Chapter 34: Uninvited Freight
The "Slip" was supposed to be a shortcut, but inside the tunnels of inter-dimensional space, time felt like pulled taffy. The Rig hummed with a low, rhythmic vibration that usually signaled a perfect jump, but ten minutes into the transit, the harmony broke.
A sickly purple static flickered across the warehouse's overhead lights.
"Xavier," Aurelius's voice crackled, his golden eye-casing spinning frantically. "Mass imbalance detected in Cargo Bay 4. We picked up a hitchhiker when we breached the glacier."
Xavier, still feeling the silver starlight of his new engine pulsing in his veins, gripped his Exhaust Saber. "Silas, Serena—on me. We don't do stowaways."
As they descended into the lower levels, the temperature plummeted. Cargo Bay 4 was a labyrinth of towering shelves filled with reclaimed Bureau tech and Zero-Point residues. But as they rounded the corner, Silas stopped dead, his vines twitching.
"Xavier... why are there two Aisle 7s?"
The warehouse had duplicated itself. Row after row of identical wooden crates stretched into an impossible distance. The air smelled of ozone and wet ink.
"It's a Void Mimic," Serena whispered, her hand hovering over her pneumatic sidearm. "It hasn't just latched onto the ship; it's consuming the inventory to build a nest."
Suddenly, one of the crates ten feet away grew a row of jagged, splintered teeth and lunged.
"Blink-Shift!" Xavier didn't think; he felt the spatial fold. He vanished in a blur of silver light and reappeared behind the crate, his saber carving a line of blue flame through its center. The box dissolved into a puddle of black ichor, but the rest of the room began to growl.
From the center of the dark sludge, a figure rose. It didn't look like a monster; it looked like a reflection in a cracked mirror. It was a distorted, obsidian version of Xavier, complete with a shadow-engine pulsing in its chest.
"You... are... late," the Mimic hissed, its voice a garbled echo of Xavier's own.
It vanished.
CRACK.
The Mimic reappeared a split second later, swinging a blade of solid shadow. Xavier barely caught the blow with his saber. The impact sent a shockwave through the bay that shattered nearby glass. The Mimic was trying to copy the Blink-Shift, but without the Spatial Gearbox to stabilize it, every jump it made tore a small, bleeding hole in the warehouse's internal reality.
"It's destabilizing the Rig!" Aurelius shouted from the intercom. "If it keeps flickering, the whole bay will collapse into the Slip!"
"I have to overlap it," Xavier gritted his teeth. He watched the Mimic's flickering pattern—it was jagged, imprecise. "Silas! Pin it for one second!"
Silas slammed his staff down. [Deep Root Sense] allowed him to feel the vibrations of the Mimic's exit point. "Now!"
Thick, iron-hard vines erupted from the floor, not at the Mimic, but at the space where it was about to appear. The shadow-Xavier manifested directly into a cage of thorns.
Xavier engaged his engine to the redline. Instead of dodging away, he Blink-Shifted directly into the Mimic's coordinates. For a micro-second, two bodies occupied the same point in space. The resulting spatial pressure was agonizing.
"Venting!" Xavier roared.
He opened every exhaust port on his body. The silver starlight engine flared, pouring purified kinetic heat directly into the Mimic's core. The destructive interference was total; the Void matter couldn't maintain its form against the raw, stabilized pressure of the Nexus-mapped engine.
With a shriek of static, the Mimic was blasted backward, its obsidian form melting into a heap of useless sludge.
"Aurelius, dump the trash!" Xavier gasped, leaning on his saber.
The floor of the loading bay opened. A localized gravity well, generated by Aurelius, sucked the remains of the Mimic into the "Trash Compactor"—a small, controlled rift that flushed the waste directly into the vacuum of the Slip.
"Cargo cleared," Aurelius hummed, though his golden chassis was scorched. "And just in time. We are exiting the tunnel."
The Rig shuddered one last time as the silver walls of the Slip shattered like glass.
They emerged into a space that defied every law of nature Xavier knew. The sky wasn't black or blue; it was an endless expanse of shifting brass gears and golden clockwork. Giant, moon-sized shipping containers floated in the distance, orbited by smaller "drones" the size of skyscrapers.
This was the Nexus of Nowhere, the central hub of the universe's logistics.
A massive beam of light descended from the "ceiling" of the gear-sky, locking onto the warehouse. A figure composed of pure light and translucent scrolls—twenty feet tall and wearing a celestial monocle—floated down toward the loading dock.
The voice that spoke next vibrated through the very atoms of the Rig.
"Identification, Courier. You are three thousand, four hundred and twelve years late for this delivery. The late fees alone will cost you a galaxy."
Xavier straightened his hat, wiped a smudge of black ichor from his face, and stepped out onto the porch.
"I'm an independent contractor," Xavier looked the giant in the eye. "And I don't pay late fees for mistakes made by the previous shift."