he stared anywhere but toward the two and change gathered before him.
“I know that you can hear me through that thing, Neril,” Siora’s voice was a jagged edge. “People saw you. You marched into the Med-Bay, triggered an evacuation, and sent every pod to the sub-level.” She approached the damaged android, her red-bottomed heels clicking against the floorgrates. “Except, your bio-pod never arrived at the secure holding area.”
“Someone loosened a Siren on me, Siora,” Neril’s voice replied through the android’s vocalizer, flat and clinical despite the repairs to his chassis’s neck. The android’s mouth did not move. “Meridian Station is not safe.”
“That’s crazy talk.” Siora huffed, returning to pace the narrow space between two shelves. “Who would risk a Class-5 predator loose on a station this size? They couldn’t have known it would go after you.”
“It clung to my hopper’s hull all the way from the deep void. It had my scent,” Neril replied through a hiss of static. “Y…you know how they hunt. You have been coming and going to the VRD for four years.”
Siora stopped pacing, pointing a manicured finger at the broken machine. “Neril Deveron, you are not accusing me. I know, you aren’t!”
“Some—” Neril started, but Siora cut him off.
“An intruder’s body was found in the containment chamber,” Siora said, her voice furious. “An outsider, not in the station security logs. Security is sure that—”
“Well, he wasn’t!” Jazmyn stepped out from the shadows of the machinery, her stomach clenching into a hard, cold knot.
The room went silent. Siora spun around, her eyes wide and bloodshot. The android’s blue sensors flickered but did not move.
“That ‘intruder’ was a burned navigator I pulled out of a shipwreck this morning,” Jazmyn said, her voice low and dangerous. “He didn’t walk to that containment chamber to drop any fields. He was dumped there to take the fall.”
The workshop felt smaller as the air between the four of them curdled. Siora smoothed her hair, her professional mask snapping back into place with a terrifying, brittle precision. She looked at Jazmyn like she was a stain on the floor of a cleanroom.
“Miss Silas. Your ledger will be credited for your work so far,” Siora said, her voice dropping into a register of pure, corporate finality. “Your original contract is now void. Meridian Station thanks you for your service, but the Peregrine will be departing with the professional personnel I brought from Throne. You and your crew may leave now.”
Jazmyn knew a corporate brush-off, but this one had the weight of a death sentence behind it. She fought to keep her breath steady, even as heat rose under her collar.
“Navigator Kai,” Siora pointed at the gaunt man trying to meld into the shadows of a shelving unit, finally acknowledging his presence. “Have Neril transfer the route data to you, then rejoin your crew on the Peregrine. I am quite fed up with my fiance’s dramatics.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, turning on her heel to stalk out of the workshop, her footsteps echoing sharply against the metal floor.
“Sir… Assistant Director Deveron,” Kai stepped forward, his hand still on his port, as if to protect it from the microwelder’s sparks. “I don’t know if we can do this, ah, remotely…” He looked hopeful, but the android’s blue sensors locked onto him with a sudden, predatory focus.
“I do, in fact, hold grudges, Kai,” Neril’s synthesized voice rasped. “Do you want to ruin your relationship with the Void Research Division? Because if you take that route from me now, I will ensure you never navigate anything more complex than a laundry chute ever again.”
Kai blanched, his hand dropping to his side. “I… I could be your backup, Sir. In case your condition… you know.” He shot a glance toward Jazmyn as if expecting her to help.
“I am not handing over the route,” Neril replied. “Find an excuse to not be on board.”
Kai didn’t argue. He looked at the half-disassembled android, then at Jazmyn again, like a man realizing that he was the only one in the room who wasn’t ready to die for a secret. And, like a man with a iota of intelligence, he backed off, turned, and followed Siora into the corridor.
Kaelen Rix let out a long, theatrical groan of frustration. He jammed a probe into the REC’s neck, sending a shower of sparks over the matte-white plating. “Are you quite done fighting with people?” he snapped. “I’m trying to keep your head attached here.”
“I have one person to go,” Neril replied, the vocalizer and the sensors still the only active parts of his shell. “You were just fired, Ms. Silas.”
Jazmyn’s cybernetic arm gave a sudden, involuntary twitch. She closed her eyes, mouthing a curse before she replied: “I gathered as much.” Her ears rang with the aftermath of lost income, already adding up the costs of the fuel it too to get to Meridian Station.
“I will rehire you through the VRD,” Neril continued, ignoring her distress. “Same fee, payable upon return regardless of the outcome, but you will work for me. I need a crew that knows where their loyalties are, and clearly, the station’s professionals aren’t on that list.”
The ghost of cold adrenaline prickled Jazmyn’s skin. “Are you good for the money?” she asked, her voice tight. “Because I don’t do IOUs, especially not for dead navigators.”
“Credits are useless when everyone’s dead and the world is on fire,” Neril remarked. It was a strange, grim comment that didn’t fit the corporate script.
“Corporate debtors collect in the afterlife,” Jazmyn shot back.
Neril’s sensors flashed with a surge of data. A second later, a priority notification chimed against Jazmyn’s temple. She pulled up the HUD: an escrow hold notification carrying the sigil of Cyrus Deveron’s VRD. The same number as before, the precise amount that made her scratch her head.
Jazmyn opened her mouth to ask about it, but Rix’s arm went elbow-deep into the android’s chest, followed by a barely-there snap. The vocalizer emitted a sharp burst of static, the blue sensors flickering once before going dark. The matte-white head lolled forward, the internal cooling pumps spinning down to a silent halt.
“If you have to think, go do it at the station bar one level up,” Rix grumbled, wiping high-end lubricant onto his branded lab coat. “Leave me to work on the damn REC in peace, already. I’ve got four hours of calibration left and only one hour of station oxygen I’m willing to waste.”
“So, that’s AHG’s new catalog darling?” Jazmyn asked, letting out a short, dry chuckle. “The REC?”
“The Apex Hazard Gear Remote Exploration Chassis, Mark II,” Rix replied without looking up. “Now go. Before I bill you.”
Jazmyn took one last look at the white machine, then turned toward the exit. She had ninety minutes to tell her crew they were either going to be very rich or very dead.