Chapter 97: Obsidian Vein [II]

CRUNCH-TEAR!

A sickening metallic shriek ripped up through the lower deck plates, followed by the low roar of escaping air.

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

The life support board at station three exploded into strobing red.

"Hull breach, ventral service corridor!" Jin-Ah’s composure cracked for a fraction of a second as the pressure numbers fell. "Compartment Four-B! A manta slipped under our defensive arc and wedged itself between the harpoon housing and the main cryogenic fuel bladder... It’s chewing through the secondary pressure seam!"

Harper’s face drained white.

"The fuel bladder?! If it bites into the deuterium line, the thermal shock’ll blow the bottom half of the ship off...!"

"Camila!" Leo shouted into the shipwide comm. "Can you reach the manual isolation valve?!"

Down in the ventral service corridor, Camila was already running.

The narrow passage was a howling gale of venting atmosphere, screaming out through the cracks in the bulkheads.

The temperature had dropped below freezing in seconds, and frost was racing across the deck plates under the strobing siren, turning her breath to white smoke and her fingertips numb.

Her hazel eyes were wide with terror, and her boots kept moving anyway.

Every morning at oh-eight-hundred, Leo had made her run this.

The manual cutoffs, the blindfolded seal drills, the race against the decompression clock while he stood on the dais with a stopwatch and said again, again, again.

...She’d hated it.

She’d cried once, quietly, in the garden afterwards, from exhaustion and now the drills carried her body through the freezing wind like a hand pressed flat between her shoulder blades.

She reached Compartment Four-B and looked through the reinforced observation port.

A fifteen-meter manta had jammed its jagged head into the exterior service recess.

Its mandibles were grinding through the composite seam barely thirty centimeters from the frosted cryogenic line that fed the main drives, and every bite sent a shudder through the bulkhead under her palm.

SCREEECH-PUMP!

The air was rushing past her toward the widening tear, and it was pulling loose tools, insulation and the ends of her curls along with it.

’Turn it the right way first,’ she told herself, hearing his voice. ’You turned it the wrong way the first time... Not this time...’

She dropped to her knees on the frosted deck, seized the heavy red isolation lever set in the bulkhead and wrenched it down with every gram of strength in her body.

CLANK!

The main fuel shunt slammed shut and locked the deuterium safe inside the armored core.

...She didn’t stop to breathe.

She tore the high-pressure emergency sealant canister off the wall rack, stepped right up to the buckling seam with the wind clawing at her and jammed the nozzle against the vibrating plate.

PFFFFFFFT-HISS!

She emptied the whole canister into the breach.

The grey ceramic foam erupted into the tear, boiled violently as it met the vacuum and then set rock-hard in an instant, choking off the escaping air and gluing the manta’s grinding mandibles to the outside of the hull frame.

THUD!

The tearing stopped... The howl in the corridor died away to nothing, and in the sudden silence the environmental scrubbers kicked back on with a soft ordinary hiss.

Camila slid down the frosted bulkhead until she was sitting flat on the deck.

Her breath came in ragged wheezing gasps of freezing air.

When she looked down at her hands in her lap, they were shaking so violently against the cold metal that she couldn’t close them into fists.

She took three deep trembling breaths, wiped a tear of pure shock off her bronze cheek with the back of her wrist and tapped her collar comm with one unsteady finger.

"Compartment... Compartment Four-B is sealed, Leo," She whispered with her voice shaking like a leaf in a storm. "The fuel line’s safe and the breach is holding."

On the bridge, Leo let out a long shuddering breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

"Good job, Camila," He said softly, and his voice dropped into the warm tone that felt like a hand resting on her shoulder. "You saved the ship... All of us... Take a breath, then get to the medbay."

"O-okay," she whispered then, after a moment, very quietly, "I turned it the right way..."

"I know," Leo said. "I could hear it heh..."

Before anyone could celebrate, the void outside shifted.

SCREEECH!

A second pulse rippled through the drift, and this time it didn’t carry the ragged hungry rhythm of a hunting pack.

It was a single sharp summons that rang through the stone bones of the whole asteroid field like a bell struck in a cathedral.

...Every manta in sight broke off at once.

They peeled away from the hull and the rocks and the open dark, snapped their wings wide and turned as one.

They poured away in perfect terrifying silence like a black river of leathery wings and pulsing violet light flowing toward the center of Sector Delta-Nine.

Leo cut the thrusters and let the ship drift to a quiet halt in the shadow of a basalt ridge.

It took almost a full minute for the river to pass.

Hundreds of wings slid by in the dark beyond the canopy, so close that the violet glow of their fissures lit the crew’s faces purple, and not one of them so much as turned its head toward the ship.

...That was worse, somehow, than the attack had been, after all, Things that hungry didn’t simply stop being hungry... They’d been told to stop.

Slowly, the static on the cameras thinned as the swarm drew away, and the canopy cleared.

Hanging in the heart of the Obsidian Vein was a hollow iron megalith three kilometers long.

Its pitted surface was scarred by deep impact craters and laced with glowing veins of raw platinum crystal that shimmered with an eerie silver light.

On its shadowed southern face, three narrow jagged fissures plunged into the dark, tunnels barely four meters wide... The whole swarm was vanishing into them, swallowed by the belly of the rock.

The bridge fell into a heavy suffocating silence.

The cooling conduits hummed too loudly in the quiet cabin, and the smell of burnt insulation and hot weapon oil hung in the air.

Harper sagged back in the gunnery seat, wiping graphite dust off her forehead with bruised knuckles.

Elena stood at her console with her hair coming loose for the first time since Driftmark with her fingers resting very still on the power switches.

Aoi lowered her hands from her temples, and the silver rings faded as she let out a long exhausted breath.

Leo looked at the empty seat by the life support panel, then stood up out of the throne.

"Aoi, you have the conn... Two minutes..."

He took the companionway down two steps at a time and found her exactly where she’d been when she’d called it in, sitting on the frosted deck plates of the service corridor with her back against the bulkhead and her knees pulled up.

Frost had caught in her dark curls and turned them silver at the tips and her hands were still shaking in her lap.

She looked up when his boots rang on the plates, and her face crumpled.

"I’m fine," she said immediately. "I’m fine, Leo, I just... my hands won’t stop."

He crouched down in front of her without a word, took both of her freezing hands between his and held them then he lifted them and breathed warm air across her knuckles.

Camila made a small broken sound and leaned her forehead against his shoulder.

"I was so scared," she whispered into his shirt. "I could hear it chewing... It was right there, Leo... Right on the other side of the wall."

"I know." He kept her hands wrapped up in his. "And you went to it anyway... You walked into a hurricane, you turned the right valve and you sealed the hole."

She laughed shakily, sounding wet against his collar.

"That was because of your stupid drills..."

"Those too," he admitted, and felt her smile against his shoulder.

He stayed until her fingers stopped trembling then he pulled her to her feet, brushed the frost out of her curls with his thumb and sent her to the medbay, and when he climbed back up to the bridge his face had settled back into the captain’s.

Behind the throne, Chloe’s eyes had slowly cooled back to green.

She was staring at the megalith with her head tilted, her small nostrils flaring as if she could smell it through the hull.

"Something big is in there," she said softly. "...It smells old and funky."

Jin-Ah stood at station three with her geometric bob lit cold blue by her slate, cross-referencing their seismic readings with the deep-core echoes filtering back through the stone.

"Report," Leo said quietly.

Jin-Ah looked up, and her dark eyes were solemn and unblinking.

"Chloe’s right... The swarm has retreated to a central chamber. Deep resonance shows a single huge biological mass in the core pocket, one point two kilometers under the crust... It’s the nest matriarch I think and that pulse was her calling them home."

"A queen," Harper muttered, scrubbing her face with both hands. "Of course there’s a queen... There’s always a damn queen."

"She is not a queen," Jin-Ah said precisely. "She’s a command organism... The swarm is her nervous system, and every manta out there is a finger on her hand."

"That’s worse, Jin-Ah... You made it worse."

She swiped, and a narrow wireframe of the internal tunnels rose into the air beside her.

"The entry corridors are three and a half to four point two meters wide. The rock inside is laced with crystallized platinum, so if we try to blast our way in with ship weapons, we’ll collapse the whole ore pocket on top of her and lose the contract."

She met Leo’s eyes.

"The Wanderer-7 is fifty meters wide, Captain... There’s no flight path that reaches the core."

"So we wait for them to come back out," Harper said. "Pick them off on the surface."

Jin-Ah shook her head before anyone else could answer.

"The surface is two hundred square kilometers of broken rock with three entrances... They’d hit us from whichever one we weren’t watching."

"They won’t come out anyway," Aoi said quietly. "Not while she’s calling them... That rock is a fortress and they can sit inside it for a year."

"Then we go home," Elena said though her knuckles were white. "We tell the Guild Master the nest is unreachable, and he can keep his twenty thousand Zuni..."

Nobody answered her right away.

Aoi had closed her eyes again, and her rings had flickered back to life as she reached out toward the megalith and felt along the tunnels with her talent.

"I can read them," She said quietly, without opening her eyes. "The corridors... They twist, they branch, and the platinum makes the walls sing in my head like wet glass, but I can read them... I could walk a team through the dark to the core without a single light on the radar."

Harper stared at her.

"...You’re saying that like it’s good news."

"No, I’m saying it because it’s true." Aoi sighed. ’This sounds hopeless...’

Every one of them was doing the same arithmetic.

Without the contract, there were no coils, no landing fee and no ID... They’d be stuck with nine thousand eight hundred Zuni in a station where the Federation was already asking about their ship.

Leo sat quietly in the throne for several long seconds.

’Ah...’

He thought about the Guild hall and the Blood-Drift captain’s sneer, and the three lost gunboats on the casualty board.

He thought about Nexus-Prime, about the clerk and the platforms and the four months it would take to scrape fifteen thousand Zuni together any other way, while the Federation went on asking questions about a corvette with seven fresh plates on its flank.

He thought about every face on this bridge, and about how much he wanted every one of them to see a real sky again... then he looked at the three black fissures in the face of the megalith and the faint silver glow of the platinum around their edges.

His hands slid slowly out of the crystal cradles and came to rest on the leather armrests.

The sun-stone hung warm against his shirt, pulsing over his heart, and the guide between his shoulder blades had settled into a deep focused hum that pointed straight down into the dark of the rock.

He unbuckled his harness and stood up from the throne.

Five faces turned toward him from around the bridge, with Camila’s voice listening silently over the open intercom and every one of them already knew what he was going to say, because they’d known him long enough now to read it in the set of his shoulders before he opened his mouth.

He looked at his crew.

"...Then we walk in."