The red emergency light pulsed, painting the wreckage in rhythmic waves of crimson and shadow. Dust, fine as powdered bone, hung in the thin air, each particle catching the light like a galaxy of dying stars. The I-beam was a fact. Two tons of cold steel alloy pinning Walter Bell to the floor of a forgotten moon. Kaelen’s mind, a machine built for parsing the chaos of human thought, stalled before the brutal simplicity of the physics. He could not talk the beam into moving.
Brute force was useless. He was a man of average build, his strength a forgotten metric in a life spent navigating psychic currents. Walter’s own servomotors, designed for the delicate manipulation of data wafers, whined in protest against a weight they were never meant to bear. The raven Uplift’s chassis groaned, a low, tortured sound of metal being pushed past its engineered limits. The beam did not shift. Not a millimeter.
— Mobility is zero, — Walter’s synthesized voice was flat, a simple statement of fact from the wreckage. — Chassis integrity at 65%. The primary leg actuators are crushed.
Kaelen’s gaze swept the ruined control room. Twisted conduits, shattered consoles, buckled floor plates. There were no levers, no tools, nothing that could serve as a fulcrum against the immense, passive weight. He was a disgraced Empath, a technician of the soul. His skills were for tearing minds apart, not for putting a broken world back together. Despair was a cold, familiar taste at the back of his throat.
He could run. The thought was an old reflex, the survival catechism of a ghost. Take the lab keycard, the fourth fragment, and leave Walter to the silence. The mission would continue. But the thought landed with a new hollowness. He looked at the single, defiant amber optic glowing in the wreckage. He was no longer just a ghost running from a system. He was a partner.
He had one tool left. A broken one.
He made the choice. The price would be the feedback screaming through his skull if he was wrong, a psychic backlash from a tool never meant for this. He reached up, his gloved fingers finding the crude metal plate of the Ghost-Eater Shunt at the base of his neck. He closed his eyes, shutting out the pulsing red light, and pushed his senses outward, not toward a mind, but toward the dead metal of the beam.
For a moment, there was nothing. Just the cold, blank absence of thought. Then the shunt, his personal token of pain, flared not with agony but with a new kind of input. It was a low, resonant hum, the sound of immense energy held in static tension. He wasn't reading a mind; he was reading stress, the pure physics of the trap. The world behind his eyelids resolved into a schematic of force, a shimmering data-weave of light and shadow.
The beam was a river of black, inert weight. But within it, three points glowed with a faint, sickly luminescence. Three nodes where the internal structure was compromised, where the energy of the collapse had created invisible fractures. They were stress points, vulnerabilities. He saw the flow of tension, the lines of force diverting around these weaknesses. He understood.
— Prepare to shift on my mark, — Kaelen said, his voice tight, strained with the effort of holding the new sense-data in his mind. The hum from the shunt was a clean, sharp vibration now, a focused tool instead of chaotic noise.
— Acknowledged, — Walter’s voice replied, still flat, but the amber optic brightened fractionally.
Kaelen focused on the first glowing node, near the beam’s contact point with the floor. It was a knot of tangled light.
— Your left manipulator, — Kaelen commanded, his words clipped and precise, the old corporate dialect surfacing from instinct. — Push against the floor plate, two centimeters from the primary joint. Not up. Outward.
Walter’s free arm moved, the multi-jointed hand finding the exact spot. The servomotors whined, a high, sharp sound in the quiet ruin. The massive I-beam shifted, a grating screech of metal on metal that echoed through the dome. It moved only a few centimeters, but the entire geometry of the trap changed. The light of the first stress point flickered and dimmed.
— Now, — Kaelen breathed, his focus shifting to the second point of weakness, a hairline fracture near the center of the beam where it pressed down on Walter’s legs. — Your torso. Rotate three degrees counter-clockwise. Use the crushed actuators as a pivot.
It was an impossible instruction, asking a machine to use its own broken parts as a tool. But Walter complied without question. The chassis twisted with a sharp crack of composite plating. The beam lifted, just enough. A gap, no wider than his hand, opened between the steel and Walter’s trapped legs.
The third stress point, high above them where the beam met the ruined ceiling, flared brightly. It was unstable.
— Now, Walter! Pull free! — Kaelen shouted, the psychic image starting to fracture, the strain building behind his eyes.
With a final, grinding tear of metal, Walter dragged his chassis out from under the beam. He collapsed onto the floor, a tangle of black composite and damaged limbs, but he was free. The I-beam settled with a deep, resonant boom, sending a tremor through the floor. Kaelen stumbled back, a wave of vertigo washing over him. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose, warm against his upper lip. The hum from his shunt faded back to its quiet, baseline presence.
Walter’s chassis began a series of self-diagnostics, his remaining limbs twitching as systems rebooted. He pushed himself into a sitting position, his raven head swiveling to fix Kaelen with an unblinking stare. The amber optic seemed to drill into him, analyzing, processing. The silence that stretched between them was different now. It was not the silence of suspicion or necessity. It was the quiet of assessment, of a calculated respect earned in the wreckage.
— Your application of Empathic resonance to inanimate structures is… novel, — Walter stated.
Kaelen just nodded, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his glove. He felt a profound exhaustion, the deep ache of a muscle used for the first time. He had bent his curse into a tool, and the effort had nearly broken him. He had become something new in this tomb. An empathic engineer.
His gaze fell upon the main console, its surface thick with the dust of years. The mission. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs unsteady, and crossed the debris-strewn floor. The lab keycard was still there, a starkly white rectangle in the pulsing red light. He picked it up. It was cool and smooth in his palm, a simple piece of polymer that held the fourth fragment of a dead man’s mind. They had what they came for.
The dust began to settle in the still air. The red emergency light pulsed with the steady, rhythmic beat of a failing heart.
They were partners now, and the whole system was hunting them.
