Chapter 35: Mining In Space [II]

"Harper, inside! Chloe, Elena, fall back to the ramp!" Leo roared, shoving Harper toward the cargo bay as he spun and sprinted up the ramp for the bridge!

His boots hammered the deck... The magnetic soles tore loose and slammed down, tore loose and slammed down.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

’Six seconds... Five... Move, move, MOVE!’

Down on the rock, four shadows burst out of a jagged fissure forty meters away.

Two-meter gunmetal-grey arachnid horrors with flat razor-edged shells and eight bladed legs that clicked furiously against the basalt... their arched tails already flaring with orange plasma stingers as they skittered across the low-G stone straight for Chloe and Elena.

CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK!

"Bugs! Four of ’em!" Harper yelled, ignoring Leo completely and dropping to one knee at the lip of the ramp with her carbine snapped to her shoulder. "Elena, MOVE!"

BRRAP! BRRAP!

Two bursts sparked off the lead Stalker’s shell.

PING-PING-PING!

...However it didn’t even slow down.

"Oh come on, they’re ARMORED?!"

She dumped the rest of the magazine into its face anyway.

BRRRRRAP!

Sparks spattered off the grey carapace like hail off a tin roof.

It shook its head once like it was shaking off a fly and kept coming with its blade-legs carving white scratches into the stone with every stride.

Elena stumbled back two steps with her heart slamming into her throat and ripped the Wasp off her hip, and the little blade crackled to life in her shaking hand.

BZZZT!

’It’s tiny... why is this dagger so TINY?!’

The lead Stalker reared up three meters in front of her.

Its mouthparts split open in four directions like a blooming flower made of knives, and the plasma stinger over its back swelled bright orange, drawing back to strike straight through her faceplate.

SKREEEEEE!

But Chloe was already moving.

Her eyes went from green to crimson in the space of a heartbeat, and she crossed the ten meters between them so fast she left a smear of moon dust hanging in the vacuum behind her.

She grabbed Elena by the back of her suit harness, hauled her clean off her feet with one arm and leaped thirty meters across the void in a single explosive bound.

"AAAAAAAAAAAH!"

The stinger stabbed down into empty rock where Elena’s head had been half a second earlier.

FSSSHHHK!

The stone bubbled and hissed into black glass.

THUD!

Chloe landed on the cargo ramp right beside Harper with Elena dangling from her fist like a bag of groceries with the two of them crashing into the deck in a tangle of limbs.

The lead Stalker was already right behind them.

It hit the base of the ramp at full speed and reared up, its blade-legs shrieking across the diamond plate as it hooked the lip and hauled itself up toward the three of them.

SKREEEEE!

Chloe spun on the deck, still on one knee, and kicked it in the face.

KRAK!

The shell over its eyes caved in like a crushed soda can and the whole two-meter bug went flying backward six meters into its friend with the two of them tumbling end over end across the stone in a tangle of thrashing legs.

"I didn’t mean to!" Chloe squeaked, slapping both hands over her faceplate. "It was just there!"

"THAT WAS AWESOME!" Harper screamed.

"Put me DOWN!" Elena shrieked, still hanging from Chloe’s other fist. "Put me down this INSTANT!"

Chloe dropped her and Elena landed flat on her backside on the ramp.

THUNK.

Up on the bridge, Leo hit the command throne at a dead run and slammed both palms into the crystal cradles.

CONNECT.

The link punched into his spine like a lightning bolt, and the turret came alive in his back like a second pair of arms... cold and heavy and hungry with a hundred and twenty fresh slugs sitting in the magazine like teeth.

The world turned to vectors.

Red diamonds blossomed across his vision as distance, speed and angle.

The broken-faced one was staggering back to its feet... The second was already scrambling for the ramp again while the other two were circling wide, flanking toward Harper’s open side.

Lock! Lock! Lock! Lock!

’Wrong rock, bugs.’

WHIRRR... CLANK!

The twin barrels swung down off the dorsal spine and locked.

THUMP!

The first slug left the barrel at eighteen kilometers per second, and the lead Stalker didn’t explode so much as stop existing, blown apart into a spinning cloud of shattered grey chitin and orange plasma that sprayed across the stone in a long glittering fan.

THUMP!

The second one was halfway up the ramp... It went from a bug to a hole in the rock in the time it took Harper to blink.

KRA-KOOM!

Shell fragments rattled off the hull like gravel thrown at a window.

The third tried to dodge left and it actually managed half a meter.

THUMP!

That didn’t matter.

The fourth one had seen enough.

It wheeled around with its legs scrabbling and bolted for the black mouth of its lava tube with eight legs pumping so fast they blurred.

Leo tracked it with a lazy twitch of his spine.

"Nope," he muttered.

THUMP!

The tube mouth caved in on top of what was left of it.

The echo didn’t carry in the vacuum... There was just the deep vibration of the recoil rolling back down through the ship and into his bones, and then nothing.

Four smoking craters sat in the stone where four predators had been running two seconds earlier.

Down on the ramp, Harper slowly lowered her carbine.

Harper looked at the craters. She looked up at the turret, still smoking at both barrels and she looked back at the craters as well.

"...Fuck, Remind me to never make you mad, Cap."

DING!

A golden notification flashed across Leo’s vision.

[Threat Neutralized: Level 1 Void Stalkers x4!]

[Solo Elimination via Vessel Primary Armament!]

[Survival Points Acquired: +40 SP!]

[Current Balance: 842 ? 882 / 1,000 SP!]

...Eight hundred and eighty-two which was one hundred and eighteen points from the Wheel.

[Four low-tier vermin vaporized at a range of thirty-five meters. The Master Captain has once again shown an uncanny ability to point an eight-meter cannon at something very close and press a button... This unit is overwhelmed by your tactical genius. Someone fetch this unit a chair.]

"At least I hit what I aim at," Leo shot back, sagging into the throne as the adrenaline drained out of his arms. "Ramp team, report... Everyone intact?"

"All clear, Cap!" Harper hailed. "Chloe threw Elena onto the ramp like a sack of laundry, but nobody’s got any extra holes."

"I was NOT a sack of laundry!" Elena’s indignant voice crackled through, though she was breathing hard. "I was strategically relocated!"

"You screamed the whole way, Princess."

"I screamed STRATEGICALLY!"

Chloe made a small noise into her comms that might have been a giggle.

Twenty meters left of the smoking craters, the impacts had split a fresh fracture open in the rock.

Elena climbed back down off the ramp and walked slowly toward it, her curiosity overriding her wounded dignity.

Jutting out of the cracked basalt was an outcrop of raw mineral unlike anything they’d dug up all morning.

A crystalline cluster the size of a human skull, jet-black but threaded with deep pulsing veins of brilliant iridescent cobalt that seemed to shimmer with its own electromagnetic field.

Even from two meters away, the needles on her wrist scanner were spinning in wild circles.

She stepped up to it and let her fingers hover over the raw crystal.

TOUCH.

The second her glove made contact, the emerald glyph of her Mechanical Attunement erupted into a blinding violent corona of green light that swallowed her entire arm.

Elena went rigid.

Her breath stopped.

Her icy blue eyes blew wide until the pupils nearly swallowed the color, and thousands of stress lines, kinetic vectors and harmonic frequencies flooded her mind in one deafening roar.

’This ore...’ Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. ’It doesn’t just conduct kinetic energy... It amplifies and stores high-frequency magnetic resonance without thermal decay...’

In one flash of pure brilliant genius, an image bloomed inside her head.

It was not a gun, neither was it a cannon that sprayed expensive tungsten into the dark.

A tethered kinetic harpoon.

A brutal heavy Graventhal rail-spike that could pin a multi-tonne predator or a dead asteroid straight to the ship’s belly and drag it through the void on a high-tension magnetic cable.

A fierce manic breathtaking smile broke across her porcelain face.

"Elena?" Harper called from the ramp, frowning. "What’d you find?"

Elena didn’t answer.

She wedged the Wasp under the cluster and pried it loose from the basalt wall.

CLACK!

Clutching the heavy humming crystal against her chest with both arms, she marched straight back up the ramp.

She didn’t look at Harper and she didn’t look at Chloe either.

Elena also blew straight past Camila calling to her from the garden archway and straight past Leo as he came down from the bridge.

"Elena?" Leo raised an eyebrow. "What is that?"

She didn’t slow down by a single millimeter.

With her chin high and her eyes blazing with frantic creative fire, she marched down the crew corridor, stepped into her quarters and slammed the door.

PSSH... CLACK!

The manual deadlock engaged from the inside.

...

Six hours bled off the ship’s clock, marked only by the corridor runners dimming down into a fake twilight for a planet that didn’t exist anymore.

Outside Elena’s door, the silence was absolute.

"I’m telling you, she vaporized herself," Harper said, leaning against the opposite wall with her arms crossed, bouncing her boot heel against the baseboard.

THUD! THUD!

"You saw that black crystal sparking, Leo. She probably tried to lick it to test the osmium content and turned her brain into static..."

"Don’t say that, Harper!" Camila scolded softly, kneeling outside the hatch.

She set down a fresh thermal tray with two warm flatbreads, a bowl of seasoned bean paste and a tall glass of cold water from the garden, and beside it, leaned against the doorframe with a single broad fragrant sprig of fresh basil she’d coaxed out of the beds barely an hour ago.

She stood up, wringing her hands.

"She hasn’t opened the door once... Not for water, not for the bathroom, not for anything. What if she passed out from fumes? What if the ore is radioactive?"

"The radiation dampers on this deck would have triggered an alarm if hazardous isotopes breached the seal," Jin-Ah stated from the galley arch, not looking up from her tablet. "However, six hours of metabolic deprivation under heavy cognitive load reduces neurological efficiency by twenty-four percent... Her refusal to eat is quite reckless."

Chloe stood two paces back in the shadow of the corner, fidgeting with the hem of her shirt, her head tilting slightly as she listened through the door.

"She’s... breathing," she murmured. "Her pulse is fast... Very fast. Like she’s running but not moving her feet and she’s muttering, mostly curses."

There was a tiny pause.

"...A lot of them are about Leo."

Harper snorted.

"Well, at least we know she’s still herself."

"Alright, clear the hall," Leo said, waving them back with a flick of his fingers. "Let me handle it."

"If she throws a wrench at your face, Cap," Harper grinned, backing away down the corridor, "duck left. Aristocrats always aim for the nose."

"...Noted."

He waited until their footsteps faded, then raised his knuckles and gave the hatch three solid measured raps.

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.

"Elena. Open the hatch. You’ve been in there six hours with no food or water... If you don’t pop the lock, I’m using the bridge bypass."

Two seconds of nothing then a heavy metal stylus slammed down onto something hard inside and furious footsteps came stomping toward the door.

PSSH-CLACK!

The deadlock snapped open and the hatch hissed back into the wall.

Elena Sterling stood in the doorway looking like a hurricane had torn through an ivory tower.

Her honey-blonde hair had escaped every one of its pins and tumbled down her back in wild tangled waves.

Her white undershirt was wrinkled and dusted with graphite powder and glittering blue flecks, its high collar yanked askew.

Her cheeks were pale enough to see through, but her cheekbones burned with a feverish flush, and her bloodshot eyes sat over dark bruised half-moons, blazing with manic exhaustion.

She gripped the doorframe with one hand and held a short drafting stylus in the other like a shiv.

"What?!" she hissed, her voice cracked and raspy. "What catastrophic failure of your rudimentary intellect possesses you to interrupt me NOW, you insufferable loud-footed stray?! Did the ship run out of oxygen?! Did an asteroid hit your beloved cockpit?! If the answer is no, turn your barbaric boots around before I redesign your facial structure with this stylus!"

Leo didn’t flinch.

He bent down, picked up the tray and the sprig of basil and stepped straight past her shoulder into the room.

"Hey!" Elena whirled on her bare heels with her fists balled. "I did not invite you in! These are my private quarters! You cannot simply barge into a lady’s—"

"You’re shaking, Elena," Leo said quietly.

He set the tray on the corner of the desk, pushing aside three empty water glasses, and turned around to look at the room.

The breath caught in his throat.