Chapter 100: Obsidian Vein [V]

The white glare of Aoi’s lantern caught thousands of tiny hexagonal facets set into folded mantles, and for three agonizing heartbeats the only sound in the universe was four people breathing hard through four sealed visors.

Leo kept his fist frozen in the air.

The Void-Mantas were stacked against the wall like sleeping bats, their fifteen-meter wings folded flat and tucked against their bellies, pressed to the cold basalt to save their charge.

Their three-part jaws were clamped shut and rimed with frozen sulfur as the violet fissures along their spines pulsed slow and sluggish, barely a flicker on his infrared display, and there were hundreds of them, floor to ceiling and stretching down the tunnel past the reach of the light.

’Don’t breathe,’ Leo thought, with his pulse slamming against his ribs. ’Just back up...’

He dropped his transmitter gain to almost nothing.

"Back up," he whispered. "Slow with your magnetics to low draw... Don’t scrape the floor at all."

Aoi gave the smallest nod and shifted her weight onto her back heel. Chloe stayed perfectly motionless with her hand in Leo’s belt and her eyes fixed on the nearest sleeping beast.

Harper eased her left boot back.

In gravity that faint, moving a pressure suit was like balancing on wet glass inside a tank of syrup.

She lifted her sole two millimeters off the stone and slid it back through the dark, and a thumb-sized shard of hematite hidden in the dust caught the steel rim of her heel.

SCRAPE!

The sound had no air to travel through so it went into the bedrock instead in a sharp tiny ping that ran straight up into the wall.

The whole wall went rigid.

SNAP! SNAP-SNAP-SNAP-SNAP!

Hundreds of lidless yellow eyes snapped open at once... The sluggish fissures along their spines ignited into channels of blinding violet fire and drowned the tunnel in strobing purple light, and hundreds of wings tore loose from the rock in an avalanche of thrashing bodies and gnashing mandibles and shrieking interference.

"Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me!" Harper yelled, and her carbine was at her shoulder before she’d finished the word.

SCREEEEEECH!

A manta dropped off the ceiling right over Leo’s head with its jaws split wide for his helmet ring.

He never saw it.

The guide seized his spine like an iron fist and yanked him sideways before the jaws had even cleared the shadows of the roof, and he kicked off the bedrock with one boot and let the low gravity carry him into a flat roll across the floor.

SNAP!

The jaws slammed shut on the space where his neck had been half a second earlier, and stone chips bounced off his visor.

Leo came out of the roll on one knee, swung the carbine around one-handed, jammed the muzzle into the soft unarmored flesh under its gill slit and squeezed.

THUMP!

A ten-millimeter tungsten round left the rails at point-blank range, punched up through the manta’s chest and blew its circulatory core out through its back in a spray of black freezing ichor.

...It folded inward like a crushed umbrella and crashed down into the gravel.

"Nice shot, Cap!" Harper roared, planting her boots wide. "Now move your ass before they turn us into paste!"

Three more came down the corridor at them, wings skimming the walls with their mandibles chattering.

Harper didn’t give an inch... Her Kinetic Tuning hummed through her arms and smothered the carbine’s recoil before it could lift her light boots off the floor.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

"Eat a bag of magnetized lug nuts, you overgrown roaches!"

The first round went straight through the lead manta’s center eye.

The second severed the wing joint of the next one and sent it cartwheeling into the wall, and the third punched clean down the open throat of the last and detonated whatever bio-battery it carried in a muffled burst of violet flame.

"Twenty-seven in the mag!" she shouted. "Come on, who else wants a taste?!"

Beside her, Aoi stood firm with her plasma sidearm held in a textbook two-handed grip and her rings spinning tight around her visor.

She wasn’t aiming at the mantas though, the older woman was reading the ceiling instead.

ZAP-CRACK!

Two emerald bolts hit a hanging cluster of rock at exactly the right fracture line... It dropped like an anvil onto the skull of a diving manta and smashed it flat against the floor.

"Corridor narrows forty meters ahead!" Aoi called, loud and clear and perfectly composed in the middle of the storm. "A choke point, two point eight meters wide, braced by a solid vein of platinum! They can’t come at us more than two abreast if we reach it...!"

"Move for the choke!" Leo drove his shoulder into a dead manta and shoved it out of the path. "Chloe, clear the lane!"

"On it, Leo!"

Down here in the dark, a kilometer from any outsider’s eyes, the rule was lifted as Chloe’s green eyes ignited into two blazing pools of crimson.

BOOM!

The stone under her boots shattered into gravel as the Blood Sovereign woke up in her, and her small body vanished from Leo’s side in a blur of black suit and red light.

She went straight into the face of a diving manta, caught its upper and lower mandibles in her small gloved hands and wrenched them apart.

TEAR-CRUNCH!

With one brutal heave of her slender arms, she ripped its head in half down the thoracic seam like wet cardboard.

Black hemolymph sprayed across her visor however she didn’t even blink.

’I feel much much better...’

She used the falling carcass as a step, kicked off its shattered spine hard enough to crater the ceiling and landed on the back of a second beast that was sliding around to flank Harper.

CRACK!

Chloe drove both fists down through its armored back and crushed what was underneath into paste.

Her whole body was shaking with wild euphoric strength, and the blood she’d taken from Leo two nights ago hummed through her veins like stored lightning.

"Chloe, don’t overextend!" Harper ducked as a severed wingtip whipped past her helmet. "Stay on the Cap’s line!"

"They’re too slow!" Chloe laughed, sweet and musical and just slightly unhinged, and spun and kicked a third manta clean across the tunnel into the platinum vein. "And they taste like old batteries, Harper! They don’t even have good blood!"

"I don’t care what they taste like, kid, just keep their teeth off my ass!" Harper drilled a round through the eye of a beast crawling out of a floor crack. "Four left! Three!"

A manta slammed into Leo from the side.

WHAM!

It hit him like a falling door and drove him back against the platinum wall, and its folded wing wrapped around his chest and pinned his carbine arm flat against the suit.

Its jaws opened ten centimeters from his visor, three rows of translucent teeth closing on the quartz.

SCREEECH-CRACK!

A hairline crack ran across the edge of his visor.

’Not like this,’ Leo thought, with a strange icy calm. ’Not in a hallway...’

He let go of the carbine.

His free hand found the hinge of the manta’s jaw by feel, and he jammed his armored thumb straight into the soft socket behind its eye and pushed until something gave.

The beast convulsed as its grip slackened for half a second, which was all he needed.

He tore his carbine arm free, rammed the muzzle up under its jaw and fired twice.

THUMP-THUMP!

The top of its head came off... It slid down the wall and he slid down with it, gasping, and checked the crack in his visor however it held, for now.

"Leo!" Aoi was at his side in two floating strides with her sidearm sweeping the dark over his head. "Your visor..."

"Holding." He got his feet under him. "Keep moving."

Ten meters ahead, Chloe had gone too far.

She’d chased a wounded manta down the tunnel in a blur of red light and was tearing into it on the floor with both hands while three more dropped off the ceiling around her, closing like a fist.

"CHLOE!"

The crack of his voice in the channel went through her like a shock as her head snapped up with her red eyes wide, and she saw the three shapes coming down on her.

"Hold, don’t chase, come back!" Leo snapped. "NOW!"

She came.

She tore free of the carcass and kicked off the floor and flew back up the tunnel so fast that the three closing mantas bit only empty dark where she’d been, and she slammed into Leo’s side and hooked her hand back into his belt, shaking and breathless.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Sorry, Leo, it smelled..."

"I know." He kept his voice hard, because it had to be. "Next time I won’t be fast enough. Stay on my line..."

"On your line," She whispered, and stayed there.

Harper hit the magazine release, slapped a fresh one home and racked the bolt in one smooth motion while two mantas crawled toward her across the ceiling.

CLACK!

"Fresh mag! Thirty! Twenty-nine! Twenty-eight!"

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

BZZZZT-CRACKLE!

His helmet transceiver burst into static, and then the familiar chime of the ship’s tactical channel, with Jin-Ah’s voice riding on top of the roar of the lasers cycling at full burn.

"Bridge to ground team... We have contact on the surface. A second group of the swarm came out of the northern fissures and is all over the hull."

Leo’s eyes narrowed. His carbine barked once and blew a manta off Aoi’s blind side.

"Elena! How bad?!"

STATIC-POP!

The channel cleared for one second, and Elena’s voice came through cool and steady over the groan of the core under a heavy draw.

"Nothing to cause alarm, Captain. Roughly twenty of the vermin tried to latch onto our starboard radiators. I’ve put sixty percent of the auxiliary bus through the shoulder mounts and I’m cutting them in half with continuous-wave pulses. The plates have taken some scoring, but the shield envelope is holding at ninety-two percent..."

"They’re coordinating," Jin-Ah cut in quickly. "They’re trying to sever the harpoon cable that anchors us... If it goes, the rotational shear could tear the landing gear loose."

"Elena, that cable does not snap!" Leo parried a thrashing wing with the stock of his carbine and put a round through the joint. "Burn anything that touches the winch!"

"I’m fully aware of our priorities, Captain," Elena said, with a crisp proud edge that left no room for doubt. "The cable will hold... Go down and kill the core organism, We’ll keep the door open until you come back."

"Hold it," Leo said, with all the trust he had packed into two words. "We’re coming back up..."

The last forty meters to the choke were the longest of Leo’s life.

They ran in a tight floating knot, boots slamming down and dragging free and slamming down again, with Aoi in the middle calling the floor ahead of them in a fast steady voice.

"Crevice left, step right, low ceiling, duck..."

Meanwhile Leo and Harper fired back over their shoulders and Chloe ran on the outside of the group, swatting mantas out of the air with the backs of her hands.

The tunnel strobed violet and white as ichor froze in black beads on every visor.

Something hit Harper in the back hard enough to knock her flat, and Leo grabbed her by the carry handle on her pack and hauled her up without breaking stride, and she was shooting again before her boots touched down.

"Thanks, Cap!"

"...Run!"

They reached the choke point.

It was an ancient fracture barely two point eight meters wide, flanked by two huge shimmering pillars of unrefined void-platinum.

The moment they crossed it, the pressure dropped as the mantas couldn’t fly through the narrow gap with their wings spread, and they had to fold down and crawl along the floor and the ceiling in a clumsy snapping line.

"Harper, seal it!" Leo stepped back through the gap with Chloe at his right shoulder with her red eyes scanning the dark. "...Bring the roof down!"

"Way ahead of you, Cap!"

Harper let the carbine drop on its sling and ripped the satchel off her hip.

She pulled out a heavy magnetic demolition charge and slapped it dead center on the stress fracture running up the left pillar.

CLANK!

The clamp bit into the stone.

She armed the receiver, scrambled backward through the gap on her hands and knees and slid ten meters down the slope to join the others, already digging the detonator out of her belt.

A manta’s head came through the gap behind her with its fissures blazing violet, and its whole body began to squeeze through after it.

Behind that one came another, and another, a solid crawling wall of them pressing into the fracture, their wings scraping the platinum with a vibration Leo could feel through his boots.

"Harper," he said, very calmly. "Any time now..."

"Patience is a virtue, Cap," Harper said, and her voice was shaking with adrenaline and something close to joy.

She raised the remote, grinned behind her visor and jammed her thumb down on the red stud.

"Fire in the hole, you ugly bastards!"