Chapter 37: Shattered Rift

The Shattered Rift warned intruders off with raw grinding violence.

Through the canopy, the calm drift of the outer belt gave way to a churning sea of broken planetary crust.

Thousands of basalt slabs, iron-veined boulders and razor-edged silicate wedges tumbled across crossing orbital planes, spinning on wild three-axis vectors and smashing into each other at four kilometers per second.

KRAAAACK!

Every impact threw out blinding showers of white-hot sparks and powdered stone, opening and slamming shut narrow corridors of empty space like iron teeth.

Leo sat forward in the throne with his fingers buried deep in the cradles.

The cold needle of the link sent a jolt of liquid blue down his neck, and the pull in the small of his back cinched into a hard knot.

In the tutorial maze he’d dodged dead frozen wreckage.

Here the graveyard was alive... rolling and crushing itself to pieces all around them.

’Okay,’ he thought, rolling his shoulders once. ’Okay. Just like the sims... Just like the sims with no restart button.’

"Approach vector locked," he muttered. "Sensei, keep your eyes on the collision tracks... Don’t let a blind flank take our wing."

"Tracking," Ms. Tachibana answered instantly, her fingers hovering a centimeter over the astrogation display.

The silver rings of her talent flared into blinding halos around her temples, and in her eyes the tumbling field became a dense layered lattice of silver wireframes, speed vectors and crossing impact curves.

’He’s flying into a meat grinder,’ she thought, her knuckles going white on the edge of the console. ’One second late on a burn and five hundred tonnes of basalt shears the cockpit clean off... I cannot blink, not for a millisecond.’

"Seven hundred meters to the threshold!" she called, sharp and clear across the bridge. "Cluster Gamma-4 is tumbling clockwise at three point two radians per second! The gap between those two iron slabs is closing at forty meters per second!"

"Jin-Ah, dump eighty percent to the bow thrusters," Leo snapped, his eyes locked on two black slabs grinding toward each other dead ahead. "Cold-gas burst on my mark..."

"Power diverted!" Jin-Ah yelled, her fingers a blur across the engineering board. "Capacitors routed! Bow RCS ready to dump!"

The slit between the rocks was shrinking... Sixty meters... Fifty... Forty...

Harper gripped her armrests until her knuckles cracked. "Cap... Cap, that gap is getting real small..."

"I see it."

"Like REALLY small—"

"NOW!"

PFFFFFT... THOOM!

The forward thrusters screamed.

The Wanderer-7 snapped its nose down thirty degrees and corkscrewed ninety along its spine like an eel darting through coral, every harness on the bridge biting into a shoulder.

SCREEEEECH!

The tips of the two five-hundred-meter asteroids slammed together right behind them in a bone-jarring concussion that sent jagged fragments pinging off the fresh Graventhal plating like shrapnel.

TINK-TINK-TANG-TANG!

The corvette shot through the closing slit with barely three meters on either flank with the twin ion drives howling a brilliant turquoise wake through the dust cloud born behind them.

"WOOOOO!" Harper whooped, pounding her armrest. "HOLY CRAP!"

Camila had both hands clamped over her mouth.

BEEP!

[The Master Captain’s profound disdain for basic self-preservation has once again exceeded operational expectations... Structural telemetry reports paint scratches along the dorsal spine. Should the Master Captain wish to turn twenty thousand tonnes of advanced corvette into an accordion, this unit suggests simply flying directly into a planet’s core to save time.]

"Shut up and track the resonance!" Leo barked, kicking the port lateral thruster to slide under a tumbling silicate boulder the size of an office building.

WHOOOOSH!

It passed so close overhead that its shadow swallowed the whole canopy for half a second, and Chloe’s small gasp crackled over the airlock comms.

"Resonance spike dead ahead!" Ms. Tachibana shouted, pointing through the glass. "Three hundred meters past the central vortex! A hollow rift inside Asteroid Prime-Zero! The gap is cycling every nine seconds...!"

At the center of the whirlpool hung a hollow crescent of dark basalt three kilometers wide.

Deep inside its fractured cavern, sheltered from the grinding storm outside, a massive deposit of pure Resonance Quartz pulsed with blinding cobalt light.

Guarding the opening were two twenty-story slabs of iron-heavy stone that swung toward each other like elevator doors on a nine-second cycle.

Open... pause...

SLAM!

The whole asteroid shuddered.

"Four seconds of clear window when the plates swing apart," Jin-Ah warned, sweat beading at her temple. "If the ship is inside when the rebound occurs—"

"We won’t be inside," Leo said, and his pulse went steady as the small of his back found the rhythm of the stone.

Open! Pause! Slam! Open! Pause! Slam!

"We hover on the threshold. Chloe, you’re on the nose. The second we hit the gap, you jump."

Down in the forward airlock, Chloe stood strapped into the staging frame in her white-and-cobalt suit with the green oxygen dome humming around her head with her magnetic boots locked to the floor and her small hands clenched into fists.

SLAM!

She felt the impact come up through the hull plates into the soles of her feet.

’I have to be fast,’ she thought, scarlet rings flaring behind her irises. ’Leo is holding the whole ship in the jaws of a trap... If I hesitate, if my fingers slip, the rocks crush the ship. I won’t let them touch him.’

She took a deep breath as her eyes glowed crazily.

’I won’t let ANYTHING touch him.’

"Airlock cycling!" Leo called over her comm. "Three... two... one... THRESHOLD!"

SWOOSH... BANG!

The forward hatch blew open onto hard vacuum.

Leo punched the reverse thrusters and killed their momentum with a brutal bone-crushing braking burn that slammed everyone forward into their harnesses, and the Wanderer-7 slid to a dead trembling halt right between the two twenty-story slabs... a silver needle hanging between two falling anvils.

The left plate was already reversing and swinging back in.

"GO!" Leo roared.

CRACK!

Chloe bent her knees, her muscles coiling like high-tension steel springs, and launched herself off the bow with explosive violence!

THUD!

Her boots slammed into the jagged wall of the hollow cavern.

Right in front of her faceplate, buried deep in the frozen rock, was the cluster.

The size of a human torso... A flawless crystal of pure Resonance Quartz glowing with hypnotic pulsing cobalt fire that threw geometric blue light across her visor.

"I have the crystal!" she yelled, sinking her hands into the seam around its base!

"Chloe, LOOK UP!" Ms. Tachibana screamed from the bridge. "Orbital shear anomaly! The eastern plate broke its rhythm, it’s closing EARLY!"

Through the canopy, a fifty-meter jagged slab of solid iron ore, knocked off course by a collision behind them, came tumbling diagonally out of the dark, screaming straight for the crevice where Chloe was standing!

"Chloe, abort! JUMP CLEAR!" Leo yelled, straining against the cradles as he fought to keep the ship from being swatted out of the gap!

The proximity alarm was howling.

BWAAMP! BWAAMP! BWAAMP!

’No!’ Chloe thought, her eyes burning blood red. ’Elena needs this! Leo needs this! I’m NOT letting go!’

She didn’t jump.

She drove her magnetic boots into the basalt, wrapped both arms around the root of the crystal and pulled with every last ounce of her S-Rank strength!

"NNNNGH... AAAAAAAAH!"

SCREEEEEEECH... CRACK!

Her suit strained across her shoulders.

The bedrock groaned and spiderwebbed with white fractures, and then the ninety-kilo cobalt crystal tore out of its ancient root!

...The iron slab was three meters from her helmet.

Chloe kicked off the crumbling wall with both feet and twisted her small body in midair, clutching the glowing crystal tight against her chest.

WHAM!

The slab slammed into the crevice she’d left a millisecond earlier and pulverized the stone into a cloud of black dust.

Its tumbling edge clipped the sole of her left boot and sent her spinning wildly through the gap straight toward the open void!

"I’ve got you!" Leo shouted through the link.

He didn’t wait for her to stabilize.

With one millimeter flex of his right wrist he flicked the belly thruster and slid the nose of the corvette sideways across the gap like a catcher’s mitt, and her spinning body hit the magnetic retention net of the open bow airlock dead center.

CLANK!

The field grabbed her boots and Chloe slammed down onto the airlock plating with her arms still locked like vises around the pulsing crystal.

"Hatch sealed! She’s inside!" Jin-Ah screamed.

"The plates are closing! GET US OUT OF HERE...!" Elena yelled from the maintenance station.

Leo threw both ion drives to one hundred percent!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The Wanderer-7 surged forward on twin screaming plumes of turquoise fire.

CRUNCH... SCREEEEEEEEECH!

Behind the stern, the two twenty-story slabs slammed together in a deafening seismic collision that shook the whole field, their jagged edges grazing the rear armor plates by less than forty centimeters.

Sparks sprayed across the rear cameras.

The corvette shot out of the jaws of the Rift, cleared the inner collision belt and rocketed into the calm open dark of the outer field.

Leo peeled his hands off the cradles and slumped back into the throne with his chest heaving and his flight suit soaked through with sweat.

The bridge went quiet except for the smooth steady purr of the fusion core then Harper started laughing. High and shaky and a little hysterical.

"You’re insane," she wheezed. "You’re actually, clinically insane, Leo."

"Yeah," he panted. "Probably."

Down in the forward airlock, Chloe lay flat on her back on the plating with ninety kilos of glowing crystal hugged to her chest like a stuffed animal, staring up at the ceiling and giggling breathlessly into her helmet.

"Hehe~ Captain caught me."

CHIME!

[The Master Captain has successfully extracted the vessel from certain pulverization with only an eight percent degradation to his cardiovascular health... This unit remains offended by your continued survival. The high-purity Resonance Quartz is currently sitting in the forward airlock, waiting for someone with actual mechanical literacy to touch it.]

Leo let out a breath that was half laugh and half groan.

"Elena," he said. "It’s all yours."

Ten minutes later the crystal sat on the main fabrication bench in the lower engineering bay.

The heavy chamber smelled of ozone, liquid nitrogen and hot metal.

The four-meter Graventhal harpoon spike, forged from the Foundry’s raw hyperalloy during the flight, lay across the assembly track with its four-flanged barbed head gleaming with cold predatory intent.

Elena and Harper stood on opposite sides of the magnetic winch assembly, and the war had started before the first bolt was turned.

"Do not torque that retaining pin past forty Newton-meters, Bell!" Elena snapped, her hair dragged back into a messy grease-streaked ponytail and her stylus tucked behind her ear as she leaned over the housing with an optical torque wrench. "You are dealing with a piezoelectric crystalline core, not the lug nuts on an antique tractor!"

"I know how to seat a retaining pin, Princess!" Harper shot back, her bronze aura flaring along her knuckles as she spun the magnetic driver. "If I don’t give the mount three millimeters of thermal play, the first time Leo fires this bad boy the kickback is gonna shatter your pretty blue crystal into expensive glitter...!"

"The crystal does not shatter under kinetic load, you illiterate savage!" Elena hissed, leaning in until their faces were practically touching. "The osmium-iridium sleeves absorb ninety-four percent of the recoil! What it cannot tolerate is rotational shear from your crude caveman tightening technique!"

"Caveman?!" Harper gasped, brandishing her wrench. "I’ll show you caveman... Who crawled into the ceiling to save your alignment lugs yesterday?!"

"That was structural necessity, not an invitation to ruin my masterpiece!"

"Will you two just wire the damn core?!" Leo called from the doorway, leaning on the frame with an amused smirk. "We’ve got fourteen hours left on the buffer clock and you’re fighting over three millimeters of brass..."

Both girls froze, glared at him at the exact same time, then turned back to the winch with two perfectly synchronized scoffs.

"Hand me the dampening sleeve, Bell," Elena muttered.

"Holding the casing steady, Sterling," Harper grumbled back.

For all the bickering, their teamwork was terrifyingly precise.

Harper’s Kinetic Tuning gave her the inhumanly steady hands needed to hold the humming crystal suspended dead center inside the superconducting stator, while Elena’s attunement guided every connection, feeling the tiny harmonic currents settle and balance across the coils one by one.

Neither of them said a word for four full minutes as neither of them needed to.

CLIK... SNAP!

The heavy Graventhal housing sealed shut around the crystal.

HUMMMMMMMMMMM!

A deep resonance rolled up through the floor plates and into their boots as the winch woke up and locked itself to the heartbeat of the ship.

Together they swung the hydraulic gantry around and guided the massive assembly up into the reinforced recess in the Wanderer-7’s belly, Harper steadying the weight and Elena calling the angles a millimeter at a time, until the heavy clamps fired all at once.

THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!

The whole ship rang like a struck bell as The Wanderer-7 now had a second set of teeth.