For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the world tore open.

  The first detonation came from below, a deep, gut-punching roar that rose through the soles of Vega’s boots. The pad lurched. Hairline fractures became gaping cracks as the ferrocrete flexed and began to fail.

  A split second later, the shuttle charges went.

  White light knifed out from the pad’s edge, spearing down into the breaches and the Vectar mass beneath. Thunder slammed into Vega’s armor like a physical blow. Her buckler flared reflexively, field shuddering under the blast front.

  “Down!” she shouted, even as the shockwave picked her up and threw her.

  She hit the side of Shuttle Three hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs, then slid into cover behind its buckled landing leg. Debris clanged off the hull—a deadly rain of stone, metal, and steaming Vectar fragments.

  The storm screamed.

  Fire poured from the ruptured pad in jagged columns, streaked with green and blue where alien fluids vaporized. The growth along the edge went incandescent, burning like soaked fabric. Vectar bodies, whole and torn, launched into the air and came down in broken pieces.

  The ground kept moving.

  The spine charges had triggered a cascade. Deep booms rolled underfoot as secondary nodes overloaded. The thrum Vega had felt in the shaft spiked, then stuttered, becoming a chaotic series of hammer blows.

  “Report!” she rasped, forcing herself up on one knee.

  “Alpha… alive,” Park said, voice rough. “Two down, breathing. Minor armor breaches, sealed. No fatalities on us.”

  “Bravo here,” Watson said. “Ears ringing. I think the pad hates us.”

  “Ito,” Vega said.

  “I am up,” he replied. “Rig took a hit, but main systems are intact. The organism… Captain, we hurt it. Badly.”

  She risked a glance around the shuttle’s edge.

  Where the pad had been solid, it was now a jagged wound. The breaches had merged into a broad collapse dropping away into a churning pit of fire and shadow. Chunks of concrete and rebar jutted like broken teeth. Flames licked at exposed segments of growth, which writhed and shrank as if trying to pull back from the heat.

  The Vectars that had been climbing were gone—blown apart, thrown back, or buried.

  For the first time since reaching the surface, there were no immediate enemies on the pad.

  Just wreckage. Fire. And the storm.

  “Advantage Helios,” Watson said, half-strangled. “Briefly.”

  “Do not jinx it,” Park replied.

  Vega’s HUD flickered.

  For an instant, every display went to static, then rebooted in a flicker of diagnostics. Suit systems came back green, but her external feeds showed only noise.

  “Ito,” she said, “status on comms?”

  He did not answer at once.

  “Ito,” she repeated, sharper.

  “Working,” he said at last. “The spike fried half the spectrum. We overloaded the organism’s conductive channels, but the collateral… We cooked our own bands too.”

  “Local net?” she asked.

  “Short range, armor to armor, still good,” he said. “Beyond fifty meters is mush. Storm plus energy dump is… ugly.”

  “And orbit?” Vega asked.

  “I cannot hear anything,” he said. “No carrier. No handshake. No ping.”

  “Dead?” Watson asked, too quickly.

  “Jammed,” Ito said. “I hope. If the Zheng He were gone, we would see something—debris, thermal, gravity wakes. We see nothing because the medium between us is on fire.”

  Vega ground her teeth.

  “Options?” she asked.

  “Wait for the storm to cool and hope interference drops,” Ito said. “Or find higher ground, closer to clearer air.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  She looked around.

  The refinery towers were still standing, some swaying, others cratered by internal failures. Lightning crawled across their upper reaches, drawn to the skeletal frames. The storm boiled thickest over the industrial heart.

  Further out, the habitats were faint darker shapes in the rain—domes and blocky living structures on the horizon. Their status was a question mark.

  “Taggart,” Vega said, turning.

  He was still propped against the barrier, soot-streaked and very pale. The blast had knocked his helmet farther away and added a new crack to his chest plate, but the armor had held—for now.

  He stared past her at the roiling pit where the pad had been.

  “You did it,” he said softly. “You actually did it.”

  “We hurt it,” Vega said. “That is all. It is not dead.”

  He laughed once, without humor. “You really do not like leaving leashes lying around, do you?”

  “Leashes break,” she said. “What is left walks.”

  He grimaced, then looked at Ito. “And our leash to orbit?” he asked. “Gone?”

  “For now,” Ito said.

  Taggart swore. “So we punched the biggest hole we could in this place and cut our own line at the same time,” he said. “Brilliant.”

  “You would have preferred leaving the spine intact,” Vega said.

  “I would have preferred controlled extraction and clean evac,” he said. “But you burned those when you wired the heart.”

  “You burned them when you agreed to black-band this rock,” Vega shot back.

  He did not argue.

  Vega stepped deeper under Shuttle Three’s damaged hull. Rain drummed on the metal above, punctuated by the ping of cooling debris.

  “Count our people,” she said.

  Park and Watson moved through the survivors, HUDs syncing as they checked vitals. Names scrolled across Vega’s display, green or red. Too much red.

  “Total Helios effectives on Kappa,” Park reported, “eleven. That includes us and Taggart. Everyone else is dead, missing, or under that.”

  She nodded toward the pit.

  “Eleven,” Watson echoed. “Out of… everyone who rode down.”

  Vega swallowed that number and kept her voice steady.

  “Captain,” Ito said, “you should see this.”

  He had angled his scanner toward the pit, ignoring the heat warnings. Data streamed in messy lines.

  “The organism is collapsing locally,” he said. “The core under the pad took the worst of it. Major drop-offs in activity along the spine here.” He highlighted the zone under the refinery and its immediate surrounds. “But out here…”

  He expanded the map.

  Thin lines, less intense but still present, traced along the infrastructure: toward the mines, outlying power stations, and the habitats.

  “It spread farther than we thought,” he said. “Weaker, but there. And it is adapting.”

  “How fast?” Vega asked.

  “Hard to say,” he said. “Right now, it is in shock. If it is anything like a nervous system, we just caused a traumatic injury. There will be a refractory period. Given time, it will reroute. Grow around the damage. Use what is left.”

  “How much time?”

  “Best guess?” Ito swallowed. “Hours. Maybe less.”

  “Then we are on a clock,” Vega said.

  Taggart opened his eyes.

  “And where exactly do you plan to spend those hours, Captain?” he asked. “We cannot stay on this pad. It is half gone and still crumbling. We cannot go back down. You saw what is under there. We cannot go up. The sky hates us. That leaves sideways.”

  “Toward the habitats,” Vega said.

  “Toward thirty-two thousand people who might already be dead,” Taggart said. “Or worse.”

  “We have to know,” Vega said. “We cannot call for a sterilization order on a guess.”

  “You already turned the pad into a crater on more than a guess,” he said.

  “That was self-defense and containment,” she said. “What comes next will be policy. That is on Szeto. She needs clear eyes, not half a story.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then gave a grudging nod.

  “You are not going to let this go,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then you go,” he said. “Take whoever is left who can walk. See what is still standing out there. I will stay.”

  “You cannot move,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said. “I will not slow you down. Someone stays with the shuttle, the wounded, and what is left of our supplies. This is as good a bunker as we get until the ground gives up entirely.”

  “You trust the ground?” Watson muttered.

  “I trust nothing,” Taggart said. “But I can still shoot from my ass if something claws up here. You have seen the habitats. You know the routes. Take Park, Ito, Watson. Pick whoever else is breathing and useful. Go.”

  Vega did not like leaving anyone on this pad—least of all a man with a black band over his head and a pistol at his hip. But the math was simple.

  They needed eyes on the habitats. They needed confirmation. Without it, Szeto’s choice would be blind.

  “Park, Ito, Watson,” Vega said. “You are with me. Marines Four and Seven, you too.” Two helmet icons blinked. “Everyone else stays, reinforces the perimeter as best you can. Treat wounds. Conserve ammo.”

  “And if the Vectars come back in force?” one Marine asked quietly.

  “Then you hold as long as you can,” Vega said. “If the ground starts to go under you, fall back into the refinery superstructure. More cover. More choke points. Do not give them a straight line.”

  “You are assuming there will be a ‘back,’” Taggart said.

  “I have to,” Vega replied. “The alternative is sitting here waiting to be eaten.”

  He grunted, which might have been agreement.

  Vega stepped out from under the shuttle, back into the full weight of the storm.

  “Direction?” Watson asked.

  She blinked through rain streaking her visor, pulling up the colony layout from their briefing. Outdated, but the bones would hold.

  “East,” she said. “Main habitat cluster is two kilometers that way. Flat ground for the first half, then low rises. Lots of infrastructure in between. Pipes. Service roads. Places to hide. Places to die.”

  “My favorite,” Watson said.

  “Stay off the obvious lines,” Ito said. “If the organism used the grid as scaffolding, it will be thickest along main power routes. We go between, not on top.”

  “Great,” Park said. “The ankle-breaker path.”

  “Better than walking on a live nerve,” Ito replied.

  Vega keyed the short-range net.

  “This is Vega,” she said. “Helios element moving to habitat cluster to assess survivor status and infection spread. Taggart has Kappa defense. If we go dark for more than four hours, you assume we are dead.”

  “And if we are not?” Watson asked.

  “Then we get to be pleasantly surprised,” Vega said.

  They left the shattered landing zone behind.

  The slope down from the pad was worse than before, mud churned into slick slurry by falling debris and Vectar fluids. The growth had not yet advanced this far up, but thin probes had begun to snake out, pale tendrils seeking purchase.

  They picked a path that gave those tendrils a wide berth.

  Behind them, the pad burned and crumbled, a wound in the earth. Ahead, the habitats sat in the storm like dark, waiting teeth.

  Between, the Vectar lay low, wounded but not dead, its remaining nerves humming under the ruined colony, listening for whatever the human with its stolen code would do next.