The Case in Red
by PulpPistil
The Lower Decks never really sleep. They just get quieter when something expensive lands. Umbriel Vega steps out of the first hatch like the ferrocrete already belongs to her: living void-metal at her throat, black ichor moving over dark skin, tentacles tasting the air. Lortha and Entha come with her. They are not here to blend in for long. The second shuttle opens on a cleaner lie—another team, another reason to want the same object, the same climb, the same city that still thinks it is only a city. Between the landing pad and the upper stacks: yard guards, street crews, broadcast heat, and rooms where bodies are the product and the cover. Public sex and public killing share the stairwells. The case moves slow. The people carrying weapons toward it do not. The Virago Games are on. Produced using AI tools.
Ghost Signal
by PulpPistil
Tes is already underground when the signal wakes up. Six hours. A dead operator’s last map. The kind of score people kill for, according to the voice in her ear that never shows a face. The trunels under the data blocks are narrow, hot, and full of gas that does not care who fires first. Bodies from an earlier fight are still cooling on the way in. Gear is lying where it dropped. Other crews are already moving—city muscle, a loud little cell with a cause, and someone who has a personal reason to be on this channel. Tes came for the cache. Getting to it is not the same problem as leaving with it. The clock does not stop because the tunnels get crowded. Produced using AI tools.