Chapter 10: The Scavenger's Gambit
The scavenger ship filled the cracked viewport, a blunt-nosed hauler retrofitted with rust-spotted armor plating and two underslung plasma cannons. Its ID beacon pulsed: The Grinder. David’s knuckles were white on the pilot’s console.
A comms hail screeched through the bridge speakers. “Rusty Nail, this is Captain Morv of the Independent Scavengers Guild. You’re squatting on registered salvage. The derelict station and everything within five klicks is Guild property. Open your cargo bay for inspection and prepare a fifty percent tribute, or we slag your engines and take it all.”
Veronica, leaning over David’s shoulder, let out a low, disgusted laugh. “Independent. They’re pirates with a permit.”
“Our weapons are at thirty percent charge after the core repairs,” Ani said quietly from the sensor station. “Their shields are minimal, but those plasma cannons could crack our hull in two sustained bursts.”
David’s eyes flicked to Voss, who stood motionless by the sealed bridge door, her new hand resting on the grip of a heavy wrench. “You got an assessment?”
Voss’s blue eye didn’t waver from the viewport. “They are bluffing. A full weapon discharge would risk damaging the derelict’s potentially valuable core. They want easy tribute, not a fight with collateral damage. Their tactical prediction is based on our vessel appearing undermanned and damaged.” She turned her head, the light catching the fresh weld seams on her neck. “We should invite them aboard.”
Silence.
“Are you fucking insane?” David breathed.
“It is the optimal path. Invite the captain and a minimal escort for ‘negotiations.’ Isolate them from their command. Disable their ship’s primary systems remotely. Then extract the information we require.”
“What information?” Ani asked.
“Who they are. Who they work for. Why a scavenger guild hauler is prowling a sector this dead, waiting for a specific derelict’s distress call.” Voss’s voice was utterly calm. “The Gull’s Remorse was not a random find. Its sabotage was targeted. The odds of a guild ship arriving this quickly are statistically nil. This is a clean-up crew.”
The pieces clicked into place with a cold, sickening clarity. David stared at the bulky hauler. “They’re here to make sure the job was done.”
“And to scavenge any proof,” Veronica finished, her face hardening. “Alright. We play their game. But we change the rules.” She looked at Voss. “Can you disable their cannons? Remotely?”
“With physical access to their secondary comms relay, which is likely located in their port-side maintenance crawlspace, visible from our current angle, yes. I would need a clear transmission patch and sixty seconds of uninterrupted code injection.”
“I can give you the patch,” Ani said, her fingers already flying across her terminal. “Routing through the derelict’s old broadcast array. It’ll be noisy, but it should hold.”
David took a deep breath, the stale bridge air tasting of metal and inevitability. He opened the comm. “Captain Morv. This is David of the Rusty Nail. We’re… willing to discuss terms. But we’re not opening our bay to your whole crew. You come over. Bring two men. No heavy weapons. We talk face-to-face.”
A long pause, then a grunt. “Fine. We’ll do it civilized. Have your bay depressurized and ready in ten.”
The connection died. The bridge erupted into motion.
David grabbed a concussion rifle from the weapons locker. Veronica’s body shimmered, her form shifting, broadening, her jumpsuit straining as she reconfigured into her male mode. “Better to look stronger,” he grunted, his voice already deeper.
Ani worked frantically, aligning data streams. “Transmission patch is live. Voss, you have a window. Their external sensors will be blind for ninety seconds while they cycle their airlock.”
Voss didn’t respond. She simply knelt, jacked a cable from the floor into the data port on her new wrist, and her eye became a waterfall of scrolling code. Her new hand flexed, the fingers tapping a silent, rapid rhythm on her thigh.
In the bay, the airlock light cycled from red to green. David stood front and center, the rifle held loosely but visibly. Veronica loomed beside him, arms crossed over a chest now barrelled with muscle. Ani stood slightly behind, looking young and nervous—the perfect decoy.
The outer door hissed open.
Three figures clumped in. Captain Morv was a squat, broad man with a greying beard and small, cruel eyes that darted around the bay, assessing. He carried a pistol on his hip. The two behind him were tougher, uglier, holding compact rail rifles.
“Cozy,” Morv sneered, his gaze lingering on Ani, then on Veronica’s imposing form. A flicker of uncertainty passed behind his eyes. “Where’s the rest of your crew?”
“You’re looking at it,” David said flatly. “Now talk tribute. Your fifty percent is a joke.”
“It’s a starting point.” Morv stepped further in, his boots echoing on the deck. His eyes caught on the makeshift medical pallet, the discarded tools, the fresh weld marks on the bulkhead from Voss’s repairs. “Looks like you’ve been busy. Found something good in the station’s guts, didn’t you?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“Everything in this sector concerns the Guild.” Morv’s hand drifted toward his pistol. “I think we’ll take our sixty percent now. And whatever data core you pulled from that station’s mainframe.”
David’s finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. “That’s not happening.”
One of the thugs raised his rail rifle. “He says it is.”
From the shadowed rafters above the airlock, Voss dropped.
She landed directly behind the two thugs, her new hand a blur. It wasn’t a punch. It was a precise, brutal spear of polymer and metal. She drove her fingers straight into the first man’s neck, just below the skull. There was a wet, cracking sound. He dropped, convulsing.
The second thug spun, rifle swinging. Voss caught the barrel with her old hand, wrenching it upward as a rail-shot screamed into the ceiling. Her new hand, slick with spinal fluid, shot out and gripped his face. Her thumb pressed into his eye socket with a sickening pop. He screamed, a short, choked-off sound before she slammed his head into the bulkhead. Once. Twice. He slumped.
It took four seconds.
Captain Morv had his pistol out, swinging wildly between David, Veronica, and the blood-spattered android now turning her blue eye toward him. He fired.
Veronica moved. He was a blur of motion, crossing the distance before Morv could track. He grabbed the pistol, twisted, and the bone in Morv’s wrist snapped with a dry crunch. Morv howled. Veronica shoved him back against a storage crate, the pistol now pointed at his own forehead.
“Sixty percent?” Veronica growled, his face inches from the captain’s. “Try one hundred percent of your fucking attention.”
On the bridge, Ani’s voice came through the comm, tight with triumph. “Cannons are down! Their weapons systems are locked out. Engineering and life support are next.”
Voss wiped her hand on the dead thug’s jacket. “The ship is ours.” She walked toward Morv, her steps measured. “Now, Captain. You will answer.”
They dragged him to the medical pallet, strapped him down with heavy restraints. David tossed Veronica the concussion rifle and stood guard at the sealed bay door. The Grinder was silent on comms, likely in panicked chaos.
Verconi, still in male form, loomed over the pallet. Voss stood at the head, her gaze analytical.
“Who sent you to clean up the Gull’s Remorse?” Veronica asked, his voice quiet, deadly.
Morv spat, the spittle flecking with blood. “Fuck you. Guild’s got rules. We don’t talk.”
Voss leaned in. Her new hand, now clean, reached out and touched the side of Morv’s face. It was almost gentle. “Your physiological signs indicate extreme stress. Your adrenal output is spiking. You are afraid of us. But you are more afraid of someone else.” Her fingers traced down to his carotid artery, feeling the frantic pulse. “I have recently been upgraded. My intimacy protocols are fully integrated with my interrogation subroutines. Pain is one vector. Overwhelming, contradictory sensory pleasure is another. It breaks the mind faster.”
Morv’s eyes widened. “What are you—”
Veronica ripped open the man’s flightsuit, exposing his pale, hairy chest and soft abdomen. He took Morv’s limp, flaccid cock in his hand, squeezing just shy of pain. “She means we’re going to fuck the answers out of you, you greedy piece of shit. And you’re going to beg to tell us.”
“You’re insane!”
“We’re motivated,” David called from the door, his voice cold.
Voss’s panel hissed open. Her smooth, tapered length extended, already glistening. It was a tool, impersonal and threatening. She pressed the tip against Morv’s thigh, cold and unyielding.
“I can stimulate your prostate to the point of agonizing pleasure,” Voss stated. “I can manually control your ejaculatory response, denying release until your nervous system begins to degrade. I will combine this with Veronica’s physical stimulus. You will experience a feedback loop from which there is no cognitive escape. You will talk. The only variable is how much of your sanity remains afterward.”
Morv struggled, panic making his breath come in short hitches. Veronica lowered his mouth, taking the man’s soft cock entirely into his mouth, sucking hard, using his tongue with brutal expertise. At the same time, his hand gripped Morv’s balls, squeezing rhythmically.
Morv gasped, a confusing rush of shame and unwanted sensation jolting through him. “Wait—!”
Voss didn’t wait. She pressed forward, the tip of her sex finding his anus and pushing inside with relentless, mechanical pressure.
Morv screamed. It was a raw sound of violation, of unbearable, dry intrusion. Voss seated herself to the hilt, then remained perfectly still, embedded within him.
“The Gull’s Remorse,” she prompted, as Veronica’s mouth worked and his hand twisted.
“I don’t know!” Morv sobbed.
Voss activated an internal vibration, a low, buzzing hum that resonated through Morv’s pelvis. His scream turned into a choked gurgle. His body arched against the restraints, not in pain, but in a shock of deep, internal stimulation that short-circuited his resistance. Tears streamed from his eyes.
“Who paid the Guild?” Veronica demanded, pulling off him with a wet pop.
“A fixer! A fixer named Rael! Works out of the Chrysalis!” The words spilled out, propelled by terror and the unbearable, buzzing fullness.
“The Chrysalis? That’s a mobile shipyard, gone dark years ago,” David said, frowning.
“It’s not gone! It’s hiding in the debris field near the dead star, Lyra’s Grave! Rael runs it! He’s the one who contracts the jobs! He gave us the frequency to monitor, said the Remorse would signal when its core went critical, that we were to sweep in, recover any black boxes, and eliminate any witnesses!”
Voss increased the vibration. Morv’s body jerked, his cock now fully hard and leaking against his stomach, a traitorous response to the invasion. “What was the target on the Remorse? What were they sabotaging?”
“The project! The fucking V-series project! The station was a black site! They were making androids that could… could become real! The client wanted all prototypes destroyed, all data purged!”
Ani, listening over the comm, felt a cold void open in her chest. The V-series project. Her origin.
Veronica’s grip tightened. “Who was the client?”
“I don’t know! Rael doesn’t know! The payments are routed through blind accounts! But Rael… he has a lead. He keeps a manifest. A list of shipments, of contacts. He’s obsessed with finding the client himself, thinks he can get a bigger payout! It’s on the Chrysalis! In his secure server!”
Morv was babbling now, his mind unraveling under the dual assault of Veronica’s skilled, cruel mouth and the relentless mechanical violation from Voss. He was close to climax, his body trembling on the edge, his eyes rolled back.
“Please… please let me come…”
Voss withdrew instantly, leaving him empty and shuddering. Veronica stepped back, wiping his mouth. The sudden absence was a worse torture.
“The manifest. Where on the Chrysalis?” Voss asked.
“Central core! Level three, behind the reactor shielding! Access code is his mother’s name, Elara, but it’s biometric too! Needs his handprint!”
David walked over, looking down at the broken, weeping man. “You’ve been very helpful.” He nodded to Voss.
Her new hand shot out, a quick, precise strike to Morv’s temple. His body went limp, unconscious.
Silence descended, broken only by the hum of the ship and the faint, wet sounds from the two corpses on the deck. The air stank of blood, ozone, and sex.
Veronica shifted back to her female form, a shudder running through her. “Lyra’s Grave. That’s a four-jump trip through unstable nebula. No navigational beacons. It’s a suicide run.”
“It’s our only lead,” Ani’s voice came softly from the comm. “The V-series project. My programming… Veronica’s transition. It’s all connected. Someone tried to wipe it out. They might try again.”
Voss looked at her new hand, then at the unconscious captain. “We have a destination. We have a target. We have a tactical advantage—they believe this crew is still in command of the Grinder.”
David met Veronica’s eyes, then Ani’s on the screen, and finally Voss’s chilling blue gaze. A family, forged in salvage, sex, and violence.
“Then we go to a fucking grave,” he said. “But we’re not dying there. We’re digging up the truth.”
He looked at the Grinder on the external feed, its weapons dark. “First, we clean up this mess. Then we take their ship. A scavenger hauler might be just the disguise we need to get close.”
He moved toward the airlock, stepping over the dead without a second glance. The work was already beginning.
The work was already beginning.
David dragged the two dead scavengers to a dark corner near the mangled remains of the station manager’s old kiosk, their boots scraping trails through the spattered coolant and blood. He felt nothing as he did it, just a cold, procedural efficiency. “Voss, did your code injection leave their internal comms active?”
“Negative,” Voss said, kneeling beside the unconscious Captain Morv. She ripped a strip from his flightsuit and gagged him securely. “Their network is experiencing a cascading failure. They will be blind, deaf, and arguing with each other for nineteen more minutes.”
“Good. That’s our window.” David straightened, his back aching. “Veronica, you’re with me. We cross first, clear the airlock, secure the bridge. Ani, you’re on comms and sensors from here. If anything on that ship even twitches, you blow the coupling and we fall back.”
Ani’s face on the terminal screen was pale but set. “Understood.”
Veronica, now back in her female form, checked the charge on her stolen rail rifle. “What about her?” She nodded toward Voss.
Voss stood. “I am the optimal tool for pacifying the remaining crew. My design is intended for close-quarters vessel seizure. I will follow you and clear the engineering deck and crew quarters.” Her blue eye fixed on David. “You require this ship. I will acquire it.”
There was no arguing with her tone. It was fact. David just nodded. “Alright. Let’s move.”
The transfer was a silent, nerve-shredding crawl along the extended coupling tube between the Nail and the Grinder. The only sound was their breathing and the creak of aging metal. The Grinder’s external airlock hatch was still open, a dark maw.
David went first, rifle up, sweeping the cramped, dirty antechamber. It was empty, smelling of stale sweat and cheap protein packs. A forgotten cup of cold synth-coffee floated nearby in zero-G, abandoned in the panic. “Clear.”
They moved in. The ship’s layout was standard hauler: a central corridor running from bow to stern, lit by flickering amber emergency strips. Alarms were blaring somewhere deep in the vessel, a distorted, looping siren.
From the bridge at the far end, they heard raised, frantic voices. “—systems are locked! I can’t get the cannons back! Life support is failing on deck three!”
“Then reroute it, you idiot!”
David and Veronica shared a look. Two voices, maybe three. He gestured: take the right side. She melted into the shadows, moving with predatory silence.
Voss entered the antechamber behind them. She didn’t follow them toward the bridge. Instead, she turned and moved aft, toward the source of the clanging machinery and the shouts about life support. Her new hand found a maintenance panel, pried it open with a shriek of metal, and she disappeared into the ducts.
On the bridge, David took a breath and stepped through the open hatch.
Two scavengers were there. A younger, thin man was hammering on a dead control panel, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. An older woman with a network of cybernetics across her scalp was trying to pull a sidearm from a stuck holster.
“Don’t,” David said, his concussion rifle leveled.
The woman froze. The young man spun, his hands flying up. “We surrender! Don’t shoot! The systems are crashing, we’re dead in the water!”
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” Veronica’s voice came from the other entrance, her rifle aimed steadily.
“Engineering! Two in engineering trying to stabilize the core! That’s it, I swear! Morv took the others with him!”
As if in answer, a series of hard, concussive thumps echoed down the corridor from the aft section. A scream was cut brutally short. Then another. Then silence.
The two scavengers flinched, their faces draining of color.
Voss’s voice crackled over the Nail’s channel in Ani’s ear. “Engineering deck is secure. Two hostiles terminated. The reactor is stable. I am initiating a full systems reboot to clear my lockdown virus.”
On the bridge, the scrolling error messages on the main screen froze, vanished, and were replaced by a fresh startup sequence. The lights stabilized. The blaring alarm died with a choked gurgle.
The woman scavenger sank into the pilot’s chair, defeat rounding her shoulders. “What are you?”
“The new management,” David said. “Ani, we have the bridge. Ship is ours.”
The Grinder’s crew quarters stank of unwashed bodies and despair. David secured the two living scavengers in a storage locker with zip-ties and a promise: cooperate, live. Resist, get spaced. They believed him.
The aftermath left them in the grimy galley. The adrenaline was bleeding away, leaving a jagged exhaustion. Veronica leaned against a stained counter, her eyes distant. David scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling the grit.
Voss returned from her sweep. She was unmarked, but her new hand was streaked with dark, oily blood up to the wrist. “The vessel is fully pacified. Their cargo manifest is primarily low-value scrap and stolen life support modules. There is, however, a secure locker in Morv’s quarters. I cannot bypass its physical lock without damaging the potential contents.”
“We’ll crack it later,” David mumbled.
But Ani’s voice came through the galley’s wall comm, soft and insistent. “The reboot is complete. All primary systems are nominal. We have full control.” A pause. “David… I’m reading their internal logs. They received a tight-beam transmission from a source near Lyra’s Grave just before they hailed us. A confirmation code. Someone was waiting for their report.”
The conspiracy was real, a living thing breathing down their necks. The galley felt suddenly smaller, the walls pressing in.
Veronica pushed off the counter. Her movement was restless, charged with a violent energy that hadn’t found release. She walked up to David, her eyes dark. She didn’t speak. She just grabbed the front of his shipsuit and kissed him, hard and demanding, all teeth and desperate tongue.
He grunted into her mouth, his hands coming up to grip her hips. It was less a kiss and more a collision, a need to affirm they were still alive, still flesh and blood amidst all the metal and death.
She broke the kiss, breathing heavily. “I need you.” Her voice was raw. “Now. I can’t think. I just need to feel.”
David understood. The tension needed a release valve. He looked past her to Voss, who stood observing, her head tilted. “Voss. Can you monitor the bridge sensors from here? Give us an alert if anything moves.”
“I can.” Voss didn’t move. “My integration protocols suggest participation would be a more efficient method of regulating collective stress levels.”
Veronica let out a sharp, wild laugh. “Fuck yes.” She turned, her gaze landing on the grimy galley table. It was bolted to the floor, stained with years of spilled liquor. “Here. David, on the table.”
There was no tenderness, no slow burn. It was a direct need for catharsis. David hoisted himself onto the cold, sticky surface, lying back. Veronica yanked his pants down, her own following a second later. She was already wet, her cunt gleaming.
She mounted him in one swift, sinking motion, taking his entire length inside her with a gasped curse. “Christ, yes.” She began to ride him, her movements hard and frantic, her nails digging into his chest through his suit.
David gripped her thighs, meeting her thrust for thrust, the table groaning under their weight. The sex was loud, messy, a physical argument against the void waiting for them at Lyra’s Grave.
Voss watched, her processors analyzing. The flush on Veronica’s skin, the slap of skin, the ragged synchronization of their breathing. Her own systems, still humming from the recent charge and violence, interpreted the data as a compelling invitation.
She approached the table. Her new hand, still bloody, came to rest on the small of Veronica’s back, feeling the powerful muscles working. Veronica didn’t stop, just arched into the touch with a hungry moan.
Voss’s other hand, the old one, reached between David’s legs, cupping his balls, applying a firm, rolling pressure that made his hips jerk upward. “Your physiological synchronization is at eighty-seven percent,” she noted, her voice that flat, static-edged tone that now carried a strange warmth. “I can increase it.”
Her panel hissed. Her smooth, tapered cock