The industrial bone saw whined, bit, and refused to go any deeper.
For half a second Caleb thought the blade had finally chewed through the chest cartilage. Then the motor gave the dry, ugly cough old machines made right before somebody's pay got docked. The handle jerked in his gloves. The teeth locked.
The warning light above the containment bay blinked yellow over the concrete, the gantry track, the dead Class-4 Siege-breaker, and the knee-high soup of blood and rinse water around Caleb's boots.
Jax cursed first. He usually did.
Caleb slapped the emergency release before the motor burned itself out.
The engine died.
The silence after it felt too large for the room.
From the crane booth forty feet up, Vance leaned into the crew comm. "Tell me that was not the saw."
"It was the saw," Jax said.
"Then lie better."
Caleb kept both hands on the iron handle and breathed through stale suit air. The blade sat wedged two feet into the beast's chest cartilage, not even all the way to bone. A white tendon as thick as a drain pipe trembled around the cut.
It should not have trembled.
The creature had been dead for twelve hours. The Defense Force had killed it before breakfast, posed with it before lunch, and dumped the carcass on the disposal crew after the public feed moved on to cleaner footage.
"We are missing quota," Caleb said.
Jax turned his visor toward him. The clear plate was smeared with black blood on one side and fogged from the inside on the other. "That your motivational speech?"
"It's math."
Caleb braced his boots against the gray scales covering the beast's chest and pulled. The saw groaned in the wound. Nothing moved except the ache spreading through his shoulders.
Jax kicked the Siege-breaker's flank. The scales clanged under his boot. "The Guild docks us for material degradation anyway. Look at this thing. Defense Force already blew half the profit margin into ash."
"Their missiles pay better than us," Caleb said.
"Everybody pays better than us."
Jax reached up and adjusted his oxygen regulator. The little hiss of recycled air sounded loud over local comms.
"We should transfer to sanitation," Jax said. "I'd rather scrub mid-level filters than stand knee-deep in a rotting kaiju."
"Sanitation pays thirty credits a cycle. My family debt interest is forty." Caleb tried the handle once more, mostly out of spite. "Help me pull."
"Quit complaining and attach the hydraulic spreaders." Vance's voice cut across both of them. "We need that chest cavity open before the core cools. You let a Class-4 core crystallize, and the Guild voids our entire contract."
"The blade is stuck, boss," Jax called up.
"Then leave the blade where it is and get the spreaders. Time is money. The part where you two know that is supposed to be why I have you on my crew."
Jax muttered something about transfer forms.
Caleb let go of the handle and waded through blood, stomach acid, and rinse foam toward the tool cart. Heat pressed against the inside of his lead-lined suit. The suit fans had been whining for an hour. His undershirt was glued to his back.
He lifted two heavy spreader bars from the cart. The metal clanked against his thigh plates.
"I'm going in," Caleb said.
Jax stepped back and made a lazy after-you gesture. "You always did want upper management."
Caleb climbed into the open wound.
His boots found slick footholds between shattered ribs and torn muscle. The smell of ozone, rot, and old stomach acid leaked past his carbon filters in a sour film that settled at the back of his throat. He swallowed twice and regretted both times.
The military elites had opened this monster from the outside. Disposal crews had to open it from the inside and pretend that was a career.
He jammed the first hydraulic clamp against the upper ridge of the ribcage and locked the steel pin.
"Cable one secured."
"Taking up slack," Vance said.
Steel cables tightened overhead. The winch groaned. The carcass shifted around Caleb, tearing cartilage with a sound like wet rope being pulled through a machine.
He set the second clamp against the lower ribcage.
The flesh beneath his boots twitched.
Caleb froze with one hand still on the lock pin.
"Vance. Did you adjust the tension?"
"Negative. Winch is locked."
The severed spine arched.
Caleb got one breath in before the beast rolled.
Its crushing bulk shifted sideways hard enough to snap the steel cables. The gantry rig tore loose from the ceiling and came down in pieces. Metal screamed. A clamp whipped past Caleb's helmet close enough to scratch the visor.
The impact threw him out of the chest cavity and onto the concrete.
A claw the size of a truck hood swept through the bay. It caught Jax in the midsection and drove him into the far wall. Concrete split behind him. Jax folded around the hit, dropped, and did not get back up.
"Jax!"
Caleb pushed onto one knee. His cracked visor made the room double at the edges.
The Siege-breaker dragged its ruined lower half forward.
It had no right to move. Half its organs were bagged on pallets. Its throat had been cut open for core access. Its lower jaw hung wrong, unhinged at the back like somebody had opened a cabinet too far.
Something inside its chest unfolded.
A barbed tendril shot from the wound and punched through Caleb's Kevlar weave. It buried itself under his ribs.
The pain did not arrive all at once. First came pressure, heavy and stupid, like a forklift had pinned him to the floor. Then the barbs opened.
Caleb tried to scream and got blood instead.
He gripped the cord with both hands. The barbs shredded through his protective gloves and into his palms. The tendril pulsed. Whatever it was, it skipped armor, skipped meat, and anchored straight to bone.
His suit panicked before he did.
Red text crawled crookedly across the cracked visor.
[CRITICAL TRAUMA DETECTED.]
[VITALS FAILING.]
[EMERGENCY AUTO-RECORD INITIATED.]
"Override," Caleb choked.
The suit rejected him with a flat tone.
[OVERRIDE DENIED.]
[PUBLIC FREQUENCY OPEN.]
The shoulder camera spun on its mount. Its recording light blinked in the dust like an embarrassed little eye.
Blind crawlers skittered from the crushed corners of the zone. They had been hiding in the carcass or under it. Caleb could not tell anymore. Their mandibles clicked against the concrete as they found the smell of fresh blood.
He reached for his sidearm.
The holster was crushed flat under his hip. The weapon inside had bent into a shape that would have been funny on a normal day.
A new feed notification flickered at the corner of his visor.
[Encrypted viewer entered.]
[??? subscribed.]
Then a line of chat appeared, too neat for a room full of dying machinery.
[??? : Oh my. What a fascinating mess you are in.]
Caleb blinked blood out of one eye.
The first crawler leaped at his face.
He threw his forearm up. Mandibles scraped across the armored sleeve. The tendril in his chest pulsed again and sent a hot wire of pain down his spine.
[??? : That looked unpleasant.]
"Dispatch," Caleb said. His voice came out wet. "Anybody on channel four, I need extraction in Bay Nine."
Nothing answered except static.
[??? : How disheartening. I suppose this is where your livestream ends.]
The Siege-breaker dragged itself closer.
Caleb's boots scraped uselessly against the blood-slick floor. He could see Jax by the wall. No movement. No help from the crane booth. No Vance on the comm. Either the line was dead or Vance was.
The chat blinked again.
[??? : Unless you accept a little help.]
He almost laughed. It came out as a cough that put more blood inside the regulator.
[??? : I will send a gift.]
[??? : In exchange, your broadcast belongs to me.]
[Executive-tier gift pending.]
[Accept?]
Caleb did not think about privacy rights, contract law, or what kind of rich lunatic watched a disposal worker bleed out for entertainment.
He accepted.
The reinforced glass skylight shattered high above the bay.
A delivery drone dropped through the hole in a steep dive, sparks trailing from one rotor where the defense grid had clipped it on the way in. It released a steel capsule three feet from Caleb's left hand.
The capsule hit the concrete, bounced once, and popped open.
Inside sat a thermal machete and a pressurized combat stimulant injector packed in foam like expensive tableware.
Caleb reached for the injector. His hand slipped once on his own blood. He got his fingers around it the second time and drove the needle straight into his thigh, through the heavy suit fabric.
The stimulant hit like fire poured into his veins.
His heart slammed so hard the visor warning stuttered. The thing in his chest fought the chemical. Caleb used the tiny space between the two pains to move.
He took the machete.
The blade came alive in his grip, orange-white and too hot for the cracked visor to process cleanly. The nearest crawler jumped. Caleb swung upward and split it open. Yellow fluid sprayed across his faceplate.
He wrapped his left hand around the tendril in his chest.
"No," he told it, because there was nobody else in the room to talk to.
He pulled.
The barbs did not come free. Human muscle tore first. His own. Caleb pulled harder, teeth locked, eyes watering, boots sliding under him.
The cord snapped out with a wet pop and a piece of rib hanging from the end.
Air found his lungs again and burned the whole way in.
Three crawlers rushed his left flank.
The first died on the upswing. The second took the machete through its sensory cluster, but its mandibles caught his forearm before the body quit. The third hit him chest-high while the second was still twitching.
Caleb went down on his back.
He drove his boot into the underside of the thing on top of him. Plating cracked under his heel. The crunch ran up his leg into a knee that had already hated him before today.
The Siege-breaker roared and brought its armored arm down to crush him.
Caleb rolled under the swing.
The arm hit where his head had been and broke the concrete into chunks. He came up on one knee with the machete held flat across his body. The second swing drove him back down before he could breathe.
The blade caught the second strike, barely.
The impact shook through his arms, through the cracked ribs, through the thing under his skin that should not have been there and somehow was.
Caleb pushed up and stepped inside the next swing instead of away from it, the way he stepped into a moving carcass on the line when the safe path was already gone. The machete went into the open chest cavity.
It hit something dense. He twisted once, felt the blade refuse, then forced it farther until something gave.
The beast seized. Its ruined body locked, sagged, and collapsed so close that its dead breath washed over Caleb's visor.
The machete slipped from his fingers.
The stimulant burned out in a single sick drop. His ribs shifted against his lungs. The bay tilted sideways even though he was already on the floor.
The containment zone went quiet.
Jax lay by the wall. The crane booth hung open and dark.
Above Caleb, the drone hovered with its lens aimed straight at his face.
Text blinked over the cracked visor.
[??? : Very entertaining.]
[??? : I think I will keep watching.]
The public rescue channel cut out.
His distress beacon vanished from the grid.
[SYSTEM UPDATE: BROADCAST RIGHTS PURCHASED BY USER ???.]
[PUBLIC CHAT DISABLED.]
[MODE LOCKED: SINGLE VIEWER.]
Caleb tried to ask who she was.
He only managed one breath.
The concrete came up cold against his cheek, and the bay went black.