The "Sump" of Babylon Station didn't just exist; it festered. It was a gravitational armpit, a gargantuan cylinder at the base of the O'Neill helix where the discarded waste of the galaxy—both the metal kind and the breathing kind—slurried together in a soup of slow-motion suicide.
Asher stood in the intake plaza, squinting against the neon glare bleeding down from the Midway levels miles above. Looking up was a mistake. It made your neck ache and reminded you that people up there were drinking fermented star-fruit while you were standing in a puddle of something that smelled like a dead battery. The air down here was a wet blanket of ozone, rotting synthetic protein, and the heavy, humid funk of ten thousand bodies that had forgotten what a shower felt like.
He wasn't a King anymore. He was Asset #492. A side of beef with a pulse.
"Don't look up," Asher muttered. His hand clamped onto Su Wan's shoulder. His fingers were stiff, callouses forming over the raw spots where the capture nets had scorched him back in the Mojave. He squeezed her thin muscle until she flinched, just to make sure she was actually there and not just a hallucination brought on by the drugs. "Looking up is for the suckers who think someone's coming to save them. Down here, you stare at the floor. You look for the things the high-rollers drop."
Su Wan was vibrating. Not a metaphorical shiver, but a literal, high-frequency rattle of her bones that Asher could feel through his palm. The psionic feedback in this hole was a physical weight—a shrieking choir of thousands of minds screaming in a dozen alien tongues, all hitting the same jagged note of terror.
"There's... too many, Asher," she gasped. Her eyes were darting toward a four-legged thing with translucent skin nearby that was weeping black fluid. It looked like it was trying to fold itself into a corner that wasn't there. "I can't tune them out. It's like a radio stuck between stations, and every station is just someone dying. I think... I think the guy over there is thinking about his kids. Or maybe those are eggs. I don't know."
"Focus on the math, Wan," Asher snapped. He felt his stomach cave in, a visceral, hollow growl that made his reinforced ribs ache. His Hyper-Adaptive cells were already getting desperate, starting to chew on his own fat stores just to keep his lights on. He felt lightheaded, the kind of hunger that makes your vision go blurry at the edges. "We have zero credits. I'm currently burning four thousand calories an hour just existing in this atmosphere. If we don't find fuel in the next sixty minutes, your brain is going to fry, and my head won't be sharp enough to find a way out. We don't have time for a moment of silence."
A chime rang out—a sharp, dissonant sound that made Su Wan's nose start to leak that dark, syrupy red again. It was a cheap, tinny sound, like a broken microwave.
"Feeding cycle starting," a bored voice announced over the rusted PA. It sounded like a guy who hated his job and was only doing it to pay off a gambling debt. "Move to the pillars. Don't fight. Damaged inventory loses valuation. We don't want to have to clean up the mess."
In the center of the plaza, a series of matte-grey pillars began to pulse. From slits in the metal, a thick, translucent slurry began to ooze into rusted troughs. It looked like wet cardboard and smelled like a chemical fire at a glue factory.
The crowd moved like a single, desperate animal. A wave of starving flesh.
Asher watched them. He didn't run. Running was for people who still thought effort equaled reward. He stood on the edge of the chaos, his eyes darting, his Pattern Recognition tracing the lines of force like he was watching a slow-motion car crash. He saw a group of Tier-G reptilians—'Kroks' with leathery green hide and too many teeth—muscling their way to the front. They weren't just eating; they were building a wall.
Idiots. They're fighting for the middle. The pressure is highest at the center of the trough.
"Stay behind this pillar," Asher commanded. He pointed to a rusted strut. "If a guard looks our way, you drop and cover your head. Don't look interesting. Just be a rock."
He stepped into the fray. He didn't push. He flowed, slipping through the gaps between sweating shoulders, moving like a shadow in a basement. He reached the trough just as a massive, four-armed brute with stony, grey skin slammed a smaller, insectoid creature into the metal rim.
The brute was slot #380—a 'Crag-Walker.' It had six milky eyes that looked like they were full of cataracts. "Scraps for the monkey," it rumbled in a low-frequency click. "This trough belongs to the Tiers."
Asher's gaze went straight to the Crag-Walker's throat. He saw the micro-tremors in the neck muscles. He noticed the way the brute leaned heavy on its right side—probably a busted hip from the transport crates.
I wonder if he's ever seen a man eat a rock, Asher thought. It was a stupid, pointless thought. He ignored it. He felt a sudden, weirdly specific urge to sneeze, but he choked it back.
"I don't want the trough," Asher said, his voice a flat, dead line. "I just want you to move."
"Or what?" the brute clicked, its secondary arms reaching for Asher's neck. Its fingers smelled like old sulfur.
Asher didn't wait. A punch was a waste of 50 calories he didn't have. Instead, he reached out with his thumb and pressed with surgical weight into the nerve cluster behind the brute's secondary jaw. He'd learned that trick from a scavenger who'd tried to skin him three years back.
The Crag-Walker collapsed like a sack of wet flour. In the middle of the shoving crowd, it looked like the big guy had just tripped. Nobody cared. People stepped over him like he was a piece of trash. Asher didn't even look down. He scooped up two fistfuls of the grey slurry—it felt like cold snot—and backed away before the guards' sensors could flag a spike in the local aggression index.
He got back to Su Wan and shoved a handful of the paste into her mouth. "Eat. Don't think about the taste. It's just fuel."
She retched, her body trying to reject the chemical sludge, but Asher's hand stayed firm on her jaw. "Swallow it, Wan. Or we're done."
While she choked it down, the air in the plaza changed. A scream tore through the humidity, but it wasn't from a slave.
A UGL Warden—a spindly, four-legged drone with a glowing red emitter—had drifted over the troughs. Below it, a human male had tried to hide a small pouch of the paste in his ragged shirt.
"Unauthorized storage of League assets," the Warden chirped in a high, cheerful tone that made Asher want to rip its processors out.
A beam of red light lanced out. It wasn't a clean cut. The human didn't just die; he evaporated in a spray of red mist and charred bone that smelled like a backyard grill gone wrong. The paste he had tried to save fell into the muck, wasted.
"Liquidation complete," the Warden stated. "Valuation restored. Carry on."
The crowd went quiet. Not a respectful quiet, but the silence of a slaughterhouse floor after the bolt-gun fires. To the UGL, that man wasn't a rebel; he was just a leaky faucet that needed to be tightened.
Asher watched the red mist settle on the grime. His hand was shaking, but not because he was scared.
His Hyper-Adaptive Organism was screaming. It had seen the thermal output of that pulse-emitter. It had analyzed the way the human cells had shattered. It was trying to write a resistance code to a weapon it couldn't survive. Not yet.
The pain was a white-hot needle in his brain.
[BIOLOGICAL ADAPTATION TRIGGERED] Stimulus: High-Intensity Thermal Pulse (Visual Observation) Action: Genetic Simulation Initiated. Warning: Caloric Deficit Critical. 8,000 kCal required for Carbon-Chitin hardening. Status: EVOLVE OR PERISH.
Asher's eyes went wide. His molars began to ache—a deep, thrumming throb that meant his jaw was trying to restructure itself for a higher bite force. He looked at the bodies around him. He didn't see people anymore. He saw Bio-Cores. He saw a buffet.
"Asher?" Su Wan whispered. She could feel the blackness growing in his head. "Your heart... it's hitting two hundred. You're scaring me. Stop."
"I need to eat," Asher growled. His voice had dropped an octave, sounding more like the Crag-Walker than a man.
He looked at the grey brute he had downed earlier. The Crag-Walker was still dazed on the floor, twitching. Its species was famous for mineral-rich Bio-Cores—the mutated glands that stored the radiation they used for muscle density.
To a human, it was a nightmare. To a King in a meat-locker, it was just resource acquisition.
Asher moved. He didn't go for the trough. He moved into the shadows of the dispenser pillar, dragging the dazed brute with him. It was heavy, and for a second, Asher thought his shoulder was going to pop out of its socket. He cursed under his breath.
He didn't have a knife. He used the jagged edge of a piece of scrap metal he had palmed from the floor during the harvest. He'd noticed a tiny crack in the metal earlier. Friction -> Flaw.
Slicing. Tearing.
He reached into the brute's neck, his fingers slick with cold, purple blood. It felt like sticking his hand into a bag of wet coins. And then he felt it—a hard, pulsing lump of glowing amber. The Core.
He ripped it out with a wet snap.
The Crag-Walker let out a rattling, dying wheeze. Asher didn't look at its eyes. He put the glowing amber core into his mouth—it was warm and gritty—and bit down.
It tasted like lightning and battery acid.
[CALORIC INTAKE: 12,000 kCal] [BIO-CORE CONSUMED: Crag-Walker (Grade G)][EVOLUTION IN PROGRESS] Synthesis: [Mineral-Reinforced Osteoderms] Result: Skin density +45%. Kinetic Resistance Acquired.
The pain hit him like a freight train. His skin rippled, turning a dull, rocky grey as microscopic carbon fibers wove themselves into his skin. His bones thickened, his height increasing by an inch as his skeleton braced for the new weight. He felt like his skin was three sizes too small.
Asher collapsed against the pillar, gasping, his vision swimming in shades of amber. He felt the 'Beast Mind'—the leftover instinct of the thing he'd just eaten—clawing at his brain. He wanted to smash things. He wanted to roar. He had this sudden, terrifying urge to crawl on all fours and bark at the guards.
"Recite the digits of Pi," Su Wan's voice hissed in his ear. She had crawled over, her hands pressing hard against his temples. Her psionic power was a cooling balm on his frying neurons. "Do it, Asher. Count! You are the Architect. You are not a lizard. Count!"
"3... 1... 4... 1... 5... 9..." Asher choked out.
Slowly, the red haze faded. The rocky grey of his skin settled into a permanent, subtle sheen—a hidden set of armor beneath his rags. He looked at his hands. They were thicker. Meaner.
"How much..." Asher gasped, watching the Warden drone drift away. "How much is a Crag-Walker core worth on the exchange?"
Su Wan checked the data she had skimmed from the guards' local link. Her nose was still bleeding. "On the black market? 50 Star Credits. To the UGL? It's just 'lost inventory'."
Asher stood up. He felt heavy. Powerful. Utterly alien. He looked at the troughs, then at the golden balconies of the rich above.
"12.5 credits," Asher whispered. "That's what they priced me at. They didn't calculate the value of my hunger."
He turned to Su Wan, his eyes now holding the cold, sharp light of a shark that had just tasted blood in the water.
"We've made our first profit, Oracle. Now, let's go find the Rat. I need someone to tell me how to bankrupt this station."