Taking The Core

"Then we don't hang around to find out what happens when the lease runs out," Harper muttered.

She swung her light uneasily toward the left side of the chamber and stopped.

"Wait. Look right there! Next to the big air intake!"

Bolted into a heavy shock-cradle about six meters from the reactor sat a sealed rack. 

Inside it rested four big silver cylinders wrapped in fine filtration mesh, their little pressure gauges still glowing a steady healthy green.

[Found: Tier-2 Atmospheric Scrubber Cores x4]

[Condition: 98.4%... Pristine...]

[This unit would like to formally announce that it loves them, This unit has never loved anything before so this unit is confused by the feeling.]

"The scrubbers!" Camila gasped, nearly sagging to her knees with relief as she hurried over beside Leo. "They're not crushed! All four of them!"

Leo didn't waste half a second.

He unlatched the retaining bar, pressed both palms flat against the four silver drums, and felt his heart hammering.

"Foundry Recall and overhaul the ship's life support… Now…"

BZZZT—FLASH!

The scrubbers were light, mostly filter matrix and thin housing, and the grid snapped them up in under a second.

[Ship Power: 41% ➔ 40%]

For three agonizing seconds, they all stared at the red ship-status bar in the corner of their visors then a deep beautiful chime rang through all seven helmets.

DING!

[Scrubber Cores installed into Wanderer-7 Life Support!]

[Flushing carbon dioxide... Pressurizing oxygen tanks...]

[Ship Life Support: 01:31:00 ➔ 24:00:00 (Tier-1 maximum)]

[Upgrade the ship to Tier-2 to unlock 2 weeks hours of air.]

"TWENTY-FOUR HOURS!" Harper whooped, punching the air. "We're not gonna choke… We've got a whole day of clean air waiting upstairs!"

Camila pressed both gloves against her visor and let out a shaky laugh that was dangerously close to a sob.

Even Elena's stiff shoulders dropped a couple of centimeters as the terrible two-hour countdown vanished from everyone's HUD.

Ms. Tachibana closed her eyes for a moment. Her lips moved silently, like she was thanking someone.

"Fuel, full. Alloy, full. Copper, full. Scrubbers, installed," Jin-Ah listed off her wrist. Then she frowned. "So why hasn't the Tier-2 evolution prompt appeared yet?"

[Because the materials were never the hard part... Evolving the hull and running an S-Rank turret need far more power than the Wanderer-7's tired little starter core can produce… The ship has the body of a Tier-2 vessel now but it does not have the heart for one.]

A golden target reticle flashed across all their visors as it locked onto the pulsing cyan sphere in the center of the room.

[New Objective: Extract Kestrel-9's Tier-2 Micro-Fusion Core to serve as the heart of the evolved Wanderer-7.]

Thump... hummmm...

Leo walked up to the reactor housing and swept his lights around its base.

His heart sank as the core canister wasn't just sitting there. 

Its base collar was sealed into the station's power bus by a thick bead of solid welding, fused right into the floor and his torch was sitting dead on his belt at zero percent. 

…There wasn't a working charging socket anywhere on this level.

"It's welded straight into the floor," he said, rapping his knuckles against the ring. "And the torch is dead… How are we supposed to pull a live fusion core out of its cradle without turning ourselves into atoms?"

[Scanning... Good news. Cores like this one are always mounted on an emergency ejection cradle, so they can be thrown clear if containment fails… The explosive bolts and the release latches are still intact but the bad news is that the control console has been cut off from the main power line.]

Leo looked over at the half-melted console sitting three meters from the housing. 

"So we can't trigger it."

"We can."

Jin-Ah was already moving.

She dropped to her knees in front of the console, popped the maintenance panel off with one sharp tug, and pulled two diagnostic leads from her wrist kit. 

The pale green shimmer of her talent rolled over her fingers as she jammed them into the exposed circuit board.

"The console's capacitor is dead," she called out with her fingers flying across a holographic keyboard as lines of green code scrolling up her visor. "But the core is still feeding a little standby current into the floor… Give me forty seconds… I can bridge the dead relays, steal that current, and send it into the ejection system to pop the latches."

"Wait."

Ms. Tachibana's voice was sharp.

She stepped between Leo and the console with her hand raised, and her eyes went back up to that inscription on the arch.

"Leo, think about this before she does anything… Why is a dead station's core still running after probably hundreds of years?" She gestured around the chamber. "And why isn't this room full of worms? They love heat and energy. This is the biggest source of both on the entire asteroid… and look at the floor."

Leo looked.

…It was clean.

There was not a single bite mark on the pipes, not one drop of violet slime as well. 

Upstairs, the worms had chewed through solid steel to get at the wiring but down here, where the richest meal in the whole station was sitting wide open, not one of them had ever crossed the threshold.

"Because the core isn't powering the lights."

Jin-Ah had stopped typing.

She was staring at a secondary readout on her screen, and her eyes were getting wider by the second.

"Sensei's right… Almost all of the core's output is going into one thing. Some kind of suppression grid… It runs through the bedrock under us, and through every sealed door around the edges of this level." She swallowed hard. "If I eject this core, every lock and every suppression coil in Kestrel-9 dies… Instantly…"

"Then don't touch it!" Camila cried, backing up toward the shaft. "Let's just leave! We have twenty-four hours of air now! We can fly away and find another wreck with another core!"

"Fly away with what power, Morales?!"

Elena's voice snapped across the channel. 

Her face was pale behind her visor, and she was staring at the dark sealed doors lining the edges of the chamber.

"Did you even look at the ship's status? It's at forty percent! That's not enough to evolve, not enough to fire a turret, and barely enough to fly… If we leave without that core, we'll be drifting through the debris belt in an unarmed tin can… and the first Void Beast that finds us will peel the hull open like a can of soup!"

"She's right," Harper said grimly, thumbing her safety off. "Without that core, all that alloy and copper sitting in the Foundry is just dead weight… No turret... No Tier-2… We're right back where we started."

Everyone looked at Leo.

The silence in the chamber felt heavier than the asteroid over their heads, broken only by that slow patient pulse.

Thump... hummmm...

Leo looked at his wrist.

[Suit Oxygen: 00:39:10]

…Then up at the three hundred meters of shaft between them and the broken window.

…Then back at the glowing heart in its cradle.

If they left it, they'd die slowly. Out there in the dark, weak and unarmed, picked apart a day or a week from now.

If they took it, whatever was sleeping behind those doors was going to wake up right now… while they were still standing at the very bottom of the pit…

'There's no good option,' he thought. 'There's just the one where we still have a chance.'

His jaw set like forged iron.

"We didn't crawl three hundred meters down a bug-infested hole just to walk out empty-handed and die tomorrow," he said. 

His voice was cold and steady and left no room for argument. "Everyone get on the shaft wall… Now… Boots primed, lights pointed up… Jin-Ah, the second you pop that core loose, you run… I'll recall it, and then we're all sprinting straight up that wall to the window with no stopping and no looking back."

Ms. Tachibana held his gaze for one long heartbeat then she nodded once and raised her carbine.

"Understood, Captain. Harper, Chloe, Camila, Elena… On the wall… Now…"

The four of them hurried to the edge of the shaft, locked their boots onto the wall, and turned their guns back into the chamber to cover Leo and Jin-Ah.

Leo took his place right beside the reactor housing and it was close enough to feel the warmth through his gloves.

He glanced up at the arch one last time. 

At the ragged gouges someone had burned into the metal with shaking hands, hundreds of years ago, right before they died.

'Sorry,' he thought, and he wasn't sure who he was apologizing to. '...But we have to live too.'

At the console, Jin-Ah took one deep breath. She slammed the final command into the keyboard and yanked her leads free.

"Current rerouted! Ejection in three... two... one!"

She sprinted for the shaft.

KA-CHUNK!

Six explosive bolts around the base of the housing fired in muffled synchronized pops.

HISSSSSSSSS!

The heavy containment clamps snapped open like metal petals, venting a cloud of frozen vapor, and the cylindrical core rose a full meter out of its cradle on a magnetic piston.

The instant it cleared the locks, Leo slammed both palms against the warm golden casing.

"FOUNDRY RECALL! NOW!"

BZZZZZZZZZZZZT—

A blinding pillar of blue light swallowed the live core. 

It was the biggest recall yet, the grid roaring and shuddering, and up on the surface, three hundred meters above, he could almost feel the Wanderer-7 groan as its battery poured into the beam.

[Ship Power: 40%... 36%... 33%... 30%.]

FLASH!

The core broke apart into a roaring cyclone of cyan and blue particles and shot straight up the shaft.

DING!

[Acquired: Tier-2 Micro-Fusion Core!]

[All Tier-2 Evolution and Turret requirements COMPLETE.]

[Return to the Captain's Throne to begin the evolution.]

[Ship Power: 30%]

The blue light vanished up through the ceiling and in the chamber of Sub-Level 9...

The cyan glow went out as for one heartbeat, there was nothing but perfect total silence.

Then...

CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

Starting from the bottom of Sub-Level 9 and racing all the way up forty stories of tower like a line of falling dominoes, every last amber beacon, every standby light, every dying emergency strip in Kestrel-9 went out.

The faint hum in the floor that none of them had even noticed until now… stopped as pitch-black darkness swallowed the bottom of the world.

One second later, the entire asteroid began to shake.

GGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

It wasn't a distant groan anymore.

It came from everywhere. 

From every wall, every floor plate, every duct, every sealed basement shaft underneath them. 

A deafening bone-rattling chorus of tearing metal and heavy locks letting go, as door after door across the lower tower lost power and slid open.

KA-CLANG! KA-CLANG! KA-CLANG!

[CRITICAL ALERT!]

The AI's voice blared across their visors.

There was no snark in it this time. Just flashing red, painted across the inside of their helmets like blood.

[Suppression grid offline!]

[Dormant life signs waking across Sub-Levels 9, 8, 7, and 6!]

[Contacts: 12... 28... 46...]

[60+ and climbing through the station's skeleton!]

"SIXTY?!" Camila screamed.

Leo was already running.

He sprinted across the shaking floor and leaped for the shaft wall beside them. His boots slammed into the metal and locked.

CLACK!

"Don't look down! CLIMB! CLIMB!"

He shoved Camila upward ahead of him, and all seven of them broke into a dead vertical sprint up the wall of the shaft.

Clack-hiss! Clack-hiss! Clack-hiss!

Their boots hammered the metal as their breathing roared over the channel and helmet beams jerked wildly up the dark tube above them.

Leo was last.

He'd made it about ten meters up the wall when the floor of Sub-Level 9 shook so hard it nearly threw him off.

Behind him, at the back of the reactor chamber, the biggest of those sealed doors bent outward with a scream of tortured metal he felt in his teeth.

SKRRRRRREEEEEEEEEE!

And then it tore in half.

'Don't look,' every part of his brain told him. 'Don't look, don't look, don't look—'

He looked.

…Just for a fraction of a second… Over his shoulder and down into the dark.

His helmet beam caught a glimpse of what was coming out of the rock beneath Sub-Level 9.

…It wasn't a worm, well not the kind they'd been fighting, anyway.

Shoving its way through that six-meter doorway, scraping both sides of the frame with plates of jagged black-and-copper armor as thick as a tank's hull, was the head of something easily ten times the size of anything they'd killed. 

Its mouth alone was five meters across, ringed with rotating rows of crystal teeth that glowed like coals in a furnace and pouring out around it, spilling from the gaps beneath its body like a living white tide, came dozens of nine-meter worms.

The whole mass of them turned its blind heads upward.

…Toward the shaft… Toward the seven little warm things climbing it…

Leo's blood turned to ice.

"Leo!" Harper's voice cracked over the channel from somewhere above him. "Why'd you stop?! What's down there?!"

He didn't answer as he didn't have the words.

Leo just turned his face back toward the wall and ran.