Berya’s hands flew to the cold plate, pressing down, then up, then down again, a frantic rhythm against the chilling metal. A faint, acrid smell of ozone still clung to the air from the blast-shields. “Karsik! Karsik, damn you, breathe!” She shifted his head, pushing his chin up, tilting his jaw. Her knuckles grazed the icy skin of his throat. There was no pulse. Nothing. She jammed her palm over his mouth, pinching his nose, forcing air into him. One breath, two, then back to the frantic compressions. The twin’s small cries echoed faintly from where Yulic had herded them behind a stack of rusted power conduits, a flimsy barrier against the chaos. A distant clash of metal on metal, a muffled shout, signaled Yulic’s ongoing skirmish in the access shaft above. “Just breathe, you idiot,” she muttered, her voice raw. Tension burned through her forearms with each thrust, but she leaned her weight down, tracking the dead stillness of his throat. The silver plate in his chest remained dead metal. Her inner production space, usually humming with cold output dials, lay motionless. She worked with brutal efficiency, the kind she applied to broken assembly lines, to flawed schematics. This was a malfunction. A critical system failure. And she would fix it. She refused to lose him now, not after he’d finally broken through her own armored exterior, not after the truth of his sacrifice had ripped through her carefully constructed defenses. Above, a spray of sparks cascaded down the shaft opening as Yulic discharged a volley. “They’re trying to flush us out! We need to move, Tarsin!” His voice was strained, thick with exertion. “He’s not breathing!” Berya shouted back. “I can’t haul him alone.” Silence from Yulic for a beat, then, “There’s an abandoned switching vault up ahead, maybe twenty meters. It’s got a sealed door, should hold them for a cycle. Get him there. I’ll buy you time.” Berya gritted her teeth. She couldn’t lift him, not alone. Not with him this unresponsive. Then, a thought, cold and clear as the Vrozhan winter, pierced through her panic. The workshop within. She plunged inward, past the hum of dormant processing units, past the silent conveyors. The main pressure gauge, the one linked to Karsik’s ID, was flatlined, a dead needle against a dark red void. The familiar dials for resource conversion, for synthesis, for repair, spun slowly, uselessly. But then, her gaze snagged on something she’d never truly considered. The output dials. They were always set to ‘forward,’ to ‘create,’ to ‘produce.’ What if they could be reversed? A sudden, chilling realization. Her empire. Her hoard. The thousands of soot-heaters, the luxury synth-fabrics, the perfectly calibrated stun-wire coils, the nutrient paste, the delicate medical components – every single item sat in her mind-factory’s vast inventory, a silent testament to her progression. Each one represented raw resources, refined and concentrated. Each one, she now understood with a sickening lurch, represented a sliver of Karsik’s life force, transmuted into wealth. Could she… deconstruct them? Could she reverse the flow, convert her accumulated fortune back into the biological current the apparatus drew from him? [INVENTORY REVERSAL PROTOCOL DETECTED. CONFIRM DECONSTRUCTION OF MANUFACTURED GOODS TO RAW VITALITY UNITS?] Yes. A harsh intake scraped her throat. Every dial in her mental assembly floor spun into gear, but not with the rhythm of creation. This was a different sound – a grinding, tearing noise, like the fabric of reality itself being undone. A massive, central dial, one she had never noticed before, labeled ‘CORE VITALITY TRANSFER,’ began to spin counter-clockwise, slowly at first, then picking up speed. It was draining from her stores. She saw it all, a frantic, horrifying blur. The stacks of premium soot-heaters, her first grand success, shimmered and dissolved. The luxurious synth-silk garments, painstakingly crafted for the black market, unwove themselves into shimmering threads of energy. The complex medical components, the ones that had saved Karsik before, shattered into their constituent parts, then those parts themselves vanished. Her hard-won wealth, her untouchable shadow monopoly, was being systematically, ruthlessly dismantled. As the stockpile dissolved, the transfer gauge whined shrilly in her skull. The pressure gauge, previously flatlined, flickered. A hesitant tremor, then a slow, agonizing crawl from the red. It was working. But at what cost? Each vanishing item was a blow to her ambition, a shredding of her carefully constructed future. Yet with each vanishing cache, the needle edged away from empty. Outside, Yulic scrambled back, his breath ragged, dragging the twins by their hands. “They’re right behind me! The substation, now!” He pointed to a heavy, rust-streaked door in the near wall. “It’s the old power shunt for Sector Rho. Blast-hardened.” Berya seized his harness as the needle twitched upward. She hooked her arms under Karsik’s armpits, grunting with effort, and began to drag him. His body was a dead weight, but the metallic clang of his boots on the grating as she pulled him forward was a perverse comfort. She hauled him across the grating, her eyes locked on his gray face. Yulic shoved the heavy door open, revealing a cramped, grimy space filled with sparking relays and dormant conduits. The air here was even thicker, heavy with the scent of burnt dust and stale metal. He pushed the twins inside, then helped Berya haul Karsik over the threshold. The heavy door slammed into its frame, Yulic slamming the crossbolts home. He pressed his ear to the cold metal. “Morza sent in the Bloodhounds. Elite Vanguard,” Yulic murmured, his voice grim. “They’re not interested in taking us alive. It’s a full execution order.” He moved to a derelict control panel, fingers dancing over dead buttons, trying to find a circuit that still held power, anything to activate a local defense. He spoke, not to her, but to himself, a low, frustrated growl. “Morza. The smug bastard. I knew she was behind the leak, but the scale of it… the original scandal, your ‘elopement’?” He turned, his eyes fixed on Berya, who was still kneeling over Karsik, her hands poised. “My intel revealed she paid a black marketeer, a notorious smuggler named Varkos, to stage the whole thing. To discredit you, to force you out of the family, so she could seize your mother’s original industrial patents. The ones that formed the foundation of the Tarsin industrial complex. She was planning this for years, building her political power on stolen foundations.” Berya heard him, distantly, the fury a cold knot in her stomach. Morza. Always Morza. But right now, only one thing mattered. The indicator dial crept out of the red band. The transfer wheel slowed, her stockpiles of finished goods reduced to bare registers. Her empire was a ghost. She was left with almost nothing but the raw resources, the most basic elements, and the humming, churning core. She looked down at Karsik. The silver plate on his chest flickered. A faint, almost imperceptible pulse. Then, stronger. The light returned, a soft, internal luminescence, growing steadily brighter. His chest rose. A shallow, shuddering intake of air. Then another. He coughed, a wet, rattling sound, and gasped, his eyes flying open, wide and unfocused, searching the dim, cramped space. Yulic’s comm unit crackled to life, a sudden, jarring sound in the enclosed space. Morza’s voice, flat and triumphant, filled the vault. “All units, initiate Block-wide lockdown. Flood Sector Rho’s maintenance tunnels with toxic smog. No survivors. Burn them out.”

The Smuggler's Ghost