Chapter 98: Obsidian Vein [III]

Harper was the first one to find her voice, and what came out was a cracked, disbelieving laugh.

"Walk in... Into the bug fortress... On foot?"

"Yes on foot..." Leo said.

"Okay." She dragged both hands down her face and then, to everyone’s surprise, grinned. "Okay... Yeah... That’s the most you thing you’ve ever said, Cap... Let’s go kill a queen..."

The rest of them took it in their own ways.

Aoi had gone pale, but she nodded once, slowly, the way she nodded when a student finally asked the right question.

Jin-Ah was already running numbers on her slate with her lips pressed tight.

Elena said nothing at all and stared at the megalith with her arms folded, and Chloe smiled for the first time since the swarm had appeared, it was a frightening smile.

The Wanderer-7 crept toward the face of the megalith with its drives throttled down to a crawl, the twin turquoise plumes fading to dull flickering embers.

Through the canopy, the iron asteroid rose like a sheer mountain range of pitted hematite and dark basalt with its surface ground by centuries of micrometeorites into jagged ledges, knife-edged ridges and wide hollows dusted with glittering mineral powder.

Leo kept his hands in the cradles, feeling every tiny shiver of the attitude thrusters as he eased the corvette toward a fairly level plateau between two towering pillars of nickel-iron.

"Thrusters to five percent," he murmured. "Aoi, how’s the ground under our pads...?"

"Stable," Aoi answered, her rings turning slowly around her temples. "Dense high-purity iron bedrock... It’ll take our mass without buckling."

THUD!

A heavy shudder ran up through the frame as the landing gear met the stone.

"Pads down and locking magnetic arrestors."

CLANK-WHIRRR!

Electromagnetic clamps in the base of all four struts bit into the iron at once with a deep humming grip that pulled the ship flat against the rock.

"Elena, harpoon... Pin us down... I don’t want an orbital shear flicking this bucket off the cliff while we’re inside."

"Understood, Captain." Elena dialed in a manual trajectory. "Seventy percent pressure..."

KA-THOOOOOM!

The Graventhal spike drove straight down out of the belly launcher and buried itself four meters deep in the iron shelf beneath the keel.

CRUNCH!

The hydraulic barbs flared open inside the rock and locked tight, and the cable winched taut with a mechanical groan.

The Wanderer-7 sat pinned to the megalith like a gunmetal beetle stuck to a boulder and for a moment nobody spoke.

The ship was down, sitting on the skin of the thing that had nearly eaten them, and through the canopy the nearest fissure yawned black and silent fifty meters away like a mouth waiting to see what they would do.

Leo let out a slow controlled breath and pulled his hands from the cradles.

"Vela, kill the main ion bus... Auxiliary power to the arrestors, the shields and the passive sensors, Keep life support on internal recycling."

[Power grid consolidated... The vessel is secured... This unit will mind the house.]

Leo unbuckled and stood, and the sun-stone tapped lightly against his sternum.

"Armory... We need hardware that fits in a four-meter hole."

The fabrication bay on Deck Two smelled of hot coils and fresh lubricant.

The Foundry’s synthesis chamber was already glowing sapphire blue, its machining heads whirring behind the ceramic ports as they worked through the armory metal the ship had swallowed from the Black Kite.

Harper stood in front of the extraction bin with her hands planted on her hips, and her grey-blue eyes were dancing like a kid on Christmas morning who’d heard the wrapping paper rustle.

HISS-CLANG!

The heavy door slid up in a cloud of cold nitrogen, and resting on the delivery tray were two brand-new weapons.

They were compact bullpup rail-carbines of matte-black titanium and Graventhal composite, barely seventy centimeters long, with paired superconducting rails sleeved in clear heat-sinks along the top, reflex sights and bright lanterns slung under the barrels.

Beside them lay four magazines, each loaded with thirty ten-millimeter tungsten rounds and a heavy satchel holding six magnetic demolition charges wired to remote detonators.

Harper lunged at the tray like a starving hawk and had a carbine in her hands before the vapor had cleared.

CLACK-WHIRRR!

She racked the bolt with one practiced sweep and felt the coils spin up with a high harmonic whine that sang straight through the stock.

She brought it to her shoulder, swept the muzzle across the empty armory and her freckled face split into a grin that reached her ears.

"Oh, sweet baby void-gods..." she breathed, running her fingers over the fluted receiver. "Listen to that coil cycle, Cap...! It’ll throw twenty rounds a second without stripping a sabot, and the barrel’s cut with my helical grooves! It’s like Christmas and my birthday and a fireworks festival all packed into nine kilos of pure love!"

She hugged it to her chest like a teddy bear.

"Can I keep it? Tell me I can keep it... I’ll sleep with it under my pillow."

Leo laughed despite everything and picked up the second carbine, feeling its dense balance settle into his hands.

"You can keep it... Every round you fire down there comes out of our raw stock, though, so make them count."

"Right between the eyes, every one," Harper promised, kissed the receiver with a loud smack, and slapped a magazine home.

CLICK!

"Suit oxygen is rated for six hours," Jin-Ah said, without looking up from her slate. "The core is one point two kilometers down through tunnels that twist, so call it three hours to reach it if nothing goes wrong... That leaves very little margin for anything going wrong."

"Then nothing goes wrong, at all." Leo said.

"...That isn’t how probability works, Captain."

"That’s how it’s going to work today."

Leo turned to the rest of them, and the warmth slid off his face like a visor coming down.

"Listen up... Those tunnels are three to four meters wide, No ship weapons, no vehicles, and we can’t afford to get bottlenecked and we split the crew."

He pointed.

"On foot... me, Aoi, Harper and Chloe... Aoi, you’re the only one who can map those tunnels with the radar dead... Harper, carbine and charges. If we find the core, we blow the arches and drop the ceiling on it. Chloe’s our vanguard so if it gets too close for rifles, she holds the line."

Chloe’s head came up, and something bright and hungry flickered in her green eyes.

Leo looked straight at her.

"Down there, the red’s allowed... Nobody’s watching but us but you stay on my line, Chloe. You shouldn’t chase and you won’t drink either... You hold, and you come back when I call, Say it."

"Hold... Don’t chase... Come back," Chloe repeated, and her small hand tightened in his belt. "I’ll always come back to you, Leo."

He turned to the other three.

"On the ship... Elena, Jin-Ah and Camila. Elena, you hold the bridge. Weapons, shields and lasers on every crevice of this plateau. Jin-Ah, sensors and the comm link to our suits... You’re our eyes up top. Camila, life support, the seals and the medbay, ready for trauma."

It was clean and logical and strategically sound, and there was exactly one person in the room who wasn’t going to accept it.

Elena stepped forward sharply.

Her grey uniform was spotless, her chin was lifted, and her hands were clenched into fists at her sides as there was a fierce indignant flush along her cheekbones.

"I object, Captain," she said, cold and crisp. "In the strongest possible terms..."

Leo met her eyes without blinking.

"...State it."

"You’re relegating me to caretaker duty while you lead a ground assault into a live nest!" Her voice rose with passionate intensity. "I’m an engineer of the Sterling line with an attunement to structures that rivals any technician in this sector! If there are collapsed bulkheads down there, old mining machinery, structural failure points, my talent can read the loads in seconds! I’m not a passenger, Leo! I didn’t help forge this ship’s armor and mount its lasers to sit on a padded chair and watch your telemetry lights blink...!"

The armory went dead quiet and Harper’s grin vanished.

Camila took an involuntary step back toward the door, and Chloe tilted her head and watched Elena with calm unblinking curiosity.

Leo stepped forward until he stood right in front of her and looked down into her blazing eyes.

"You aren’t a passenger, Elena... You’re the officer holding the bridge of my ship."

He pointed up at the ceiling, at the fifty-meter warship sitting on the rock above them.

"Think about it... We’re sitting on an unaligned asteroid surrounded by a swarm that just went to ground. If they double back and hit the surface while we’re a kilometer underground, who routes the auxiliary power to the shield grid...? Who balances the shunts when their pulses wash over the hull...? Who fires those lasers precisely enough to keep them from chewing our thruster bells into slag?"

He held her gaze and didn’t let her look away.

"You’re the only person on this crew who knows our power conduits well enough to keep the engines alive under a sustained attack... If you come down with me and the ship gets breached up here, every one of us dies in the dark... The Wanderer-7 is our only way home, Elena. It is our home... I’m leaving it in your hands because you’re the only one I trust to keep it standing."

Elena’s lips parted and her breath caught.

The fire in her eyes wavered, and then it went out of her all at once, replaced by a steadier look.

Her fists slowly opened as she looked away from him and down at the armory console before pressing both hands flat on the steel until her knuckles went white.

"Understood, Captain," she said, fighting to keep a tremor out of her voice. "I’ll keep your ship in one piece but if you let yourself get eaten by oversized insects because you didn’t have an engineer to cover your retreat, I will never forgive you..."

"...Wouldn’t dream of giving you the satisfaction, Princess."

Elena let out a soft exasperated huff and turned her back on him to inspect the ammunition crates, her shoulders squared and already running the shield routing in her head.

"Keep my ship pretty while I’m gone, Princess," Harper said as she shouldered past toward the airlock with her carbine.

"Try not to drop the ceiling on yourself, Bell," Elena replied, without turning around. "I’d hate to have to explain the dent to the Guild..."

It was the closest thing to good luck the two of them had ever wished each other, and both of them knew it.

Twenty minutes later, the four members of the ground team stood in the starboard airlock vestibule in their Void-Weave suits.

They were sleek matte-black, reinforced with flexible slate mesh along the joints with heavy magnetic boots and pressurized utility belts and gold-tinted quartz helmets clipped at their hips.

’New designs... hm?’

Harper was checking the battery pack on her carbine and humming something off-key.

Aoi stood by the inner hatch methodically tightening the straps of her mapping pack, and Chloe stood beside Leo in her small fitted black suit with one gloved hand hooked firmly into his utility belt with her green eyes tracking every breath he took.

Leo looked down at his own gloves, flexing them slowly.

The last time he’d gone outside a ship, he’d gone without a suit.

He remembered the silence first and then the cold crawling into his chest like a living thing as the stars turned slowly overhead while his lungs burned empty.

He’d fought his way back through that with nothing but a vial of god’s blood and sheer refusal to die.

Now he was about to walk out into the same dark on purpose, and take three people he cared about with him.

’Different this time,’ he told himself. ’You’ve got a suit and you’re going to succeed...’

Aoi stepped up beside him, close enough that her shoulder nearly touched his arm.

She kept her eyes on the inner hatch and spoke so softly the others couldn’t hear.

"...You’re thinking about the airlock."

He glanced at her, surprised.

"You touch your chest when you think about it," she said, still looking straight ahead. "Right over where it burst... You’ve done it three times since we landed."

She paused.

"I’ll be right at your shoulder the whole way down, Leo... I’ll tell you where every wall is, You won’t be alone in the dark this time."

Something in his chest unknotted.

"Thanks, Aoi," he said quietly, and he meant it more than the two words could carry.

"Don’t thank me." The faintest pink touched the tip of her ear. "Just come back up. We still have... an unfinished curriculum."

Leo bent to pick up his helmet as a soft warm hand caught his wrist.