Starfire Scoundrels and the Kill Code
(before the shooting starts)
The kill-code did not belong in a jungle stall. Jax said it on the way off Elyria, still smelling like cheap incense and spent casings: the slug was a key. It needed a lock that still remembered Vita Synth’s old language. Lumara Verge could hide a secret. It could not speak to one.
Nexus Prime could.
Not the neon towers. The Ashline Tech Belt — industrial park grown around dead Unity fab yards and never forgiven for it. Cargo rails. Coolant stacks. Black-glass clean rooms bolted onto rusted loading bays. A squat annex that called itself a materials contractor and fooled no one who had ever stolen a gene-vault. Marek’s manifests pointed here. Whoever bought the copy had rented the stack. And hired Blood Storm Mercs to keep the door shut.
The jump was nothing. Empty dark. The code sat in the locker like a held breath. Jax used the quiet. She put the broken sonic emitter back together until it sang that ugly, useful pitch again.
They came in dirty and legal enough. No fanfare. Elias was already working before the ramp kissed ferrocrete — false berth chatter, dummy pings, a ghost heading that would send Vesperon Arms sniffing an empty pad on the far side of the station. The bounty on the Scoundrels was still live. He intended to feed it shadows.
Aria and Hex hit the trade halls while the decoy ripened. Nexus still had a market that sold more than knives. Aria walked out with a starship repair kit and a sector permit folded into her jacket — paper for later doors, later docks, later arguments with men who loved stamps more than sense. Hex bought a laser sight, slotted it on the beam pistol, and said nothing.
Jax disappeared into the range and came back with her machine pistol riding her hip like it had never left.
Kai found a trainer in the under-levels — the kind of tired specialist who still remembered how to make a body listen. She came back sharper. She did not talk about Rax. She did not have to. The empty bunk still had a weight.
Korra found a gaming table. She came back without the broken military rifle that had been riding in the stash since the Veil. Visor slits dim. “The odds were acceptable. They were also wrong.” Elias looked at the empty rack and did not ask.
Night in Ashline was all sodium and steam. The annex squatted in the middle of the belt like a secret that had given up hiding. No weather. No alarms yet. Just gantries, containers, and a clean-room glow leaking under a shuttered bay.
Blood Storm was en route to the Ashline site. Hired muscle. Three shooters, two specialists, a captain who looked like he billed by the hour, and a cyborg mercenary just to make sure.
Aria stood in the Vanguard’s bay with the code-drive in her scarred hand. Hyperblaster slung. Voice low.
She looked at them — Kai still humming from the trainer’s bruises, Korra poorer and unbothered, Hex’s new sight already hungry, Elias watching feeds that pointed the wrong way on purpose.
“Load it. End it. Then we go home.”
The ramp went down into steam and ferrocrete.
The night was waiting.
The alley behind the annex smelled like coolant and old rain. Scouting had been clean. Blood Storm was already committed — a green hauler rolling the front approach like they owned the belt. Fine. Let them.
Aria
split the crew with two fingers.
Voss, Elias, Jax — back door.
Hex, Kai, Korra — crates and containers, eyes on the street.
“Tech bought us quiet,” Aria said, low. “Don’t waste it. Jax takes the cradle. Nobody touches her.”
Korra’s visor slits dimmed. “Probability of organic compliance: low. Probability I will compensate: acceptable.”
Seize the initiative
Jax’s fingers kissed the lock. The back hatch sighed open like it had been waiting. Voss and her half slipped into the dark. Out front, Hex settled the hyperblaster on a crate lip. Kai found a lane. Korra stood in the open a half-second longer than a human would, rattlegun already tracking the hauler’s nose.
“They are walking into a prepared field,” Korra said. “This is statistically rude of them.”
Round 1
Inside, Voss’s team crept the corridors — ferrocrete, pipe runs, the clean-room glow leaking under a shutter. Outside, Hex’s fireteam sank into cover and waited.
Blood Storm came on careful. Full cover. No heroics. The green van rolled them forward like a moving wall. Boots. Breath. The click of safeties.
Nobody fired. The belt held its breath.
Round 2
Voss took the stairs. Elias at her shoulder. Jax already tasting the air for the vault’s handshake. The data room opened like a throat — consoles, cold light, the cradle waiting in the stack.
Outside, Korra and Kai went to snap-fire.
A shooter broke cover at the van’s front bumper.
Korra’s
rattlegun spoke first. Two bursts. The merc folded like someone had cut his
strings, slammed back into the hauler’s grill, stunned stupid.
“Recoil pattern logged,” Korra said. “You may stand up. I will put you down
again.”
Second shooter pushed. Kai’s shot kissed air. His auto-fire walked across her chest. Armor held. She did not flinch. She never did anymore. Not since the sewers.
Captain and the cyborg peeled the far side of the green van and dumped everything they had on the crate line. Korra took two hits — stun stacking through plating, systems stuttering. Kai’s armor ate the rest and still left her with a white flash behind the eyes.
The rest of the squad hugged cover and kept coming. No shots. Just pressure.
Hex leaned the corner.
The hyperblaster barked once.
The captain hit the ferrocrete in a dark pool and did not get up.
Somewhere in the belt, Blood Storm found a second wind. One of them moved when he should have been done. The night was not finished with anyone.
Round 3
Korra’s displacer belt coughed. She vanished off the crate line and reappeared in a new pocket of teal steel, rattlegun already up.
“I do not have a gambling problem,” she said, almost conversational. “I have a targeting solution.”
The rattlegun chewed a specialist into the deck. He went down bleeding and did not get polite about it.
Kai stepped out and let the shell gun speak. The blast took two mercs off their feet and left them on the grid like discarded tools.
Hex did not wait. She came around the corner like a problem with a name, hyperblaster roaring, two stuns walking the cyborg back. Then the chrome bastard accepted the invitation. Powerclaw down. Hex’s ripper sword up. They met in the space between the van and the crates and the belt pretended it was a quiet industrial park.
The claw missed the line that mattered. The sword did not.
Arm gone. Cyborg down. Sparking. Bleeding out in a way metal is not supposed to.
A shooter and a specialist rushed Korra’s new cover and unloaded.
Korra went down.
“Systems… reallocating,” she said, visor flickering, already horizontal. “This is inefficient. Do not let them touch the cradle.”
Jax was already at the terminal. Hands in the stack. The kill-code sliding into a language Vita Synth still remembered.
A leftover merc tried Kai and missed. The shot sang off hab-steel and died.
Round 4
Kai’s blaster found the shooter. Stun. He staggered.
Hex took the facility doorway like it belonged to her. Two shots. Shooter stunned. Specialist stunned. The specialist’s return fire kissed her and she ate it standing.
The shooter tried Kai again. Missed again. Ghosts are hard to hit when they have decided not to die today.
Upstairs, Voss and Elias hit the stair rail and looked down into the fire. They could see Hex in the door. They could hear Korra’s systems cycling on the grid. Aria’s jaw went tight.
“Hold the floor,” she said.
Jax finished the injection.
The cradle took the code. The stack answered. Somewhere in a rented vault under Ashline, a copied nightmare lost its name.
The specialist renewed his efforts, one more shot that glanced off hab-steel next to Hex’s head.
Battle-luck, mean and sudden: Hex’s beam pistol was in her hand before the thought finished. Auto-hit. The specialist at the van corner folded.
Round 5
Kai and Hex put the last shooter down together. He was toast. The street went quiet except for steam and the tick of cooling barrels.
Aria came down the stairs already barking.
“Team up. Get Korra. We are leaving. Now.”
Aftermath
They carried the bot out the way they came. Korra’s visor slitted once on the ramp.
“Dents,” she said. “I am fine. The rifle I lost at the table was more expensive than this. Statistically.”
Blood Storm would not forget the captain in the pool or the chrome arm in the gutter. That contract just grew teeth. New rival. Earned.
The code fired. The copy’s handshake burned. Quest done. Specimen Zero’s ghost finally put in the ground where the original was supposed to stay.
Loot off the field: a grav dampener, a body wire, a plasma rifle. Useful. Ugly. Paid for in spent casings.
And someone else, out in the dark of the belt, was pissed they had used the kill-code at all. Another name on the board. Vesperon held the lease. But Red Helix wrote the check.
New Rival. Red Helix Combine - Fringe pharma that lost the patent war to Biomorphix years ago. They bought the duplicate to reverse-engineer a competitor’s buried nightmare and sell a “cleaner” strain. Kill-code in their cradle is an insult and a delay.
Jax sat on the Vanguard’s ramp with the sector night on her face and that look she gets when the universe blinks first. Charmed life. She did not say it. She just flexed her fingers like the luck was still warm.
Aria looked back once at Ashline’s sodium and steam.
“Load it. End it. Go home.”
They did.
The copy is dead. And the new rivals remember.
.JPEG)
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