A new chapter of Siren’s Song is here. Lucky’s plan to rifle through the pockets of the dead goes off. Now we just need to see if it was worth it as the rest of his life collapses around him. Good times, eh? For snippet of the chapter, look below and for the full story, check out the link above.
Enjoy!
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For those who hadn’t been fortunate enough to be vapourized by the beams carving through the ship, immolated by exploding power cells or to fall unconscious as they were pulled out into space, their ends would have been drawn out and unpleasant. Some of them had probably deserved it. A lot of them hadn’t. No one had gone back for the bodies. Even the salvage of the bulk cruiser had been rushed, the clan afraid of remaining too long too close to Semtillian. Many people scoffed at the stories but few of those brave, rational souls would linger around the emerald world.
With a shake of his head, Liam left the desecrated wall and the crew deck behind, heading down an open cargo elevator shaft towards deep storage. With the reactor dead, the lift itself would have been hooked up to battery packs to let the salvage teams access the lower levels, but they’d removed their gear. Not that he’d have trusted it even if it had still been hooked up. That sensation of being watched hadn’t gone away and as he headed down the open shaft, it got worse.
Just the last level of the crew decks disappeared from view, Liam’s eyes widened. There was something in the corridor. He only caught a glimpse of it. It was wirey and unrecognizable, gone in an instant. Under normal circumstances, he’d have dismissed it as a trick of the light against broken bulkheads and dangling cabling. The grotesque, serpentine shadows his torch cast among them made him see a coterie of monsters lurking in the hall. He couldn’t tell which were real and which were just his imagination at work, or if it was all or none of them.
Liam tried to calm himself as he descended, but he kept looking above him, half-expecting to see something scuttling down the shaft after him. He hadn’t actually seen anything, right? Paranoia and fatigue was catching up with him. He’d had a hard enough time getting into the bay, surely nothing else would have gotten through security, right? He was just scaring himself. Right?
He wanted so very much to believe that. His heart pounded in his ears and he tried to slow his frantic breathing. I’m alone, he told himself, hoping that it wasn’t a lie, like a child pulling the blanket over their head as if that would shield them from the monsters in the dark. I’m alone. I’m alone.
And are you going to die alone, too?
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