Chương 449: 213.Hunt in Abyss 1

The next second, the high-pressure nitrogen thrusters at the assault boat's stern blew wide open. The whole craft shot straight out along the launch channel, like some ill-tempered god had flicked it away with a fingertip. My scream hit a wall inside the cabin, bounced, and nearly dissolved into the same language as the warning tone.

The armor on Asgard's stern section, the indicator lights on the servicing platform, Lan and Akari standing behind us—all of it stretched into a blurred smear of afterimage in an instant. And Jess— Jess, it turned out, was actually flying the thing well. Well enough to make me angrier. The assault boat cut a clean arc through vacuum, using the loose rock and tiny ice chunks drifting around the Jupiter system for cover, hugging meteor shadows one moment and flashing through gaps the next.

The thrusters weren't a brute, reckless charge; this was precise, restrained steering that plainly carried the pilot's personal enjoyment in it. In short: technically superb on one hand, flown like a joyride on the other. I clamped down on the handrail while my internal organs got rearranged, my voice nearly ground to bits between my teeth.

"Jess, if you dare turn a covert insertion into an amusement-park ride, the first thing I do when we get back is tell Nikaido about the bottle you've got stashed under your bunk."

"Hoshino, that's a dirty threat."

"I have no psychological burden about being dirty right now!" In my earpiece, Maki cut in, cold.

"Frost Squad, stay quiet. The outer Imperial monitoring arc has entered marginal range." I shut my mouth immediately. Jess eased off a little too, though I suspect that had more to do with her finally finding something more interesting than arguing with me. Jupiter slid slowly past on the left of my view, and in its place came a moon wrapped in an ice-white shell. Europa. It didn't have Jupiter's overwhelming, godlike scale. What it had was a quieter, colder sort of singular beauty.

Starlight from somewhere far off glazed the ice crust, and the cracks looked like old scars on white skin—lovely in an unlucky way. Stare long enough and it stopped being a moon at all, and became a creature with its eyes shut, its killing intent tucked away beneath the ice.

"Overlord to Frost Squad." Maki's voice cut in again.

"Begin final approach. Report status." Holding down a stomach still eager to file a complaint, I took a look at the external readouts through the observation canopy.

"This is Frost 01. We've entered Europa's near-surface zone. Attitude stable, approaching under cover." I paused, then couldn't help adding, "Also, I'm refusing to ride in anything piloted by Frost 02 ever again."

"I'm flying fine," Jess protested at once.

"Only if you'd stop treating it like a roller coaster."

"If we arrive safely anyway, that's called a driving style."

"That's called psychological torture." In my earpiece, Maki's voice carried a very clear edge of impatience.

"Both of you shut up. Focus on the mission."

"Copy," I said. Jess answered with an obedient little sound too. The next second, I cut the continuous voice link with Asgard, keeping only the essential emergency channel.

"Frost offline," I said. Jess popped the internal weapons rack on the assault boat and tossed me an assault laser rifle, a set of power cells, and a ceramic knife. I caught them, and the impact jarred my wrist.

"That knife of yours looks cleaner than your conscience usually does," I said. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Thanks for the compliment," Jess answered, grinning.

"I wasn't complimenting you." I looked down at the holographic map on my wrist. The route Akari had preloaded pulsed slowly along it, one nearly vertical ice fissure marked as the entry point, with the exhaust port sitting under a deeper layer of the ice shell.

"Frost 02, go this way." I pointed at the darker-shadowed fissure on the right.

"The exhaust port is below the ice. Stop here first." Jess tucked the assault boat in behind a jutting ice ridge, killed the main thrust, and left only minimum station-keeping. The moment the craft stilled, the world outside went unnaturally quiet. No wind, no waves—just the cold white glare reflecting off Europa's ice plain, and the sound of the two of us breathing a little too fast in the cabin. I pulled the micro flyer out of the equipment slot.

The thing was about the size of a housefly, which made it exactly the right size for scouting in a hellhole like this. As long as you kept it from slamming into an ice wall, it usually stayed unnoticed long enough.

"Watch the external monitors for me," I said.

"Understood, 01," Jess answered, unexpectedly crisp. I sent the micro flyer out. The little thing slid silently under the ice fissure, feeding imagery back to me in real time. The ice walls threw back a pale blue glow and narrowed as they went down, like walking into the throat of some white beast. The camera turned, and I saw the artificial structure near the exhaust port—and two Imperial guards. Their backs were to the outside, stationed beside the passage entrance, muzzles low, their stance relaxed but alert.

So the enemy knew the exhaust port was their weak point too.

"Found them," I said quietly, backing the flyer off and switching the feed to Jess. Jess watched it, and the corner of her mouth ticked upward. I knew that expression. It meant she'd started having fun. I recalled the flyer and locked it back onto the magnetic mount on my wrist.

"Frost 02, there are people down there," I said.

"Change of plan. Running descent." Jess had the waterproof bag open at once, pulling two gravity lines out of it with a crispness that suggested this abnormal way of going down was her everyday entertainment.

"Finally, the part I like." Jess shoved one of the lines into my hands.

"Take it. Gravity is low here, so one bad step and you will drift. Clip your line, or in a minute you will be the most literary drifting corpse in this ice fissure."

"Thank you. That metaphor did nothing for morale." I fixed my line's clip to the tactical loop at my waist and checked the sole adhesion modules and the joint-assist tension one more time. Jess was faster still, as though the moment her whole body's quotient of trouble entered mission mode it magically coexisted with efficiency. We leaned over the edge of the fissure and looked down. The exhaust port below the ice looked like a wound someone had hidden, the two guards shrunk to black dots in the cold light.

The drop was steep, deep, and perfectly suited to any act you'd later look back on and ask yourself why on earth you'd agreed to it. Jess and I exchanged a look.

"Ready?" I asked. Jess grinned at me.

"Hoshino, you've asked that a lot today."

"Because today my pilot and my accomplice are both deeply untrustworthy."

"Relax." Jess raised a hand and tapped her temple, like some sloppy version of a tactical salute.

"Space cowboys don't drop their passengers."

"You'd better not." I let out a breath.

"GO." The next instant, Jess and I jumped together. Not free fall. Running. In Europa's low-gravity ice fissure, we ran flat out down a nearly vertical ice wall, held by gravity lines and sole adhesion modules. The white surface tore away beneath and beside us; all I could hear was gear scraping, lines snapping taut, and my own heartbeat against my ribs. The whole world felt tipped upright—we weren't falling, we were sprinting at speed down a wall far too white, in a posture humans were never meant to use.

The two guards hadn't reacted yet. For them, danger should come from the front, from radar, from deep inside the passage. Not from overhead. And certainly not from two Federation schoolgirls rappelling down an ice wall on gravity lines like runaway field-trippers. In the instant before we cut into engagement range, I snapped the line in, threw my weight inward, and dropped into their blind spot like an inverted blade.

The guard had barely begun to turn his head; I was already on his back, left hand clamped over the lower half of his faceplate, right hand flipping the ceramic knife, the tip driving hard into the weakest seam between helmet visor and neck ring. No clang of metal. Just a choked gasp that never made it out. His whole body jerked rigid, and his knees folded instantly. On the other side, Jess was harsher. Jess didn't go for a clean follow-up strike.

She grabbed the guard by the back of the neck with one hand and dragged her knife along the pressure seams under the arm and across the flank of his suit. The instant the high-seal material parted, Europa's surface cold poured in like something alive. The guard never managed a full scream; he came apart the way a fish does when its heat is pulled out, thrashing once, then freezing stiff where he stood. When I landed, my knees took a small jolt and the dead man's weight swung out on the line tension.

I shoved the body aside and looked up at Jess. Jess had just flung hers off too, breathed out a plume of white, and wore an oddly refreshed expression, like she'd finished a warm-up.

"Good teamwork," Jess said.

"Don't get smug." I wiped the ceramic knife down on the corner of the dead man's uniform.

"Only because you finally didn't treat the mission like a playground."

"But that stretch really did feel like the park's top-tier attraction."

"Sooner or later medical is going to classify your mental state as a research specimen." I crouched and pried the mesh cover off the top of the exhaust port. The metal fasteners gave a clean snap in the cold, revealing a black, deep passage mouth beneath. Heat was welling up out of it, colliding with the air outside that was cold as the flat of a blade, and the two together made a blur of white vapor. I looked down.

The passage tilted away, deep and dark, and exactly like the kind of entrance where, the moment you slid in, your life formally got more complicated. I couldn't help laughing a little. Not from happiness. It was the kind of laugh a person gives when they're about to fall somewhere worse and end up feeling a sort of absurd respect for their own situation. I turned my head toward Jess.

"Frost 02," I said.

"Do you like slides?" Jess's eyes lit up, and her smile turned thoroughly ominous.

"Hoshino, that sentence finally sounded like human speech."