[Part One available at: https://scrubreport.com/2026/07/12/short-story-icarus-nine-part-1/]

[Part Two available at: https://scrubreport.com/2026/07/30/short-story-icarus-nine-part-two/]

“Spectra Vestal,” Granté echoed. “Holy shit.”

Hiss made a savage grinding noise that probably stood in for an expletive.

Lady Spectra snickered. “Pleased to meet you, too.”

Granté’s head swam. “What are we doing, Cap?”

Paola blinked. “Uh.”

Whatever it is, make it soon, Hiss signed. The silent man pointed down the hallway behind them. Security’s coming.

Lady Spectra swooned, her hand dropping from her side with the white palm slicked red. Granté took her around the shoulders and guided her to the next intersection. Shouts and bootsteps sounded from where they’d come – only to be cut off by the whoosh of the security doors’ double-layered hexagonal plates sealing.

“Peak, I need a route to security control,” Paola snapped. “We gotta shut down the station’s turrets before we split.”  

“Done,” Peak said. “You’ll need to proceed through the hab areas above the spindle to Upper Security Control. Polk’s skiff should be docked there. I’ll rendezvous with you outside the station.”

“You can’t just come get us?” Granté complained, glancing at the girl’s injured side. A through-and-through wound – lucky, assuming she lived.

“I can’t fit inside the upper dock,” Peak said, as if it were obvious. “If you’d like, I could come to the hab-level docks, but that would require backtracking from upper security after you take down the turrets.”

“Screw it,” Granté said. “You’re right.”

“Thank you,” the ship said. “Hostiles coming from two directions ahead. At your current pace, they’ll cut you off before you exit the spindle.” Peak left out the implication.

I don’t want to leave the girl, Hiss signed.

“I agree,” Granté said, certain but unsure why. “Unless she’s got a better chance staying behind…” He eyed the blood spreading down her hip.

“You sound like a butler my father ordered shot,” Spectra said, awake but still sagging at his shoulder. “I liked him. The butler, that is.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m bleeding quite badly, you know.” Her accent made every sentence sound like it was being decapitated at the end. “But I want you to take me with you. Please…”

“Peak, get the med-bay ready,” Paola snapped. “Lady Spectra, what’s your blood type?”

“O-Positive,” she murmured.

“Hey, Speck,” Granté said, “Stay awake, alright? Put some pressure on your side with your other hand.”

“Speck,” she said dreamily. “That’s nice. My sister used to call me that.”

“O-Positive blood is ready for transfusion in my medbay,” Peak said. “That said, sooner is better than later when it comes to keeping someone from bleeding to death. ”

“Thank you, Peak,” Paola muttered. Then, louder – “Here they come! Hiss, take the left!”

The mute man crouch-walked clockwise around the hexagonal intersection they’d just entered, firing down the hallway in occasional bursts. Paola went right, pistol high and spitting fire, and toggled the control panel by the door to the group’s two o’clock.

Granté hauled Spectra to a stop as the gunmen down Hiss’ hallway returned fire, pockmarks digging into the floor and walls. “Frankly, I’m looking forward to a change of scenery,” the girl said, completely ignoring the gunfire. “This station is all steel and chrome and endless black winter…”

“The leftmost security team is looping around,” Peak said. “They’ll be at your position in two minutes. You’re on the primary evac route, so they’ll be able to override the lockdown on the doors behind you.”

Paola swore. She was stuck on the opposite side of the intersection – Hiss, Granté and Spectra were on the half closer to where they’d entered, and Paola was pinned down by careful shots from the security team in Hiss’ hallway, providing covering fire for each other as they moved up. Paola went to toss Polk’s security tag to Hiss and a shot from one of the security gunners took off her pinkie at the first knuckle; she fumbled the tag and it bounced to the center of the intersection.

“Peak,” she spat, “That hallway with the guards in it?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to see it anymore.”

“Find something to hold on to,” the ship said.

Granté shoved Spectra against a set of junction boxes that looked reasonably well-attached to the wall. “Close your eyes.”

She yawned. “Thought you told me to stay awake.”

He cast a glance toward the open hallway. “I – ”

The Pequod cut loose with both Icarus-9 units, strafing the connecting hall with railgun slugs and anti-vehicle rounds. Torso-sized holes punched through the station’s superstructure, vaporized the security team, and exploded out through the opposite side of the hallway, turning the area into a twisted, carnage-spattered ruin in less time than it took to think about blinking. The corridor squealed and shrieked and twisted away into the void, trailing a clump of storage pods with it. Granté had just enough time to wonder how many people had gotten spaced with the pods before the doors cycled shut, cutting out the howling void with a clap of steel on steel. Salvar Station groaned like a dying thing; the floor lurched into a sickening diagonal, and Granté and Spectra slammed into the wall with twinned whoofs of lost air.

Spectra cocked her head. “That wasn’t very subtle.”

Still counts as stealth if there aren’t any witnesses, Hiss signed. He gestured toward the exit to the hab level. Go.

Paola already had the doors open, waved Granté and Spectra through. Hiss followed, putting a round into the door’s access panel behind them. “They’ll have a cutting torch soon, if they don’t already,” Paola said, hurriedly wrapping a bandanna around her wounded hand. “C’mon.”

Salvar Station’s hab level was a massive cylindrical space nearly twenty times the width of the spindle. Hab-stacks grew from the walls like orderly ivy with semicircular leaves and jutted from the floor like steel anthills. Granté guessed the hab level might be capable of housing ten thousand people (not comfortably, but that was outer space for you).

“Peak, which elevator do we use?” Paola hissed. The area wasn’t crowded, but there were station residents around, and they were giving the new arrivals confused looks that were starting to border on alarm.

“Hullo!” Spectra waved at the nearest of them, a woman in oil-smeared coveralls.

“Uh, hi.” The woman waved back.

“Spectra, please shut the fuck up,” Granté muttered.

“What are you going to do, kidnap me?” The girl tittered at her own joke. “Ow.”

“Are you OK?” the oil-stained woman asked. Her brow knotted as she took in Spectra’s wound. “Did these people hurt you?”

“She took a bad fall down below,” Granté said. “Taking her to get help now.”

“Wouldn’t medical be doing that? You’re not wearing station uni’s…”

“Here’s an idea,” Paola said, wedging her pistol into the woman’s ear. “You stop being curious and start walking home, or I give you the bad kind of brain surgery.”

The woman gulped. “Walking.”

“Wait. Give me your comm unit,” Paola said coldly. The woman complied, and Paola gave her a pat on the shoulder, leaving a thin red smear across her coveralls. “Good. Fuck off.”

She fucked off.

“Only two of the elevators lead to security,” Peak’s voice murmured through the group’s conduction units. “Your three o’clock and nine o’clock.”

“Never fucking easy,” Paola grated.

If it was, it would be boring, Hiss signed.

“I could go for boring once in a while,” Granté sighed.

Which one, Cap?

Paola shrugged and pointed left. “Nine o’clock.”

Found us a ride, Hiss signed. He jogged ahead to a path marked “Cargo” in bright yellow lettering. Granté frowned, unsure what the other man was talking about until a battered cargo lorry the same yellow color as the signage came trundling around the side of the nearest hab-stack. Hiss introduced himself to the operator and, some thirty seconds later, the group were on their way to the security elevator. Hiss yawned, Paola smirked behind the controls, and Granté tried to find something to pack Spectra’s wound with.

“Hey, Speck – how you feeling?”

 “Injured,” the royal said, blinking slowly. “Hurt, maybe? Which one sounds worse?”

“Injured, I guess.”

“Hmm. Halfway between them, then. Ouch.” The lorry had hit a bump, which led to the final of these remarks.

“Sorry,” Paola said, not meaning it.

Sirens sounded, a hundred metal cherubs being stomped.

“Security vessels are being scrambled,” came Peak’s voice. “They’re not sure who to target yet, but that will change.”

“You can take them, right?”

“If I engage at close range, the station will suffer irreversible structural damage.”

“OK, so back away,” Granté suggested.

“The issue is the skiffs’ proximity to the station, not mine,” the ship replied snippily.

“I see the problem,” he groaned, feeling stupid. “How long ‘til – ”

The lorry juddered to a halt. Just about now, Hiss signed. He hopped down from his side of the lorry and extended a hand to Spectra, who giggled, bowed in her seat, and made to exit. She lost her balance partway and stumbled woozily into the mute man’s arms, nearly taking the both of them to the pavement. Hiss caught his balance and signed, one-handed, we have to hurry.

“It’s not like we were taking our fucking time,” Granté shot back.

The matte-red cylinder of the elevator shaft whooshed as the car approached, and the doors – hexagonal, like all the others on the station – cycled open. The group hustled inside, and Paola punched in the floor code on the control panel. As the doors closed, Dusty saw a gaggle of locals approaching the discarded lorry.

His stomach dropped as the elevator kicked upward. The red walls of the shaft were transparent from the inside; from overhead, the hab level fell into an orderly grid, the steel anthills adopting a neat geometric pattern.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Spectra asked drily.

“Oh. Uh, I guess?” Granté’s brow furrowed. “I mean, it’s interesting, in a way, right? The, uh, patterns.”

“Not really. Especially when you’ve been here a while.”

“How long’s ‘a while’? Didn’t you only go walkabout recently?”

The girl flushed.  “Every day’s the same here. A week feels like a month, a month, a year…” Her head drooped, chin sagging to her collarbones.

“Hey, Speck. Speck.” Granté lightly slapped her cheek.

“What?” Her voice was distant.

“Do I need to poke you in the side?”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because you got shot there, and it would hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.”

“Please don’t?”                  

“Then stay the hell awake,” Granté said gruffly.

The elevator halted, opening onto a dull grey hallway studded with rectangular panels, short-side-down, that Granté realized led to small side rooms. Hiss confidently led the way down the length of the hall, stopping just before the big exit hatch. Voidsuits first, he signed, and pointed to the nearest side door, marked “Dressing Room.” Paola waved Polk’s security tag and the group followed her into the cramped area beyond. The dressing room was lined with clear-faced cubical lockers, several of which held sealed voidsuits. Granté set Spectra down on a bench while Paola and Hiss started cracking lockers. Before long, they’d wrangled up voidsuits for everyone – Spectra needed a bit of help getting into hers, but when it was fully sealed she gave Granté a pale smile and a thumbs-up that he couldn’t help returning.

[To be concluded]