The first Vectar died on the pad.

  Concentrated fire from three rifles took its legs, Ito sheared off its tail, and Vega finished it with a tight burst into the exposed underbelly when it reared. It collapsed, skidding in the rain, acid blood hissing as it etched shallow pits into the ferrocrete.

  There was no time to celebrate.

  Two more came behind it, claws biting into the cracked surface, pulling themselves out of the same ragged wound in the pad. Further down, another bulge in the mat promised a fresh breach.

  “Short, controlled bursts!” Vega barked. “Do not cook your barrels! We are not winning this with one magazine!”

  Helios met the charge.

  They moved as they had trained: overlapping lanes of fire, leapfrogging cover, armor turning them into black angles against the storm. The Vectars came in low and fast, tails lashing, acid darts punching smoking holes into barriers and hull fragments.

  One dart hit the side of Shuttle Three, chewing into the already damaged thruster housing. The shuttle rocked, alarms whooping faintly from inside.

  “We are going to lose our ride if this keeps up!” Watson shouted.

  “We already lost it,” Ito snapped. “It is shelter now. Use it.”

  Another Vectar clawed onto the pad from a fresh breach.

  This one was different.

  Its carapace was darker, less translucent, with thicker plates and ridged edges. The inner light was redder, duller, angrier. When it screamed, the sound had a lower, grinding undertone that vibrated in Vega’s chest.

  “Variant,” Ito said. “Heavier. Maybe a frontliner.”

  “Hit it hard,” Vega said.

  They did.

  Rifles barked. Impacts rang off the thicker plates, some glancing, some digging in. The creature slowed, but did not stop. It pushed through the hail, tail weaving.

  “Darts!” Park warned.

  The variant flicked its tail, not in a fan but a precise, stabbing motion.

  A dart struck a Marine at Vega’s left in the thigh plate. The armor blew inward, poison spraying. The woman screamed once and went down, leg dissolving inside the suit.

  “Dragging her!” someone yelled, grabbing her harness.

  “Leave her,” the woman gasped, voice already breaking. “You will not—” Her words cut off in a wet choke.

  Vega saw the notification go flat on her HUD.

  “Back behind cover!” Vega shouted. “Park, take its eyes!”

  Park knelt behind a half-collapsed barrier, braced her rifle, and snapped off three calm shots. Two went wide. The third punched into one glittering orb, blowing it out in a spray.

  The Vectar recoiled, scream pitching up. Its tail jerked sideways, darts going wild.

  “Again,” Vega said.

  Park obliged. This time, two rounds hit solid. The creature’s front limbs faltered. It lurched, momentum finally checked.

  “Underbelly!” Vega called. “Watson!”

  “On it!” he said, breathless.

  He broke from his position, sprinted across a gap, and slid under a low barrier as acid chewed the edge where his head had been a second before. He came up on one knee right in front of the Vectar’s path, almost too close, and fired straight up into the thinner plates.

  Shots hammered through. Fluid gushed.

  The Vectar collapsed on top of him.

  “Watson!” Vega snapped.

  “Still here!” he grunted. “It is heavy as hell!”

  He shoved at the dying creature’s side with both hands, armor servos whining. The corpse rolled just enough for him to wriggle free, armor smoking where contact had been too long.

  “I hate this planet,” he panted.

  “Get back in line,” Vega said, but something in her unclenched.

  “Charges are set along the edge!” a crew chief called from near Shuttle Three. “Everything we could rip from the intact birds. If we blow them, there will not be much pad left.”

  “Good,” Vega said. “Ito, tie them into your network.”

  “Already syncing,” he said. “We can trigger with the spine for one big party, or separate if the timing goes bad.”

  The next breach split wider.

  Instead of a single Vectar, a cluster of smaller shapes spilled out—juveniles or some other subform. They were the size of large dogs, quick and jittery, claws scrabbling on wet stone. Their tails were shorter, dart clusters less developed, but they made up for it with speed.

  “Swarm,” Park said. “Close pattern.”

  “Shotguns,” Vega ordered. “Anyone carrying, this is your moment.”

  Two Marines at the line clicked over, barrels thick and stubby. The first blast bucked one back half a step, a scatter of high-energy pellets tearing through the leading juveniles, shearing off limbs, bursting small carapaces.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The others trampled their dying in the rush.

  “Do not let them around the flanks!” Vega yelled. “If they get under us, they will go through our ankles.”

  Acid spat around them. One juvenile skittered sideways, found a crack in the pad, and disappeared.

  “Under!” someone cried. “They are under the surface too!”

  “Keep your feet moving!” Vega said. “Do not stand still on the pad unless you have to!”

  It was chaos.

  For seconds at a time, Vega lost track of individual targets, seeing only motion and threat angles, reacting on training. Buckler up, rifle up, fire, shift, step, fire, buckler again. A dart pinged off her shield and sprayed harmlessly into the rain. Another took a chunk from a barrier near Taggart, showering him with corrosive droplets that sizzled on his armor.

  Through it all, the storm never let up.

  Thunder rolled overhead. Lightning lit the battlefield in harsh, stuttering strobes, freezing Vectars in mid lunge, Marines in mid recoil. The smell was ozone, burned alien matter, hot metal, and fear trapped in armor.

  Somewhere in the middle of that, Taggart’s private channel pinged Vega.

  She almost ignored it.

  Then she saw the flag attached: PRIORITY.

  “Make it quick,” she snapped, ducking behind a chunk of shattered hull for a heartbeat as a fresh volley of darts rattled off it.

  “Szeto knew,” Taggart said, voice low and rough. “About Vectar.”

  “Now is not the time for old gossip,” Vega said, snapping around her cover to drop another juvenile at ten meters.

  “It is not gossip,” he said. “It is orders. Black band. I was supposed to secure the core, not destroy it.”

  “Black band,” Vega repeated, the term cutting through the din like a knife.

  Those directives did not go through standard Fleet channels. They came from the shadows behind the Admiralty, from committees whose names never made it into public records. You followed them, or you disappeared.

  “What exactly were your instructions, Major?” she asked, even as she fired again.

  “Land, assess, contain,” he said. “If the organism was active, protect it from local interference until extraction could be arranged. Limit information flow to operational necessity.”

  “Protect it,” Vega said. “While it turned thirty-two thousand people into compost.”

  “It was not supposed to be like this,” Taggart snapped. “Nemea Nine was a test bed. Controlled. Monitored. Whatever happened, it escalated beyond the parameters. We were supposed to shepherd it, not watch it run wild.”

  “And Admiral Szeto?” Vega asked. “She signed off on that?”

  “I do not know,” he said. “Black band came through a different channel. Her name was not on it. That does not mean she did not know. Or that she did.”

  “Convenient,” Vega said.

  Another Vectar, standard size, pulled itself over the rim.

  Rifles chewed into it. It went down faster than the variant, but not fast enough to stop a last, desperate volley. One dart struck the pad and skipped, spinning into a Marine’s calf. The woman fell, screaming.

  “Get her behind the shuttle!” Vega ordered. “Seal that edge with fire!”

  “Listen to me,” Taggart said urgently. “You light that spine, you are not just killing this growth. You are erasing the project. Every sample. Every record. No one up there will know what we bled for on this rock.”

  “Good,” Vega said.

  “You think they will not just do it again?” he demanded. “In some deeper hole, with a unit that will not talk back? At least if there is data, there are lessons. Limits.”

  “Limits,” Vega echoed. “Like ‘do not plug an alien growth into a colony grid’?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly that. Science does not stop because of one disaster. Neither does war. You know that.”

  “I also know if you leave a loaded gun lying around, someone picks it up,” she said. “Again and again. Vectar is not a lesson. It is a temptation.”

  “You cannot unring this bell,” he insisted. “Better Fleet owns it than some corporate lab on a backwater moon.”

  “You sound like the people who built this place,” Vega said. “How did that work out for them?”

  He did not answer.

  A fresh tremor ran through the pad. Vega’s HUD flashed: SUBSURFACE INSTABILITY. Ito swore.

  “Captain!” he called. “The organism is surging up the spine. It felt the charges. It is fortifying around the nodes. If we wait much longer, those explosives may not do more than scratch it.”

  Vega fired twice more, dropping a juvenile that had tried to flank Watson, then ducked behind a scorched barrier.

  “Taggart,” she said. “Any more surprises for me? Biological, tactical, personal?”

  A pause.

  “The genetic key,” he said at last.

  “What key?” she asked.

  “Vectar was not just built from alien tissue,” he said. “It needed human stabilization. A template. That template is in the system. In its growth algorithms. In its command nodes.”

  Understanding slotted into place like a round chambering.

  “In me,” Vega said.

  “In your line,” Taggart said. “Your mother served on an earlier phase of this work. Khepri Station was not her first rodeo. She volunteered her genome, or they took it. Either way, you carry a variant. That is why you were on the list to command this mission. Not because I like you. Because they did.”

  Cold knifed up her spine that had nothing to do with the storm.

  “You are saying this thing has my DNA in its bones,” she said.

  “I am saying you may be able to do something no one else can,” he said. “Your presence, your biocode, it might give you leverage. A way to shut it down without turning the whole continent into glass.”

  “How?” she demanded.

  “I do not know,” he said, frustration raw. “The black-band people kept that part. But if you burn the core now, we will never find out. You will just be a footnote in a report labeled ‘containment failure.’”

  A Vectar slammed into the barrier in front of her, claws scrabbling over the top, mandibles snapping inches from her visor. She drove her buckler up, caught it under the jaw, and blew the top of its head off at point-blank range.

  Green light washed her faceplate.

  “We do not have the luxury of clean options,” she said.

  “You have one,” he insisted. “You. The organism is responsive. It is signaling. You have already felt it. Down there, in the cavern. It reacted to you.”

  “It reacted because we cut it,” she said.

  “Or because it recognized you,” he shot back. “You said you felt it in your bones. That is not just poetry.”

  “Captain!” Ito yelled. “Pad edge is going! I need your call! Spine and pad together, or we get overrun in five minutes!”

  The mat near the breaches was rising faster now, bulges tearing open, smaller Vectars spilling out in a grotesque, constant birth.

  “Taggart,” Vega said, “you had your chance to control this. It is over. We are past salvage.”

  “You think Admiral Szeto will forgive you for wiping out her evidence?” he snarled. “You think Fleet will? You are signing your own death warrant if we live through this.”

  “If we live through this,” Vega said, “I will take my chances with Szeto. But I am not leaving this thing a brain.”

  She cut his channel.

  For a second, all she heard was storm, gunfire, and the hissing boil of acid on stone.

  “Ito,” she said. “Link the pad charges and the spine. On my mark, we light them both.”

  “How long a delay?” he asked.

  “Ten seconds,” she said. “Enough to get to cover and maybe say a prayer.”

  “You believe in those now?” Watson asked, half-laughing, half-panicked.

  “Today I believe in overpressure and structural collapse,” Vega said. “That will have to do.”

  Vectar bodies clogged the breaches, some dead, some dying, more still climbing. The pad’s edge sagged, chunks sloughing away into the ravine as the organism undermined the supports.

  “If we do this,” Ito said quietly, “we may not have a way off.”

  “We did not have a way off before,” Vega said. “This way, at least, there is a chance it all goes down with us.”

  She looked up through the storm.

  For a heartbeat, she imagined the Zheng He up there, a darker shadow against the clouds, Admiral Szeto at some reinforced window, waiting for any sign from the surface.

  “Admiral,” Vega said, not sure if the dead channel would carry anything, “if you can hear this, we are about to give you your target. Vectar core is under the Kappa pad, along the main refinery spine. When the storm clears, you will see the scars. Aim there.”

  She lowered her head.

  “Helios!” she shouted on the open net. “Fall back to the shuttle! Use it as cover! When this goes, the pad will not be friendly!”

  They moved, discipline asserting itself through exhaustion and fear.

  Vega took one last look at Taggart.

  He stared back, rain running into his eyes, jaw set. His pistol still sat holstered at his hip. For an instant, she wondered if he would draw it.

  He did not.

  “Do it, then,” he said bitterly. “Write our own black band in blood.”

  Vega turned away.

  “Ito,” she said. “On my count. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

  Ito hit the trigger.