Hot metal pressed in. A cramped, black, suffocating tube.
Haruto lay still for a moment, his breath fogging the inside of his cracked visor, listening to the sound of his own failing, frantic heart. The air was a cocktail of smells he was becoming far too familiar with: the acrid tang of drive plasma, a smell like burnt copper, mingled with the faint, sweet, cloying scent of the Anomaly. It was the perfume of the Vanguard. The perfume of his own tomb.
He was crawling. On his hands and knees, in a tube of hot metal, in the dark, in the guts of a ghost ship that was actively trying to kill him, while dragging the dead weight of an unconscious soldier. This was not a tactical situation. This was a grave. And they were just burrowing deeper into it.
He could feel the fine, gritty texture of the vent's interior through his gloves, a layer of ancient, metallic dust that got into everything. His suit's power gauge, a tiny, ominous red icon in the corner of his HUD, blinked at 16%. The plasma purge had almost cooked them, and the suit's regulators had burned a critical amount of power just to keep them from boiling inside their own armor. He had no idea how much power Kaito's suit had left, but it couldn't be much.
And the song.
It was still there. A single, silver note at the back of his skull. A parasite in his thoughts. He tried to wall it off, build the mental barriers his training had taught him—a box, a void, an empty room. Useless. The song wasn't a push; it didn't batter at the walls. It just… seeped in. It was a part of him now, a cold, alien presence that lived behind his eyes. He could feel it. A faint, alien warmth. A resonance.
Behind him, a new sound. A grim, steady, scraping rhythm. Scrape. Pause. Scrape.
It was Riku, dragging Kaito's limp body. A man dragging a corpse.
"Status," Haruto rasped. His throat was raw from the plasma's heat.
"Forward path is… clear," Riku's voice came back, a low rumble from the darkness. "For another fifty meters. No blockages. Kaito's vitals are… stable. He remains unconscious."
Stable. Haruto almost laughed, a dry, humorless puff of air inside his helmet. Nothing about this was stable. They were cockroaches in an oven, and the chef was about to turn up the heat. He forced himself to move. Crawl. Stop. Breathe. The world narrowed to this. The hot, sharp-edged metal digging into his knees. The burning in his shoulders.
Time became a thick, viscous thing, a river of hot, dark minutes that all felt the same. His mind, starved of external stimuli, began to turn inward. He saw the face of Captain Eva Rostova, the sad, determined woman in the silver frame. Live for us. Her final words were a quiet, persistent, and utterly impossible command. How was he supposed to live? He was a soldier. A tool. His entire life had been a series of objectives, of missions, of calculated risks and acceptable losses. He didn't know how to live. He only knew how to survive.
He was so lost in the spiraling, self-defeating labyrinth of his own thoughts that he almost missed the change.
The sound.
It was a new sound, different from the hissing of the vents or the groaning of the ship. It was a deep, powerful, continental hum. A sound of immense, active power.
And the song in his head was getting louder.
It was no longer a single, silver thread. It was a harmony. Two notes, then three, then a dozen, all weaving together, a chorus of cold, mathematical bliss that was rising in volume, pushing against the inside of his skull. It made his teeth ache.
He crawled faster, his movements suddenly urgent, desperate. The heat was increasing, the metal of the vent floor becoming almost too hot to touch. The high-pitched hum of the power systems was a dentist's drill against a raw nerve in his skull.
And then, light.
Not the harsh, red glow of the emergency systems. Not the oily, green-black pulse of the Anomaly.
A clean, steady, brilliant blue light.
It was coming from a grate, just ahead. A large, reinforced engineering access hatch. He scrambled the last few meters, his carbine held in front of him, the weapon a clumsy, awkward burden in the tight space. He peered through the thick, metal slats.
He forgot to breathe.
The world dissolved.
He was not looking into a room. He was looking into a cathedral.
They were on a high gantry, looking down into the main engineering deck of the Vanguard. It was a space so vast it defied comprehension, a cavern of metal and machinery that dwarfed the cargo bay they had passed through. The ceiling was lost in a web of shadows and conduits a hundred meters above. The floor was a complex, multi-leveled landscape of catwalks, plasma conduits, and massive, silent turbines.
And in the center… in the center was the god.
The main reactor core was still there, a massive, cylindrical column of polished, black alloy that rose from the depths of the ship, easily fifty meters in diameter. But it was wrong.
Glistening black biomass, the Anomaly's flesh, was wrapped around it like a serpent, its own sick, green-black light pulsing in a slow, counter-rhythm to the reactor's steady, brilliant blue glow. The two lights warred, casting the entire cavern in a ghastly, strobing, blue-green-black-blue battle of illumination.
Thick, ropy cables, more like arteries than wires, snaked from the reactor, burrowing into the walls, the floor, the ceiling, connecting everything. The walls of the engineering bay were not metal anymore. They were the same pulsating, living biomass he had seen in the vertical shaft, a lung that was breathing in time with the reactor's pulse. The song… the song was deafening here, a full, overwhelming symphony that hammered at his mind, a chorus of ecstasy and hunger and union. He felt a sudden, terrifying urge to open the grate, to jump, to simply… join. To let go. To become part of that vast, terrible, beautiful whole.
He slammed his head back against the vent wall, the physical pain a small, sharp anchor in the overwhelming psychic tide. "No," he whispered, his voice a dry, cracked thing. "Get out. Get out of my head."
The song didn't stop. It just… continued. Awaiting his surrender.
He looked down. His objective. The primary reactor control console. It was on a raised, isolated platform that jutted out over the main reactor pit, connected to their gantry by a narrow, unsupported catwalk. And it was covered in the stuff. A thick, pulsating cocoon of the black biomass.
And sitting on top of that cocoon, as if it were a throne, was the Conductor.
It was just as he had seen it on the gantry. Tall, slender, its black robes a patch of absolute void in the strobing, chaotic light. It was not looking at them. It was facing the reactor core, its head tilted as if listening to a private, intimate conversation.
As they watched, a new, more advanced automaton, a sleek, gunmetal-gray Mark-IV, marched out from a dark tunnel, its movements precise and fluid. It stopped at the edge of the Conductor's platform, and then, in a gesture that was so horribly, absurdly human, it knelt. It bowed its head, a machine paying deference to an organic god.
"Oh, hell," Haruto breathed. The Warden wasn't just co-opted. It was worshipping the Anomaly. The distinction he had been clinging to, the idea of two separate, rival entities, was a lie. They were one. The Warden was the Conductor's loyal, metal fist.
A low, painful groan from beside him. Kaito. He was waking up.
"Haruto…?" he moaned, his voice thick with pain and disorientation. "Where… oh gods, my arm. It's… it's hot. It's so hot in here."
He began to struggle, his movements clumsy, disoriented in the tight space.
"Kaito, be still!" Haruto hissed, grabbing his shoulder. "Stay quiet!"
But it was too late. Kaito, in his pain-fueled panic, thrashed, his heavy armor boot slamming into the metal vent with a loud, resounding CLANG.
The sound was a gunshot in the vast, humming cathedral.
The song in Haruto's head stopped.
Instantly.
Leaving a void that was more terrifying than the noise.
Down in the vast cavern, the Conductor, its movements still slow, graceful, and utterly unhurried, turned. It didn't look up at the walls. It looked directly at their grate.
Its dark, empty, bottomless eyes found Haruto's.
And the chorus-voice filled his mind, no longer a song, but a cold, sharp, and terribly intimate whisper.
There you are, Lieutenant.
The Conductor raised one pale, long-fingered hand.
And the wall of the vent behind Haruto, the solid, thirty-centimeter-thick alloy of a starship's main duct, began to dissolve. Not melt. Not tear. It was simply… unmade. The metal turned to a fine, gray dust that poured into the vent, the smell of ozone and rotten flowers filling the space.
A new, perfectly circular opening was being bored through the wall, a new door into their tiny, metal coffin.
And on the other side of that new, impossible door, a new sound began. A sound Haruto had been dreading more than anything.
The low, chittering sound of the nest.
"Riku, the grate!" Haruto roared, abandoning all pretense of stealth. "We're punching out! Now!"
He didn't wait. He drove his armored boot into the engineering grate. The metal, weakened by the heat and the ship's groans, bowed outwards. He kicked again, a desperate, frantic blow. The grate flew open, its hinges screaming, and tumbled down into the cavernous dark below, disappearing into the web of catwalks.
"Go! Go! Go!"
He grabbed the front of Kaito's armor and shoved him, hard, out of the opening. Kaito tumbled out of the vent, a clumsy, pained heap, landing hard on the narrow gantry.
Haruto was right behind him, rolling to his feet, his carbine already sweeping the new, vast, and horribly exposed space.
The chittering was loud now, echoing from the new hole in the vent behind them. They were coming.
He looked across the gantry. The Conductor was still on its throne, watching them with a detached, almost bored curiosity. The kneeling Mark-IV automaton, however, was rising to its feet, its plasma caster already whining as it powered up.
The Guardian's voice was a calm, cold presence in his ear.
Fifteen seconds.
They were trapped. Trapped between a god, its machine-knight, and an incoming swarm of alien bugs.
"Riku, the console!" Haruto yelled, his voice a raw, desperate bark. "Buy me time!"
He didn't know what he was asking. He just knew he had to get to that console. It was the only objective that mattered.
He grabbed Kaito, who was groaning, trying to sit up, and hauled him to his feet. "Run!" he screamed, shoving him towards the catwalk.
Kaito stumbled, then ran, his movements a lurching, three-limbed shamble.
Haruto ran after him. He heard Riku open fire, the sharp, staccato crack-crack-crack of his carbine echoing in the vast, open space, his plasma bolts aimed not at the Conductor, but at the Mark-IV, a futile, desperate attempt to suppress it.
The automaton didn't even flinch. It raised its weapon.
A bolt of orange plasma, thick as his arm, shot across the cavern. It didn't hit Haruto. It didn't hit Kaito.
It hit the catwalk, just in front of them.
The metal exploded in a white-hot, molten shower. The entire structure, its support strut vaporized, gave a tortured, metallic shriek and collapsed. The narrow bridge that led to the reactor console was gone.
Haruto skidded to a halt at the edge of the new, gaping chasm, the heat of the molten metal washing over his face. Kaito fell beside him, skidding on his knees, and stared, wide-eyed, at the twenty-meter drop.
They were cut off.
The chittering from the vent behind them was deafening now.
The Conductor stood from its throne.
And the song, the terrible, beautiful, all-consuming song, returned to Haruto's mind, no longer a whisper, but a triumphant, welcoming roar.
It is over, little ghost. Come home.