Chapter 96: Obsidian Vein [I]

The scream in the small of Leo’s back felt like a white-hot nail driven between his shoulder blades and twisted.

Around the Wanderer-7, the black faces of the basalt pillars peeled open.

...What had looked on approach like slabs of rock and pitted iron came loose from the asteroids in broad silent sheets.

Silicate skin, black as dead coal and rough as raw ore, unfolded into triangular spans twelve to fifteen meters wide.

Wing-mantles snapped taut against the vacuum, and along their leathery undersides dull violet fissures woke and began to pulse like embers someone had blown on.

Ten of them came loose, then twenty and thirty, and then forty more crawled out of the craters and crevices of every boulder within three kilometers of the hull...

DING!

These were Level 2 Void-Mantas...

They’d been lying flat against the iron with their bellies pressed to the rock, letting the cold metal hide their mass from every scanner on the ship and waiting for the prey to slide between their teeth.

SCREEECH!

A silent pulse detonated out from the center of the swarm... a shimmering wave of electromagnetic interference that crashed over the Graventhal hull and rattled every console on the bridge.

BZZZZT-POP!

The main displays strobed... Frantic amber static washed across the tactical hololith as the radar grid collapsed, the three-dimensional map dissolved into dancing noise, and the long-range optics flared into white snow beyond two hundred meters, exactly as Aoi had warned in the Guild hall.

The stars and the far edges of the field vanished behind a wall of electronic dark.

CHIME!

[External sensors blind... This unit recommends whatever the Master Captain was already doing.]

"Hold onto your teeth," Leo said, and his voice dropped into a low iron tone that seemed to anchor the deck under their boots.

His bare hands were already buried in the crystal cradles of the throne.

The neural link flared white-hot around his palms and pulled his mind out of his skull and through every beam and strut and armor plate of the fifty-meter corvette.

With the radar dead and the cameras showing grey snow, any pilot flying by instruments would have hit a basalt wall inside four seconds.

Leo flew on the guide alone.

The agony in his spine resolved into a sharp three-dimensional map that existed only inside his head...

He could feel a six-hundred-ton nickel boulder rolling end over end eighty meters to port, the frantic flutter of sixty mantles converging on their dorsal arc and a razor-thin seam of empty vacuum running through the heart of the drift.

At the dead tactical pit, Aoi Tachibana took one deep breath through her nose, pushed her glasses up with a steady finger and closed her eyes.

SHING!

Three silver rings of light spun to life around her temples.

Her Tactical Cartography reached straight through the hull past the ruined radar, reading the mass and stress lines and density of the living rock instead of radio waves.

"Density fracture in the forward pillar, forty meters up!" she called, crisp and loud. "Twelve-meter shear running diagonal! Port thirty, pitch positive forty...!"

The ship was moving before she finished the last word.

The ventral and starboard thrusters fired three quick bursts, the nose slammed up into a diagonal climb, and the corvette rolled eighty degrees onto its flank and slipped through the crack in the pillar like a needle through a seam.

SCRAPE!

The tip of the starboard stabilizer clipped a ridge of raw ore and threw a spray of orange sparks into the dark, and then they were through, bursting into the narrow tumbling canyon beyond.

They settled into a rhythm without ever deciding to.

Aoi called a fracture, and Leo was already sliding into it... She called a shear, and the ship had already rolled.

Her voice and his hands moved like two halves of one instrument, and for a few wild seconds, in the middle of a swarm that wanted to eat them, it felt almost like dancing.

"Next gap!" Aoi’s rings spun faster and threw sharp shadows across her cheekbones. "Two rotating plates sixty meters ahead, counter-spin! It opens in two seconds, nine meters wide!"

"I’m in it..." Leo murmured.

He shoved the ship forward on a burst of main thrust before the gap had finished opening and threaded the closing jaws at four hundred meters per second.

The hull cleared with thirty centimeters on either side, and behind them the two slabs slammed together and turned three pursuing mantas into grey paste.

THUD! THUD-CLANG!

Four mantas dropped from the roof of the canyon, folded their wings and slammed their armored bellies flat against the dorsal and starboard hull.

SCREEECH-GRIND!

Their mandibles bit into the new slate-composite plates with the sound of a dozen circular saws screaming through sheet metal.

Sparks sheeted across the canopy as they worked the seams, trying to peel the hull open and get at the warm meat inside.

"They’re on our belt!" Harper shouted, her boots braced on the riser of the gunnery seat as she fought the traverse dials. "Two on the dorsal spine and two right over the starboard coolant line! I can’t depress low enough to scrape them off without blowing our own radiator fins...!"

"Elena!"

"Discharging now, Captain!" Elena’s voice was cold and her hands were already moving.

Her fingers ran the capacitor dump they’d drilled every morning, and the full auxiliary reserve of the core went straight into the exterior grid.

SZZZZZZT-BOOM!

A ring of pale blue lightning erupted from every hull seam at once.

The shield grid drove seventy thousand volts through the plating, fried the mantas’ bellies and boiled their nerve clusters in a fraction of a second... All four of them convulsed, let go and tumbled backward into the dark.

"Clear!" Elena called, her blue eyes bright with fierce triumph. "Surface gouging on the starboard plates, integrity at ninety-eight percent!"

"Sixty-plus contacts and climbing," Jin-Ah reported from station three, her voice clipped and fast with her slate showing nothing but static and the ghost readings her Logistical Matrix could pull out of it. "They’re not attacking at random... Every pulse comes from the center of the swarm, then they move... Something is giving them orders, Captain."

’Something’s giving orders,’ Leo thought, and filed it away without letting it slow his hands. ’Then somewhere in here, there’s a head...’

Down on the lower deck, Camila’s voice came breathless over the intercom.

"Life support is holding! I’ve sealed the galley vents so the pulses don’t fry the scrubbers! Leo, I... please just keep flying!"

"I’m not stopping..." he said.

"Turret’s free!" Harper yelled, and her Kinetic Tuning surged down the linkages of the twin-barrel mag-rail. "Come get some, you flat bastards!"

Five mantas banked across the bow with their violet fissures blazing, turning to rake the canopy with their jaws.

Harper waited.

She knew the Guild data by heart now... their carapaces were shaped like wedges, built to shed any round that didn’t hit dead square, and a glancing slug would skip off them like a stone off water.

She held her breath and waited for the lead beast to bank flat and show her the middle of its armored chest.

THUMP!

"Twenty-six!" she roared.

The helical round left the right barrel at twenty-two kilometers per second and hit the lead manta dead center.

Her grooves spun the plasma bloom into a drilling vortex that punched straight through the carapace and blew the beast’s insides out of its back in a huge spray of black ichor and shattered shell... It folded like a crushed umbrella and spun into the manta behind it.

THUMP!

"Twenty-five!" Her freckled face split in a ferocious grin as the left barrel cycled, and the second round blew the sensory cluster off a banking manta forty meters out.

"Conserve the load, Harper!" Leo felt the recoil ripple through the ship’s spine. "Lasers for the screen! Save the heavy rounds for the choke points...!"

"Lasers cycling!" Elena switched the shoulder batteries to proximity sweep.

ZAP-BOOM! ZAP-BOOM!

Twin crimson lances sliced the wingtips off two diving beasts and sent them tumbling into the rotating rocks, where thousand-ton slabs ground them flat...

The swarm kept coming anyway.

Dozens more poured out of the shadows, and their pulses rolled over the ship in nauseating waves that flickered the cabin lights between amber and emergency red.

They moved like locusts that had learned tactics, using the tumbling field to herd the Wanderer-7 into a narrowing ravine between two huge iron boulders on a collision course.

"Wall dead ahead!" Aoi’s voice jumped an octave as her rings blurred. "...Two hundred meters! The boulders are closing the corridor, it seals in three seconds! Leo, we can’t clear it!"

Fifty mantas waited behind them, and the walls were closing ahead and for a single frozen heartbeat the whole bridge seemed to hold its breath, waiting for him to choose which way they’d die.

’Not today,’ Leo thought, and the guide in his back gave one hard violent jerk to port.

"Hold onto something...!"

Leo killed the main thrust completely.

WHAM!

The corvette coasted along its vector on pure inertia while he fired the port thrusters at full force and spun the whole ship one hundred and eighty degrees on its vertical axis.

The Wanderer-7 went screaming backward down the gorge at three hundred meters per second with its nose pointed at the swarm.

THUMP!

"Twenty-four!" Harper screamed, and the pursuing manta that had opened its jaws on their reversed bow took a round straight down its throat and came apart in black fire.

"Elena, harpoon! Anchor that spire at ten o’clock!"

"...Targeting manual!"

KA-THOOOOOM!

The four-meter Graventhal spike blasted out of the belly launcher and buried its hydraulic teeth five meters deep in a stationary iron pillar hanging just outside the ravine.

SCREEECH!

The braided cable snapped taut with a shriek that shook the keel, and the corvette whipped around the pillar like a stone on a string.

All its backward momentum turned into a vicious ninety-degree sling that flung the ship clean out of the ravine, skimming across the face of the rock so close that Harper could have reached out and scraped it.

KRA-KOOOOOOM!

Behind them, the two iron boulders slammed together.

The shockwave turned thirty pursuing mantas to dust between their faces and sealed the corridor behind a wall of crushed stone.

Harper let out a strangled laugh that was half sob.

"You whipped us around a rock! You whipped the whole damn ship around a rock like a tetherball!"

"It worked," Leo said, breathing hard.

"...It shouldn’t have!"

WHIRRR-CLANK!

"Harpoon recovered," Elena reported, her fingers flying as the winch dragged the cable home and the spike slid back into its launcher with a heavy satisfied clunk.

She checked the readout twice, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

"Not a scratch on the spike... Graventhal doesn’t bend for anything, apparently, not even for the Captain’s flying."

"Good, because I’m going to need it again," Leo said.

He needed it sooner than he liked.

The survivors of the swarm were already peeling themselves off the rocks ahead in fresh black sheets, banking to come around for another pass, and Aoi’s rings flared as she called the next gap and the next.

Leo threaded them one after another, a hard roll under a spinning slab, a burst of reverse thrust to let a pair of mantas overshoot and a snap climb past a boulder so close that its shadow swept across the canopy.

WHOOSH!

Harper held her fire through all of it with her jaw clenched and her finger resting light on the trigger, saving her rounds exactly as he’d told her, while Elena’s lasers flashed and flashed and kept the swarm off their throat.

On the command dais, Chloe Ivanson threw herself against her harness.

Her green eyes had drowned in burning crimson.

Her small hands had torn into the padded armrests of her seat, and her teeth were clicking together in a frantic rhythm as the smell of void-beast ichor leaked through the hull seals and drove her hunger to a boil.

"Leo!" she screamed, with a raw edge in her voice that rattled the glass. "Let me out! I can tear their wings off! Open the ventral hatch and let me out there...!"

Leo kept his eyes forward, and his voice came out like a slammed bulkhead.

"No, Chloe! You’re not stepping onto an open hull in a kinetic drift! Sit down and stay down!"

Chloe’s breath hitched.

The command hit her like a hand on her chest and pressed her back into the cushions, and she stayed there with her small shoulders trembling and her fists clenched white, glaring out through the canopy with a furious pout that looked ready to murder the entire universe.

...For three long seconds, the bridge breathed.

Elena reset the capacitor bus, Aoi’s rings slowed, and Harper wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and checked her count.

Twenty-three rounds left in the drums.

Behind the throne, Chloe sat rigid in her seat with her red eyes fixed on the canopy and her breathing slowly, painfully evening out then came the breach.