She saw the failures were all in the same section, around a quantum battery that supplied power to the rear caterpillar tracks.
“What systems are being hit?” she asked as she sent three microdrones racing to the location. “Is there a pattern?”
Zapata mapped a route to the section. She’d need to go back into the harvester through a hatchway on the left-hand side. But—inside was the last place she wanted to be. “Find me a target line the magrail can shoot through,” she told Zapata. From what she could see on the schematic, the section was almost completely surrounded by chunks of dense machinery.
“Er, Kandara,” Tyle said. “It’s the safety systems that are being taken out. Two more have just gone.”
A microdrone crawled into the tiny cubicle that provided access to the quantum battery and its cabling. Kandara felt her breath catch. Cancer was there, using a tool to work inside a high-voltage cabinet. The woman turned in a smooth motion, lining her right hand up on the microdrone. The connection vanished, but not before its radiation sensor spiked.
Maser, Kandara realized. Cancer was using a peripheral to shoot through her suit. The narrow beam would wreck any active systems in the fabric it passed through, but wouldn’t puncture it. Kandara opened her communications to an open broadcast.
“Cancer, there’s no way out. You know that. Every portal is closed to you.”
No answer.
“I’m authorized to offer you a deal. Tell us who hired you, and you’ll be renditioned to Zagreus. Refuse, and you’ll be terminated.”
“She just took out another voltage regulator,” Tyle said. “There’s only two left to limit the quantum battery’s output.”
Kandara looked at her own feet. The crumbled bodywork she was standing on was composite—non-conducting. But the frame underneath was boron fiber–reinforced aluminum. Is she trying to electrocute me? But she’s inside; she’ll receive a lot more of the charge.
It didn’t make much sense, but Kandara crouched down and jumped anyway. Her muscles were strong enough to propel her in a long arc, taking her over the side of the harvester. She landed hard in the mushy ice granules, but managed to keep upright as her boots slithered about. The ice came up over her ankles.
Mother Mary! “Tyle, if she rigs a full discharge, how far will the ice conduct the charge?” She looked back up at the broken harvester, ready to jump back. Her armor could ward off an electric shock ordinarily, but that quantum battery stored a lot of electricity.
“Not far. Remember the ground underneath is ice, too. It should just travel straight down. She’d be better off rigging…Oh, Kandara, if she shorts out that quantum battery, it’ll explode—and trigger the others.”
Kandara stared at the harvester in growing panic. “How big an explosion?”
“Uh—get away! Kandara, she’s just taken out another voltage regulator. There’s only one left. Run! Get out of there. Move!”
Kandara brought her arm up and started firing armor-piercing projectiles. The magrail rifle slammed them through dense machinery. An overlapping series of explosions sent dazzling yellow vapor streaming out through the tears in the bodywork. The whole mass of the harvester shifted slightly, the profile distorting.
She turned and jumped. Soaring above the lustrous ground took an age. She landed, wobbling; jumped again, a lower trajectory this time, carrying her farther.
“Last regulator!” Tyle exclaimed.
Landed—
The quantum battery exploded.
Kandara flung herself flat—a movement she never completed. Zapata instantly hardened her armor’s outer layer, locking her limbs in mid-leap. Behind her, a flawless hemisphere of blue-white light erupted from the harvester. It flashed across her, physically nebulous but enriched with energy. Milliseconds behind the incandescent wave front came the shrapnel cloud.
Amid glitching electronics and mutilated lens displays, her outer armor rang like a bell from the impacts. She tumbled anarchically, punched by the disintegrating splinters. Beneath her the ice flash-evaporated from the energy deluge, forming a secondary blast wave. She hit the seething ground and plowed through the superheated slush.
Red danger graphics plagued her vision. She rolled along chaotically, banging elbows and legs as the solar-bright light dissipated. Finally the universe stabilized. Eclipsing the passive gas giant above, a scintillating debris cloud formed a spectacular short-lived galaxy of coral-pink embers that curved delicately back toward the ground.
Kandara groaned from the pain. Icons stabilized in her vision. Five red-hot fragments had pierced her hardened armor, stabbing through the suit layers underneath to sear into her flesh. No major blood vessels or organs punctured, Zapata reported. The suit’s self-sealing layer was already closing, cutting off the flow of air and blood into space. Inside her backpack, the medical kit injected a coagulant agent, helping stanch the flow of blood from the wounds.
She winced as she attempted to sit up. The parts of her body spared lacerations seemed to be a single giant bruise. Where the harvester had been, a steam-cloaked crater had been blasted into the ice ocean, nearly twenty meters deep. A hazy aurora cavorted over it like a demonic will-o’-the-wisp. She watched in astonishment as effervescent geysers pirouetted around the jagged rim, their spume freezing before it even reached the ground. Within a few seconds the phenomena had abated, and the aurora’s phosphorescence grounded out.
Larger chunks of wreckage started to tumble out of the clearing sky. They were scattered over kilometers, shining brightly in infrared, kicking up sprays of ice as they thudded down into the granules.
After a while, Zapata picked up a signal.
“Kandara? Are you receiving this? Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
“I’m here,” she replied.
A burst of cheering came along the comms channel.
“A harvester is on its way,” Tyle said. “I’ve diverted it to you. It’s not fast, but we’re dispatching a recovery team through an ice-feed portal. They’ll be with you in ten minutes. Can you last that long? How bad are you hurt?”
“I can last ten minutes.”
“What the fuck happened?” Jessika asked.
“You were right about shorting the quantum batteries. She didn’t want to give us her employer, so she suicided.”
“That’s just twisted. You offered her a way out.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t like the odds. There are a lot of powerful people who’d like to act out some medieval-level vengeance on her. She’d probably never have made it to Zagreus, no matter how sincere Emilja was about the offer.”
“So we still don’t know who was paying her?”
“No. You’ll have to wait until next time, and hope you make a better job of apprehending them than I did.”
JULOSS
YEAR 593 AA
The passageway was circular, four meters in diameter, its cyan-shaded walls made from something resembling fluorescent cotton candy. Dellian floated down its empty center, his armor suit’s thrusters firing almost constantly to keep his course steady. Four of his combat cohort clawed their way along in front. As they were in zero gee, they’d linced additional segments around their core to form a segmented oval shape wrapped in a shell of energy and kinetic armor, which bristled with tri-segment arms. Their gripper talons tore long rents in the corridor’s glowing organic fibers. The remaining two from the cohort were tail-end-charlies, bringing up the rear, alert for any enemy soldiers creeping up.
What Dellian assumed to be nutrient fluid squirted out of each wound the cohort’s talons inflicted, filling the passageway with clouds of shimmering drops—a glow that slowly faded as they merged into larger globules. He batted them away. Suit sensors ran compositional analysis. It wasn’t a bioweapon.
“Another fifty meters, then take the third branch, coord, seven-B-nine,” Tilliana told him.
>
“Got it.”
“Any sign of hostiles yet?”
“No.”
“There has to be something there to defend the asteroid.”
“I’m looking.” Which was almost true. He’d been relying on the cohort to scan the passageway. That’s complacent. The cohort picked up on his mild anxiety, the way his eyes changed focus to watch the sensor data splash a little more attentively. The two following him immediately released a swarm of dronebugs. They slid through the thin nitrogen atmosphere, as agile as the terrestrial wasps they were modeled on, dodging the oscillating blobs of fluid, their sensors scanning the weird organic walls for any changes.
“Light level is decreasing behind,” his suit announced. “Three percent down.”
Dellian checked his squad display, seeing the platoon locations. They were sticking to formation, all of them snaking their way along the fluffy passageways that wound their erratic way through this section of the asteroid city. Their target was a large central chamber that earlier drone sweeps had discovered, containing a negative energy loop. Command had assigned the squad an infiltration mission to discover the nature of the loop and destroy it. Tilliana and Ellici had split them up, allowing a greater probability that one of them would make it through.
“Janc. Hey, Janc,” Dellian called. “What’s your light level? I’ve got a reduction here.”
“I’ll check.”
Dellian was mildly pleased he’d been the one who found the drop. More savvy than the others. And now the fluffy glowing strands had lost five percent luminosity just behind the two tail-end cohorts. Sensing his interest, they launched a batch of tik-drones. The size and shape of maggots, they landed on the passageway’s soft walls. Tiny bodies, with fangs of artificial diamond dust, chewed down into the delicate material. New displays splashed over his vision, detailing the chemical composition of the alien organic. The cells were arranged in a very loose weave and threaded with a fiber conducting electrochemical impulses.
Nerves!
“Yeah, it’s getting darker in here, too,” Janc replied.
“For me, too,” Uret announced.
Colian: “Same here.”
“What’s it doing?” Dellian wondered out loud. In response to his misgiving, the cohort stopped moving and began to scan around. Even on his ordinary visual splash, the light level was noticeably lower. Now down forty percent, his databud reported.
Dellian fired his suit jets, moving himself toward the cohort. All six of them started to close into a protective formation around him. Then the tik-drones began reporting that the structure of the alien cells was changing, the strands shrinking, growing denser. Through his helmet sensors, Dellian saw the darkening walls were starting to contract. Undulations began, moving slowly toward him. The appearance of a giant gullet swallowing was inescapable.
The cohort quickly surrounded Dellian, their limbs lincing to provide a solid cage with him at the center. Energy beams fired into the fuzzy mass of alien cells. The outermost layers were fried instantly, shriveling and steaming. But more of the stuff was advancing toward them like a sluggish tsunami, carrying a tide of dead cells and congealing liquid ahead of the still living tissue. Even the coherent X-ray beams could only penetrate the dead matter so far. The sticky fluid bleeding from the charred strands was absorbing the energy, forming a hot barrier ahead of the living surface. In less than a minute, the cavity was completely full, engulfing him and the cohort. Pressure began to increase rapidly, as did the temperature. It was proving impossible to dissipate the cohort’s energy barrage.
Dellian clenched his hands, and the cohort switched off their beam weapons. Sensors located slim tendrils worming their way through the seething liquid toward the cohort. Power blades slashed at them, cutting through effortlessly. But the fluid was becoming more viscous, hampering movement. And still the tendrils kept coming, multiplying like a burgeoning root system.
The tactical feed connecting him to the rest of the squad cut out. “Signal Lost” splashed across his lens. “Shit.” That shouldn’t have happened; they were using entangled comms. He didn’t waste time running diagnostics.
When he tried a swimming motion, the armor’s actuators strained against the pressure to move his limbs. Low-level joint-seal warnings splashed up. He fired the suit thrusters, but all that did was send thin streams of phosphorescent bubbles out into the darkness.
The cohort immediately started to move, using their gravitonic drives to tow him along, heading toward the rock wall that lined the passageway. It was tough going. The new tendrils were insidious, coming at them almost like a solid wave. Dellian had given up trying to move his own limbs. Now he was starting to worry about the pressure seals; they’d never been designed for this kind of environment. Being immobilized was also starting to conjure up black phantoms in his mind. Bizarrely, for all the force being exerted on the armor, he was still in zero gee, which was somehow helping the sense of isolation.
Progress was slowing drastically as the tendrils grew thicker. The forward cohort started firing X-ray lasers to break them up; they’d become too thick for the power blades to cope with. Medical monitors showed Dellian’s heart rate increasing. The claustrophobia was getting to him. His plan was to detonate grenades against the rock; that was where the thickest nutrient arteries were supplying the cells. If he could cut those, he might be able to disable more of the passageway and claw his way out of this clot.
One of the cohort stopped moving, every limb overwhelmed by the tendrils, and still they kept coming, wrapping it deeper and deeper in layers of alien cells. And tendrils were gaining on a second cohort.
Deep inside Dellian’s neck one of his new glands discharged a mild tranquilizer into his bloodstream. It was odd. He knew he should be panicking, but he wasn’t. Instead he ordered the cohort to fire a grenade. It barely moved ten centimeters from the launch tube nozzle. Tendrils began to coil around it.
Dellian triggered it. His armor was easily tough enough to withstand the blast, but the pressure waves shook him about violently. “Saints shitting,” he groaned. Some of the suit seal warnings were now turning amber. His gland pulsed out another discharge. It didn’t seem to make any difference. The explosion had died away, but his limbs were still shaking. Body temperature was up, except his skin now felt like ice.
“Calm!” he ordered himself. “For fuck’s sake, keep calm!” His voice sounded thin and pathetic. What would Yirella do? A question that brought about a dangerously wild giggle. Not get into this shit to start with.
It was looking bad. The cohort had come to a halt; their gravitonic drives weren’t strong enough to push any farther through the churning knot of tendrils.
Can’t use grenades again.
Energy weapons are heating the fluid.
Power blades beaten.
Come on, think!
The suit sensors showed him tendrils starting to wrap around his legs. He’d be cocooned in minutes, probably less. He didn’t have the power to tear the strands free.
Power!
He yelled out the old yeargroup games war cry. It was shockingly loud in the helmet, ratcheting up the claustrophobia another couple of degrees, and now there was the very real prospect of drowning in alien gunk if the seals were breached. It took him thirty seconds to issue instructions to the cohort, rerouting the electrical output of their aneutronic fusion chambers, taking safety systems offline, cranking the output to redline.
“Go,” he commanded.
The combined power of the twenty-seven generators discharged through the cohort’s shells. Everything went black. Dellian had no displays, no suit functions. He couldn’t even sense the cohort, which spiked his fear.
Black panic really hit then. He began to struggle. The suit held him tight. He screamed.
“Hang on,” Tilliana’s smooth voice instructed through the unnerving darkness. �
�We’re getting you out.”
The high-pitched whine of actuators cut through Dellian’s frenzy. He forced himself to stop thrashing about and drew some shaky breaths. A crack of bright light appeared right in front of him as the helmet hinged apart. Faster! Great Saints, I want this to stop. Then the spongy contact pads that made up the interior of the suit released their grip on his sweaty skin. The helmet finished opening, and he could see the simulation egg’s upper segments rising away from his body on the end of metal tentacles. They withdrew into a service globe in the middle of the simulation chamber, leaving him drifting a few centimeters above the pedestal that formed the rear half of the egg. He reached up and peeled the medic patches from his neck and thighs, then pulled the waste tube cap from his dick.
The cohort returned to haunt the back of his mind, and they didn’t seem upset at all. It had all been just another training session for them.
“You okay?” Tilliana asked.
“Sure. Fine.” Right now Dellian didn’t want to think about what had happened, how badly he’d reacted to the exercise. The stress had drained away, to be replaced by shabby embarrassment. He could barely bring himself to glance around the spherical chamber.
The other simulation eggs had opened, leaving his squad floating listlessly above the pedestals. Most of them didn’t even have the energy to remove their patches and tubes.
That was bad, he thought—although a part of him was wondering if they didn’t deserve it. The last eighteen months had seen them run through some of the toughest simulations the tech strategists could dream up—and they could dream nasty. Eighty-three percent success level, putting their squad well out in front of anyone else. This, though, this was on a whole other level of crap.
He could guess why it had been created. The senior staff had decided it wouldn’t hurt for the squad to have their confidence beaten down once in a while. He could even agree with the theory. But the actual experience—fearing you were about to smother, totally alone, without even your cohort, buried alive in the center of malignant alien goop—it made him worry just how much it would affect them.
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