The chittering was not one voice. It was a chorus.
A dry, sharp, unnervingly complex sound, like a thousand pieces of broken glass being shaken in a metal box. A sound that did not belong in the dead, mechanical silence of the Vanguard. It was the sound of life. A hungry, alien life that was now fully, horribly aware of their presence.
Haruto froze on the maintenance ladder, his body pressed flat against the cold, vertical support strut. Every muscle, every sinew, every nerve ending screamed at him to keep moving, to get to the relative safety of the gantry above. But his training, the cold, hard-wired discipline of a dozen campaigns, held him in place. Assess the threat. Identify the target. Do not move without a plan. His mind was a frantic, grinding engine, trying to fit this new, impossible data into a tactical framework that simply didn't exist. Not soldiers. Not a security automaton. Something else. Something that belonged to the world outside the ship, the world they were now irrevocably exposed to.
The air itself was a battlefield of smells. From below, from the deep, dark heart of the ship, came the familiar, sterile scents of his own world—ozone, hot metal, the faint, dead smell of recycled air. But from the breach, from the pale, milky light of the caves, came a flood of new, overwhelming sensations. The wet, loamy smell of damp earth. The sharp, mineral tang of wet stone. And something else, something underneath it all, a faint, sharp, almost chemical scent like ammonia, the smell of a hive.
A nest.
A strangled, whimpering noise came from below him. Kaito.
"What is it?" the younger man's voice was a raw, frayed whisper. "What is that sound?"
Haruto didn't answer. He was watching the breach. A shadow detached itself from the forest of alien crystals, scuttling into the pale moonlight. It was fast. Impossibly fast. A blur of jointed limbs and dark, chitinous armor. It was insectoid, vaguely arachnid in its design, easily the size of a military utility vehicle. Six legs, maybe eight, it was hard to tell, each one tipped with a wicked, sickle-like claw that scraped and sparked against the crystalline floor of the cave. Its head was a small, wedge-shaped nightmare, dominated by a pair of massive, multi-faceted eyes that glittered like chips of obsidian in the moonlight. It had no discernible mouth, only a pair of rapidly vibrating mandibles that produced the horrible, chittering static.
It was a hunter. And it had just scented its prey.
"Move," Haruto's voice was a low, guttural thing, a sound torn from his own throat. "Now! Climb!"
The command broke the paralysis. He began to move again, his arms and legs pumping, his movements a desperate, frantic scramble up the remaining rungs. The smooth, worn metal was a small, solid reality in a world that had suddenly dissolved into a primal nightmare. One handhold. The next. Pull. Another rung. The world narrowed to this simple, brutal sequence. The chittering from the caves grew louder, more excited, a rising crescendo of alien hunger.
He heard Kaito scrambling below him, the sound of his boots slipping on a rung, a sharp, terrified gasp.
"Don't look down, Kaito!" he roared, not daring to look back himself. "Look up! Just look at my boots! Keep climbing!"
He risked a glance over his shoulder, at the breach. Another one of the creatures had joined the first. Then another. A hunting pack. One of them, its obsidian eyes fixed on their struggling forms, lowered its body into a low crouch. Its powerful, back-jointed legs tensed.
Oh, no.
"It's going to jump!" he screamed.
The creature launched itself. It was not a jump. A ballistic launch, a silent, dark missile of chitin and claws arcing across the fifty-meter chasm between the cave floor and their support strut. The sheer, alien power of it was a thing of terrible, breathtaking beauty. It was aiming for Kaito.
Time seemed to slow, to stretch into a thick, syrupy thing. Haruto saw the creature soaring through the air, its multifaceted eyes catching the pale moonlight. He saw Kaito, frozen on the ladder below him, his head turned, his face a perfect, white mask of pure, catatonic terror. He saw Riku, who had almost reached the gantry above, twist his body with an impossible, acrobatic grace, his carbine already shouldered.
A single, brilliant bolt of blue-white plasma shot from Riku's weapon. It struck the creature mid-air. The impact was not a clean kill. The bolt slagged a massive, molten hole in the creature's thorax, sending a shower of sizzling, ichorous green fluid into the air. The thing let out a high-pitched, piercing shriek, a sound of grating metal and tearing flesh that drilled into their ears. Its trajectory was ruined. It missed Kaito by a meter, its flailing, clawed legs scraping a shower of sparks from the support strut, and then it fell. It tumbled end over end into the absolute, silent blackness of the chasm below, its shriek fading into the abyss. It did not make a sound when it hit the bottom.
The shot galvanized them. Haruto scrambled up the last few rungs, his heart a wild, frantic bird in his chest. He hauled himself onto the gentry, the solid, grated metal of the catwalk a small, reassuring miracle beneath his boots. He immediately turned, reached down, and grabbed the front of Kaito's armor harness.
"Come on!" he yelled, and with a surge of adrenaline-fueled strength, he pulled. Kaito tumbled onto the gantry, a boneless, whimpering heap. Riku was already there, his carbine scanning the breach, his posture a study in lethal calm.
They were safe. For a moment. The gantry was a thin, skeletal ribbon of metal, barely a meter wide, spanning the massive, dark cavern. There was a low, rusted handrail on either side, but it offered little in the way of comfort. The drop on either side was a dizzying, terrifying plunge into nothingness. The chittering from the caves had changed. The excited, hungry sound was gone, replaced by a lower, more menacing, angrier chorus. They had hurt one of them. And the nest was angry.
"Get up," Haruto said, nudging Kaito with his boot. The younger man didn't move. He was curled into a tight, fetal ball, his hands over his helmet, his whole body shaking.
"Leave him," Riku's voice was a flat, dispassionate thing. "He is a liability. We move faster without him."
Haruto stared at Kaito's shaking form. The cold, tactical part of his brain agreed with Riku. Kaito was broken. He was a weight. A risk. They could not afford risks right now. But the ghost of the captain, the weight of her final order—live for us—it was a quiet, persistent voice in his head. He looked at Kaito, and he didn't see a liability. He saw a scared kid who was in way over his head, a kid who had followed him into the dark because he had offered a sliver of hope.
He knelt. He grabbed Kaito's shoulder, his grip hard, painful. He shook him. Once. Violently.
"Kaito!" he barked, his voice a sharp, cracking whip of sound. Kaito's head snapped up, his eyes wide, vacant, unfocused. "Look at me. Look. At. Me."
He waited until Kaito's gaze finally, slowly, focused on his faceplate.
"They are just bugs, Kaito," he said, his voice low, intense, a lie that he desperately needed to be the truth. "Big, ugly bugs. And we are soldiers of the Galactic Empire. We are the baddest things in this corner of the galaxy. We are not going to die here. We are not going to be food for overgrown cockroaches. Now, you are going to get up. You are going to pick up your weapon. And you are going to follow me across this bridge. That is an order. Do you understand me?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He stood up, turned his back on Kaito, and started walking. It was the biggest gamble he had taken all night. He walked out onto the gantry, his mag-boots clanging a steady, deliberate rhythm on the grated metal. He did not look back. If Kaito didn't follow, Riku was right. They would have to leave him.
One step. Two. The wind, a cold, damp draft from the caves, whistled through the open breach, a mournful, lonely sound. He heard a rustle behind him. A groan of protesting armor. Then, the sound of another set of footsteps, hesitant, shuffling, but moving forward. Kaito was on his feet. He was following.
The relief was a brief, sharp, painful thing in Haruto's chest. He pushed it down. There was no time for relief.
They moved across the gantry, a slow, single-file procession of ghosts. Riku took point, his movements fluid, balanced. Kaito shuffled behind him, his hand clamped to the rusty guardrail in a white-knuckled grip. Haruto brought up the rear, his attention divided between the path ahead and the seething, chittering darkness of the caves to his right.
The view from the center of the gantry was a vision from a nightmare. The breach in the ship's hull was a massive, peeled-back wound of torn, jagged metal. Beyond it, the cave system opened into a vast, cathedral-like cavern. The pale, milky light of the planet's twin moons streamed down from crystalline fissures in the ceiling, illuminating a breathtaking, horrifying landscape. It was a forest of translucent, glowing crystals, some as tall as skyscrapers. And at the bottom of the cavern, in the heart of the crystal forest, was the nest.
It was a huge, pulsating, organic structure, a semi-translucent mound of woven, sinewy material that glowed with a faint, sickly green light. And it was covered in them. Hundreds of the chittering, insectoid creatures swarmed over its surface, tending to it, guarding it, their dark, chitinous bodies a crawling, living carpet of death. The air was thick with their chorus, a constant, low-level thrum of alien intelligence that vibrated in Haruto's teeth.
They were in the heart of the hornet's nest. The gantry, their only path forward, was a tightrope strung directly over the pit.
Riku suddenly stopped. Haruto almost collided with Kaito.
"What is it?" Haruto whispered, his voice a dry rasp.
Riku didn't answer. He just pointed. To the far side of the gantry. To the hatchway that led back into the ship, back onto their path to the engineering deck.
It was not empty.
Standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim red light of the corridor beyond, was a figure. It was humanoid, tall and slender, wrapped in the dark, flowing robes of a Weaver. But it was not a Weaver. It wore no mask. And it was not holding a weapon. Its hands were clasped peacefully behind its back. It was just… waiting for them.
As they watched, it raised a hand and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod, a gesture of polite, patient welcome.
The chittering from the nest below suddenly stopped. The entire cavern fell into a profound, ringing silence.
And Haruto knew, with a sudden, gut-wrenching wave of pure, cold dread, that the creatures in the cave had not been the real threat. They were just the guard dogs.
They had just met the master.