Date: October 10, 2026
Attendance: Varrik Stonehorn, Franklin, Calvin, Rotti, Torse
The job was supposed to be simple. A breach and clear for the Galactic Bounty Guild at a Khymera Biotech hydroponic farm, somewhere in the stacked middle levels of Neo-Edifex, where the company swore a rival corporation had been sabotaging its crops. The crew of the Stargazer had taken worse tickets for less. By the time they were inside, the pipes were bursting.
The things that came out of them were slime the size of a man, black and stinking, packed with toxic waste and garbage, pouring through pipes two inches wide and reassembling on the far side. Workers ran screaming between the plant racks. Somewhere among the shelving, the farm’s own security androids had decided that everyone in the building was a thief: Please return all corporate proprietary information to the designated spaces, one announced, and opened fire down the aisle. Franklin had already been flung across the room and was peeling himself off a wall, plastered in sludge. Rotti had been knocked clean onto the top of a rack. Everyone else was simply covered in ooze.
Franklin shot first, from where he lay, putting a plasma bolt into the nearest slime. Torse surged forward thirty feet on hydraulic legs and emptied his shotgun into another, blasting a crater out of it that splattered the wall behind and left the thing shrinking to fill its own wound. Calvin’s scatterblast went straight through a sludge that simply parted around it and closed up again; the old Anitron popped the shield out of his forearm compartment and waded in instead. The slimes struck back with acid that hissed and smoked on armour, and one of them hurled a mouthful of itself at Varrik, who stepped out of the way. Then the big security unit raised a fist the size of a car door, with a blaster where the knuckles should be, and fired at Rotti. It missed him and hit the rack he was standing on, and the whole shelf came down, Rotti with it.
He did not bother getting up. He shot from the floor, and the slime he picked vaporised.
Varrik’s combat sword stuck fast in the security unit’s forearm the first time he swung. Torse leapt onto a rack behind it, came down like a dropped girder, and the shockwave of his landing threw both slimes into the walls and hurled the big robot straight into Varrik — who planted his shield and took it, and left the machine reeling. After that it was a brawl. Rotti stabbed a slime to death with two blades. Franklin shanked another. Calvin’s powered sword lit with radiant fire. The slimes began to vent a reek that made the air itself a hazard, and Calvin’s sensors choked on it until he burned the poison out of his own systems. The big robot pounded away at Varrik and hardly scratched the exosuit. Rotti, rolling clear of the little Boom Bot’s lasers, found a clean line and blew half the security unit’s head off; Torse walked up behind it, tapped it with his sword, and a crack of thunder split it in two.
The Boom Bot was last. Calvin’s sword caught it square, and it fell back beeping faster and faster — system compromised — and went up in a fireball that swallowed the room. Calvin went down sparking. Torse laid hands on him and brought him back.
When the fumes cleared, the workers came out from behind the hydroponic racks to shake their hands. Torse drove a spike out of his arm into the control tower’s systems and read what Khymera had not told the Guild. The company had been pumping grey water up from the lower levels — wastewater, the runoff of plumbing that had never been good — to feed its crops. The sludges had come up with it. He sent it to the others and said nothing to the workers.
The payment meeting was at the Astro-Burger, twenty storeys up the side of a tower, all chrome and red-and-white checkerboard, with a cheeseburger sign revolving over the docking arm. Inside it looked like a headache: knick-knacks, alien dancers on wall clocks swinging their hips to the tick, nostalgia for an era on a world none of them had ever seen. The waitresses were androids in blue smocks who rolled on a single wheel. One brought menus and the news that they had chimkins — boiled, fried, battered, gumbo, chimkin and grits — and asked whether their small ugly child needed a booster seat. Franklin ordered the chimkin fingers with fries. And crayons.
The man who came to meet them arrived in a black luxury hover car and wore dark glasses where there was no light to block. Salt-and-pepper beard, sharp black suit, a lip that curled the moment he smelled the place. He wiped the seat with a handkerchief before he sat down, and the table after it. He introduced himself as Agent Vosk, of Khymera, and asked that they never say his name to anyone.
He paid them 900 credits for a clean job, and then he offered them another. A runaway employee, he said — a data thief having a momentary lapse of judgement, in danger of breaching her non-disclosure agreement — had fled to Hope’s Reach Hospital, Khymera’s old low-income outreach hospital down in Ward 14, closed for years and recently sold to a Globelin developer who meant to bulldoze the whole district into a playground for rich children. Her name was Imee Sarra. He wanted her alive. He wanted the patient index of Ward 7 on the third floor, the pharmacy’s dispensing records, any legal documents marked LGL, the correspondence of every experiment the facility had run, and samples of the donor genetic records. Khymera’s own reclamation team would land in about four hours, delayed only by red tape he had arranged, and they would not be as forgiving as he was. He had, he said, a fatherly connection to her. Two thousand credits now, four thousand on delivery, at Delivery Ramp 5 in the Low Market. He paid for their lunch with a corporate card and left, saying he would never take a meeting in a place like that again.
Calvin had watched his face the whole time and could not read it at all. Varrik had told him they would save his daughter. His smile, when it came, was reptilian.
Fido flew them down. The air grew worse with every level. Torse had walked a beat down here once, years ago. A billboard of a tangerine-coloured Globelin waved at them from the edge of a bulldozed field — Tesali Amusements: bringing the light back to Ward 14 — and in the middle of the field stood the hospital, an obsidian monolith with excavators already chewing at its base. They set down on the old ambulance pad among looted, rusting air-ambulances. The door said INTAKE and was taped over with a health-violations notice. The keypad’s eight years of dust had already been rubbed off, key by key, in exactly the code Vosk had given them.
Inside, the lights were on power-saving dim and terminals were running. A trail of fresh footprints led away down the hall. On the intake terminal someone had logged in with Khymera credentials and been told the Ward 7 index was paper only, and had left a sticky note: 212 in, 181 out. Where are the other 31? Index is paper only. Keep looking. Under it: She won’t run the story unless I have evidence, and a number for Tovac Wren. A quick search of the hypergrid made her an Action News 5 reporter — the Argonauts’ independent news outfit — who had been sued into retracting stories about Khymera more than once. The corkboard spoke of rising referrals from the resettlement transports and a chest complaint everyone was told not to call an outbreak.
Then something touched Rotti’s shoulder. He dropped a foot and spun into a fighting stance and found himself face to face with a padded white care-bot, its face a marshmallow with a smile on it. It welcomed him to Hope’s Reach and insisted he sign in for a visitor badge. Asked his family name, Rotti invented one that began with a K, and the robot became very interested indeed: a relation of Cavalon royalty, it said, was exactly what its cancer programme needed. Three more arms came out of its back, and a syringe. Varrik tried to explain the difference in spelling. The robot did not care. The moment anyone resisted, it announced aggression detected and collapsed in a puff of smoke.
The elevator was dead, so they took the stairs down, the footprints ahead of them. On the ninth floor, among the staff lockers and a dead kettle, one locker was still padlocked, and Varrik ripped the lock off with two fingers. Inside were a notebook, a nurse’s uniform, and a badge on a lanyard reading M. Trevaine, Charge Nurse. The uniform was enormous. It fit over Varrik’s exosuit, hat and all. The notebook’s last entry said she had asked about Patient 7 again and been told to stop; that V said the consents were fine, and V was senior; that she had called corporate to speak to a Dan Trask and they had never heard of him; and that her transfer had come through. Sorry, not sorry. Franklin pulled out his deck and forged a charge-nurse badge for every one of them.
On the eighth floor there were voices behind the door, and Torse’s optical scanner found heat signatures and a small walker being loaded. The crew kicked the door in. The men inside wore high-visibility vests and hard hats and threw their hands up, and Varrik, dressed as a nurse, told them to stop disturbing the patients. Their leader came clean: they were Chemtek, stripping antibiotics and cancer drugs for the free clinic on the lower levels before the building came down, and the pharmacy’s security system had snapped on five minutes ago and killed two of his best men. He offered 500 credits if they could clear it for him. The crew left them to it and went looking for the project office, which had lost its nameplate. Inside were desks pushed together, a shredder nobody had emptied in eight years, and a blue folder: Project Viridian, a billing schedule of four instalments to the Shensaati Trade Legation, three stamped paid, the fourth stamped void — client dissolved. Rotti knew the date. It was when Shensaati lost its war and was absorbed by the Cavalon Empire. Half a card jammed in the shredder was an LGL consent form to donate genetic material, signed for Khymera’s head of medicine, with patient names and signatures. They took the whole bin.
Blood was seeping under the door of the seventh floor, and the door was holed with laser burns. Torse saw five robots in the hall beyond: four small and one large. So Varrik straightened his nurse’s hat and walked in as if he belonged. The big robot demanded credentials, read the forged badge, and informed him that Nurse Trevaine had not logged in for eight years and must report to Human Resources on the second floor for mandatory harassment training. Varrik said that was exactly why he was here, and that the head nurse wanted a few things pulled on the way, and that nobody was to shoot his trainees. The warning light cycled from amber to green. Security level de-escalated. The robots backed into their niches and the hall lights came up to full fluorescent glare.
Two dead Chemtek men lay by the door with their shotguns and 500 credits between them. Further down was a dropped gym bag — a lamp, food, water, a hundred credits, and photocopies of the contract that had sold the building to Tesali Real Estate, annotated in a hurried hand: Why was floor 3 not included in the transaction log? On its map, the whole third floor was blacked out. Past it, a vent cover hung off the wall, scorched, the duct collapsed beyond the first few feet, a scrap of torn cloth caught on the grate. Whoever had run had got through. In the pharmacy, the binder for a drug called Veldrin-C cited a consent reference on every line, the consent form was version two, and the approver was Dan Trask, Department of Experimental Treatments. A rack labelled Viridian samples A–K stood empty under a note — project discontinued — and a transfer sticker Calvin spotted: Sample K retained. Transferred to sub-level cold storage, level 3. The crew took two stimpacks, antibiotics, and every piece of paper in the room. Rotti, who had been injected by a robot not an hour before, took more antibiotics than strictly necessary.
They ran for the third floor. Beyond the stairwell door was a short hall of empty beds and the double doors of Ward 7, welded shut. Someone had been at the weld with a bone saw, which was not built for steel, and had made very little progress. Torse heard shivering under one of the beds. When the light found her she said she had a gun; Franklin pointed out that he had two. She came out with her hands up. I knew the reclamation team would find me. I told Wren this was a stupid idea.
They told her that her father had sent them. She laughed, and asked who on earth they meant. When they said they were here to get her out before the reclamation team arrived, she said she was not leaving without the evidence. People in this neighbourhood, where she grew up, had come into Hope’s Reach with simple treatable illnesses and simply died, and nobody knew why. Wren was supposed to meet her at a fifth-floor balcony once she signalled that she had it. The crew promised to get her to the news station themselves. Then Varrik put his shoulder to the welded door, and instead of breaking the weld he broke the entire frame out of the wall, and plaster came down on his nurse’s hat. After you, milady.
Ward 7 was rows of beds around a doctor’s station full of charts. Veldrin-C, administered under compassionate use — the dying volunteering for the experimental in the hope of being saved. Subjects one through seventeen: no results. Batch A, subject seventeen, dead on day nine; checked afterwards, no match. Batch B, two more dead, no match. Batch C. Not enough of the right sort coming through the doors. We need more samples from District 14. The old settlement rolls are still there. Batch F, subject ninety-three, dead on day four: match. Success. Mother’s side. He didn’t know. On and on, faster: dead inside three days, all matched. Nineteen walked out of the ward clean. Batch K. Keep. Move the stock down to the cold room. On the board, a list of names, some circled, some crossed through. Subject 7 was Elias Moore, sixty-one, no next of kin, a grandmother who came over on the resettlement ships and whom he had never met. Crossed off. Another’s mother’s people came from the hill country around Uthen — the Cavalon capital. The survivors’ names were still circled.
The office at the back had no nameplate either. It was a very nice office. Torse spiked its terminal and found the login A. VOSK, Legal and Compliance, and inbox after inbox of angry demands for results before the final Viridian payment came due. There was a photograph of a much younger Vosk. In the desk were hiring records: Vosk had personally hired every member of the Department of Experimental Treatments, a department that had not existed until just before Shensaati fell, and all its money had gone into a private account — a nail salon, owned by Vosk. Rotti took the photograph out of its frame and added it to the pile. Calvin, in a quiet ritual, reached out with his senses toward the frosted door at the back of the room and felt contagion behind it. Several kinds. They found yellow hazmat suits. Varrik sealed his exosuit. Rotti swallowed another handful of antibiotics.
The cold room door was frozen shut and had to be cracked free. Rickety aluminium stairs went down into the dark, and the lights clicked on one by one along a morgue. Tall glass tanks held bodies floating in fluid, wrapped in surgical plastic, with clipboards hung beneath them. Subject 7. Lineage confirmed. Linked to royal family. Each of the others said the same, with heritage confirmed by sequencing where the patient had never known it. Rotti remembered the care-bot upstairs, and how badly it had wanted the blood of a man it thought was royal. Calvin said it aloud: the earlier batches took a week or more to kill, the later ones three days, and only the matches died. A weapon, tuned to the Cavalon royal line. Imee said it was worse than she had thought. The fridge at the back held ampoules labelled Batch K, and Torse found a hard case to carry them in.
The glass broke behind them. All four tanks at once. The bodies punched out of them and fell to the floor in bloody heaps, then stood up, screaming, with oxygen masks still strapped to their faces, and charged. They were faster than anything dead had a right to be. Franklin got in front of Imee and laid a ward on her. Calvin’s sword burned radiant, but their claws took him down; Torse got to him and lifted him back to his feet, and Calvin got up swinging. Rotti carved one apart and blew another’s head off in a ball of fire. Torse leapt among them and the shock of his landing dragged two into reach, and his shotgun fired a round that wrapped one up like a net. Varrik held them on his shield and they could not get past him to anyone else. Franklin, finally given an opening, crept in close and stabbed one until it stopped. The last of them collapsed with a clatter of patient bands.
Torse had started recording the scene when the door hissed. Cold fog rolled in, and a familiar voice with it: the Chemtek foreman, and behind him men who looked a great deal more like soldiers than salvagers, one with a drill for an arm. That was the second room they had cleared for him today, he said. He would like the sample. He would pay six thousand credits for it, right now, and they could even keep the girl. Calvin pointed out that he owed the Cavalon Empire nothing. The crew handed over half the ampoules, and the foreman sealed them in his own case, kicked the credit sticks across the floor, told them to get the little lady out of there because it was very important, and left.
Fido’s voice came over the comm: a large combat dropship was approaching the building. There was no going back up to the roof. The crew ran for the fifth floor, and Fido brought the Stargazer in to hover at the balcony where Tovac Wren was meant to be waiting. Imee started to say she could still summon the reporter. Varrik picked her up with one hand and threw her into the ship. They blasted off as a black dropship settled onto the ambulance bay behind them.
They argued it out in the air. The reporter would want originals, not copies. Vosk was paying four thousand more on delivery. Imee could tell Vosk the truth whenever it suited her. In the end they settled it the way people settle things they would rather not decide, with a coin, in a private channel, while Imee watched. Heads for Vosk. It came up heads. They destroyed her transmitter.
At Delivery Ramp 5 in the Low Market a fruit delivery van docked, and Vosk climbed down from the back of it and asked whether they had the produce he had commissioned. Rotti offered him his leaves and a fine head of cabbage. Vosk took Imee by the arm, told her that her decisions had caught up with her, and sat her in the front. His men loaded every page into the van. The money, he said, would arrive in their accounts shortly, and perhaps he would be in touch. Varrik remarked that it always felt good to reunite a father and daughter.
A few weeks later they were back at the Astro-Burger with a celebratory meal and real-dairy milkshakes when the news came on. Five hundred confirmed dead in a Cavalon shopping complex, every one of them related to the royal family. Reporters were claiming Khymera had been testing a secret bioweapon, and the suspects believed to be involved were the following ne’er-do-wells — and there were their faces. In other news, an Action News 5 reporter had been gunned down while buying illegal drugs from one Imee Sarra, who had been stealing medication from her job at Khymera and selling it on the street, and who had died in the same shootout with several of her friends and family. Khymera stock had risen ten points on news of its bioweapon’s success rate.
Red and blue lights began to flash across the windows. Hover cars were settling in around the building. Franklin went on colouring his kids’ menu, loudly. Rotti remarked, to no one in particular, that it was an amateur operation: you should never take out two assets in the same job, because it makes them easier to link.