Chương 450: 213.Hunt in Abyss 2

Once Jess and I had changed into our gear, we walked from the equipment bay all the way to the outermost maintenance interface at Asgard's stern. The closer we got to the hull, the thinner the luxury of a ship custom-built for the royal family became, and the more it gave way to bare, cold functionality. No star dome here, no hot-spring steam, and certainly none of that senior officers' club that would rather die than admit it was a bar.

Only layer upon layer of metal bulkheads, thick piping running tight along the hull, and a vibration that felt like the whole ship holding its breath and leaving the tremor caught between its ribs. The maintenance well opened right there. A narrow exhaust channel cutting diagonally downward, black and very deep, its inner metal wall coated in a thin film of white frost.

Standing at the edge and looking down gave you a distinctly bad feeling—like the world had opened its mouth, and you were expected to crawl in yourself.

"Suits on. So can you two finally give me the answer?" I looked down at that passage, too thin to be meant for people, my tone full of distrust for how life had arranged itself.

"I refuse to believe this hellhole is really going to let us walk down normally."

"You guessed right." Lan stood beside us, and her answer was not remotely reassuring.

"Not walk. Slide." My eyebrow twitched.

"Could you package the answer a little more humanely?"

"No," Akari said.

"Because there isn't a humane version." Great. As expected of Asgard's bridge intel and radar crews. Their most trustworthy trait was never wasting time comforting anyone. The exhaust well was too narrow for us to go side by side, so we lined up single file. Jess went first; I followed.

To control the descent speed and keep us from crashing around like two cans kicked into a gutter in low gravity, I had to pin Jess's waist with both legs from behind and manage friction and posture with my elbows and boot adhesion points. The posture itself was humiliating. Not the flirtatious kind of humiliating. The kind where, if we died down here, the autopsy report would be very hard to explain. Jess put her upper body into the channel first, tested the angle, then looked back and grinned at me.

"Come on, Frost 01."

"That smile makes me want to go down even less." I took a deep breath and slid in after her. The inner wall was frighteningly cold, and the instant the outer layer of my suit touched the metal duct it gave off a soft scrape. I shifted my stance, squeezed my legs forward, and locked Jess's waist in place.

"01," Jess said suddenly.

"What?"

"Your thighs are really warm." My head buzzed for a second. Not from being moved. From murderous intent. Reflexively, I put the squeeze on. Jess let out an immediate muffled yelp.

"I—I surrender!" Jess wailed from up ahead.

"I'm dying, I'm actually dying!"

"Say one more joke and see what happens." I gritted the words out just behind her ear, voice very low.

"I'm not in a good mood, and I have no objection at all to making you the first person on Europa to die in the line of duty because of a smart mouth." Jess sucked in a breath and, still suicidally unafraid, shot back.

"Monster strength... like a crab's big claw..."

"Shut up."

"Copy, Frost 01, Miss Crab Claws." I decided that once this mission was over, if we were both still alive, I would find a chance to throw Jess, swim ring and all, into the deep end of the artificial beach. With the position locked in, we started down. At first it was a slope. The duct was long and narrow inside, frosted over, tilted slightly downward, like a frozen esophagus.

I hooked my left hand into a maintenance recess on the side to control speed and kept my right hand guarding the ceramic knife and the sidearm retention strap on my chest, while Jess steered ahead with her shoulders and elbows. Front to back, the two of us were practically packed into the same shell casing. At the third section, the problem arrived. A faint red line lit up ahead in the passage. Not a warning light. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

A detection net.

"Stop," I said quietly. Jess pulled in at once, wedging herself awkwardly beside an inspection node. I stamped my sole adhesion pad hard against the inner wall too, all but flat against her back, and only just killed our downward momentum. The duct was far too quiet. Only the sound of us breathing inside our faceplates, and a regular low hum from somewhere below.

I raised my wrist and brought up the low-light scan, and the full structure surfaced behind the red line—a low-power infrared grid across the middle of the duct, with thermal sensor nodes attached alongside. The designer had a nasty mind: clearly whoever came down an exhaust duct wasn't likely to use the front door, so the security here wasn't anti-intrusion. It was anti-rat.

"How thoughtful," I muttered.

"The Empire really does put effort into the details down here."

"Can we climb over it?" Jess asked.

"Over your head." I stared at the readout.

"Too narrow. Force it and we'll definitely trip it." I looked up, then down, and finally my eyes landed on a slightly raised maintenance panel on the right. Exhaust well. Infrared. Thermal sensors. And a high-temperature waste-heat stream currently in circulation. A second later, I got it.

"02, feel for the third inspection panel to your right."

"This one?"

"Yes. Pop the retaining catch." Jess had clever hands; two moves and the panel came loose. Inside sat a thin pipe furred with white frost, and when I saw the coolant return marking on it, I finally relaxed a little.

"Good. Push it down."

"You sure?"

"No," I said.

"But we can't exactly wait here until retirement." The instant Jess pressed down, the pipe let out a piercing hiss. A second later a blast of freezing vapor erupted from the fracture and filled the whole narrow duct. The infrared scattered inside the white fog, and the surface readings on the thermal nodes went wild.

"Move!" I barked. We released our holds at the same moment and rode the fog straight through. The red light flashed past at my side, almost grazing the outside of my calf, and my heart contracted hard. But no alarm sounded. The gamble paid off.

"Hoshino." Jess's voice came back muffled from ahead.

"You're occasionally, genuinely a little cool."

"Shut up and focus on sliding."

"The more I hear that, the more it sounds like flirting." I really wanted to squeeze her again on the spot. No chance, unfortunately, because a second later the entire exhaust well shook violently. Not an explosion. A pressure wave. Somewhere below, the waste-heat discharge system had clearly just finished a cycle, and a rumble low enough to be an animal's throat noise surged up out of the depths.

The airflow in the duct turned heavy in an instant, hot fog and cold frost rolling back together and nearly lifting the two of us off the wall.

"Hold on!" I shouted. Jess jammed her arm into a support ahead while I braced back hard against the gravity line, legs clamped around her waist. When the exhaust wave came up the pipe, I could feel the pressure slap the outer armor on my back like someone swinging a whole wet towel at me.

"Shit," Jess said through her teeth up ahead.

"This is way more exciting than a game."

"You're only figuring that out now?!" The pressure wave took about seven seconds to pass. Neither of us said anything; we just breathed quietly in the wind noise and the aftershock. In those few seconds, I suddenly remembered the sound of Hedwig's voice on the bridge, level, telling me to come back alive. I hate that. Remembering a line like that at a time like this was like adding extra pressure on myself for free.

Because once someone has looked at you like that and said that to you, it gets very hard to treat your own life as only your own.

"01?" Jess called softly.

"I'm still alive," I answered.

"Good," she said.

"You went quiet for two seconds there. I figured you were already picking out my funeral photo."

"Relax. I'll pick the ugliest one."

"That's way too cruel."

"Because you deserve it." The further down the exhaust well went, the wetter it got. The second half wasn't really sliding anymore; it was more like being swallowed deeper by some cold throat. A thin film of condensation began forming on the inner metal, and my boots slipped now and then. We could only brake in alternation with the gravity line and our elbows, cutting down section by section.

Partway along we hit a half-closed thermal door, its panel stuck across the middle of the duct like a valve leaf, leaving a slit barely wide enough for one person.

"What the hell is this now?" Jess grumbled. I pressed my head against the side of the door and listened to the rhythm inside.

"Pressure door," I said.

"Wait for the next discharge beat."

"How do you know?"

"Because if I were an Imperial engineer, I'd design this kind of door to sync with the exhaust cycle too." I paused, then added, "Otherwise an idiot like you would have slid straight through by now."

"Hoshino, your way of showing trust is really twisted." Three seconds later, the low mechanical sound came up from the depths again.

"Now." I pushed the door with one hand and shoved Jess forward with the other. We slid past it almost brushing the metal edge, our shoulder armor grinding out a sharp sound, and in the instant before the door closed again we tumbled together into the final slope. This time nothing else got in the way. Only acceleration. The duct suddenly grew steeper, slicker, straighter, as if the facility had given up pretending and decided to spit us at the finish line.

Jess and I cut down through it entirely out of control until the darkness ahead split open and the cold white space swelled— We were there. The exit was a round well mouth. More precisely, an entrance like a moon pool. It was a vertical space enclosed by ice, metal, and deep sea together. Below the well mouth there was no floor, only a stretch of water so black it looked bottomless.

Work lamps hung cold and dim around the platform, white vapor drifting slowly up from where the water met the passage, as if all of Europa had hidden its breathing in here. Farther down, the water occasionally gave off a faint cold glow, like something deep and distant turning over in silence. I steadied myself first, then switched the comms back on.

"Frost 01 calling Overlord." Maki's voice came back through the earpiece quickly.

"Overlord, go ahead." I glanced at the black water, then at Jess.

"We're going down." Six short words, and even I thought it sounded like filing temporary exit paperwork for my own life. Maki's side went silent for half a second.

"Copy," Maki said.

"We're ready on this end. Frost Squad, use your own judgment. Mission first."

"Understood." I switched back to the short-range channel and took the DPV out of the waterproof bag. The small diver propulsion vehicle sat heavy and solid in my hand, its surface metal as cold as if it had just been dug out of the ice. With my other hand I locked the assault laser rifle onto the chest magnetic mount, then checked the oxygen mask seals and supply readings once more.

Every movement slowed down naturally at this point, because once we were in the water any fastener you'd forgotten could turn into a very ugly incident report ten minutes later. Jess finished her gear check too. She raised a hand and gave me an OK. I looked at her and laughed, suddenly.

"Frost 02."

"Mm?"

"If you say anything about my thighs being warm once we're in the water," I said, "I will put you on the bottom." Jess looked at me through her faceplate, and those eyes curved.

"Copy, Frost 01," she said.

"Then I'll say you hold on nice and steady instead."

"... You really have no filter." I set the DPV to standby and looked down at the black water below. Europa's inner sea was down there. The Imperial submarine was down there too. And the two of us—a Hoshino who'd been tagged by fate with pinpoint accuracy, and a damage control officer who flew an assault boat like an amusement-park ride—were really about to jump. I drew a breath.

"Frost 01," I said. Then I stepped forward.

"Moving out."