Chương 452: 214.Cardiac Arrest 1

When Jess and I climbed out of the submarine, the first thing I saw wasn't sea, and wasn't sky. It was row after row of vertical missile bay doors, standing open. That image is hard to describe. If I'm honest, it was like someone had turned the entire ice plain into an absurdly expensive piano and was now lifting the lid one key at a time, getting ready to play a tune written specifically to send people on their way.

The metal hatches flipped up in sequence, exposing the deep black launch silos beneath, cold white indicator strips lighting one after another, so orderly amid wind, snow, and smoke that it came off as almost neurotic. The truly terrifying thing about the Empire was never the firepower itself; it was that they could make even destruction look like a ceremonial display. I was half-kneeling on the submarine's hull with my boots still slipping when the comms connected.

"Overlord, this is Frost 01. Missile launch confirmed. Where's our ride home?" Maki's voice came back fast. That calm of hers really is both reassuring and infuriating. Reassuring, because as long as Maki can still talk in the tone of someone proofreading a term paper, the situation probably hasn't gone past saving. Infuriating, because other people staying that steady while they're fighting makes me—wheezing like I just ran ten kilometers—look very lacking in class.

"Frost 01, this is Overlord. Missile launch confirmed. Combat craft inbound." I blanked for a beat. Wait. I actually blanked. Not tactically, not philosophically. Just the pure kind of pause you get after absurd reality slaps you across the brain.

"Overlord, this is Frost 01." I couldn't help confirming again.

"Please confirm: combat craft, or transport?" Jess was crouched beside me, moving fast, like she'd known all along the script wasn't going to be written kindly. Jess popped the smoke canister with one hand and still had room to slant a look at me. A white column of smoke shot up at once between the ice plain and the falling debris, like a monument we'd raised to our own extremely bad luck.

"Don't be scared," Maki said, and her tone was actually light.

"I'll ask them to be gentle. Overlord, out." The comms cut the very next second, as expected. Wonderful. Maki didn't even give me a chance to protest. As expected of the student council. As expected of a battlefield. Two institutions that specialize in wrapping responsibility in elegant phrasing had finally, today, achieved a fateful rendezvous on Europa.

"Accept it, 01," Jess said.

"At least we get to go back." Jess's hands never stopped. A few small devices that one glance told me had insurance clauses you wouldn't want to read got tossed onto the ground, driven into the ice, and locked down with claws. The next second, the top cap of one cylinder snapped open and a tightly folded skyhook balloon swelled upward at once, like an invisible hand had yanked it hard, and shot up into the sky. That wasn't an ordinary balloon. That was a battlefield edition death reservation slip.

A thin but frighteningly strong custom cable trailed from its tail, flashing through the wind and snow like a straightened metal snake. Jess grabbed the end and whipped it around my waist, clasping, cinching, double-checking—so practiced it made me wonder whether she usually packed and shipped people for a living. Then she fixed a second length onto herself.

"Hold on." I looked down at the safety clasp on my body.

"Jess, was this thing originally designed for rescue? Because it looks a lot more like sorting and recycling to me."

"Sorting and recycling is a kind of recycling."

"That did absolutely nothing for my morale." I was about to add a more constructive complaint when the first wave of missiles lifted off. The whole ice plain looked like someone had kicked it hard from underneath. BOOM. Not one single blast, but a chain of strikes—multiple points, precise enough to chill your spine. A large comms tower in the distance took the first hit and its entire upper half broke away in white-hot light, like a black syringe snapped in two.

Then the big antenna array on the other side: the missile bored inside the structure before detonating, and the metal frame sprayed outward like a torn neural net. Ice, steel, arcs, and burning debris all flew at once, and the base outline that had barely held any order a moment ago was blasted into a geometry diagram in the middle of collapsing. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. The good news: we hit the targets. The bad news: we were still inside the diagram.

A low hum rose from the ground, the kind that makes your teeth ache. Not an explosion. The groan of a structure failing. The submarine under my feet, the one we'd just cut our way through, lurched too. White cracks opened across the nearby ice, like the whites of some enormous creature's eyes suddenly opening under my boots.

Ice dust and the smell of scorch swirled in the wind, and pieces of the fallen comms tower were still crashing down in sections far off, each impact landing on what little sense of stability I had left. Then another voice came into the channel.

"This is Thunder-22. Heard somebody needs a ride." I froze for an instant. That voice—"... Class F's class rep." I raised my head. The next second, I learned what battlefield humor that shouldn't exist looks like. A combat craft was cutting in at high speed, extremely low. Not the gentle "flying in to pick people up" version. This was the "scrape you off the surface on the way past" version, plainly a product of an engineering team staffed by lunatics.

The craft screamed in hugging the ice plain, its wingtips almost grazing the collapsing edge, the belly thrusters throwing up snow, broken ice, and smoke in one sheet. A custom recovery rig projected from the nose, and at its front wasn't a claw but a V-shaped iron anchor so crude it made no effort to hide its personality, built specifically to catch cable. Simple, effective, dangerous, and it sounded exactly like something the military would proudly write into an operating manual.

"This move gets used a lot in ground combat," Jess said.

"Which part of this looks like ground?"

"There's ground. Close enough."

"We're in space."

"Technically, Europa is in space too." My thanks to Jess for the astronomy refresher at a moment like this. The combat craft swept past low. The V-shaped anchor locked on with the precision of malice itself, catching the cable the skyhook balloon had pulled taut. The instant the line bit, the automatic release at the tail fired, the balloon popped free with a snap, and the cable pulled into a line so straight it was almost cruel. Then Jess and I got yanked off our feet. That wasn't "being pulled up" anymore.

That was body and soul torn off the surface together by a high-speed force with no intention of consulting the parties concerned. I felt the jolt at my waist, and the next second the ice beneath me, the submarine wreck, the collapsing base, the burning towers all shrank downward in a very short time. Wind pressure slammed in, my vision shook into fragments, and my internal organs seemed to decide, collectively and in the same second, to leave home. I couldn't even finish a curse.

The moment my mouth opened, my lungs regretted it. Honestly, I now feel a kind of equal-opportunity grudge that spans factions—toward Imperial military engineering, toward the student council's operations staff, and toward everyone who ever thought "skyhook recovery is very practical." This wasn't a ride. This was treating the passenger like a parcel, dangling them outside for direct delivery—the kind labeled "fragile, do not drop," while the courier never looks at the label. The ice plain fell further behind.

The black universe came closer. Europa's pitifully thin exterior environment soon fell past the line our suits could barely tolerate. Sound began to vanish. Not poetically—physically. Wind, explosions, engines, all of it had been hammering my eardrums a second ago, and the next it was shut behind a door by someone. The whole world went too quiet, quiet enough that only my heartbeat remained, the last airflow from the respirator, and the pain swelling inside my body. Vacuum. Damn it. Vacuum.

All we had on us was that all-environment suit, so thin you wanted to file a complaint about the manufacturer's conscience, plus breathing modules originally prepared for underwater operations. Saying they were completely useless wouldn't be fair. At least they let me have enough spare capacity to notice I was dying. If you die too quickly, sometimes you don't even get to complain, and for a person with my temperament that's a raw deal. I fought to turn my head and look at Jess. And my heart dropped hard.

Jess had lost consciousness. Not a figure of speech, not a moment of squeezed-shut eyes against pain. Jess was being dragged on the other end of the line, head lolling, limbs slack, like a puppet whose weight had been drained out by cold light. Her face behind the faceplate was frighteningly white, and her eyes had already rolled slightly up.

The image was beautiful almost to the point of horror, like someone had tossed a rose—one that had been stubbornly talking back until now—straight into the coldest shelf of the refrigerator.

"Jess—" I couldn't hear my own voice. Or maybe I never got the call out at all. But I reached anyway. In that state, with my own body nearly ruined, I grabbed almost on instinct. The line shook violently, my glove's outer layer nearly grinding sparks, and I dragged myself forward along the cable until I got a hand around the retention strap on Jess's arm and clamped down hard. At least don't let Jess become space junk. The moment that thought surfaced, I almost laughed at myself.

Even now, my brain could still cough up a line that cheap. But people are like that sometimes. The closer you get to passing out, the harder you cling to the roughest, most direct thoughts, as if holding that one line would buy everything else a little more time before it fell apart. I pulled Jess a little closer to me. It was brutal work. The pull of the cable, the heat bleeding out of my body, the dull swelling pressure as the edges of my vision started going black—all of it dragged at once.

I could feel my fingertips growing clumsier, my chest filling with lead, and keeping my eyes open took raw force. Finally the outline of Asgard's hatch section entered view, that enormous hull opening its recovery bay in the dark, its lights as bright as another world. Almost there. Al-most there. I'm not sure whether that was me comforting myself. Because the next second, my vision started to swim again.

The figures on the recovery deck smeared into blurred blocks of color, and the instant the cable decelerated, Jess and I were almost dragged sideways into the recovery zone. My knees hit the deck first, then my shoulder and elbow slammed down after, so hard I half believed my bones had been taken apart and reassembled. But none of that mattered. Jess mattered. I didn't even bother adjusting my breathing. I ripped the oxygen mask off my own face and fumbled it onto Jess's.

The catch nearly missed, I swore once, pressed again, and finally got it locked. High-pressure oxygen went in at once, and the inside of the mask clouded with a thin, urgent white fog. I reached out to feel Jess. Bad. Very bad. It wasn't just cold. It was a cold that had already started losing the ability to respond.

"Hurry..." I heard myself speak, my voice hoarse as if sanded. My head started spinning. Not ordinary dizziness—the kind where the entire world tilts sideways and even light grows heavy. I fought to nail my eyes to Jess, to hold on to that thin remaining thread of clarity by force, to make the people running over on the deck faster, faster—"Somebody help!" I dragged out the last bit of strength in my throat.

"Jess isn't breathing—" The next second, my vision went completely black.