Cerberus-9 – Sector 12 – The Fractured Core Bar
The bar was a symphony of bad decisions, each note played on a broken instrument. Stale alcohol, sour sweat, and the ozone tang of overloaded neural jacks formed the base chord. Over it played the melody of slurred arguments, the rhythmic thump of a broken stim-dispenser, and the percussive clatter of glass falling from numb fingers.
Cassian wove through the press of bodies, a man navigating a fever dream. He dodged a swaying addict whose eyes were veined maps of crimson circuitry, sidestepped a miner whose whining exo-suit seemed on the verge of a violent seizure, ducked under the wild gesticulations of a woman arguing with someone who wasn't there. The artifact's hum, now a constant companion at the edge of his hearing, had sharpened upon entering, guiding him like a dowsing rod pulled toward a toxic well. It led him to the darkest corner, to a stained booth where a woman in a lab coat that had once been white sat slamming back shots of something that smelled like industrial solvent and regret.
"Vex," he called, his voice barely cutting through the din.
Dr. Lira Vex didn't turn. She simply raised a hand, a universal gesture of dismissal that also showcased fingers stained with chemical burns and a fine, persistent tremor. "Go die, Rhys. Preferably somewhere that doesn't stain my favorite booth."
Cassian slid into the seat across from her, the synth-leather sticking unpleasantly to his thighs. He winced as his shoulder protested the motion. "Missed you too, Lira. You look… prosperous."
Up close, the years had not been kind. The sharp, fierce intelligence he remembered from their brief, brilliant collaboration on the Xenthis preliminary reports was still there, but it was buried under layers of grime, exhaustion, and something else—a hunted, feral quality that made her look like prey that had somehow survived the predator but never stopped running. Her dark hair hung in greasy strands, and the shadows under her eyes were not just from lack of sleep; they were trenches, deep enough to hold whole armies of ghosts.
"You're bleeding on my table," she observed flatly, not looking at him but at the amber poison in her glass. A fresh graze on his temple from the rough handling by Jareth's guards had reopened, a thin rivulet of blood tracing his jawline.
"And you're drinking solvent. I'd say we're both making excellent life choices." He didn't have time for this dance. He nudged the artifact onto the sticky table between them, keeping it half-covered by his sleeve. Its internal glow, even muted by the fabric, seeped out, painting the rings of old spills in an unearthly blue. "I need your help."
Vex went very, very still. Not the stillness of calm, but of a prey animal sensing the predator's breath, the moment before flight or fight. Then, with a speed that belied her dissipated appearance, her hand flashed out—
—and slapped him across the face.
The crack was surprisingly loud, cutting through the bar's noise for a second. A few heads turned, registered the tableau—a thin woman in a stained coat, a man with a bleeding temple and a stunned expression—then looked away. Violence was just another currency here, and this transaction was none of their business.
"You idiot," she hissed, leaning forward, her breath a cloud of chemical sweetness and decay. Her eyes, bloodshot and furious, finally met his. "Do you have any idea what that thing is? What it does?"
Cassian rubbed his stinging cheek, more shocked by the raw fear in her eyes than by the blow itself. "I have some idea. It got me thrown in a cell on Theta Station. It's currently singing a duet with my migraine. I was hoping you'd tell me the rest. You were the best xeno-linguist in the sector before you… disappeared."
Vex opened her mouth, a retort or a revelation trembling on her lips—
—and the bar's reinforced front door exploded inward.
The concussion was a physical wall. Shrapnel—splinters of metal, chunks of permacrete, shards of glass from the shattered neon sign—scythed through the room. The sound was swallowed by a sudden, deafening silence, followed by the screams of the wounded and the frantic scramble of the survivors.
Through the smoke and dust, silhouetted against the garish neon of the street, stood three figures in sleek, non-regulation combat armor. No insignia. Their faces were obscured by full-head helmets that reflected the chaos in distorted, nightmarish funhouse mirrors. They moved with a synchronized, unnatural grace, weapons scanning the room with cold, mechanical precision.
Not Jareth's people. Something else. Something worse.
Cassian's training, buried under years of ruin, surged back. He grabbed Vex's arm, yanking her down behind the substantial bulk of the booth table as a second later, controlled bursts of gunfire chewed through the space where their heads had been. The artifact, jostled, glowed fiercely in his free hand, its light casting their cramped hiding place into sharp, jumping relief.
"Silas," Vex choked out, her voice thick with dust and dread. "He found me. He must have tracked your dock signature…"
"Who are they?" Cassian yelled over the staccato roar.
"His cleaners!" she screamed back. "He uses them for repossession! They don't take prisoners!"
One of the figures turned its helmet toward their booth, drawn perhaps by the anomalous glow. It raised its weapon, a compact rifle with a bore that looked too wide for solid shot. The barrel tracked toward them with the unhurried certainty of a machine executing a program.
Cassian made a decision. He shoved the artifact into Vex's hands. "Run. Out the back. Now."
"What are you—?"
He didn't answer. He stood up, a perfect target, and hurled his half-full glass toward the bar's ancient, volatile power regulator. It missed, shattering against the wall. But it was enough. All three helmets snapped toward the movement, toward him.
"GO!" he roared.
Vex went, scrambling on hands and knees toward a service hatch behind the bar. Cassian ducked as a plasma burst vaporized the edge of the booth, the heat searing his cheek. He was pinned. The lead cleaner advanced, its steps measured, its weapon unwavering.
Then, from the shattered doorway, a new sound. A familiar, furious roar.
"HEY! ASSHOLES! YOU OWE FOR THE DOOR!"
Rourke. She stood framed in the wreckage, a heavy rotary cannon braced on her hip, its barrels already spinning with a rising whine that built to a deafening crescendo. She wasn't in armor. Just her street clothes, her scarred face a mask of pure, professional annoyance.
The cleaners pivoted as one. It was a mistake.
Rourke's cannon spoke. The sound was not of gunfire, but of sustained, industrial demolition. A tearing, grinding roar that chewed through the lead cleaner, its armor flaking away like rotten wood under a pressure hose. The second cleaner managed to raise its weapon before the stream of fire found it, dismantling it into component parts with the same brutal efficiency. The third fired a wild shot that scorched the ceiling, showering them with debris, before it, too, was reduced to a smoking heap of slag and shattered crystal.
The silence that followed was heavier than the gunfire. Acrid smoke filled the air, stinging the eyes and lungs. Rourke let the barrels spin down, the whine fading into a tired sigh. She stepped over the gore, kicking a helmet aside. It rolled, revealing a face inside that was oddly serene, its eyes replaced with dark, crystalline lenses that still held a faint, fading glow.
She stopped before Cassian's booth, looking down at him where he crouched amidst the ruins. "You," she stated, "are the worst client I have ever had. And I once worked for a man who wanted to weaponize aggressive flatulence." She looked toward the service hatch. "She get away?"
Cassian nodded, getting shakily to his feet. His shoulder screamed, but he ignored it. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why come back? The job was a bust. I'm caught. You got paid."
Rourke's good eye narrowed. She jerked her thumb toward the obliterated cleaners. "Silas Rourke is my ex-husband. We have an understanding: I don't work in his territory, he doesn't send his pet monsters to disassemble my clients. He broke the understanding." She leaned in. "That makes this personal. And when it's personal, I work for free. Now, where's the doctor?"
---
Theta Station – Commander's Private Sanctum
Jareth watched the chaos unfold not on a security feed, but on a dedicated, encrypted channel. The footage from the Fractured Core was sharp, high-contrast, likely from a drone Silas had hovering outside. He watched Cassian Rhys move with the desperate grace of a cornered animal. He watched the mercenary—Rourke—intervene with brutal, beautiful efficiency. But his eyes were on the artifact, that sliver of obsidian that glowed like a captive piece of the void itself.
It was here. It was active. And it was in the hands of the man from Xenthis.
"Sir?" Veyra's voice was tight over the comm. "Our team at the Star-Crossed reports no artifact on the prisoner's person. He must have hidden it or passed it off."
"He passed it," Jareth murmured, pausing the feed on a frame where Cassian shoved the glowing shard toward an unseen figure behind the bar. "To Dr. Vex. How… poetic." He steepled his fingers. The hologram of Lara on his wrist was dormant, a silent sentinel. "Silas's cleaners have been neutralized. The targets are on the run. In Cerberus-9's underbelly."
"Should we dispatch a recovery team? We can flood the sector—"
"No." Jareth's voice was a soft knife. "Let them run. Let them think they've escaped. Silas will be angry. He'll throw more of his toys at them. He'll soften them up. Crack them open."
"And the artifact?"
"It will call to her," Jareth said, his thumb brushing the dormant hologram. "It will lead them to the next piece. To the lock that needs its key. Our job is not to hunt. It is to shepherd. Let the wolves drive the lambs to the slaughterhouse door."
He closed the feed. The room was dark, lit only by the soft glow of starfields on a large viewscreen. He walked to it, staring at the pinprick of light that was Cerberus-9.
"You're close, Lara," he whispered to the cold glass. "Daddy's bringing you a new song. A duet."
---
Cerberus-9 – The Aftermath – A Rooftop Chase
Cassian pressed a wad of filthy gauze to the new, burning graze on his thigh, his back against the cold, riveted metal of a rooftop vent. The wind this high up was a knife, scouring away the stench of the bar, replacing it with the acidic smell of the station's upper-atmosphere processors. Beside him, Vex cursed with a linguist's creativity as she probed a shallow cut on her forearm.
"You're lucky I didn't leave you there," she spat, her breath frosting in the chill air.
"You tried," Cassian pointed out, peering over the vent's edge. The alley below swarmed with Silas's more conventional enforcers—hired muscle with visible weapons and loud voices. "I just happen to be very persuasive. And Rourke happens to hate her ex-husband."
Rourke herself was a silent silhouette against the orange glow of a nearby smelter stack, her rotary cannon discarded for a sleek, suppressed rifle. She was watching the access door to the rooftop. "We have five minutes before they sweep up here. Talk fast, Doctor. Why does Silas want you dead so badly he'd break a treaty with me?"
Vex hugged herself, the artifact a hard lump in her coat pocket. Its glow was muted, wary. "Because I owe him sixty thousand credits. And because I know what he bought with the money he owes other, worse people."
"Which is?" Cassian pressed.
She looked at him, and for a moment, the old Vex was there—the brilliant, burning mind trapped in the ruins of her life. "The missing files from Project Lament. The ones the military deep-six'd. The ones that don't just describe the signal's effects… but its source code. The ones that show how it doesn't just rewrite neural pathways… it seeds them. Grows something new inside the skull."
Cassian's blood turned to ice. "You worked on Lament?"
"I fled it," she hissed, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "When I realized what we were really doing. We weren't studying a signal. We were providing a bridgehead. Jareth's daughter wasn't Patient Zero. She was… fertile ground. And the signal planted something in her. It used her mind, her voice, to build a… a receiver. A translator. She didn't just hear it, Cassian. She became it."
The artifact in her pocket pulsed, a slow, mournful beat.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It wasn't her heartbeat. It was deeper. Older.
"It's not a weapon," Vex whispered, her eyes wide with horrific revelation. "It's a womb."
Below, the enforcers' shouts grew closer. A searchlight licked the edge of the rooftop.
Rourke shifted her rifle. "Touching family reunion. We moving or dying?"
Cassian looked from Vex's shattered face to the glowing outline in her coat. The song had led him here. To a debtor, a monster, and a truth more terrifying than any weapon. He pushed himself up, his body protesting every movement.
"We're moving," he said. "Silas wants his files. We need them too. So we're going to take them."
"And then what?" Rourke asked, her voice dry.
Cassian met her gaze. "Then we find out what the hell it is they're trying to give birth to."
Somewhere in the station's depths, as if in answer, a siren began to wail—a long, rising note that sounded unnervingly like a scream given voice.