Chapter 104: Feeling Up Each Other

SHING! SHING-SHING-SHING!

A cascade of golden panels tore through the gloom inside his helmet one after another, chiming with a melodic fanfare that bathed his face in warm light.

[Entity Defeated: Void-Manta Matriarch (Level 5 Swarm Matriarch)]

[Aoi Tachibana (Tactical Cartography): Level 5 ? Level 7!]

[Jin-Ah Park (Logistical Matrix): Level 5 ? Level 7!]

[Harper Bell (Kinetic Tuning): Level 4 ? Level 7!]

[Elena Sterling (Mechanical Attunement): Level 4 ? Level 7!]

[Chloe Ivanson (Blood Sovereign): Level 4 ? Level 7!]

[Camila Morales (Biosphere Harmonizer): Level 4 ? Level 7!]

[Master Captain: Experience gained... Level 5 ? Level 8!]

Three levels, all at once, from a single kill he hadn’t even made...

The rush of it poured through Leo’s nerves like a warm river.

The leaden exhaustion in his limbs washed away under a surge of raw vitality as the micro-fractures in his knuckles and the ache in his ribs smoothed out, and his mind went clear and sharp, as if someone had pushed the walls of his skull back to make more room.

’It’s amazing...’

Harper gasped against his chest and clutched at her temples through her helmet as Level 7 hit her.

Across the cavern, Aoi’s rings flared around her cracked visor with brand-new brilliant intensity.

On the gravel below the ledge, Chloe stopped crawling... She went limp on her side with a soft sleepy whimper as the level-up caught her starving cells and held them steady as her eyes slid closed.

BZZZZZT-CRACKLE!

With the Matriarch dead and its pulse field gone, the radio spectrum snapped back into crystal clarity, and the suit transceivers exploded with overlapping voices from the surface.

"...LEO! DO YOU COPY?!" Elena’s voice, stripped of every scrap of icy composure, shrieked through the earpiece. "CAPTAIN, REPORT! The entire swarm just broke off and scattered! Leo, ANSWER THE COMM!"

"His bio-signature’s online!" Jin-Ah’s voice was breathless and didn’t sound robotic at all. "He’s alive! They’re all alive! The core signal has flatlined, and we’ve got level confirmations on every station! We’re Level 7! All of us!"

"Leo! Oh, God, Leo!" Camila was sobbing openly on the channel, her voice muffled behind her hands. "You’re alive... the bread’s safe, the ship’s safe, you’re all alive..."

Leo wiped the blood from under his nose with the back of his glove and laughed with the sound breaking out of his chest before he could stop it.

"I’m here, bridge... We’re all here... Harper, Aoi, Chloe, everyone’s in one piece. The Matriarch’s dead."

He let his head fall back against the inside of his helmet.

"Stand down your stations, we’re coming up."

"Captain." Elena again, and this time her voice was back under control, mostly, though he could hear how hard she was holding it there. "For the record, the cable held and the plates held... I told you I would keep it standing."

"You did," Leo said. "Thank you, Elena. I mean it..."

There was a short pause on the channel.

"...Naturally," she said, and clicked off as somebody on the bridge, probably Jin-Ah, made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

A roar of tearful cheering erupted on the channel and washed away forty minutes of terror in a single flood.

Getting back up was easier than coming down.

With the swarm gone, the megalith was an empty tomb of cold iron and glittering platinum, and Aoi’s expanded range found what they needed at once, a vertical shaft carved by ancient mining lasers that ran six hundred meters straight up through the rock and came out on the plateau barely eighty meters from the ship.

Leo climbed down from the ledge first and crossed the cavern floor to where Chloe lay curled on the gravel.

He knelt and gathered her up, and halfway into his arms her eyes opened a crack that was pale green and hazy.

"You came," she mumbled against his chest plate.

"Of course I came..."

"I told you... I’d hold the line." Her voice was a thread. "Did I hold it?"

"You held it, Chloe... You held it better than anyone." He tucked her closer. "So now hold onto me instead."

"Okay," she breathed, and her small gloved hand found his collar ring and closed on it then she was gone again.

Leo carried her all the way up the shaft.

She was out cold, small and limp and pale in his arms with her face turned into his chest plate, and she didn’t stir once.

Harper helped Aoi, an arm wrapped tight around her waist and her hip braced under the older woman’s weight, muttering the whole way up.

"Lean on me... No, really lean... You weigh nothing, Lecturer, I lift engine blocks for fun."

"I’m perfectly capable of..."

"You’re perfectly capable of getting thrown into a wall by a space bug, is what you’re capable of. Lean..."

Aoi leaned, finally, all her weight on Harper’s shoulder. Through the cracks in her visor, Leo caught her smiling.

Near the top of the shaft, Aoi turned her head toward him.

"Leo. What happened down there? Before the ship came... Your arms were glowing, is it a new skill or...?"

"I tried to force it," he said quietly. "Universal Determination."

She was silent for three long rungs of the climb.

"You promised Elena," She said finally. "On the bridge... You said we’d rely on discipline, not miracles."

"...I know."

"Don’t do it again." Her voice shook once and steadied. "Please."

He didn’t answer, because they both knew he would, and she looked away.

They came out onto the wide cratered plain of the plateau.

Overhead, the Vein had gone quiet, its black rocks tumbling in slow harmless orbits under the pale light of the distant sun.

Forty meters away, the Wanderer-7 sat in its magnetic clamps.

Its hull was scorched by laser fire and scored with bite marks, but all seven slate plates were intact with its shields hummed at full power and the harpoon cable still held it flat to the stone like an iron chain and twenty meters off its starboard flank, resting on three sleek landing skis like polished silver blades, sat the Violet Mirage.

Up close it looked like a sculpture carved out of alien starlight.

Its iridescent purple hull shimmered with a hypnotic sheen in the vacuum, its six thruster bells breathed thin curls of cooling vapor, and there wasn’t a scratch on it anywhere, as if it hadn’t just punched through a sixty-meter monster’s skull.

CHIME!

[Unidentified Class-S vessel... This unit would like it noted that nobody consulted this unit before parking.]

"No transponder, no registry ping, nothing," Jin-Ah reported tightly over the channel. "It’s running completely dark... Captain, I can’t tell you who that is."

Harper let out a breathless snort.

"Box, she just drilled an apex monster through the head to save our asses... I think we can let the parking ticket slide."

The feeling in Leo’s back hadn’t stopped singing since the cavern.

The closer they got to the purple ship, the louder it rang, until it was almost hard to think through.

HISS-PULL!

On the near flank of the Mirage, an oval canopy slid open along magnetic tracks, and a slim figure climbed out onto the hull.

She was tall and long-legged, and she moved across the exterior catwalk with a bouncy buoyant grace that the faint gravity only exaggerated.

She wore a fitted white pressure suit trimmed with glowing neon-violet lines along the ribs and thighs, and her helmet was a clear crystal bubble instead of tinted quartz.

Built into the back of the suit was a long flexible pressure sleeve, and inside it, plainly, a long slender tail swished back and forth in wide happy arcs.

She spotted them, and her whole body lit up.

She waved at them with both arms over her head and then she seemed to remember herself and waved one-handed and a bit more politely as the woman then forgot again and went back to both arms.

"What," Harper said flatly, "is happening...?"

"I genuinely don’t know," Aoi said.

The stranger vaulted off the boarding ladder, drifted three meters down to the iron and landed in a crouch like a cat then she straightened, dusted her gloves off on her hips and turned toward them.

CLACK!

Harper dropped Aoi’s arm against Leo’s side and had her carbine up in one motion.

It was empty however the stranger couldn’t know that... Harper planted the matte-black muzzle five centimeters from the center of that crystal helmet with her jaw set in a snarl.

Aoi braced against Leo, cleared her holster in a smooth textbook draw and leveled her sidearm at the stranger’s chest despite the spiderweb of cracks across her own vision.

And in Leo’s arms, Chloe’s eyelids fluttered open.

A faint spark of red flickered in her washed-out green eyes, and her small teeth bared at the scent of something new however the stranger didn’t flinch at any of it.

She looked straight past Harper and straight past Aoi and straight past the fifty-meter warship behind them with its lasers tracking her every move, and through the crystal bubble of her helmet, Leo could see all of her face at last.

Her skin was a soft glowing pink, flushed deep across high delicate cheekbones.

A wild cloud of purple hair was crammed into the helmet so tightly that it pressed against the crystal on every side, and when she smiled, two little sharp white fangs caught the starlight.

Her eyes were enormous luminous liquid violet, and they were fixed on Leo with such dazzling delirious joy that it was like standing in front of a small sun.

’What is this feeling...?’

She took three bouncy strides forward, brushed right past Harper’s carbine as if it were a twig and stopped so close to Leo that her helmet bumped gently against his visor.

BONK!

Behind her, the tail in its sleeve was wagging so hard that it smacked against the back of her own thigh over and over.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

She stared at him through two layers of crystal, her violet eyes going wider and wider, taking in his dark hair inside the helmet, his dark eyes and the line of dried blood down his lip.

"It’s you!" She breathed over the open channel, and her voice was high and trembling with wild uncontainable delight, like a little girl who’d just found a real live star in her toy box. "It’s really, REALLY you! I knew it! The moment you hit the Boiling Belt and pulled that crazy beautiful reverse drift through the rocks, I felt it! Right here!"

She twisted and slapped her own palm flat between her shoulder blades and wriggled her fingers there in breathless glee.

"You felt it too, didn’t you?!" She leaned in until her helmet squeaked against his. "In your back! That tingle! That pull! That deep hot electric feeling that tells you where the void’s going to open... You felt me chasing you! You FELT me!"

Harper’s jaw dropped so fast it nearly hit her collar ring.

"He... he FELT you?!" she shrieked, and her voice cracked into a furious scandalized squawk. "Leo, what the HELL did you do in that asteroid belt?!"

Were they telepathically feeling each other...? What was going on?

Aoi’s sidearm sagged two degrees in bewilderment, and in Leo’s arms, Chloe’s faint red eyes narrowed into tiny murderous slits.

"Mine," she hissed weakly. "Leo’s mine."

The stranger blinked down at the small pale girl in his arms, and her head tilted inside the crystal bubble.

"Oh! Hello! You’re tiny! Are you okay? You look really hungry!" She beamed at Chloe as if she hadn’t just been threatened, and her tail kept right on wagging.

Leo stood frozen with a scalding wave of heat climbing up his neck.

"Wait, hold on!" he stammered. "She means the instinct I have for flying! I’ve told you guys about it before..."

"I mean the CONNECTION!" the stranger sang happily, completely deaf to the disaster she’d just set off.

She took one bouncy step back, planted her hands on her slim white hips and threw out her chest with a dazzling grin that showed off every one of her little fangs, and her tail never stopped wagging for a second.

"I’m Vexa Tarn! Champion of the Core Nebula! The Neon Phantom of Thyrra! Oh, and also..."

She gave him an adorable unrepentant wink.

"...those three strike ships that tried to blow you up near the moonlet? Mine! Well, technically the Federation’s, but I was the one commanding them! Sorry about that! You’re really, really good at shooting people!"