Chapter 87: Attacked By Eels

The Wanderer-7 was cutting through a thin ribbon of ancient basalt dust that drifted lazily between two minor asteroid clusters.

Leo sat in the command throne with his hands resting easy on the armrests, half listening to Jin-Ah and Aoi murmur through their final approach vectors.

...The feeling at the base of his spine snapped taut.

It came on hard and sudden, an iron grip closing around his spine like a coiled spring, and it yanked his whole awareness toward the forward canopy with violent urgency.

The faint curious twitch he’d felt in the Boiling Belt had been a whisper however this was a hand on the back of his neck shoving his face toward the dark.

His eyes narrowed.

Before any sensor could make a sound, he drove both bare hands into the bio-synthetic crystal cradles in the armrests, and his mind locked into the corvette’s neural bus in a blinding fraction of a second.

Harper looked up from the secondary console, catching the sudden rigid change in his posture.

"Leo? What is it?"

"Aoi, drop our burn to thirty percent," Leo said, his voice falling into the low register that meant life and death. "Kill the forward running lights and tactical sensors to passive thermal."

Aoi obeyed without a single question.

Her fingers flew across the console, the drive note fell away and the forward lights blacked out as the bridge sank into the deep shadowed glow of red.

Nobody had sounded battle stations, but nobody waited for it either.

Harper vaulted into the gunnery seat and had her harness buckled before Leo finished speaking.

Elena’s hands were already resting on the power board, and Camila had slid into the auxiliary seat beside the life support panel with her jaw set and her knuckles pale.

...Three mornings of drills had worn grooves into them, and their bodies went where the grooves led.

Behind the throne, Chloe sat very still with her hands folded in her lap and her nostrils slowly flaring.

"Passive thermals engaged," Jin-Ah whispered, filtering the background radiation on her slate. "Scanning the drift..."

Her breath caught.

Five glowing signatures bloomed across the hololith, crawling out of the shadowed crevices of the basalt ribbon barely three hundred kilometers ahead.

They carried no metal and no drive signature... They were organic heat sources, burning at more than two thousand degrees.

HISS-CRACKLE!

Through the quartz canopy, the dark rocks of the drift seemed to wake up.

From the hollow craters of a five-hundred-meter nickel asteroid, five huge serpentine shapes uncoiled into the vacuum.

...Level 2 Pyre Eels.

Each was over sixty meters long, its thick armored body sheathed in jagged black scales whose seams glowed with simmering orange magma.

Their finned tails lashed the void and trailed plumes of superheated sulfurous gas, and their broad heads split open to show furnace maws lined with three rows of white-hot fangs.

Their lidless yellow eyes snapped toward the fading turquoise wake of the Wanderer-7.

Their burning fins flared in unison, and all five of them banked their molten bodies straight toward the corvette.

The basalt drift shattered into a boiling inferno of orange and sulfur yellow as they surged out of the craters.

Sixty meters of black-plated muscle whipped through the vacuum behind each wedge-shaped head, and the seams between their scales burned like open fissures in a planet’s crust, turning the void around them into a shimmering haze.

Their jaws split along three hinges at once, baring cavernous gullets where ignition glands churned with pressurized plasma, and in perfect predatory unison, all five snapped into tight S-shaped coils and spat.

Five spheres of boiling magma, each three meters across, screamed down the Wanderer-7’s flight path at twelve hundred meters per second!

"Incoming bio-thermal artillery!" Aoi called from the cartography pit, her silver talent rings spinning in tight brilliant halos around her temples. "Five spheres, one point two kilometers per second! Triangular spread, bracketing our forward line!"

"I’ve got the line..." Leo answered calmly.

The link through the cradles was instantaneous and it locked his nervous system into the fifty-meter frame with a hum that buzzed straight through his collarbones.

The guide at the base of his spine flared into a molten bronze current that flooded his mind and lit the whole battlefield in sharp impossible clarity.

He could feel the heat displacement of each sphere as it tore through the dust, the tiny differences in their trajectories and the razor-thin sliver of empty vacuum running between the upper two...

He thought the ship into the gap, as easily as shifting his weight on a skateboard back home.

PUMP-PUMP-PUMP!

The ventral and starboard attitude thrusters fired in a syncopated three-beat burst, and the Wanderer-7 snap-rolled into a violent corkscrew with its gunmetal hull slicing through the dark on an inverted sixty-degree climb.

SZZZZZZT!

The two upper spheres screamed past the canopy with less than eighty centimeters to spare.

A wave of orange glare washed across the thick quartz and set every interior temperature sensor shrieking, then the vacuum swallowed the heat before it could scorch the resin patches, and the corvette shot through the gap intact!

"Lead eel closing for a wrap!" Jin-Ah called from station three, her fingers flying, and three mornings of drills rang in every crisp syllable. "Negative forty-five degrees off our keel, six hundred meters per second! It’s trying to coil around the propulsion housing and crush the thruster bells!"

"Not while I have power in this grid..." Elena snapped from station two.

She didn’t fumble a single switch.

The rerouting drill she’d run every morning with Camila took over with machine precision.

Three decisive taps bypassed the domestic reserves, sent forty percent of the core’s auxiliary output through the secondary bus and locked the magnetic shunts straight into the starboard armor belt.

"Capacitors aligned!" she reported, her voice ringing with sharp authority. "Shield grid at one hundred percent! Starboard battleplates fully charged!"

The lead eel exploded out of the dust below them and slammed its armored snout into the starboard flank, whipping its sixty-meter body around the hull in a furious constricting coil.

CLANG-CRACK!

Its magma-veined body hammered against the new slate-composite plates, and a dull ringing boom shuddered up through the deck beneath their boots.

The raider metal took it, and the frame held without a single fracture.

SZZZZT-BOOM!

The instant its burning scales touched the hull, Elena dumped the stored charge.

The shield grid flared along the starboard seam in a blinding sheet of pale blue arc lightning and drove a high-voltage shockwave straight into the eel’s nervous system.

The monster convulsed in silent agony, its molten veins sputtering with blue interference, and its coils spasmed and recoiled off the hull.

"Harper, take its jaw!" Leo barked, and the yaw thrusters kicked hard left at his thought, swinging the dorsal firing arc into line with the beast’s thrashing skull.

"Locked and loading, Cap!" Harper yelled from the gunnery seat with her boots braced flat and her bare shoulders corded.

She was moving on pure drilled instinct now.

Her Kinetic Tuning hummed through the turret linkage like an extension of her own nerves, and her fingers nudged the traverse dials a fraction of a millimeter to cancel the ship’s rotational drift before she slammed both palms onto the triggers.

THUMP-THUMP!

The twin-barrel mag-rail on the dorsal spine roared twice, and two of her helical rounds left the rails at twenty-two kilometers per second.

...Of the thirty she’d loaded for the ship, these were the first two to taste blood.

KRA-KOOOOOM!

The first punched straight through the lead eel’s armored brow and shattered the black plates like cheap porcelain.

The second plowed through its brainstem and detonated the plasma gland in its throat... The sixty-meter body blew apart from the inside in an expanding sphere of black ichor, shattered bone and burning sulfur, and the headless carcass went rigid and drifted away into the dust.

"Target one is scrap!" Harper roared, a wild grin splitting her freckled face as she cleared the feed. "One down, four to go!"

"Two from the dorsal blind spot!" Aoi shouted. "Synchronized pincer! Plus twenty degrees, four hundred meters, closing at full burn!"

"Lasers, Elena! Burn their eyes!"

Leo threw every forward thruster into a violent reverse burn!

WHAM!

The corvette killed its momentum with a shudder that rattled teeth and slid backward through its own ion wake, dragging the two attacking eels straight into the forward arcs of the shoulder mounts.

Elena locked the optical targeting bus into continuous discharge.

ZAP-BOOM!

ZAP-BOOM!

Two blinding crimson lances erupted from the corvette’s forward shoulders and struck the flanking eels dead across their armored snouts.

The coherent light heated their black eye plates to five thousand degrees in under half a second, boiled the moisture in their sockets and vaporized their sensory whiskers in two sizzling bursts of white steam!

Both beasts thrashed in blind agony.

Their pincer collapsed into a flailing tangle as they lost their bearings in the vacuum, and Leo cut the reverse burn and pitched the Wanderer-7 straight up through ninety degrees, bringing it to hang directly above the blinded pair.

"Harper! One each!"

THUMP!

THUMP!

Two rounds, two flashes of blue, and each one drilled straight through a dorsal heart-sac and tore through the reaction organs beneath.

Twin fountains of burning orange hemolymph sprayed into the vacuum and froze instantly into clouds of glowing crystal droplets, and the second and third eels rolled onto their bellies as the magma in their seams cooled to dead grey stone.

"Three down!" Jin-Ah reported, steady and clinical. "Target four is diving from our ventral quarter, trying to ram the fuel bladders from below... Target five is holding at eight hundred meters behind a basalt boulder, charging a maximum-yield shot! Throat gland at ninety percent!"

"Elena, harpoon!" Leo shouted. "Anchor the diver before it reaches the bladders!"

"Tracking locked!" Elena slammed the release with ferocious elegance.

KA-THOOOOOM!

The four-meter Graventhal harpoon spike blasted out of the ventral launcher at seven kilometers per second with its braided carbon tether uncoiling behind it like a silver serpent.

SHCK-CRUNCH!

The barbed spike punched straight through the fourth eel’s armored dorsal ridge, and its hydraulic anchors snapped open deep inside the spine.

SCREEEEECH!

The tether went taut with an ear-splitting groan that shuddered through the keel.

Fifty meters beneath the belly, the fourth eel thrashed in dying fury with its fins flaring, its huge weight dragging against the attitude thrusters and trying to wrench the whole corvette into a spin.

Leo felt every jerk of the line in his own shoulders, and he held the ship level with a stream of tiny ventral bursts then its tail came up.

It whipped out of the dark like a burning cable and lashed across the ventral plating aft of the harpoon mount.

KRANG!

The whole bridge lurched sideways as a shrill new tone cut through the noise, and a red light began strobing on Elena’s board.

"Breach! Deck Two, starboard!" Elena called, her voice cracking for just a fraction of a second before the drill caught it. "A coolant line’s gone and the seam’s venting! Pressure’s dropping!"

It was the exact scenario Leo had barked at them on the first morning, word for word, and for one frozen heartbeat nobody moved then Camila was already gone from her seat.

She went down the companionway rail on her palms the way she’d done it six times that first morning, hit the deck below the mezzanine and threw her whole weight against the manual valve wheel.

She turned it the right way. Above her, Elena’s fingers ran the cutoff sequence clean, and this time she waited for the confirmation before she called it.

"Seal holding! Confirm green?"

"Green!" Camila shouted up from below, breathless.

The strobe on the board blinked once more and died.

"Time?" Leo sai with his eyes never leaving the hololith.

Jin-Ah didn’t even need to look.

"...Nineteen seconds."

From somewhere under the mezzanine came a small, hoarse, completely undignified sob of pride, and Elena let out a sharp breath through her nose that might, in another woman, have been a laugh.

"I asked for twenty," Leo said. "...That was good."

Out past the boulder, the fifth eel’s throat glowed brighter and brighter, like a sun rising behind a hill.

On the command dais, Chloe surged to her feet.

Her green eyes were gone, swallowed by two burning pools of incandescent crimson.

The long sleeves of her sweater had fallen back from her pale forearms, and her small fingers had curled into hooks.

The smell of boiling hemolymph had crept in through the hull sensor feed, and it had set every nerve in her body on fire.

She’d sat through the whole fight in her seat behind him, exactly where he’d told her to sit during every drill, and it had cost her...

Her hands had torn two long ragged holes in the padded armrests.

...She’d been counting the eels as they died, and smelling every one of them, and the last two were still alive and full of hot blood.

She stepped right up beside the throne, trembling with raw need.

"Leo!" she cried. "Let me out!"