The periter was gone.
Luca had swapped into his Centauri Phantom suit during the last lull, the armor pieces rging around him in sections while Emily covered his position. The tactical visor ca online and overlaid his vision with its heads-up-display. Forty-four blue dots on the clifftop. Twenty-two more clustered near the western edge where the mustangs had gathered. And red. Red everywhere, flooding every approach, more red than he'd ever seen on a single display.
So. That wasn't great.
His helt's systems clicked online. Passive camouflage and thermal masking kicked in, reflex circuitry spinning up to boost his reaction ti. All that tech, and none of it mattered when there was nowhere left to run.
Creatures had crested the final ridge in waves. His sniper rifle punched through them in lines, but for every one that dropped, three more scrambled over the dissolving corpse. Emily stood beside him with her plasma sword drawn, the blue-white blade carving through anything that got close. Ryan's plasma shotgun, the Coronal Scythe he had picked up from that battleship delve in New Dawn, roared from the far side of the formation. Joey had the wounded behind a rock shelf, his blaster in one hand and the Triage Shell cracked open beside him.
The kid with the xican music was still singing. His voice cracked on the high notes but he kept going, reloading between verses, and Luca wanted to tell him to save his breath but couldn't bring himself to do it.
Below the ridgeline, the military was barely holding on.
Luca's visor zood in on the western flats. Apaches in a holding pattern, door guns blazing, but the wave of Level 31 creatures barely flinched. They noticed. They died. But more kept coming. Jets streaked overhead, dropping napalm that blood into orange fire across the desert floor. The flas consud everything they touched and the creatures kept coming anyway, so of them burning, still moving, still climbing.
Real military. Actual trained soldiers with actual military hardware. And it wasn't enough.
Two bombers appeared on the horizon, big ones, the kind that carried enough ordnance to level a city block. Even from here, Luca could see the bomb bay doors opening as they lined up their approach. The ground shook as the first bombs hit sowhere between the two portals. Columns of fire and debris rose into the morning sky.
It wasn't enough. Nothing was enough.
He tried his comms again. Static hissed in his ear, the portal interference turning every frequency into white noise. The double overflow had killed communications across the entire sector.
Co on, Zoe. Where are you?
A Crystalline Matriarch crested the ridge and Luca put a bolt through its skull before it could scream. Two more followed. He dropped the first and Emily's sword bisected the second.
"We're almost out," Gabriela called. Her voice was hoarse. Her energy blaster clicked empty, and she threw it at the nearest creature's face, buying herself two seconds to pull an energy dagger.
That was the problem with being overleveled. Level 31 creatures against Level 60 adventurers ant no loot, no XP, and no energy cell drops to resupply. Luca's team was racking up kills and getting nothing for it. Gabriela's Desert Sparks were in the sa boat. They were burning through ammunition faster than they could replace it, and the System didn't care.
Natalia was still shooting one-handed, bracing against a boulder, her other arm strapped tight to her chest. Valeria had descended from her ridgeline position and was fighting at close range now. The Stallion stood at the edge of the cliff, muscles bunched, watching the approach like he was calculating whether to charge or jump.
Luca didn't need his rifle now, not when the monsters were almost on top of them. He switched to his blaster in one hand and his tomahawk in the other.
Emily's sword swept through three in a single arc. She was beautiful and terrifying, blonde hair flying, armor gouged, moving like she'd been born for this. Luca loved her so much it hurt. He shot the creature lunging for her back and she didn't even turn, just kept fighting, trusting him to cover her the way she always did.
Luca saw the light before his brain realized what it was.
A streak in the eastern sky. Too fast for a missile, too controlled for a teor. It left a trail of fire behind it, orange and red against the morning blue, and as he watched it grew brighter and closer and resolved into sothing that shouldn't have been possible.
The Triumph of Darron was entering the atmosphere. Because apparently Zoe had decided that "dramatic timing" ant dropping eight decks of exploration frigate through reentry like she was parallel parking.
The hull glowed white-hot where plasma licked against the shields, shedding heat in sheets that trailed behind like a cot's tail. The ship dropped toward them at an angle that should have torn it apart, should have turned it into a fireball.
It didn't. Zoe was flying.
The Triumph punched through the upper atmosphere and kept coming. Nose up, engines flaring, the whole ship roaring through air that wasn't designed to let anything that big move that fast. Physics could file a complaint later.
Everyone stopped.
Not just the people. The overflow creatures froze in place, heads swiveling toward the sky, red eyes tracking the impossible thing that was dropping out of the sun. For three heartbeats, the entire battlefield went silent except for the growing roar of atmospheric compression.
Then the point defense plasma guns ca online.
The first plasma bolt hit the main ravine and Luca's visor auto-darkened before his eyes could lt.
The explosion carved a crater twenty ters wide and deep enough to swallow a bus. Every creature in the blast radius just stopped existing. The shockwave knocked Luca back a step and he braced against it, watching through filtered lenses as the Triumph opened fire with everything it had.
Not the main guns. Not the offensive plasma cannons ant for ship-to-ship combat. These were the little ones, the rapid-fire point defense turrets designed to swat missiles out of the void.
Defensive weapons. The small ones. The Triumph's equivalent of a flyswatter.
And they were turning the desert into glass.
Holy shit. Luca's chest swelled with sothing between pride and terror. That's my ship. That's my fucking ship. The turrets cycled faster than he could track, each bolt a miniature sun that burned holes in the world. Plasma struck the approaches one after another, systematically and devastatingly.
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Please let Chris be the one aiming. Please let Chris be the one aiming. Because if soone else was behind that targeting console, Luca was about three degrees of arc from being a very handso crater.
The ravines that had funneled the overflow for hours beca graveyards in seconds.
The Triumph descended through its own barrage, plasma guns still firing as it dropped. The landing struts extended, four massive supports that folded out from the hull. The ship was too big for the clifftop. Way too big. Luca had seen the clifftop from above and there was no world in which this worked.
It landed anyway. Because Zoe.
The struts hit the stone, and the whole cliff shook. The Triumph settled onto the raised platform with most of its mass hanging over empty air, balanced on a shelf that shouldn't have held a fraction of its weight. The engines stayed idling rather than powering down. Smart. The hull groaned. The landing struts dug into rock hard enough to crack it.
A fracture line split across the clifftop, running from the nearest strut toward the eastern edge.
The ship held. For now.
Around the cliff, the desert was smoking. Craters everywhere. Black glass where sand had fused from the heat. Nothing was moving in any direction for as far as Luca could see.
The overflow was gone.
Nobody spoke. Luca wasn't sure he rembered how.
He stood in the aftermath with his blaster hanging at his side, watching smoke curl up from the devastated landscape. His visor showed zero hostile contacts. The red dots had vanished from every approach. The only blue dots left were the survivors and the mustangs.
They'd made it. Sohow, impossibly, they'd actually made it.
Sowhere behind him, a girl started crying. Quiet sobs that built into sothing louder, relief and exhaustion and trauma all tangled together. Soone else was laughing, the high-pitched sound of a person who'd given up on surviving and suddenly didn't have to. Luca understood both reactions. He was pretty sure he was experiencing them simultaneously.
The kid with the corridos had stopped singing. He was staring at the Triumph with his mouth open, which was fair. That was the appropriate response.
Gabriela stood frozen in place. Her knife was still in her hand, raised for a strike that would never co. Dust and blood covered her face and her eyes were locked on the ship. Luca had known her for less than twelve hours and already knew she was going to be processing this for years.
Natalia crossed herself. "Madre de Dios."
Jake just kept saying the sa thing over and over. "Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit."
Valeria, for once, had nothing to say at all. That might have been the most surprising part of the whole morning.
The main cargo ramp began to extend. Hydraulics whined and tal groaned and the ramp touched down on the clifftop stone with a clang that echoed off the smoking walls.
Danny walked out first.
He was in full Centauri Juggernaut armor, the heavy powered suit adding a foot to his height and twice his weight in protection. His Plasma Warhamr rested across one shoulder, the head crackling with energy. Red curly hair stuck out from under his helt rim and his dimples showed when he grinned.
"Sorry we're late." His voice carried across the silent clifftop. "Zoe wanted to make an entrance."
Ryan appeared at Luca's shoulder. He'd holstered his shotgun and was staring at the ship, at Danny, at the devastation around them.
"Okay," Ryan said. "That was pretty good."
Pixel ca bounding down the ramp behind Danny.
The nixocatus had grown since Luca last saw her. She was panther-sized now, her midnight blue fur rippling with bioluminescent purple that glowed brighter in the morning light. Her amber eyes scanned the clifftop and a low rumble built in her throat, the kind of sound that said I'm here and I'm ready and don't even think about it.
She spotted Luca and her whole deanor shifted. The rumble beca a purr and she bounded across the scorched rock to press against his legs, nearly knocking him over. He scratched behind her ears and she pushed into his hand like a housecat ten tis normal size.
"Missed you too, Pixel."
Chris ca down the ramp next, his Plasma Rifle slung across his back. He took one look at the smoking craters and let out a low whistle. "Damn. You guys had a party without us."
"Barely survived," Emily said. She'd deactivated her plasma sword and was walking toward the ramp.
In the distance, the bombers made another pass. Their ordnance struck sowhere between the two portals, and through the smoke Luca could see the columns of light pulsing. Still active and producing. The Triumph had cleared the area but the source was still there.
Another crack split the stone, this one running parallel to the cargo ramp.
"Move!" Danny's voice cut across the clifftop. "Everyone on the ship, now!"
Ryan, Danny, and Chris shepherded the survivors toward the cargo ramp while the cliff groaned under the Triumph's weight. Forty people, give or take, snapping out of their daze when they realized the ground was about to give out. So ran under their own power. Others had to be carried. Joey was already on the ramp, directing traffic toward the dical bay, his calm voice the only thing keeping the evacuation from becoming a stampede.
The mustangs followed, because apparently that was just happening now.
Luca watched the scarred stallion lead his herd up the cargo ramp like it was the most natural thing in the world. Twenty-two Level 32 wild horses, hooves clattering on tal, filing into the cargo hold of a starship while fracture lines spread beneath them. Chris's face split into a grin that said every ridiculous impulse purchase in Houston had just been validated.
"Space horses," Chris said to Ryan, jogging alongside the herd. "Actual space horses."
"We bought saddles for space horses."
They bumped fists while running and Luca had to focus on not laughing. People had died today. Five on the south flank, probably more down in the front lines. He could laugh later. Not now.
Emily touched his arm. "Kestrel. Now."
"Yeah."
They ran to where the vertol sat on the clifftop, untouched by the battle. The Roadrunners were nearby. Another crack split the stone as Luca climbed into the Kestrel's pilot seat and Emily took copilot.
The engines humd to life. He lifted the Kestrel off the fracturing stone and guided it toward the ship's open hangar bay, not bothering to look back at the cliff edge crumbling behind them.
Inside, the Triumph felt like coming ho. Familiar bulkheads, familiar sll of recycled air, familiar hum of the reactor sowhere deep in the ship's guts. He set the Kestrel down next to the Specter and powered down the engines.
Zoe was waiting at the hangar entrance.
She looked tired. Her dreadlocks were pulled back and there were shadows under her eyes, but she was smiling.
"Nice entrance," Luca said.
"I try."
He climbed out of the Kestrel and his eyes found the Specter. The tactical hovercar sat in its cradle, sleek and black and designed for exactly this kind of situation.
Sothing wasn't right about the double overflow. Two stable portals destabilizing at the sa ti, right when the military was spread thin across the state. That wasn't bad luck. That was planning. Soone had done this deliberately, and Luca was going to find out who.
"We need to find out what's going on."
Zoe followed his gaze to the Specter. Then she nodded once.
"Five minutes. I'll get us there."
Emily stepped out of the Kestrel. She looked at Luca, at Zoe, at the Specter. She didn't argue. Didn't ask to co. The Specter had room for five, but room wasn't the issue. When the active camo kicked in, only Phantom Suits synced with the vehicle's stealth field. Luca and Zoe could go ghost for twelve minutes flat.
"I'll handle things here," she said. "Go."
Luca kissed her. Quick and hard and full of everything he couldn't say. Then he was climbing into the Specter's pilot seat with Zoe dropping into copilot beside him.
The tactical hovercar humd to life. Sensors ca online, and the Specter lifted off its cradle with the near-silent hum of mag-lev propulsion.
They shot out of the hangar bay and into the morning light. Just as Luca's fingers found the camo switch, sothing large and midnight-blue launched itself over the roll cage and landed across the back seats. Pixel. Panther-sized now, all lean muscle and bioluminescent markings, taking up half the cabin like she owned it.
"Pixel!" Zoe twisted around. "What the—"
Luca hit the switch.
Behind them, the Triumph sat on its impossible perch, survivors streaming up the ramp, mustangs filing into the cargo hold, the desert still smoking from plasma fire. Ahead of them, the portals pulsed against the horizon.
The Specter vanished.
Active camouflage wrapped around the hull. Visual, thermal, electromagnetic, all of it bent around them until they weren't there anymore. One mont they were there. The next, gone. Nothing but empty sky and the distant sound of engines that nobody could hear.
Zoe looked back at the seat where Pixel had landed.
Empty.
She blinked. Looked harder. Pixel was gone. All seven feet of alien predator, not hiding, not crouched low. Just... gone. Her bioluminescent markings, her midnight-blue fur, all of it had vanished along with the Specter.
"Luca."
"I saw."
Neither of them had ti to process what that ant. Luca pushed the throttle forward.
Whatever had caused this, he was going to find it.
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