Chapter 315 - Rising

覆水盆に返らず

Fukusui bon ni kaerazu — “Spilled water cannot return to the tray.”

Chris’s heart rate had not dropped below a hundred and forty since they’d come up through the bore in the root mound, the ribbed throat that had let the two of them up onto the grove floor. It sat there in the corner of Danny’s visor, a red line the squad feed pulled off Chris’s armor, pegged high and holding.

The Vexillari slime they’d troweled over their armor an hour back had worked into every seam of Danny’s power armor until the white plating underneath was fully covered, and every few minutes the multitool tried to tell him what it was made of, sulfur and protein chains it logged and stored. He was glad the seal spared him the rest of it. Chris had the same coat of it over his medium rig, plus the acid case clipped to his belt.

“How the fuck are we going to send a signal?” Chris asked as he climbed over another boulder of the stuff. He wasn’t asking Danny so much as himself.

The vegetation went up around them in thick stalks, the floor between the stalks moved, and columns of Vexillari poured out of the holes in the root areas, heading away southeast, toward Site 4 walking past on both sides and not one head turning their way. The goop was doing its job. To everything in here, the two of them read as a pair of drones that smelled right and crept by slowly, and the swarm gave them the exact wide berth it gave its own.

Danny’s multitool had been scanning the air since they clambered into the site, and it didn’t like what it found. Methane, ammonia, a spore load thick enough to clog its intakes, and, beneath all of it, a volatile hydrocarbon. One good spark and the grove went up like a fuel-air charge. He’d said as much to Chris on the way in. Chris had not been impressed.

The storm was doing its best to strip that disguise back off them. It had been building all morning, and the wind had picked up, shoving through the stalks in long gusts and driving the snow sideways in sheets that shut visibility down to the next trunk. The bile they’d troweled on an hour ago had started freezing over them, a grey crust that cracked at every joint Danny bent and shed flakes off into the wind. He made himself not count how much of their cover was blowing away one frozen chip at a time.

Neither of them said so out loud, not with the grove maybe listening.

Up on the ridge to the north and east, past the native tree line, Anke and Alejandro were prone in the snow by now, rifles aiming into the site and watching the two of them. Danny couldn’t see them, not through the whiteout and the vegetation. He just knew they were up there, two sets of eyes and a prayer away.

“Just gotta, I dunno.” Danny turned the spare gland over in his glove. “Squeeze some juice out of it. Maybe warm it up.”

Chris looked at him. “Warm it up?”

“Yeah. Kinetic energy, right? Get the molecules moving, put some noise on the channel they all talk on.” Danny wobbled the gland to demonstrate.

“Have you even tested this?”

“You know we haven’t.”

“Danny.”

“It’s all educated guesses, man.” He said it as gently as he could, because Chris was about a minute from vibrating out of his own skin. Chris lived in the gym, ate his beam rifle for breakfast, and right now the strongest man on the op had exactly two empty hands and an empty case to carry. “We worked on the chemistry all night, with Eleanor, who’s more into exo-biology and stuff. Franco and Anika cooked this up with her.”

The two big Heralds, for that’s what the multitool called them, stood right where Luca had put them, out on a shelf of organic shell where the ore seam cut the clearing in a bright jagged line. Impossibly large and slimy, low on braced legs, the whole back half of each swollen into sacs that glowed slow green from the inside. Drones worked over them, tending the legs, the sac walls, milking. Danny watched one drone press up under a sac and draw a bead of acid off into a belly tank, and the Herald didn’t so much as twitch.

The things were docile, Danny guessed, because they spent all day getting handled, and Danny supposed he and Chris smelled enough like them to blend in. As far as the Heralds were concerned, this was just another shift.

“Okay,” Danny breathed. “Walk up like you own the place.”

He walked in, squishing across the organic, bouncy surface one boot at a time. Fluids from the living carpet stained the snow beneath him as he set a glove against the flank of the nearest sac. The multitool put the light membranous shell at three hundred and thirty-one degrees. Danny’s hand, covered by his armored gauntlet couldn’t feel the heat, but the vapor hissing up from the snow melting against the sac gave every indication that the reading was correct.

He held the gland to the bare vein and squeezed.

“Come on,” Danny whispered.

He kneaded it harder, forcing warmth and pressure through the dead tissue until the grey sac slicked against his glove. Then the vein under it flexed.

One pulse.

Then another.

The gland beat against the Herald’s line, a soft answering rhythm that ran through the sac wall and into whatever network lay under the grove. Danny held it there and tried not to think too hard about what was listening on the other end.

“Did it work?” Chris was right at his shoulder now, and the red line in Danny’s visor had finally come down off its peg.

“I don’t know.” Danny reached up to push his glasses up his nose and rapped his glove off the faceplate instead, a dull tap of nothing. For a second, he felt like a kid again, trying to adjust his frames in the middle of a New Hampshire snowball fight. His glasses were back on the Gorgon with his hammer and Eleanor, and at that moment he missed all three about equally.

Then, above the clearing, the grouping of Vexillari fliers flying in circles over the grove came apart. The whole formation leaned, tilted, and dragged itself onto one long turn to the southeast, pouring away toward Site 4.

“...Danny.”

“I see it.”

They took the acid the same way the drones did, and it was the worst thing Danny had done with his hands in about forever. Chris got the case open, the lining a dull ceramic Eleanor swore would hold the stuff for six hours, and Danny milked the sac the way he’d watched the drone do it, thumb up under the swollen wall, coaxing a rope of thick mucus green fluid down into the case while it hissed and smoked where a stray drop found the shell floor. His HUD threw a corrosion warning. He ignored it. The Herald shifted its weight, blinked something that might have been an eye, and went back to feeding the thing under the ground.

“Enough,” Chris said. “That’s enough, seal it, seal it.”

Danny sealed it. The latches bit down and the case was sealed, and for one whole second, crouched in the filth of an alien hive with a case of poison between them, he let himself believe they were going to walk out of this clean.

They ran, and running across a grove floor churned to slime by ten thousand passing feet was less running than a controlled sequence of falls. Danny went down twice. The second time he caught himself on a root mound, felt the acid case skid out of Chris’s grip, and snatched it out of the muck before it could tip. Chris hauled him up by the pauldron. They slipped and swore and stumbled northeast into the wind, toward the tree line and the ridge where Anke and Alejandro were watching them flail.

They were maybe halfway when the sky came apart.

Varnathi fliers roared over head, coming in low over the towering stalks, close enough for their shadows to race across the snow. A heartbeat later, the grove ignited.

Cannon fire tore through the high hives, its dry foliage detonated in white-gold light. One hive went up, then the next, then the whole canopy became a burning ceiling a hundred meters overhead. Fire rolled through the stalks in sheets, and burning matter began to rain down around them.

“Move,” Chris was shouting, “move, move—”

Danny moved. Behind them the clearing lit gold, and something far down under the roots shifted its weight in a way he felt in his boots more than heard, slow and enormous and awake.

His interface flashed white across the burning grove.

[Objective Assigned: Vexillari Swarm]
Threat designation confirmed.
Vexillari Progenitor is rising.
Primary Tasks:
Defeat the Swarm (1/3 defeated)
Defeat the Progenitor (0/1 defeated)
Contribution Reward: 500,000 CP

The mushroom stood over Site 5 on a single stem. Sato Inoue needed to get to its base, four hundred meters into the worst place on the map.

He crouched at the tree line and held still a moment before he moved. Behind him the bomb sat heavy in its cradle between Miguel and Farid, four hundred pounds of it, and even in powered armor the two of them set it down slow, servos whining under the weight. Out behind him in the whiteout the Gorgon sat with its engines idling and its ramp down, Avi’s people and the two pilots watching the site through the storm, near enough to see and too far to be any use. One of the bombs had already gone with them, for Zoe. This one was his to set.

Joao lay flat at his shoulder, reading the ground for a way in. The cradle itself had been borrowed from the Varnathi at Site 4, after its owner turned to dust with a bolt of plasma through the head. All four of them were slick with Vexillari bile, the grey fluids thick over their armor and already stiffening in the cold, so the swarm would take them for its own.

Miguel, Farid, Joao. They were his to bring in and his to bring out, the same as the bomb was, and Sato had never yet left a man behind him in the dark.

The blizzard had intensified while they staged. It came over the open ground in walls now, wind hard enough to lean into, the snow driving flat and everything past twenty meters gone to white. The bile had frozen on all four of them into a stiff grey rind that cracked when they moved, and they would have to trust it anyway, because it was the only thing between them and the swarm.

“When we get home,” Joao said, his teeth audible over the channel, “I am buying an island. Somewhere warm. Everyone is invited except the crazy guy who picked this planet.”

Sato didn’t smile, and he didn’t tell him to quit.

“Slow,” he said over the cell channel. “Like we’re being delivered.”

They walked in slowly, carrying the large bomb between them.

The large stem ahead stopped being a shape in the storm and became a wall of pale living matter, ribbed and faintly lit from the inside, climbing until the blizzard swallowed it. The spongy ground beneath them shook with outbound traffic. Vexillari poured past on both sides, north and west, mindless and without end, and the four of them crossed against that current at the pace of a loaded drone.

Something heavy broke from the column and stopped in front of Sato.

It lowered its head until Sato could have laid a palm flat on the ridged plate between its eyes. Wet black eyes watched him from under hooks of chitin. Its mandibles opened and closed in slow, tasting clicks, and its forelimbs hung folded against its chest, blade-tips flexing each time it breathed.

It drew in the air around him.

Sato held still and hoped his team would do so as well.

The mandibles opened revealing darkness inside. Threads of saliva stretched between them, steaming in the cold. One claw touched the bile frozen over his chest plate, a light tap against him that almost pushed him over.

Then the creature lifted its head, decided he was nothing worth killing, and rejoined the march.

“I think it likes you, chefe,” Joao breathed. “You should ask it to dinner.”

Sato didn’t answer him. “The stalk,” he said. “Find us the way in.”

Forty meters to the base, he signed, and they closed the distance.

The base of the stem opened around them, warm and pale and ribbed, a slow tide running up into the dark cap overhead. Miguel had the cradle open before Sato finished clearing the ground at the roots.

Sato set himself over the two engineers, and watched the dark they had come through while they worked.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Seating it.” Miguel had both arms into the cradle.

Farid ran the fuse alongside him and called the window. “Timer goes live when I close it. Four minutes on the clock. That’s your run.”

Four minutes. Sato had walked the route coming in, and four minutes held enough margin, if nobody fell.

“Close it,” Sato said.

Farid closed the seal and the bomb woke under his hands with a low pulse, and then the four of them were up and moving back down the way they had come in on.

Sato turned before the sound finished. “Move.”

They moved, not fast at first. Not until they had cleared the roots and reached the churned path they had made coming in. Then Sato broke into a run, and the others followed, the four of them running through a river of Vexillari traffic that had begun to hesitate around them, heads lifting, mandibles tasting the air.

Three minutes and forty seconds.

The thought had barely formed when the stem behind them flashed white.

The bomb had not waited for the timer. The heat found something inside the mushroom, some deep reservoir of spore and gas and volatile breath, and the whole base answered at once.

The blast opened under the stem.

For one instant, the world behind Sato became daylight. The pale column lit from the inside, veins burning green-white all the way up into the storm. Then the stem split.

A wound opened through four hundred meters of living support, and the sound came after it, so deep it turned the snow in the air to mist and punched the ground out from under Sato’s boots.

He was airborne before he understood he had fallen.

The cap began to come down.

At first it looked impossible. Too large to move. Too large to be part of the same world as the four men running under it. The giant cap of pale fungus sagged overhead, its underside glowing through the blizzard, ribs and hanging shelves and whole nests tearing loose as the ruined stem folded beneath it.

Sato hit the ground hard enough to lose his vision for a moment. Snow and slime filled his visor. Warning icons bloomed and vanished. He got one hand under Joao’s arm and hauled him forward, because forward was the only order left in his body.

Behind them, Miguel shouted something.

Then the falling cap hit the outer stalks.

His last clear thought went to the two men still coming in behind him, Miguel and Farid, and to the fact that he had walked them in and was not going to walk them out.

Then the mushroom finished falling, and Site 5 went dark over all of them.

In Luca’s interface, the Objective window updated.

[Objective Updated: Vexillari Swarm]
Defeat the Vexillari Hive
Primary Tasks:
Defeat the Swarm (2/3 defeated)
Defeat the Progenitor (0/1 defeated)
Contribution Reward: 500,000 CP