The Siphon Code: Sins of the Maledictis Academy

The sirens on the mining colony of Aethel-9 didn’t sound like the ones on Earth. They were deep, low-frequency groans that rattled the dishes in the kitchen cabinets and made the synthetic atmosphere taste like copper.

Ten-year-old Silas sat beneath the heavy steel kitchen table, hugging his knees to his chest. Outside the viewport, the beautiful violet rings of the gas giant were blotted out by black smoke.

“Silas, stay down. Do not make a sound,” his father whispered.

His father wasn’t looking at him. He was standing by the reinforced blast door, his hands shaking as he loaded a kinetic hunting rifle. Beside him, Silas’s mother was frantically typing commands into a terminal, trying to restore the sector’s defensive grid.

“They breached the lower airlocks,” she gasped, her voice cracking. “The colony guards... they didn’t even have time to fire. Kasimir, it isn’t a pirate raid. They aren’t stealing ore. They are feeding.”

A horrific screech echoed through the ventilation shafts—a sound like metal tearing mixed with a human scream. Then, the heavy blast doors shuddered. Something incredibly strong slammed into the three-inch steel, leaving deep, concussive dents.

“Barricade!” his father yelled.

But it was too late. The door didn’t just open; it shattered inward, torn from its hydraulic hinges.

Through the smoke stalked three figures. They wore the ragged pressure suits of deep-space miners, but they weren’t human anymore. Their skin was a sickly, translucent grey, and their eyes glowed with a terrifying, milky luminesce. The Rogue Siphons.

Silas’s father fired. The kinetic slug tore right through the shoulder of the lead monster, but it didn’t even flinch. It blurred forward with impossible, sickening speed.

Silas covered his mouth to stifle a scream as the creatures fell upon his parents. There was no negotiation. No demands. Just the terrifying, wet sounds of teeth tearing into flesh and the low, static-like hum of bio-electrical energy being ripped from his parents’ bodies.

In less than a minute, the room fell dead silent.

The largest Siphon, its jaw dripping with crimson, turned its milky eyes toward the kitchen table. It sniffed the air, catching Silas’s scent, and crouched low to the ground. It lunged under the table, grabbing Silas by the throat and slamming him against the steel floor panels.

“Please,” Silas choked out.

The monster unhinged its jaw and buried its fangs deep into the side of Silas’s neck.

Silas braced for death. But instead of feeling his life force drain away, a sudden, blinding heat exploded in his chest. His rare, undetected genetic mutation awakened in a flash of survival instinct.

The Siphon suddenly let go, shrieking in agonizing pain. Silas’s blood was burning its mouth like molten lava. The creature stumbled backward, smoke literally rising from its throat as its internal organs began to liquefy from the toxicity of Silas’s veins.

As the monster choked on its own blackening blood, Silas looked down at his own hands. The blood pooling from his neck wound wasn’t dripping. It was moving. Under his sheer terror, the liquid crystallized, sharpening into a jagged, three-inch shard of solid red glass right between his fingers.

Driven by pure panic, Silas drove the blood-shard straight into the monster’s chest. The creature disintegrated into ash.

By the time the Alliance extraction team arrived hours later, they found a silent, traumatized boy sitting in a pool of hardened, metallic red crystals, surrounded by the bodies of his parents. Because he was an orphan of a bio-hazard colony attack, the military state didn’t know what to do with him—so they shipped him away to the highest-security, most isolated facility they had: Maledictis Academy.