Chapter 299 - The Nest

Past the last hatch, the walls were swollen and ridged where the Nullmaws had laid something over the original plating, a hardened gray mass that looked smooth and wet and shining under the light of their helmets.

They had chewed through. Past the gnawed conduits and the secretion, where the station's plating ended, the tunnels kept going into the rock, new passages had been eaten clean through the body of the asteroid itself, curving up and out toward where the asteroid base's outer skin had to be.

The last pressure door had cycled shut behind them the second they crossed it, sealing the station's good air off from the breach, and the atmospheric readout in the corner of his visor had been sitting at zero ever since. Whatever the Nullmaws had chewed open toward the surface had pulled the atmosphere out of the deep decks with it. It was hard vacuum now, all of them sealed into their suits.

"We're exposed back here," Zoe said over the channel.

"Watch your neighbor, call anything that even looks like a tear. Tight formation. Nobody past Ivan," Luca said.

The nest itself appeared past the rough bored hole, and it stopped him for a second. The chamber was lined floor to curved ceiling in the gray secretion, and set into the walls were bodies, dormant ones, smaller than the things they'd been killing all day, folded into hollows in the resin with their tentacles drawn in tight. They were young, Nullmaw offspring by the looks of it. There were clusters of pale sacs lower down that he didn't let himself look at too long. This wasn't a dungeon the System had drawn for him to clear. It was a den, a real one, animals that had done what animals did, which was make more of themselves.

Then he thought about the boot clamped to Ivan's back, and there was nothing left in him to argue with.

"Burn it on the way out," he said. "All of it. Right now we go through."

The Champion woke before they reached the far wall.

He felt it before he saw it, the chamber going still in a way it hadn't been a breath ago, and his body braced for the thing he remembered from the battleship, the lights dying all at once and a Champion loose in the dark. The lights didn't die. This one didn't have that in it, or maybe it did but didn't use it. What it had was mass. It came up out of a hollow he'd taken for more wall and kept coming, unfolding itself from the hole until it filled a third of the chamber, a dozen armored tentacles of black plate. The front of its shell was worn smooth and scored pale where it had eaten its way through rock and station steel both, and a ridge of swollen sacs ran back over its hull, the same dead white as the clusters packed into the walls. This was the thing that had dug the nest and packed the walls with its young.

"Ivan," he called. It was the only order there was time for.

Ivan was already there. He took the first tentacle on his shield, and the impact came up through the deck and into Luca's boots and drove Ivan back half a step on his magboots, and then the chainsaw was up, the plasma arc strobing blue-white off the wet walls and the whole brutal thing of it reaching Luca as light and tremor and no sound at all. The chainsaw did what it was meant to, chewing through its thick armor, throwing chips of black carapace and a spray of violet goop that froze to beads in the vacuum. Ivan leaned into it with his whole body. The tentacle came apart. The stump lashed back trailing ribbons, and somewhere in the thing's mass a blow landed that Luca felt come up through the deck and into his teeth.

Dmitri hit it on the flank. His upgraded plasma bulava came down into the root of another tentacle, where it met the body, and he caved the armor in and rode his own follow-through into the backswing and hit the same crack again, and it split, and the insides boiled outward from the champion. The thing turned and caught him across the chestplate and threw him clear across the chamber, but his armor held, and he came off the far wall already swinging.

Luca went in under the reach of the limbs. [Precognition] ran a half-second ahead of him, every tentacle already where it was going to be, so he was never quite under the one that came down. He dropped into [Ghost Protocol] long enough to wedge the tomahawk into the seam where the armored hood over its head met the body, drive it to the haft, and drag it down until the plate split.

Pixel came off the ceiling and tore the same hood open, and violet goop boiled out of the gash and froze to beads in the vacuum. The four of them swarmed it with everything they had, and it was like trying to bring down a building that fought back.

Luca kicked back out of reach, and threw his tomahawk, which sank into the soft dark under the hood from clear across the chamber, exactly where he put it.

Behind them the young were waking. They tore out of their hollows in the walls and pushed off the ceiling, and Zoe held the back of the chamber by herself, her rifle picking the small fast things out of the dark as they came, keeping them off their backs.

The large champion stopped caring what it hit. A tentacle Luca had already slipped came down where he'd been and tore through the conduit run that fed the nest, his conduit, ripping it out of the rock in a fistful of cable and blue sparks, and the next blow caved in the station plating that walled the throat. He broke for cover behind a slab of crusted plating. The next blow hit the other side of it, and he felt it come through the metal, up his arm and into his teeth. The thing was tearing his station apart to get at them, the place that had already cost Polina a leg, and some sick small part of him was already counting what it would take to put it back.

And it wouldn't die. They took three of its tentacles down to floating wreckage and opened the hood in a dozen places, and it didn't slow the way a dying thing slowed. It changed. It stopped trying to kill them and started trying to leave.

It went for the hole. The bored hole at the back of the chamber where its tunnels ran out into the rock, and it poured itself toward it faster than anything that size had any right to move, hauling its ruined limbs, leaving a haze of its own insides hanging behind it. And the young went with it, what Zoe hadn't dropped, the survivors breaking off the walls and scrambling up off the floor and walls and ceilings, climbing over each other to follow the thing that had made them down into the rock.

Zoe had gone quiet on the back line. She had the angle to drop the runners before they made the hole, and Luca watched her not take it, her rifle down and her head tracking them into the dark after the thing that had made them.

"Told you they were real," she said over the channel. That was all she said about it, and it was enough.

Ivan took one step after it, the saw still lit in his hand.

"Let it go," he said. "Ivan. Let it go."

Chasing a wounded animal that size into a hole in an asteroid was just an elaborate way to bury everybody. The thing was leaving his station. It could have the rock, every tunnel in it. He wanted the lights on and a door it couldn't come back through.

The last of the young vanished after it, and the loudest thing in his helmet was the team breathing hard. They were all up. He made sure of that first, Zoe and Dmitri and Pixel.

Dmitri was flat on his back where the Champion had thrown him, plates scored down his chest, and his laugh came up over the channel winded and enormous. He said something in Russian that, like the last time, needed no translation, except this time it was joy and not a curse.

"You saw it run," he said, switching over for the rest of them. "A dozen arms, who knows how many hundreds of kilos, and it runs. From us." He picked himself up off the deck blood visible against his teeth through the faceplate.

"You flew very well, Dmitri," Ivan said, dry as bone.

"I have always flown well."

"Cut the chatter." Anya, from the command level. "Good work. All of you."

Ivan stood at the mouth of the hole. The armor was wreckage, the Centauri Guardian set down his left side scored to ruin, one pauldron gone, the underlayer dark and wet where something had gotten through, and he held the dead chainsaw in one hand and the cracked Aegis shield still up on his arm like he hadn't noticed the thing was gone. He was breathing the same as always.

"Down," Luca said. "Ivan. We're clear. Shield down."

It took him a second. Then the shield turned off, and Ivan looked at the dark hole the thing had gone down, the boot still clamped to his back, and he didn't say anything at all.

What was left was work, not a fight. They burned the sacs the thing had left behind, the clusters too unhatched to crawl out after it, and it was ugly and nobody said much. Then they sealed the rock over the hole the whole nest had poured down, so that whatever the thing became in the dark below, it would have to start over to get back in. A handful of arc traps in the chewed side galleries caught the few stragglers that came to the noise. It took the better part of an hour, and somewhere in the middle of it the last red flag in the corner of his vision turned over.

[+18,000 XP]
[+29,260 credits]

[Objective Update: Reclaim Ship Maintenance Facility AC-MF78b]

Designation: Drydock TK-739, Alpha Centauri belt

Clear the infestation (1/1)

Restore primary power and atmospheric processing (1/1)

Establish territorial claim beacon (0/1)

Contribution Reward: 3,000,000 CP

Ivan and Dmitri turned back for the Triumph. Luca took the now restored lift up through the station with Zoe, and the lights came on level by level as they went, the gravity coming up under his boots, the air moving again somewhere below them. By the time they reached the top he had his helmet off, breathing the station's own cold, metal-tasting air. The command theater was where he'd left it, and he went in to finish what he'd come up here to start.

[System Notice: Territorial Claim Established]

Designation: Drydock TK-739, Alpha Centauri belt

Ownership transferred to House Rossi.

Fabrication and maintenance systems online.

Dead consoles woke in a wave down the line, and through the wide port the whole inner sweep of the dock lit up under him, gantries and bays, a dark hulk turning into a working yard while he stood there.

[Objective Complete:]

Reclaim Ship Maintenance Facility AC-MF78b

Contribution Points +3,000,000

It was his. It meant more than that now. Air in the corridors, the lights on, and protection for a thousand people asleep in a vault he would soon wake up. That was the whole reason he'd come up here, to make a secure place to put them while the rest got settled down on the planet, somewhere with a roof and a bed. The place had cost Polina a leg and damn near cost Ivan his hide, but it was lit and breathing and his.

He pulled up the company interface. The contribution balance had already moved, three million points dropped in at once. Then a new objective came in under it, and he knew before he read it that Emily had seen the completion banner.

[Objective Assigned: Can't Wait to Hear All About It]

Task: Interpretive.

Contribution Reward: 0 CP

Note: “Congrats Luca! Come back safe. We've made progress.”

Two and a half light-months out, and she'd already watched the balance move.

He and Zoe stayed up in the command theater long enough to bring the defenses online. The point-defense turrets around the outer ring, and the shield generator over the whole structure. Zoe pulled the power readout and tapped the screen. "Reactor's burning its reserves to hold all this," she said. "We'll need to run fuel up from the Triumph before long." Not today, though. The station had enough in the tank to keep its guns up and its shield lit for weeks, long enough to resupply and make the station habitable. A problem for another day. He was starting to keep a list of those.

He went down to the infirmary before he left the station. Polina was where they'd left her, sealed in the med pod, deep in the repair cycle, her vitals steady green on the displays and the bio-gel doing its slow work. She wouldn't wake for days yet. The doctors had been clear about that.

Ivan was there too, out of the ruined armor now, taped down one side of his ribs with fresh stitches. He sat in the chair beside the pod.

He set the course home himself from the navigation console, up on the Triumph's bridge with the dock falling away behind them.

With the course set, he took the lift down to Deck 6, to the cold storage, and stood a second in front of a row of industrial freezers the size of shipping containers. Each one sealed like an airlock, and each handle, as far as he could tell, did not work from the inside. He'd lived through a Champion two hours ago. He was not going to end up a frozen captain on his own ship because he got careless about a door. He dragged a loading pallet over, wedged it into the gap, leaned on it until he was sure it would hold, and climbed in.

No. No frozen pizzas in this one.

The next freezer down had them, buried under a stack of something, and he hauled out an armful and stood there a second, boxes cold enough to burn through his fingers, grinning at the empty cold-storage like an idiot. He'd run off a nullmaw clan today and walked out owning a whole station, three million points of it, and it was the pizza that did it. He was going to host a pizza party. That's what it was. He kicked the pallet clear and put out the word that the officers' lounge was open.

None of them had been up here before. It showed in the way the Frozen Fangs slowed in the doorway, the way you slow walking into a room nicer than you are, taking in the leather and the dark sweep of the viewport, and a table too clean for the company. Zoe was already inside, freshly showered, hair up, and still damp. The rest of them came in half out of their underlayers, hair flat with helmet sweat, moving like people who'd been hit a lot and would feel every bit of it tomorrow, Dmitri with a cold-pack taped to one shoulder.

Ivan came in last. He'd have rather been down at the pod, and everyone knew it, but everyone was also starving, and he stopped a step inside the door, took in the soft lighting and the good furniture, and said, "Fancy."

"Don't get used to it." Luca cracked the first beer and passed it over, then opened one for himself.

Dmitri held a slice up to the light and considered it. "In Russia," he announced, "we would not call this pizza."

"You're in space," Zoe said. "Eat your space pizza."

He ate it, and then four more.

"Just don't tell Emily we ate in here," Luca said. He dropped onto the couch with his beer and pulled up the entertainment system, scrolling until something with guns in it came up and put on Die Hard.

"It's not Christmas," he muttered. Then he shrugged. He was pretty sure it had Russians in it somewhere, close enough, and figured his Russians might like it.

Partway through the movie, he remembered that Ivan had come in without the boot, the one he'd carried clamped to his back since the trunk corridor, through the whole sweep and the nest and the claim.

"The boot," Luca said. "Where'd it end up?"

"Freezer," Ivan said, and reached for another slice.

Luca had spent the last hour climbing in and out of those freezers before dinner. He ate his pizza and let it be a question for tomorrow.