Chapter 2: Frost and Fury on the Acid Barge
The canister was a bar of ice against his palm, so cold it felt like it was burning. Thalixian symbols, just like she’d said. A spiraling, angular script that seemed to move if you stared too long.
The smuggler—a thin man with gill-like implants fluttering on his neck—wasn’t staring at anything anymore. He was on his knees, hands clutching the ruin of his throat, arterial spray painting the garish purple velvet of his divan a rich, dark crimson. His final words, choked and wet, still hung in the humid air between the wailing alarms.
Thraine set you up!
Rut’Aba had known. The moment the silver-eyed woman had laid out the transaction, he’d felt the trap’s teeth. But knowing and feeling were different. Knowing was abstract. Feeling was the visceral understanding, here in this dripping, neon-soaked coffin of a room, as the first Escher needle-fighter swung down from a ceiling pipe and landed with a liquid grace five feet away.
She was all sharp angles and coiled tension, her face a mosaic of chrome scarring and contempt. A mono-whip, a filament of glittering death, uncoiled from her wrist. “Drop the pretty box, warp-ghost,” she hissed, the vocal mod making it sound like grinding glass.
The barge shuddered, a long, deep groan of stressed metal. Condensation rained from the low ceiling. Somewhere, synth-pop blared, warring with the alarm klaxons.
Rut’Aba didn’t drop the canister. He threw it.
Not at her. At the wall of bubbling, organic tanks behind her—the smuggler’s prized collection of bioluminescent eels. The cold cylinder sailed through the humid air. The Escher’s eyes flickered, surprised, tracking it for a critical half-second.
That was all he needed.
He lunged forward, not away. He went low, under the expected arc of the mono-whip, his shoulder driving into her midsection. The air left her in a whoosh. They crashed into a low table of sniffer-narcotics and cheap stim injectors, glass vials shattering. He rolled, feeling a line of fire across his back—the whip had caught him, but shallow.
He came up with a shattered table leg, jagged and mean. The Escher was already rising, her movement an economy of lethal intent. The whip sang again. Rut’Aba blocked with the wood. It didn’t cut clean. The mono-filament dug in, searing, and he yanked, hard. She stumbled off-balance.
He kicked a metal brazier of glowing incense coals into her path. Hot embers scattered across the floor, hissing where they met the perpetual damp. She danced back, snarling.
The door to the smuggler’s den burst open. Two more Eschers, bulkier, armed with compact shock-mauls.
Time to go.
Rut’Aba snatched the canister from where it had rolled against an eel tank, its surface now slick with glowing algae. He sprinted for the room’s only other exit—a narrow maintenance hatch the smuggler had probably used to flee creditors. He didn’t look back.
The hatch led to a claustrophobic vertical shaft, rungs slick with rust and greenish condensation. He climbed, the cold canister shoved into his belt, his burned palm screaming. Below, he heard shouts, the crackle of a shock-maul hitting metal.
He emerged onto the main deck, into a wall of sound and stink. The acid canal’s emerald-green surface churned twenty feet below, vapors curling up to mix with the neon haze. The barge was a chaotic sprawl—makeshift bars made of cargo containers, flickering hologram stages where attenuated dancers moved with synthetic lethargy, clusters of buyers and sellers haggling over things in opaque tubes. The alarm was softer out here, absorbed by the ambient noise.
Nobody paid him any mind. A bleeding man running was just part of the scenery.
He moved, pushing through a crowd gathered around a cage where two gene-spliced reptiles tore at each other. The crowd jostled, a wave of bodies. He used it, disappearing into the press, putting distance between himself and the hatch.
He needed a way off the barge. The only connections to the wider undercity were the narrow, precarious gangplanks stretching to other vessels or the canal docks. They’d be watched.
His hand went to the credit chip the Thraine woman had given him. Useless here. This wasn’t a place for credit. This was a place for barter, for violence, for favors.
A hand closed on his arm from behind. He spun, raising the table leg.
It was a kid. Maybe sixteen, skin pale under grime, eyes wide with a mix of fear and avarice. “You’re the one they’re looking for. The warp-ghost. The Eschers are offering a bounty.Alive. Mostly.”
Rut’Aba stared down at him. “You collecting?”
The kid shook his head fast, a jerky motion. “I don’t like them. They stiffed my sister. You need off the barge? I know a way. Not the walks.”
“What’s the price?”
“The shiny thing in your belt.” The kid’s eyes darted to the canister.
“No.”
“Then you’re paste when they find you. They’re already sealing the walks.”
Rut’Aba weighed it. The kid was a weasel, but weasels knew the holes. He needed a hole. The canister was his ticket out of the nano-filament in his blood. But a dead man didn’t need a ticket.
“Get me off, and you get a reward. Not the canister. Something else.”
“What else you got?” the kid sneered.
Rut’Aba leaned close. “I’ve got the fact that I don’t break your neck right now.”
The kid swallowed, his bravado fading. He nodded, quick. “This way. Fast.”
He led Rut’Aba along the edge of the deck, behind stacks of leaking barrels that reeked of chemical solvents. The kid moved with a furtive, unerring knowledge of the shadows. They reached a section where the barge’s rusted hull met the superstructure of an ancient, gutted crane. A thick, greasy cable, once part of the crane’s rigging, stretched down into the acidic mist below, attached to some sunken wreck or anchored to the canal bed.
“Servitor maintenance line,” the kid whispered. “Leads to the old pump-house on Dredge Ward. Eschers don’t know it’s still intact. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Nothing’s certain down here. You want certain, go back up-spire.”
From behind them, a shout cut through the synth-pop. “Check behind the barrels!”
Rut’Aba looked at the cable, slick and dripping.Looked at the kid. “You first.”
The kid shook his head. “I’m not going down there. My deal was to show you. Now pay up.”
Rut’Aba felt the trap close.Another transaction. Another betrayer. He grabbed the kid by the front of his ragged coat.“A name. Who wants the canister? Not the Eschers. Who hired them?”
The kid’s eyes went even wider. “I don’t know names!A fixer. Came with a Thraine sigil.Nice clothes. Smelled like ice.”
The silver-eyed woman. She hadn’t just set him up to die. She’d set him up to be intercepted. The Eschers weren’t here for the smuggler. They were here for him. To take the canister from his corpse and erase the trail. Clean.
The Eschers rounded the barrels. Three of them. The one with the mono-whip, her face a mask of cold fury, and the two with shock-mauls.
“There,” she said, flatly.
Rut’Aba shoved the kid towards them as a distraction and leaped for the cable. His hands closed around the freezing, grease-slimed metal. He swung out, over the void, the green acid churning below. The cable vibrated, groaning in its anchors.
A shock-maul buzzed through the air where his head had been.
He didn’t look back. He started to descend, hand under hand, legs wrapped tight. The world narrowed to the burn in his shoulders, the slickness in his grip, the rising plume of acidic vapor that stung his eyes and throat.
Above, he heard the Escher lieutenant curse. “Cut it!”
A moment later, the mono-whip’s distinctive hum shrieked through the air. There was a ping, a sound of parting strands.
The cable went slack.
Rut’Aba dropped.
It wasn’t a sheer fall. The cable had been cut near the top, but the lower half swung in a wild, precipitous arc. He held on, the world tilting, the rusty hull of the barge rushing past, then the dark water rising to meet him. He let go at the last second, aiming for a patch of darker shadow beside the crumbling pumphouse.
He hit black water, not the burning green acid. A runoff pool, thick with refuse and slime. The impact drove the air from his lungs. He surfaced, gasping, treading in the freezing, filthy muck. Above, the jagged silhouette of the Smuggler’s Barge blotted out the neon sky, alarms still faintly wailing. He saw figures looking down from the rail. None followed.
He swam for the pumphouse landing, hauling himself onto a ledge of crumbling concrete. He lay there for a moment, breathing in the rancid air, feeling the whip-wound on his back sting in the polluted water.
He was alive.
He fumbled at his belt. The canister was still there. The cold of it was the only clean feeling on his body.
Thraine set you up.
He pushed himself to his feet, water streaming from the torn, stained feminine robes he still wore. The elegant fabric was now a testament of blood, acid burns, and canal filth. He looked up at the glowing underbelly of the Spire, a distant, hateful crown of light far above.
They’d wanted a ghost. A deniable, disposable weapon.
Fine.
He’d be a ghost. But he wouldn’t be deniable. And he was done being disposable.
The transaction was void. This was war.
He had the canister. He had a name—Thraine. And he had a destination. Not the drop point the silver-eyed woman had given him. That was a coffin.He needed answers. And he knew someone who traded in them. Someone who owed him from a lifetime ago, in the void. Someone who, if he was still alive, would be in the darkest, deepest sink of this dying city.
He pulled the hood of his ruined robe up, shadowing his face, and melted into the steam and the gloom of Dredge Ward. Above, the barge’ lights receded. Behind him, the green acid canals churned, swallowing all traces.