Chapter 7 #2
The vent above her let out a sickly mechanical hiss as it belched more cold air, the kind that reeked of coolant, mold, and rust.
She rolled to her side and gagged at the ache that bloomed in her gut. Her body spasmed in protest, then tensed again as she realized something was wrong.
Her duffel was gone.
‘Nada,’ she croaked, pushing herself to her elbows.
Around her, scattered like bones in a graveyard, lay the remnants of her belongings.
A sock. A single boot, and her uniform was balled up beneath a rusted pipe.
Her underwear flung like rubbish, and her duffel was now in the grubby grip of a skeletal, toothless man crouched nearby.
He pawed through it like a crow picking at roadkill.
‘Hey!’ she rasped, throat raw.
She lurched forward, crawling, knees scraping across the stained deck. She reached him just as he yanked out her backup shirt and tried to stuff it under his jacket.
‘Give that back!’
She lunged, grabbing for what she could.
He hissed like an alley cat and attempted to wrench it away, but she held fast, her hands white-knuckled, her entire body burning with fever and cold.
They wrestled for a moment, her strength fading, and she was about to scream when the man finally gave a mocking cackle and tossed it at her feet. ‘Ain’t nothin’ in there, girlie. Nothin’ worth fightin’ for.’
Fokk, it was all she had left.
She pulled the limp bag to her chest and collapsed in a corner far from the vent, curling in on herself.
Her vision blurred as chills racked her again, this time harder, accompanied by a deep ache that rooted in her back and spread like wildfire.
She was burning up and freezing all at once.
Sometime later, minutes or maybe hours, a shadow fell over her.
She blinked up, unable to focus.
A woman crouched beside her.
Wrinkled, hollow-eyed, dressed in three layers of patched clothes and synth-plas sheeting.
She looked like she’d been born in the alley and might die there, too.
Her hands, cracked and dirty, extended a bruised piece of fruit.
An apple, half-rotten.
‘Eat,’ the woman said. ‘Won’t help much, but better than nothing.’
Soleil took it with trembling fingers and bit into the flesh, but the moment it hit her stomach, nausea surged.
She turned away and vomited onto the steel floor.
Her body curled with the motion, every muscle spasming.
When she lifted her head again, bile burned her throat.
The woman rose, shaking her head, a kindness in her eyes.
‘You canna sleep under the vent,’ she croaked. ‘They cycle heat at night, dump cold air in the mornin’ to clear it. Mixes wrong with the mist. Makes folk sick. Killed two men last month. Shoulda warned ya.’
Soleil groaned, unable to speak as the octogenarian shuffled away.
Her stomach lurched again, but she had nothing left to give.
She lay back, cheek to metal, her body trembling as the fever took over.
Time slipped sideways.
She thought she detected music.
A knock. A laugh. The flutter of Santi’s voice, deep and slow like a lullaby she craved.
She saw sunlight through slatted blinds. Her cousins giggling. Her mother chopping fruit. Her father calling her Scarletta.
Somewhere beneath her shirt, her commtab pinged, a soft, insistent vibration, over and over. Probably Astra or Wren, wondering where she was.
But her arms refused to move in response to the calls.
She was fading fast, every breath a freakin’ struggle.
Then it happened.
Her wrist ignited.
The pain shot like a lightning strike up her arm, wrenching her awake in agony.
Her eyes dilated as the skin around her lower arm throbbed and the nanite cloud rose from her skin.
It unfurled into a bracelet that gripped her wrist.
It powered on as a holo burst into life above it, into a face that coalesced in crimson static.
‘Scarletta!’ the visage roared. ‘I need an update!’
‘Fokk you,’ she muttered.
The figure leaned in, eyes dark with fury. ‘Don’t disrespect me bitch. Give me what I want or else -.’
‘I, I can’t,’ she whispered, chuckling weakly, lips cracked and dry.
‘You will.’
The last thing she heard before the vision began to glitch was the growled promise:
‘Get up. Get moving. Or I’ll send my wolves to flay you into action.’
Her eyes rolled back.
Soleil collapsed, unconscious, into the steam and silence of the alley, the echoes of her secret name hissing in the cold.
SANTIAGO
Santi was having the shittiest of days.
Being XO of a massive dreadnought wasn’t for the fainthearted, but today tested even his polished steel nerves, especially on the back of his prison stint.
A weapons shipment scheduled for Sector E24 vanished mid-transit.
The Signet crew at the drop site reported a ‘spectral interference event,’ which, without evidence, sat between a valid account and a riveting bedtime tale.
A Red Skull’s skiff attempted to ram one of Signet’s patrol boats in retaliation for their recent fokk-up, and lost.
A trainee security officer on deck duty arrived koko-high at work.
Lost in a hallucinatory meltdown, he fired his laser gun through the medical bay.
Santi spent half the morning working with Rion, the chief medic, to move patients and file an incident report.
One of Signet’s AI couriers developed sentience mid-route and tried to elope with a drone in the docking hangar.
To top it all off, Kaal and Boaz almost come to blows during a tactical drill.
He’d scarcely had time to piss, let alone breathe.
By the time evening bled into night, Santi was a coil of frayed nerves and simmering tension.
Which justified the bottle of forty-year-old single malt clutched in his hand and his favorite cheroot tucked behind his ear.
His plan?
Head to Deck 27, kick off his boots, plant himself in front of his cabin’s terrace, gaze at the lights and fireflies ripple over the lake, and, freakin’ unwind.
He unlocked the door to his cabin with a tired swipe of his hand, stepped inside, and came to a halt.
The scent of candles she burned after each cleaning didn’t greet him.
The floors weren’t gleaming.
The subtle arrangement of fresh fruit she always left on his bench was missing.
The sink was still full.
His dishes still sat in it from three days ago, crusted with food.
His bed was unmade.
He stood in the center of the cabin, the whiskey bottle dangling from two fingers, pursing his lips, his lycan spirit stirring and not in a good way.
Soleil hadn’t worked her latest shift in the cabin.
Nor her previous one.
He hadn’t seen her in, fokk, how long had it been?
His stomach knotted as he plonked the grog on the dining table and pulled up his neural comm. With a flick of his digits, he called her supervisor.
Wren’s face shimmered into view.
He appeared harried, the tiredness stemming from managing too many people while juggling numerous shifts and gigs.
‘She hasn’t been in,’ Santi said without preamble.
Wren sighed. ‘I know. I flagged it yesterday.’
‘You check in on her?’
A beat. Then a shrug. ‘She’s FIFO, a fly-in, fly-out temp. We don’t have a team of oversight staff to go door to door every time someone fails to show up for a shift. We’ve got hundreds of temps, XO. A hundred more are willing to replace her tomorrow.’
Santi’s jaw locked. ‘Give me her address.’
Wren blinked. ‘That’s not protocol.’
‘I am the fokkin’ protocol,’ Santi growled.
Minutes later, he was out the door, prowling towards the elevator.
He took the first one, descending into the underbelly of the ship, the bowels of Deck 5, where the lights flickered, and the walls sweated condensation.
It stank of mold and recycled breath and hopelessness, regardless of the multiple social services The Sombra offered its residents.
He found the location easily enough.
The corridor outside it was a narrow, dark artery carved through cold alloy and stained bulkheads.
Overhead, exposed conduit pipes hissed with reclaimed steam, casting pale halos in the gloom. The deck plating vibrated beneath his booted feet, trembling with the constant thrum of the ship’s engines.
The air stunk of metal dust, oil, and the lingering sourness of too many bodies packed too tight for too long.
Voices echoed distantly through the thin walls, arguing, laughing, crying, never quite silenced, joining the chorus of music, corner bars, and religious nutters.
At the end of the hall, nestled between rusting support struts and faded hazard signs, sat the berth door he searched for.
Dented, scraped raw from years of abuse, its paint had long since peeled away, revealing bare, scarred steel beneath.
Someone had once scrawled graffiti across it: warnings, gang names, or maybe just crude jokes.
A blinking access panel hung askew beside it, its cracked screen struggling to recognize clearance codes.
He knocked.
Once, twice, waited. Then a third time.
The door hissed into a crack, releasing the hiss of its seal as stale air escaped from within.
A single, wild, bloodshot eye glared out.
‘What?’ a woman’s voice screeched.
‘I’m looking for Soleil.’
The eye widened, then narrowed.
The door got pushed open, revealing a wedge of the view inside.
Santi stared at the woman in the doorway, who appeared disheveled, sporting wild-hued locs, mottled skin, and torn clothes.
Beyond lay a cramped two-room berth lined with patched insulation, scarcely holding back the cold of the outer hull.
This was survival space, nothing more. Functional, frayed, and forgettable.
‘The demon girl?’
His brow creased. ‘What?’
‘She spoke to things! They came from the vents, they’re still in the ducts!’
Santi took a calming breath, realizing he was dealing with a soul and mind that had long taken flight into fantasy. ‘Is she here?’
‘She left. Took her demons with her. Gone two nights ago!’
She tried to slam the door, but Santi’s foot blocked it.
He stared into her eyes, unleashing a storm of violet charge.
She yelped and then sank into the ground for a short nap.
She’d wake with no memory of him, but perhaps an echo of an amethyst-flamed demon.
Hell.
He swept the gloom of the hovel, activating a neural scan.
Violet glyphs arced from his eyes as he scanned the room.
The woman had spoken the truth; Soleil was not here.
Fokk.
His worry ratcheted, even as his lycan spirit roiled, his instincts howling.
Wherever she was, Soleil was not OK.
He nudged the sleeping woman away from the entrance, backed up, shut the door, and moved.
As he prowled along the claustrophobic corridors, he took a deep inhale, trying to use his scent markers to guide him, but nada.
Too much mixed redolence hit, marring her foil.
He growled, tapping into his node to patch in Miral.
I need a security sweep starting from my location, going through every level of this damned ship.
Miral’s avatar shimmered to life beside him, in silver glyphs and beautiful sculpted cheekbones.
‘You look like shit,’ she said.
‘Not the time. Would you please search for Soleil’s comm link?’
‘Who?’
He huffed, realizing Miral might have no idea of whom he was referring to.
‘She’s my -’
Miral stopped him with a wave of her hand. ‘Just pulling your leg, ‘course I’m clued in on who she is.’
With a flick of her fingers, she summoned her metanoids, tiny metallic drones that pulsed outward from her wrist like a school of fish.
They dove through the decks in all directions, slicing through matter like mist.
Moments ticked by as Santi waited, arms crossed, brow furrowed with worry
Miral tilted her head as data from her nanites flooded her neural cortex. ‘I think I’ve found something.’
She zoomed in on a cluster of pings deep in the Phobos Sector, an area near the derelict heat exchangers.
Miral frowned. ‘There’s a weak comm signal on Deck 3. In a quadrant riddled with wanderers, the mentally unstable who flee care, and half-feral metas. Nobody patrols it anymore.’
Santi’s stomach dropped.
‘I’m going after her,’ he growled.
‘Santi -.’
He vanished before she completed her sentence.
He launched through the corridors, his spectral lycan form flaring to life.
Aetherial energy surged through his veins, bursting violet at his fingers and eyes.
He didn’t need doors; he moved through walls like smoke, his body blurring and reforming with every leap, like a ghost sprinting through dimensions.
He glimmered through levels at high speed, his soul lurching as his heart raced.
Carino, where the fokk are you?