Chapter 310 - A Way In

The Specter settled onto the open ground a stone’s throw from the Vault, and for a long moment Luca just sat there with his hands on the controls, listening to the wind work at the roll cage.

Zoe stayed with the vehicle, her rifle up and eyes on the tree line where the two Varnathi columns had gone. He left her to it. He climbed out, and his boots hit snow that nobody had touched, none of the trampled grey slush that marked every approach to the other sites. The overflows had been fighting circles around this place for almost eight months, and not one of them had crossed the last kilometer to stand where he was standing.

Pixel dropped down behind him and fell into step at his hip. She wasn’t purring now. Her head was up, and her ears were forward, and she watched the dark stone the way she watched a portal she didn’t trust.

He walked up to the wall and put his hand on it.

The stone was colder than it should be, but the hum was familiar. It was the same vibration that had lived in the back of his mind for a year, almost a lifetime ago. The Vault hadn’t stopped doing whatever it had always been doing. It had just been waiting for someone to come back and lean on it.

Boots crunched up behind him. Avi and Larissa had their helmets off, both of them looking past him at the wall and the dark entrance of it where the darkness pitched downward and into the mountain.

“Is this—” Larissa started, and didn’t finish.

“This is the place,” Avi said it quietly, the joking gone out of him again. His eyes traced the engravings that ran down into the dark, rows of cut figures heading subsurface, deeper than the light reached. “This is where it all started.”

“Put your helmets on,” Luca said, his voice low. He kept his hand on the stone a moment longer, the hum coming up through his glove. “Maybe,” he said, “we can let out a signal.”

Avi looked at him. “Out of here? In this mess?” He tipped his head at the sky, where the EM storm clashed against the blizzard. “We’ve been out of comms range since we crossed in.”

“You’re a field tech.” Luca turned around. “This whole thing is broadcasting. Has been the whole time. You think you can put our line on top of it?”

Avi just stood there, hands going to his hips, looking at the wall like Luca had asked him to talk to it. He didn’t move.

“Well?” Luca said.

“Well what?” Avi spread his hands. “I didn’t bring my kit. We were scouting, not running cable. And even if I had it, what exactly am I plugging into? There’s no panel. No port. No outlet. It’s a rock, Captain. A very, very old rock.”

Luca squinted at him. “Aren’t you an engineer? That’s the whole reason I brought you on my ship.”

That didn’t land the way he’d hoped. Avi gave him a look that said he’d heard better, then turned and waved a hand at the Specter sitting back on the open snow. “Zoe. Bring it up closer, would you?”

The Specter rose a foot and drifted in until it sat almost against the stone. Avi popped the side, leaned over the dash, and pulled the lead off his own scout suit, jacking it straight into the craft’s console instead of the wall. He worked the panel for a few seconds, mouth moving on something Luca couldn’t hear, and the dash threw up a string of readouts that climbed instead of sliding around.

“There,” Avi said, straightening. “Try it now.”

Luca keyed the comm. “Emily, come in.”

Static crackled back, the sound of a line being pulled through a storm.

“Command.” He gave it a beat. “Command, this is Ghost-1.”

The static thinned then broke. A voice came through the other end.

“Captain, we read you.” Polina, steady, relaying. “Emily’s on the line. Patching you now.”

Then Emily came on the line. “Luca. Luca, what’s going on? Are you back?”

“No, Em, listen.” He turned his back to the wind. “We’re at the Vault. We’re at the door, we’re fine. But I’ve got an idea, and the first thing I need is Danny.”

There was a pause on the other end, and then Danny came on, his voice climbing. “Luca, what’s going on? You’re at the Vault?”

“Yeah, Danny, the Vault’s fine. It’s amplifying our signal; that’s how you’re hearing me this clean through the wash.” He watched Avi nod at that, faintly proud of the wall like he’d built it himself. “But listen. That pheromone gland we pulled off a drone on the way in. Zoe said you’d have a field day with it.”

“The Communication one?” The drag went out of Danny’s voice all at once. “I’ve been wanting to get my hands on that since Zoe called it in. Why?”

“Because I want more of them.” Luca turned as snow was now slamming against his visor. “I need a team to get into Site 5. Not all the way in. Just far enough to take down a few drones and pull their glands. We’re going to need them, and we’re going to need more than one.”

The line was quiet for a second.

“Pull together a team of infiltrators,” he went on. “Get them out there, and you go with them.”

“What are you thinking, Luca?” Emily asked, and he could hear her already trying to fit it into the plan she’d built, the one that had broken on the slope this morning.

“There’s no way we get close to either site without a way in,” he said. And stopped there, because he wasn’t completely sure and the plan in his head hadn’t clicked into place yet.

“We have to check Site 3,” he said instead. “I need to confirm something before we do anything else. Have the teams move carefully when they go for those glands. The Vexillari out here have cloaked units; we found that out the hard way. Nobody gets cute.”

“Understood,” said Emily after a moment. “Be careful out there, Captain.”

The forest swallowed them again the second they pulled off the Vault’s clearing, and Luca was glad of it. Out in the open his skin had crawled the whole time, the snow and the dogfight overhead and the feeling of being the one moving thing in a place nobody else would come. Under the trees he had cover and a direction, and the direction was northeast, toward the corner of the sky the Varnathi fighters kept driving out of.

Zoe had the Specter, threading it slowly between the old-growth trunks, and the dash ticked the window down a minute at a time. Avi rode the cannon with his eyes up, watching for anything that watched back. Larissa sat quiet behind Luca. Pixel had stretched out across the whole back bench again, chin on her paws, doing her best impression of a creature with nothing to worry about.

“Keep it under the canopy,” Luca said, biting back the urge to tell Zoe how to drive. “If anything cloaked finds us out here, I want trees between us and it.”

Zoe sighed loudly and took them down into a dip in the ground where a frozen stream ran under the snow.

They went a kilometer like that, then two, the ground tilting up under them. The trees had none of that yellow rot and corrosive fog that had taken over Site 5. Whatever the Varnathi were, they didn’t poison the ground they held.

Then the canopy thinned, and the trees quit at the lip of a long cleared slope, and Luca told Zoe to hold.

The starport stood on the far side of the clearing, and it was the first thing on this whole planet that looked like it had been made by people who knew what they were doing.

It went up. That was the first thing his head caught, the sheer height of it, a white tower of a structure cut into the rise, walls so pale they looked blue against the snow. There wasn’t a scorch or a crack on them, nothing of the weathered alien stone the Vault was made of. This place had gone up recently.

High above the base, floating clear of the tower on nothing he could see, the landing platforms hung in the air. Three of them, then a fourth further up, flat white platforms the size of parking lots holding station fifty, eighty, a hundred meters off the ground, and the fighters sat parked along their edges in neat rows. As he watched, one platform lit at its rim and a fighter lifted off it, clean into the murk, and drove away southwest toward the Vault and the fight he’d just left. Down at the base of the tower, a hangar door stood open, big enough to swallow the Specter ten times over, with light spilling out of it onto the churned snow.

Then the light changed. A second door opened beside it, lower and wider, and a line of Varnathi mechs came out in perfect spacing, white armor hunched under the storm. Infantry followed between them, squads moving without a word, all of them turning south as soon as they cleared the threshold. A wave.

Luca watched them march away from the tower, to meet Site 5’s own wave somewhere in the woods. Site 3 had ground forces. It just didn’t waste them standing beside walls. It threw them out to meet the hive before the hive ever reached the starport.

The System built the fighters in there, the machines and whatever sat in them to fly, and fed them up to the platforms in waves, and it would keep building them as long as the site stood.

Zoe had gone still over the controls, tracking the fighter up out of the murk with that hungry focus she saved for two things in this world, a shot she wanted and a machine she hadn’t flown yet. “Vertical off a standing platform,” she said, low. “They don’t taxi those things, they just drop them off the edge and let them fall into a climb.” She watched another one take off. “That’s good flying.”

“They’re throwing them like darts,” Larissa said from the back, and the two of them shared a look, the look pilots shared over a sky they both wanted a turn at.

New Dawn’s own flora, the rust-red vines and moss that grew thick all through these mountains, had found the white walls and started up them from the ground. Eight months of it now, by the look, red vegetation up the first ten or fifteen meters and no higher, thick at the base and thinning out as it climbed toward where the wall ran out of reach.

Nobody had cut it back. The Varnathi who held this place didn’t live on the ground at all, Luca understood. Back home, the closest thing was an airport, with airplanes or shuttles and dropships, runways and fuel lines and a tower you could see for miles.

Security towers ringed the clearing, and every one of them had its lenses tipped up, watching the platforms and the lanes of sky between them. Not one of them was aimed at the ground. All the movement he could find was up high too, figures walking the platform rails, crews working between the docked fighters. As he watched, one of them stepped off the edge of a platform and didn’t fall, a jetpack at its back lighting blue and carrying it across the open air to the next platform over. Down here, on the forest floor where Luca actually was, the place could barely be bothered to watch.

Barely, though, wasn’t the same as not at all, and he found the one place it did. Out at the edge of the clearing, where the churned snow met the first trees. A Varnathi squad walked a slow patrol of the tree line, four of them in full armor, heads turning, plodding the perimeter.

“That’s a lot of fighters,” Avi said quietly.

“Yeah,” Luca said.

“Stay put,” he told Zoe, and pulled his own rifle off the rack. She took the Specter down off the lip, easing it out over the slope a few feet above the snow and turned its now recharged camouflage.

The squad never broke stride. Four armored shapes plodding the tree line, blind to the black craft drifting up on their flank, because nothing down here was supposed to be hunting them and the System hadn’t built them to expect it.

“Take them out,” he said. “All four, fast, before one of them gets a hand up.”

Luca already had his rifle up and braced across the doorframe. Larissa came half out of her seat on the other side with her own, and Avi laid his plasma sniper over the cannon mount and sighted down it. Three barrels, four targets, and the Varnathi still plodding the tree line with no idea.

“Steady,” Zoe whispered.

“Go.”

The Specter’s open sides lit with the crack of plasma bolts, three shots inside a breath. The lead Varnathi dropped where it stood. The second folded over a hole punched clean through its chest plate. The third spun half around from Larissa’s bolt and went down in the snow. The fourth got exactly as far as Luca had feared, one armored arm coming up, reaching for whatever the Varnathi reached for when they wanted to scream for help, and Luca’s second shot took it through the side of the head before the arm finished rising. It crumpled into the red-streaked snow at the foot of the wall and lay still before they dissolved into black dust.

Up on the platforms, a hundred meters into the sky, nobody so much as turned a head.

“Clean,” Avi said, and didn’t bother to hide that he hadn’t expected it.

Zoe brought the Specter the last stretch in and set it in the deepest cover she could find with a sightline on the clearing, repulsors idling, its hull tucked where the white walls couldn’t throw light on it. Then she killed the camo.

“Far as we ride,” Luca said. “They’ve got towers watching every lane of that sky and a hangar that’ll spit a wave the second something up there notices us.”

Zoe was already swapping a fresh power cell into her rifle, and she had the look. “Finally,” she said. “I was getting tired of driving all day.” Larissa holstered her own blasters and checked them again. Avi pulled his rifle off the cannon mount and looked from it to the long white tower.

Behind him, Pixel lifted her head off her paws, opened her mouth in a wide pink yawn, and stretched as the whole thing bored her.

Luca jumped off the side of the Specter.

“We’re on foot.”