Chapter 309 - Dead Center

“Control—” Luca tried again as they cleared the white spongy ground of the overflow. “Come in.”

Static crackled back, and he fought the urge to bang the console. He’d switched the Specter’s active camouflage a few kilometers back; there’d been more movement west and south of the hive than he’d counted on.

“Captain—” Polina’s voice cut through. “Captain, we’re under attack at the Strategos. Situation is contained, but there are active portals here.”

“What’s happening?” Zoe asked.

They had five hundred meters to go, and Luca punched the throttle; the Specter rose a few feet and picked up speed. The Vexillari drones below stopped, their antennae lifting and swiveling as the Specter shot past. Ahead of them, a Vexillari shape that hadn’t been there a second ago rose, its head big and wide. It opened its mandibles on a row of sharp teeth, the dim light catching the points, and as the Specter passed over it, the thing leaned back and spat.

A barb a meter long punched through the chassis between him and Zoe, bigger than anything the hive scouts had thrown at them, the organic spike sizzling where it stuck.

“The fuck!” Avi shouted, swinging the plasma cannon back toward the creature.

They were long gone, the scout already a shrinking shape behind them.

“Luca, come in,” Emily’s voice broke through the comms, out of breath.

“We’re here, making our way back to staging,” he said. “What’s happening?”

“The EM wash from orbit,” Emily said. “All that noise and it obscured local portals. We’re fine; Nyah and her team are holding them off, but we’re under attack. Our shield can only do so much, and the dropships are exposed.”

When it rains, it pours, Luca thought as they sped south. “Ryan, you copy?”

Ryan came up on the channel with an edge of go in his voice that had been building since 0400. “Go ahead. We’re staged and green. Say the word and we launch the attack.”

“Don’t.” Luca watched the ground blur red and white under the Specter, the blizzard thickening by the second. “Stand the column down. I need all of you back at staging.”

The pause stretched out. When Ryan came back, his voice had lost its excitement. “I’ve been listening to Polina call portals in at the Strategos. This about Em? You want me to peel off and cover staging?”

“Staging’s handled, Nyah’s got it.” And that wasn’t the reason anyway, so Luca told him the rest. “This isn’t about Em, Ryan. Our assumptions on the overflows are wrong. All of it.”

Luca could almost see it, eighty people strung out behind Ryan in the snow, geared and ready since before dawn, Ryan at the head of them doing the one thing he had no patience for, which was waiting.

“We went in expecting minimal defenses, like the sites around the Tower,” Luca explained. “That’s not what’s down here. They’re dug in, and there’s a lot more of them than we drew the plan for. If we push in with what we’ve got, it’s going to be a massacre. Pull your people back.”

“Ten-four.” Ryan said, no jokes this time.

“Emily.” Luca switched it over. “We’re heading north and west, heading up to Site 4.”

The overflow gave out behind them by degrees. The yellow spongy floor thinned, broke into patches between the roots, and then it was gone along with its toxic haze. The ground under the Specter’s repulsors was solid again, dark soil topped with snow and red ferns poking out.

The trees changed with it. The grey warped skeletons fell behind, and the living ones took over, evergreens three and four meters at the trunk, their crowns lost somewhere up in the snow. This was the planet’s own forest, Proxima b growth that had been here long before anyone planned a colony on its soil, and the canopy was thick enough overhead that the storm came down softer, broken up into a steady fall instead of the sideways drive out on the open ground.

The hole the barb had punched through the chassis was still there between his seat and Zoe’s, a clean melted ring the width of his fist, the cold air whistling up through it. Pixel did not look impressed.

“Better cover in here,” Zoe said, her rifle back up on the dash.

“For everybody,” Luca said. Out by the Vexillari overflow he could see a thing coming a hundred meters off. In here the forest gave him cover and gave the Varnathi exactly as much.

The snow only got heavier the deeper they pushed, sifting down through the canopy and loading the ferns and the branches, snow on everything and more of it hanging in the air between the trunks. The whole forest had gone quiet and still. Somewhere ahead the neutral ground ran out and the Varnathi’s started.

“Control, this is Ghost-1.” Luca kept his voice down out of habit. “We’re crossing the threshold.”

He held his thumb on the channel and waited. Static. He gave it another second. The same interference they had from Site 5 again; the electromagnetic was swallowing every signal.

“Comms are out,” he said. “Both ways.”

“So we’re on our own again,” Zoe said, her eye still on the scope.

“On our own again.”

In the back, Larissa hauled the charge handle on her rifle and let it snap forward, the same check she’d already run twice since the dropship. “At least it’s Varnathi,” she said. “We know Varnathi.”

“A month of them in portals,” Avi said from the turret, and the familiar enemy seemed to settle something in him the bugs hadn’t. “Practically family at this point.”

That was half of why Luca had pulled these two onto the Specter and left the heavy hitters with Ryan. They were quiet, they were good in close, and they didn’t spook at something they’d already killed a hundred times.

“Eyes open,” Luca said. “Here we go.”

He kept the Specter low and slow between the trunks, its active camouflage still recharging.

Zoe called the first spotter before he saw it. “Eleven o’clock. Up high.”

Luca slowed the Specter down. It took him a second to find it. Where the Vexillari chewed the ground into sponge, the Varnathi had built straight into the towering trees. The spotter sat forty meters up the trunk of one of the big evergreens, a hard grey pod clamped to the bark with a cluster of sensors turning slowly on top under a cap of snow. Luca couldn’t find a way up, unless the outline of a trapdoor beneath it was an indicator. If Zoe hadn’t put his eye on the one straight edge in a forest that didn’t have any, he’d have driven right under it.

“There’s more of them,” Zoe said. “Spread out. They’ve got the whole approach wired.”

“Yeah.” Luca eased off, set the Specter down behind a large bush, and killed the forward motion. “We can’t just drive into that.”

“Think there’s anyone up there?” Avi asked, peering up at the spotter.

“Probably.” Luca checked the dash. Two minutes left on the cooldown before he could activate the camouflage back up, and once it took, it would give them twelve minutes before it needed to cool down again. Six to push in, six to get back out, and whatever they could see in between. “Think we can make the site and back inside that?”

“Don’t take any detours,” Zoe said, her eye still on the scope.

“Keep Pixel in the Specter and your finger off the trigger.” He meant all of them, and they knew it.

The cooldown cleared. Luca eased the throttle up, and the Specter rose, two feet, four, six off the ground, the drives humming up to pitch and then going quiet as the camo took. Beside him, Zoe faded into barely an outline. Avi and Larissa and Pixel in the back were just gone. He took them forward, deeper into the overflow site.

The forest slid past without a sound. He kept the Specter low between the trunks and watched the dash count down.

The first buildings came up on the right, a row of them low and long under the trees, smooth white walls and sealed doors with light bleeding out around the seams, heat shivering off the roofs into the snow. Varnathi moved between them in white, long coats. Techs with tablets and hard cases crossed between them without hurry while squads in full armor stood posted at the building corners.

The deeper ones were bigger, set in rows with low six-wheeled haulers parked between them and more of the white coats going door to door. The Varnathi had left every tree they could and threaded the whole thing in under the canopy, so the forest itself roofed it.

“What’s that?” Zoe asked, her voice low.

Two of the white coats were walking a cart out of the nearest building, and Luca put the scope on it. A single grey round rode the cart in a padded cradle, longer than a man, finned at the tail, lifting lugs welded down the casing. They wheeled it to a waiting hauler, and a loader arm folded down to take it.

“Shit,” Avi said softly from the turret. “Is that what I think it is.”

“Yeah.”

He didn’t turn around. The main site was the whole reason they’d pushed in this far, and it sat right there past the last buildings. “One look,” he said.

He pushed the Specter out past the last buildings, and the tree cover quit. Open ground, and the wind hit the Specter. He kept them low, six feet over the churned snow, and took it slow.

The slope ran wide and clear between the buildings and the main site, a kill zone wide enough that anything crossing it in a snowstorm would still be visible. He counted four guard posts along the near edge, Varnathi in full armor with their heads turning slowly. More squads beyond the perimeter past that, spread at intervals, close enough to cover each other. A pair of the squat vehicles sat at the base of the slope with their guns elevated on the open ground.

The main site filled the ridge ahead: a bunker, concrete and raw, cut into the rock face, roads zig-zagging down the front of it and in. A wide armored tunnel sat at the base where the slope funneled in, vehicle-sized, heavy blast doors peeled back and a guard post on each side. Gun towers high at the corners, and at the very top a landing pad lit and cleared, snow blowing straight off the surface. The roads went in and kept going down, and he couldn’t see where they stopped.

Off the near flank, under long shelters with snow loading the roofs, the rounds sat racked in their hundreds.

“They’re building a stockpile,” Avi said. “That’s not front-line resupply. That’s months of it, racked and waiting. They’re making a lot more than they’re throwing.”

Luca weighed one of the grey rounds in his head, wondering whether two people could lift it and whether it would fit atop the Specter. Somewhere in that, a plan began to come together.

A column was forming up out of the armored entrance.

It came out in ranks and split. Hundreds of the heavy infantry, the squat vehicles in among them, a pair of tracked things at the back too big to be anything but artillery, all of it pouring out and dividing against the snow, one column bending east toward Site 5 and the Vexillari, the other driving off to the northwest.

Luca watched the two columns pull apart into the trees, and the last clean line of the plan went crooked in his head. The briefing had Site 4 and Site 5 locked on each other, one front, one line between two armies. That had never been true. Half this force was going east to meet the Vexillari, the other half was driving northwest for Site 2, and somewhere east the Vexillari were still coming for this place. Five sites. Five separate battlefronts. Every army fighting two enemies at once, none of them strong enough to break through, and the crew had dropped into the middle of it, braced for a tug-of-war.

The dash chimed. Six minutes, the whole window gone.

“Time’s up,” he said. “We’ve seen enough.”

He brought the Specter around off the rise, swinging wide and east around the buildings, the trees between them and the spotters the whole way, until the cleared slope and the lit roofs were behind them and the forest closed back up. By the time the camouflage was down to its last seconds, they were northeast of the site, a long way from where they had crossed in.

Three more sites still to look at, and Luca brought the Specter northeast, cutting the inside line between the two columns instead of running the long way around them.

He got about a kilometer before the trees opened, and what stood in the clearing ahead made him take his foot off the throttle.

He knew it on sight, the dark weathered stone and the geometry that belonged to no world the System had ever touched, the same as the place he’d walked into, chasing a signal, the day the Varnathi stopped being a lore entry and turned into something that breathed.

The Vault. He’d known it was down here, under the mountains, in every briefing they’d built the plan from. It had never once occurred to him that cutting northeast would run the Specter straight across its doorstep, dead center of the ring, while five armies marched their circles around the edge and never reached for it.

Whatever should have been on that landing pad was up here instead, over the Vault. High through the breaking cloud Luca caught them, Varnathi fighters driving in hard out of the northeast, out of Site 3, and the Vexillari fliers strung across the sky above the Vault to meet them. One came apart as he watched, an orange tear in the murk and a long fall of burning pieces down into the trees. The pad at Site 4 was empty because nothing the Varnathi sent in from Site 3 ever got past them to land.

And there he was, stopped in the open with the camouflage dead, the dogfight ripping up the sky over his head and the Vault sitting under all of it, untouched.