Chapter 3The Scavenger’s Price

The maintenance bay smelled of rust, coolant, and blood.

Varen dragged Jax through the hatch, the old man's boots scraping against corroded grating. Jax's cybernetic eye flickered with each step, erratic pulses of amber light casting distorted shadows against the walls. The shoulder wound had soaked through the makeshift bandage. Blood dripped in rhythm with his slowing pulse.

"There." Varen pointed to a public terminal embedded in the far wall, its screen cracked but still glowing. "Sit."

Jax collapsed against a pipe, his breath ragged. "The Valdari will have—"

"They'll have monitors on every channel. I know." Varen's fingers flew across the terminal's worn keys, pulling up Orla Vance's encrypted contact from memory. Three years since he'd last used it. He'd scrubbed records for her crew once—fake salvage permits, clean identity chips. She owed him. "But she uses dead relays. Harder to trace."

The terminal beeped. Connected.

Orla's voice came through, low and clipped. "Sorrel. You're loud for a dead man."

"Not dead yet. Need extraction."

A pause. He could hear her thinking, calculating. "Five million says otherwise."

"Five million says I'm worth keeping alive."

Another pause, longer this time. Then: "Decommissioned cargo hub, sector seven. One hour. Don't lead anyone to my door."

The line died.

Varen turned to Jax. The old man's eyes were closed, his breathing shallow. The cybernetic implant at his temple was flickering faster now, a warning sign Varen didn't need decoded.

"One hour," Varen said, hauling Jax upright. "Stay with me."

---

The cargo hub was a skeleton of what it had been—conveyor belts frozen mid-motion, crates of abandoned goods covered in decades of dust. Emergency lights cast everything in a dull amber glow.

Orla arrived with a woman Varen didn't recognize: young, nervous, her hand resting on a sidearm. Orla herself looked unchanged—lean, hard-eyed, her gray-streaked hair pulled tight. She carried a medkit in one hand and a data-slate in the other.

"Put him down." She knelt beside Jax, pulling aside the bloody bandage. Her jaw tightened. "This is bad. Cybernetic feedback loop. His own body is rejecting the implant."

"Can you fix it?"

"Stabilize him. Maybe." She worked as she spoke, peeling back fabric, pressing a hypospray to Jax's neck. The old man twitched, then stilled. "Full recovery needs a proper med-bay. Which I don't have."

"But you have a ship."

Orla's eyes met his. They were the color of old steel—hard, practical, holding no sentiment. "I have a ship. I also have a crew who doesn't want to die for a five-million-credit bounty."

"You owe me."

"I owe you a favor for fake permits. Not suicide." She stood, wiping blood from her hands. "What did you steal, Sorrel?"

Varen hesitated. Trust was a currency he'd learned to hoard. But Jax was slipping, and Orla was their only thread.

He pulled the data crystal from his pocket and held it up.

Orla's eyebrows rose. "That's a Valdari encryption core."

"It was. Now it's a history lesson." Varen slot the crystal into a portable reader, selected a fragment. "Listen."

The air crackled. A voice emerged—ancient, resonant, layered with harmonics no human throat could produce.

*"—they will call us gods, but we are only prisoners. The flesh they wear is a cage. If you hear this, know that the bloodlines are lies. We did not abandon them. They buried us—"*

The recording cut off. Varen pulled the crystal free.

Silence hung in the cargo bay. Orla's first mate had gone pale, her hand drifting from her sidearm to her chest.

Orla stared at the crystal for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was flat. "Where did you get that?"

"Valdari vault. Before Lyra sold me out."

"And the old man?"

"He decoded it. He knows more."

Orla turned to Jax, who had opened his eyes, the flicker in his implant steadier. She studied him the way a merchant studies damaged goods—calculating worth against risk.

"How much does he know?" she asked.

"Enough to bring down every noble family in the nebula," Jax whispered. "And not enough time to do it."

Something shifted in Orla's expression. Not trust—Varen didn't expect that. But calculation. Interest.

She pulled Varen aside, lowering her voice. "Years ago, someone came to me. Offered me a fortune to retrieve data from the Valdari archives. Same kind of data you're carrying."

Varen's pulse quickened. "Who?"

"Never got a name. They used a dead-drop system, encrypted channels. I turned them down—too risky." She glanced at Jax. "But I kept the contact. Figured it might be useful someday."

"You think they're still active?"

"I think someone out there has been hunting this truth longer than you have." She crossed her arms. "I'll make you a deal. I get you and the old man to a safe port, patch him up enough to travel. In exchange, you track down my old contact and retrieve a Memory-Flux recorder they left with me. It might have information about who they were—and who they worked for."

Varen's jaw tightened. "Every day I wait, the Valdari bury this deeper."

"Every day you wait, you stay alive." Orla's voice hardened. "You want to burn it all down? Fine. But you don't do it half-dead in a sewer. My ship, my rules. Take the job or find another ride."

He hated it. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to broadcast, to act before the trail went cold.

But Jax couldn't run. And Varen couldn't carry the truth alone.

"Fine," he said. "But we move fast."

Orla nodded once. "Good. Now let's get—"

A proximity alarm blared from her wrist-comm. High-pitched, insistent.

Her face went hard. "Valdari patrol ship. Docking at the station's main bay." She was already moving, pulling Jax to his feet. "They're sweeping the hub. We have ninety seconds before they lock on."

"The blast doors are sealed," her first mate said, panic creeping into her voice.

Orla's hand flew to a control panel. "Not all of them."

A shudder ran through the floor. Somewhere in the station's depths, metal groaned. Then a warning klaxon began to wail—coolant leak, sector four.

"Distraction," Orla said, slamming a fist against the panel. "It'll buy us sixty seconds. Move."

Varen grabbed Jax's other arm, and they ran.

The ship was waiting on the far side of the hub—a battered freighter with mismatched plating and a name stenciled in faded letters: *Last Gasp*. The ramp was dropping as they sprinted across the empty bay.

Behind them, the sound of boots. Shouted orders. A blaster bolt pinged off the hull.

Orla shoved Jax up the ramp, then turned, firing a wild shot into the darkness. Varen scrambled after them, the ramp closing as the freighter's engines roared to life.

Through the closing gap, he saw them—Valdari soldiers in black armor, raising rifles.

Then the ramp sealed, and the ship lurched, throwing him against the bulkhead.

Orla's voice cut through the chaos: "Hold on to something. This is going to be ugly."

The *Last Gasp* punched through the station's atmosphere shield, alarms screaming, pursuit already locking on.

And Varen realized he'd just traded one trap for another.