Chapter 2: Scars That Sing of Other Worlds
The Valkyrie’s roar faded into a deep, metallic shudder as it docked somewhere deep in the ship’s belly. The transition was violent. One second, gut-churning G-forces and screaming turbines, the next, the clang of mag-locks and a sudden, ringing silence broken only by the hiss of depressurization and the thump of Rut’Aba’s own heartbeat in his ears.
Hands hauled him up. The woman with the scarred lip—Kaela, someone called her—led the way, her movements efficient and devoid of ceremony. They moved through corridors that were all exposed pipework and grimy deck plating, the air thick with the smell of recycled oxygen, promethium, and human sweat. Crew in stained overalls glanced at him, their eyes flicking to the dead pike still locked in his grip, then away. No curiosity. Just assessment. He was another piece of debris hauled in from the void.
The medicae bay wasn't like the corridors. It was a cavern of sterile, terrible light. The air bit with the sharp, false scent of antiseptic, undercut by something older and less clean: the coppery tang of blood and a faint, sweet odor of decay that no cleaner could scrub away. The hum here was different, too—a high, electric whine from the flickering surgical lumens overhead, underscored by the low drone of life-support engines.
He was dumped on a slab of cold, polished plasteel. A servitor, its human origins lost under a crust of chrome and trailing optic cables, shambled over. It didn't speak. It just started cutting his ruined clothes away with sterile snips. He was too exhausted to care about the exposure. The cold of the slab seeped into his bones.
Kaela leaned against a console nearby, watching. A door hissed open and a new figure entered. This one was mostly machine. A tech-priest, his lower body a complex nest of mechanical legs, his left arm a manifold of tools, his face a bronze mask with a single, deep-crimson lens where an eye should be. He moved with a whispering clatter of actuators, the scent of sacred oils following him.
The med-servitor began its scan. Beams of cool blue light passed over Rut'Aba's body, mapping bruises, the laser-burn on his side, the stress fractures in three ribs. A holo-slate near the slab flickered with readouts, displaying internal damage in clinical, glowing detail. Then the scan passed over his thighs.
The blue light stuttered. Flickered. The servitor emitted a confused buzz of binary. The readouts on the slate dissolved into static.
The tech-priest hurried forward, his mechanical legs ticking against the deck. "Cease emission. Switch to spectrum analysis, band theta-seven," he hissed, his voice a synth-grind.
The servitor complied. A different kind of light washed over Rut'Aba's skin—a thinner, more searching beam. Where it touched his thighs, his flesh responded.
They weren't normal scars. They were like jagged, interior lightning burns, but buried deep beneath the skin. As the theta beam touched them, they ignited from within. Each one glowed with a distinct, sickly light: one a bruised purple, another a poisonous green, a third a hollow, nebular white. They pulsed slowly, in time with nothing, a dormant signature written into his very cells.
The tech-priest's crimson lens whirred, focusing. He leaned so close Rut'Aba could smell the ozone on his metal breath. A thin, mechadendrite slithered from his wrist, its tip glowing with a microscopic scanner. It hovered an inch above the glowing flesh.
"Fascinating," the priest whispered, the word crackling with static."Trans-dimensional ionization. Residual particle traces... non-local. This is not Warp-taint. This is... translocation. Anchoring." His synth-voice dropped to a reverent, hungry mutter. Binary prayers, ones and zeroes spoken like sacred verse, hissed from his vocalizer. "The flesh is a testament.A record. Each scar... a universe."
Kaela pushed off the console. "What's that mean, Zaron?In plain Gothic."
The tech-priest, Zaron, didn't look away. "It means his body has been... indexed. Marked by realities beyond our own. These are not wounds. They are signatures. Coordinates, perhaps. The machine-spirits whisper of a tuning fork... struck in parallel worlds." His mechadendrite twitched, as if fighting the urge to touch. "How is this flesh not ash?"
"Good genes," Rut'Aba croaked, finally finding his voice. It sounded wrecked.
Kaela ignored him, her eyes locked on Zaron. "Is it a problem? Is it active?"
"Unknown," Zaron said. "The energy is dormant.Latent. But the fact of its existence... Captain Varek will need to be informed."
At that moment, the main doors hissed open again. Captain Varek filled the doorway. He was a big man, his frame straining the shoulders of a worn flight jacket. He had a blunt, uncompromising face, shaved head, and eyes that had seen too many collapsing worlds. He took in the scene: Rut'Aba naked on the slab, the glowing scars, the rapt tech-priest.
"Report," he said, his voice a low rumble.
"He carries extradimensional markers, Captain," Zaron chimed, his lens still fixed on Rut'Aba's thighs. "Theological implications are profound—"
"Can he fight?" Varek interrupted, his eyes on Rut'Aba.
Kaela answered. "Fought a tomb full of necrons and something else. Something that walked on air and didn't like bolter fire. He's got cracked ribs, minor plasma scoring, severe fatigue. Nothing a few hours in a knit-sleeve and some stims won't fix."
"And that?" Varek nodded toward the pulsing scars.
Zaron finally pulled back. "An unknown variable. The energies are foreign. Not Warp.Something... else. They are currently inert."
Varek walked to the slab. He looked down at Rut'Aba, his gaze as assessing as the med-servitor's scan. "You're the one they called the Walkway Ghost. The scavenger who kept popping up in dead zones no one else could reach. You found the Morning Star's beacon on that rock."
It wasn't a question. Rut'Aba met his stare. "You dropped it. I used it. Seemed the thing to do."
"You used a three-century-old, encrypted Imperial distress beacon. And you knew how to activate its homing pulse." Varek leaned in slightly. "You also, according to Kaela's after-action, referred to a daemon of the Warp as 'a consequence'. Not many baseline humans have that particular kind of casual familiarity."
Rut'Aba said nothing. The hum of the medicae bay filled the silence.
Varek straightened. "The Morning Star is a salvage vessel.We find things. Lost things. Sometimes we return them. Usually, we sell them. Your particular set of... skills... and your unique physiological condition," he glanced at the scars, which had faded back to faint, silvery lines under normal light, "make you a find. A potentially valuable one."
"I'm not for sale."
"Everything's for sale," Varek said, a hint of tired finality in his voice. "Right now, you're a ledger entry under 'medical debt'. You work it off. Kaela says you can handle yourself. We're heading core-ward, into the Ixaniad Stretch. Lots of dead space there.Lots of lost things. You'll help us find them."
"And if I say no?"
Varek's expression didn't change. "Then Zaron here gets to satisfy his theological curiosity. And you get to spend the rest of your short, scarred life as a biological curiosity in a jar on his lab shelf. Your choice."
The med-servitor whirred, presenting a hypospray filled with greenish fluid. The knit-sleeve, a gelatinous healing membrane, waited on a tray.
Rut'Aba looked from Varek's implacable face to Zaron's humming crimson lens, to Kaela's neutral, watchful gaze. He thought of the thing on the bridge, of its beautiful, cracked face and infinite curiosity.It wasn't dead. He knew it. Some things didn't die. They just waited.
He let out a long, slow breath. The cold of the slab was finally sinking in. "The food any good?"
Varek almost smiled. "It's edible.Get patched up. Kaela will show you to a bunk. We make the first translation in twelve hours. Welcome to the crew, Ghost."
The captain turned and left. Zaron, after a long, last look at Rut'Aba's now-quiescent scars, clattered away after him, whispering binary to himself.
Kaela stayed. She watched as the servitor administered the stim-shot and began applying the cold, sticky knit-sleeve to his ribs. "He's not wrong, you know," she said, her voice quieter now. "About the jar."
Rut'Aba lay back, staring at the flickering lights on the ceiling. The hum of the ship was a constant vibration in the slab, in his bones. It felt different than the tremble of the dying tomb world. This was a live thing, a beast moving through the void. He was inside it now.
"Yeah," he said, closing his eyes. The after-image of those pulsing scars still danced behind his lids. "I know."
"I know."
The knit-sleeve tightened around his ribs, a cooling pressure that quickly became a deep, itchy ache as it knitted bone and flesh. The servitor injected a cocktail of stimms and nutrients into his neck with a pneumatic hiss. He barely felt the prick. Fatigue was a lead blanket over his mind, heavier than any physical wound.
He must have passed out.
He woke in a different room. A cell, really. Four walls, a sink, a waste-recycler, and a bunk bolted to the wall. The only light was a recessed amber glow-strip in the ceiling. The air was cold and tasted of recycled metal. He was wearing a coarse grey shipsuit. His old clothes and the dead pike were gone.
The door wasn’t locked. He found that out after an hour of staring at the ceiling, listening to the ship’s deep, vibrational song. He pushed it open. The corridor outside was empty, lit by the same intermittent amber strips. He walked, his steps silent on the grating. He found a mess hall.
It was a long room with welded tables. A few crew members sat in clusters, eating from metal bowls.They looked up. Their conversations didn’t stop, but their eyes tracked him. He took a bowl from a stack and went to the dispenser. It was a lump of beige paste.It smelled of nothing. He sat alone at the far end of a table.
No one approached him.He ate.He slept. The cycle repeated. A chime would sound, harsh and artificial, and the light in his cell would brighten to a painful white. Time for a meal. He’d shuffle to the mess, take his paste, sit alone. The paste was different colors sometimes. Grey.Beige. Greenish-brown. The taste was a constant: stale and vaguely metallic.
He learned the rhythm of the ship by its sounds. The deeper thrum of the main engines. The higher-pitched whine of life-support cycling. The distant clang of repairs somewhere in the lower decks. Sometimes, a shudder would run through the deck plates, a translation tremor, Kaela called it. They were moving.Jumping. He didn't know where.Days bled together. Sleep was a fractured, shallow thing. He dreamed of violet light and silent silver faces and the feeling of falling forever. He’d jolt awake in the dark, the ghost-itch of his dimensional scars prickling on his thighs. He’d run a hand over the smooth, unmarked skin. They only glowed under specific light. In the dark, they were just memories.He kept to himself. He spoke only when necessary. “Yes.” “No.” “Where’s the san-unit?” His voice grew rusty from disuse. The crew gave him a wide berth. They’d seen Zaron’s report. They’d heard the whispers about the scars that lit up like a star chart of wrong places.
Kaela was the only one who didn’t treat him like a contaminant. She’d slide onto the bench opposite him during meals, her own bowl of paste clattering onto the table. “You gonna stare a hole in that, or eat it?” she’d ask, shoveling a spoonful into her mouth.
“It stares back,” he’d mumble, but he’d eat.
“Got a job for you,” she said one cycle, halfway through a grey lump. “Translation static messed with the starboard lateral sensor array. Access is tight. You’re skinny. Varek wants you on the crawl team.”
He looked at her. “Crawl team.”
“You go where the servitors can’t. Or where we don’t want to risk them. It’s just pulling burnt conduit, splicing in new fiber. Simple.” She eyed him. “You can follow a schematic, right?”
He gave a single nod. He could follow patterns. He’d always been good at that.
The work was claustrophobic. The access tunnels were pipes within pipes, a labyrinth of hot metal and buzzing electro-magnetics. He wore a thin environment suit, its breath-mask filtering air thick with the smell of ozone and lubricant. He worked beside a woman named Els, who had synthetic lungs and a dark sense of humor. She didn’t ask about his past. She just handed him tools and cursed colorfully when a line of data-fiber refused to seat properly.
“This ship’s held together by faith and precedent,” she wheezed, her voice a rasp through her mask’s filter. “And my soldering. Mostly my soldering.”
It was mechanical.Simple. His hands remembered the work. The silent focus of it was a relief. For a few hours, he wasn’t the Walkway Ghost or the scarred man. He was just a pair of hands in the dark, fixing a broken thing.
He was coming back from a crawl, covered in grime, when he turned a corner and found Zaron waiting for him. The tech-priest’s crimson lens glinted in the corridor’s low light. He was alone, his mechanical limbs perfectly still.
“A moment of your time,” Zaron’s synthesized voice grated.
Rut’Aba stopped. He said nothing.
“I have been analyzing the spectrographic residuals from your… markings.” Zaron took a step closer, the lens whirring softly. “The energy signatures are stable. Dormant, as observed. But they are not inert.They resonate. At a frequency bordering on the ultrasonic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they are listening.” Zaron’s head tilted. “Or perhaps broadcasting. A very faint, very specific song. I wish to map the harmonics. A simple procedure. Non-invasive.”
Rut’Aba looked past him, down the empty corridor. “No.”
“The data could be profoundly—”
“No.” Rut’Aba stepped around him. The smell of sacred oils was cloying.
“The Captain has authorized the research,” Zaron called after him.
Rut’Aba kept walking. “Let him strap himself to your table, then.”
He returned to his cell. The chime for the next meal cycle sounded. He ignored it. He sat on his bunk in the amber gloom, listening to the ship. He placed a hand flat on the cold metal wall. He felt the thrum of the engines, a steady, powerful heartbeat. Then he felt something else. A thinner, higher vibration, a shiver in the metal that wasn’t part of the ship’s rhythm.
It was coming from him. From the bones of his own legs. A faint, answering resonance to the deep-space void rushing past the hull.
The chime sounded again, more insistently. The door hissed open. Kaela stood there, a bowl in her hand.“You missed mess. Brought you your glop.” She stepped in, placed the bowl on the sink, and leaned against the wall. She looked at him, at his hand still pressed to the bulkhead. “Zaron bothering you?”
“He wants to map my harmonics.”
She snorted. “He wants to take you apart to see how you tick. Varek won’t let him. Not while you’re useful.” She pushed off the wall. “We’re coming up on the Ixaniad debris field. Real graveyard out there. First real salvage op since we picked you up. You’re with me on the first skiff.Get some sleep. Real work starts in six hours.”
She left. He stared at the bowl of cold, congealed paste. The subtle, wrong vibration in his bones had faded, but the memory of it lingered, a phantom itch deep in the marrow.
He didn’t sleep. When the chime blared again, marking the start of the watch cycle, he was already dressed. He walked to the launch bay, the ship’s usual noises now underscored by a new tension—the shouted checks, the rumble of heavy machinery moving, the pressurized hiss of skiffs being prepped.
The bay was a chaos of noise and light. Crew in heavy salvage harnesses moved between gantries. Kaela was by an open skiff, checking the seals on her void-suit. She tossed him a suit. “Suit up, Ghost. Time to see what you’re really made of.”
Beyond the massive bay doors, visible through the thick armor-glass, the pure black of the void was littered with a million silent, frozen pieces of dead ships.
The debris field was a silent, frozen hurricane. Chunks of hull plating the size of hab-blocks tumbled in slow motion alongside shattered engine cones and the delicate, bony remnants of scaffolding. It was a landscape of utter stillness, where the only movement was the patient, gravitational drift of ruin.
“Remember,” Kaela’s voice crackled in his helmet comm, “this isn’t a museum. It’s a pantry. We’re here to eat.” The skiff shuddered as it slid through the bay’s energy curtain, the sudden absence of sound a physical weight. Stars, sharp and cold, pierced the eternal dark between the wrecks.
Their target was a mid-sized merchant vessel, its spine broken clean amidships. The split revealed a cross-section of decks, like a dollhouse kicked open by a god. The skiff’s thrusters pulsed, edging them toward the jagged maw. Els was already at the rear hatch, her suit bulky under the work lights. “Look at that shear.Direct energy weapon. Someone didn’t want this guy talking.”
Rut’Aba cycled his helmet seal, the hiss deafening in the sudden quiet of his own breath. His suit display flickered with ambient data.No life signs. No residual energy, except for the faint, fading glow of a secondary reactor deep in the wreck’s carcass. Standard procedure. He’d done versions of this a hundred times before, in tighter, darker places.
He followed Kaela’s line across the void. The magnetic boots clamped to the hull with a solid thunk-thunk that vibrated up his shins. Inside the wreck, the world changed. Emergency lighting, powered by dying cells, cast long, stuttering shadows. A coffee mug orbited lazily past his faceplate, trailing brown droplets frozen into delicate beads.
“Main server hall should be deck three, stern-ward,” Kaela said, her voice all business now. “Els, you’re on conduit and power rerouting. Ghost, you’re with me. We find the data-core, we pull its teeth.”
The work was methodical. Brutal, sometimes. They used cutting torches on sealed blast doors, the molten metal spiraling away in glowing orange tendrils that cooled instantly into twisted sculptures. They hauled broken furniture and cracked view-screens out of the way. Rut’Aba’s muscles, stiff from days of inaction, began to burn, then to settle into a reliable ache.
He found himself falling into the rhythm of it. The problem of a jammed door. The puzzle of a fried terminal. His mind, which had been cycling uselessly between memory and dread, focused down to the immediate tactile world: the grip of a hydraulic pry-bar, the tension in a leverage point, the satisfying crack of a seal giving way.It was simple. His hands knew what to do.
“You’re not bad at this,” Els commented over the comm as he guided a floating server rack clear of her work area. “For a dimensional weirdo.”
“I had a desk job once,” he grunted, maneuvering the mass. “Filing reports. This is better.”
“A desk job?” Kaela laughed, a short burst of static. “What, you got tired of the ergonomic chair and decided to become a tomb-hopping phantom?”
“Something like that.” He didn’t elaborate. The memory of that life—the grey walls, the silent, hateful glow of a data-slate, the stifling weight of pointless procedure—felt more alien to him now than the necron tombs. That work had dulled him. This work, despite the danger and the grime, demanded a sharpness. Taking on work was what he needed, as much as he had hated work in his office life. But this work kept the mind sharp. It required every sense, every calculation. It left no room for the ghosts.
They breached the server hall. It was a cathedral of dead intelligence. Racks of logic engines stood like silent monoliths, their connection fibers severed and drifting. Kaela went straight for the primary core, a massive black cube anchored in the center of the room. “Jackpot. Looks intact. Els, get me some juice.”
As Els worked to reroute emergency power, Rut’Aba moved through the aisles. His helmet lights swept over the dead machines. Then a glint, caught in the peripheral. Not the dull grey of standard plating. Something else, wedged behind a collapsed support girder.
He pushed the girder aside. It was a small, private strongbox, fused to the deck. Its surface was a polished alloy he didn’t recognize, etched with spiraling patterns that hurt his eyes if he looked directly. It wasn’t part of the ship’s standard kit.
“Found something,” he said.
Kaela floated over. “Personal stash. Probably the captain’s. Break it.”
He applied the cutter. The alloy didn’t melt like steel. It glowed a faint, resistant blue before finally yielding with a sound like a sigh. Inside, padded in moulded foam, were three items: a roll of archaic platinum coins, a small, pearl-handled laspistol, and a data-slab. The slab was featureless, black.
“Treasure,” Els chirped. “I call the shiny gun.”
Kaela ignored her, picking up the data-slab. She slotted it into a reader on her forearm. Her suit feed projected a tiny, green-tinted holoscreen above her vambrace. Lists scrolled. manifests.Then, a star chart. It depicted a region of space he didn’t know, marked with a single, pulsing icon.
“Not treasure,” Kaela said, her voice low. “A map. And not to a sunshine planet.” She zoomed in. The icon was labeled in gothic script, but a second, older language was etched beneath it. Rut’Aba recognized the angular forms. It was similar to the scripting on the necron monoliths.
A cold, familiar resonance trembled up from his bones. A faint, ultrasonic hum. The scars on his thighs didn’t glow, but he felt them, a sudden, icy awareness beneath his skin. The ship around them seemed to hold its breath. The drifting dust motes in his helmet lights paused in their random dance.
“We need to go,” he said, his mouth dry.
“The core’s only at sixty percent extraction,” Els protested.
Kaela was staring at Rut’Aba. She saw the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand had gone to his thigh. She didn’t ask.She made a decision. “Abort. Now. Els, grab what you have. Ghost, with me.”
They moved fast, kicking off the deck toward the ragged hole they’d entered. The silent server hall watched them flee. Just as Rut’Aba crossed the threshold, he looked back. In the deep shadows between the logic engine racks, for a fraction of a second, he saw a shape.Tall. Slumped. With too many arms, hanging limp and twitching.
It was gone when his lights swept over it.
Back on the skiff, with the wreck falling away behind them, the resonance in his bones faded to nothing. Els grumbled about leaving salvage behind. Kaela was silent, turning the strange data-slab over and over in her hands. Rut’Aba stared out at the endless debris, seeing not shattered metal, but a battlefield. A graveyard. And a signpost.
In the bay, as they disembarked, Captain Varek was waiting. He looked at the recovered server core, then at Kaela’s face, then at the black slab in her grip.
“Report,” he said.
Kaela handed him the slab. “We got the core. And we got a package. Addressed in a language Ghost here seems to understand.”
Varek’s eyes snapped to Rut’Aba. The ambient noise of the bay—the clanging, the shouts, the hiss of depressurization—seemed to recede. The only sound was the low thrum of the ship’s heart, and the soft, almost imperceptible whisper coming from the data-slab’s surface. It sounded like chanting. It sounded like a scream.
“My ready room,” Varek said, his voice barely a whisper. “Now.”