The Splitstone Quarry sprawled like a wound in the deck plating of the Warden, a vast stepped excavation carved into the industrial underbelly behind the Great Silver Mirror. Once, automated borers and laser cutters had bitten into asteroid-sourced rock to feed the fabrication plants farther aft; now gravity had failed in patches, leaving zero-g pockets where dust and debris drifted in lazy, eternal orbits. The air carried the metallic tang of ozone and old blood, undercut by the faint, acrid stink of scorched feathers.
The Warden Reclaimers approached from the northwest rim, moving in the low-slung silence of predators who had learned caution the hard way. L’Uomo Prime’s detector legs clicked softly against the scaffolding, parsing heat ghosts and electromagnetic flickers. Steve Austin’s heightened vision pierced the shadows, picking out the heat signatures of the squat, gobbling shapes inside the cluster of patched tents. Turkeyoids. Well-armed ones, judging by the glint of leaking energy cells and the crude vibro-axes slung across their broad backs.
D’Can’Tr felt the old memory stir unbidden: the camp on Deck 14, the cyborg-Knower’s face splitting into a rictus grin as he executed the boy, the plated thug bugs scuttling forward under android fire. Revenge had brought them here, across decks and wastelands, but revenge was a cold engine. It ran hot only when fed.
They struck the tents first. Sheik M. Baek led, his poison talons extended, regeneration already knitting minor abrasions from the journey. The flock inside barely had time to gobble alarm before the fight became surgical: Henry Darksky’s radiated eyes flared, burning retinas; D’Can’Tr’s quills spat silicone-hardened barbs; L’Uomo’s laser sheen carved precise arcs through the gloom. The Turkeyoids fell in a welter of electrical discharge and charred meat.
Down the ladder, onto swaying scaffolding, two more waited in ambush. They died quietly.
Inside the tents, the Reclaimers found the first freed slaves—gaunt men and women, some sporting third eyes or extra digits, staring with the hollow hope of those who had stopped expecting rescue. One stepped forward: Lieutenant Faux, quills bristling along his arms, his telekinetic field a faint shimmer in the air. “Grit’s below,” he rasped. “Ten more with him. The birds have the deep shafts.”
Southward they moved, hugging the ramps that spiraled into the quarry’s throat. More prisoners emerged from side tunnels and alcoves, clutching makeshift tools. Shovels. Pickaxes. One whispered of the crane overhead—its counterweight could be released to crush anything caught beneath. Another spoke of explosive barrels at the pit bottom, gas canisters stacked to the north like forgotten ordnance.
They pressed on, ghosts in the machinery.
The processing plant loomed on the eastern side, a rusting hulk perched on massive supports. A dry sluice jutted from its flank, channeling nothing now but memory; below it, a mound of processed ore glittered dully in the half-light. The administrative block south of it had a balcony running its length, wooden stairs dropping to the ramp. A guard tower stood sentinel farther north.
The sentries died in pairs: two in the tower, two at the plant’s north entrance. Inside the processing building the Reclaimers found only corpses—Amazoé overseers, their armor blackened by laser burns, feathers fused to skin. The Turkeyoids had not been gentle in their coup.
From the plant’s shadowed doorway they spotted the pit floor: a Butterball—massive, blubbery, vibro-axe in one claw-like hand—tormenting a lone slave. Nearby, two regular Turkeyoids jeered. On the administrative balcony above, another sentry watched the scene with lazy arrogance.
They planned the flare. A coordinated strike. Maximum violence in the first heartbeat.
But Willy was gone.
He had slipped away without a word, drawn toward the southern building’s rear door like a man following a precognitive thread he could no longer ignore. When he pushed inside, Gobble Lord Struthio waited—enormous, blubber-armored, eyes glowing with electrical charge. A sonic mental blast ruptured the air; Willy crumpled. The lord dragged the body deeper, out of sight.
The flare rose anyway.
Laser fire and quills answered it. The Butterball roared, axe swinging. From above, Lord Struthio exploded through the office door, launched himself in a zero-g leap, wings half-spread, blubber rippling. He landed with a shock that cracked the gravel floor, calling reinforcements—more Turkeyoids pouring from side passages.
The fight turned desperate. Electrical arcs snapped across the pit. Henry reflected blasts back at their sources. Steve phased through a vibro-stroke, density control making him untouchable for a heartbeat. D’Can’Tr’s mental paralysis locked one attacker in place long enough for Sheik to close.
Sheik M. Baek—mutated rooster, once mocked by the gobble-necked freaks—found the vibro-beak the Turkeyoids themselves had crafted, a cruel trophy from an earlier skirmish. He drove it upward in a single, precise thrust, punching through blubber and bone, into the soft place beneath Struthio’s beak. The lord’s electrical field discharged in a final, blinding corona, then guttered out. The massive body slumped, twitching.
Silence followed, broken only by the hiss of cooling metal and the groans of the dying.
They found Willy in the office, crumpled against a console, eyes open in surprise. No last words. Just the quiet accusation of a future that had almost been changed.
The last slaves came up from the deep shafts: Foreman Grit, broad-shouldered and scarred, eyes hard with the calculus of survival. Lieutenant Faux recounted the battle in clipped sentences, naming Super Shop Mart, naming the Reclaimers’ deeds. Grit listened, then spoke.
“The mine produces what the cells need—rare earths, isotopes, scrap we turn into power. The Amazoés starved us to keep it. You could change that. Alliance. Direct trade. No more middle-women.”
The words hung in the thin air. D’Can’Tr thought again of the ruined camp on Deck 14, the cyborg duplicate wearing a friend’s face, the promise of revenge that had already cost so much. Betraying Ursula would mean war—another front in a ship already tearing itself apart. Yet the hydrogen cells were oxygen to Super Shop Mart. Control of Splitstone was leverage across the Silver Wastes.
They stood amid the cooling corpses, the quarry’s vast silence pressing in, and felt the weight of the next choice settle like dust. The Warden kept turning, indifferent, its ancient engines driving toward whatever waited beyond the next bulkhead.
And somewhere, far aft, Usu-Alpha-Two waited still.
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