Plasma Cutter

Everyone cleared out of the way.

Chloe slung her carbine over her shoulder and stepped up to the pile of collapsed steel and she didn't hesitate this time. 

Keeping her eyes on the metal and nowhere else, she wedged both gloved hands under the main I-beam.

Behind her visor, a thin ring of scarlet flashed around her green eyes.

'Just lift,' she told herself. 'Don't think about it… Don't think about what you are… Just lift…'

SCREEEEECH!

The grav-plates in her boots whined under the load, the two-ton beam groaned as bolts sheared off one after another like gunshots.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

And then Chloe tore the entire tangled mass out of the doorframe and heaved it across the corridor like a bag of dry leaves.

It floated lazily for a second before it hit the far wall.

CLANG!

The impact shook through everyone's boots.

At the back of the group, Elena took an involuntary half-step backward with her icy blue eyes going wide as she stared at the tiny brunette who'd just thrown two tons of steel one-handed.

"Path is clear," Chloe mumbled.

She immediately shuffled back and tucked herself behind Ms. Tachibana again with her head ducked low.

"Good work, Chloe," Leo said warmly.

Her ears went pink inside her helmet and Leo stepped through the gap into the Damage Control room.

It was small and cramped, and the back half had been crushed flat, but the racks along the front were still intact. 

Bolted to the center workbench sat a heavy tool that looked like someone had welded a chainsaw grip onto a twin-pronged torch, cabled to a compact power pack.

[Tool Found: Vulcan-IV Industrial Plasma Torch]

[Tier: 1]

[Function: Cuts sealed bulkheads, welded obstructions, and anything else you point it at.]

[Charge: 42%]

[Note: It is not a toy… This unit says that knowing full well at least one of you is already thinking about using it as one.]

Leo picked it up and clipped it to the magnet on his belt.

"That solves any more welded doors."

"Leo! Over here!" Jin-Ah called from the far wall, her voice jumping a bit.

Lined up on a padded rack were seven white canisters about the size of fire extinguishers, each one with a glowing blue gauge.

[Found: Emergency Oxygen Cells x7]

[Effect: Each cell adds 40 minutes of suit oxygen.]

[This unit would like to note that there are exactly seven, Somebody up there likes you… It is not this unit, but somebody.]

"Forty minutes each!" Harper practically lunged at the rack, yanking two free and tossing one to Camila. "Oh, sweet mother of God, come to mama!"

Nobody needed a second invitation.

They each grabbed a canister and slammed the nozzle into the intake port on the left side of their chestplates.

HISSSSS-CLICK!

Cold fresh air flooded into the suits, flushing out the stale heavy air that had been building up inside their helmets. 

Across every wrist, the red timers flipped to green.

[Suit Oxygen: 00:48:00 ➔ 01:28:00]

"Oh... thank heaven," Ms. Tachibana sighed, leaning back against the rack as she took a long deep breath.

For the first time since they'd left the ship, the crushing tightness in everyone's chest let go a little.

While the others caught their breath, Harper wandered over to a pile of crushed carbines lying under a fallen locker in the corner. 

There were four of them with the barrels bent at right angles and their stocks shattered, they were completely useless.

"Hold up a sec," she muttered, kneeling down in the dust.

The bronze shimmer of her talent rolled over her fingers. She flipped one of the ruined guns, popped a hidden pin with the tip of her thumbnail, and slid the battery housing out of the crushed receiver like she'd been doing it her whole life.

[Subclass Active: Armory Technician]

[Salvaging residual charge from damaged batteries...]

She did the same to the other three, twisting wires together with quick practiced hands until she'd cannibalized all four dead cells into a single pack. 

Its indicator strip blinked yellow.

"Hey, Bug-Killer!"

She tossed it across the room. Jin-Ah caught it against her chest and blinked down at it.

"Managed to squeeze four dead batteries into one working one," Harper grinned. "It's not full… Eight shots but eight beats swinging your gun like a baseball bat."

Jin-Ah looked at the battery, then up at Harper.

A real grateful smile softened her sharp features as she slammed the pack into her carbine.

Click!

[Ammo: 8/15]

"Thank you, Harper," she said. "I'll make sure my next engagement gets at least an A-grade efficiency rating…"

[This unit will believe it when this unit sees it.]

"Just aim for the head before you hold down the trigger," Harper winked.

Near the doorway, Camila drifted over to where Chloe was standing alone in the shadows.

The smaller girl was staring down at her gloved hands, slowly opening and closing them, watching the white armor plates shift over knuckles that had just bent solid steel.

Camila stepped beside her and gently rested a hand on her shoulder.

Chloe flinched and looked up with wide uncertain green eyes.

"Hey," Camila said softly, switching to a private channel so the room wouldn't hear. "That was amazing back there. The window, and now the door… If it wasn't for you, we'd still be outside in the dust waiting to choke."

Chloe bit her lip and dropped her eyes back to her boots.

"I... I'm a freak, Camila." Her voice cracked, barely a whisper. "My teeth... what I did to Leo on the bridge... Elena's right. I turned into something horrible."

"Elena's got her head shoved so far up her own butt she can see her tonsils," Camila said firmly, giving her shoulder a little squeeze. "Don't listen to a word that snob says… You didn't choose what the system gave you and you didn't hurt Leo… Look at him, He's standing right there totally fine."

They both glanced over.

Leo was poking at the plasma torch, trying to figure out which end the fire came out of and Harper slapped his hand away from the trigger.

"Okay," Camila amended, "fine-ish…"

A tiny laugh slipped out of Chloe before she could stop it.

"As far as I'm concerned," Camila went on, smiling, "you're our strongest protector right now so don't go hiding in corners. Okay?"

Chloe looked at her warm earnest face for a long moment and slowly, the tight knot in her shoulders loosened.

"...Okay," she whispered. "Thank you, Camila."

"Alright, everyone," Leo called, clipping the torch back onto his belt and nodding toward the corridor. "We've got forty extra minutes, Jin-Ah's armed again, and the scrubber bays can't be far down the central spine. Let's grab the filters, find the alloy, and get back to—"

"Wait."

Ms. Tachibana's voice cut through the channel as everyone turned.

She was standing just outside the doorway, completely still but she wasn't looking down the corridor.

She was staring at the floor between her boots.

The silver halo around her temples wasn't pulsing gently anymore. It was flaring in sharp jagged rings, reflecting off the inside of her visor.

"Sensei?" Leo was at her side in two steps, his hand on his carbine. "What is it? Another one?"

"No," she whispered.

Something about the way she said it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

She lifted one trembling finger and pointed straight down through the deck.

"My talent just pushed through the lower shielding… It isn't a living thing, Leo. Down at the very bottom of the tower… three hundred meters under our feet… there's an energy pulse that's strong and steady."

She looked up and met his eyes.

"Something at the bottom of this station is still running."

Thump...

Leo felt it then faintly through the soles of his boots… It was so faint he'd have missed it if she hadn't said anything.

Thump...

"AI," he said quietly. "Cross-reference Sensei's reading with whatever blueprints you've got. What's down there?"

[Reconstructing. Please hold… This unit is stitching together a map from a corrupted alien database and a thirty-year-old woman's sixth sense, which is not how this unit was designed to work, but here we are.]

A broken wireframe map bloomed in the top corner of their visors.

Most of it was eaten away by static and flashing red blocks, but as Aoi's silver pulse swept deeper, blue lines filled themselves in one by one.

[The signal comes from Sub-Level 9, the station's auxiliary core. Directly along the way down, on Sub-Level 6, sits the Primary Parts Depot and Metallurgy Vault... If this station has the alloy you need, that is where it will be.]

[Recommended route: Central Service Shaft. The elevators were sheared in half so you will be walking.]

"Sub-Level 6," Harper said, tapping her carbine. "So we don't actually have to go all the way down to where the creepy heartbeat lives… We stop three floors early, grab what we came for, and run."

"Assuming the way down isn't caved in," Jin-Ah said, tracing the new blue lines with her eyes. 

Since her level-up, she hadn't blinked once while reading. "Notice the tilt on the schematic… We're going to be climbing down diagonal shafts."

"And on a timer," Camila added quietly, glancing at her wrist.

An hour and twenty-eight minutes… In the dark bowels of a dead alien station, it felt like five…

"Then we don't waste it standing in the hall," Leo said. "Sensei, you're right behind me calling the turns and watching that pulse, Harper, rear, Chloe, stay in the middle with Camila and Jin-Ah."

He glanced back.

"Elena… Stay close, and keep your hand off that knife unless I call a target."

At the back of the line, Elena stiffened.

Her fingers had, in fact, been resting on the Wasp's handle so she snatched them away like it had bitten her.

"I'm perfectly capable of walking down a hallway without your micromanagement, peasant," she hissed. "Just try not to lead us into a dead end with your brilliant intuition."

[For what it is worth, Crew Unit: Elena, the Master Captain's brilliant intuition has kept you alive for two consecutive hours… This unit would put that on a résumé.]

Elena glared at the ceiling like she wanted to stab it.

Leo didn't bother answering as he clicked his lights to full and stepped into the dark.

The deeper they went, the more the station changed.

The cramped crew hallways gave way to huge ribbed shafts built for hauling machinery between forty stories of tower. 

Everything sat at that drunken fifteen-degree tilt. 

Service catwalks dangled by single bolts over black drops… Frozen beads of hydraulic fluid hung in the air like strings of black pearls…

About fifty meters down the main corridor, the deck simply ended.

In front of them yawned a vertical shaft, easily twelve meters across, plunging straight down into the pitch-black belly of the tower. 

The ladder rungs had been ripped off three levels down as all that was left were smooth curved walls dropping away into nothing.

"End of the road for stairs," Harper said, peering over the jagged lip and her beams vanished into the gloom.

[Gravity in this shaft has failed completely… Your soles will lock onto the walls, so you can walk straight down them like a floor. This unit would describe it as easy but your inner ears will describe it differently.]

"Walk down the walls," Camila whispered, looking from the floor under her feet to the sheer ninety-degree drop. "Like bugs on a window? Right... Easy… Totally normal Tuesday…"

"Don't think of it as a drop, Camila," Ms. Tachibana said gently, stepping up beside her. "Treat the wall as the floor, and the shaft as a long corridor in front of you… Without gravity, 'down' is just something your brain made up."

"Easy for the astrodynamics instructor to say," Harper muttered, though she was rolling her shoulders to shake off the nerves.

"It's easy for anyone to say," Jin-Ah said. "Doing it is the problem."

Behind them, Elena hadn't said a word.

She was standing a full step back from the edge with her arms crossed tight, staring down into the black. 

Her jaw was clenched so hard the muscle jumped. 

For a second, the haughty mask slipped, and what was underneath looked a lot like a girl who had never once in her life been somewhere she couldn't pay her way out of.

She caught Leo looking and the mask snapped right back on.

"What?" she snapped. "Some of us were raised to use elevators, peasant."

"Didn't say anything," Leo said.

"...You were thinking it."

[He was. This unit can see his heart rate… It went up slightly, which this unit interprets as either concern or smugness, possibly both.]

"Can you not narrate my heart rate?!"

[No.]

Harper wheezed.

Even Chloe made a small muffled sound that might've been a laugh, and the tension along the edge of the shaft eased just a little.

"Alright, Cap," Harper said, nudging him toward the lip. "You're the captain… Show us how it's done."

Leo stepped to the very edge, he looked down into the dark and held his breath for one long second.

Thump...

Then he swung his right boot out over the abyss and planted it flat against the wall.