What Kind Of Food Do You Want?

CLACK!

The magnets in Leo's sole bit into the steel with an instant grip.

He shifted his weight forward, lifted his left foot off the horizontal deck, and brought it down beside his right.

For two full seconds, his inner ear lost its mind.

Every instinct he had was screaming that he was leaning out at a right angle over a three-hundred-meter elevator shaft, about to faceplant into the dark and his stomach lurched as cold sweat prickled at the back of his neck.

'Nope. Nope, nope, nope—'

Then that familiar pull in the small of his back kicked in…

The same instinct that told him where a ship's mass was tilting reached down and flipped the world for him. 

The wall under his boots became the floor and the black pit in front of him became a long tunnel stretching ahead as he let out a breath.

"Grip's solid," he called back. "Roll your heel to let go of the magnet when you step, then plant your toe flat and whatever you do, don't look up at the ceiling once you're on."

He took two slow steps straight "down."

Clack-hiss! Clack-hiss!

One by one, the girls followed.

Ms. Tachibana made the transition like she'd been walking down elevator shafts her entire career with her boots locking in cleanly right behind him. Jin-Ah followed with stiff calculated precision as her eyes were nailed to the back of Leo's shoulders.

Chloe stepped over without a sound. 

…Whatever had rewritten her body had rewritten her balance too, and she adjusted instantly.

Harper hopped onto the curve of the wall to the left and walked along it at a forty-five-degree angle, keeping her carbine clear of everyone.

Camila let out a strangled whimper as both her boots locked on.

Her knees went rigid as she stared down the dark tunnel between her feet.

"Oh, Dios mío... my brain hates this. My brain really, really hates this." Her head snapped sideways. "Harper, stop walking on the curve above me! You're upside down and it's making me dizzy!"

"I'm giving you fire support, chica," Harper laughed. "Just stare at Chloe's back and keep moving your feet."

Elena stepped onto the wall last as her gloved hand shot out to brace against a seam the second the vertigo hit her. 

She snatched it back just as fast with her chin up, refusing to look weak in front of anyone.

Together, the seven of them walked straight down the wall into the dark.

Fourteen helmet beams sliced through the drifting dust like needles.

For the first hundred meters, the only sounds were the rhythmic clack-hiss of their boots traveling up through their suits and the quiet rasp of seven people breathing.

Thump...

The pulse was a little stronger now.

"Okay," Camila said suddenly with her voice sounding too bright. "I need to talk about something… Anything or I'm going to start thinking about how far down this goes."

"Talk away," Leo said.

"Food." She swallowed. "First thing you'd eat if we got back. Go. Harper."

"Double cheeseburger," Harper said instantly. "Extra pickles… Fries drowned in so much ketchup they'd need a lifeguard…"

"Classic," Camila laughed shakily. "Jin?"

"Something nutritionally balanced," Jin-Ah said.

"Liar."

A pause. "...Tteokbokki… The really spicy kind… From the cart outside the library…"

"See? Was that so hard? Chloe?"

Chloe hesitated so long they thought she wouldn't answer.

"...Strawberry milk," she finally whispered. "The little cartons."

Harper made a noise like her heart had just been stepped on. 

"Oh my god. That's adorable. I'm going to find you strawberry milk in space if it kills me."

"Elena?"

"I don't play peasant games."

"Elenaaa."

A long, irritated sigh crackled through the channel. "...Truffle risotto. From a restaurant you couldn't afford to stand outside of."

"There she is," Harper grinned.

"Sensei?"

Ms. Tachibana was quiet for a few steps.

"My mother's miso soup," she said softly. "She always put in too much tofu. I used to complain about it…"

Nobody said anything for a moment.

The clack-hiss of their boots filled the silence, and every single one of them was thinking the same thing. 

About mothers and food carts and little restaurants, and whether any of it still existed.

Camila's voice came out smaller. "...Leo?"

He thought about it.

"Anything I didn't have to scavenge out of an alien tomb," he said. "And seconds."

That got a laugh out of Harper, and a tired one out of Camila, and the heaviness lifted just enough to keep walking.

[For the record, this unit does not eat. This unit is, however, enjoying this conversation far more than it expected to. Please continue to have feelings at a reasonable volume.]

They passed the twisted wreckage of the Sub-Level 4 junction.

That was when Leo noticed something along the wall right beside his boots.

Four huge recessed trenches ran the full length of the shaft, each nearly a meter wide. 

They were made to carry the station's main power lines, thick braided bundles of pure copper hidden behind heavy steel faceplates except the faceplates hadn't fallen off.

…They'd been peeled back like the lids of sardine cans.

Leo slowed and angled his lights down into the trench beside him.

"Hold up a second," he said quietly.

The group stopped as seven figures clinging to the sheer metal in the dark.

Inside the trench, the black insulation had been shredded into ribbons, floating in place like dead seaweed.

And underneath it... nothing.

Every centimeter of copper was gone, not a single strand, not a bus-bar and not even a ground wire. 

The brackets that used to clamp the cables to the wall were still bolted every two meters, but whatever they'd been holding had been stripped clean down to bare composite.

"Look at the other side," Ms. Tachibana murmured, sweeping her rifle light twelve meters across the shaft.

…Same thing.

The secondary trenches, the junction boxes, even the little relay panels bolted beside the dead emergency lights. 

Every single one had been torn open, and every scrap of copper inside had been taken.

"Did someone salvage this place before us?" Camila asked, frowning. "Is that why it's all gone?"

"Salvagers use torches and shears," Leo said slowly.

He crouched down on the wall, bringing his visor close to the edge of the trench.

"Look at the brackets."

Jin-Ah stepped over and locked her boots beside his. She leaned in and zoomed her helmet optics.

The moment the image sharpened, her breath caught.

The steel hadn't been cut.

Gouged deep into every bracket, stamped all along the shredded rubber, were thousands of overlapping circular bite marks. 

Each one ringed by five rows of tiny, razor-sharp tooth marks that had ground straight through solid steel just to suck the copper out of the middle like marrow from a bone.

Crusted along the chewed edges was a dry, flaky, iridescent violet residue.

"No..." Jin-Ah whispered.

The calm level-two confidence she'd carried out of Damage Control shattered in an instant.

Her face went chalk-white inside her helmet as she jerked her head back from the trench like a live snake was coiled inside it.

"Those aren't tool marks." Her voice climbed half an octave. Her breathing went shallow and quick. "Circular jaw patterns... five rings... violet acid residue on the steel… It's them! It's the worms!"

"Easy, Jin," Leo said, reaching for her elbow.

But she was already backing up, her lights whipping from the left trench to the right one, then up toward the curve of the shaft, then down into the dark.

"They eat copper!" she gasped.

Her brain had flipped from her greatest strength to a nightmare engine, calculating every horrible variable at once.

"That's why their shells deflect our rounds! That's why their veins glow! They don't eat meat, they eat metal… they weave it into their armor! And look at this, Leo! Four main trunks, three hundred meters each! That's tons of solid copper chewed down to nothing!"

A small amber warning began blinking inside her helmet.

[Crew Unit: Jin-Ah… Heart Rate 141 bpm… Oxygen consumption rising.]

Her hands were shaking on her carbine.

"One worm couldn't eat that much! There has to be a nest! Dozens of them! Hundreds! Writhing behind these walls! Crawling through the pipes right under our feet! Just waiting in the dark with those disgusting slimy segmented—"

"Jin-Ah!"

CLACK-CLACK!

Harper crossed the curved wall in three heavy strides, planted herself right in front of Jin-Ah to block the trench from view, and grabbed both her shoulders.

"Eyes on me, Park! Right here! Look at my visor!"

Jin-Ah flinched. Her wild eyes locked onto Harper's freckled face, fifteen centimeters away through two layers of glowing green.

"Stop doing math in your head and listen to me!" Harper gave her a solid grounding shake. 

"First. Look at those bite marks… Even I know fresh-chewed metal shines… Those brackets are frosted over and covered in years of dust. Whatever ate this copper did it a long damn time ago, not ten minutes ago."

"B-but the sheer biomass required to strip an entire—"

"Who cares about the biomass?!"

A fierce grin broke across Harper's face as she knocked her knuckles lightly against the side of Jin-Ah's helmet.

"Second. Did you already forget what happened upstairs? One of those ugly maggots jumped us in the hallway, and what did you do? You shoved a gun down its throat and turned its brain into purple confetti… By yourself."

Jin-Ah's chest heaved against her suit.

"You're not some helpless girl sitting in a lecture hall anymore, Jin," Harper went on, her voice dropping lower, warmer. "You're Level 2… You've got a gun… You've got Chloe, who throws two-ton beams like pillows… You've got Sensei, who shoots eyes out in the dark. And you've got Leo up front… If there were hundreds of worms in these walls, Sensei's radar would be lighting up like a Christmas tree. You're safe so breathe with me. In for four… Out for four..."

For five long seconds, the only sound on the channel was Harper taking big exaggerated breaths.

Slowly, Jin-Ah closed her eyes.

She breathed in… Held it… Let it out…

[Heart Rate: 142... 118... 95.]

[For the record, Crew Unit: Harper just accomplished in fifteen seconds what three years of university counseling services likely could not. This unit is mildly impressed and will deny saying so.]

When Jin-Ah opened her eyes again, the terror was gone and in its place was a deep mortified flush.

She straightened up on the wall and very carefully adjusted her grip on her rifle.

"My apologies," she muttered, refusing to look at anyone. "A temporary neurological feedback loop caused by an irrational terrestrial phobia. It won't happen again." 

A pause. 

"...Thank you, Harper."

"Anytime, Bug-Killer," Harper winked, patting her shoulder before stepping back into formation. "Just save the panic attacks for after we're back on the ship… We'll schedule you one."

"On the bright side," Leo said dryly, looking back at the empty trench, "that explains why we haven't found a scrap of copper anywhere in this place… The wildlife ate every wire in the building."

"Which means our only real hope is sealed storage in the vault," Ms. Tachibana said.

She pointed ten meters farther down, where a wide reinforced opening was cut into the shaft wall.

"Sub-Level 6… We're here..."

They walked down the last stretch and stepped off the wall onto the flat landing of Sub-Level 6.

Seven inner ears sighed in collective relief as down went back to being down.

In front of them stood a pair of huge industrial blast doors striped in faded orange, crawling with that same spiraling script.

[Translation: "Sector 6 — Primary Parts Depot and Metallurgy Vault." This unit would like to remind the crew that "Metallurgy Vault" is where the metal is... That is the point of the entire trip so please look excited.]

"Woo," Harper said flatly.

[Thank you.]

The doors had already been blown half off their tracks by some decompression years ago, leaving a jagged gap a little over a meter wide between the slabs.

Leo glanced back and nodded once.

Chloe stepped up without a word, wedged her gloved fingers into the gap, and leaned her small weight sideways.

GRRRRRIND!

The left door groaned along its track and slid back another full meter.

"Lights in," Leo said, raising his carbine as he stepped through. "Sweep the corners."

The seven of them fanned out just inside the doorway, and fourteen beams of white light cut into the dark.

The room was enormous.

Easily the size of an aircraft hangar, lined with towering storage racks that climbed twelve meters toward the ceiling trusses or at least, that was what it had been built to be.

Whatever had slammed this station into its rock had turned most of the depot into a graveyard. 

Entire rows of steel shelving had gone down like dominoes, spilling thousands of actuators, ceramic turbine blades, and glass sensor housings across the floor. 

Falling girders had ground most of it into glittering worthless powder and Harper swept her light across the high rafters.

"Clear," she called. "No bugs, no crabs… Just a whole lot of broken expensive junk…"

"Sensei?" Leo asked. "The pulse?"

"Unchanged," Ms. Tachibana said, her halo flickering. "Still three levels below us and whatever it is, it hasn't moved."

Thump...

Leo lowered his carbine and looked out over the wreckage.

"Good," he said. "Then let's find out what survived."