Chapter 41: Against The Shroud Ray [II]

[The Master Captain has discovered that monsters have tails. This unit will alert the scientific community.]

The Shroud Ray screamed.

There was no air to carry it, but it didn’t need air.

The shriek came straight through the ship’s frame, rattling the fillings in Leo’s jaw and buzzing through the soles of every boot on the bridge.

All down its back, the cobalt ridges flared furious and blinding.

"Oh no," Chloe whispered over the comm. "Oh no, oh no... it’s angry."

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ... CRACK!

A second pulse detonated off its spine and washed over the hull.

BANG!

Down on the lower engineering deck, an auxiliary transformer exploded and sprayed black smoke and white-hot sparks across the gangway as Harper threw herself flat on the grating.

"Main bus overload!" Jin-Ah screamed as half her displays died into static. "Capacitors three and four just blew! Power’s dropping... sixty-one percent!"

"I got it! I GOT IT!"

FWWWWOOSH!

Harper’s torch roared through the smoke as she cut a melted copper relay free and jammed an emergency jumper cable into the live bus with her gloved hands, bronze light blazing up her arms as her Kinetic Tuning ate the jolt.

BZZZT!

Her teeth rattled in her skull and her hair stood straight up, but she didn’t let go.

’Don’t you dare let go, Bell... Don’t you DARE.’

"Bypass is in! Thrusters are live!" she screamed up the stairs. "Fly this damn bucket, Leo!"

"Harper, you’re amazing!"

"I KNOW! Tell me again later!"

Out on the belly, the pulse washed straight over Chloe.

Blue lightning crawled across her white suit like snakes and popped the magnetic fuses in her boots.

POP! POP!

Her left sole died, and the whip of the ship’s roll flung her legs out into empty space, leaving her dangling over infinity by the fingertips of one hand.

"CHLOE!" Leo shouted.

She looked down past her own boots into forever and laughed breathlessly.

"Okay... okay, okay, okay..."

CRUNCH!

She squeezed, crumpling the Graventhal under her fingers like tinfoil, and hauled her whole body back down against the hull with one arm before slamming her boots into a fresh anchor point beside the harpoon tube.

CLANK!

"I’m okay! I’m still here, Leo!"

"...DON’T scare me like that!"

"Sorry!"

She wasn’t sorry though, Leo could hear her smiling if that was possible.Inside the garden, the shudder of the ship tore a whole tier of tomato racks off its brackets.

CRASH!

"NO!"

Camila threw herself forward to catch the falling frame before it crushed the potato beds, and the heavy tray slammed into her shoulder and nearly buckled her knees... but she shoved it back against the wall with her whole body, her aura flaring emerald as she slapped an emergency patch over a hairline crack hissing cold air near the floor.

SSSSS... click.

"Bulkhead sealed!" she panted, tears stinging her eyes as she held the rack up with her own weight. "The babies are safe! Keep fighting, Leo!"

Up on the bridge, the Shroud Ray had finished its wide sweeping turn.

It was coming back on a direct collision course, wings angled up, accelerating straight at the canopy.

"Elena, harpoon!" Leo shouted, his eyes locked on the oncoming nightmare. "Wait until it commits to the dive! Wait for the flat angle!"

"I have the solution!" Elena cried, her knuckles white on the dual firing grips.

Her heart was pounding at two hundred beats a minute.

The massive black shape was swallowing the stars in front of her, getting bigger and bigger and BIGGER, and the sheer suffocating terror of watching thousands of tonnes of black chitin scream toward her face crushed every gram of architectural patience she had.

’Now, now, it’s too close, NOW...’

She pulled the trigger.

KA-THOOOOOOOM!

The pneumatic staging locks on the belly blew open, and the four-meter Graventhal spike blasted out of the tube at seven kilometers per second, trailing eight hundred meters of glowing blue cable behind it!

SWOOSH...

It was half a second too early.

The Ray hadn’t committed to its dive.

It felt the violent disturbance in the vacuum and flexed its right wingtip four degrees, rolling its flat body diagonally through the drift.

The harpoon screamed past its left wing by less than two meters, its barbed head biting into nothing as the cable paid out behind it into the void.

...Miss.

"NO!" Elena shrieked, slamming both palms down onto the console in pure agonizing fury at herself. "No! I rushed the trajectory! I MISSED!"

Tears of humiliated rage welled in her pale eyes.

"I missed, Leo! The winch is recycling, it takes twelve seconds to reel the cable back into the drum!"

"Don’t freeze, Elena!" Leo barked, cutting through her panic like a splash of ice water. "Start the winch! We’ll get another shot, just get that cable back in the tube!"

"Recycling winch!" she choked, furiously resetting the stator relays.

WHIRRRRRRRRRR...

The miss left the Wanderer-7 exposed.

With the harpoon cable trailing behind them like a glowing blue tail, the ship couldn’t pull a hard turn without tangling the line in its own thrusters.

The Shroud Ray knew it.

It didn’t pull away for another pass. It climbed twenty meters above the corvette’s dorsal spine, flared its massive wings wide... and began to come down right on top of them.

"Leo, look at the cartography scan!" Ms. Tachibana’s voice rang out over the alarms, sharp and breathless.

She leaned over the projection well and stabbed a finger at a row of glowing blue anomalies pulsing on the wireframe of the Ray’s underside.

"Look at its belly! When it opens its wings to wrap around us, its underside isn’t armored... Six ventilation slits along the base of its sternum! They’re glowing, Leo! They’re exposed to dump the heat from those ridges!"

Leo looked up through the glass as the Shroud Ray was directly over them.

Its black wings were curling down around the Wanderer-7, blotting out the stars, the nebula, every single light in the universe, until there was nothing left but the cold dead silhouette of the beast.

...And as the wings curled in, the underside of its flat chest lit up with pale bioluminescent emerald and sapphire.

A double row of six long ribbed gill-like slits opened down its belly, glowing like furnace vents as they dumped superheated plasma into the vacuum... soft and unarmored and barely thirty meters above the hull.

"The gills..." Leo breathed, his pupils blowing wide. "That’s its heart."

Before he could swing the turret around, the trap snapped shut.

The wings folded around the ship.

SLAM!

The beast’s underside slammed flat against the hull, wrapping around the corvette like a suffocating leather shroud, and the rows of thirty-centimeter obsidian teeth along its wing edges clamped straight into the Graventhal plates along both flanks, locking the ship in a crushing multi-thousand-tonne bear hug!

CREEEEEEEAK... GROOOOAN!

The ship’s ribs started to scream.

Down in the corridors, wall panels buckled inward and burst out of their frames.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The gravity flickered and the cabin air went hot in an instant as the beast’s burning belly pressed flat against the outer skin.

Up on the bridge, the whole canopy was covered by thrashing pulsing black flesh.

SCREEEEEECH... CRACK!

Right above Leo’s head, dead center in fifteen centimeters of reinforced blast-quartz, a jagged spiderweb fracture appeared.

SNAP!

It raced a meter across the glass in a heartbeat and it hissed.

A needle-thin jet of white frost shrieked out of the seam into the void with the tiny drop in pressure whistling like a dying tea kettle right over his head.

CREEEAAAK... BANG!

The main ribs along the port side of the bridge buckled inward five centimeters.

The paneling over the astrogation desk popped its rivets and rained shattered plastic clips and severed fiber-optic cable onto the deck.

Red strobes pulsed blood and shadow across the cabin as eight separate klaxons overlapped into one concussive drone of catastrophic failure.

[CRITICAL HULL INTEGRITY FAILURE!]

[Vessel Structural Integrity: 58%... 51%... 44%!]

[Constriction Torque Exceeds 120,000 Kilonewtons! Hull Breach Imminent in Compartments 2, 4 and Bridge Canopy!]

[Primary Fusion Output: 45%! Core Temperature Rising!]

"Canopy seal is failing!" Jin-Ah’s voice was cracked and raw and stripped of every scrap of composure as she pinned herself into her seat with one arm and hammered purge overrides into a half-dead terminal with the other. "If that glass goes, explosive decompression empties the bridge in zero point four seconds!"

’We are in the mouth of the beast,’ she thought, her fingers bleeding where she’d jammed them against a shattered breaker. ’There is no math for this. If the frame snaps, we are pulp...’

The obsidian teeth bit deeper.

The sound was unbearable, a scream of tearing metal that came up through Leo’s boots into his shins and climbed into the base of his skull.

The ship was being crushed like a soda can in the fist of an angry god.

The link burned like molten copper against his spine... Every groan of the frame felt like his own ribs bending past breaking, and blood trickled warm and steady from his left nostril and dripped off his chin onto the crystal of the cradles.

The pull in the small of his back wasn’t a tug right now, it was a screaming iron vise demanding violence.

"Hold your stations!" Leo roared. "Don’t touch the ejection releases! Jin-Ah, kill the cabin heaters! Kill the galley! Kill the grow lamps! Dump every watt we have left into the harpoon capacitors!"

"Rerouting!" Jin-Ah slammed both palms down on the transfer breaker.

"Leo, the lower viewport!" Ms. Tachibana screamed.

She was bent half over the buckled rim of her console with both hands braced on the twisted metal.

Her dark eyes were wide and blazing in the emerald-and-sapphire glow pouring in from outside, and silver tears of overloaded talent were running down her cheekbones.

’It had to expose its flesh to fold its wings,’ she thought with razor clarity. ’It cannot crush us without showing us its breath. Its heart is right there... right in front of our teeth!’

"Its belly!" She flung both hands toward the ventral observation blister under the dais. "The wings are fully curled! The vents are wide open! Thirty meters! Right in front of the ventral launcher!"

Through the lower glass, the view was horrifying and magnificent.

The Ray’s chest wasn’t armored in that light-drinking black chitin... It was a pale heaving expanse of translucent white cartilage, gasping in slow suffocating rhythm, and down its center ran the double row of vents, each one three meters long and glowing furnace-hot cobalt, flooding the ship’s belly in a blinding sea of blue plasma.

Every time it exhaled, superheated steam blasted the hull and blistered the paint off the plates, and the whole ship shuddered like it was being breathed on by a dragon.

The heart of the monster was naked.

Out on the belly, Chloe was pinned flat against the hull between two of those blazing vents with the beast’s chest so close above her that its steam was frosting and boiling across her faceplate in the same breath.

Her suit was screaming heat warnings into her ears.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

However she didn’t hear them.

She was staring up into the glowing slit three meters from her face, watching something huge and wet and pink pulse inside it.

THUD-THUMP. THUD-THUMP.

’There you are,’ she thought, and her lips peeled back from her fangs inside her helmet. ’I can hear you... I can hear your heart, fishy.’

Down in the lower deck, Harper had her back jammed against a buckling bulkhead with both boots braced on a pipe, holding a cracked coolant line together with her bare hands as the whole compartment groaned around her.

"Whatever you’re doing up there, Cap," she grunted through her teeth, "DO IT FASTER!"

Leo turned his head toward the weapons station.

Elena was gripping the firing sticks with hands that were shaking violently.

Her honey-blonde hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat and her uniform was torn at the shoulder where a falling panel had clipped her, and her dilated eyes were locked on the flashing red reticle of the harpoon.

’I missed,’ her thoughts spiraled, bleeding. ’I fired early. I let the panic take the wheel and wasted the shot. If I miss now it isn’t embarrassing. It’s six coffins. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault...’

"Elena!"

Leo’s voice thundered across the bridge and snapped the spiral like brittle glass.

She gasped and her eyes jerked to his.

He was looking straight at her through the smoke and the red strobes like there was nobody else on the bridge, his face streaked with sweat and blood and his jaw set in that same unbreakable fearless line that had stood between her and the void on the dead moon.

"You built this gun," he said. "You felt the iron... You tuned the coils. You’re the only person on this ship who knows when the latch will sing so look at the slits... wait for the breath..."

His eyes didn’t leave hers.

"...and pin this bastard to our belly."