Chapter 124: Descent Into Nexus-Prime

The descent into Nexus-Prime started with the sudden violent shudder of atmospheric entry.

High above the equatorial cloud banks, the Wanderer-7 left the sapphire lanes of Registry Station One behind with its seven slate plates catching the hard glare of the twin suns.

Off its starboard flank, the Mirage knifed down through the thinning vacuum in a steep sixty-degree dive, painting a brilliant furrow of lilac fire across the upper sky.

"Entry vector locked," Aoi called from the cartography pit, with her silver rings turning in slow calm halos around her temples. "Eight kilometers per second, sixteen-degree angle of incidence... Atmosphere is seventy-two percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen."

Her voice wavered, just slightly.

"Leo... the air is breathable like we expected."

Leo’s hands rested in the crystal cradles, and his mind was threaded straight into fifty meters of Graventhal hull.

’Easy... let her ride it,’ he thought, and feathered the attitude jets so the bow met the first wisps of real air smoothly.

ROOOOOOOAR!

Real air came howling across the canopy like a great beast waking up, and every one of them flinched at the sound.

SHING!

A blinding sheath of orange plasma bloomed across the canopy and wrapped the bow in a halo of fire and the obsidian-dark forward plates drank the heat without warping.

Then, in half a second, the fire broke...

WHOOOOOOSH!

The plasma stripped away into trailing ribbons of grey vapor, and the whole bridge was suddenly drenched in natural daylight.

The sky opened in front of them.

It was an endless dome of crystal blue that faded into soft gold along the far horizon, with white clouds drifting under their keel like floating islands of snow and green plains stretching away below to oceans of turquoise and violet.

Across the command deck, everything stopped.

Elena’s fingers froze above the weapons bus, and her icy eyes went wide and filled up with blue.

Harper pulled off her headset, got up out of the gunnery seat and took two slow unsteady steps toward the forward glass before pressing her grease-smudged hands flat against it.

"Sky..." she whispered, and her voice cracked. "Leo... it’s a real sky. Look at the clouds... They’re white. They’re actually white..."

By the galley rail, Camila’s lower lip was trembling, and tears were spilling silently down her cheeks.

She pressed her forehead against the thick glass, and her shoulders shook with soft shuddering sobs.

’Dirt,’ she thought. ’Real dirt down there. Rain... I can grow things in real rain again.’

Beside her, Chloe pressed her small face against the lower viewport with her green eyes wide as she tracked the forests rushing by underneath, and without looking, she slipped her hand into Camila’s.

Even Jin-Ah had lowered her slate onto her knee, and her dark eyes were shining as she stared down at the living world.

Leo sat in the throne and felt warm daylight spill across his shoulders for the first time in months.

’We made it,’ he thought, and his throat went tight. ’All seven of us... We actually made it.’

BZZZZZT-CLICK!

"Welcome to Nexus-Prime, Wanderer!" Vexa’s voice burst through the speakers, bubbling with proud theatrical joy. "Look at that horizon! You’re in Sector Four now, Leo, private airspace... Follow my exhaust down through the cloud deck! My place is right on the cliffs ahead!"

Through the canopy, the Mirage banked hard to port, sliced straight through the crest of a towering cloud and threw up a great plume of sparkling white mist as it dove for the coast.

Leo smiled and eased the Wanderer-7 into a smooth banking descent behind it.

"Take us down, Vexa..."

They punched through the lower cloud base at two thousand meters, and the coast of Sector Four opened out beneath their bow.

Sheer cliffs of dark basalt and white marble rose three hundred meters above a vast calm ocean that shimmered a strange hypnotic violet, and along the clifftop, among emerald lawns and terraced gardens of glowing alien flowers, stood Vexa’s estate.

It was built of sweeping curves of white ceramic and soaring panels of blue quartz that caught the twin suns like a fortress of sea glass, with three terraced pavilions stepping down the cliff face.

Carved straight into the living granite of the northern headland was a private hangar with a sixty-meter mouth, sealed by a shimmering atmospheric curtain.

"That’s her house?" Harper breathed. "Cap, that’s not a house. That’s a whole town..."

"It’s twelve square kilometers," Jin-Ah said, checking her slate. "So... technically, it’s larger than most towns."

"Twelve square kilometers," Camila whispered, with her hands pressed to her cheeks. "For one person... What does she even do with all of it?"

The Mirage glided through the glowing blue field first and touched down on the polished black floor with feather-light grace, and Leo eased the Wanderer-7 through after it.

THUD-CLANG!

The four landing struts met the black floor, and the magnetic arrestors engaged with a soft chime that echoed through the huge cavern.

Leo drew his hands out of the cradles and let the link go.

"Vela, kill the sublight bus," he said quietly. "Switch to ground power, lock down the weapons and open the starboard ramp..."

[Primary drives dormant... Ground atmosphere contains no hostile contaminants, This unit observes that the landing pads are substantially cleaner than the Master Captain’s boots.]

Harper let out a breathless snort of laughter and fumbled her harness open with trembling fingers.

"Come on, Cap... Let’s go see where the cat-girl sleeps."

The ramp came down onto the black floor with a hollow metallic clang, and Harper took two strides down it and froze dead.

"Sweet... mother... of... kinetics..." she gasped.

The hangar was more than two hundred meters wide and forty high, lined with three tiers of polished chrome gantries, and along the western wall, behind glass, stood hundreds of glittering trophies from forty-two championships, each one lit by its own golden spotlight.

Scattered across the floor on pneumatic cradles lay eight stripped-down Class-S racing engines with coil windings so fine they gleamed like woven gold, and a dozen little drones hummed quietly between them, wiping invisible dust off the chrome.

Harper’s fingers twitched frantically against her thighs as she stared at an open Tier-3 racing turbine six meters away.

"Look at the balance on that rotor," she whimpered, with both hands flying to her hair. "It’s balanced to three ten-thousandths of a gram! That thing could spin at four hundred thousand RPM without throwing a blade... Cap, shoot me... Shoot me right now, because if I’m dreaming and somebody wakes me up, I’m gonna throw myself into an intake!"

Elena came down the ramp behind her with her boots clicking on the black floor, and even her composure cracked as she looked over the fabrication rigs.

"An extraordinarily sophisticated private facility," she murmured, smoothing her jacket with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. "The cost of all this would be the yearly revenue of several mining colonies... And she bought it with prize money... Driving in circles."

Elena paused.

"I may have to revise some of my remarks."

Camila, Aoi, Jin-Ah and Chloe followed them down onto the solid ground of Nexus-Prime.

The gravity was real like a firm and unhurried weight that settled into their heels, and a warm breeze swept in across the floor from the great opening that faced the sea.

WHOOSH!

It tasted of salt and wet earth and wild grass.

Leo stopped three paces from the ramp, closed his eyes and took a long slow breath through his nose, and his lungs filled with real unscrubbed air.

’Oh... that’s good. That’s so good. I forgot air could smell like anything...’

Beside him, Camila crouched down and touched the floor with her fingertips, smiling out at the open sky, and Aoi stood close enough to his shoulder that their arms brushed.

"You did it, Leo," she said quietly, without looking at him, while the sea wind lifted her hair.

"We did it," Leo said. "I just steered..."

Aoi’s mouth curved into a small warm smile, and her little finger hooked around his for one second before she let go.

"Hey! You made it down!"

Vexa came bouncing toward them from the Mirage’s gantry, and she’d already changed out of her racing suit into charcoal flight leggings and a cropped sleeveless violet top, with her purple hair bouncing in a messy high ponytail and her tail swinging in wide happy arcs.

She marched right up to them, planted her hands on her hips and swept her violet eyes across all seven of them.

"Welcome to Tarn Point!" she beamed, flinging her arms wide. "Twelve square kilometers of coastal highlands, and every centimeter of it paid for with my own winnings! The main pavilion has thirty suites, three kitchens and a hydro-spa, and a merchant house stocked the wine cellar to say sorry for losing a bet... It’s all yours while you’re here! Eat whatever you want, sleep for three days straight... and Camila, the greenhouse on the lower terrace has sun-melons and fire-peppers and about two hundred kinds of herbs my botanists can’t even pronounce!"

Camila gasped, and her eyes lit up like twin stars.

"Truly?!"

"Truly! Take all the seeds you want!" Vexa giggled.

Chloe tugged at Vexa’s sleeve with two fingers, and Vexa looked down at her in surprise.

"Do you have lemons?" Chloe asked.

"Do I have lemons?!" Vexa’s tail shot straight up. "I have forty kinds of lemons! Blue ones, spicy ones, ones that glow in the dark..."

Chloe considered this very seriously.

"...I like you a little bit now," she decided.

Vexa looked like she’d just won her forty-third championship.

Harper was already inching toward the open racing engine with her hands trembling.

"Can I... can I touch the lathe? Just with one finger? I swear I won’t drool on the bearings..."

"Touch anything you want, wrench-girl!" Vexa laughed. "There are four spare lathes in the machine shop and sixty tons of raw alloy ingots in the lower vaults... Turn half of it into rail-slugs if you want!"

Harper let out a high strangled squeak of pure joy and practically sprinted for the nearest tool bench.

"Bell!" Elena called after her. "Do not disassemble our host’s house within the first five minutes...!"

"No promises!"

Jin-Ah cleared her throat and stepped up beside Vexa with her slate held in front of her chest.

"Is there a licensed medical supplier in Sector Four?" she asked, very formally.

Vexa blinked. "Sure, there’s one in the town below the cliffs... Why, is somebody sick?"

"Logistics," Jin-Ah said.

Behind her, Aoi’s face went bright red all the way up to her ears, and she suddenly found the hangar ceiling extremely interesting.

Leo watched them with an amused grin, and then his expression settled and the captain came back into his shoulders.

"It’s an incredible home, Vexa," he said. "And we’re really grateful for the shelter... But we came here on business. The clerk said we need a citizen of high standing to sponsor us before our IDs can be issued."

Elena stepped up to his shoulder and folded her arms.

"Without your endorsement, our crew spends six months in a holding dormitory," she said. "We’ve paid our tariff in full... What we need now is your signature."

Vexa stopped bouncing, and her tail slowed to a steady sway behind her calves.

"I can do it," she said, and her voice dropped into a clear, steady and surprisingly serious register. "I’m a Tier-A Champion, this estate is mine and my household charter carries full administrative weight in Sector Four... I can file your biometric data straight to the Central Registry from my office upstairs. It’s completely legal. It skips the queue, skips the refugee audit and issues seven unrestricted spacefarer IDs in twenty minutes."

"Then let’s file the papers," Leo said.

From across the hangar, Harper’s voice came echoing off the chrome.

"CAP! She’s got a gravimetric balancer! A real one! I’m gonna cry! I’m actually crying right now!"

"We heard, Bell!" Elena called back, without turning her head.

Vexa giggled, but she didn’t turn toward the stairs to her office.

Instead, she took one slow step forward, and then another, until she stood barely sixty centimeters from his chest.

A scalding magenta flush swept across her cheekbones, the tips of her pointed ears twitched, and her violet eyes went huge and shining with a fierce, breathtaking hunger as she looked up at him.

’Ah,’ Leo thought, watching her tail start to swing. ’I know that look... That’s the look she had in the asteroid stream...’

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Behind her, her tail wagged so hard its tip drummed against her own thigh.

She tipped her chin up and looked straight into his eyes, and her lips parted over sharp white fangs in a radiant, dazzling and utterly dangerous grin.

"I’ll sponsor every one of your IDs," she said, in a breathless voice. "I’ll sign the papers, and I’ll give you the run of my estate for as long as you want to breathe real air..."

She leaned in a centimeter closer, and her fangs caught the gold sunlight pouring in through the hangar mouth.

"But first... you race me."