Chapter 95: Guild Mission

Jin-Ah’s slate synchronized with the public bounty frequency, and the harsh angular glyphs rearranged themselves into clean text.

[High-Hazard Expeditionary Contract: Driftmark Mining Guild]

[Classification: Nest Extermination & Territorial Reclamation]

[Target Zone: Sector Delta-Nine (The Obsidian Vein)]

[Threat Profile: Void-Beast Infestation (Organized Swarm Hive)]

[Operational Status: Critical / Mining Suspended]

[Bounty Payout: 20,000 Zuni (Direct Guild Treasury Transfer)]

[Secondary Concession: Exclusive First-Claim Salvage Rights on Primary Core Ore]

[Warning: Three licensed mining gunboats lost with all hands... Two mercenary escorts routed with catastrophic structural failure... Sector Delta-Nine quarantined under lethal-hazard protocol.]

"Twenty thousand..." Harper breathed.

She took half a step closer, her calloused fingers twitching. "Twenty thousand flat, plus first dibs on the rock in the vein... Cap, the bounty alone doesn’t cover the ticket and Torv’s coils both but the ore claim on top closes the gap. Platinum, palladium, whatever’s in there... we fill the hold and we walk onto that planet with our heads high."

"It’s also a graveyard," Elena said, her eyes on the casualty line at the bottom. "Three licensed ships didn’t fail to come home because of a software glitch... A frontier Guild doesn’t post twenty thousand for pest control unless its own gunboats have been pulverized into scrap."

"Elena’s right," Jin-Ah said. "The Vein feeds sixty percent of this station’s smelters, and it’s been shut for twelve cycles... They’re offering twenty because they’re desperate, and because whoever takes it is expected to die in the rocks."

Camila looked from the crimson numbers to Leo’s profile, her fingers pressed over the pouch in her apron.

Aoi adjusted her glasses.

"The decision rests with command," She said. "If we walk into that hall, we put our transponder on their registry..."

Leo looked up at the flashing letters for several long silent heartbeats.

The feeling at the base of his spine lay quiet and warm, with no warning of ambush in it and only the steady gravity of a road that wouldn’t wait.

"Let’s go hear what they have to say..."

He walked straight through the heavy blast arches into the Guild hall.

It was a huge tiered chamber cut into raw hematite, hung with the smoke-stained banners of the station’s prospecting outfits.

The air reeked of burnt fuel, stale ale and the coppery tang of raw ore... Dozens of mining captains and scarred rig-masters crowded around iron tables, drinking from dented steins and arguing in half a dozen guttural tongues.

At the far end, on a raised dais behind a massive slab of polished basalt, sat the Guild Master.

He was a Karkad, a hulking four-armed being from some ancient subterranean race with his hunched torso plated in craggy stone-grey hide like weathered granite.

Four sunken yellow eyes burned beneath heavy brow ridges, and a ceremonial collar of interlocking gold gears hung over his chest.

His lower hands lay flat on the stone, and his clawed fingers were drumming an impatient rhythm.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Leo walked straight down the center aisle with his six officers close behind him.

The chatter thinned as scarred heads turned to follow them... In a hall full of three-meter brutes and multi-limbed drillers, a long-haired young man leading six immaculate human women was an impossible sight.

He stopped two paces from the slab and met the four burning eyes calmly.

"I’m here for the Delta-Nine contract... The Obsidian Vein."

The Guild Master’s eyes blinked in slow staggered pairs.

A deep grinding noise like boulders tumbling down a dry riverbed rose from his chest before his translator hissed.

"Delta-Nine is reserved for registered combat wings and heavy battle-rigs, terrestrial... I have your transponder from Berth Forty-Four... A fifty-meter Tier-1 scout with light armor and no heavy ordnance. You don’t have the mass to crack an asteroid, let alone clear a swarm that pulverized two armed gunboats... I don’t issue suicide clearances to children who want to decorate our drift with fresh scrap."

A loud grating bark of laughter broke out from a nearby table.

BANG!

A metal stein slammed onto iron and sloshed foul amber ale across the grates.

The captain who rose behind it was a massive reptilian biped, two and a half meters of scarred olive-green chitin with four upper fangs jutting from a wet sneering snout and a customized plasma carbine slung across his chest.

His grease-stained webbing bore the three-clawed emblem of the Blood-Drift Prospectors.

He swaggered three heavy strides toward the desk with his clawed tail scraping the floor behind him, and his slit pupils fixed on Leo with dripping contempt.

"Hear that, boys?" he rasped to his crew of laughing multi-eyed deckhands. "The little pink ape with the clean hair wants to play exterminator...! He brings his harem of pretty dolls out to the frontier, buys a shiny necklace and thinks a Tier-1 scout can fly into the Vein without wetting its docking clamps!"

He leaned his tooth-filled snout down until it was barely sixty centimeters from Leo’s face and breathed out a hot blast of sulfur and rotting meat.

"Listen, soft-skin," he hissed, his claws resting heavily on the grip of his carbine. "The things in Delta-Nine eat iron for breakfast... They crack titanium like dried nutshells. Turn your toy ship around, crawl back to your nursery and leave the real work to captains with scales thick enough to take a hit. Before you get your little girls torn open in front of your..."

Leo stepped forward.

His weight never shifted and his hands never moved toward a weapon.

He simply closed the distance until his chest was eight centimeters from the scaled snout, and his dark eyes locked straight onto the creature’s slit pupils.

When he spoke, his voice dropped into a quiet bone-chilling whisper that carried the crushing density of deep space and seemed to pull the air out of the room.

"Take your hand off that carbine," Leo whispered softly, his eyes boring straight through the alien’s skull like two drills of cold obsidian. "And sit your ass back down at that table... If you speak to my crew again, I won’t call the Guild guards. I will pull your jaw off your skull, feed it to you through your neck, and take your ship’s engines for scrap. Move..."

The reptile froze and the sneer slid off his snout.

His pupils blew wide with sudden animal terror as something old and primitive in his brain recognized a predator that would keep its promise without blinking.

A bead of cold oily sweat broke across his snout.

Slowly, with his trembling hands held wide, the captain shuffled two steps backward then he turned without a sound and slunk back to his corner table like a whipped hound with his eyes fixed on the floor.

The hall fell into stunned silence.

Harper wore a vicious grin, Elena’s eyes glittered with deep approval, and Chloe stood with her chin tilted up, looking disappointed that she hadn’t been allowed to rip the lizard’s throat out herself.

Leo turned back to the desk as if he’d brushed away a fly.

"The contract, Guild Master. We’re taking it..."

The Karkad stared at him for three long seconds, and the dismissal drained out of his craggy shoulders and left calculation behind.

A creature that could break a Blood-Drift captain with two sentences was no ordinary spacer.

"The terms are as posted," he rumbled, pressing a transfer rune on the slab. "Twenty thousand to your ledger the moment our beacons confirm the nest core is destroyed and the vein secured and first-claim rights to whatever platinum-palladium ore you can pull from the central pocket before our dredgers arrive..."

Leo nodded once and drew his crew into a tight circle by the archway.

"You heard it... Twenty thousand and the ore. It solves every problem we have but three ships didn’t come out... It’s going to be a slaughterhouse in those rocks."

He looked at each of them in turn. "I want everyone’s read. We do this together, or we walk away."

"We take it, Cap," Harper said at once. "Twenty-six helical slugs left in the bins, and the turret’s dialed in to half a micron... If it bleeds, I’ll punch a hole in it."

"The slate plates took the eels’ heat wash without buckling," Elena said coolly. "The harpoon is reloaded and pressurized to one hundred and ten percent. With discipline, our survivability is high."

"Colonial swarms run on a central command organism," Jin-Ah said. "Kill the core, and the rest scatter. I put our odds at fifty-eight percent... That’s better than our odds were on the day Earth ended."

"Delta-Nine’s topography is treacherous," Aoi said, pushing her glasses up. "But my rings can map the density fractures in real time... As long as you’re flying, Leo, I can guide us through the blind pockets."

Camila’s hand rested over her seed pouch, and she gave him a warm, unshakeable smile.

"The medbay’s stocked... We survived the cold and the raiders. We’re not letting a bunch of overgrown space bugs keep us from home."

Chloe stepped up against his thigh and looked up through her bangs.

"I’m ready, Leo. If they have teeth, I’ll break them." She paused. "I’ll eat first though."

A deep grounding warmth surged behind his ribs, and an easy smile broke across his face.

"Alright. We’ll take it..."

He stepped back to the slab and pressed his bare palm flat against the authorization plate.

BEEP-CHIME!

[Contract Authorization Confirmed]

[Assigned Vessel: Wanderer-7 (Tier-1 Corvette / Master Captain Leo Kaine)]

[Mission Objective: Sector Delta-Nine Extermination Guild Registry...]

[Status: Active / Quarantine Bypass Granted]

"Packet transmitted to your ship," the Guild Master rumbled. "The void take mercy on you, terrestrial... Don’t linger in the hollows."

They walked back to Berth Forty-Four in silence.

The Guild’s tactical packet hit the Wanderer-7’s hololith the moment the starboard airlock sealed behind them, and while the ship sat quietly in its clamps, the light well on the bridge exploded into a terrifying three-dimensional wireframe of where they were going.

...The Obsidian Vein was an ancient orbital graveyard, an eighty-kilometer vortex of jagged basalt, crystallized platinum ore and razor-sharp nickel shards trapped in the unstable gravity of a dead planetary fragment.

At its center, deep inside the hollow core of a three-kilometer iron megalith, lay the nest.

"Void-Mantas," Jin-Ah reported from station three. "Level 2 hive entities... Twelve to fifteen meters across the wing-mantle, with radar-absorbent silicate shells that shed kinetic fire. They have no projectiles and they hunt with electromagnetic pulses and high-frequency mandibles that shear thirty millimeters of armor in a single pass."

She brought up the recovery logs.

One hauler had been stripped to the ribs by thousands of bite marks... The second had blown its own core when a swarm poured into its thruster bells, and the third had vanished into the megalith with its black box shrieking static for forty seconds before it went silent.

"Packs of twenty to thirty," Aoi said, her silver rings spinning slow circles around her temples. "They hide their heat against the iron rock... In that clutter, radar and optics are blind past two hundred meters..."

"Then we don’t rely on radar," Leo said from the top of the dais. "We rely on our drills. Stations!"

They moved like a machine.

Harper hammered down to the armory and loaded the twenty-six remaining helical rounds into the dorsal turret’s feed drums, slamming the pneumatic lines home with her wrench.

Elena verified the laser shunts and charged the harpoon to full pressure.

Camila dogged down the moisture seals in the garden off the mid-deck and laid out regenerators, coagulant gel and saline in the medbay with her face set tight.

Jin-Ah plotted three escape vectors through the vein’s gravity pockets, and Aoi’s rings accelerated into a brilliant halo as her talent reached out into the dark.

Chloe strapped into the couch behind the throne with a sharp click and fixed her eyes on the viewport.

Leo stood by the throne and looked at all of them.

"Twenty thousand Zuni on the other side of those rocks," he said quietly. "We fly smart, we shoot straight and we come back together. Every single one of us..."

"You do the crazy flying, Cap," Harper called back with a fierce grin. "I’ll make sure nothing with wings stays in one piece."

He dropped into the throne and buried both hands in the crystal cradles, and the link surged warm and electric through his palms and locked him into the hull.

"Clamps off... Take us out."

CLANK-HISS!

The mooring arms of Berth Forty-Four let go.

The twin turquoise plumes flared bright, and the corvette backed out of its cradle, swung on its axis and shot away from Driftmark into the deep black.

CHIME!

[Ore field approaching... This unit reminds the crew that the last three ships to enter it did not come back.]

"Thanks, Vela," Harper muttered.

Twenty minutes later, the lights of Driftmark had shrunk to a single spark behind them, and the Obsidian Vein rose out of the dark like a churning monster of shattered stone.

Millions of black basalt slabs and razor ore shards tumbled and crashed through an eighty-kilometer vortex with their iron faces swallowing every scrap of light.

Leo eased the burn down to thirty percent as they crossed the outer perimeter.

The Wanderer-7 slid silently between two towering pillars of pitted magnetic basalt, and the shadows swallowed the hull whole.

SCREEEEEECH!

Every rock, every nickel slab and every shadowed crevice within three kilometers of the hull shifted and shuddered at once...!

And right between Leo’s shoulder blades as the guide erupted into a blinding scream of pure alarm.