I pushed myself off the floor before the Asset Recovery specialist could take a second step. My legs were rubber. My hands screamed. But I was moving, stumbling backward into a narrow aisle between two towering stacks of corroded machinery.

  The figure in the work suit didn't rush. It raised the scanner, pulsed another blue-red sweep, and spoke. The voice was flat, amplified through the suit's speakers.

  "Unauthorized Variable, designation unknown. Priority tag order active. Stand down for biometric tagging. Resistance escalates recovery penalties."

  I didn't answer. I kept moving, deeper into the salvage maze. My shoulder clipped a stack of decommissioned drone chassis, sending them clattering. The sound echoed in the cavernous space.

  Another voice, this one tinny and irritated, came from around the corner.

  "Vasquez, you made contact? Why didn't you signal?"

  "Contact made. Variable is non-compliant. Moving into Sector 4 sorting."

  A pause. Then: "Kaelen's asset or general pool?"

  "Unknown. But the tag order has a priority lock. We get paid on recovery, not identification."

  "Fine. I'm routing you backup. Kessler's on his way."

  Two of them. At least. Maybe more.

  I ducked behind a salvage bin labeled CRYOGENIC MODULES - RECYCLING PENDING. My lungs burned. I looked down at my hands. The blisters had ruptured, leaving patches of raw, weeping flesh. I couldn't grip anything without pain. I couldn't fight.

  But I still had the transponder chip.

  I pulled it from my pocket. The battery was almost dead, the indicator light flickering weakly. But it still worked. The system still thought I was Maintenance Unit 734-CC.

  A plan formed. Not a good plan. A desperate one.

  I scanned the aisle. Ten meters away, a sensor panel glowed on the wall, part of the salvage sorting automation. It read incoming material, identified components, routed them to crushers or reclamation. It was connected to the same network as the transponder chip.

  I crawled. My knees found sharp debris; I ignored it. I reached the panel, pressed the chip against its reader, and triggered the maintenance interface.

  [MAINTENANCE UNIT 734-CC DETECTED]

  [QUERY: STATE NATURE OF REQUEST]

  I didn't have time to type. I spoke, my voice a dry rasp.

  "Initiate emergency diagnostic sweep. Sector 4 sorting. Flag all unauthorized biological signatures as priority contamination."

  [PROCESSING...]

  [DIAGNOSTIC SWEEP INITIATED]

  [SCANNING SECTOR 4...]

  A high-pitched whine emanated from the panel, then a series of rapid clicks. Above me, a bank of orange warning lights began to flash.

  [CONTAMINANT DETECTED: ORGANIC SIGNATURE (1)]

  [CONTAMINANT DETECTED: ORGANIC SIGNATURE (2)]

  [CONTAMINANT DETECTED: ORGANIC SIGNATURE (3)]

  Three. There were three of them now.

  [PROTOCOL 7.4: AUTOMATED SANITIZATION RECOMMENDED. ESCALATING TO SECURITY.]

  Footsteps. Running.

  "The hell? The system just flagged us as contaminants!"

  "Shut it down, override the sweep—"

  "I can't, the maintenance unit is spoofing the local node—"

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  I pulled the chip off the panel. The whine stopped. The orange lights continued to flash. I had maybe thirty seconds before they found me, or before the system escalated to something worse.

  I moved. Not deeper into the maze. Toward them.

  The first one rounded a stack of scrap, scanner raised. This was Kessler, I guessed. Big, broad, his suit scarred from years of work. He saw me and lunged.

  I threw the transponder chip.

  It arced through the air, a tiny black square trailing its thin battery wires. Kessler's visor tracked it instinctively. His hand came up to catch it.

  That was the opening.

  I drove my shoulder into his midsection. The suit absorbed most of the impact, but he was off balance, his weight shifting backward. His boot caught on a cable and he went down hard, the scanner skittering across the floor.

  I didn't stay to fight. I ran, scooping up the chip as I passed.

  "Contact! The Variable is armed—"

  "He threw a chip, he's not armed, he's—"

  "Just move!"

  I ran until my legs gave out, then I fell behind a reclamation bin and tried to breathe without making sound. My heart hammered against my ribs. My hands left wet prints on the metal floor.

  Silence. Then footsteps, receding.

  "Lost him. He's ghosted into the output buffer. We need more sweepers."

  "Tag the sector and pull back. He can't leave the Null Pocket without triggering a perimeter alert. We'll box him in."

  Their voices faded.

  I waited five minutes. Then ten. Then I forced myself to stand.

  My pocket felt lighter. I checked. The transponder chip was still there, but the battery was dead. No more power. No more spoofing.

  But something else was in my pocket. A small, curved piece of metal I had pried from the casing before I shoved it into the vent. The Omega-Null Interface Plate. About the size of my palm, warped by heat, its surface etched with micro-circuitry and a single serial number.

  I held it up to the dim light.

  [OMEGA-NULL INTERFACE PLATE (DAMAGED)]

  [STATUS: PARTIAL FUNCTIONALITY]

  [CLASSIFICATION: FOUNDATIONAL WEAPON COMPONENT]

  [EFFECT: WHEN ATTACHED TO COMPATIBLE HOST WEAPON, ENABLES OMEGA-NULL FREQUENCY MODULATION. CURRENT INTEGRITY: 23%.]

  [NOTE: REPAIR REQUIRES ADMIN-LEVEL TOOLING.]

  Not a weapon. A weapon component. But it was something. Progression. A tangible piece of the machine I was trying to dismantle.

  I tucked it into my waistband, close to my skin.

  Outside, the cold was a secondary enemy.

  Marcus moved at the head of the column, his cracked shield strapped to his back. Behind him, seven survivors picked their way through the frozen rubble. The relay tower's service bay was still half a kilometer away.

  The woman walked at his side. She hadn't spoken in thirty minutes.

  A sound stopped them. Not gunfire. Not drones. The crunch of boots on frost, moving fast, coming from the east.

  Marcus signaled. The column melted into the shadow of a collapsed hab-unit.

  Three figures emerged from the grey haze. Kaelen's enforcement team. Not soldiers. Contractors, like the ones hunting Leo. They moved with practiced efficiency, scanning, communicating in hand signals.

  They stopped at the spot where the column had crossed open ground. One knelt, examined the disturbed frost, and pointed toward the relay tower.

  They knew where they were going.

  Marcus looked at his people. Two of them were too injured to run. A woman with a deep gash in her thigh, barely able to walk. An older man, coughing blood, his lungs compromised by the pathogen.

  "Leave them," the woman said. Not a question. Not a judgment. Just the hard math of survival.

  Marcus didn't answer. He walked to the injured pair, knelt, and spoke quietly. He gave them a flare, a ration block, and coordinates for a secondary rendezvous point he knew they would never reach.

  Then he stood, turned his back, and led the column forward.

  The woman fell in beside him. "We should have done this earlier."

  The Rival said nothing. His eyes tracked the distant shapes of the enforcement team, calculating angles, distances, probabilities.

  Marcus's face was stone. But his hands, at his sides, were clenched into fists so tight the knuckles had gone white.

  I moved through the salvage wing, keeping to shadows, avoiding open aisles. The Asset Recovery team had pulled back, but I knew they hadn't left. They were waiting. Tagging exits. Letting the sector become a cage.

  I needed a way out. I needed something that wasn't just a dead chip and a damaged circuit plate.

  The salvage stacks ended at a heavy blast door, its status light glowing a steady amber. A sign beside it read:

  OMEGA-NULL TEST BAY — AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY

  Test bay. Where they developed the weapon. Where there might be tools, information, another component.

  I pressed the damaged interface plate against the door's reader. The amber light flickered, shifted to green. A soft chime.

  [ACCESS GRANTED: OMEGA-NULL COMPONENT DETECTED]

  [WELCOME, AUTHORIZED TECHNICIAN.]

  The door slid open.

  Beyond was a small, climate-controlled chamber. Workbenches lined the walls, cluttered with diagnostic equipment and half-assembled hardware. In the center of the room, mounted on a vertical rack, was a second Omega-Null casing. Identical to the one I had sacrificed. Intact. Complete.

  I stepped inside.

  The door sealed behind me.

  Then the main display screen flickered to life. Not the Archive's clinical white text. A different interface. Black background, green glyphs. Corporate.

  [AUTHORIZED USER: VANCE, KAELEN]

  [REMOTE SESSION: ACTIVE]

  [BIO-CONFIRMATION PENDING: COUNCIL DIRECTIVE 7 PROHIBITS LETHAL ACTION AGAINST UNCONFIRMED VARIABLES WITHOUT FORMAL REVIEW.]

  A pause. Then new text, typed in real time.

  [VANCE, KAELEN: "Hello, Variable Seven. You've been busy."]