“Too bright!” Vanje covered his face with his hands. “Turn that thing off.”

  Hunter tapped the same spot on her backpack again, and the appendages retracted.

  “What, you don’t like having four lightbulbs pasted in front of your face?” Gravel asked.

  Vanje exhaled, the soft hiss of his exoskeleton's ventilation system filling the silence as he tilted his head, the closest version of a head shaking a Trelvian could achieve with their thick exoskeleton wrapped around their necks. “You people really know how to make an entrance.”

  Vanje’s lair was like what Gravel had envisioned, but at the same time, it wasn’t. The walls were cluttered with jury-rigged tech, half-disassembled consoles, and an assortment of tools clearly designed for something other than human hands.

  Strange, multi-pronged instruments hung from the ceiling by retractable cables, their grips shaped for segmented fingers, while a mechanical rig in the corner held a set of reinforced exoskeletal bracers—likely maintenance supports for when his natural armor became too rigid.

  “A lot more confident now you’re in your own turf, huh?” Said Gravel.

  Vanje shut the door behind them, locking it with a heavy bolt before turning back, tapping the tip of his slender fingers together. “And you brought company all the way over here.”

  Fang waved her datapad. “Oh, please. You looked at the file, which means you’re already involved. Hunter, can you help me loosen my mask?”

  “Now I am really your Mom.” The redhead walked over.

  Vanje clicked his tongue, rubbing his temple. “You realize the kind of heat this brings, right? Whoever locked this thing down wasn’t just paranoid. They were smart. Like me. That’s the worst combination.”

  Hunter finished loosening Fang’s mask. “You said impossible before. What changed?”

  Vanje let out a sharp laugh. Or at least, his translator did, alongside the uncharacteristically audible chirp from inside him. “Nothing. It’s still impossible.” He jerked his chin at the datapad. “But now I’m curious. And curiosity is a terrible habit.”

  Gravel spread his hands. “So? You in?”

  Vanje walked toward an old workbench covered in scrap tech and outdated terminals, sat down, leaned back, tapping a command into his terminal. The metal workbench was covered in fine-tipped welding torches, resin applicators, and bio-synthetic sealants, which were probably necessary for repairing any cracks in his outer shell.

  The screen vomited lines of garbled text before settling into something almost legible. “I’ve already poked around at the data for ya.”

  The crew leaned in as he pulled up the results. Most of the data was still locked behind layers of encryption, but a few lines of decrypted text stood out.

  PROJECT: VARIANT GENESIS

  SECURITY LEVEL: RED

  SUBJECT STATUS: ACTIVE MONITORING

  AUTHORIZED BY: UNKNOWN

  “Always with the dramatic naming, these motherfuckers,” Gravel clicked his tongue, grinning.

  Fang drummed her fingers against the console. “So, like mutation and stuff? Would explain why some of the wildlife on Namor looked like it crawled out of a nightmare.”

  Vanje moved his finger up and down. More corrupted text scrolled past—then a fragment cleared.

  INITIAL TEST SITES: NAMOR-4, KESTRIS-9, CRIMSON-4, VEIHOLD RESTRICTED ZONE

  The crew turned back after an audible gasp from Fang. “Crimson-4. That’s where my boyfriend’s at.” Her face was pale, like a reflection from a hologram with too much interference. Gravel’s grin faltered for half a second before he masked it. Hunter angled herself closer to Fang, as if ready to catch her if she swayed.

  “They’re testing on this very planet?” Hunter’s voice was low. “Where the hell is Veihold?”

  “You asking me?” Said Vanje without turning back.

  “Yes.”

  “How should I know? I’m just a guest on this planet, like y’all.”

  Hunter turned to Priest. “Priest? You worked here.”

  “I have heard of Veifield and Veicon Valley. Never Veihold,” Priest replied.

  Vanje kept scrolling. Another section partially unlocked.

  SUBJECT GROUP CATALOGUE: PHASE 3

  HUMAN VARIANTS [REDACTED]

  TRELVIAN VARIANTS [REDACTED]

  SECONDARY SPECIES ADAPTATION: ONGOING

  FULL INTEGRATION PROJECTION: N/A

  The room went dead silent.

  Hunter narrowed her eyes. “They’re doing this across species?”

  “Oh look!” Gravel clapped. “Both us and you, Van!”

  Vanje sat back. “Means they either didn’t plan for whatever this was to stop . . . or they lost control of it. So you’ve been to Namor?”

  “Got this drive from there,” Gravel said.

  “You can make your own deductions from what you saw there. I’m just pulling data.”

  Hunter exhaled sharply. “And here I was hoping we were just sitting on some corporate fraud files.”

  Vanje tapped his console again, tilting his head. “That’s all I can get for now. Whatever’s left is locked behind higher encryption.” He looked at them. “I need time. And resources.” He gestured. “Cracking this isn’t about brute force. It’s about finesse. I’ll need to piggyback off a high-level corporate relay to even start unraveling the encryption.” He reached for a narrow, pen-like instrument on his workbench, and turned it on with a sharp whirr. A thin line of gel extruded from its tip as he ran it along a faint crack in the plating near his shoulder. The gel hardened, and a smooth, glistening layer blended with his exoskeleton as he put the instrument back on the bench.

  Fang’s eyes narrowed. “You have a lead on one?”

  Vanje’s mouth barely twitched, but the subtle shift in the angle of his exo-helmet’s edge suggested a smirk. “I might.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Priest crossed his arms, visor dimming as he studied him. “What’s the catch?”

  Vanje sat down, stretching out his legs. “Oh, there’s always a catch.” He steepled his fingers. “You’re gonna have to break into a corporate data vault. Republic. McPherson. Gilneas. Austjsocs. Your choice.”

  Silence.

  Gravel let out a low whistle. “Well, aren’t those some fun options.”

  Vanje shrugged. “Welcome to my world.” He leaned forward, tapping the datapad. “The vault is where they keep their deepest secrets. And we don’t need everything—just the right key to get past the first few layers.”

  “Do you realize what happens if we get caught?” Priest turned to Gravel. “Do we really need to unravel this secret?”

  Gravel exhaled through his nose, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed. “Need is a strong word.” He tilted his head toward the datapad. “But let’s put it this way. Someone went through a hell of a lot of trouble to keep this thing buried. If we let it go, we’re walking away blind. Do you want to walk away blind, Priest?”

  “Sunk cost fallacy, Gravel,” Priest retorted.

  Gravel scoffed. “Sunk cost fallacy? Please. You’re the white knight for justice. Remember that time we just had to rescue those children under the Topassium mine because you felt like it was the right thing to do?”

  “You were the first one who mentioned saving the kids,” Hunter chimed in.

  Gravel replied, “That’s what I meant! Priest agreed with that too! Think about all the other children all over the galaxy that we can save from becoming subjects of mutations against their will.” He gestured broadly at the datapad. “We already saw what was on Namor. That wasn’t some one-off freak accident. And now we know Kestris and Veihold were in the mix too. You really wanna tell me you’re not even a little curious what the hell ‘human variants’ means?”

  Hunter replied, more hesitant this time, “Forced mutations . . . Are you sure this isn’t just about you?”

  The room fell into silence once more. Even Fang, who had been prancing back and forth, stopped.

  Gravel hadn’t been thinking about his own forced mutation. Not at all.

  But the second Hunter said those words, a name clawed its way to the front of his mind. Dr. Stein.

  He had been doing a damn good job of not thinking about that man. Of not remembering the wheezing voice, the sterile scent of antiseptic, the way his body had never quite felt like his own after the injections.

  He stared at the ceiling. Then let out a short, dry laugh, opened his mouth, shut it, then opened his mouth again. “Careful, Hunter. You almost sounded insightful for a second.”

  She didn’t reply.

  Priest asked, “Suppose you are right, and we are uncovering inhumane practices on an astronomical scale. What do we do if we find out? Are you going to save the galaxy?”

  “We find people who wants to save the galaxy and sell the data to them! If we get past this bottleneck, it’s easy money. Some people murder others over this kind of money, Priest.”

  “I want a 15% cut of whatever amount you sell the data for,” Vanje spoke.

  “Deal. Send me a contract via Sye and I’ll sign it off.” Sye was a smart contract-based virtual wallet, meaning it operated on automated, self-executing contracts stored on a decentralized ledger. Since Sye ran on a decentralized ledger, the contract could not be altered or voided unilaterally. Gravel turned to the others. “Hunter, back me up here. Redeem the dumb thing you’ve just said. You love a good corpo scandal.”

  Hunter looked at them, and said nothing.

  “Well?” Gravel asked again.

  Hunter’s hand fiddled on the place on her belt where her tool pouch sat. “I already said yes. You don’t have to convince me twice.”

  Gravel sighed, then turned to Fang. “And you—tell me you don’t wanna crack this open.”

  Fang leaned forward, tapping the side of her holo-slate with a seldom-seen fire. “I don’t want my Kai turned into a mutated sabertooth tiger.” Kai was the name of her boyfriend.

  “We gotta protect Fang’s loverboy, team, or else she’ll be eternally depressed.” Gravel threw his hand upward.

  Priest’s visor flickered as he processed the situation. “Alright, let’s assume this goes sideways. We break in, trip an alarm, and McPherson sends half their security force to drag us out in cuffs. What’s the escape plan?”

  Gravel exhaled. “We wing it.”

  Priest stared. “That’s not a plan.”

  Hunter sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Gravel, we’re good, but we’re not ‘take on an entire corporate task force’ good.”

  Fang was practically flouncing about now, tapping furiously on her holo-slate as her movements became brisker. “Then we don’t fight them. We outmaneuver them.” She pulled up a rough layout of the city surrounding the McPherson facility. “If we fail and security’s on us, we don’t try to shoot our way out. Instead, we retreat to a secondary point. Somewhere crowded. Somewhere McPherson won’t want a firefight.” She shrugged off Hunter’s hand as the latter tried to keep her in one place. “I’m good. Don’t mind me.”

  Fang zoomed in on a transit hub marked Skyway Terminal. “We make for the hub. Too many civilians, too many cameras. McPherson won’t risk an open battle in a public space. From there, we slip onto a commercial hauler with falsified IDs and get to the dock.”

  Hunter frowned. “And what if they shut down all transit out of the city?”

  “That’s a tall order. McPherson, or Gilneas, or whoever we’re liberating from, are powerful, but they’re just corpo. They don’t run the entire city.” Fang did a 360 degree spin for no reason. “But if it does happen, we really improvise.”

  Gravel grinned. “See? That’s a plan.”

  Priest folded his arms. “That is a half-plan. We would need pre-set IDs, a clean ship to board, and a way to retrieve the Black Fang once we’re clear. If McPherson locks down the docks, we are not flying her out.”

  Fang walked in circles and drummed her fingers on her holo-slate. “Then we hack the docking system first. We override the lockdown protocols before we go in, not after.”

  Priest replied, “Preloading an authorization signal.”

  Fang nodded. “Exactly. Before we hit the vault, I slip a backdoor command into the system. When we need to leave, we remotely trigger a fake clearance override justtt long enough to lift off before they figure it out.”

  “Can you slip past their security measures unnoticed?”

  “I didn’t say unnoticed. Just not immediately noticed.”

  Hunter raised an eyebrow. “So best-case scenario, we walk onto a hauler, let it take us past the security perimeter, ping the Black Fang to auto-launch, and dock with it mid-flight?”

  Fang snapped her fingers. “Bingo.” For some reason she curled a leg back, which became an accidental back kick to the workbench behind her. An exoskeleton bracer that was hung on the wall dropped on the workbench with a thud, lying on top of the pen-like instrument Vanje had just placed earlier. “Oops. I’m so sorry!” She turned back and gasped. “Hope I didn’t break anything.”

  Vanje immediately hurried over to examine the potential damage, flipping over tools after tools. From behind his exo-exterior echoed a series of incessant chittering that didn’t stop for another ten seconds. Somehow, his auto-translator only seemed to have caught the last two words. “All good.”

  “Keep your impulsive tick in check, Fang,” Priest said. Fang nodded once, mouthed another ‘sorry’ before crossing one leg behind the other, presumably in an effort to keep them from moving. It didn’t last long.

  Hunter gestured for Fang to move away from the workbench with a frown on her face. She silently did as told, and when Fang started pacing with her knees raised too high again, Hunter’s frown deepened.

  “Worst case?” Gravel asked Fang.

  Fang shrugged. “We improvise.”

  Priest sighed. “Of course.”

  Gravel clapped his hands. “Boom. Full plan.” Dust swirled all around the hideout as he clapped.

  Priest drew out his next exhale. “Fine.” He’d already envisioned Plan C and Plan D to get them off-world as he pulled up the data overlays from his visors. “McPherson’s vault is the most locked-down, but they move data more often. Higher risk, but also higher chance of finding an exploitable gap.”

  Fang smirked. “And, you know, I already helped myself to some of their tech.”

  Hunter exhaled. “Of course you did.”

  Gravel rubbed his chin. “Gilneas and Austjsocs are heavy on automation. Fewer boots on the ground, but I heard their AIs are a nightmare.”

  Vanje moved his exo-helmet up and down, resembling a nod. “You heard right. And Republic? Well, you’d be robbing the government. Which—call me crazy—seems like the worst idea.”

  Hunter glanced at the others. “So. Who’s feeling suicidal?”

  Gravel grinned. “I vote McPherson.”

  “Right after we just did business with them?” Asked Fang.

  “Might as well do business again,” replied Gravel. “We’ve got experience now.”

  Priest’s visor chimed—RISK ANALYSIS: HIGH. SUCCESS PROBABILITY: UNKNOWN.

  He sighed. “McPherson it is.”

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