Chapter 293 - Hornet's Nest

The Triumph lifted with a low, steady rumble that vibrated through the command deck and into Luca's bones. He sat in the captain's chair with one hand on the armrest as the deck plates trembled under his boots, all three hundred meters of ship hauling itself out of New Dawn's gravity well.

Zoe was sitting at the navigation console. Her hands stayed light on the controls while the forward screen tilted from the ground to sky. The landing struts folded into the belly with a quiet thump, the field dropped away beneath them, and the settlement that had spent three days pressed up against the ship's hull finally had room to breathe.

"Emily," Luca said over the open channel. "Status."

"Gabriel is getting final confirmations on the grid," she said. "The tower accepted the corridor submission as soon as you cleared the airspace, Captain."

"Copy, XO."

Of course it had. The System could tolerate monsters, alien weather, portal noise, thirty-five vehicles, and every other bit of local nonsense New Dawn threw at them, but it could not build roads, power, water, and data around a frigate sitting dead center on the ground it wanted to build through. Luca had thought they could move the Triumph a kilometer and call it done. Gabriel had corrected him, explaining circles to a tired captain.

The tower's controlled radius was four kilometers. A three-hundred-meter ship parked anywhere inside it was still inside it. The only place that counted as out of the way was up or outside the circle.

So they were going up.

Below them, the Colonial Territory Tower stood tall. Canvas tents were laid out in rows to the west of the tower, and the field kitchen smoked beside stacks of supplies that had come out of the ship's storage. Joey's medical tents sat in a tight cluster with people moving between them. Dropships and light combat vehicles had been parked in ordered lines along the cleared ground.

It looked more real from above. Smaller too, which Luca did not like.

The Triumph had been their home, their kitchen, their hospital, their storehouse, and the thing in the background with guns pointed down at anything stupid enough to come close. Luca was taking all of that with him because the settlement needed the ground under it, and because the ship being in orbit gave him a chance to do the scouting mission he and Emily had already agreed to.

Useful did not make it feel better.

The comms held as they climbed. Three days ago, that would not have been true, but the nearest overflows were down, the EM suppression around the landing site had cleared, and the satellite coverage was finally doing what satellites were supposed to do. There was no hiss, no swallowed words, only his people spread too far apart and still on the line.

Ryan checked in from fourteen kilometers northeast of the base camp at the drainage basin. Desert Sparks were supporting him in the mud, with chains wrapped around the Titan.

"We have the front clear," Ryan called. "Hull is intact. The main gun is still buried. Valeria needs another ten minutes before we pull on it."

"Copy," Luca said. "Take your time."

"That's the plan, Captain. Mud and progress."

Chris came next from the Varnathi observatory, where he had gone with Die Sturmer inside the walled compound Luca and Zoe had breached three days ago. The System had left the place standing after the overflow broke, telescope, server banks, research terminals, all of it, except for the parts Luca had shot or blown up.

"Approaches are mapped," Chris said. "Klaus has the north face. Petra is taking the east. We have the dome locked down, and the terminal Tamar used still works. First priority is tech recovery. If the walls hold, we can make it a defensible post too."

"Good," Luca said.

"We'll send news when the relay settles."

Emily stayed on while the Triumph climbed and broke through to the upper atmosphere.

"Danny and Eleanor are east with the sample teams," she said. "Delve rotation has started. First teams have been dropped off. Joey's got the medical situation handled. I have control."

"Copy, XO," Luca replied. He wanted to say more, but they were all operating, the teams spread out below him, and this wasn't the moment for idle chatter.

The Vault was first, to see whether there was any quiet way to reach the Varnathi sleepers. Once the Triumph approached, Luca would form a plan of attack. The asteroid base, the drydock came after, to claim the shelter and factory waiting in the belt.

"Do what you need to do and come back, Luca," she said.

He could have kept the channel open all the way around the planet if he wanted to. That was the problem with clean comms: leaving was a choice, not something the atmosphere did for him.

"I will," he said.

He closed the channel and kept his hand on the chair.

The bridge was too empty for the ship around it. Zoe at the helm. Luca in the command chair. Frozen Fangs scattered across stations built for a much larger crew: Ivan stood like he trusted his feet more than any chair on the ship. Polina had taken shields, Irina had comms, and Anya was already bent over sensors. Dmitri was wedged into a seat that looked one size too small.

He had picked them because the team made sense for a ship this empty. Zoe could handle navigation, Polina had her engineer specialty in shields, Irina could hold comms and the team picture, Anya could read sensors without guessing, and Ivan and Dmitri gave him two people he trusted if things got ugly.

"Zoe, let's go."

She was already on it.

The Triumph climbed up and out, with New Dawn curved beneath them, as they picked up speed and height, its red forests and purple grasses falling behind. The bay dropped out of sight behind the planet's turn. Somewhere down there, Pepe and Pepa were prowling the plains. Emily was at her desk in the camp. Pixel was aboard, tucked in the shadow beside Zoe's console like seven feet of midnight-blue judgment, because apparently the cat had decided the navigation officer was not leaving the planet without her.

The spaceborne portals waited beyond the planet’s rings, past the planet's rings, waiting to be explored. Their fleets were hanging in space.

"Anya," Luca called. "See if you can triangulate on the closest portal."

She worked her instruments as the image resolved. It was not the portal the observatory had been watching, only the closest one: barely two million kilometers out, past the second moon. "There it is, Captain. Three starships, one of them larger than the other two."

Luca saw them, alright. Two of them just a hair larger than the Triumph, and a third ship, nearly double its size. Their designs reminded him of the images that had flooded his memory, though not nearly as large as that battleship; these high-tech hulls were certainly Varnathi, or whatever version of them the System had used.

Ivan made a low sound behind him.

Luca glanced back. "Problem?"

"No," Ivan said. His eyes stayed on the three distant ships. "Good ships."

Zoe kept her eyes on the console. "They're enemy ships."

"Still good ships."

Dmitri shifted in the too-small chair. "He is homesick."

Ivan ignored him. "My grandfather had models like this. Rockets. Warships. Old things from before unification. He said the motherland should have gone to the stars properly."

"There is no more motherland," Zoe said.

Ivan looked at the Varnathi ships for another second.

"There is always motherland."

Dmitri sighed. "Now he is sentimental."

"I am not sentimental."

"Don't worry, Ivan," Zoe said. "We'll find you vodka later."

"Good," Ivan said. "Then we discuss ships properly."

Luca almost smiled. Then his eyes went back to the three Varnathi hulls on the display, and the question behind Ivan's appreciation landed colder. Good ships meant strong ships. Likely stronger than the Triumph, much stronger.

Not today's problem.

Luca focused back on the plot as Zoe set the orbit and carried them around the planet.

That first continent they landed in, during the original survey, came up under them as a long smear of coast, forest, and weather. Luca had stood down there once, over a buried passage that led to a chamber full of stasis pods that had been through ten thousand years. Back then, the place had been dangerous, too alive and too strange.

The satellite scans said it was worse now.

They descended over the ocean first, then the coast, then the high purple canopy of the old forest. Zoe brought the Triumph down carefully, the ship's nose pointed toward the coordinates.

At first, Luca's brain tried calling it weather, a moving front, or a storm wall, something natural enough that he could measure it and keep going, but then the viewscreen resolved, and the lie came apart.

The airspace above the Vault was full of movement.

Varnathi fighters cut through the lower cloud deck in hard, fast lines, lean shapes snapping in and out of the red haze. Vexillari flyers rose to meet them, their broad ugly bodies shouldering upward on too many limbs, smaller things swarming around them.

Below that, the forest floor had stopped being forest in any useful sense. Five separate overflow ecosystems had crawled into the same place and refused to give it back. Two Varnathi portals had thrown down hard, geometric scars through the canopy. Two Vexillari sites had answered with red-black growth, broken towers of bone, and swarms boiling out of ruptures in the ground. The fifth was something else, a beast overflow that had turned the low basin into torn mud and moving bodies.

They were all too close together. None of the sites could finish spreading before another one smashed into it, so the flow never stopped. The Varnathi fronts pushed against everything. The Vexillari fronts pushed back against everything. The beast things tore through whatever got near them. Plasma bolts lit the canopy from underneath, trees burned in jagged strips, and every gap in the smoke showed another line of bodies hitting another line of bodies.

The hope he had brought with him went out the window.

It had been a small hope, and he had known better than to trust it. He had wanted to put the ship down somewhere quiet, then take Zoe under ghost protocol and walk to the buried door, the same move they had used at the observatory. Two people, no heroics, no big fight, just a clean look and a way in.

There was no edge to this madness.

Every place wide enough to take the Triumph sat inside the churn. Every approach line to the Vault crossed movement dense enough that active camo would buy seconds, not passage. He traced one route, then another, then stopped because the answer was the same each time. There was no place to land, no corridor through, no quiet way down.

Luca gritted his teeth. Goddammit. The Varnathi were the mission, the reason they had come back across four light-years, and the planet had stacked a war over the door. Next time he came here, he was not coming to sneak through it. He was coming to take the site back.

"Sensors are poor," Anya said. Her voice was level, not calm exactly, but disciplined. "EM wash is heavy. I can only get a clean read on the Vault when our angle clears the main Vexillari site."

"Give me what you can," Luca said.

Zoe eased them lower.

The fighting noticed the ship in pieces. A cluster of Varnathi shapes broke off first, not toward them yet, only changing vector. Then a Vexillari flyer rolled upward through a gap in the dogfight and turned the same way. Its wingspan was absurd, broad batlike membranes stretched between armored spars, with its orange-red eyes burning above a mouth crowded by crushing mandibles. Spikes ran along its thick plates, and its segmented lower body curled down and forward beneath the head.

The Triumph was too large to hide, too loud in every spectrum that mattered. Even with Zoe keeping them high and moving, they were a new problem over a battlefield that already had more than enough problems.

Anya leaned closer to her panel.

"There," she said. "Vault confirmed."

No one spoke.

A long second passed. The ship shook as something detonated far below, bright enough to flash white through the canopy.

Luca leaned forward and pulled the sensor feed onto his chair display. Static crawled over half the return. An explosion swallowed the southern edge, then cleared. The buried entrance resolved for half a second before the interference took it again.

The objective was still there. The System had not canceled it, had not replaced the rescue with a failure notice.

"Looks intact," Anya said. "No breach."

Luca felt his shoulders drop.

The door was still there, beneath a forest no one could land in and a war no one had started for them. The Varnathi were still sleeping behind it, packed into pods under a world that had turned into a grinder over their heads.

Intact was good.

"Bogies incoming," Irina said.

Luca saw them before the threat icons finished blooming on the screen. The air below tore loose in streams. Varnathi first, then Vexillari, then more from both sides. The fight did not stop. It widened. The Triumph had become one more thing to kill.

"Point defense turrets," Luca said. "Zoe, get us out of here."

Frozen Fangs moved like they had been waiting for the word. Anya called targets without raising her voice. Polina routed power to the shields. Ivan and Dmitri took the gunnery stations.

The first plasma bolts cut through a climbing Varnathi fighter, opening it in midair. The second caught a Vexillari flyer across the leading edge and folded it into a burning drop. Then the rest of the turrets joined, and the space beneath the Triumph filled with white fire and falling bodies.

For a minute, maybe two, the count almost favored them.

They had height. They had range. The ship's point defense turrets were not delicate things, and Frozen Fangs used them well. Targets came apart before they reached striking distance. The bridge stayed quiet around Luca, but the dorsal guns came up through the floor in a heavy thrum-thud, thrum-thud, a mechanical pulse under his boots. Shields flared only at the edges.

Yet, for every shape they burned, another three took their place. The lower fight fed upward without stopping below, layer after layer peeling off the brawl while the rest kept tearing into each other. A Vexillari flyer hit the port shields hard enough to throw blue-white light across the viewscreen and make the overheads flicker. Another struck the dorsal hull before Ivan burned it off at point-blank range. The Triumph could take it for now.

The question was how long this would keep going, and for what? They couldn't land. Luca couldn't check the Vault himself. It was too hot down there.

Luca looked once more at the sensor trace over the buried Vault.

The Triumph's nose came up, and the deck pressed under Luca's boots as the ship climbed hard back to space.

The turrets kept firing through the retreat. The hits came faster for ten seconds, then slower, then stopped as the attackers reached whatever ceiling the overflow had written into their bodies. Shapes dropped away beneath them.

The Vault disappeared under clouds and forest.

Luca stayed in the chair while New Dawn fell beneath the screen. The people below were not numbers anymore. Not colony capacity. Not labor. Not a thousand warm bodies who could turn a camp into a city. He had lost the ability to think of them that way somewhere between Sandworth and here.

They were people, his people. He had flown across a planet to look at the door behind which they slept, and then he had flown away because there was nothing he could do today.

Rushing the Vault would not save them. Building toward it might.

Out past the atmosphere, the signal steadied and the readouts cleared. The hornet's nest dropped off the screen.

Luca frowned. That was a fight they had to take. "Irina, prepare a package for the XO, all readings, video, and observations from the Vault site. Send it when it's ready. I need Ryan to take a look at it."

"Da, Captain," she replied.

The communications line beeped, and Emily's voice came through. "Captain, quick update before you burn for the belt. Danny and Eleanor are heading back to the tower with the first sample team. They've got sealed cases of berry analogs, fruits, tubers, and three leafy things Danny refuses to call vegetables. Initial analysis looks good."

Luca let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Any injuries?"

"None reported; they were able to get out just in time. Gabriel says the first service corridor is already printing; he's doing it by stages."

Forward motion. Not enough to make the Vault feel better, but enough to remind him that the day had not stopped just because he had run into a wall.

"Good," Luca said. "And Ryan's team?"

"They're still working on the tank; it's almost out and might be intact."

"Thanks, Em, take care of the base. We'll be back soon."

"You too, Luca," she replied. "Stay safe."

"Set course for Alpha Centauri, Zoe. The belt," he said.

Zoe looked back once, then nodded and turned back to her navigation console. Pixel yawned beneath her, and Luca wondered, not for the first time, if they should have also brought Zayaan.