Chapter 11: Waste Disposal
The afterglow was a physical warmth, a humming vitality that made the grimy deck feel inconsequential. For a handful of heartbeats, they existed in a bubble of shared breath and spent energy. Then the world, relentless and crude, reasserted itself.
A new sound cut through the barge’s chronic groaning—a sharp, repetitive clang-clang-clang from somewhere above, followed by the hiss of pressurized seals. Docking clamps. Not for waste discharge. For boarding.
“Shit,” Tiara breathed, the word evaporating the last of the haze. She was moving before the echo died, scrambling for her discarded flightsuit. Her body protested, muscles singing with a pleasant, deep fatigue, but her mind was already five steps ahead, mapping vectors and threats.
The twin was a blur of motion beside her. They moved with a new, unsettling synchronicity, pulling on clothes not as one hesitant entity, but as a coordinated unit. Vex’s impatience yanked a sleeve right-side out while Kael’s careful precision fastened seals.
“They’re early,” Kael said, his voice tight. “Standard sweep protocols wouldn’t put boots on a barge for another twenty minutes.”
“The telepath,” Vex snarled, stepping into his boots. “Even fried, it might have sent a final ping. A death rattle with our location attached.”
Tiara nodded, zipping her suit. The feeling of solidity, of fierce renewal from their joining, was already hardening into a cold, ready focus. “We’re not trapped. This coffin has a back door. The primary waste chute.”
Kael’s eyes widened. “The plasma effluent line? That’s not a door, that’s a suicide chute.”
“It’s got a service crawlway running parallel for maintenance,” Tiara countered, snapping a fresh power cell into her hold-out blaster with a click that echoed in the vast hold. “It vents to an external filtration array on the station’s underside. It’ll be tight, and we’ll smell like recycled shit for a week, but it’s not monitored.”
The clanging above turned to the distinct thud-thud-thud of mag-boots on metal plating. A lot of them. Voices, distorted by helmet comms, filtered down through the grate systems.
“—scan shows three life signs, clustered. Non-barge registry. Proceed with full restraint.”
“Zorgon wants the anomaly alive. The woman is collateral.”
Tiara’s blood went cold, then hot. Collateral. Expendable. The old, lonely fury found a new, sharper edge. She was not collateral. She was the fucking reason they existed.
“Move,” Vex commanded, and they moved.
They ran, not toward the main hatch where the bootfalls converged, but deeper into the bowels of the hold, toward the roaring maw of the waste processing unit. The air grew thicker, hotter, the chemical stench so potent it made their eyes weep anew. The bioluminescent fungi here was sparse, eaten away by the fumes, leaving them in pockets of near-darkness broken by the angry red glow of heating elements.
Tiara skidded to a halt before a massive, corroded panel marked ‘HAZARDOUS FLOW – MAINTENANCE ACCESS.’ The seal was rusted shut. She cursed, fingers scrambling for a tool she didn’t have.
“Allow me,” the twin said, and their voice held a harmonic resonance that wasn’t entirely Kael or Vex. They placed a palm flat against the rusted seal. For a second, nothing. Then a low vibration, a sub-audible hum, emanated from their hand. The metal didn’t melt. It… flaked. Corrosion fell away in dusty sheets, and the locking mechanism inside squealed in protest before snapping with a dull pop. The door slid open six inches and stuck.
“New trick?” Tiara gasped, wedging her fingers into the gap.
“Old memory,” they grunted, muscles straining as they helped her heave. “Molecular dissonance. We used to… tune crystals.” The door gave with a shriek, revealing a dark, narrow tunnel reeking of stagnant chemical soup.
A blast of searing orange energy sizzled past Tiara’s head, vaporizing a chunk of conduit beside her. She didn’t look back. “Go!”
Vex went first, dropping into the crawlway with a predator’s grace. Tiara followed, the cold, slime-coated metal of the ladder burning her palms. Kael’s presence was a reassurance at her back until he wasn’t.
“They’re here!” Kael shouted from above.
Tiara looked up. The twin was still in the hold, silhouetted against the flashing lights of Zorgon’s enforcers—six armored figures filling the far end of the walkway, rifles raised. The twins’ body was half-in, half-out of the hatch.
A snarling laugh, pure Vex, echoed down. “Hey, fuckheads! Catch!”
Their free hand came up. Not with a weapon. They made a gesture, sharp and complex, like tearing a veil. The air in front of the enforcers warped. It wasn’t an illusion. The walkway itself seemed to flex, a psychic shockwave of distorted perception. The lead enforcer screamed, firing wildly as his helmet’s display and his own equilibrium betrayed him, showing him a thousand-foot drop where solid plating existed.
The distraction cost them. A wild shot caught the twin in the shoulder, a glancing burn that spun them around. They lost their grip on the ladder.
Tiara lunged, catching their wrist with both hands. The weight yanked her violently, her boots slipping on the rung. Pain screamed through her shoulders. Below, Vex’s curses echoed up the shaft.
“I’ve got you!” she screamed, tendons standing out in her neck.
The twin looked up, their face a mask of pain and shock. In their eyes, she saw the flicker—Kael’s fear, Vex’s raging defiance. Then a terrifying blankness. The psychic exertion, the injury, was too much. Their shared consciousness, already strained, was faltering. The body in her grip became terrifyingly limp.
“No!” The denial was ripped from her gut. She wasn’t losing them. Not again. Not after just finding them. With a guttural cry born on a dying crystal world, she hauled with every ounce of strength in her reforged body.
Muscles tore. Something popped in her shoulder. But they came up. She dragged them into the crawlway, collapsing in a heap as another volley of blaster fire peppered the now-empty hatch above.
The crawlway was a tomb of dripping pipes and stale, toxic air. They were in. But the twin wasn’t moving.
“Hey. Hey!” Tiara slapped their cheek, her hands trembling. A nasty burn scored their shoulder, the fabric of their shirt fused to the skin beneath. Their breathing was shallow.
Vex was there, his presence surging to the forefront. He grabbed their face. “Kael! You sentimental idiot, wake up!”
A faint flutter of lashes. The eyes that opened were dazed, swimming with confusion. “Tia… ra?” The voice was faint, thin. Just Kael.
Panic, cold and slick, coiled in Tiara’s stomach. “Where’s Vex?”
“I… I can’t…” Kael whispered, a child lost in a dark room. “It’s quiet. It’s so quiet.”
They were broken. The shock, the injury, had forced a separation deeper than any before. Vex’s consciousness had retreated, or been suppressed, leaving only Kael—vulnerable, tender Kael—in a broken shell.
Boots hammered on the deck above. They’d be in the crawlway in minutes.
“We have to move,” Tiara said, her voice iron. She hooked Kael’s good arm over her shoulders, ignoring the fire in her own. “Vex, if you can hear me in there, now would be a good fucking time to come back.”
They stumbled through the labyrinth. Kael was a dead weight, stumbling, muttering fragmented memories of sunlit spires. Tiara navigated by instinct, the map she’d studied of the barge’s schematics flashing behind her eyes. Every distant shout, every clang of pursuit, was a whip-crack at her back.
They reached a junction. One pipe, wide enough to crawl through, hummed with the vibration of active flow—the main waste chute to the station’s processors. The other, smaller, led to the filtration array. Freedom.
A grating slid open behind them. Light poured in. “There! In the junction!”
Tiara shoved Kael into the smaller pipe. “Go! That way! Don’t stop!”
He looked at her, terror and trust warring in his eyes. “Tiara—”
“Go!” she roared, turning to face the light.
She stood in the opening of the waste chute pipe, a silhouette against the glare of the enforcers’ helmet lamps. Three of them, crammed into the crawlway.
“You’re alone, hunter,” the lead one barked, his rifle leveled. “The anomaly is fading. Stand down.”
Tiara’s smile was all teeth. “I’m never alone.”
She didn’t reach for her blaster. She took two running steps and dove headfirst into the wide, humming waste chute.
The world became a roar of sound and a blur of stained metal. She was in freefall inside the tube, picking up speed, the station’s artificial gravity fighting with the violent suction of the disposal system. She tucked her limbs, becoming a bullet. The enforcers’ shouts were swallowed by the vortex.
She’d gambled. The chute didn’t go to the incinerators immediately. It had a junction valve—a massive, grinding piece of machinery that directed flow. She’d seen it on the schematics. A service hatch there, if she could reach it before she was pulped or burned.
The g-force threatened to black her out. Her shoulder screamed. Up ahead, a circle of blinding light—the valve, and beyond it, the raging plasma inferno of the primary processor.
Now.
She flung her good arm out, fingers scrambling for a lip, a seam, anything. Her fingertips brushed a maintenance rung. She hooked them, felt the skin tear, felt the bone-jarring stop as her momentum wrenched her arm nearly from its socket.
She hung there, over the mouth of a miniature sun, the heat blistering the paint on her suit. With a sob of effort, she hauled herself into a shallow alcove beside the grinding valve gears. The service hatch was there, just as the schematics promised.
She kicked it open, tumbling through into a blessedly cool, silent corridor—a forgotten sub-level of the filtration array. She lay on the grated floor, gasping, her body a map of fresh agony.
A soft sound made her freeze. A footstep.
She rolled, blaster coming up, aiming at a shadowy figure leaning against a console.
It was Kael. Or mostly Kael. He was pale, sweating, clutching his injured shoulder. But his eyes… they held a flicker of familiar, dark fire.
“Took you long enough,” the figure said, and the voice was a rough blend—Kael’s timbre layered with Vex’s gravel. “We’re not… fully integrated. It’s… messy in here. But we’re both present.”
Tiara lowered the blaster, a wave of sheer, dizzying relief washing through the pain. They were here. Broken, but here.
She crawled to them. They met her halfway, collapsing against each other in the dim light. She didn’t kiss him. She pressed her forehead to theirs, feeling the feverish heat of their skin, the unsteady rhythm of their breath.
“We can’t stay,” she whispered.
“We know,” they replied, the dual voice unstable. “They’ll search the processors, find no body. They’ll expand the grid.”
“We need a ship.”
“We need a miracle.”
Tiara looked past them, down the long, deserted corridor. At the far end, a flickering sign was barely legible: Bay Sigma-9: Decommissioned/Impound.
A grim, desperate plan clicked into place. “Maybe just a really shitty, forgotten ship.”
They followed the corridor, a limping, bleeding triad. Bay Sigma-9 wasn’t guarded. It was a graveyard. Hulks of obsolete freighters and crippled fighters sat in dusty berths, stripped of anything valuable.
And there, in the third slot, was the Wandering Light.
Or what was left of her. Her hull was patched with ugly, raw welds from Zorgon’s people. Her sensor mast was gone. She looked skeletal, violated.
Kael made a wounded sound. Vex’s fury was a silent tremor through their shared body.
Tiara walked up to the main hatch, placed her palm on the cold metal. The entry pad was dead. She pulled a multitool from her belt, pried the faceplate off, and began reconnecting wires with brutal, efficient movements.
“Security will have tagged her. The second her core powers on, Zorgon will know,” they said.
“Let him know,” Tiara said, a spark from a severed cable arcing near her face. “He thinks we’re rats in his walls, scrambling to hide. I want him to see us steal his prize right out from under him. I want him to watch us fly.”
The last wire connected. A weak, yellow light flickered in the pad. With a hiss of protesting hydraulics, the hatch of the Wandering Light cracked open, exhaling the familiar, comforting scent of ozone, old coffee, and home.
They staggered inside. The interior was a disaster—panels ripped out, conduits dangling. But the core chamber was intact. The ancient, resonant stone they’d used to fool the telepath still sat in its housing, pulsing with a faint, steady light.
Tiara sank into the pilot’s chair, its familiar contours a balm. Her hands flew over the console, bypassing damaged systems, rerouting power.
“Bring her up,” she said. “Slow and quiet. Just life support, grav-plating, and the maneuvering thrusters.”
Kael-Vex sank into the co-pilot’s station, their hands moving in unsteady unison over the controls. Lights stuttered on across the console. A low, vibrational hum filled the ship, deeper than engines. It was the hum of the stone, reacting to their presence, to their damaged but persistent bond.
On the external feed, a flicker of movement. Three enforcer skiffs dropped from a higher deck, settling into a blockade pattern before the bay doors.
“They’re here,” they said, their voice taut.
Tiara didn’t look at the skiffs. She looked at the bay doors. Old. Manual override. Possibly forgotten.
“Remember the canyon run on Kryg? The tectonic sheer?”
A flicker of a smile touched their damaged mouth. “You said it was suicide.”
“You said it was Tuesday.” Tiara’s hands closed over the thrusters. “Hold onto something.”
She didn’t aim for the bay doors. She aimed for the bay floor. She fired the Light’s maneuvering thrusters at full power, not for lift, but for lateral thrust. The ship, battered and light, screeched across the deck plating in a shower of sparks, straight toward the massive, corrugated wall at the far end of the bay.
The enforcers hesitated, confused by the maneuver.
At the last possible second, Tiara cut forward thrust and fired the ventral thrusters at maximum. The Wandering Light, groaning in protest, lifted its nose in a sickening, jerking pivot. It wasn’t flying. It was falling with style, crashing down onto the broad, flat top of a forgotten cargo loader parked near the wall.
The impact jarred every tooth in her head. Alarms she didn’t know still worked blared. But the loader’s height was just enough.
She fired the mains.
The engines, damaged but fundamentally sound, gave a gout of blue flame. The Light lurched forward, not through the doors, but over the wall, using the cargo loader as a ramp. She scraped through the service gap between the top of the bay wall and the station’s superstructure with a shriek of tearing metal.
Then they were out. In the cold, star-dusted silence of the Rendering Fields’ peripheral space. The station, a glowing tumor of industry, receded behind them.
Silence, broken only by the ragged breathing of three survivors and the pained wheeze of their wounded ship.
Tiara set a course for the nearest nebulous gas cloud, a place to hide and lick their wounds. She sat back, her body beginning to shake with delayed shock.
A hand, warm and trembling, covered hers on the console. She looked over. Their eyes were closed, head resting against the seat, but both Kael’s gentleness and Vex’s possessiveness were in that touch.
“We’re not okay,” Tiara stated, her voice flat.
“No,” they agreed, the word barely audible.
“But we’re out.”
“For now.”
Tiara turned her hand over, lacing her fingers with theirs. The connection was a live wire, humming with pain, with fracture, with a terrible, unkillable need. The memory of the crystal city was a ghost in the cockpit. The smell of the waste chute was real in her nose. The taste of them was still on her lips.
They had a broken ship, a broken bond, and a Syndicate lord who now knew they were not just prey, but a personal insult.
Tiara looked at the swirling colors of the nebula ahead, a hiding place that was also a tomb of light. She squeezed their hand.
“Then let’s get unbroken.”