The ventilation shafts groaned like dying beasts above Caleb’s head, their rusted metal joints screeching with each pressurized gust that forced its way through Sector 18’s decaying infrastructure.
What had once been gleaming ferrocrete corridors built to last centuries now resembled the fossilized guts of some ancient mechanical leviathan – all peeling sealant, weeping condensation, and the omnipresent stench of industrial decay.
Caleb leaned his full weight against a coolant pipe that hadn’t seen proper maintenance in three fiscal cycles, the heat-resistant plating worn thin enough to transfer the boiling liquid’s warmth through his grease-stained coveralls.
Somewhere beneath all that grime and three layers of patched fabric, his thighs were probably burning.
He didn’t care enough to check.
The chemical mist pouring from ceiling nozzles stung his nostrils as he watched Sector 17’s bulkhead door seal with finality – a two-ton slab of reinforced durasteel sighing pneumatically into place like the last breath of a condemned man.
“Fucking stinks worse than a recycler bot’s asscrack after festival week,” Caleb muttered to no one in particular, scratching at the week’s worth of stubble darkening his jaw.
“It will stink for a while,” Tessa whispered.
“Aren’t they supposed to be done by now?”
The sterilization compounds might have killed every microbe within fifty meters, but nothing could erase the underlying reek of hot metal, stale sweat, and that distinct metallic tang that clung to every unlicensed mechanic who’d spent too long elbow-deep in a leaky reactor.
Noises fell far ahead: clang, clang, thump, thump.
Stuff his freak beta-dominant ears could pick up.
“There’s still people cleaning the walls if it stinks this much.” Caleb said as he held up his hand, “Find another way, you are not wearing a jumpsuit. Wait for Chad.” he said.
She nodded obediently.
Down the claustrophobic service corridor barely wide enough for two grown men to pass shoulder-to-shoulder, a pair of junior engineers were losing their battle with a malfunctioning turbine assembly.
The damn thing kept spitting angry blue sparks every time they tried to wrestle it onto a hover-dolly that had seen better decades.
Caleb watched dispassionately as one mechanic – couldn’t have been more than nineteen with those baby-smooth cheeks – nearly lost his eyebrows to an enthusiastic arc of plasma.
The comm unit clipped to Caleb’s belt chose that moment to crackle to life with Monique’s voice – all tinny desperation and that particular brand of exhausted patience only mothers and shift supervisors ever truly mastered.
“Craig? You get that transfer manifest squared away yet?”
“Negatory.” Caleb rasped to this borrowed identity’s new supervisor.
He didn’t bother unmuting the receiver.
Just thumbed the silent button hard enough to bruise his calloused fingertip and watched the indicator light blink from green to warning-red without so much as a twitch of acknowledgment.
His eyes drifted back upward to the shuddering vent covers where hot air pulsed through the grilles in rhythmic bursts – the entire sector breathing like some great wounded animal.
When the ceiling ducts answered with an echoing metallic clang that reverberated through three sublevels, Caleb didn’t so much as blink.
The Sector 17 door hissed open again with considerably less ceremony than it had sealed moments before, admitting two ABO enforcers in their signature black uniforms.
The carbon-fiber plating hugged their frames like a second skin, polished to a mirror shine despite the omnipresent grime.
They moved with the predatory grace of men who’d never missed a meal or wondered where their next credit was coming from – scanning clearance badges with retinal projectors that cast eerie green gridlines across every surface.
Caleb heaved a sigh of relief he had sent her back.
He lined up pulling on gloves.
His hands were too damn clean to be in here.
He reached into his pockets to check to find the credentials.
Caleb’s knuckles went bone-white where they were shoved deep in his pockets.
One enforcer – taller, with the sharp cheekbones and cold eyes that marked him as pure Alpha stock – paused mid-stride, nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly as he sampled the chemical-laden air.
Caleb kept his breathing shallow and even, gaze fixed on a ruptured valve three meters ahead that was spitting viscous amber fluid onto the grated walkway in rhythmic spurts.
Footsteps approached from behind – quick, light, the particular cadence of someone who’d grown up navigating tight maintenance shafts.
A kid Caleb recognized vaguely from Hydroponics skidded to an unsteady halt beside him, cheeks smeared with enough grease to suggest he’d been elbow-deep in a filter housing recently.
“Craig! Foreman’s pissed as hell about the coolant flush in Bay Seven. Says if it’s not done by shift change, he’s docking your ration credits.” The kid’s voice cracked on the last word, eyes darting nervously toward the enforcers who’d disappeared down a side corridor lined with flickering emergency lights.
Caleb’s jaw worked silently for a moment before he ground out, “Tell him I’m on it,” through clenched teeth.
When the kid hesitated, clearly debating whether to push his luck further, Caleb shouldered past him hard enough to send the younger man stumbling into a stack of empty parts crates.
The sterilization mist clung to the back of Caleb’s neck as he walked, the bitter taste of burnt plastic coating his tongue no matter how often he spat to clear it.
Beneath the harsh chemicals, he could still detect traces of that cheap synthetic floral scent clinging stubbornly to his collar despite three rounds of industrial degreaser and a brutal scrubbing with pumice soap.
His fingers brushed the well-worn grip of the plasma torch hooked to his belt.
As he made his way back towards the coolant he was ‘supposed’ to flush.
Easy job, if he cared about the rations.
‘Fuck it, the canteen’s pretty good,’ he rationalized
The filter bay door loomed ahead, its hydraulic systems groaning louder than usual as it cycled open – the sigh deeper this time, weighted with mechanical exhaustion.
Caleb hacked the access panel without breaking stride, barely waiting for the biometric scanner to engage that something was approaching it..
Inside, the air hung thick with the cloying sweet-rot stench of biogel preservative.
Rows of coils hummed under flickering strip lights that cast eerie shadows across the grated floor.
Caleb’s boots clicked against the metal walkway as he moved deeper into the chamber, pausing momentarily beneath a fractured feed line dripping some coolant fluid in a steady drip-drip-drip onto the plating below.
He’d have to fix that to avoid anyone coming back.
A shadow shifted behind him – too quick, too quiet to be one of the regular maintenance crew.
Caleb’s hand closed around the persons throat before they came into view.
Tessa slammed into the ferrocrete wall before she could so much as gasp, her toolbox hitting the deck with a clatter that sent emitters scattering.
Caleb’s forearm pressed hard beneath her jaw, cutting off her airway with clinical precision.
Her eyes – wide, terrified blue pools in a face still round with youth – bulged as her fingers scrabbled uselessly at his grease-stained sleeve.
“Boss!” she managed to choke out despite the pressure, voice strangled and thin.
“It’s me, Gods above, it’s just me!”
“I told you to go and find Chad.” Caleb didn’t ease his grip.
His gaze flicked upward toward the ceiling, where the ventilation ducts groaned with more than just the usual thermal expansion.
He saw her boot prints.
“Sorry.” she wheezed, “I had to hide, people came by.”
“ABO’s in the vents,” he hissed, barely louder than the hum of the suspension pods.
The metal above them groaned faintly in response, as if in confirmation.
“Got it.” Tessa wheezed against his forearm, her breath coming in shallow, panicked bursts.
“Uncle Brant intercepted their comms… They’re pulling out of the sector.” Her voice turned liquid, breathy in a way that had nothing to do with asphyxiation as she arched deliberately against him.
“Your hand… feels good like this.”
Caleb released her throat slowly, watching without comment as she gasped in great lungfuls of biogel-tainted air.
Twenty years old if she was a day – Cait’s age, with the same hungry look in her eyes that all the young ones got sooner or later.
Whether it was power she craved or just some twisted paternal substitute didn’t particularly matter to Caleb.
It had suited him well enough when their casual arrangement began three months prior, and it suited him now as her cheap floral perfume filled his nostrils when she leaned in to kiss him with the particular brand of desperate enthusiasm only the very young could muster.
Her mouth tasted like synthetic coffee and the slight metallic tang of ration-bar protein when Caleb’s hands slid under her grime-streaked shirt, rough palms scraping over lace that had probably cost her half a week’s ration credits or made herself.
“Mmm.” Tessa moaned into the kiss, legs locking around his hips with practiced ease as he rolled her nipples between thumb and forefinger with just enough pressure to make her gasp.
“Please,” she whispered against his mouth when they broke for air, voice gone husky with want.
“It’s been too damn long since you had me properly. Fuck me. Now.”
“Be quiet.” Caleb said.
He didn’t hesitate.
There was no romance in the way he shoved her pants down around her thighs, the belt buckle clanging loudly against nearby pipework.
No tenderness in how he ripped open his own fly and speared her.
He took her hard against the cold ferrocrete wall, driving her shoulders into unyielding metal with each punishing thrust.
Tessa gasped like a landed fish, nails raking bloody furrows down his back through the thin coverall fabric.
Caleb fisted a hand in her blonde ponytail, yanking her head back at an angle that made her mouth round – the sound echoing off rows of silent suspension pods.
She came apart faster than he’d expected, a wordless sound of pleasure-pain as her thighs clenched around him.
Caleb followed moments later, teeth gritted against the wave of release that left his vision momentarily whiting out at the edges.
Silence fell between them, broken only by the ragged sounds of their breathing and the ever-present hum of machinery.
She was a pureblooded beta, so he had to make her take precautions.
Luckily she was stupid and obedient.
Caleb pulled out with a wet sound, reaching into his pocket without preamble to produce a small white tablet that he tossed carelessly in Tessa’s direction.
“Open.”
She caught it clumsily, swallowing the pill dry with only the barest hesitation.
The fertility suppressant hit her system fast; Caleb watched dispassionately as she winced, rubbing at her throat as she could physically push the medication down faster.
He pulled a rag out cleaning her down there.
“Again?” Tessa pleaded, eyes already glassy with renewed arousal.
The young ones were insatiable in a way the older women never seemed to be – all hungry hands and desperate mouths and that particular willingness to do absolutely anything for another taste of power, however borrowed it might be.
Caleb zipped himself up with a sharp tug.
“Later.” He turned away without another word, wiping his hands on his thighs as if he could scrub away the lingering scent of sex and sweat and cheap perfume.
The vents rattled once more overhead, empty now of everything but the usual airflow, but the combined stench of biogel and their recent activities hung heavy in the recycled air.
Too heavy.
Caleb reached for the small aerosol canister clipped to his tool belt, thumbing the release valve with practiced ease.
A sharp hiss filled the chamber as he sprayed a dense cloud of pheromone neutralizer and scent remover into the surrounding air – the cocktail of chemicals burning his nostrils with its particular sharpness that always reminded him of bleach cut with burnt sugar.
The buzz hit almost immediately, lightheadedness swimming through him even as Tessa coughed violently behind him, swaying on unsteady feet as her pupils blew wide enough to nearly swallow the blue of her irises.
“Stars,” she slurred, giggling like a child who’d gotten into their parents’ bread crust booze, or fruit scrap wine.
“Pretty stars everywhere. That’s the good stuff, boss. Honest truth… we call it Trance down in Hydroponics when we can get our hands on it. Makes everything all… floaty.”
Caleb sighed, pocketing the canister with more force than strictly necessary.
“Kids these days.” He grabbed her arm none-too-gently, steering her toward a rusted maintenance ladder bolted precariously to the far wall.
“Would huff reactor coolant straight from the vents if it gave them half a buzz.”
Tessa stumbled as he shoved her toward the ladder, her laughter echoing far too loudly in the cavernous chamber.
The sound bounced off the suspension pods like mocking ghosts.
“Like worms,” she giggled, fingers slipping on the rungs.
“Worms in the dirt all squirming together…”
“Shut it.” Caleb chided her.
“You actually doing the day job?” Tessa asked curiously.
“It is usually a good idea, it keeps your cover and it will prevent them from coming back and discovering something.” Caleb’s plasma torch flared to life with a sharp click, its blue-white beam cutting through the gloom like a blade.
Tessa made a fart noise between her palms.
“I will stick to keeping a student identity for as long as I can so I don’t have to come out here.”
Caleb finished sealing the leak and flushed the coolant.
“Betas breathe the air that comes out of these. Don’t want them to fry if this blows and takes another cooler down with it,” he said as he hauled himself up and dusted himself off.
“Why the fuck are we planning a giant culling then?” Tessa asked as she stepped on to the maintenance ladder.
Caleb stepped on the ladder and made his way down.
“Because when we kill those freaks, there won’t be enough housing or food outside for them. It’s going to be kinder to do it this way. Quicker.”
“Real kind,” Tessa grumbled as she made her way down.
Caleb sighed, “Sometimes you got to be really cruel to be kind.” The ladder groaned ominously under their combined weight, rust flaking away in reddish-brown showers with each upward movement.
The ductwork beyond was a tight, dark maze of shuddering metal and stale air that tasted of decades’ worth of accumulated dust and decaying insulation.
They’d be opening up the area for the base from behind; getting in was tricky.