Chapter 298: The Deepbell Had Been Double-Booked

The pressure animal was called a deepbell, according to the label beside its chamber, and whoever had hired it clearly hadn’t explained the difference between a working holiday and being strapped inside a weapon.

Its body looked like a broad fish with a reinforced shell along its back. Nothing on the visible anatomy proved unnatural mutation, so Bio-Recall wasn’t a shortcut I could apply simply because it looked inconvenient.

The handler below was different. His grafted arm split around a surgical support, and the bright modification tag on the brace matched the supply markings from the enforcer who had become my most disgusting souvenir.

Unfortunately, he had pulled an opaque shield over his face after spotting me. Actual eye contact remained difficult when the relevant eyes had developed an interest in hiding behind equipment.

[System: He’s read the safety booklet, mate. Bloody inconsiderate when you’re trying to turn a workplace disagreement into shelf-stable meat.]

I was going to complain to management, provided management survived long enough to receive the feedback.

The guards reached the landing behind me. I slid beneath the rail and dropped onto a lower pipe shelf, catching the support with my tail while the first shot struck the wall above my head.

My side protested the landing. I kept moving because pain was currently a less urgent issue than the two armed NPCs trying to improve it with extra holes.

The handler pulled a lever and a powered restraint tightened around the deepbell. The animal struck the chamber wall, sending water into an overflow channel that ran beneath my shelf.

He wasn’t controlling its mind. He was hurting it until it moved the machinery, a system of management my uncles would probably describe as traditional values.

I followed the overflow channel toward the handler’s station. A narrow service window separated us, with a retracting inspection cover above it and a large red button he kept protecting with his modified arm.

Galaxy Brain followed the visible labels quickly. The button dumped pressure into the launch line; the smaller lever beside it opened the animal’s harness for maintenance only after the outer chamber had been isolated.

I couldn’t simply release everything while the rig remained armed. That would free the deepbell into a passage full of working machinery and send whatever pressure it had built toward the junction we were trying to save.

Bridget called with the public station’s update. She had closed the ordinary service branch, but the external junction remained exposed and the rig had enough stored pressure for one heavy discharge.

"I found the pump, sweetheart. It had a face, a very bad employer and the sort of mood you got when somebody called your lunch break optional."

"Then stop the employer before you started arguing with the face," she said. "Lukas was still behind the shelf, and he couldn’t take another pair of those weapons."

The handler heard my side of the call and laughed through his mask. He announced that the discharge would make a better warning than killing me quietly, which confirmed he had inherited my family’s talent for making simple cruelty sound like a business plan.

A pipe beside his station carried a removable inspection mirror. Mine Now had cooled during the lock cycle and the fight through the landing, but stealing his shield would only help if the shield could separate without taking his head with it.

Its latch sat openly against his shoulder. I pulled the inspection cover down with a tendril, making him turn toward the window, then flicked a loose cleaning rag through the gap into his control hand.

He swore, shook it off and lifted his shield to see the snagged lever properly. For a brief moment, his actual eyes met mine through the open service window.

Bio-Recall activated before he could lower the shield again. The grafted body collapsed out of the brace with one appalling compressed noise, and a sealed little cube dropped onto the station where his hand had been.

I looked away from the rest of the aftermath, kept the packaged horror out of the controls and decided Dazza was never receiving leftovers from this particular part of my day.

[System: There we are, champ. One less arsehole in middle management, and the staff fridge has technically gained a product nobody should fucking open.]

You could stop trying to make that skill sound like a meal deal any time you felt the urge to develop manners.

Bio-Recall entered its fifteen-minute cooldown. The guards remained ordinary living problems, so I shoved the station’s security shutter closed between them and the control window rather than pretending the skill had removed everyone in the room.

I checked the harness controls and called Lukas for the stolen cabinet’s matching screen. He read the actual connection status aloud while I entered the maintenance pairing through the local station.

I made him repeat the cabinet serial before confirming, because connecting the wrong machine would be a spectacularly stupid way to die after surviving the correct one.

The cabinet aboard his sub finally gained access. It also activated a broadcast panel above the handler’s station, which had been waiting for the same authorized connection to resume its call.

My face appeared on the screen beside the chamber camera. Somewhere outside the rig, somebody had been watching the test feed, and I had just helpfully returned their picture in excellent resolution.

An older man’s face filled the main display. I recognized Harden before he spoke, including the expression he wore when he discovered something he considered his had developed an opinion.

He glanced at the empty handler station, the damaged chamber and my very visible presence, then asked whether I understood how much that animal had cost him.

"I understood it probably wanted a refund on the owner, Uncle. I was helping it explore the available options."

Harden didn’t shout. He pressed something outside the camera’s view, and the maintenance controls beneath me changed from local access to remote override while the pressure gauge continued climbing.