Chapter 99: Obsidian Vein [IV]

Leo turned his head and Camila was standing right beside him.

She’d changed into a clean dark green flight suit with her long hair pinned up behind her ears, and her apron was left behind in the garden.

In her hands she held a diagnostic wand, and her bronze forehead was furrowed in a tight knot of nervous concentration.

"Camila?" he asked softly. "...Everything alright?"

She didn’t answer right away.

She stepped closer, bringing the faint scent of fresh soil and crushed mint that followed her everywhere, and pressed the wand against the magnetic seal at his left shoulder cuff with careful trembling fingers.

BEEP!

"Pressure seal’s good," she whispered, barely louder than the hum of the scrubbers.

She knelt and passed the scanner along the seam of his left knee, then his boot collar, listening for each small affirmative chime.

BEEP! BEEP!

She rose and moved around to his right side and checked his right cuff, his hip harness and the life-support manifold set into the small of his back.

...Every reading on her little screen came back green and airtight and she finished but she didn’t step back.

She stood in front of him and looked up into his eyes, and her own were swimming with a fragile tenderness that made her throat ache.

Her lower lip trembled.

Her hands rose to the collar of his suit, and very slowly she smoothed down the thick composite neck ring and pressed the thermal fabric flat against his chest, even though it had already been lined up to the millimeter.

Her fingers lingered there, resting lightly over the place where the sun-stone hung beneath the weave.

"Camila," he murmured, and covered her hand with his. "My seals are fine. I’m safe."

She swallowed hard with a rose blush spread across her cheekbones, and she leaned in a centimeter closer.

"I know," she whispered, and her fingers curled around his hand and squeezed with surprising strength. "I just needed to be sure... I don’t want you to feel the cold again, Leo... Not even one breath of it."

She looked down at their joined hands.

"Come back to the ship... I’ll have the tea hot and the bread fresh... Just... please be careful down there."

Leo looked at her earnest glowing face and felt the wild pounding of her pulse under his palm, and a warm aching swelled in his chest.

He lifted his other hand and tucked a loose dark curl behind her ear, and his thumb grazed the curve of her cheek.

"I’ll come back, Camila. I promise... Save me the biggest slice."

She let out a wet half-strangled laugh and nodded before she let go of his hand slowly and stepped back toward the inner hatch with a bright beautiful smile that stayed glued to her face.

Behind them, Harper had suddenly become very interested in her carbine’s battery contacts.

Aoi was looking at the ceiling, Chloe was looking at Camila, thoughtfully and then she nodded to herself once, as if Camila had passed some test only Chloe knew the rules of.

HISS-LOCK!

Leo brought his helmet down and twisted the collar ring home.

The heads-up display woke with a soft amber chime, laying his oxygen reserve, suit pressure and an encrypted channel showing the vital signs of Aoi, Harper and Chloe across the inside of his visor.

Beside him, the three of them sealed their own helmets.

Aoi’s dark hair was tucked neatly under her comm cap and her glasses caught the glare of her display.

Harper adjusted her cheek pads with a satisfied grunt, and Chloe tilted her head back with her green eyes luminous through the gold tint as she looked up at him.

"Suits sealed," Leo said. "Comms check."

"Loud and clear, Cap..."

"Signal is clean..." Aoi confirmed.

"I can hear you, Leo..." Chloe whispered.

He looked through the inner observation window, where Elena and Jin-Ah stood watching from the command corridor, and gave them a sharp thumbs-up.

Elena returned a stiff formal nod while Jin-Ah tapped the airlock sequence on her slate.

HISS-PULL!

The outer door slid aside and vented the last of the air in a brief white puff of frozen vapor that vanished into the black.

The four of them stepped out onto the hull of the Wanderer-7, and the silence of the void came down on them like a physical weight.

Out here there was no hum of fans and no voices.

There was only the hiss of their own breath in the microphones, the thump of their hearts and the dull clacking sounds of their magnetic boots locking onto the gunmetal plates one step at a time.

Above them, the Obsidian Vein hung like a frozen canopy of black stone and tumbling gravel.

Below their boots, the pitted iron face of the megalith stretched away in endless plains of cratered rock that swallowed the weak starlight of the distant sun.

Leo’s breath came a little faster for the first few steps.

"Leo," Aoi said quietly on a private channel. "Your breathing... Don’t make it too fast."

"I know." He made himself slow it, in through the nose and out through the mouth. "...I’m fine."

"I know you are," she said. "I just wanted you to hear somebody say it at least."

They walked down the sloped bow, stepped off the forward landing pad and locked their boots onto the bedrock of the megalith.

The gravity was so faint it was barely there, and every stride turned into a slow floating leap that their magnetic soles had to drag back to the rock.

They leaned forward against nothing and marched single-file toward a jagged fissure that opened fifty meters ahead.

Halfway there, Harper turned and walked backward for a few steps, looking at the Wanderer-7 sitting pinned on the rock behind them with its harpoon cable stretched tight into the iron and its canopy glowing faintly gold.

...From out here it looked very small.

"Weird," she said quietly. "I’ve never seen her from the outside like this, She looks lonely."

"She’s not alone," Leo said. "She’s got Elena..."

"Yeah." Harper turned back around. "That’s what I’m worried about, she’ll rearrange my tool racks by color while I’m gone."

The fissure was a deep vertical wound in the crust, four meters wide and plunging straight down into the belly of the stone.

Its edges were lined with razor-sharp plates of hematite, and deep in its shadows, iridescent veins of raw platinum-palladium caught the starlight and glittered silver-white.

Leo reached the lip first.

He unclipped his carbine from his chest harness and thumbed the under-barrel lantern.

CLICK!

A hard cone of white light lanced down into the dark, cut twenty meters through the gloom and vanished around the twisting curve of the stone.

"Elena, Jin-Ah," Leo said. "We’re at the entrance of Corridor One... Going in."

Jin-Ah’s voice crackled back.

"Logged, Captain... I’m reading thirty-two dormant signatures in the side chambers near you, but the main mass is still motionless at one point two kilometers, Keep pinging us... The platinum will eat our signal the deeper you go."

"Understood." He looked back at his team. "Harper, watch our rear... Aoi, stay on my shoulder... Chloe, stick to my hip. We move slow, we check every corner, and nobody fires unless I call it. Down we go."

He let go of the magnetics, grabbed the jagged lip with both gloves and dropped into the dark.

THUD!

He landed four meters down on an angled shelf of crushed basalt, and his soles clamped onto the iron vein beneath.

Harper, Aoi and Chloe dropped in after him one by one and locked onto the stone without a sound.

They turned and walked into the labyrinth.

The tunnel was barely three and a half meters across, with a low arched ceiling of jagged crystalline rock that forced Leo and Harper to keep their heads ducked.

Inside the stone, the silence was absolute.

When Harper’s boot kicked a loose fragment of basalt, it tumbled away down the slope in eerie weightless slow motion and bounced off the walls without making a single whisper of sound.

The walls themselves were magnificent.

Every few meters the black iron gave way to sprawling veins of crystallized void-platinum, dense geometric clusters of black crystal shot through with ribbons of liquid silver light.

They caught the lantern beams and scattered them into a thousand glittering reflections, until the tunnel felt like a forgotten cathedral buried under the stars.

"Look at that ore..." Harper breathed, sweeping her light across a two-meter cluster of silver-veined crystal. "That’s Grade-A void-platinum, Cap... Scrape ten kilos of that off the wall and you could buy a new ion drive outright."

"Eyes on the dark, Harper," Leo said quietly, scanning the ceiling ridges. "The ore isn’t going anywhere and the things guarding it are here."

"How much is ten kilos worth, roughly?" Leo asked, because Harper was obviously dying to tell him.

"Depends who’s buying. If Elena’s selling it?" Harper snorted. "...Probably someone’s firstborn."

Behind them, Chloe had stopped.

She stood in the middle of the tunnel with her helmeted head tilted, absolutely still, her small gloved hand still hooked in Leo’s belt so that he felt the tug and turned.

"Chloe?"

"It’s warm," she said slowly. "Down there... All of it... The rock is cold, but there’s something warm under it, a lot of something, and it’s all breathing at the same time."

She looked up at him through her gold visor, and her green eyes were wide and very serious. "I don’t like it, Leo... It’s like being inside something’s chest."

"That’s comforting, kid," Harper muttered. "Thanks for that, It helped me calm down."

"But you’re the one that asked though?"

"...I really didn’t, tch."

Leo pinged the ship.

"Bridge, ground team... Two hundred meters in and all good."

The answer came back with a crackle riding underneath it.

"Logged, Captain... Signal strength is down twenty percent and your vitals are steady. Harper’s heart rate is elevated."

"Harper’s heart rate is always elevated," Harper said. "I’m a passionate woman of course, you wouldn’t understand..."

"So I’ve heard," Elena said dryly, and the channel clicked off.

Harper opened her mouth, closed it and gave the comm unit on her wrist a very offended look and Aoi made a small sound behind her visor that might have been a laugh.

They went on.

The tunnel bent and narrowed and dropped, and twice they had to turn sideways to squeeze between pillars of raw platinum that glittered close enough to touch.

Leo kept the pace slow and his lantern moving and the guide in his back hummed like a hand resting on his shoulder and waiting to squeeze.

Aoi walked at his left shoulder with her hands raised slightly, her three rings spinning in tight halos around her visor.

Their pale light threw intricate geometric grids across the stone as her talent mapped the rock five hundred meters ahead.

"The corridor descends at eighteen degrees for three hundred meters, then opens into a gallery," She reported. "The basalt around us is very dense, but seventy meters ahead, the starboard wall goes strange... It’s porous and hollowed out like a honeycomb."

Leo slowed.

The guide between his shoulder blades had stopped humming and started to tighten as a slow pressure that crawled up his spine one vertebra at a time.

Every instinct he had was telling him to stop moving and stop breathing and stop being warm, and he raised a closed fist as the team stopped instantly.

"Stop."

To their left, the wall was solid jagged iron, laced with glittering silver... however to their right, it looked wrong.

It was smooth and perfectly flat, as if someone had plastered the raw stone with a thick seamless layer of asphalt.

Aoi took half a step forward, and her brow furrowed behind her glasses as her rings pulsed in sudden confusion.

"That’s impossible," she whispered, and her voice trembled. "I read a sheer iron wall here, thirty centimeters thick but the density keeps changing... It isn’t stone."

"Cap?" Harper whispered behind them, and the carbine came up to her shoulder without her seeming to decide it. "Talk to me... What’re we looking at?"

"I don’t know yet." Leo’s voice was barely a breath, and his lantern stayed perfectly steady. "Nobody move..."

At his hip, Chloe’s grip on his belt had gone tight enough to creak the webbing as the woman was no longer looking at the wall.

She was looking at the floor in front of it, where a thin skin of frost had formed on the iron in a long even line, as if something very large and very cold had been lying right there for a very long time.

Aoi raised her hand, adjusted the focus of her helmet lantern and swept the bright white beam across the starboard wall.

The light washed slowly over the smooth black surface, from the frosted floor all the way up to the ceiling, and the whole wall shifted.