Chapter 101: The Matriarch Behind It All

KA-BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The charge went off inside the stress fracture of the platinum pillar, and the megalith answered...

There was no air to carry the blast, so it came through the rock instead.

It slammed up through their boots like an earthquake and threw all four of them flat on the crushed basalt as thousands of tons of fractured iron, shattered platinum and pulverized stone came down in a slow catastrophic avalanche that buried the choke point and everything squeezing through it under a solid wall of rubble.

CRASH-THUD!

The shrieking interference of the swarm cut off as if someone had shut a door on it, buried under eighteen meters of collapsed rock as silence came back.

For several long heartbeats, they lay on the gravel with their rebreathers hissing in the dark.

The dust of the blast drifted through the lantern beams in slow shimmering clouds of silver powder, catching the light like frozen stars.

Harper pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked back at the wall of crushed boulders sealing the way they’d come. Then she let out a long, ragged, wheezing laugh and shook her head.

"Well, that took care of the welcoming committee but unless Chloe’s got a talent for eating solid iron, we sure as hell aren’t going back the way we came."

"The blast was necessary," Aoi said, getting smoothly to her feet and brushing silver powder off her suit.

Her glasses glinted behind her visor, and her voice was steadier than her hands. "The collapse is total... They can’t get through that much rock so we’ve cut off their pursuit completely."

"...And ours," Harper said.

"And ours," Aoi agreed quietly, looking at the rubble for a long moment.

Leo stood and rolled the tension out of his shoulders, and checked the glowing readouts of his team.

They had four oxygen bars which were all green, there were no pressure leaks, except the hairline crack at the edge of his own visor, which was still holding.

Harper had one and a half magazines left, and he had most of two.

’What are the odds man?’

Aoi stepped in front of him before he could move, took his helmet in both gloved hands and turned it gently toward her lantern so she could see the crack.

She studied it for a long moment with her face very close to his behind the two layers of quartz, and he watched her lips press into a thin worried line.

"It’s stable," she said at last. "But if anything hits it again in the same place..."

"Then I won’t let anything hit it again in the same place," he said lightly. "You don’t need to worry about me."

"That’s not how impacts work, Leo." Her hands stayed on either side of his helmet longer than they needed to then she let go and stepped back, all composure again. "Stay behind Chloe if you can..."

He tapped his collar comm.

"Elena, Jin-Ah. We’ve collapsed the corridor behind us... The pursuit’s cut off. What’s your status up top?"

STATIC! BZZZZZT-POP-HISS.

A harsh, erratic storm of noise was the only answer.

Leo frowned and cycled through the primary and backup bands. "Bridge, this is Leo. Do you copy? Elena? Jin-Ah?"

STATIC-CRACKLE!

Through the howling interference, a single fractured scrap of Jin-Ah’s voice came through, sounding warped and barely audible.

"...Captain... pulses increasing... core resonance... can’t hold the..."

POP!

The signal snapped as the channel dropped into a cold hollow silence that left nothing but the sound of his own breathing inside his helmet.

The team went still.

Harper slowly lowered her carbine, and the battle-grin faded off her freckled face as she tapped her own wrist unit, then tapped it again.

"Cap, I’m dead too... Not even a carrier ping from the ship."

"Mine’s dark as well," Aoi said, checking her mapping interface with her eyes narrowed. "The platinum is three times denser down here than near the surface... It’s acting as a shield, and those pulses from the core are scrambling everything we have, We’ve lost contact with the Wanderer-7."

The air in their suits grew heavy.

They were more than a kilometer under the crust of an alien asteroid, sealed inside a hollow mountain of iron, cut off from the ship and the others and the only way out.

Up on the surface, Elena and Jin-Ah and Camila were fighting off a swarm on an open plateau, and down here four people stood in the dark with a handful of magazines and five demolition charges.

Nobody said Elena’s name, or Camila’s, or Jin-Ah’s but everyone was thinking them anyway.

’Haah... What is this situation?’

Leo pictured Elena at the power board with her jaw set and her hands flying, Jin-Ah calling vectors in that flat calm voice, Camila down in the medbay laying out bandages for people who might not come back to use them, and a cold feeling settled in his stomach and stayed there.

Harper looked at the collapsed wall, then at Leo, and her rough voice dropped low.

"What’s the play, Cap? Do we dig back up, or...?"

Leo didn’t answer straight away.

He looked at Harper, and for one odd suspended second he wasn’t seeing a mechanic in a pressure suit in the belly of a monster’s nest.

He was seeing a twelve-year-old girl with grease on her nose, sitting on an upturned bucket behind Henderson’s garage with a lawnmower engine in pieces in her lap, asking him the same question about a carburetor she’d taken apart and couldn’t put back together.

He’d said the same thing then that he said now.

"We don’t dig..."

He turned to look down the tunnel ahead of them, it had stopped twisting.

It smoothed out into a wide ancient passage carved through a solid vein of glittering platinum, sloping steadily down into the lightless belly of the megalith.

"If we try to claw through eighteen meters of rubble, we burn our air, and the mantas on the surface wear down the shields while we’re doing it... They’re only swarming the ship because the core is telling them to so we go down, we find her and we kill her... When the head dies, the swarm breaks, and the ship is safe then we keep moving."

The logic was dangerous and impossible to argue with.

Harper let out a slow breath through her teeth, and the tension went out of her shoulders.

The familiar armory smirk came back to her mouth, a little thinner than usual as she gripped the fore-end of her carbine and racked the bolt.

CLACK!

"You’re the boss, Cap. Lead the way..."

"The path is clear," Aoi said, and her rings spun into a quiet focused halo. "There’s a huge acoustic void sixty meters ahead and the passage runs straight into it."

Chloe’s small hand gave his belt a firm possessive tug.

"I’ll protect your back, Leo," she whispered. "Nothing’s touching you..."

He looked down at her. Her eyes were still red behind the gold visor, but the wild edge had gone out of them, and what was left was a singular thought.

Chloe wanted to protect Leo.

"I know," He said, and the strange thing was that he did... He believed her completely.

They moved soon after.

They walked in silence down the platinum passage with their boots clicking softly on the silver-dusted stone, lantern beams carving long white lines through the gloom.

With every ten meters the temperature dropped further, and frost began to creep along the edges of their visors.

A slow heavy vibration grew in the bedrock under their soles with a pulse like the beating of a buried heart.

Halfway down, Leo called a halt to check their air.

They stood in a loose circle in the middle of the passage with their lanterns pointed at the floor, and for a minute nobody said anything at all.

"Cap," Harper said finally, quietly, on the open channel. "Can I ask you something stupid...?"

"You always do."

"Are you scared?" She wasn’t joking. Her voice was small in a way he hadn’t heard since they were kids.

"Because I am. I’m really scared and I kind of need to know if you are too, or if I’m the only idiot down here..."

Leo thought about lying to her.

It would have been easy, and it would have been a kindness, maybe however he looked at the three of them, standing in the dark a kilometer under the stone because he’d told them to.

"Yeah," he said. "I’m scared, Harper... I’m scared of what’s at the bottom of this... I’m scared for the ship... I’m scared I’m walking the three of you into something I can’t walk you back out of."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"Okay," Harper said, and somehow her voice came out steadier. "Okay, good. That’s... weirdly better."

"Fear is information," Aoi said softly. "It means you understand the stakes... I’d be far more frightened if you weren’t."

Chloe tilted her head up at him.

"I’m not scared," she said, as if reporting the weather. "Because you’re here so you can be scared for both of us, Leo, and I’ll be not-scared for both of us then it’s even."

Harper snorted, and Aoi laughed under her breath, and Leo found himself smiling behind his visor in spite of everything.

"Deal," he said. "Air check’s done. Let’s go."

Aoi walked so close at his left shoulder that her arm brushed his with every step.

Once, when the floor dropped unexpectedly and his boot slid, her hand caught his elbow before he’d even registered he was falling.

Neither of them said anything about it.

Sixty meters down, the walls suddenly fell away.

The passage ended at a ledge, and the four of them stepped out onto it, and every one of them stopped breathing at the same moment.

...They were standing inside the hollow heart of the megalith.

It was a cathedral of a cavern more than eight hundred meters across, carved into the living core of the asteroid.

Its walls were sheer cliffs of deep, lustrous black void-platinum, shot through with wide sprawling rivers of crystallized silver that glowed with their own faint pale light.

Far above their heads, the vaulted ceiling had been sheared open by some ancient impact as a jagged crack forty meters wide looked straight out into open space, and through it the cold light of the distant sun fell in long pale shafts of blue and silver, lighting up the drifting mineral dust like slow ribbons of diamond smoke.

It was silent and vast and so beautiful that for a moment, Leo forgot to be afraid...

Somewhere very far away, on a planet that didn’t exist anymore, there had been cathedrals where people crossed oceans to stand inside, however none of them had ever looked like this.

"Oh," Aoi whispered beside him softly. "Oh, Leo. Look at it..."

Harper said nothing at first... She just stared, with her carbine forgotten in her hands.

"Camila would cry," she said finally, in a hushed rough voice. "If she saw this... She’d just stand here and cry."

"So would I," Aoi admitted, and her voice was already thick.

At his hip, Chloe had gone rigid.

Her nostrils flared behind her visor, and her red eyes went slowly upward, past the walls and the rivers of silver to the black recesses of the vaulted ceiling where the starlight didn’t reach.

"Leo," she whispered. "The warm thing. It’s right above us..."

Then, high in those shadows, the darkness moved.

CREAK-SNAP!

It came through the rock as a deep concussive pulse that rattled their visors in their collar rings and sent a sick shudder down every nerve in their bodies.

High in the recesses of the roof, something enormous came loose from the stone.

Slowly with the terrible unhurried patience of something that had never once in its existence needed to hurry, a vast silhouette unfolded its wings.

It was sixty meters from wingtip to wingtip...

Its mantle was made of seamless polished plates of deep violet-black silicate that shimmered with an oily iridescent sheen in the starlight.

A towering crown of razor-sharp purple crystal spines rose along its armored ridge, pulsing with blinding plasma light, and three pairs of huge burning golden eyes opened one after another across its brow and locked onto the four tiny humans standing on the ledge below.

Harper made a small sound in her throat.

Aoi’s rings stuttered and spun backward for a heartbeat, as if her talent had flinched while Chloe’s hand closed so hard on Leo’s belt that he felt the buckle bite through his suit.

Leo didn’t move.

He stood on the ledge looking up at it, and the guide in his back wasn’t humming or tightening anymore... It was screaming, a single long note of pure warning that drowned out everything else in his head.

’That,’ he thought, very clearly, ’is the biggest thing I have ever seen that wants to kill me...’

BEEP-CHIME!

A golden system panel slammed across Leo’s vision with its text flashing blood red.

[Entity: Void-Manta Matriarch]

[Classification: High-Density Swarm Command Organism]

[Level: 5]

[Threat Assessment: Lethal]

[Special Capabilities: High-Output EMP Pulse, Bio-Plasma Breath, Reinforced Silicate Carapace (Kinetic Resistance: 85%)]