Chapter 311 - The Key

Luca exhaled and held still, letting his suit’s passive camouflage adjust to the outer structure. No more patrols had come since the one they had taken out. It was quiet.

Something kept nagging at him. The key to the whole thing was sitting right there, close enough to bother him and still out of reach.

“What are we looking for, Captain?” Larissa asked. She was kneeling in the snow two hundred meters west of him, with Avi spotting for her.

“I’m not sure yet,” Luca said.

The sites had been in constant overflow for the past eight months, yet they balanced each other perfectly. Tip one side too hard, and the other would roll straight through whatever was holding it back. What happened after that was anyone’s guess, and Luca hated guesses when eighty people were waiting on him to get one right.

The System was leaving them breadcrumbs. Site 4 manufactured ordnance. Site 3 had the fighters to carry it. That was what the platforms meant; he was sure of it. The transfer had never happened, though. For eight months, Vexillari flyers from Site 2 had cut the route between Site 3 and Site 4.

“There’s gotta be a key somewhere,” Luca said. “A weak spot, a counter. Something in this base counters one of the Vexillari sites, and one of theirs has something that disables this one. We have to find it.”

“Then let’s go,” Zoe said. She lay below him in the snow, her sniper rifle trained on a service entrance at ground level. She had watched the door since they took position.

“We can’t trip the objective—” Luca started.

“Then how do you expect to find the counter?” Zoe asked. She was itching to get inside. Luca knew the feeling, which was exactly why letting her indulge it would be a terrible idea.

“We never tripped the objectives for the previous sites,” Avi said.

“Because we never entered them.” Luca looked down at his rifle. A thought came together quickly enough that he had already reached for his rifle’s sling before he finished examining it. “What if we go in unarmed?”

Without weapons, the System might not tag them as attackers. Once an Objective appeared, the site’s defenses would flare up, and Luca had no idea what the cooldown mechanic was for returning them to normal. If the site’s own waves turned inward, the stalemate around the Vault would change.

“You know,” Zoe said, reading him as though he were transparent, “Emily warned me about this.”

“What?” Luca asked. He unstrapped his rifle and set it against the wall.

“She said it was dangerous when you started thinking.”

“Funny.” Luca unhooked the Tomahawk and handed it to her. “I’m going in.”

Luca felt exposed, and pretending otherwise would have been a waste of effort. With his Phantom helmet sealed and only a hacking pad at his hip, he crossed the open ground between the outbuilding and the base of the Varnathi starport. His boots left a trail through the snow. Every step looked too obvious, but no Objective appeared in his interface.

He reached the service door and tried the handle. It held. A control panel sat beside it, tucked between the smaller entrance and the hangar door that had disgorged the ground wave. He pulled out his TL9 hacking pad and set it against the panel.

The security was embarrassingly thin. The lock fought him for three seconds, clicked, and slid open.

Avi hit the wall beside him before he could cross the threshold, his own Phantom helmet sealed. His hard breathing came over the comm.

“Hey, Captain,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

Luca looked him over once and saw no rifle or blaster. No dagger on his belt either, unless Avi had figured out how to hide a weapon in his skin-tight suit.

“You armed?”

“Brought my smile,” he said.

Luca wanted to tell him no, he really did. But Avi was still an engineer, technically, and right now “technically” was the best Luca had.

“Stay behind me.”

“Sure.”

“If the Objective comes up—”

“We run screaming?”

Luca gave him a look, then turned toward the dark interior. “Try to keep the screaming off comms.”

The service corridor turned twice before it joined the starport proper. Luca let the Phantom suit’s passive camouflage match the dark walls and kept [Ghost Protocol] in reserve. The adaptive field covered him from his sealed helmet to his boots, but it enclosed him perfectly only when he stopped; in motion, the suit did its best to maintain ambient color patterns. Avi’s armor behaved the same way.

“Larissa, Zoe, we’re inside,” he said.

“No change out here,” Larissa answered. “The door closed behind you.”

“Watch it for us.”

“Already am.”

The corridor opened onto a maintenance room warm enough that melted snow ran off Luca’s boots. Racks of narrow tools covered one wall. Two Varnathi technicians worked at a bench with their backs to him, their rust-colored tails passing components between them while they stayed busy inside an open machine.

A plasma cutter lay within Luca’s reach. The System could call it a tool if it wanted. He had seen what one did to armor.

He left it alone.

Avi edged against the wall first. Luca followed him through the opposite door and into a loading bay where white-armored infantry stood around a pair of twelve-foot mechs. Missile pods hung open while technicians loaded them from carts. Nobody guarded the room. Why would they? The entire building sat behind an army and several dozen fighters.

One of the mechs stepped backward without warning.

Luca caught Avi by the vest and hauled him into the narrow space between two storage cabinets. The mech’s foot came down where Avi had been standing, close enough that the impact traveled up Luca’s legs. Its pilot turned the machine toward the exit, rotary cannons tracking with the torso; the large hangar door slid open, and they marched out with six infantry following.

“Thank you,” Avi said after the last armored tail cleared the door.

The passive camouflage rippled as they crossed behind the second mech.

“Zoe, heads up,” Luca said. “A couple of mechs and a squad heading out.”

Luca slowed until his suit settled against the loading bay’s white walls, then followed Avi into a lift lobby. A vertical diagram on the wall showed the hangar below them, three maintenance levels, a command level, and four narrow bridges extending toward the floating platforms. The bridges ended before they reached the platforms.

He pointed at the command level.

The hangar bay door showed open on the diagram. Two mech markers and an infantry cluster were already moving toward it.

A side door in the lobby slid open. Luca stepped through before he registered the room beyond, and Avi followed because apparently both of them had decided that an unknown room beat the known mech hangar.

They had walked into a pilot-ready room. Helmets filled the wall racks, and white pressure suits hung open beneath them. Luca recognized the cut immediately. Striker Mk-I, or close enough. Zoe’s old suit still sat in storage aboard the Triumph, torn open where she had crawled out of the wreck.

A dozen female Varnathi pilots gathered around a tactical display at the far end while a Commander moved routes across the map. Two were already suited with their helmets sealed. The others were still getting dressed, pulling flight suits into place while their tails twitched.

“Avi, eyes on the exit,” Luca whispered. “Don’t be a perv.”

“What? They’re not real.”

Luca and Avi lowered themselves behind the nearest equipment bank. Passive camouflage could hide them against the white walls if they stayed still, but warm bodies were passing close and reflective visors waited to betray every blurred movement.

This was what [Ghost Protocol] was for.

Luca triggered the ability, and the Phantom suit dissolved around him from his boots upward. Avi vanished a second later. Twelve minutes appeared at the edge of Luca’s interface.

“What are you doing?” Zoe hissed through their comms.

“Found you a replacement flight suit, Zoe,” Luca replied. “We’re at a changing room for Varnathi pilots.”

“Is that why—” she started. “Oh, I’m telling Lucy.”

Luca felt Avi freeze beside him.

“What?” Avi whispered, suddenly desperate.

The briefing ended, and the pilots filed through the far door in pairs, close enough that the last one’s tail swept across the top of the bank. Luca waited for her to clear, then followed, gaining the stairwell without crossing the lobby again. Behind them, the white warning light became green, and heavy footsteps entered the hangar below.

The lift was out of the question. They took the service stairs, climbing around armed crews moving down toward the hangar. [Ghost Protocol] removed their heat and stabilized the camouflage while they moved, but it could not make the stairwell wider. Twice Luca pressed against the inner rail while Varnathi passed close enough for their tails to brush the air over his boots.

At the third landing, a Commander stopped directly in front of him.

She was shorter than Luca, silver-furred, with a plasma rifle across her chest and an officer’s band glowing around one ear. Her nose lifted. The ears on top of her head turned toward him.

Luca went still.

The Commander took one step closer, sniffed again, and looked down at the wet print his boot had left on the deck.

“Captain,” Zoe said over the comm, “two fighters are coming home. Looks like they took damage.”

Wonderful timing. Luca kept his hand away from the hacking pad at his hip while the Varnathi stared at the print between them.

The starport vibrated. An alert sounded overhead, and the Commander’s ear band flashed. She turned and bounded up the stairs, taking three steps at a time.

Luca waited until she cleared the next landing. Avi’s invisible hand closed around his wrist before he could move.

“Print,” Avi said.

Luca looked down. Melted water marked the stairs behind them in a neat dotted line. His suit concealed him across half the electromagnetic spectrum and still couldn’t help against the snow.

They wiped the worst of it with their boots as they climbed. It was slow, awkward work, and [Ghost Protocol] dropped under six minutes before they reached the command level.

The door opened into organized chaos, and Luca’s body remembered the last Varnathi command room before his mind caught up.

A room full of voices, commanders bent over displays. Tails moving through the glow, and then darkness. Zoe’s dagger cracking to life beside him, his own Tomahawk slicing through the air. Varnathi screaming in a room with blocked exits.

Luca’s hand twitched for a weapon he didn’t have.

That was new. Or maybe it wasn’t new anymore, and that was the part that bothered him. The last Varnathi command room had taught him something ugly about himself: that he could move through screams and darkness and keep choosing the next target. He had carried that lesson out with him, even when he wished he hadn’t.

He forced his fingers open.

This was not that room.

Not yet.

Varnathi voices overlapped in a circular control theater built around a holographic map of the region. Every station was occupied by a female Commander in the same pale tactical armor, with ear bands flashing as orders moved through them. Their fur ranged from white to deep brown. Bright tails curled around chair supports or worked secondary controls beneath the desks.

Luca and Avi crouched behind the last row.

The map gave Luca the answer the moment he understood what he was seeing. Five sites glowed across the terrain, crossed by moving lines that represented forces already in the field. Varnathi blue marked Site 3 on the eastern side of the map and Site 4 to the southwest. Vexillari red marked Site 5 to the southeast, Site 1 in the north, and Site 2 just west of it.

The theater controlled every fighter launching from this one.

Flights peeled away from the starport toward Site 2, where Vexillari flyers rose to meet them north of the Vault. A thinner route ran southwest toward the allied Site 4, but it never completed. Every fighter on it disappeared where Site 2’s aerial screen crossed the route.

The third route ran south toward the Vexillari hive at Site 5. Mech icons advanced through the forest with squads moving on foot between them, directly against the hive’s heavier concentrations.

“It’s the theater,” Luca said. “This is the counter.”

“Or one of them,” Avi answered.

A station directly in front of Luca cleared as its Commander hurried toward the center map. The display remained active. Regional flight-control architecture filled one side, followed by a schematic for the command relay and a System prompt waiting in his interface.

[Objective Available: Seize the Starport]
Hostile command node within reach. Engage to contest the site.
Confirm to begin.

Luca’s fingers moved before his better judgment caught up. The schematic was right there. One touch, and it would be his.

Avi caught his hand.

“You touch that, and every rifle in here turns around,” he said.

“I know.”

“Your hand.”

Luca pulled it back. “Keep watching it.”

[Ghost Protocol] hit thirty seconds.

They retreated behind a structural column at the outer wall. Luca pressed himself against its white surface while Avi crowded in beside him, and the active concealment collapsed. Their Phantom suits shifted to passive camouflage, matching the wall perfectly while they held still. Movement would turn them into two human-shaped blurs in a room full of Commanders.

The damaged fighters reached the platform. The theater changed around their arrival as officers redirected crews, cleared a landing lane, and sent another flight toward Site 2. One silver-furred Commander walked down the outer aisle toward Luca’s column.

He held his breath.

She stopped within two meters and studied a side display. Her tail reached behind the column, feeling for a recessed control strip. The tip brushed Luca’s gauntlet.

Avi tightened his grip on Luca’s forearm. Luca had already tensed to catch the tail, which would have been an inspired way to start a fight with no weapons.

The Commander tapped the strip and opened a narrow door beside them. Cold air rolled into the theater. She stepped through and let it close.

“That door goes to the platform bridges,” Avi said.

“Then that’s our way out.”

They waited for the theater to surge toward another launch order, then crossed the aisle one careful step at a time. Their camouflage blurred at the edges with every movement. A brown-furred Commander looked up as Luca reached the door. Avi flattened against the wall, becoming white again, while Luca stopped with his hand two centimeters from the control.

The Commander stared past him, ears turning. A launch timer reached zero on the main display. The platform outside discharged a fighter into the storm, and every station flashed with telemetry.

Her attention dropped to her console.

Luca touched the door control. He and Avi slipped through before it closed.

The passage beyond was an enclosed maintenance spine that projected from the tower into open air, twenty feet of thick white structure ending beneath the nearest platform without touching it. Three more spines extended from other levels, each aimed at a different floating deck.

Wind hammered the narrow inspection windows. Luca looked through the nearest one at the broad emitters built into the end of the spine. Bundled conduits as thick as his body fed into their housings, which projected twenty feet out from the tower without touching the platform.

The emitters hummed with enough power to make the air shimmer around them. Above, thousands of tons of metal, fighters, fuel, and air-defense batteries hung over the forest with nothing beneath them but a pale blue arc of light. It was an engineering miracle and a very large target.

Avi leaned close, voice barely audible over the wind. “Those are load anchors.”

Luca didn’t look away. “Can they break?”

“Everything breaks.”

“Avi.”

“Yes,” Avi whispered. “With the right kind of acid, yes.”