Stealing From Worms

Harper cut faster.

FWOOOOSH!

The torch roared into panel five, and Elena stopped bickering and started calling cuts like a drill sergeant.

"Left seam! Now down! Faster, Bell, it's dead weight, it isn't going anywhere!"

"Then why are you yelling?!"

"Because you're slow!"

SZZZZZZZT!

Sparks sprayed across the vault in glittering silver-blue clouds.

CRACK!

Chloe tore the slab free.

"Recall!"

BZZZT… FLASH!

[High-Grade Alloy: 40 / 50]

[Ship Power: 58% ➔ 50%]

Panel six…

The torch was getting hot in Harper's hands now, its gauge bleeding down fast as sweat ran into her eyes inside her helmet, and she couldn't wipe it.

'Come on, come on, come on...'

FWOOOOSH… sputter… FWOOOOSH!

"It's dying!" she yelled.

"Then hurry up and finish before it does!" Elena snapped.

The torch coughed on the last stretch of the bottom seam, flickered, and then pushed through the final few centimeters with a dying wheeze.

[Plasma Torch: 4%]

"Pull it, Chloe!"

Chloe planted her boots, gripped the last slab, and wrenched it off the wall with a ringing metallic snap that hummed through everyone's soles.

Leo didn't wait as the second it floated clear, he slammed both palms against it.

"Foundry Recall!"

BZZZZZZZZT… FLASH!

The grid strained, flickered once, and then the slab burst apart and shot up through the ceiling.

Ding!

[High-Grade Alloy: 50 / 50 — COMPLETE!]

[All alloy requirements for the Mag-Rail Turret and the Tier-2 Evolution are now in the Foundry.]

[Ship Power: 50% ➔ 42%]

And right on its heels, a second panel, no longer even pretending to be polite.

[Master Captain, this unit is going to say this once, slowly, so it sticks. The ship is at forty-two percent. If it falls under thirty, this unit will not have enough power to keep you breathing and run that turret at the same time, and this unit will have to choose… This unit will choose breathing and the turret will not be happy. Neither will you, when things start eating the hull so please, no more big recalls.]

"Fifty out of fifty!" Camila cheered anyway, throwing both arms up into the zero-G air. 

Her magnetic boots were the only thing keeping her from floating off in pure joy. "We got it! We actually got all of it!"

"Forty-two percent power, though," Jin-Ah said grimly, staring at her wrist. "Whatever we find next, we have to be careful how we move it…"

"Copper's light and scrubbers are light," Harper grinned, clipping the nearly dead torch back onto Leo's belt. "So we grab those, we go home, and we kiss this creepy tomb good—"

[WARNING.]

The AI didn't chime this time.

It cut across every channel at once and killed the celebration on their lips.

[Heavy low-frequency vibrations detected in the station's main skeleton.]

Leo's hand dropped straight to his carbine. "Sensei?!"

Before she could even answer, they felt it.

GGGGRRRRRRRNNNNNN...

A long gut-churning groan rolled up through the floor plates and into their shins.

It wasn't the ceiling as Elena's map had been flawless, truly the vault above them hadn't shifted a hair.

It was coming from below.

Deep in the black bottom of the tower, down where that pulse had been beating all this time, something huge had just shifted its weight.

The metal under their boots shivered with a slow grinding scrape, like thousands of tons of armored body slowly uncoiling inside a hollow steel drum.

Chloe's hand clenched into a fist against the wall.

"That's it," she whispered. "That's what I felt."

Ms. Tachibana's face went paper-white. Her silver halo flared violently downward.

"The pulse just spiked four hundred percent," she breathed. "And Leo… the vibrations from Harper's torch, and from Chloe snapping those bolts..."

Leo slowly turned toward the vault doorway.

Out there, in the shaft, the four chewed-out trenches ran down the wall into the dark. 

He followed them with his eyes, past the landing of Sub-Level 6, deeper and deeper.

…All of them led down.

And in a vacuum, sound couldn't travel through the air… but slicing three-ton plates straight off the station's skeleton had turned the entire tower into a giant tuning fork.

They'd been ringing a dinner bell.

"It wasn't asleep," Leo said quietly, raising his carbine as another long shudder rolled up through the steel. "Something down there heard us."

For a long horrible moment, nobody moved then, slowly, the groan faded as the pulse settled back into its slow rhythm.

Thump... hummmm... Thump...

Whatever had moved down there hadn't started climbing.

…Not yet at least.

"It's settling," Ms. Tachibana whispered. 

Her halo flickered and steadied. "But that echo just showed me something else… A hollow space, forty meters below us. Sub-Level 7… Look at the trenches."

Leo stepped to the edge of the shaft and pointed his beams down along the peeled-open troughs.

The trenches didn't go all the way to Sub-Level 9.

About forty meters down, the wall of the shaft had been torn inward, leaving a jagged hole three meters wide. 

All four chewed-out trenches ran straight into it and around the mouth of that hole, the metal was smeared with thick dried streaks of violet mucus and tangled, glinting whiskers of copper.

Jin-Ah zoomed in and her face went tight.

"They didn't digest all of it," she said, her voice strained but steady. "They only use part of the metal for their shells. The rest... they spit back up and pack into the walls, to build a nest."

"Wait," Harper said, narrowing her eyes at the hole. "You're telling me the twenty units of copper we need aren't missing? They're sitting in a giant bug nest right under our feet?"

"AI," Leo said. "How much power would it cost to recall copper from down there? And don't lecture me."

[This unit never lectures… This unit enlightens. Copper is much lighter than Graventhal… A copper recall from that distance costs roughly a quarter of a percent of ship power so you could recall all twenty units and barely notice.]

[However. This unit feels obligated to point out that the copper is inside a nest. Nests usually contain the things that built them… This unit is simply raising the possibility.]

"Walk into a worm nest," Camila repeated, her voice squeaking. "While they're inside it?"

"Check your ammo," Leo said, pulling up the squad display.

[Leo: 15 | Harper: 15 | Camila: 15 | Chloe: 15 | Aoi: 14 | Jin-Ah: 8]

[Elena: Wasp dagger — charge full]

[Plasma Torch: 4%]

"If we go in shooting, we're dry in thirty seconds," Leo said calmly. "So we don't… We go down slow, minimum grip, no heel-slap… If they're asleep, I sneak in, touch the copper, recall it right out from under them, and we back out without firing a single shot."

"And if they wake up?" Elena asked coldly from the back.

Her fingers had drifted to the Wasp's handle again but this time Leo didn't say anything about it.

"Then we make every shot count," he said. "Lights to ten percent… Move."

They dimmed their helmet lights to faint ghostly halos and stepped back onto the shaft wall.

The descent was agonizing.

Every step had to be rolled off the steel one millimeter at a time, so the magnets let go without a single clack ringing through the frame.

…Forty meters had never felt so long as nobody spoke as well.

Camila's breathing was so loud over the channel that Harper eventually reached over and gently squeezed her hand, and it slowed down.

Jin-Ah walked with her eyes locked on her HUD, refusing to look at the walls.

Chloe moved at the front beside Leo, her gloved fingertips trailing lightly along the steel, feeling.

Halfway down, Ms. Tachibana's voice slipped into his helmet on a private channel.

"Leo."

"Sensei."

"You realize that if the copper is in there, you're the one who has to touch it."

"Yeah."

"And if you die in there, the ship goes with you… All of us go with you."

He kept walking. 

Step! Roll! Step!

"I know," he said quietly. "But nobody else can recall it. If I send someone else in to carry it out by hand, they're spending ten times longer next to those things than I would." 

He paused. "This is the fastest way for everyone to get out alive… Including me."

She didn't answer for a few steps.

"...Then don't you dare do anything stupid," she said finally. "I would be very upset with you."

"Upset like 'write a strongly worded email' upset?"

"Upset like 'fail you for the semester' upset."

He almost laughed out loud, and caught it just in time.

"Noted, Sensei."

When they reached the jagged hole on Sub-Level 7, Leo crouched at the torn lip and peered inside.

His breath caught.

The room beyond had been some kind of transformer station once… now it was hollowed out into a cavernous round grotto of warped metal and dried, resin-like purple slime.

Cemented all over the curved walls, packed between the ribs like grotesque wasp nests, were huge spheres of tangled, half-digested copper wire. 

Each one was more than a meter across, glittering with exposed copper glazed in dry translucent violet and curled up across the floor as well as the ceiling, tangled together in a cold slumbering pile around a leaking heat pipe, were seven full-grown Void Carapace Worms.

…Nine meters each with milky-white armor, dim amber veins pulsing slowly and their round mouths slack with rings of teeth barely turning as they slept.

Leo heard Jin-Ah stop breathing beside him.

…Seven of them.

…Seven nine-meter maggots, coiled in a heap, close enough to touch.

It was every nightmare Jin-Ah had ever had, rolled into one room. Leo could see her hands starting to shake on her rifle as her breathing hitched once… twice…

And then she clamped her jaw shut so hard he actually heard it click.

She tore her eyes off their segmented bellies and locked them onto her tactical grid instead, crushing the panic down with pure cold discipline.

'Biological targets,' she told herself, over and over. 'Carbon… Chitin… EXP… Nothing else… Nothing else…'

Leo didn't say anything. He just reached over and tapped her shoulder twice.

She didn't look at him but her shoulders came down a centimeter.

Behind them, Chloe had crouched low and pressed her gloved palm flat against the bare floor. 

A faint ring of scarlet glowed around her green eyes.

"I can feel their hearts," she whispered on the squad channel, barely a breath. "Through the metal… slow at four beats a minute." She swallowed. "As long as it stays slow, they're asleep… If it speeds up, I'll know before they even twitch."

"Good," Leo breathed. "You're my alarm so don't take your hand off the floor."

She nodded.

[Tactical Observation.]

The AI's voice dropped into their helmets at a deliberately lowered volume, a dry stage whisper that made Leo's eye twitch.

[The Master Captain is about to attempt to burgle seven sleeping metal-eaters in a sealed metal room while wearing magnetic boots… This unit calculates his odds of success at eleven point four percent. This unit has prepared the medical bay however this unit just remembered the ship does not have a medical bay… Good luck, Master Captain.]

'Shut up, you glorified toaster,' Leo thought.

He signaled the crew with a flat hand.

They fanned out silently along the inside of the breach, rifles trained on the sleeping pile. 

Harper braced a knee on a transformer block, sensei and Jin-Ah took the left, Camila and Elena stayed close to the entrance with Chloe with her hand still on the floor.

Leo moved along the right-hand wall toward the closest ball of copper.

Step!

Pause!

Step!

His boots kissed the metal without a whisper.

He reached the first sphere, a huge tangled mass of saliva-crusted wire cemented to a transformer housing. 

Holding his breath, he pressed his palm against the exposed copper and thought the command as quietly as he could.

'Recall.'

Bzzt.

A muted flash of blue swallowed the sphere. It dissolved into fine glowing motes that drifted up through the ceiling.

[Copper Conduit: 7 / 20]

"Still slow," Chloe breathed. "Keep going."

He glided three meters farther along the wall.

He stepped right over a slick patch of frozen slime, two meters from the tail of the nearest worm. 

…Close enough to see the amber light pulsing lazily under its armor plates.

'Don't wake up… Don't wake up… Don't you dare wake up…'

He reached the second ball, jammed behind an overturned junction box, and pressed his palm to it.

Bzzt!

[Copper Conduit: 11 / 20]

Sweat beaded along his hairline and ran down the bridge of his nose inside the helmet, where he couldn't wipe it.

'Eleven... Nine more…'

The third ball sat two meters up the starboard bulkhead. 

He reached up slowly with his fingertips trembling as they touched the copper.

Bzzt!

[Copper Conduit: 14 / 20]

…Fourteen.

Leo let out the slowest quietest breath of his entire life.

There was just one ball left. 

The biggest one, nearly two meters across, cemented right beside the leaking heat pipe in the middle of the room.

…Right next to the worms.

He looked across the room at Chloe and she gave him the smallest nod in the world.

It was slow… still very slow…

Leo took a breath and started walking toward the middle of the room.