Mars Time: 16:00, February 17, 2295
Cavern #51131, suspected Vöxtr nest, The Karma Moor
They reached the cave entrance — a natural formation widened by claws.
"Movement," he said. "Multiple signatures. Deep inside."
"Mmm." Fuuka knelt, examining claw marks in the stone. Her fingers traced the grooves. "Want to bet what's inside? I say no active Breeding Machine, no Draugs."
"Based on?"
"These marks." She pointed at the parallel gouges. "Draugs leave fresh damage. If any woman was captured and used by the Breeding Machine, there'd be breast milk. Constant activity around breeding operations. But whatever was here left in a hurry."
"Disturbingly specific knowledge."
"I'm full of disturbing knowledge." Her smile turned sharp. "Five hundred Atomic Dollars says I'm right. Nest's already abandoned."
Jabari studied the claw marks, then her confident expression. "Deal."
"Excellent! I do love taking money from honest men." She gestured toward the darkness. "Shall we confirm my inevitable victory?"
The smell hit them first: rot and metal and something organic that made Jabari's stomach turn.
"Ekwensu!" he muttered. "Smells like someone's armpit after a three-day rave."
"Poetic." Fuuka's lantern brightened, purple light pushing back shadows. "Though I'd say it smells more like abandonment."
The cave widened into a natural chamber. What they found made Jabari's hand drift toward Sankofa's hilt.
Bone Fiends. Seven of them, curled on the floor in loose clusters. Their breathing was shallow, barely visible — ribs expanding in slow, synchronized rhythm. Dormant. The pale hide had gone dull, crimson streaks faded to brown.
"Hibernating," Fuuka said quietly, kneeling beside one. "Without a Kraken or Draug issuing commands, pack units go into standby. Conserving energy until the next signal comes." She prodded it with her dagger tip. The Fiend's leg twitched. She pulled back. "Still alive, though. Don't touch them."
Jabari's Nucleus Watch hummed against his wrist. "Something was here recently. Big operation."
"Very big." Fuuka moved deeper, stepping carefully around sleeping Fiends. Her lantern revealed massive gouges in the stone — claw marks that spoke of heavy machinery or creatures being dragged. "Look at this."
In the chamber's far corner: a sprawling mass of organic residue, like someone had melted a building-sized tumor and left it to congeal. Fibrous strands hung from the ceiling. The whole thing pulsed with faint, dying bioluminescence.
"Buddha's blessed balls," Jabari breathed. "A Breeding Machine?"
"Remnants. Or what's left after they packed it up and moved." She pointed to torn organic cables. "A Vöxtr is an incubator. You connect a captured woman to it, and it duplicates her eggs."
"That's..."
"Efficient? Yes. Disgusting? Also yes." She touched one of the fibrous strands and it crumbled to dust. "Dead maybe three, four days. They evacuated in a hurry."
"Why leave it?"
"Can't transport a dying Vöxtr without killing it completely. Better to abandon and build new ones wherever they—"
Her lantern flickered.
Fuuka stopped mid-step. Her head tilted, those almod-shaped eyes scanning the ceiling.
"Jabari-san."
"Yeah?"
"How fast can you run?"
Something peeled off the cave ceiling.
Jabari looked up and his stomach dropped through the floor.
The brown mollusk had been there the whole time. Pressed flat against the rock overhead, arms threaded through cracks and fissures, three burning orange eyes watching them with the patience of something that had already decided how this ended. Maybe two meters across the main body, its arms spreading much further — suckers gripping the ceiling and walls, pulsing in slow rhythm.
The creature descended headfirst. Wet membrane stretched and separated from stone with a sound like tearing bandages. It inverted in midair, those three glowing eyes locking onto them at ground level. Each arm found new anchor points along the walls, framing Jabari and Fuuka inside a cage of living muscle.
"Kraken," Fuuka said. "Juvenile. Telepathic command unit."
"I can see that!"
"It let us walk right underneath it. Watched us examine its nest." Something he hadn't heard before in her voice: respect. "Clever beast."
The Kraken pulsed, a deep timbre echoing from its form. "Beinhundar. Vaknið!"
Every sleeping Bone Fiend snapped awake at once.
Seven pairs of eyes lit up, milky and feral. The Fiends scrambled upright in jerking, synchronized movements — legs finding purchase on stone, skulls rotating toward Jabari and Fuuka with coordinated precision. They fanned into a crescent, blocking the entrance.
Pressure slammed into Jabari's skull. He staggered, one hand finding the cave wall while the other tore Sankofa free.
"—CATEGORIZE: MALE. MARIDIAN PHENOTYPE. COMBAT-VIABLE. PSIONIC SIGNATURE: LUNAR-MIRAGE HYBRID. AETHER RESERVE: MODERATE. NUBILE. SPERM HEALTHY. PHYSICAL THREAT: LOW PRIORITY—"
It was cataloguing him. Filing him like inventory.
For a sickening moment, Jabari's right arm lifted Sankofa and angled the blade toward his own neck. His muscles weren't his. He wrenched control back with a gasped "Meh rhythm boh-ho ban!"
The Lunar barrier flickered across his skin. The telepathic grip loosened enough for him to think.
The Bone Fiends charged.
They moved wrong. Normal Fiends were fast and vicious and predictable. Under Kraken control, these things flanked in coordinated pairs, one lunging high while the other swept low. Jabari's Agility 6 kept him ahead of the pattern — Sankofa took one through the skull, then reversed to catch the second across the spine. They dropped and stayed down.
"Kill the brain, not the body!" Fuuka called, her dagger splitting a third Fiend's skull. Her Spirit Lantern orbited her head, violet flame consuming a fourth. "The Kraken can redirect the dogs if you leave them twitching!"
"I'll see what I can do, yo!"
Three more closed on Jabari from his left, driving him toward the wall. Dead limbs scraped stone, dagger-teeth chattering in unison — clack clack clack clack — like someone keeping time. He killed two. The last one latched onto his forearm before Fuuka's lantern fire took its head off.
Then the Kraken stopped watching.
The telepathic pressure tripled. Jabari's knees buckled. Alien cognition bulldozed through his thoughts and the broadcast began:
"—PRIMARCH SKARN DEMANDS: LOCATE SIGRUN FJELD. THIRD PRINCESS OF HOUSE FJELD. BIOLOGICAL PRIORITY: MAXIMUM. HER EGGS ARE REQUIRED FOR ACCELERATED BREEDING PROTOCOLS—"
"—ALL UNITS PRIORITIZE CAPTURE. ALIVE. UNHARMED. EGGS FERTILIZED. NO EXCEPTIONS—"
"—SIGRUN'S GENETIC PROFILE PRODUCES SPAWN TWELVE TIMES STANDARD YIELD. PRIORITY EXCEEDS ALL CURRENT MILITARY OBJECTIVES—"
Each directive hit like a physical blow. Jabari saw white. Beside him, Fuuka grunted, blood trickling from one nostril.
One arm whipped toward his ankle. He rolled, slashing across the sucker-lined appendage. The blade bit deep, drawing yellowish fluid, and the arm recoiled.
The Kraken screamed and dropped Jabari flat on his back. His armor dampened the hurt.
When his sight came back, two arms had his left leg. They lifted him off the ground. Suckers clamped and pulled, draining Aether through direct skin contact — warmth bleeding from his calf like someone had opened a valve in his veins. His Nucleus Watch flickered, numbers scrambling.
He screamed and drove Sankofa into the nearest arm. The Kraken tossed him into the cave wall.
"Vyālīṃ Prajvala!"
Fuuka's lantern erupted. A serpent of purple flame roared across the cavern, coiling around the Kraken's main body. Three orange eyes blazed as it released Jabari and rounded on her.
She'd been buying time. A wild violet fire slithered free from her kimono neckline and crossed the cave floor to the dead Vöxtr remains. It bit into the dry organic residue and ignited it.
The fibrous strands caught first — old, dry, saturated with dead Aether. Smoke billowed thick. Crystallized deposits cracked in the heat, releasing pockets of trapped gas that popped like firecrackers.
The Kraken recoiled. Arms released the walls and drew inward, animal panic overriding battlefield intelligence. Fire was old. Fire was before any Radi-Mon and psionic warfare.
"Now!" Fuuka grabbed Jabari's arm, hauled him upright.
They ran.
The Kraken recovered fast. Arms slammed against the cave floor in pursuit — wet slap of suckers finding purchase, grinding scrape of chitin on stone. The telepathic broadcast hammered with each lunging advance:
"—SIGRUN FJELD—CAPTURE—BREED—SIGRUN FJELD—"
Fuuka pulled him left at a fork. "This passage narrows! It can't fit!"
The tunnel shrank from cavern-wide to shoulder-width in twenty meters. Jabari wedged himself sideways, scraping skin. Behind them, the Kraken's body slammed against the bottleneck. Rock cracked. Dust rained. One arm snaked through the gap, sucker-tips grasping blindly.
Jabari hacked at it. Fuuka poured fire into the gap. The appendage withdrew, and they heard the beak gnashing in grinding fury.
They squeezed through fifty meters of rock that felt like fifty kilometers. Natural light appeared ahead.
They tumbled out of a secondary cave mouth onto a rocky slope. Mars's copper sun hung low. The air tasted like freedom.
For a full minute, neither spoke. They just breathed.
Jabari checked his leg. Two concentric circles of red welts where the suckers had gripped, already darkening. His watch recalibrated:
[Aether Reserve: 31%]
"Shango's schlong." He leaned back against warm stone.
Fuuka sat beside him, legs folded under her kimono — all composure except for the blood drying under her nose and the tremor in her hands.
"Use Medi-Vap within the hour, and the marks will be gone. Do it late, and you'll need proper Nucleus Cultivation to heal." she said. "I was right about there being no Vöxtr."
"Technically there were Vuhk-stir remnants—"
"Remnants don't count, ne! Pay up, Mister Griot."
Jabari sighed, pulling out a credit chip. "This is extortion, hey?"
"This is a gentleman honoring his wager." She pocketed the chip with a satisfied smile. "See? I knew you had integrity."
"Lady, we almost died. Expensive integrity."
"The best kind!" Fuuka rose, signaling him to follow.
They walked back toward Xing Hong's outer checkpoint as sunset painted the city gold. The bored guard scanned their IDs, noted their bounty confirmations, waved them through without interest.
"You know," Fuuka said as they entered Dragon District's neon glow, "I just won five hundred of your Atomic Dollars. The honorable thing would be to buy you dinner with it, ne?"
"That's... surprisingly generous for someone who just did the 'taking money from honest men.'"
"I contain multitudes!" She gestured grandly. "Besides, I'm curious about you, Jabari-san. Not many Griots make it to Mars, and even fewer survive long enough to know me. You must have stories."
"A few." He kept his tone light. "Most aren't dinner conversation material."
"Those are exactly the kind I want to hear." She tilted her head, studying him. "So? Where does a wandering Griot eat in this rust-bucket of a city?"
"The Slumbering Mantis Inn. Dragon District, near Bounty Board #7." He checked his watch. "I've got a standing reservation tonight, actually."
"The place with the cyborg bartender? Iron Roach?"
"You know it?"
"I know of it." Her smile turned thoughtful. "Shazmeen Vinh's establishment. Interesting choice for a Directorate operative."
"It's cheap, the food's decent, and they don't ask questions."
"All excellent qualities in an inn." She clapped her hands together. "Perfect! I'll meet you there. Say, eight-thirty? That gives me time to clean up and you time to prepare."
"You're really coming?"
"Wouldn't miss it! I promise to be on my best behavior." Her smile turned wicked. "Only light heckling, minimal dark magic."
"So reassuring."
At the intersection where they parted, she paused.
"Oh, and Jabari-san? That name the Kraken kept broadcasting?"
"Sigrun Fjeld?"
"If you happen to encounter anyone by that name..." Something older looked out from those dark eyes. "Be very, very careful. Anyone Skarn dedicates a Kraken sentry to finding is either incredibly good-looking or incredibly dangerous. Possibly both."
She vanished. Cherry blossoms and purple light, then nothing.
Jabari stood alone. He looked down at his welted leg. Remembered the speed of those tentacles. How casually it had turned his own arm against his throat. A juvenile Kraken, by Fenris reckoning.
And Skarn—the rumored Primarch of the Fenris Horde—had entire fleets of them.
"Yeah," Jabari said to the Martian sunset. "I'll probably find out eventually."
He headed toward the Slumbering Mantis Inn, thinking about what to order later, and whether anything on the menu came strong enough to drown the sound of that name still rattling around in his skull.