Chapter 287 - The Commander

Luca pushed the heavy security door open and stepped into the command room, Zoe a shadow at his shoulder.

The concrete floor shook beneath his boots, a heavy, low-frequency rumble vibrating up through six floors of solid rock. Topside, the fighter was making another pass over its own compound, trying to burn Luca's team out of the ruins. The light above swung wildly on its mount, throwing long, jittery shadows across the metal bulkheads.

Tamar's voice sputtered through the squad channel, chopped by six floors of rock and thick static, but readable. "—towers are down. We're behind the transformer housing. Shai's on the wall—it's making another pass."

"Copy," Luca said, his voice tight. "We're inside the command chamber."

The Varnathi field commander stood at the main terminal with her back to them. She was a sleek, armored figure in full-plate armor, her tail twitching near her heavy boots. A short hilt hung at her hip. On her left forearm, a bracelet with a blue light hung.

Luca took a single step in, his boots grinding on the concrete grit. Her sensor kit pinged.

She turned.

Luca's chest felt tight, his breath coming short in the suffocating dark, the air thick with concrete dust and the weight of six floors of solid stone overhead. His [Threat Scan] flashed her level in red on his HUD: level sixty-eight. Beside him, Zoe vanished, her [Active Camouflage] turning her into a watery ripple that dissolved into the corner. Luca stood alone in the red emergency light. He panted, his throat raw from the smoke, while the ceiling ground and creaked under the weight overhead as if the whole place was about to cave in.

[Precognition] kicked in with a sharp, familiar heat behind his eyes. It highlighted her hand twitching toward the holstered plasma blaster on her thigh, drawing a dotted line through the dust. He had to move first, cutting her off before she could clear the holster.

Luca lunged across the gap. She was fast, blurring forward with an explosive burst of speed, and flicked on her bracelet. A small buckler snapped open on her forearm, a pale disc of hardlight that caught his tomahawk and shunted it sideways. He got a hand on her weapon arm anyway, his fingers digging into the cold joints of her armor, and shoved it wide.

A plasma bolt roared from the barrel, the blinding white flash scorching the ceiling and showering them in hot sparks and melting plaster.

The blaster clattered away across the floor. She stepped back and drew the hilt from her belt, and a short plasma sword appeared, shorter but wider than Emily's, the white-blue blade hissing to life. Luca raised his wrist and pulsed the Venture Signet Cuff. The hardlight shield snapped open between them, pale blue against the red emergency lights. She drove the plasma sword into it hard, a crack of energy against energy, and he felt the impact up through his elbow.

Luca rotated his body, trying to sweep her legs with his tomahawk, but she was solid. She drove a heavy, armored knee into his ribs, knocking the wind out of him. He saw the tail move a fraction too late, already wrong, and it snapped around his ankle and yanked. They both went crashing down onto the concrete, his shield dissipating on impact.

Luca scrambled up first, his chest screaming from the knee strike. The squad channel crackled, and Noa's voice came through high and screaming. "Luca! Shai's shield is failing! The fighter is lining up for another run. We can't stay in the open!"

The commander was already rising, buckler still up, her sword leveled. Luca had no space for a clean swing. [Blade Form] was only level two: it painted a clunky, bare-bones recovery line in his vision, but he had to rely on raw reflex to take it. He ducked under a sweeping strike, his shoulder scraping the sharp metal edge of a console, and lunged into her chest, driving her back into the terminal.

She lunged forward, her head slamming into his face with a brutal crack. The nosepiece of his visor shattered. Hot blood flooded his mouth, and his eyes watered in the dark as his boots slid on the slick dust.

The fighter above him must have made another pass, the concussive force of the strike above traveling down the stone pillars. The floor shook. The entire command terminal shattered and sprayed blue holographic glass and electric sparks across his armor. Luca and the commander were thrown sideways, slamming into the heavy metal chairs. The buckler winked out, its charge spent.

Static screeched in his ear, Erez's voice cutting through the noise. "The buildings are collapsing! The fighter is shredding the whole surface, Luca! If you're still down there in ten seconds, you're going to be buried under a million tons of concrete!"

Luca gritted his teeth as she pinned him against a fallen console, the plasma sword pressing toward his neck seal. Her free hand found his wrist and wrenched the tomahawk away. Luca's [Precognition] flashed a red warning as she reached for the dagger at her thigh, but his arms were pinned, his strength failing under the weight of the rock above and the commander's hold.

Zoe materialized behind her.

She drove her plasma dagger into the gap at the commander's armpit seam, where the pauldron met the chest plate. The white-blue blade hummed for a fraction of a second, casting a brilliant light across the rock walls.

The commander's grip released. She collapsed forward, her heavy armor dissolving into fine black dust that settled through the red backup lights.

Luca rolled out from under the pile of ash. He coughed, his hands shaking as he wiped blood from his mouth. The interface updated, flashing bright gold in the dark.

[+21,865 XP]
[+17,765 credits]

Zoe's active camouflage rippled away. She leaned against a tilted workbench, her chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged breaths.

Right after the commander's notification cleared, the comms channel hissed with new pings. Marco's voice cut through the channel, sputtering with static and rising in pitch. "Hive is collapsing! The main pillars are shearing, we're rushing for the exit!"

Collapse the Hive (3/3 objectives complete)

Contribution Reward: +100,000 CP

Paco's voice cut through on the second channel, heavily broken by static but rising as the EM interference began to thin. "—ksshh, we need a MEDEVAC!"

Collapse the Warren (3/3 objectives complete)

Contribution Reward: +100,000 CP

Emily's voice broke in from the orbital feed, calm but fast. "Argonauts, hold your line. Eleanor already has a shuttle down for Paco's team. I'm on my way to pick you up. Hang on."

His interface updated:

[Objective Uncovered: Silence the Column]

Breach the Varnathi Foothold (Complete)

Destroy the Tactical Relay Array (Complete)

Recover Field Intelligence (Complete)

Eliminate the Varnathi Field Commander (Complete)

Contribution Reward: +200,000 CP

Luca sat on the floor for three seconds, his head spinning. The violent shuddering from the surface finally died down, leaving his ears ringing in the sudden quiet. The thudding and fighter passes had finally stopped, replaced by the slow drip of melted plastic from a ruined terminal panel.

"You okay?" he said, his voice sounding flat in the small room.

"I'm fine," Zoe said, gesturing toward the floor. "Get the box."

An item lay in the soot where the commander had dissolved. Luca reached down. His fingers grabbed the matte-black box. Zoe slid a thick interface module out from the terminal's secondary port, pocketing it alongside a flat core and an encrypted blueprint drive she pulled from the main drive.

Item Acquired: Adaptive Stealth Fabric (Schematic)

Adaptive Stealth Fabric. He pocketed that one. Another schematic for their Nanite Forge. He would explore this one back at the tower.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

They took the stairs two at a time. The elevator well was still standing, though Erez hadn't been exaggerating about the buildings collapsing above. Concrete rubble and sheared cables choked the stairwell, and they had to scramble over a pile of broken masonry to reach the exit.

Luca pushed through the shattered frame of the observatory door and squinted against the harsh daylight.

The compound above was unrecognizable. Both instrument towers had collapsed, dumping heavy cables across the research buildings, and one outbuilding had lost its entire roof. A massive ten-meter breach split the perimeter wall where something had shattered the paneling. Pale smoke drifted across the dirt, but the sky was quiet.

Tamar's voice crackled through his headset, clean and even for the first time in hours. "Luca. The fighter. It's gone."

"Gone?" Luca asked.

"It pulled north," Tamar said, her voice level over the channel. "As soon as the commander went down, it banked hard toward the valley."

Luca ran toward the collapsed transformer housing, Zoe at his heels. "Tamar! Where's the crew?"

He found them huddled in the shadow of the broken concrete wall.

The sky was quiet for the first time in twenty minutes. Wind pushed pale smoke across the dirt, and somewhere in the collapsed towers, a cable groaned and gave way, and that was all.

He looked down, and his chest tightened.

They were in bad shape. Shai lay flat on his back, his Bulwark armor scorched black and buckled deep into his chest, blood bubbling from the seams. Avi was propped against Erez, his leg shredded by shrapnel, his teeth gritted as he held a dirty strip of webbing against a deep thigh wound. Even Noa was pale, holding a cracked, useless arm tight against her ribs. Yael was on her knees between them, her trauma kit open. She fumbled with the buckled edge of Shai's chest plate, trying to find the seam, but her hands shook too hard to unclasp it.

Zoe crouched beside her without a word, wedged her fingers into the gap, and wrenched. The plate groaned and popped free.

Yael got the seal seated. Zoe held pressure while Yael pressed the clot foam in. Shai's chest stopped bubbling on the next breath.

Luca let himself exhale.

Erez looked up from where he was still holding Avi's webbing in place, his face grey with dust and dried blood. Luca reached down and pulled him to his feet.

"You okay?" Luca asked.

Erez let out a slow breath, looking at the collapsed towers and the smoking crater where the east wall used to be. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. That was... that was a lot."

"Yeah," Luca said. "I know."

They stood there for a second. Luca could feel his ribs from the knee strike, the dried blood cracking on his upper lip every time he moved his mouth. He looked out over the wreckage, and Erez stood beside him doing the exact same thing, staring blankly at the pile of concrete.

"Get any loot?" Luca asked.

Erez's expression cracked into a grin, wide and slightly unhinged given the circumstances. "Tons," he said.

Luca keyed his comms. "Emily, what's the situation at the hive?"

Her voice came back clear, the low vibration of thruster noise behind it. "They did alright. Everyone is on their feet. I'm already in the air, heading back to the tower."

"Copy," Luca said. "We're waiting for—"

The heavy thud of thrusters rolled over the ridge. A dropship, Heavy-01, swept in low, its repulsors blowing clouds of amber dust and dead leaves across the clearing as it touched down near the breach. The ramp hissed open, and Chris jumped down first.

Behind him came the Andean team, Furia Andina, along with the downed Iranian crew. Arash supported Leila, whose arm was secured in a tight stabilization wrap, while Farid and Shirin followed.

Chris stopped, his gaze sweeping over the collapsed towers and the blood on the grass. He whistled low.

"What a mess," Chris said, taking three fast steps toward Luca. He looked down at the wounded Israel Vanguard crew.

Elena Vargas ran down the dropship ramp, her heavy trauma pack unclipped and held in both hands, and dropped straight into the work beside Yael.

Luca exhaled, his chest still tight, but his shoulders finally dropped.

"We've won," he said, wiping a smear of soot and dried blood from his jaw. "The site is ours."

Zoe came to stand beside him, looking out at the smoking ruins.

"Doesn't look like this one's dissolving," Luca said.

Zoe was quiet for a second. "Maybe we should have been more careful."