Chapter 295 - Dinner Bell

Somewhere below them, deep in the station, metal struck metal a second time.

"Polina, Irina, barricade that door."

They sprang into action. Polina kicked a console housing off its mounts and walked it across the room while Irina wedged a strut through the door's manual handle. Ivan planted himself in front of it. It took them maybe twenty seconds, which meant they had either drilled barricading doors or Ivan made them practice on holidays. The command theater now had one way in, and it was blocked. He made himself think instead of pace.

Claim Suspended. Facility Integrity Compromised. Clear the Infestation.

"Infestation of what?" Zoe asked.

"It doesn't say." He read it a third time in case the System felt like adding a helpful detail. It didn't. "Something's living in my station. The System knows what, and it's not telling."

"It is a very creepy situation," Dmitri said, and Luca couldn't read if he was being funny beneath that bushy beard and his blue eyes.

The claim was suspended, but operator access had allowed them to operate this place unclaimed eight months ago. Luca pushed a full restart through the console, going in under the two subsystems that balked with [Root Access] and the hacking pad. Far below, generators answered. The vibration climbed through his boots, and for two whole seconds it was going to be that easy.

Then every screen in the theater turned red.

Fault flags scrolled in tables, hundreds of them. Power trunks were dead across whole districts and the atmospheric processors refused to start. The gravity grid had gone dark on sixty decks. There was no summary and no cause, just the station listing its injuries. All of these were new.

Luca read the columns searching for the thing that didn't fit. The generators were fine. Every fault was downstream of them, in the lines that carried power away. A dead station rotted at random, and this wasn't random.

He threw his own [Systems Analysis Burst] over the fault map, the thermal record his suit had been keeping since the airlock. The dead power lines thickened toward the deep decks, toward the service corridors around the secondary plant where the warm signature from the transit shaft had appeared. Something down there had been taking his station apart along its power lines.

Ryan would have read this board in ten seconds and started insulting individual relays by name. Ryan was back on New Dawn hauling a tank out of a ditch, so the station got Luca and a hacking pad.

"We have to fix it from the plant," Luca said. "Power, air, then the station's internal sensors. We get those back and the facility finds this thing for us, instead of seven of us sweeping this giant base."

They unbarricaded the door.

"Three teams cover ground faster," Dmitri said in the corridor, while the command room sealed itself behind them.

"No." Luca had grown up on the movies where seven idiots split up to cover more ground, and he knew exactly which scene this was. He also knew which of the seven made it to the end. "No way. Nobody walks alone in here." He looked at Ivan. "You know your team, we move on your word. I'll call the route and the fights."

"Da." Ivan agreed.

"Pixel should be on this hunt," Zoe said.

"There's no air, and we don't have a complete suit for her." Her stare held, so he gave her the honest version. "Let's get some atmosphere first. Then we can get her."

The route down was one he had walked before. Eight months ago the generator room had held the third portal, and he had hung outside its threshold until Emily came back through it and stumbled into his arms. She was back on New Dawn now, running a colony out of a canvas tent, and she would have planned this descent better than he had. Missing her was useless and he did it anyway. His old waypoints still floated on the heads-up display, the station mapped out, yet felt eight months stale. The corridors mostly matched them, and he hated the places where they didn't.

Zoe went ahead and below, calling corners as she scouted ahead. Luca had stopped worrying about Zoe alone in the dark years ago. These days he worried, in a mild, professional way, about whatever found her. The rest of them descended the vertical shaft in a tight line, Ivan leading behind his shield, Dmitri at the rear with the bulava on his back, their mag-boots clanking wall to wall while black depth opened underneath them.

Luca had his thermal overlay layered under [Threat Radar]. Either there was nothing down here, or there was something down here that his radar couldn't see, and he had stopped believing in the first option once they passed the second deck.

The taps started on the fourth.

A single click came through the structure. A long moment later another arrived from a different bearing. He held the line still while lights hunted across ribbed walls and sealed grates, and two more taps came, the second answering the first.

"Structure noise," Irina said, without believing it.

"Don't be an idiot," Anya said. "Cold metal doesn't make noises."

Nobody argued with either of them.

Twice on the way down, heat ghosted across the bottom of Luca's overlay and faded before his light found it. He noted each one and kept the team moving, because standing still in the dark wasn't a plan, and the plant was a few more decks down.

The trail stopped being a theory in the corridor below.

It ran straight toward engineering, wide enough for cargo carts, conduit housings were strung along both walls. A third of the housings had been clawed open, the alloy peeled back in curls, and the cable runs inside were scored black with arc burns. Around the worst of them, something pale and hard had been built up in layers, like the papery walls of a wasp nest, wound around the lines until the cables disappeared inside it.

Luca pulled himself along the wall and ran [Threat Scan] over the wreckage. It handed him materials, stress directions, an age measured in months, everything except a culprit, so he figured out the rest himself. The ruined housings all sat on runs that mattered. He didn't even need the schematic, but he asked anyway.

"Anya. Pull the station's records. Which of these lines carried standby current?"

"The damaged ones. All of them. The untouched lines are cold."

So it wasn't sabotage, and it wasn't decay, and whatever lived down here didn't care about his station at all. It was eating the current. He had put the facility to sleep with a trickle of power to keep it alive, and for eight months that trickle had rung through the dark like a dinner bell. They had left the door unlocked and the porch light on, and something had moved in under the light.

Heat rose at the bottom edge of his overlay while he was still looking at the chewed lines, washed thin by decks of metal, ahead of them and below. He counted blooms and stopped at five.

"Contacts," Luca said. "Between us and the plant, five plus. Tight formation, we push to the plant. And watch your fire. Every machine down here is the reason we came. Don't shoot my factory."

The corridor emptied into a machine gallery two decks above the plant, gantry rails crossing overhead, fabricator housings rising out of the dark in rows. Zoe's voice came down the channel from somewhere ahead and to the right.

"Movement on the rails. Above you."

They dropped together.

Three shadows unfolded off the gantry rails and fell with their limbs already spread, and [Threat Radar] finally lit, three red contacts appearing in the same half second they committed. His rifle put two bolts into the first one before it reached Ivan's shield, and the impact burst it into ribbons of violet that kept the body's momentum, splattering across the Aegis in a wide wet fan.

The second one hit the shield and rebounded sideways into Dmitri, a barbed limb raking his chest as the bulava came around. The energy head caught the thing center mass and crushed it against a fabricator pedestal, where it stuck, twitching.

The third never landed. It touched a strut, changed direction off it the way nothing that size should, and came in flat and fast along the deck. Luca's hand made the decision before he finished having it. The tomahawk flew, [True Throw] bending its arc down into the lunge, and the blade went through the wide center of the thing and carried it backward into the dark.

[Target Identified: Nullmaw - Level 66]

Threat Profile: High

He knew that name. The battleship had been full of them, hundreds of them surging against sealed hatches while Ryan stunned whole rows through a stripped cable, because live current pulled them in from decks out. His dinner-bell theory had a species attached now.

The gouge across Dmitri's chest was a finger deep. They were five levels under the threat and mostly in TL8 armor. Luca remembered being five levels under these exact things, and what that had cost people in TL9.

A fourth one came off the rails at Anya, and Zoe killed it out of empty air, her blade finding the joint behind its maw from a flank nobody had seen her take, including Luca, and he had been looking for her. The body tumbled past Anya's shoulder, shedding violet beads into the vacuum.

Nothing else came off the rails.

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"Clear?" Irina asked.

Luca's radar was empty again. It had also been empty right up until the rails moved, which meant nothing down here except the size of his own blind spot. "No live contacts," he said. "Don't trust it."

Luca hauled the tomahawk back in and planted his light on the nearest corpse, and waited.

It floated. The ribbons of violet drifted with it. The limp limbs turned through his beam, wet plating catching the light, and nothing came apart into black dust. He counted ten seconds, then twenty. Every System construct he had ever put down had unmade itself before it finished dying. This one hung there being meat.

Joey's voice came back to him, calling the battleship a skybox, simulated space, doesn't matter. Zoe had argued that those things weren't fake. There had been a portal threshold back then to hide the question behind. There was no portal here. There was his station, in real space, with a dead animal floating in it.

"Captain," Ivan said from the front, his eyes still working the rails. "You have fought these."

"Nine or ten months ago. A derelict battleship in a System portal. There were hundreds of them in the hull." Luca kept his light on the corpse a moment longer, giving it one last chance to dissolve and prove him wrong. It floated there instead. "I didn't think they were real."

"I did," Zoe said.

"You did." There was no arguing with the record. "They're real, though. They got in, and they've been feeding." The rest followed on its own, and he heard himself say it. "We have to find their nest."

Dmitri said something in Russian that needed no translation.

Polina moved down the line while he spoke, two gloved fingers tracing Dmitri's gouge, reading seal integrity off his armor. "No breaches," she said. "Nobody needs me yet. Try to keep it that way."

Joey would have liked her. Joey was also back on New Dawn, along with the entire medbay.

The heat came back at the bottom of his overlay while she worked, the same returns and new ones crowding in behind them, too many.

"Contacts again," Luca said. "Same bearing, and a lot more of them. Between us and the plant."

Of course they were. The heaviest standby draw fed the plant's own service ring. So much for sweeping toward a nest. They were standing in its feeding area, and the things that lived off it had noticed them.

"Back to the corridor," Luca said quickly. "We need to hold a chokepoint. Move."

They moved, and contacts appeared and faded at the edge of Luca's visor the whole way, pacing them through the machinery.

It came out of the conduit trunks this time. The housings they had walked past, the torn ones, the ones wound in layered sheets, emptied all at once, and his radar lit with more contacts than he had time to count. Ivan anchored the corridor mouth, and the Aegis Shield took three impacts in two seconds, blue-white light slamming across the passage. Dmitri's bulava swept the deck lane. Luca raked fire across the overhead conduits in short bursts, aiming his fire between two fabricator housings he refused to hit.

"Fall back by pairs!" Irina kept it level. "Anya, Polina, move!"

Anya unlocked her boots and went. Polina turned to follow, boots still mag-locked through the turn, one hand reaching for the wall.

[Precognition] hit him half a beat before his radar lit, a cold pull at the base of his skull, and he was already turning with the Tomahawk, certain down to his boots that the strike was his to dodge. It wasn't. The warning had read the attack and his body had read the warning wrong, and by the time he found the tentacle in the dark, it had found Polina.

It took Polina around the thigh, barbs first, and it did not stop moving.

Two hundred kilos of nullmaw kept all of its velocity through the dark and swung its whole weight against the one thing holding her in place, which was her own magnetized-boot, locked to the deck exactly the way she had been trained to lock it. The barbed coil sheared through her TL8 plate at mid-thigh and sliced into the leg inside it, and the rest tore. She came apart from her own anchor, the femur shattering somewhere above the knee, and the creature was gone into the gallery black ahead of Luca's bolt.

Her scream burst over the comms, because the corridor had no air to carry it.

The suit clamped the stump in the same instant, the emergency seal cinching down around her thigh. The first blood out flash-boiled in the vacuum, a red mist that froze as it spread, beading into droplets that drifted glittering through everyone's helmet lights, and Polina went tumbling backward through her own frozen blood. Her boot stayed where she had planted it, locked upright to the deck plating with her shin and knee still inside it, and from its torn top stood the broken stub of her femur, sliced clean partway and shattered the rest, jagged as a snapped branch. Smaller shapes drifted around it, splinters of bone, white among the freezing beads.

"Polina!" Irina shoved off the wall after her.

Dmitri caught them both out of the spin and folded them in behind the Aegis with one arm, and Ivan's shield widened to cover all three. Polina was staring down at the place where her leg had stopped being, and Luca's brain handed him the worst fact in the corridor: the only person qualified to treat that wound was the one looking at it.

They pulled back, and her boot stayed behind, standing in the middle of the corridor like she might come back for it, until the retreating lights let it go dark.

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"Shit," Luca said.