Chapter 88: Chloe’s New Power

"I can smell their cores!" Chloe pleaded, her small body shaking with raw energy. "The fourth one’s still kicking, and the fifth one’s charging its belly! Let me go out there and tear them apart!"

Leo’s eyes stayed on the tactical display.

His left hand stayed buried in its cradle, countering every drag of the harpoon line with tiny ventral bursts, and when he answered, his voice cracked across the bridge like an icy blade.

"No. You don’t jump into open space without a tether, Chloe... You don’t dive into the dark like a rogue missile... Sit your ass down."

Chloe’s mouth snapped shut.

Her crimson eyes went wide, and for a moment she simply stood there with her fists clenched and her breath hitching in a small frustrated whimper then she sat, because it was him, and because the last time she’d stopped listening to him she’d woken up in a medbay with a crew afraid of her.

She lowered her head, and her fingers dug two new holes into the armrest as Leo’s eyes flicked across the hololith.

He saw the fifth eel lurking behind the boulder eight hundred meters out, its throat blazing with a sun-white glow as it built toward a shot that could gut their exposed flank.

He saw the fourth thrashing at the end of the taut cable under their keel, an anchor holding their thrusters hostage and in that split second, the guide at the base of his spine twitched and drew a bold insane line straight across his mind.

A slow wicked grin spread across his face.

He turned his head and looked at Chloe over his shoulder, and his eyes crinkled with sudden warmth.

"Suit up, Chloe," he said, his voice dropping into an eager conspiratorial rumble. "Full seal... Grab a magnetic runner from the locker, clip onto the harpoon cable and ride the wire down... Gut the fourth worm, then use its skull as a launch pad and take the fifth before it clears its throat. Can you handle that?"

Chloe’s crimson eyes blazed with ecstatic brilliance.

"Yes, Leo!"

She was moving before the words finished.

She tore her Void-Weave suit off the emergency rack behind the throne and stepped into it right over her skirt and sweater, and the smart fabric crawled up her body and cinched tight around her limbs.

Chloe slammed the helmet collar down over her neck and twisted the locking ring.

HISS-LOCK!

The seal indicator on her wrist flashed green.

She snatched a heavy magnetic runner from the armory locker by the mezzanine, spun on her heel and dropped down the companionway stairs like a streak of dark lightning.

PSSH-CLANK!

The ventral maintenance hatch cycled open onto the freezing vacuum.

Chloe stepped out onto the narrow exterior catwalk under the corvette’s belly, and starlight slid across the glossy black curve of her visor.

Fifty meters below her, the fourth eel was still thrashing at the end of the harpoon line, its burning scales throwing a flickering orange glow across the hull plates above it.

She slammed the runner onto the vibrating cable.

CLACK!

...And jumped.

She shot down the line at fifty meters per second with her suit pulled skin-tight and her magnetic boots trailing tiny sparks of static as they kissed the wire, riding the taut silver thread straight at the monster.

THUD!

She landed squarely on the fourth eel’s armored skull, and her boots clamped down onto the black plates like a vice.

The wounded beast hissed and wrenched its huge neck from side to side to throw the tiny parasite off its brow, and Chloe rode every twist of it with her knees bent and her body loose.

Her small gloved hands closed around the thick titanium shaft of the embedded harpoon spike... then she reached down inside herself, into the warm full well of blood she’d taken from Leo.

It had been different ever since the tank.

His blood was steeped in the Space God’s essence now, and when she drank it, it fed her and then stayed, sitting in her like a stored storm... She’d never been able to do anything with it before so she gave it a reason.

The blood surged out of her marrow and down her arms, burning through her like a lit fuse, and she poured it straight down the harpoon shaft into the wound.

VWOOOOM!

A blinding wave of deep crimson energy detonated from her palms... It ripped down through the beast’s neck vertebrae and blew its armored skull plates apart into a thousand jagged shards!

CRUNCH!

She plunged one hand into the ruined cavity, closed her fist around the main circulatory valve and tore it out of the beast’s chest in one brutal sweeping pull.

The sixty-meter body went stiff with its molten veins guttered to dull lifeless grey, and the carcass sagged limp at the end of the tether.

Chloe swayed.

The world tilted a little inside her helmet.

Her arms felt hollow, as if someone had scooped the warmth out of them with a spoon, and a deep familiar ache woke in the pit of her stomach.

...That blast had eaten more than half of everything she’d been carrying.

’Later...’ She told the ache, and lifted her eyes.

Through her visor, her crimson gaze locked onto the fifth eel eight hundred meters away.

It was just clearing the edge of the boulder... Its jaw had unhinged to a full ninety degrees, and the sphere of plasma building in its throat had swollen to a blinding critical mass.

She dropped into a deep crouch on the dead eel’s snout and coiled the muscle in her slender legs like industrial springs.

BOOM!

She leaped.

The dead skull buckled under the force of her takeoff, and her small frame, barely thirty-five kilos inside the suit, rocketed across the open vacuum like a warhead.

She crossed eight hundred meters of empty space in under three seconds, flying straight down the line of the monster’s open mouth...

WHAM!

...and slammed feet-first onto its upper snout just as it was about to fire!

Before its nerves could even register the impact, she drove both fists straight down through its soft nostrils, seized its upper and lower jaw plates and wrenched them shut with bone-snapping force.

The monster’s yellow eyes flew wide with pure animal terror.

The plasma in its throat was fully lit, carrying the pressure of a small sun, and suddenly it had nowhere to go.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

It detonated inside the sealed throat and blew the eel’s lower jaw and chest cavity apart in a huge blinding eruption of white-hot fire and vaporized organs.

The shockwave tossed Chloe gently backward into the vacuum... Her suit drank the heat wash without a single scorch mark, and she tumbled slowly through the cloud of fading sparks, then tapped her wrist, fired the little cold-gas thrusters and steadied herself.

She drifted back toward the open ventral airlock and turned toward the forward canopy to give Leo a small triumphant wave of one gloved hand.

Silence returned to the bridge.

The five signatures had vanished from the tactical grid, leaving only drifting clouds of cooling debris and inert stone and for two breathless seconds, nobody moved.

CHIME!

[Five for five... The Master Captain’s record against things with teeth remains disturbingly consistent.]

Harper let out a wild ear-splitting whoop and slammed both fists on the console before throwing her hands in the air.

"Holy hell! She rode the harpoon like a damn zipline and held its mouth shut! Did you see that?! She made the overgrown worm eat its own fire!"

Elena leaned back against the rail and let out a long composed breath, smoothing her lapels, though a brilliant smile of triumph lit her eyes.

"A remarkably savage and indisputably efficient application of leverage. I’ve never witnessed an assault executed with such... delightful insolence."

Aoi pushed her glasses up her nose, her eyes shining as she logged the parameters.

"The drills held... Station reaction times are down forty-two percent across every board. Five Level 2 beasts in under three minutes."

Camila had climbed back up from under the mezzanine and was laughing through tears against the telemetry screen.

"She’s safe... she’s waving! Look at her waving!"

A golden panel unfurled across the central well with a clean melodic chime and bathed the bridge in warm amber light.

[Pyre Eel Pack has been eliminated]

[Targets Slain: 5x Level 2 Pyre Eels]

[Battle Assessment: Coordinated Engagement / One Minor Breach, Contained]

[System Reward: Combat EXP Distributed to All Active Crew]

A second private tab opened beside Leo’s shoulder.

[Previous Balance: 482 SP]

[Combat Assessment: Extermination of Level 2 Pyre Eel Hunting Pack]

[Survival Points Awarded: +120 SP]

[Current Balance: 602 / 1,000 SP]

’Six hundred and two...’ Leo thought, and a deep quiet satisfaction settled behind his ribs as he dismissed it.

He’d crawled out of the freeze with thirty-two points... Now he was well past halfway to another spin.

The ventral airlock cycled with a heavy hydraulic thud, and a minute later Chloe came up the companionway stairs with her helmet tucked under her arm.

She came up slowly.

Her bangs were damp with sweat, and her eyes had faded back to green, but her face had gone a pale translucent white and there were faint blue shadows under her eyes that hadn’t been there five minutes ago.

She was holding the railing with her free hand.

When she reached the top step, she stopped, swayed and leaned against Leo’s knee with all her weight, as if her legs had quietly resigned and he grin fell off Leo’s face.

He pulled one hand out of the cradle and caught her by the back of the suit.

"Chloe... Hey... Look at me."

She looked up at him and her lips were bloodless.

"The red thing," she said, very matter-of-fact, "is expensive."

"How expensive?"

Chloe thought about it seriously for a moment.

"I’m hungry," She said, "all the way to my toes."

He stood up out of the throne and scooped her up in both arms, suit and helmet and all, and she folded against his chest without a word of protest, which frightened him more than anything she could have said.

"Aoi, you have the conn," he said. "Camila, start the harvest. I’ll be two minutes..."

He carried her into the small ready room off the back of the bridge and kicked the hatch shut behind them.

Through the narrowing gap, he caught a glimpse of Harper’s face turned toward the door.

He sat on the edge of the bench with Chloe in his lap, peeled back his left sleeve and held out his wrist.

Chloe looked at the wrist then she looked up at his neck, and back at the wrist, with an expression of mild betrayal.

"Wrist," Leo said firmly. "We’re on duty... You’ll take all you need later."

"The neck’s closer to the heart," Chloe pointed out. "It’s more efficient and Jin-Ah would agree too."

"Chloe."

She sighed as if he were being very unreasonable, took his wrist in both gloved hands and sank her teeth in.

The draw was harder and deeper than it had been two nights ago, and it pulled a low sound out of his throat before he could stop it.

She drank with her eyes closed and he felt the warmth leaving his arm and going into her... Leo watched the color creep back into her lips and then her cheeks like dawn coming up over a hill.

Her fingers loosened their death grip on his forearm as her shoulders came down.

When she finally let go and licked the punctures closed, her face had gone soft and pink, and the blue shadows under her eyes had faded.

She leaned her helmetless head against his collarbone, right beside the sun-stone.

"Next time," she said, "I want to do the red thing on purpose... Not just when I’m angry."

"Next time," Leo said, holding her a little tighter than he needed to, "you tell me before you empty your whole tank in one shot."

"But you’ll say no."

"I’ll say ’eat first,’" he said. "There’s a difference."

Chloe considered this, and then she nodded against his chest looking very satisfied.

When they came back out, Camila was already at the ventral harvesting console with her hazel eyes bright.

When the Foundry had swallowed the Black Kite, it had digested more than armor.

It had rebuilt the raider’s suction lances and its cracking manifold into the Wanderer-7’s own belly, and Camila had been itching to try them since the day she’d found them in the menu.

CLANK-WHIRRR!

The lances unfolded from the lower hull, stretched across the void and stabbed into the five drifting carcasses.

GURGLE-CHUG-CHUG!

For twenty unbroken minutes the pumps drew the glowing nutrient-rich hemolymph out of the beasts’ reservoirs.

The cracking manifold split the toxic sulfur bile from the dense hydrocarbon chains, and six hundred liters of high-grade bio-propellant flowed into the corvette’s ventral fuel bladders until the gauges read full.

With the bladders topped off and every system running cool, the Wanderer-7 fired its attitude thrusters and broke through the last thin veil of the basalt drift.

Leo sat forward in the throne, and his eyes widened as the deep system opened in front of them.

Rising out of the cold silent dark was Driftmark Station.