Chapter 7 — The Scavenger's Hand

Deep in the astral blind spot, the Rustclaw crawled like a beetle of patched old-era iron, struggling through the black slag and wreckage.

This old ship had once been a long-obsolete heavy mining vessel, its hull coated in thick anti-radiation gray paint, its shell covered in welds and patches. At the stern, the ion thruster coughed intermittent orange-red exhaust, rumbling with the dull, asthmatic tremor of a sick man.

In the cockpit, the light was dim.

On the console, several badly damaged fluorescent screens flickered with snow. The air carried a sharp stink of cheap engine oil, burnt circuit boards, and years of sweat.

Caleb sat in the brutal metal pilot's seat.

He was a tall, burly roughneck in an oil-stained leather hunting coat; his bare arms were laced with a dense web of hard radiation-burn scars. What caught the eye most was his left eye — not a socket, but a crudely fitted old-model military mechanical prosthetic. Its brass gears turned faintly in the dark, ticking with a weak, measured click, casting a cold red glow.

"Damn this catastrophe… not a single intact ore left in this wreck."

Caleb stuffed a shriveled slab of compressed high-energy nutrient paste into his mouth and cursed around it, deftly working the thruster lever to steer the ship past a rapidly spinning giant meteor fragment.

This was the core ruin belt after Tartarus's destruction — and the "blind spot" unmarked on any LinBoo Astrolabe map.

In most eyes, scavengers were hyenas prowling the dead, scraping by on the dregs left by war and disaster. But Caleb was different. As the most veteran salvage hand on this wasteland, he kept his own rules — he never robbed the living, and he never touched a dead man's keepsake. In this desperate place where even the gods couldn't be bothered to look down, this crude bottom line was the only proof he could offer that he was still a "man."

"Beep—beep—beep—!"

Suddenly, the long-failed shortwave radar on the console screeched a sharp, urgent alarm!

On the fluorescent screen, a flat waveform suddenly spiked into a dazzling red peak!

"What now?"

Caleb's brow knotted; he slapped the radar display. The lenses deep in his mechanical left eye completed a focus adjustment in an instant, and a red laser-net swept along the ship's forward searchlight beam, straight at a heap of wreckage several kilometers away.

A line of broken, crude data popped onto the display:

[Bioelectric pulse detected… vital signs: extremely faint (1.2%)] [Environment: vacuum, absolute zero, overdose of inert dark radiation…] [Warning: target surface shows abnormal higher-dimensional waste-energy reaction. Recommend avoidance!]

"A live one?!"

Caleb jerked to his feet, half a nutrient slab nearly choking him.

After a world-ending blast that could flatten an entire planet in an instant, with no protective gear, exposed to vacuum and absolute zero for nearly half an hour — a mortal still alive?!

"Impossible… even the Sixth House's genetically recombined divine-messenger soldiers would burst their veins after twenty minutes in absolute vacuum! What kind of monster is this?"

The mechanical eye spun furiously; Caleb, through the searchlight beam, finally made out the figure trapped in the wreck-gap.

A boy.

He wore a torn ordinary mining coat, floating unprotected in the vacuum, his body covered in terrible frost and purple-black blood-marks. Yet strangely, a faint but icy black-purple halo flowed around him — and it was this halo, like a thin preservative film, that locked fast the last faint heartbeat inside him!

"Damn, this kid's tough as meteor-iron!"

Without hesitation, Caleb slammed down the emergency rescue lever.

The Rustclaw's ion thruster belched a violent flare; the massive ship wrenched its head around in the void, and with crushing inertia came crashing like a beast toward the wreck heap.

"Tow-arm out! Airlock preheat!"

Caleb roared, his ten thick fingers flying across the control panel. A heavy industrial claw-arm of high-strength alloy, with a shrieking winch, extended with a howl into the deep vacuum.

Boom!

The alloy claw precisely clamped the wreck-metal plate behind Elias. The tow-cable snapped taut, and with tremendous pull hauled the ice-stiff boy all the way back into the ship's lower decompression chamber.

"Pressure injection! Airlock seal! Move!"

Caleb slammed the gas valve.

The heavy alloy gate crashed shut; with a ghost-wail shriek of inflating rupture, high-pressure oxygen and warm air flooded the vacuum-state decompression chamber. The anti-frost units on the walls blazed with heat, turning the white frost on the chamber surface into steaming vapor.

Caleb grabbed a heavy water-pressure injection gun and two vials of potent antifreeze adrenaline, pushed through the inner bulkhead, and charged in.

Yet when he actually reached the boy, he froze solid on the spot.

The Elias on the floor was in a state beyond words.

The boy's skin, from severe frostbite and subcutaneous bleeding, showed a strange purple-black; no one knew how many bones had snapped in the gravity tug. Most horrifying, under his skin, black-purple energy veins writhed like bulging tendons, radiating a chilling death-air that made the hair stand on end.

"This… this isn't energy an ordinary mortal can endure. This is divine abandoned higher-dimensional toxin!" Caleb couldn't help but suck in a cold breath; the red light in his mechanical left eye flickered wildly.

Years of practice — or rather, pulling countless comrades back from death on the wasteland — had never shown him anyone who could keep a breath after such terrible dark-energy erosion.

"Hah…!!"

The still-dead Elias on the floor suddenly spasmed violently; a mouthful of ice-chunk black blood sprayed out.

The boy's hands clawed madly at the empty air; his blood-flooded eyes had no focus, but he was in a state of extreme frenzy and pain, unconscious.

"Aira… Aira!! Keep it… brother… keep it!!"

The hoarse, desperate murmur squeezed from Elias's parched throat, with a heartbreaking bleakness. His right fist was welded to the bone, pressed hard against his chest; no matter how Caleb pulled, he could not pry the fingers open a hair.

Through the gaps between the fingers, Caleb saw a point of broken blue starlight.

It was the glow refracted by Tartarus's peculiar star-core slag.

Looking at the boy's eyes — even in unconsciousness filled with despair, hatred, and unwillingness — Caleb's hand on the adrenaline gun trembled slightly.

He knew that look too well.

Thirty years ago, when the Divine Court's Sixth House, to mine rare divine ore, had used an orbital law-cannon to boil a crater ten thousand kilometers wide into his homeworld, he had lain in the escape-pod wreckage just so, watching his family turn to ash, tearing at his own hair in frenzy.

Back then, no one had saved him. He had crawled out of the dark like a stray dog, living on the grease inside the pod and chewing his comrades' keepsakes.

"Fuck…"

Caleb swore under his breath, his voice rasping like sandpaper on iron.

He stepped forward and, rough but strangely careful, drove the water-pressure injection gun hard into Elias's carotid, pumping both precious vials of antifreeze adrenaline into the boy's blood.

"Listen, you brat!" Caleb gripped Elias's shoulder, the mechanical eye blazing red, and roared into the boy's eardrum. "Whatever hell you just went through, whoever slaughtered your family — if you want revenge, first get this breath back! A dead man in this wreck isn't even worth a god's footstep!"

The antifreeze detonated inside him; its brutal potency clashed violently with the higher-dimensional dark energy Umbra had injected.

"Ah—!!"

Elias loosed a beast-like, despairing death-roar; he sprayed another mouthful of black blood, then rolled his eyes back and collapsed heavily into Caleb's arms, sinking into deep shock.

Though still unconscious, his flickering heartbeat, forever on the verge of going out, finally steadied, under the brutal rescue and the dark energy's support, into a faint but rhythmic beat.

He had survived.

Caleb let out a long, foul breath and wiped the cold sweat from his brow. He leaned against the cold metal bulkhead and, from his belt, drew out half a personal backup life-support gas canister.

That canister was his ace-in-the-hole on the wasteland — in this blind spot where breathable gas was dearer than gold, it could buy half a broken ship.

Caleb looked at the boy in his arms — fist clenched on the pendant, refusing defeat even in dreams — and was silent a long while. At last he laughed at himself, yanked open his backup canister's valve, and fed that precious pure life-support gas into the simple breathing mask over Elias's mouth and nose.

"I must be a goddamn madman…"

Caleb stood, rubbed his sore mechanical left eye, and heaved Elias onto the old bunk behind the cockpit.

The Rustclaw's thruster rumbled again, carrying this mortal survivor who had escaped the Astrolabe's cracks, and tore through the boundless dark of the blind spot, heading for the secret outpost of the wasteland scavengers.