Chapter 102: Fruitless Battle

The golden panel was torn apart from Leo’s vision.

KRA-ZZZZT!

The Matriarch arched its huge segmented spine, and the crown of purple crystal along its back flared violet-white, throwing jagged shadows across eight hundred meters of cavern then came the pulse.

It wasn’t heat and it wasn’t sound either...

WHOOSH!

It was a dense sphere of electromagnetic violence that expanded out from the beast at the speed of light, passed through the rock as if it weren’t there and washed over the four of them on the ledge.

BZZZZT-SNAP!

Inside Leo’s helmet, the amber display strobed once and died.

The oxygen readout, the pressure gauge, the horizon line and the thruster reserves all vanished into black glass... The little stabilizer gyros at his collar and waist sputtered and seized with a sharp metallic click as their circuits fused solid.

The thrusters were dead and the display was gone... Their suits were nothing now but heavy unpowered pressure skins, held to the freezing stone by the passive magnets in their boots.

Leo’s breath hitched as his rebreather dropped onto its manual bypass.

Through the clear quartz of his visor, stripped of every number and every line, the cavern was suddenly very real and very silent and sixty meters of polished violet-black silicate was dropping out of the ceiling like a falling mountain.

’W-what is this...?’

It came down without a sound with its wings carving through the dust lanes and all six golden eyes locked on the ledge.

Below its brow, its triple jaw split open into a chasm three meters wide, lined with row on row of translucent teeth and venting clouds of frozen sulfur.

"Spread out!" Leo shouted. His voice didn’t go anywhere but the inside of his helmet and down through his boots into the stone, but they felt it.

Harper didn’t need a radio.

The second the display died, her armory instincts took over with raw drilled fury... She planted her boots wide, slammed the carbine’s stock into her shoulder cup and leaned her whole weight into it.

CLACK-WHIRRR!

Her Kinetic Tuning flared through her gloves and forced the dead coils to spin up anyway, sheer will dragged through copper and steel.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

She held the trigger down and emptied the magazine in one continuous stream of blue kinetic fire.

PING! PING-RICOCHET! PING!

...It was a nightmare.

The Matriarch’s mantle was a seamless shingle of wedge-plates angled at sixty-five degrees, and her rounds skidded off them in bright showers of orange sparks and whined away into the cavern walls.

A handful found the softer seams between the plates and tore small weeping holes that bled violet ichor, and the ichor boiled into vapor in the vacuum however the Matriarch didn’t even notice.

CLICK-CLICK!

The bolt locked back on an empty chamber.

"Empty!" Harper’s yell came up through the floor, and her face was white behind her visor. "The damn plates are angled like tank armor! It’s shedding everything I’ve got...!"

Leo was already firing.

He put three rounds into the soft membrane at the root of the left wing, where the plates folded, and saw them punch in and the wing flinch.

It wasn’t a wound, but it was enough to make the thing look at him... All six golden eyes swung onto Leo at once, and the purple crown along its back flared from violet to white.

’Oh, that’s bad,’ he thought.

The Matriarch’s jaws split wide and something built in the back of its throat, a swelling ball of light so bright it hurt to look at.

"DOWN!"

FWOOOOOM!

A torrent of bio-plasma poured out of its mouth and raked across the ledge in a solid river of violet-white fire as Leo threw himself flat.

The heat washed over his back so intensely that he felt it through every layer of his suit, and the stone where he’d been standing glowed cherry-red and ran like candle wax.

The jet swept on along the cavern wall and carved a molten trench through ten meters of solid platinum before the beast’s throat ran dry and the light guttered out.

Leo rolled over with his ears ringing and smoke curling off the back of his suit as the ledge behind him was a puddle of slowly cooling slag.

"Cap!" Harper’s voice came through the stone. "Tell me you’re still in there...!"

"Still here!" He scrambled up. "Don’t let it look at you!"

"It’s a little late for that advice!"

The Matriarch banked forty-five degrees, and its left wingtip came sweeping across the ledge like a sixty-meter scythe.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The guide in Leo’s back screamed.

He threw himself backward, dragging his weight down until his knees hit the basalt, and the leathery edge of the wing passed over his helmet so close that he heard it whisper along the quartz, right over the crack.

...Aoi wasn’t as lucky.

She was three paces to his left, still trying to read the fault lines in the floor through the pulse haze with her rings spinning in dim stuttering circles, and the displaced mass of the wingtip caught her full in the chest.

WHAM!

Her boots tore loose from the iron... Her body, which couldn’t have weighed more than sixty kilos in her suit, went flying backward through the faint gravity like a thrown doll.

SMASH!

She hit the platinum wall twenty meters behind the ledge spine-first, and her visor struck a jutting spike of hematite.

CRACKLE-SNAP!

The glass didn’t shatter.

The multi-layer resin held its seal and kept the vacuum out of her lungs but a dense white web of fractures burst across the center of her visor from the bridge of her nose to the rim, and the blow knocked every bit of breath out of her.

She slid down the rock and folded onto the gravel and didn’t get up. Her hands moved weakly against the stone.

Her sidearm tumbled away into the dark six meters off.

"AOI!" Harper threw down the empty carbine and scrambled across the ledge toward her on her hands and knees.

The Matriarch wheeled in the middle of the cavern on the faint currents of the megalith’s gravity, and its six eyes narrowed onto Aoi’s still body.

Its crown flared again, charging, and it turned its whole mass toward the wall to dive and crush her flat against the stone.

BOOM!

The far edge of the ledge exploded in crimson as Chloe moved.

Her eyes had drowned completely in a red so deep and so bright that it burned through the gold tint of her visor like two dying stars.

Her dark bangs were plastered to her forehead and her teeth were bared in a snarl that had nothing human left in it.

...Someone... No, rather... This thing... had thrown Aoi into a wall.

CRACK!

The iron under her boots shattered into powder as she poured every drop of her strength into her legs, and her small body launched fifty meters straight up into the open air of the cavern like a red shell fired from a gun.

The Matriarch felt her coming as its head snapped around and its jaws gaped to snatch the tiny missile out of the air... Chloe hit it before the jaws could close.

She landed on its right flank, slammed her boots into the soft pulsing seam between two mantle plates and drove both bare gloved hands straight down into its flesh, hooking her fingers in like grappling irons then she reached inside herself for the storm.

It was there, stored in her marrow, everything she’d taken from Leo two nights ago...

His blood was steeped in the Space God’s essence now, and it sat in her like thunder in a bottle.

’I’m going to do it...’

She gave the Matriarch all of the rest.

Chloe opened her mouth inside her helmet and screamed, and nobody could hear it but her.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A blinding detonation of crimson light erupted from her palms at point-blank range... For one instant, the whole cathedral of a cavern turned into a daylight of blood-red fire.

The shockwave ripped into the Matriarch’s right flank and shattered three square meters of silicate plating into a thousand smoking shards.

It tore on into the chest cavity behind them, vaporized the lateral breathing vents and blew a smoking hole two meters wide straight into the monster’s side, gushing boiling black ichor and burning tissue into the vacuum.

SCREEEEEECH!

Across the cavern, Harper’s jaw dropped behind her visor, and Leo felt his own heart stop and start again.

The Matriarch convulsed in the air... Its right wing locked in spasm, and it lurched off its axis and tumbled sideways with its crown flickering and stuttering as it fought to catch itself.

It was a strike that could have broken a Tier-2 gunboat clean in half, and for one wild hopeful second Leo thought it was over.

Unfortunately...

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

The Matriarch had three separate hearts and a nerve core buried three meters deep under its crown so it lived.

It curled its wings, arrested its fall twenty meters above the floor and turned its burning eyes back toward the ledge with a hatred so dense that it seemed to freeze the dust where it hung and Chloe had paid for it.

The blast had burned up nearly every drop of the blood she’d been carrying.

The light went out of her hands... The red in her eyes flickered, cracked and drained away, back to a pale washed-out green, and her strength went with it all at once.

Her muscles turned to lead and her veins to ice, her skin went ghost-white, her chest hitched in shallow frantic breaths and her fingers slid loose from the monster’s hide.

She fell.

THUD!

She hit the crushed gravel of the cavern floor fifteen meters below the ledge and tumbled across the stone until she came to rest on her side, and she didn’t get up.

Chloe curled into a small trembling ball with her gloves scraping weakly at the dust, fogging the inside of her visor in tiny shallow bursts, every limb shaking with the hollow bone-deep starvation of a predator whose tank had run completely dry.

She tilted her head back and looked up through her bangs, and her eyes were wide and helpless and very afraid.

’N-no...’

Chloe was not afraid for herself...she was looking past the Matriarch, past the falling dust and the starlight, to the ledge where Leo stood, and her lips formed his name inside her helmet over and over again.

Ten meters from her, Aoi was still crumpled against the platinum wall with her face hidden behind a spiderweb of white cracks and one hand pressed against her ribs as she tried and failed to push herself up.

’C-come on...’

Harper had finally reached her.

She’d dropped to her knees and pulled Aoi half into her lap and was holding her cracked visor close to her own, shouting into the glass even though no sound could cross it.

Aoi’s hand came up and found Harper’s wrist and squeezed once, weak but there.

Through the web of cracks, Leo could just see her lips moving.

’I’m alive... I’m alive...’

Harper looked up at the ceiling, at what was coming down on all of them, and then across the cavern at Leo, and her face was pure white terror.

They were both down in the open dust.

CREAK-SNAP!

High above them, the wounded Matriarch flared its one good wing, and its crown reignited with a deep toxic violet glow.

It rose in the faint gravity, lifting its sixty-meter bulk fifty meters above the cavern floor, and tilted its huge plated head down toward the two fallen women.

It didn’t need to bite and it didn’t need to breathe fire... It was going to drop its whole weight on them, a body slam of thousands of tons that would crush Aoi and Chloe and the whole stone shelf under them into fine powder.

Leo stood alone on the edge of the ledge.

His carbine was nearly empty and his thrusters were dead... The comms were dark, and the ship was a kilometer away through solid rock.

He looked at Aoi, fighting to breathe behind her broken visor.

He looked at Chloe, curled on the stone and shaking, staring up at him with that desperate trusting gaze that said he would fix this.

’I need a way...’

His mind ran through everything he had, faster than he’d ever thought in his life.

The carbine had five rounds left, and the plates would shrug them off... Harper’s charges were in her satchel twenty meters away on the wrong side of a river of slag, and they were built for rock, not for something that could ride a demolition blast and come out angry.

He couldn’t reach Chloe in time to drag her clear of the drop... He couldn’t reach Aoi.

He couldn’t fly, couldn’t call the ship, couldn’t call anyone either as the Matriarch hung above them all like a fist at the top of its swing, and in a few seconds it was going to fall.

Every option came up empty and every door he tried in his head was already locked.

...He had nothing left.