The smell dragged them deeper into the wreck like a rope, a thick, clinging thing that saturated every breath. The emergency lights threw long, trembling shadows across the floor. The blood trails converged into a wide circular chamber, the center given over to glass and tubing and the steady drip of mechanical pumps. The air was heavy and wet and smelled of people in a way that made Vaeliyan's mouth go dry.

Rows of containment pods stood shoulder to shoulder along the curved walls, thin glass cylinders joined by skeins of tubing that fed into the ship itself. Inside each cylinder bobbed a shape that had once been a person. Skin drawn tight like parchment, cheeks puffed in some places, hollow in others, limbs at odd angles. Tubes entered arms and legs and necks, liquid moving in slow, clinical tides. Other lines siphoned waste away. The pods hissed and sighed; condensation ran down their sides in pale rivers.

They all knew the lesson before they saw it. The Legion taught the legionary rules for the Neuman, how they raised people like herds, how they fed and doped and grew them until they were ready for slaughter. Knowledge meant nothing when the sight was real. Seeing it close made the stories small and ugly; it made the smell a thing that sat in your chest.

Silence sat in the room like a coat none of them wanted. No one spoke for a long time. Sylen's voice finally broke the quiet, rough and small in the filter. "So it's true."

"Yeah," Jurpat said. He sounded far away. "Just like what Isol showed us in class."

Chime kept her scanner active, the device blinking in soft blue. "Alive," she said, voice low, "but unconscious. Systems keeping them stable."

Vaeliyan moved closer, antennae twitching against the air. Up close the smell changed; chemicals threaded through it like second notes, hormones, sedatives, stabilizers, nutrient syrup. He could see hairless patches where surgical cuts had knitted smooth, tiny scars at the base of skulls where someone had reached in and taken thinking from them. These were not prisoners who could be unmade with will and time. They were emptied rooms, shells left to grow.

Xera watched the pumps with a flat look. "They blunt them." She jabbed a thick finger at a control cluster. "Muscle inhibitors, lobotomy, long term sedative feed. Keeps supply predictable."

The faint breathing that came from the pods was more a mechanical compliance than life. No blink, no twitch of comprehension, only the slow inflation and deflation of lungs kept in motion by piped chemistry. If there was suffering, it had been ground into stasis and replaced with vacancy. It was merciful in a way that made every one of them feel worse.

Elian studied the nearest face until the helmet filters fogged his visor. "We are not leaving them like this," he said, and his voice did not rise.

Sylen scrubbed at her mask, jaw tight. "There's nothing left to save," she said. She meant it without fatalism; it was simply a fact.

"We do what we can," Vaeliyan said. "We mark the coordinates. We call civilian retrieval and bio tech, they might have the tools to deal with this. They can decide what to do with the bodies and whether anything at all can be salvaged for identity. We move on. We go find the ones who made this."

There was no argument. Jurpat began pinging the net for civilian retrieval and bio tech. Chime pushed a clean channel toward the nearest Legion engineering node and uploaded a hard point on the ship's layout, a ghost trail of where the pods stood. The twins moved with economy, sealing the chamber and rotating the hazard markers until they read clearly through the comms as civilian retrieval only. They would not sacrifice their day and their mission on a room that was already a grave. There were scum to kill and answers to be taken. They left the pods behind.

As they filed back into the corridor, the quiet pressed in again. The wreck seemed to breathe with them, its walls flexing faintly with each passing vibration, as if the ship itself was listening. The Complaints Department stayed close, weapons drawn, ready to meet whatever waited deeper inside.

As they moved deeper into the wreck, a faint noise began to filter through the walls—a rapid exchange of sharp whistles and clipped tones that echoed through the corridors. The sound was constant, urgent, and alive, threading through the bulkhead like metal scraping on glass. Every shift in pitch carried command, question, or warning. They were talking.

Vaeliyan raised a hand and called a halt before the others could step into view. His sightlines were sharper than anyone else's, and instinct told him everything he needed to know: the path ahead was bait. From his vantage, he caught the glint of threads strung across the corridor, tension lines almost invisible against the glow of the emergency lights. Turrets nested in the corners like insects, motionless but awake. It was the kind of trap that looked simple but killed anyone careless enough to underestimate it.

He reached to his belt, pulled a small metallic orb, thumbed the activator, and tossed it down the passage. The orb bounced once, twice, clattering as it rolled past the first line. A half-second later, the hallway detonated into chaos, turrets snapping to life, filling the air with precision fire. Bullets shredded the dark, sparks bursting across the walls as the orb continued its path, pinging with a steady, rhythmic beep. It rolled to the far end and struck the bulkhead.

The explosion of smoke swallowed everything.

"Move," Vaeliyan ordered, calm, clean, absolute.

They surged forward, not in panic, but with the deliberate rhythm of killers at work. The Complaints Department didn't move like soldiers, they moved like killers enjoying their craft. Every motion connected, every rhythm followed the next. They were fast, efficient, and terrifying.

Roan took the lead. His four-legged armor hammered the floor, the rhythmic pounding like the heartbeat of some colossal predator. He carried a massive battering ram gripped in both hands. He hit the bulkhead full force, the impact folding steel and flesh alike. The two Neuman who had been peering through the viewing slit vanished under the blast of his charge, nothing left but red across the plating.

Then the Complaints Department was through.

It wasn't a fight. It wasn't even close to one.

They weren't here to survive or prove themselves. They were here to clean up, and to enjoy doing it.

Flechettes ripped through the haze, tracing perfect arcs toward exposed flesh. Sylen moved like liquid violence, her blade flashing through torsos and limbs. Elian followed, gravity bending the room in waves; Neuman twisted midair before collapsing under their own weight. Chime reached straight into their equilibrium, distorting balance, twisting orientation, wrecking their inner ears until they stumbled and fell into Elian's will.

Jurpat's laughter cracked through the chaos, feral and sharp. He moved like a blur, using the weight of his armor and strength of his claws to tear through Neuman ranks, rending them open with effortless precision. Rokhan moved beside him, a wall of kinetic mass grinding through everything unlucky enough to be within reach. Jurpat's claws cut through flesh like butter, each strike brutal and clean. Roan's stomps shattered skulls beneath him, each step a dull, wet punctuation.

Vaeliyan was at the center. His truncheon spun, fluid and sure, each strike an ending. He didn't hesitate. He didn't miss. The weapon connected with heads, necks, and joints in an unbroken rhythm, guided by the steady hum of his armor. Around him, the smoke twisted, colored gold by his motion.

The Neuman broke within seconds. Their whistles turned sharp, shrill, fragmented, panic bleeding through their tonal language before it cut off completely. Forty of them had been waiting here, ready and coordinated. They were gone in less than ten seconds.

When the smoke settled, the room looked like a machine that had eaten itself. The walls dripped, the air hung heavy, and the Complaints Department stood in the ruin, unshaken, quiet. They looked satisfied. Not triumphant, content, like mechanics who had finished the job correctly.

At the far end of the chamber, one Neuman remained. Smaller than the others. Female, probably. Thin arms, pale skin, a long spear clutched tight enough to whiten her knuckles. She didn't move. Her stance was wrong for an attack, more a last stand than a fight. Her tones were high and uneven, fear leaking into the pitch of her whistled breaths. She wasn't defending herself; she was guarding the door behind her.

No one spoke. They just watched her, half-interested, waiting to see if she would do anything worth reacting to.

Fenn raised a hand, the motion casual, almost lazy. He didn't even aim. His lance fired, the shot a single flicker of light. It hit her in the skull and blew the back of her head out in a neat, efficient burst. She was there one moment and gone the next. She dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, the spear clattering beside her.

The door behind her, thick, marked in layered Neuman script, now stood unguarded.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Vaeliyan tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly. The silence that followed felt heavier than it should have. He exhaled once, a slow, restrained sound. For all their ease with slaughter, something about the way she'd stood there stuck with him.

Xera broke the quiet first. "I wonder what she was guarding that made her stand there like that," she said. "She had to know it wouldn't matter."

Vaeliyan's voice came low. "Yeah," he said. "I really, really hope it's not what I think it is behind that door."

The squad formed up without a word, weapons raised, moving as one toward the door.

The door sighed open and the scene inside was worse than any of the warnings had allowed them to imagine. A nursery, rows of low cots and soft polymer beds, and in them the bodies of children. Neuman and yet at this distance they looked human, small faces, round cheeks, thin limbs. The oldest stood between the cots and them like a thin, trembling stone, eyes hard and narrow. She was no more than a handful of years beyond a child by human counts. She held herself like a ward and a warrior both.

She tried the common tongue in a stuttered rush, words rusty and sharp. "You kill us now. We never surrender. We never surrender. We Neuman. You savage. No hurt. Children. Kill quick." The cadence was animal and defiant at once.

For a heartbeat there was nothing but the sound of the ship and the small, wet breaths from the beds. Then people started talking; not out of cruelty, but because someone had to make sense of what to do next.

Wesley's voice came first, quiet and raw. "Are they… kids?"

"Yeah," Jurpat said. His mouth was a hard line. "They're fucking kids."

"Their Neuman," Elian said. "They're mon..." He cut himself off. Nobody wanted to finish the sentence.

Bastard made a low, disapproving sound and pressed closer to Vaeliyan's leg. Momo shifted, awkward and protective.

Xera was already on the comm, voice clipped. "Legion engineers and bio tech are en route. They'll be here in, approximately forty minutes," she said. She did not say that anyone who turned these children over to Legion custody would be signing their death warrants.

"Then what the fuck do we do?" Rokhan asked, blunt and uselessly loud. "We can't hand them over. They'll be killed or worse."

The room went still. The moral line was sharper and uglier than anyone wanted it to be. Killing them here would be a mercy that would feel hollow. Taking them to the Legion was a promise of slow death.

Vaeliyan rubbed his jaw, feeling the weight of it in his hands. "We do not fucking kill children," he said slowly. "Not like this. If they are a real threat, that is one thing. This is not that. We take them with us or we leave them to die in Legion hands. I won't do the latter."

Sylen cursed softly. "We take them with us then. Who the hells is ready for that?"

"None of us," Jurpat answered, tired humorless. "But none of us are killing kids either."

Planning happened fast and dirty. Chime setup a hold for the Boltfire to carry the children. Jurpat flagged the fragments in the net, not salvage points. He was the one who would do the dirty work, the one who always did the jobs the rest of them pretended not to see. Vaeliyan barked three quick orders: secure the children, prepare the house for departure. They would grab what they could, then move. The ship's bounty and any fragments on it were theirs if they cleared the claim. That mattered, cold and mercenary as it sounded; fragments were currency and power. But it mattered less than the small faces in the beds.

Wesley paled. "Babies?" he said. "Has anyone here ever dealt with a baby?"

Elian made a face. "I have not. I had a pet dog once. But that is different."

Rokhan barked a laugh that sounded like it might break. "Roan, you want to be on diaper duty?" he asked, half joking about to cry at the insanity of it all.

Roan screwed his face up and nodded his head. "I will do it. I have no skills. But I will learn."

Vaeliyan placed a hand on the shoulder of the oldest girl and waited while she gathered herself. She moved with the cautious authority of someone who had been forced to grow up too fast. Her hands were small, but she steered the younger ones into line, whispering tones at them that sounded more like shushing than anything else. The babies stirred and one started to cry. Sylen picked the child up, cradling it the way his size allowed, and the sound cut through the hardened men like a blade.

They moved fast after that, taking the children with them through the wreck. There were five infants, six toddlers who could walk, and two older teenagers who led the little group. They held hands, moving at the edge of frightened obedience. The squad kept faces averted when they passed the cots where the adults lay, but it wasn't sorrow that kept them from staring. The parents had been monsters, predators who had butchered and burned and left wreckage in the wake of their raids. The corpses were proof of that, arms twisted around wreckage, tools stamped into skulls, tiny hands ghosting plastic where they had reached for play and found only violence.

Vaeliyan looked at the oldest girl, her posture stiff and guarded. "You're coming with us," he said.

She glared at him, trembling but defiant. "We no surrender." Her accent was broken, words halting but sharp.

Vaeliyan tilted his head, unflinching. "Do you want to die?"

"Death for all," she spat.

He pointed his lance toward one of the smaller children behind her. "Do you want them to die too?"

The girl's body shifted, her instincts taking over as she moved to shield the younger ones. Her jaw clenched, eyes wide with a fury that had no power behind it.

"If you don't want them to die," Vaeliyan said quietly, "then you come with us."

She stared at him for a long moment, shaking with the effort to stay proud. Then she nodded once. There was anger in her eyes, but she obeyed, motioning to the others. She moved them forward, sharp and protective, knowing she couldn't stop the Legion soldiers but refusing to watch the ones she was meant to protect die before her.

As they cleared the nursery and the chamber beyond, Jurpat moved with a different, quieter purpose. He stayed behind while the others shepherded the children out, kneeling among the wreckage and the dead. The work was surgical and filthy. Where the parents lay he cut open chests with a small blade. He dug straight into their hearts, opening them with clean, brutal precision. He pried the fragments free and slid them into lined cases. These were monsters who had earned this, and Jurpat's blade didn't slow for any of them.

The twins moved in to sanitize the scene. A controlled flame licked the deck where it mattered, a quick scrub of heat to erase fragile traces. It was not vengeance. It was protocol and a brutal practicality. They did not care about mercy when it came to evidence they could not control. The ship would be claimed, sources would be logged, and the children would ride with them.

When they reached the house, the plan fell apart in seconds. The moment the Neuman children stepped inside, order dissolved. They scattered in every direction, poking into cupboards, pulling at drawers, crawling under tables and up onto furniture. They didn't speak, only whistled and chirped to one another in their strange, clipped tones, communicating fast and sharp like birds in flight.

Vaeliyan tried to wrangle them, shouting halfhearted orders. "Stop, don't touch that! Put it back, no, not that either!" He turned as one of the older ones tried to pry open a storage crate with her bare hands. "You're not helping your case!" he growled.

It was chaos until a soft, rhythmic whistle cut through the noise. Roundy floated into the room, his metal shell catching the light, emitting a sequence of crisp, deliberate tones. The Neuman froze, their heads snapping toward him as if he'd spoken their true names. The little round bot hovered forward, gave what might have been a nod, and whistled again. Slowly, obediently, the children gathered around him and began to follow.

Vaeliyan blinked. "Wait, you can speak Neuman?"

Roundy bobbed once, like that answered everything.

Vaeliyan turned to the others. "When the fuck did that happen?"

Chime's voice came over the comm, calm and steady. "Does it matter? We're ready to go. Get the house in the air before Command starts asking questions."

"Fine," Vaeliyan said. "House, take us up."

The walls shuddered, the hum of power growing underfoot as the house lifted from the wreck. Outside, smoke curled away beneath them, the ruined Neuman ship shrinking into shadow. Inside, the children followed Roundy down the corridor in perfect silence.

Vaeliyan almost had a heart attack as they narrowly escaped their own foolish decision. They should not have gone down there. They had known the Neuman traveled in families. Of course there would be kids.

He sat at the kitchen table of the house, armor still half-on, staring out the window while the synthesizer hummed behind him, building a meal he didn't intend to eat. He had told it to cook just to fill the silence. The faint pulses and click of its mechanical rhythm gave him something to focus on, noise instead of thought. Outside, the clouds thinned as the estate climbed higher, leaving the wreck far behind.

There had been salvage at least. That was something. They'd get a ton of credits for downing the ship. They could claim there were no children, no survivors. The damage the twins had done made it look like the room had collapsed before they ever arrived. Every record, every trace, gone. They had wiped the ship's systems clean with Deck's help; Ramis had been given a few program disks for situations just like this as part of his graduation gift, had shared them without asking why, and they'd done the job perfectly. It had worked. To anyone checking, it would look like the Neuman had purged their own systems to hide something. The Legion would find nothing.

They had made a clean break. But now they had children. Infants. Toddlers. Teenagers. A walking moral disaster stuffed into their mansion with nowhere to take them. Too much time to travel and too many eyes that would see what they had done if they weren't careful. They couldn't hand them back to the Neuman, because fuck that. The adults were monsters, and the kids, maybe, just maybe, the kids had a chance. They were young enough that something closer to human might still be forged.

He wasn't so sure about the oldest one. She was sharp-eyed, cold, too steady for her age. But she was protective, not suicidal. That was something.

Rokhan's voice broke the silence. "You got that list from Wirk, right?"

Vaeliyan blinked, still staring at the rain streaking down the glass. "Yeah. Why?"

"There is a skill on there. It's a language adaptation skill or something like that, as far as I was told. The combo is on there. It doesn't make you fluent, but it makes you learn them faster. We're going to need those, a bunch of them, one for everyone. Otherwise, we're going to be stuck talking to an angry girl who doesn't speak Common for who knows how long, and I don't know how hard it's going to be to teach a bunch of kids a language that they probably think is beneath them," Rokhan replied.

Vaeliyan sighed. "Yeah. You're right."

Rokhan smirked. "Also, the Power Nap skill. I don't think I'm sleeping for more than a minute at a time with all this noise."

"Yeah," Vaeliyan said, rubbing the back of his neck. "I was thinking about doing some crafting. Get my head straight."

Rokhan groaned. "No. Absolutely not. I know how you get when you start crafting. You'll ignore the world until it falls apart. I'll do it. It's my forge tonight."

Vaeliyan gave him a faint, tired grin. "You know what, Rokhan? That's actually not a terrible idea. I'd drown myself in it, and you… you might not."

"Oh no, I definitely will," Rokhan said. "I'm just not letting you be the one to do it. Now give me the gods damned list."

Vaeliyan sent the message to Rokhan's AI. He leaned back, eyes drifting toward the window as his thoughts wandered to Mara. He knew its people well enough to trust that they might take in children like these. Mara had far less prejudice than any of the Green. If anywhere could stomach this, it would be there. Still, this was far beyond what he had ever imagined bringing home.

"Fuck," Vaeliyan muttered, rubbing his face with both hands. "Why did it have to be kids?"

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