Chương 295: 124.Scorching Cadmium Planet 2

The moment the landing struts touched ground, what I felt first wasn't heat. It was weight. Not the oh, gravity's a little higher here kind you could footnote respectably in a field manual. The kind where your bones, your muscles, your gear, your sleep-deprived brain, and every life choice you hadn't gotten around to regretting all get shoved downward at once, without asking permission. The lander settled with a jolt.

My chest tightened with it, like my organs had just held a quick meeting to confirm: great, looks like everyone's working overtime today. The restraints popped. I hadn't even stood up before the knee and hip sections of my gear doubled in presence. Things that had barely registered as "worn" aboard ship were now demands — asking, very pointedly, whether I really needed to keep them on.

"Welcome to Hell Substation," Jess said, unbuckling.

"Gravity gets its hazing ritual in right at the door. Very polite."

"If that's polite," I said, hauling myself up against my pack and leg mounts, "then that Imperial patrol shot yesterday counts as a warm welcome." D was already up. His movements were heavier than usual, but steadier — like the 1. 25G load wasn't a surprise, just another condition to fold immediately into the math. He didn't engage with the banter, just glanced at his wrist readout, confirmed weapons and sensors were clear, and said, short:"Perimeter first."

"Understood," Maki said. The hatch hadn't fully dropped before the color outside bled through the gap. Not light — color with a temperature attached. Dark red, charred black, a smear of rusted orange, the shade metal turns when it burns and remembers it used to be iron. When the ramp finally lowered and the world unfolded, my first thought was: this doesn't look like a surface. It looked like a furnace that had been stopped halfway through cooling.

The sky pressed low, not pure red but a deep, dirty crimson thick with gray and iron dust, as if the atmosphere had been slow-boiled with heat and metal. The distance shimmered. The air writhed. Even the horizon looked dropped in boiling water, drifting and reshaping itself. No soil. None of the forgiving at least this counts as ground quality of a normal planet. Just charred rock, exposed ore veins, and the channels of cooled lava crossing the terrain like ruptured arteries.

Those channels had long since solidified but still held the shape of their old violence — like the whole planet had once burned nearly to liquid and only barely managed to crust over, still simmering underneath. A beat later, I actually felt the heat. Not the lick of open flame. Something more tedious, more insidious, entirely lacking in heroism. It seeped through the suit shell, past plating, filter, lining, skin, climbing bone by bone.

Like the planet wasn't in any hurry to kill you outright — it just wanted you to understand that from now on, every minute belonged to it. Then the smell. Sulfur, thinned by the filters, still felt like a heated needle pressed lightly into the sinuses. Underneath it, a fine grit — not enough to chew, but enough to make it unmistakable that what floated in the air was metal, not dirt. Every breath felt like drawing a pinch of ground scrap into your body.

Even with the system running, something dry and abrasive settled in the back of the throat and stayed there. I stepped off the lander. My first footfall nearly cost me my dignity on the spot. Because heavy. Genuinely, completely heavy. The ice field had been low-gravity, turning everyone into clumsy strangers in their own limbs. This was the opposite — like the planet had a personal grudge against outsiders and had decided every motion would cost 1.

25 times as much, just to see if we still had the nerve to call ourselves trained. By my second step I understood that "walking normally" here was itself a resource expenditure. Heavier legs. Tighter shoulders. Breathing easier to lose. Even the tool pack that barely registered on the ship was now asking, pointedly, whether I really needed to bring it.

"Good news," I said, pulling up my wrist log.

"If anyone dies here, it probably won't be the heat. It'll be their own gear giving them a spinal condition first." Jess had just sealed her visor. Her voice came back over comms, carrying that particular, slightly wicked color.

"Finally admitting you skip your workouts?"

"No. I'm complimenting this planet's terrible personality."

"Save the argument with the environment for later." Maki cut in, voice as steady as if this scorched hell had no effect on her at all.

"Split up. Now." She stood by the ramp, pulling the terrain projection into our shared HUD. The dark-red model lit up inside every visor, several near veins clearly marked, a slightly raised ridge of charred rock flagged nearby as temporary sightline cover.

"D, take two corporals, first-ring perimeter, eighty-meter radius. Priority: bio-signatures and surface fissures." Fast, clean.

"Jess, high ground on the left. I want visuals. Not your commentary." Jess, entirely unconvincing: "Usually I provide both at the same time."

"Today, only the second one."

"Strict."

"It's hot today." I nearly laughed. Too fast, too flat, too exactly her — Maki rarely meant to be funny, but she landed better than people who tried. Jess went quiet half a beat, then raised a hand in mock salute, though in powered armor the gesture looked like some vaguely punchable mechanical ritual.

"Copy, Executive Officer, ma'am!" Maki ignored her and kept going.

"Shimo, with me on the center line. Primary logging, vein tagging, environment calibration. Transport detail holds at the rear — no movement without orders. Anyone whose thermal mesh drops below fifteen percent, report it. Anyone who sees a solid band of dark red flash across the horizon, call the withdrawal. Immediately." D nodded once and moved out with his two soldiers fanning left and right.

Watching his back — maybe it was the dark red backdrop — he looked even more like a piece of iron forged under high heat: heavy, straight, hard, and well-suited to handling anyone who declined to cooperate with site management. The soldiers' footsteps landed noticeably harder under the gravity, kicking up fine bright metallic dust with every step.

In the red light it looked like ash, or shattered glass — pretty while it drifted, and I had zero interest in learning what it would leave behind after working past a filter, or straight into a lung. Jess, acting like gravity was optional, headed for the ridge on the left.

"Ran" would be generous — nobody moves gracefully at 1. 25G — but she was still lighter and faster than the rest of us, each footfall landing harder, like a cat adjusting mid-stride to a heavier floor. Halfway up the slope, she still found the bandwidth to glance back.

"Shimo, if I find something good up here, I want credit." I looked up at her.

"If you slip and fall, I'll write you a good epitaph."

"Content?""' She could have lived longer. Her mouth had too much free time.'" Her laugh came back over comms, carrying static and this planet's peculiar dry echo. Inappropriately energetic. And I had to admit, in a limited way, that people like Jess were useful — even in a place that made you want to turn around on sight, she could still stir enough human noise into the air to remind you people were actually out here. Maki and I moved up the center line.

The further we went, the clearer it became that this planet's hostility toward the human body wasn't a single point of failure. It was comprehensive. The ground felt hard but never quite stable — some patches solid fused metallic rock, others a thin crust of what felt like charcoal mixed with iron sand, grinding dry underfoot.

Heat steamed off the surface, keeping the low view in a permanent shimmer, even the tall black crystal formations in the distance looking faintly warped, like something seen through heated water. Data ticked quietly down inside my visor. External temperature. Dust concentration. Thermal mesh drain rate. Heart rate. Estimated endurance. I logged as I walked and thought I resembled some very unpromising field researcher — except other people's notes read ecosystem rich, soil layers distinct.

Mine ran closer to: do not come here unless truly desperate. Hot, heavy, foul, complimentary surprise storms included.

"Center-line heat flux is running high," I said.

"Readings near that cooled channel up ahead aren't pretty."

"Avoid it," Maki said immediately.

"Head for that charred vein cluster instead. More exposed layer, easier for the transport detail later."

"Copy." She never took long to decide. No excess hesitation, no wasted words. Working with her at moments like this was steadying — you knew she wasn't the type to hold up the whole team while quietly contemplating the meaning of life.

Unfortunately, I kept having to split my own attention toward things that helped absolutely no one — the data field she'd hidden during the briefing, the impossibly level way she'd said we'll talk when we're back, the fact that she was walking beside me right now, her back just as steady as ever, as if the Kushima thread carried no weight at all. Of course it did. She was just better at holding it up. Better than me. I was mid-log when Jess's voice cut into the channel.

"Left high point, good visibility. No bio activity so far, but—" She paused.

"You two should look at your eleven o'clock." I looked up. At first I thought it was just another unusually straight stretch of charred rock — the terrain here already looked like the ruins of some cult architecture, black, angular, wrong, every outcrop qualified for the cover of a doomsday film. Then I pushed the visor magnification up two notches, and whatever part of me had been too tired to be nervous woke up, very honestly. That wasn't natural.

Roughly three hundred meters out, where a charred ore vein met the edge of a cooled lava channel, stood a man-made structure. Not large. Not base-grade. But too straight — too straight for anything this planet could have grown on its own. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Half-buried in black-red rock, the outer wall carried a deep gray, near-black metallic finish, most of it eaten under high-heat dust and slag, only a few structural ridges still forcing themselves out of the ground. It read like a low facility that had been burned, then buried — a half-collapsed archway still marking what might once have been an entrance.

From the angle, it could have been an old mining outpost, a thermal processing node — or worse, some private installation that had never made it onto the Yukikaze's public charts. My throat went dry.

"... Someone's been here," I said.

"More than been." Maki stopped, pulling up a localized scan.

"Partial internal cavities. Metal density's wrong." D reported in.

"No immediate threat on the perimeter. No large bio-traces."

"Don't relax," Maki said.

"The danger on this planet doesn't necessarily have legs." True enough. Sometimes the worst thing isn't alive. It's what someone else left behind. I stared at the structure, and a much more inconvenient thought surfaced. The Kushima family. An old facility. An unregistered building. Thermal capacitor cores. Possibly ore pre-processing equipment. The way all of that connected did nothing to reassure me. I was about to speak when Maki got there first.

"Everyone hold distance. Perimeter readings first. D—" She didn't finish. A short, light, entirely unwelcome laugh crackled across the channel.

"Copy, copy — no rushing in, perimeter first, readings first, being a good little soldier—" Every alarm in my head went off at once. Because anyone talking like that is usually one sentence away from not being a good little soldier.

"Jess," I cut in, "don't you—" Too late. She'd apparently filed caution under background noise. A shadow blurred on the left ridge, and she was already cutting down the charred slope. The high-heat suit drew a line under the dark red sky far too clean — like someone had thrown a disobedient knife straight at that half-buried structure.

"I'll check the door for you!" Still laughing. I nearly cracked the log board in my hands.

"Jess McCallow!" Maki's voice dropped in temperature for the first time this whole landing. Jess didn't care. She crossed the scorched ground and the edge of the channel at speed, closed on the entrance in a handful of strides, and ducked under the collapsed arch without a second's hesitation. Not one second. My first thought wasn't tactics, or discipline, or this woman genuinely needs a leash. It was: we're doomed.

Because in a place like this, anything that looks like I'll just go check for everyone is almost never built for checking.

"Jess, get back here!" I called into comms. No response. Just a burst of static, like the dust she'd kicked up going in had collided with some deeper residual signal from inside the facility. Maki stepped forward immediately.

"D, close the perimeter! Both corporals on the entrance flanks, no one scatters!" Her words came fast, like a blade sliding across a table.

"Shimo, with me—" She didn't finish. From inside the structure came a short, sharp metallic clang. Then Jess screamed. Not her usual voice — the deliberately loud kind she used when she wanted the whole world to know she was up to something. Not the small stumble-and-curse kind that resolves itself in five seconds. This was a scream forced out of her. Short, sharp, broken — like something had squeezed the breath straight out of her lungs, the trailing edge of it shaking, completely out of control.

My entire spine went off like a struck wire. That wasn't a sound Jess normally made. Which meant — there really was something in there. I didn't have time to think it through. My legs moved first.

"Shimo!" Maki called from behind me.

"I know!" I didn't know anything, really. I just knew that the second that scream hit my ears, my body had already made the decision before my brain caught up. I crossed the scorching, broken ground, boots grinding against fractured metallic sand in a dry, harsh rasp, and the instant I crossed the threshold, the readings inside my visor spiked. Interior/exterior temperature differential: abnormal. Localized trace power signature detected.

Elevated concentration of organic decomposition matter and unidentified biological particulates in the air. Good. Outside was an oven. Inside was a laboratory nightmare. The moment I burst in, the light differential hit my vision like a wall. Outside, the world had been all dark red and char, like the whole sky was running a fever. In here, it was a different kind of wrong — a cold that turned your stomach.

Low-power blue-white emergency strips still clung to the walls, flickering, cutting the corridor into something that looked like a corpse that hadn't quite finished losing power. The floor gleamed wet in places — condensate, nutrient fluid, or some other viscous substance I had zero interest in ever identifying. Half-transparent specimen tanks were built into the walls on both sides. Some had cracked open. Some still glowed faintly blue, dark shapes drifting inside, outlines impossible to make out.

Further in, a faded military-industrial logo clung to one wall, half the lettering eaten away, leaving only what looked like the tail end of a unit or research-division code. Definitely not a standard mining outpost. This was an abandoned research facility, half-buried by a high-heat planet, that hadn't quite finished dying. Then I saw Jess. She was just ahead. Or, more precisely — something had her. The thing was wrong-sized. Not "very large bug" wrong.

The kind of wrong where you look at it once and think whoever designed this organism should be locked in a room with their own creation for a week. Its body was as thick as several industrial conduits twisted together, the skin a deep, wet-looking purple-black, studded with clusters of yellow-white bioluminescent pustules that were viscerally unpleasant to look at.

The front half reared up — part worm, part arthropod, part experiment that never should have been allowed to crossbreed — its mouth a ring of hard bone-teeth opening in layered circles, with shorter, wetter tendrils twitching deep inside. And right now, several limbs thick as live snakes had Jess pinned from the waist up.

"Fu—!" Jess's curse broke pitch halfway through. One of the creature's bladed forelegs was jammed across her shoulder and ribcage like a metal hook, locked hard. She had both hands braced against one of the tightening fleshy segments, fighting the squeeze. The outer layer of her suit was already torn open in a long gash, thermal insulation spilling out from inside, the surface even scorched black where the creature's secretions had started eating through. My heart dropped straight through the floor. Too close.

Way too close. I drew my thermal sidearm on reflex — and knew, a second later, it was useless. Jess was practically fused to the thing. The hold was too tight, the angle garbage. At this range, a shot's best case punched through both of them. Worst case, it lit up whatever leftover power equipment was still packed into this place and turned it into a second explosion.

"Shimo!" Jess snarled through the struggle, real pain in it now.

"If you keep watching the show, I'm actually going to get mad—""I should've hit you first before I ever walked in here!" I roared it back. No high-level tactical thinking left in my head. Just one raw, ugly, primitive instinct: don't shoot, don't slow down, don't let it tighten any further. My hand dropped to my hip. The combat knife. The thing that spent most of its life as a piece of kit that just made you look like you'd actually been trained — suddenly the only option left that wouldn't send Jess along with it.

I didn't hesitate. I drew it. The blade clearing the sheath made a sound short and cold in that cramped, wet, blue-flickering space. The creature's wet, gleaming head snapped toward me. I watched the ring of bone-teeth flare open, viscous threads stretching and snapping deep inside, something like acid-tinged saliva dripping down. The sight alone was disgusting enough to nearly bring up the exhaustion I hadn't finished digesting since last night. But my feet didn't stop.

First strike: I drove the blade straight into the fleshy segment wrapped around Jess's upper body. The feedback was vile. Not like stabbing meat at all — more like forcing a blade through a bundle of high-pressure wet cables and rotting rubber. Slick on the outside, tough underneath. The instant the tip bit in, a wave of heat and stench blew back against my visor — metal, biological slime, and high-temperature spoiled protein, all at once. The creature wrenched violently. The whole corridor shook with it.

Jess ground her teeth and used that half-second of slack to force herself outward — but a second limb whipped straight back around, catching her thigh and hip, dragging her toward the main body again.

"What the hell did you grow up eating?!" My second strike went in hard, near the cluster at its neck. I put my full weight behind it this time. The blade sank in halfway. Yellow-white fluid with a metallic sheen sprayed out, splattering across my forearm guard and the deck. My visor warning lit up at once: WARNING: Foreign biological fluid confirmed corrosive. Recommend avoiding direct contact. I almost laughed on the spot. Recommend.

The system, still being polite in the middle of all this — like someone handing you an administrative manual in the middle of a firefight. The creature made a sound unlike anything I'd heard a living thing make. Not a roar, not an insect's screech. Closer to dozens of metal wires being yanked hard in opposite directions at once — a high, grinding shriek. Its whole front half lunged at me, dragging Jess forward with it.

"Shimo, left!" I went left on pure instinct. The bladed foreleg swept past the edge of my visor close enough to feel it, carving a long shower of sparks down the metal wall beside me instead. Half a beat slower, and it wouldn't have been Jess's suit torn open. It would have been my skull.

"Thanks!"

"Less talking!" I planted a boot on an overturned crate, threw my weight forward, and drove the third strike — half-lunge, half-collision — straight into the dense cluster of what looked like sensory organs. That one worked. The creature convulsed hard, the limbs around Jess snapping tight, then slack, thrashing like a nervous system shorting out. Jess seized the half-second and wrenched backward — another section of her shoulder plating tore, but her upper body came free. I grabbed her arm and hauled.

The creature gave one last, massive convulsion. Not an attack. Pure reflex, the final kind. Its huge, slick body thrashed in the narrow corridor, tail slamming into the already half-collapsed archway at the entrance, forelegs sweeping blind, that teeth-grinding shriek tearing out of its mouth. A second later, the structural plating over the entrance finally gave — like someone had kicked out its last supporting bone — and came down all at once. Jess and I both dropped low under the impact.

Chunks of charred outer wall, metal beams, half-melted support frames slammed down across the entrance. The dark-red light from outside narrowed to a crack in front of my eyes, then vanished entirely under dust, heat, and rubble. My mind only had time for the most basic word available. —Fuck. Then the HUD started screaming. Not a figure of speech. Actual screaming.

Every warning frame inside my visor flared blinding orange-red, the system voice cutting straight over the comms channel, fast enough to sound like it had started panicking too.

"Warning! Severe localized weather anomaly!"

"Ultra-high-temperature storm approaching!"

"Estimated time of arrival: sixty seconds."

"Surface temperature projected to exceed three hundred degrees!" The dust from the collapse hadn't even settled when I heard Maki's voice from outside.

"SHIMO!!" She almost never called me like that. Not the low, faintly cool "Shimo" she used day to day. Not the clean, efficient roll-call version from duty hours. This one had been torn straight out of her throat, and even through the collapsed entrance and a wall of static, it pinned me to the spot. I had one hand locked around Jess, who still hadn't found her footing, and used the other to flick the creature's fluid off my blade, shouting back into comms:"Maki!" The noise outside was heavy.

The storm hadn't fully hit yet, but the heat and dust were already shredding the signal. I still heard her draw one sharp breath on the other end — like she was about to start clawing the entrance open with her bare hands. That couldn't happen. Absolutely could not happen. If she stayed here, everyone outside — the whole team, the entire landing zone, the Yukikaze's follow-up recovery plan — would get dragged down with us.

And once this storm actually rolled over, nobody could promise what the surface would even look like afterward. I gritted my teeth and forced more edge into my voice than I usually used on her.

"Maki! You and D, get back to the Yukikaze! Now!" Silence on the line, less than a second. Then Maki's voice. Low. Hard. Every word pressed out through her teeth.

"I am not leaving you." My heart clenched. At a moment like this, the worst thing was never someone saying copy. The worst thing was her refusing to. Jess drew a low, ragged breath beside me, still not fully recovered from being crushed and dragged — and still found the energy for an entirely inappropriate, breathless laugh.

"... So romantic. You two want to finish this later and—""Shut up!" Maki and I shouted at her, in perfect unison. Good. If she still had the energy to run her mouth, she wasn't dying anytime soon. But outside, there was no time left. The sixty-second countdown on my HUD was already dropping. Forty-eight. Forty-seven. Forty-six. Every tick felt like this planet very politely confirming our cremation appointment. Then D's voice cut in.

"Move!" He never talked much on a good day. Right now, even shorter. Even harder. Almost a command in itself. Maki clearly hadn't moved. I could piece it together from a few short, clipped breaths over the line — standing out there, staring at the blocked entrance, shoulders locked tight enough to start tearing rubble apart with her bare hands, eyes cold enough to freeze another layer over the scorching ground.

"D!" I was nearly yelling now.

"Get her out of there!"

"HOSHINO!" Maki's voice snapped sharp across the channel, using my surname. She almost never did that. Rare enough that it hurt, right in my chest. But there was no choice left. Genuinely none. I dragged Jess back two steps, clear of the still-twitching carcass, and stared at the entrance — completely sealed with rock and twisted framing — as if not looking away first could somehow keep the person on the other side from having been forced to leave.

"Go!" I bit it out again.

"This is not the time to argue!" A beat of silence outside. Then the unmistakable sound of bodies colliding, and Maki's breath catching, fury pressed down hard, as she was hauled bodily away. D had moved. In a very D way. I could picture it almost too clearly — coming in from behind, locking his arms around her before she could reach the rubble, dragging her clear of the collapse zone by force. No comfort. No please stay calm. None of the civilized procedure that wastes time.

Because he understood: one more second of arguing, and everyone outside would end up burning here with us. Maki's muffled voice fought through the comms.

"Let go of me — D—" Then D, shouting almost directly into the mic:"HOSHINO!! WE'RE COMING BACK FOR YOU!" The signal shattered a second later. The storm's leading edge had finally hit outside. The whole structure shook. I stood on the inside of the collapsed entrance, one hand still locked around Jess, listening to the countdown still falling inside my HUD, and felt something hot and heavy close its fist around my chest — and show no sign of letting go.