Chapter 43: The Start Of Troubles...

The smell of ozone was thick enough to taste, coating the tongue with an acrid metallic tang that no amount of ventilation could scrub out.

"Fuck..."

Leo stayed in the throne for long minutes after the shouting and the hugging finally died down and the girls had collapsed into seats and onto the deck, his palms flat on his thighs and his fingers uncurling bit by bit as the adrenaline drained out of his blood and left a heavy hollow ache behind in his bones.

Around him, under the flickering runners, the physical cost of the fight lay bare.

The deck under station three was littered with shattered quartz clips, scorched copper ribbon and the grey dust of burned-out capacitor insulation.

Station two’s display housing had warped under the pulse and was still smoking faintly where Harper had sliced the auxiliary conduits.

Overhead, the jagged spiderweb across the canopy caught the cold starlight, frozen in place by the emergency magnetic sealant Jin-Ah had sprayed along the seam.

"Diagnostics, Jin-Ah," Leo managed though his throat felt like he’d swallowed gravel.

Jin-Ah leaned her hip against her console, holding a damp cloth to her bruised forearm.

Her bob was hopelessly rumpled and there was a smudge of soot across the bridge of her nose, but her eyes were steady as she ran her fingers down the one working quadrant of her terminal.

"Primary core is stable at ninety-one percent... Capacitor banks three and four will need complete rewiring, but the bus didn’t melt... Starboard armor belt is at forty-four percent. The Graventhal absorbed most of the teeth, but we have forty-eight distinct impact fractures across the outer skin."

"The harpoon?" Leo turned his head toward the weapons station.

Elena sat slumped forward with her forearms crossed over the controls and her chin on her wrists with her hair hanging in limp damp strands and her uniform ruined with carbon scoring and grease.

"The winch held," she murmured, a quiet core of triumph under the exhaustion. "The brackets sheared their secondary pins, but the stator never warped. Two hours in the machine shop to press new bolts and the launcher... the launcher is operational."

She lifted her chin a centimeter and met his eyes with a faint tired smirk.

"A Sterling design does not disintegrate under biological stress, stray."

Harper snorted from the floor, where she sat cross-legged against the companionway rail with a thermal wrench across her knees.

"Yeah, yeah. Keep talking, Princess. You were white as a sheet when you pulled those triggers."

"I was assessing the trajectory!" Elena snapped, without a gram of venom, and let her head sink back down onto her arms with a helpless little smile.

CHIME!

[Operational summary for the biological survivors. Vessel integrity has degraded to forty-four percent... External armor plates resemble a rusted cheese grater dragged across a gravel pit. Atmospheric scrubbers are operating at eighty percent efficiency due to an abundance of vaporized alien entrails clogging the ventral intakes.]

A tiny pause, it almost sounded like reluctance.

[However. Telemetry confirms the absolute biological cessation of one Level 2 Shroud Ray... The crew has successfully demonstrated that an apex predator with six hundred percent physical superiority can be brought down by a collection of stubborn terrestrial mammals armed with an oversized harpoon and an alarming disregard for basic mathematics. This unit begrudgingly logs its congratulations, The probability of you all choking on your own incompetence has been downgraded from total certainty to a mere statistical likelihood.]

Harper let out a hoarse bark of laughter and dropped her head back against the bulkhead with a hollow clunk.

"Hear that? We got downgraded to ’likely’! We’re practically naval officers now!"

Camila laughed through her nose and pressed her hands into the small of her back, stretching her bruised shoulder.

"I’m going to go harvest another basket... The beds took a beating when the racks popped."

"Take Chloe with you," Leo said gently, glancing toward the corner of the bridge. "And get someone to look at that shoulder."

Chloe was sitting on the bottom step of the mezzanine with her knees pulled up and her small hands wrapped in clean white gauze.

Her green eyes were clear and peaceful again with the scarlet gone.

When Leo looked at her, she gave him a small shy nod, got up and followed Camila down the companionway without a word.

At the top of the stairs, she glanced back at him over her shoulder.

"Get some rest, everyone," Leo said, and it came out like an order. "Repairs can wait until we’ve had eight hours of sleep. Jin-Ah, lock the cruise drift on Beta-9... Harper, leave the tools."

"Gladly, Cap." Harper hauled herself up the rail with her knees popping. "Anyone who wakes me before tomorrow gets a wrench through their door."

One by one they filed off the bridge in a slow shuffling rhythm of bone-deep fatigue.

Elena dragged her feet with her haughty posture melted into a weary slouch, Jin-Ah tucked her datapad under her arm and rubbed her eyes, Ms. Tachibana paused at the hatch and looked back at him with a quiet lingering look before she gave him a soft nod and slid the hatch shut behind her.

The bridge fell silent except for the steady purr of the core three decks down, thrumming up through the soles of his boots.

Then...

DING!

A radiant celestial chime rang right in the center of his mind.

[Target Eliminated: Shroud Ray (Level 2 Apex Pelagic Specimen)]

[Master Captain Allocation: Absolute Solo Kill Credit!]

[Base Elimination Reward: +150 SP!]

[Current Balance: 882 ? 1,032 / 1,000 SP!]

His breath caught in his throat.

...One thousand and thirty-two Survival Points, The threshold was broken, finally!

FLASH!

Before the first panel even faded, a second far more magnificent interface tore open in the air of the bridge, circular and turning slowly in three dimensions, framed in swirling ribbons of cosmic gold and deep violet starlight.

[WHEEL OF FATE: INVOCATION AVAILABLE]

[Required Cost: 1,000 SP (Sufficient Balance Detected)]

[Master Captain Leo Kaine, do you wish to spin the Cosmic Gacha Wheel?]

Leo sat frozen with the gold light dancing in his eyes.

...The Wheel of Fate.

The celestial machine that had given him the S-Rank turret, the weapon that turned fifty worms to dust and blew the heart out of an apex leviathan.

The machine that held starship technology, god-tier techniques, spatial engines and cosmic weapons that could crack moons in half.

All he had to do was raise his right hand and press one finger against the glowing golden rune hovering fifteen centimeters in front of his nose, and the five-meter wheel would tear open the air of the bridge, roaring with celestial lightning as the needle spun across every treasure in the universe.

His hand rose on its own.

His finger drifted toward the glyph and hovered a centimeter from the burning gold with his pulse kicking into a wild hungry flutter.

A new weapon? A working shield generator to replace the dead magnetic grid? An engine that could jump them clean past the belts and out of this graveyard for good?

...What could a thousand points buy him right now?

Leo stopped.

He looked past the golden panel, through the sealed crack in the canopy and out into the cold silent black.

The Novice Buffer was dead. The tutorial had ended hours ago, and the Shroud Ray was only the beginning... an apex predator, sure, but still a beast hunting on animal instinct.

What happened when the void threw something worse at them? What happened when they ran into another vessel? An armed raider... An automated war cruiser from some dead empire... Something that didn’t have soft gills to shoot?

Right now they were limping, but they were safe with eleven days of clean air, food in the beds, and a turret full of tungsten.

If he spun now, he might get something incredible or he might get a fertilizer catalyst... A cultivation manual... A piece of ship equipment that did nothing at all when the real ambush came and once those thousand points were gone, they were gone.

He’d be back to starting over from nothing in a sector where the safety net had been ripped away.

’I can just use it later...’

A feeling nagged at the small of his back.

The same pull that told him when to roll the ship... the same whisper that said a real emergency was waiting somewhere out there in the dark.

If they ever ended up trapped in the teeth of something they couldn’t fly out of, an unspent spin sitting in his ledger would be the ultimate trump card.

It would be the last door out when every other door was shut.

Slowly, he pulled his finger back and tapped the small grey dismiss icon in the corner.

SWOOSH.

The wheel folded in on itself and dissolved into fading motes of gold, retreating into a quiet tab at the edge of his vision.

[Wheel of Fate: 1 Spin Ready... Standby Mode Engaged.]

He let out a long slow breath through his nose and leaned his head back against the leather headrest.

For twenty minutes he just sat there alone in the dark, watching a distant iron boulder tumble slowly past the cracked glass while his eyelids grew heavier and the phantom hum of the link finally faded out of his spine, leaving him back in his own flesh.

Then he finally pushed himself up out of the throne and walked down the companionway, through the hatch and down the amber-lit corridor, his boots dragging on the runner.

Past Jin-Ah’s door, there was dead silence... Past Camila’s, the faint comforting smell of basil leaking through the seams... Past Elena’s, no scratching stylus and no cursing, only the slow deep breathing of an exhausted engineer finally sleeping on a real mattress.

PSSH... CLICK!

He didn’t bother undressing.

Leo kicked off his boots, fell face-first onto the charcoal bunk and let the crushing dark weight of sleep swallow him whole.

...

Millions of kilometers away, deep in the unmapped dark of the sector, the silence of the void tore open.

SKRRRRRR... BOOM!

A massive angular starship, nearly twice the length of the Wanderer-7, ripped out of nothing in a jagged wake of pale-green tachyon radiation.

It was an iron terror, ugly and heavy and built for one thing.

It didn’t have smooth gunmetal Graventhal, but a brutal wedge of overlapping dark-slate armor scarred with hundreds of kinetic gouges and thermal burns from dozens of void battles... Heavy twin-barreled rail-cannons jutted from its broad shoulders, and clusters of missile tubes lined its flared belly like rows of open shark teeth.

Up on its wide multi-tiered bridge, bathed in the harsh crimson of active combat presets, nobody spoke.

The crew at the lower stations kept their heads down and their hands busy, the way men do when they’ve learned not to draw attention to themselves.

In the center of the command deck, on a heavy hydraulic dais, sat a massive high-backed steel chair.

A man sat in it, leaning forward, relaxed and arrogant and completely at home among the hum of lethal machinery.

He was Japanese, somewhere in his late twenties, with sharp angular features carved like cold flint and jet-black hair cropped short on the sides and messy on top.

A dark high-collared naval coat with no insignia hung loose over his broad shoulders, open over the dark armor plate beneath.

An unlit cigarette was wedged between his teeth, rolling slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other as his dark predatory eyes scanned the telemetry.

BEEP-BEEP!

A high-frequency alert chirped on the holographic projector floating by his armrest, and his eyes flicked lazily down to the blue wireframe.

Across the dark, past the drifting debris of an outer asteroid belt, a faint residual signature was rippling through the gravitational drift.

The fading ion wake of a high-G turn and the cooling bioelectric corpse of an apex void entity...?

’Huh?’

In the middle of it all, drifting slowly along vector Beta-9, a single metallic contact.

It was a starship that was small and alone with its armor scarred, its canopy cracked as it drifted quietly in the dark like an exhausted animal licking its wounds.

The man sat very still for three long seconds as the cigarette stopped dead between his teeth.

His eyes narrowed over the corvette’s clean sleek lines, the turret on its spine... and the unmistakable pristine hum of a working Tier-2 Micro-Fusion Core in its belly.

The cigarette rolled slowly to the corner of his lips.

A wide razor-sharp grin spread across his face though there was no warmth in it.

"This is good..."

There was only the cruel hungry certainty of a wolf that had just caught the smell of blood in the snow.

He tapped the flight override on his armrest.

The warship banked with terrifying predatory mass, its heavy thrusters flaring blinding green, and turned its prow straight toward the Wanderer-7.