I was falling down a long, deep shaft netted with enormous, silken, sticky spider webs. Sickly light the shade of cooling magma pierced the gloom from hundreds of ktonshi eyes as they clung to the walls all around him, reaching out in an effort to ensnare him with their webs, or pierce him with their legs. But I screamed my defiance at them and unloaded round after round from his coilgun.

  But they did not die! They refused to die! The coil gun retorts filled the shaft with a constant staccato beat as my finger spasmed on the trigger, but the endless rounds seemed to have no effect on them. Unlike the one I’d encountered while rescuing the pilot from her ruined fighter, they just watched me fall out of their reach with impassive ire, breaking through more and more webs as I continued to accelerate on his descent.

  Eventually, the red light of their eyes began to fade, and it seemed like maybe I’d fallen below their nesting places. I dared think maybe I’d escaped, and grabbed for my emergency grapple. I’d managed to rip it from one of the ktonshi when I’d made my mad dash to jump down this pit hoping to escape. It had screeched out my name in the same way Barstol had, as if crying out for revenge for its previous life. Possibly one of Barstol’s crew.

  Making sure that the winch end was securely fastened to my harness, I raised the launcher and fired, sending the grapple towards the side of the shaft. I sent a prayer out to whatever god of luck might be listening that it would find purchase and arrest my descent. While I had no wish to find myself warped into one of the demonic ktonshi, neither did I desire to be a human pancake at the bottom of this abyss.

  The grapple, which was designed cleverly to either adhere magnetically to metal surfaces, or penetrate non-magnetic surfaces with tiny denticles and hold on, struck the surface of the shaft walls and stuck solid. Moments later the high tensile line it was attached to started spooling out from the winch with the high pitched, angry whine of a hungry mosquito. I kept a white-knuckled grip on the coil gun, holding it aimed above me should anything emerge from the darkness, and braced myself for when the spool finally ran out of line.

  Thomas!

  Damn it, I could hear Barstol’s voice again, but somehow it was in my head! Were the Ktonshi telepathic somehow? Were they not nightmarish enough as it is? Being able to invade his mind and drive him insane was just too much. No! He snarled fiercely back at the voice, No Barstol, you didn’t get me then, and you aren’t getting me now! I’ll die by my own choice, my own hand, before I let you decide my fate!

  Just then, I felt the violent, bone-jarring jolt as the line ran out and I was jerked to an abrupt stop. But then, before I could recover from the impact or even take a breath for a sigh of relief, there was a sharp, metallic ping, and I saw the line rebound like a snapped whip off into the distance as I began falling again. “Fuck!” I screamed amidst my chaotic tumble, only then remembering the earlier conversation with Jophixa about the new defense platform of my suit pushing me past the weight rating for the grapple.

  Moments later I felt myself impact with the side of the shaft, the force driving the breath from my lungs and sending me bouncing violently off in another direction. I could now taste the coppery favor of blood in my mouth - I must have bitten my cheek or something.

  Thomas! Snap out of it already! This isn’t real!

  This time the voice in his head sounded weird. The dark, whispery, gravel scraped voice that was Jonathan Barstol was mixed up in a terrible harmony with a panicked woman’s voice, filled with desperation and urgency. That second voice fought with a fierce intensity to push itself past Barstol’s demonic whisper, to drown it out and become the only voice in this dark, voids-damned hell.

  It’s not Barstol, Thomas! He’s not here! There are no ktonshi on the station, none even in the system as far as we know! Snap out of it Tommy-bear! PLEASE!

  Wait…”Tommy-bear?” There had only been one person who had called me that since I was fourteen, since my mom had died. Stacy? Is that you? But you sounded like…

  You’re hallucinating Tommy-bear! The aliens that built this place communicate via infrasound! Infrasound causes…

  “Bad trips for humans,” I said out loud, and suddenly something in my head switched channels, and the rocky, shadowy hellscape of a cave shaft started to blur into the metallic walls of the station. “Lots of haunted houses in history turned out to be some source of infrasound. Oh…oh fuck. I’m falling out of control here Stacy, and…”

  I impacted violently with the other side of the metallic shaft, this time, having seen it coming, I was able to brace for it and not bite the inside of my mouth again. Instead, my helmet bounced off the wall like a carbon fiber basketball, and there was nothing more but black.

  “Thomas?” Stacy’s voice echoed in my head like a yodel at a canyon’s edge, pain spiking with every reverberation. “Thomas, if you don’t wake up soon, you’re going to end up with several very freaked out people jumping down that hole after you. And while the Keeper can control the gravity in the conduit, he doesn’t like doing it, something about power fluctuations to critical systems. Come on Tommy-bear, Tindron is worried about what Boudya’s gonna do to him if he returns to the ship without you. You don’t want to leave the poor guy to tell his wife how he let her paramour Wile E. Coyote into an abyss, do you?”

  “Star’s light,” I cursed hoarsely, wincing at the pain, curling up and cradling my head. “What the fuck hit me?”

  “The wall. Several times, after you tried to use your magnetic grapple to arrest your fall. The dynamic stress caused by your momentum, and the added weight of the defensive module exceeded the safety ratings of the winch. At that point the shaft sheared off like it was made from cheap polyurethane, but not before it sent you bouncing off the walls like a billiard ball, with an impressive amount of english. Do humans still play billiards? It sounds like a fascinating game, with lots of trigonometry involved in it.”

  “Ugh!” I groaned, wishing my head didn’t feel like it was trapped in a twentieth century pile driver, or that Stacy would stop screaming like a damned banshee through the comms set. “Stacy, I love you and I’m eternally grateful you are my friend and you helped snap me out of whatever that was, but could you be a bit quieter please? My head is throbbing like a fusion core about to go critical, and my back feels like a Thrantican Osticar has been using it as a xylophone. All I want is a high level analgesic, maybe nova-morphine, and one of Boudya’s fabulously brutal but effective deep tissue massages before I hit my bunk for a week of sleep. Is there any chance at all you can move on to the important parts like, how the hell I’m getting out of this mess, and if Jophixa is fit to throw me out an airlock when she sees me next?”

  “Heh. Oh, Tommy-bear is worried about how the Commander is gonna throw him out an airlock?” Stacy was barely holding back laughter, I could hear it in her voice. “Oh, oh, I love it! And she is definitely liable to do something to you, but I’m not sure an airlock will be part of it. Perhaps a bit of…smacking around…” and with that she broke down in a fit of maniacal giggles.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Half an hour later, I’d managed to get an analgesic into my system to kill the ache in my head enough I could get moving. Stacy had gotten the go ahead from Tratsa to release a decently strong one into my next water pull. It was no nova-morphine, but I was finally able to get up and move around. This meant I was now wandering down a long dark corridor with deja vu of wandering the giobhioni station nagging at my mind.

  “So there’s actually something still alive here, and Joe and Tindron are talking to it right now?” I asked Stacy as I walked. The engineer in me was still keeping an eye out for things that might prove useful, even though I wasn’t expecting anything except the same seemingly endless corridors we’d already seen. The only real difference was that the corridors were no longer featureless. There were odd markings made up of circles of various sizes and various intervals and heights along every surface.

  “Yup! More than one something, it seems,” she replied, “Keeper-” and here she emitted a string of sounds that I could only compare to something I’d last heard from a ship’s zero gravity toilet a night when the special kartavian lobster bisque had been bad back in my early years in the salvaging business, “Is one of twelve of his kind on the station, though he is the only one not in stasis. It seems they switch off every century or so in order to make sure none of them suffer any long term stasis effects.”

  “So they are hiding out from the Ktonshi too?”

  “We think so? They’ve been avoiding that question a bit, but do assure us they are in no way allied with them. So at least there is that.”

  “Assuming they aren’t lying.” I said with a sigh, “Which is just one of those things we’ll have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst on. And he floats in this atmosphere right? Too bad he couldn’t just come down the shaft, grab me and bring me back up top. Would have saved me all this walking.”

  “As I told you earlier,” She explained, “Tindron asked about that, but was told that the Keeper is worried physical contact might be dangerous to you. Something about a caustic gel that is secreted from their tentacles. So you’ll just have to - I believe the expression is ‘hoof it’?”

  “And none of those transport drones down here?”

  “Apparently not, sorry.”

  “Bugger.”

  Ten minutes later a thought occurred to me. “Okay, so I get the massive scale of the corridors in this place now that we know about the Keepers,” I mused out loud as I walked, “They’re fuck off big after all. But they float right? You said the one up there talking to Jo and Tindron floated up out of the shaft I fell down - “

  “Jumped down in the style of a Looney Toon.”

  “While not in my right mind, I’d like you to remember! And how do you even know about Looney Toons! I barely even know about Looney Toons.” I waved a hand dismissively, “Right, AI with access to the StellarNet, nevermind!” The discussion of my journey down the conduit was one I wanted to avoid: I was still quite embarrassed by the whole thing and felt the need to reaffirm that the whole thing wasn’t my fault. To convince myself more so than Stacy. “But anyway, so they can float up those shafts right? Why did they need to install that massive fucking lift we rode up on? Sure they’d need a lift for any species visiting the station that weren’t also so damned big, but in all of humanity’s explorations, they are the only sophont species we’ve encountered that are that large. The only other thing I’ve seen even close is…”

  “The Ktonshi.”

  Nodding to myself, I continued to walk, my eyes once again scanning the walls for anything that might indicate some hidden feature, which was made more difficult here due to the no-longer-featureless walls. “You’d think they had frequent visitors of people my size, they’d have more efficient ways for them to get around. Some kind of high speed tram system, vectored gravity, something.” I stopped and leaned against a bulkhead, the unexplained inefficiency really starting to irritate me.

  “Tommy-bear.”

  “Why did we have to spend hours riding a damned transport drone that was slow as a reaction thrust rocket on a round trip to Pluto, when a species that build this,” and I bashed my fist against the wall, “had to have been able to logic out the idea of a rapid transit for us wee folk!” I knew I was starting to rant, but between being embarrassed as hell, and thinking of the seemingly massive illogic to it all, I was having a hard time holding it back. “This station is-”

  “Thomas.”

  “-Likely bigger than any five of earth’s biggest metroplexes put together, but I’m going to have to walk for hours just to find a lift up to the deck where the others are so I can join up with them and meet this Keeper person. They couldn’t have been xenophobic, they had that drone-transport that picked us up in the first place and-”

  “THOMAS!”

  I stopped, blinking, mouth open with another bit of tirade on the tip of my tongue. After a moment I shook myself and got my thoughts in order before asking, “Uh, yes my dear?”

  “Ahem. That’s more like it.” She said, possibly a bit surprised by me calling her my dear, “You really should pay more attention to me when I’m trying to get your attention Tommy-berry-jam. I could have something very important to tell you, like maybe the fact there could be something crawling down the wall above you.”

  I might have screamed like a five year old in a haunted house when I tripped over my own feet in an effort to turn around, bring my coil gun to bear, and move away from the wall, all at the same time: Only to find that there was absolutely nothing on the wall.

  Stacy was giggling like mad as I tried to get my heartrate under control. “Stacy! That wasn’t funny!”

  “It was a tiny bit funny!” she said, but stopped laughing, “But you’re right that it wasn’t very nice. But you want to impress the Commander don’t you? You need to learn to pay attention! You never know when your teammate could be trying to communicate vital information.”

  I let out a massive sigh. Of course she was right. I’d just been saying to Jo not that long ago that I knew she’d rather have more combat trained people along on this, this…away mission. And I’d promised to follow her lead. If I was gonna get distracted by complaints on engineering efficiency…

  “Anyway, I’m sorry for scaring you Tommy, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “I’ll try.” I told her, “But if I end up with more nightmares because of that, I’m telling the ladies it’s all your fault when they ask.”

  A passable reproduction of a blown raspberry came through my speakers. “Boudya wouldn’t blame me a bit when I explain why, and Tratsa will just get up in your lap and…”

  “Hey now, I’m trying not to be distracted here.” I pushed myself back up to my feet, “Better get moving, still got a lot of walking to do.”

  “Wait Tommy-bear!” she urged, “I wasn’t trying to get your attention just to get you to stop ranting - though it did need to be done. I was trying to tell you something actually important! Once I knew that the Keeper and its kind communicated in infrasound, I started paying a great deal more attention to the audio pickups on your suit.”

  “And?”

  “When you struck that wall, it sounded different than any of the other times you’ve done so. It was muffled, like effort was taken to disguise it, but there’s a definite difference to that section of bulkhead.”

  Turning to stare at the wall, I frowned. What could these Keepers be hiding? Was it something innocuous like some sort of maintenance closet? Or, if I figured out a way past the wall, would there be something nefarious back there?

  “Are you picking up any kind of emissions? Electrical, radiation, whatever?”

  “No, noth-” She cut off and was quiet for a moment, “wait. I didn’t see anything at first, but then I tweaked the gain on the sensors up higher. There’s so much shielding this far into the station that there’s little background noise. I’m picking up very faint electromagnetic frequencies and…”

  “And?”

  “They match giobhioni networking protocols!”

  Thank you for Reading this chapter of The Salvager’s Plague.

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