The fleet advanced under heavy fire, with only the mercy of distance reducing the attrition from Hymir's defenses. Sleipnir’s ships were strung out in a long, serpentine line, their formation dictated by the need to balance speed, firepower, and survivability. Perhaps a quarter of the vessels would thread the needle at a time, weathering the output of the alien defenses for longer than was comfortable before they were cleared to engage. It couldn't be helped. The aliens had a distinct home field advantage, with the luxury of an entire planet and several minor moons as heatsinks and ammunition depots. The fleet (mostly) could only fire what they carried, and had to conserve ammunition till it was gauged to be effective. They had a few ex-Nihilists, and plenty of metahumans were theoretically 'renewable', but in practice plagued by their cool downs.
The strategy was simple in theory, brutal in execution. The fleet was divided into waves, each wave consisting of roughly a quarter of the total force. As one wave completed its pass over Hymir, the next would begin its approach, creating a continuous cycle of engagement and withdrawal. The idea was to keep the Centauri defenses off balance, forcing them to divide their fire between multiple threats while minimizing the fleet’s exposure to their most devastating weapons.
It wasn't all bad news. The alien defenses were mostly fixed in predictable orbits, mobile fleet defense was lacking. Yossarian and the other captains had all sighed in relief, the ships defending Hymir were nowhere near the peak of Centaur performance. Hymir had been bootstrapped from a non-existent industrial base by minimal Von Neumanns; the aliens had limits too, they had probably been working on the RKV launchers for years and only had another to move to a war footing. Not enough time for giga-factories and Dreadnought forges to be spooled up and birth their terrifying craft.
The ships they did see were daunting nonetheless. Only the barely outdated craft from Ragnarok were a match in a fair fight, but thankfully they'd only counted two hundred or so ships-of-the-line. The error bars, while large, were tolerable, and were being constrained quickly as the fleet Precogs and ESPers looked in places mundane sensors couldn't.
Fenrir was part of the second wave, screaming in at 0.5% c hot on the heels of the first. They'd taken 10% losses already, his stomach sank as they passed through the debris fields, shattered hulls still white hot. He wondered if they'd be able to catch up with the vessels that had propulsion knocked out and were now helplessly drifting away.
The first wave had already paid the price. As the Fenrir and its companions approached, the wreckage of the vanguard ships littered the void, their shattered hulls glowing white hot. The Centauri had been waiting for them, their defenses primed and ready. The moment the first wave entered range, the void had erupted in a storm of fire. Kinetic impactors, particle beams, and antimatter warheads had torn through the fleet’s forward elements, their shields and armor no match for the sheer volume of fire.
He'd wanted the Fenrir to lead the way, it was the most durable ship by far, but had been overruled. If the Centaurs had dirty tricks, better that more disposable ships reveal them.
Now it was the their turn, he'd have to see if his high hopes for their survivability were warranted.
Yossarian stood on the bridge, his mind-forks stretched thin as he monitored the fleet’s progress. The tactical display showed the fleet’s formation as a long, sinuous line, each ship a glowing icon against the dark backdrop of space. The mosty intact first wave was already pulling away, their trajectories, too open ended to called orbits, carrying them back out into the void. The second wave was just beginning its approach, their weapons firing as they closed the distance to Hymir. The third wave was still decelerating, their engines burning bright as they prepared to enter the fray.
The Fenrir was part of the second wave, its position near the center of the formation giving it a clear view of the battle. Yossarian watched as the ships ahead of him engaged the Centauri defenses, their weapons lighting up the void. Railgun slugs and fusion torpedoes streaked through the darkness, their impacts lighting up the surface of the closest moonlet, now christened Hymir-Alpha. Now close enough for the ship's sensors to clearly resolve, its surface was a nightmare of geometric shapes and jagged spires buried deep into the surface ice, crawling with energy signatures. Glaciers the size of cities began sublimating as waste heat was dumped into them, allowing weapons to be fired at a pace the human ships couldn't match.
A cruiser on the Fenrir’s starboard flank took a direct hit from a particle beam, ablative armor flaring and failing in an instant. The beam carved through the ship’s hull, slicing it in two. For a moment, the two halves hung in the void, their interiors exposed to the cold vacuum. Then the reactor breached, and the ship vanished in a flash of light. He winced, the Ragnarok fleet's ships had been the first to be outfitted with completely antimatter based power plants and propulsion system, as opposed to the older antimatter-catalyzed fusion that prior models used. A lot more power, but when the reactors were compromised and the magnetic bottles lost confinement, the end was quick.
“Cruiser Freja is down,” Bulldog reported, its tone unchanged. “No survivors.”
Yossarian clenched his fists, his mind-forks racing through the data. The fleet was taking losses, and they hadn’t even reached Hymir yet. He glanced at the tactical display, his augmented cognition processing the information at lightning speed. The Centaurs were adapting, shifting their defenses to counter the fleet’s movements. They were learning, and fast.
“We need to punch through,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. “We need to get to work on Hymir.”
The Fenrir’s Teleporters were already at work, their abilities stretched to the limit. One moment, a ship would be caught in the crosshairs of a Centauri weapon. The next, it would vanish in a flash of light, reappearing kilometers away from the kill zone. But even the Teleporters had their limits. The closer the fleet got to Hymir, the more dangerous the jumps became. The Centauri had anticipated this, seeding the approach with gravitic mines that threw off their abilities. Several ships had already been lost to misjumps, their crews torn apart by the unforgiving physics of folded spacetime.
Yossarian watched as a Centauri mass driver emplacement on Hymir-Alpha was obliterated by a direct hit, its structure collapsing in a slow-motion cascade of debris raining down on the opposite hemisphere.
But for every emplacement destroyed, a dozen more took its place. The Centauri defenses were relentless, their fire precise and unyielding.
"This is too slow. Bulldog, enact Scenario Blitz. Send Anya in." Yossarian ordered, the words barely out of his mouth before Anya was vanished from crew quarters and appeared in the teleportation bay. She'd have mere seconds to act, but that was all she'd need.
Shd stood in the Fenrir’s teleportation bay, her body humming with barely contained energy. The air around her crackled faintly, sickly blue Cherenkov radiation a consequence of her exerting her powers to the max in anticipation of the jump. She adjusted the lightweight harness strapped to her torso, its compartments filled with hundreds of micro-charges, each no larger than a coin but capable of leveling a city block. Her fingers twitched, eager to move, to run.
“Ready?” Yossarian’s voice crackled over her comms, his tone calm but edged with urgency.
Anya smirked, her eyes narrowing as she stared at the teleportation pad. “Born ready, Cap. Let’s light this candle.”
The Teleporters - twins with matching grim expressions - nodded in unison. Their hands glowed faintly as they synchronized their powers, the air in the bay shimmering with the promise of imminent displacement. Anya took a deep breath, her heart pounding not from fear but from anticipation. This was what she lived for - the rush of speed, the thrill of the impossible.
“Go,” Yossarian ordered.
The world dissolved into a blur of light and sound. For a fraction of a second, Anya felt weightless, her body stretched across the void. Then her boots hit solid ground, and the chaos of Hymir-Alpha engulfed her.
The moonlet’s surface was steaming. Towering spires of black metal rose from the icy ground, their surfaces crawling with energy conduits and weapon emplacements. The atmosphere was thin and could hardly have been said to exist before the battle had started. It was mostly nitrogen just woken up into gaseous form. Above her, the sky was a maelstrom of light and fire as the fleet’s bombardment continued, the impacts sending shockwaves through the ground. It was achingly slow, she could see the incoming tungsten rods falling as gently as rain.
Anya didn’t waste a second.
Her body exploded into motion, her speedster abilities propelling her forward orders of magnitude faster than the naked eye could follow. To the ship's sensors, she was little more than a blur, a blue-shifted streak darting across the battlefield. To Anya, the world had long slowed to a crawl. The Centauri drones hovering above the surface moved like molasses, their weapons tracking her with agonizing sloth. The most advanced drones could detect her in nanoseconds, begin target acquisition in microseconds. The hypervelocity kinetic rounds meant to kill her seemed to hang in the air, their trajectories clear and easy to avoid. Lasers were a much bigger problem, but she dealt with them by outpacing the tracking systems, if not the beams.
She weaved through the defenses with practiced ease, The first charge was placed in less than a millisecond, appearing to freeze in place when she let go of it. She was gone before the turret’s targeting systems could even register her presence. The second charge went on a missile silo, the third on a gravitic mine dispenser. Anya moved like a ghost, her presence announced only by the faint click of each charge as it attached to its target. The Centauri defenses were formidable, but they were built to handle threats that moved at machine speeds. Anya was something else entirely.
There was little gravity to speak of, but that didn't matter to Anya. Whatever force kept her fixed to surfaces clearly did not give a single fuck that by all rights, a single step at such speeds should have sent her into orbit. She ran straight down the barrel of a massive coilgun, the helical superconducting coils and surrounding capacitors momentarily intert after having just fired a payload. Another charge, another few milliseconds.
She ran out of charges before she ran out of time, walking leisurely to a crater where one of the twins stood frozen like a statue. She walked up to him and grabbed his hand, and relaxed her senses. Poof. Back to the ship..
Her smile mirrored Yossarian's as the charges detonated, amat spilling out of containment and turning the moon brighter than a star. When the flash faded, so did most of the incoming fire.
She was still smiling as she slumped into her husband's arms, grinning up at his furrowed brows.
"ANYA GARAMOND MOVES AT RELATIVISTIC SPEED. IT WOULD BE MORE EFFICIENT TO DISPENSE WITH ANTIMATTER PAYLOADS AND SIMPLY USE HER KINETIC ENERGY AS A WEAPON" Bulldog asked Yossarian as the latter leaned back in his crash couch. The Fenrir was fully inertially dampened by its metahumans while in combat, so the hassle of shock foam was dispensed with.
"Bulldog my boy, you're thinking too hard. You're not paid to think." He drawled, releasing his own pent-up tension as he sprawled.
"I DO NOT ACCRUE PAYMENT."
That was humor. Bulldog wasn't that dumb. It did ask a reasonable question, but Yossarian knew that Anya's powers didn't work that way. Otherwise they could have thrown her at the moon itself and dispensed with other considerations.
No, despite reaching relativistic speeds, she somehow avoided the energies that Einstein would normally demand. Even if she threw a ball while going all out, at what appeared to her to be 50 kilometers an hour, the moment it left her immediate vicinity, it would somehow reconcile itself to actually moving at that speed in real time. In effect, it was only whatever she was in direct contact with that would seem to behave like it had been enveloped in her power's field. That's why she had to manually place the charges. She couldn't 'run' through vacuum either, she needed something to walk on. A pity, but there were speedsters who did function that way, but those would certainly be a class 6 strategic assets not so easily deployed in a minor engagement.
Other metahumans in Sleipnir had been doing their dirty work in the background. A Centauri installation the size of Manhattan writhed in purple lightning, a drone swarm turned inert, rendered helpless as their sensors fed them gibberish. Water-ice asteroids that would have been comets if they had more sun were yanked out of their orbits and descended on Hymir-Epsilon, crushing defenses under their weight. He noticed the work of a powerful telekinetic on the flagship, crumpling a sleek Centaur ship into a fireball that then steered itself unerringly into another orbital outpost. A supe who had initially been dubbed a mere class 2 had proved that power scales weren't everything. He had the ability to 'unlock' anything in his range. During a quick fly-by of another space fort, he threw open the layers of failsafes in their missile silos, leaving it self-detonating in his wake.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Most of Fenrir's resident metas weren't too adept at long range combat. Even supes with strong powers were often hamstrung by the inhuman distances involved in the bulk of orbital combat. That was one of the reasons the fleet had been forced to fly this close in the first place. Still, his crew weren't cooling their heels. Well, maybe Ryan was, he was currently returning from a jump to a beleaguered ship that had its radiators blown off and was on the verge of cooking from the sheer heat dumped into it by merciless lasers. He'd cooled it down long enough for it to escape to a distance where diffraction rendered the laser system impotent.
Yosuf was working himself ragged, scouring seemingly empty space for hidden traps and fuzzing their sensors with false data. Anya was a boon, while he was in her head, he had the benefit of the world running at glacial speeds, letting him keep up with clock cycles in entities that had eschewed silicon circuits for longer than Homo sapiens had existed. Still, he couldn't delve too deep into alien thoughts, both because some of them were fundamentally incomprehensible to an otherwise baseline human, and because of the risk of hidden coghazards that might one-shot him if careless. It was enough to gauge intent, identify if hostility radiated from a weapon's platform, following his intuition to identify its target in time for evasive maneuvers.
After a nerve wracking transit, Fenrir was out, the distance rendering almost all incoming weaponry practically harmless. Unlike their initial approach, the Centaurs hadn't kept up a hail of fire even outside of effective range. This was the best news Yossarian had seen all day, it meant that the fleet was putting sufficient pressure on the alien defenses such that they had to prioritize the most dangerous targets.
"Status?"
"HULL GREEN. SHIELDS GREEN. WEAPONS YELLOW. PAYLOAD AT 95% OF NOMINAL."
Yossarian shook his head. Several of his crew had perished, not that they'd died had died while still aboard Fenrir. One of them was a Technomancer who been borrowed to help in an engagement involving ships with no metahumans of their own. His presence hadn't helped, the ship had run close enough to a hidden graviton mine been well within lethal range. There wasn't much any amount of armor could do when your enemy attacked with tidal forces. The ship was mangled, everyone aboard squeezed into paste. There was no reactor explosion this time, Yama's remnants died quietly. There wouldn't be an open casket burial nonetheless.
Yossarian 35, one of the older forks, told the others that deaths were inevitable. Fenrir didn't exist to protect just itself, it was meant to dispense supes where needed, keeping them safe in the meantime. As many as half of its metahumans would be redistributed to ships seeing active combat when it itself was out of range. There simply weren't enough heavy hitters to go around.
A worn out contingent had just returned, and Yossarian was confident enough that Bulldog could handle the grunt work of station keeping, so he took the time to greet them after their sortie. Grim nods returned his. He felt his stomach churn as he noted their injuries, he wasn't used to seeing his troops return wounded. A consequence of his earlier battles having been long distance brawls in AC - in a fleet engagement, utter obliteration was the usual consequence of getting hit. Five of them had returned, of the nine sent out.
He'd already sent out a request for their Healers to be returned to them, but that had been denied. The walking wounded here would keep, the ship's autodocs were good enough for burns and the kind of bullet holes that didn't kill out outright.
Ranja was still sprouting shimmering shields that wrapped around her figure. A nervous tic, a sign she'd been pushed to her limit.
"No boarding action this time?" He asked her. She'd been in charge of Team Orion, a group of supes who had powers that synergised particularly well.
"We didn't get in range of Ruslan, the Purana's Teleporter. We did fight ground-side. It wasn't pretty, but Anya had cleared the majority of the turrets. I can handle a few warforms and drones." She spat on the floor, a faintly pink blob which made Yossarian shudder. He could be a neat freak at times. "Sorry Cap. The bots are going to mop it up." He didn't admonish her. She was clearly moments away from shock.
The war had extended onto the little ground there was to be fought on around Hymir. The fleet intended to neutralize all of the orbital defenses, and if possible, set up their own factories and automated defenses on the moonlets. Terran robotic self-replicators were nowhere near as efficient as alien ones, but they would, given enough time, be able to start harvesting the moons. The fleet had been loaded with enough supplies for a protracted engagement, but any reinforcement was at least six months away. The very best Teleporters stationed near AC could get to them in weeks, but couldn't bring much along with them. It made eminent sense to start building up their own resupply hubs on the shattered rocks.
Hymir-Alpha was the first moon to be contested. Tens of thousands of robots had been deployed, stalking through the irradiated ruins, engaging the tenacious Centaur survivors. The more limited metahumans who couldn't contribute much from shipside had been sent down to help them.
He'd seen the raw telemetry, and the bloodless reports from the command net, but a part of him wanted to know what his men and women had been through.
"Ranja, do you have footage?" He asked gently.
She stared at him for a moment with hollow eyes. "Nothing from the ground. When Mikko used his powers, the suit cameras failed." Out of pure force of habit, they'd formed up in combat order in the return bay. Mikko's absence was almost palpable.
"I'm going to ask Yosuf to come by and grab memories. Is that okay?" Yossarian asked gently.
"Have him wipe them clean once he's taken them." She muttered.
The Clairvoyant appeared in moments, having had an inkling he'd be needed. He stepped out of a spinal passenger lift, gently touched Ranja, making her eyes glaze over.
"I.. I didn't mean it. I don't want to forget them.." She mumbled.
"I knew you didn't. I just took the parts you were trying to forget. You'll remember them and their sacrifice." She nodded, and walked away in the wake of the rest without another word.
Yossarian took in a breath, and touched Yusuf.
Memories. Not his, though they were as vivid as any he had. One of the Yossarians rippled, turning into a woman with a haunted look on her face. The rest of them looked on in quiet expectation.
Hymir-Alpha’s surface had buckled, dotted with craters so fresh that only now was liquid nitrogen now dripping down their sides to pool at the bottom. The moonlet’s brittle crust, already fractured by the fleet’s opening bombardment, now heaved under the tread of war machines. Human drones - boxy, angular things of tungsten and graphene - advanced in phalanxes through valleys of irradiated glass, their sensors flickering like fireflies in the choking static of Centauri countermeasures. Above them, the sky boiled with the afterimages of orbital strikes, the auroras of dying ships painting the ice in hues of lithium-green and cobalt-blue.
Ranja’s boots crunched through permafrost carbonized by plasma burns. Her shield shimmered faintly around her, a second skin of fractal geometries that hummed in time with her pulse. Unlike the rest of her squad, her environment suit was minimal, the bare minimum that would keep her alive. To her left, an Anduril Indomitus combat drone listed sideways, its torso sheared open by a Centauri particle slicer. Hydraulic fluid pooled black around its carcass, steaming where it met the -200°C ice.
“Contact front!” shouted Kael, their Technomancer. His voice crackled through the squad’s bone-conduction comms. “Warforms - three o’clock, subsurface!”
The ice erupted.
Centauri war machines uncoiled from hidden burrows. Ranja’s HUD tagged them as Type-VIIIs: six-legged, with carapaces that refracted light like oil on water. Their primary weapon—a spinal-mounted mass driver—pulsed once.
A Dreadnaught Super Heavy Infantry unit three meters ahead of Ranja ceased to exist. Where the 3-ton drone had stood, a hypersonic slug left only a crater lined with molten silica. If it had not been for the attenuated wisps that could barely be called an atmosphere, the shockwave would have hit her shield like a freight train.
“Suppressing fire!” she barked. The surviving drones obliged, their rotary cannons hosing the warforms with depleted uranium. Ricochets screamed through the air, each round cratering the Centauri armor but failing to land killing blows. The Type-VIIIs scuttled sideways with uncanny coordination, their movements a perfect counterpoint to the drones’ predictive algorithms.
“Mikko - now!” she screamed.
A wiry figure detached from the squad’s flank, skin etched with glowing circuitry hidden under the anonymizing combat armor. Mikko Varga, Class 3 Electromancer. He hit the ice palms-first, his suit having fired out long webs of thin wires to channel his power through.
The nearest Type-VIII spasmed. Its legs locked mid-stride as Mikko’s surge overrode its motor functions. For three glorious seconds, the warform was a puppet with its strings cut—long enough for Private Cho to slap a shaped charge on its underbelly. The detonation peeled the machine open like a rotten fruit, spilling coolant across the ice. This time, it didn't sizzle. The drone had been as cold as the ice it lurked under, dodging their thermal scans.
“One down!” Cho whooped.
“Nine to go,” Kael muttered. The Technomancer’s eyes were shut, his fingers dancing an invisible keyboard. Sweat froze on his brow as he dueled the Centauri drones in the dying Noosphere. “Their command node’s buried—300 meters deep, bearing 278. Need to—”
A particle beam lanced through his chest.
Kael’s eyes flew open. He looked down at the smoldering hole where his sternum had been, opened his mouth as if to comment on the weather, and collapsed.
“SNIPER!” Ranja roared. Her shield flared crimson as another beam struck—this one deflecting skyward to vaporize a low-flying recon drone. She scanned the horizon, HUD layering thermal and infrasound signatures. There—a heat bloom on the ridge, half-hidden behind a seemingly undisturbed mound of blackened ice.
“Lyn - suppress that position!”
Lyn Nguyen didn’t answer. The Class 4 Pyrokinetic was already moving, her hands trailing tendrils of starfire. She vaulted onto a Goliath’s carcass, her pupils swallowed by molten gold. The air rippled as she pulled heat from the vacuum itself, compressing it between her palms into a spark that resembled a newborn sun.
The ridge exploded.
Molten rock rained down as Lyn’s firestorm scoured the sniper’s nest. Something shrieked in the flames - a sound no machine should make - before falling silent.
“Clear!” Lyn gasped, swaying on her feet. Blood trickled from her nose, flash-frozen before it reached her chin. Her specially modified suit quickly resealed itself, it was an unfortunate fact that she needed her hands uncovered to use her abilities. At least she wasn't at much risk of frostbite.
Ranja didn’t pause to celebrate. She grabbed Mikko’s shoulder strap, hauling him behind a half-melted slag heap as the remaining Type-VIIIs regrouped.
“Command node’s still up,” she growled. “Ideas?”
Mikko tapped his temple. “I can pulse their network again, but it’ll fry my implants for good.” He didn't suffer from MRS, and in fact rejoiced in his ability to commune with the hardware buried in his head.
“Do it.”
“You know what happens if-”
“Do it, Private.”
He hesitated, then nodded. The Electromancer’s tattoos blazed white-hot as he dumped every joule from his reactors into the ice.
The effect was immediate.
Centauri drones froze mid-stride. Goliath IFVs tumbled over a nearby hill, wheels spinning madly in freefall. Even before they hit the ground, they seized the opening, ripping into the drones with guided missiles and point-blank autocannon fire. Two Type-VIIIs detonated their cores rather than be captured, blasting craters in the human line. Mikko collapsed, his neural lace opting to shutdown his brain before it overheated one too many times.
“Got it!” Cho yelled. Her drone’s sensors pinged - a subsurface vibration, rhythmic and artificial. “Command node’s pulsing—it’s rebooting!”
Ranja grinned savagely. “Lyn, melt us a path.”
The Pyrokinetic didn’t hesitate. Her flames carved through permafrost like a plasma torch, exposing a honeycomb of Centauri tunnels. Ranja leapt in, shield-first, following the tremors to their source.
The command node wasn’t entirely a machine.
It pulsed in the chamber’s center - a fleshy orb the size of a shuttlecraft, veined with bioluminescent cables. Ranja’s HUD classified it as a Centauri Synaptic Nexus: part brain, part optoelectronic computer, all ugly. Its surface rippled as she approached, while its partially biological nature meant it wasn't as powerful as other mainframes, it had resisted electronic warfare that would have fried more delicate circuitry.
“Burn it,” she ordered.
Lyn obliged.
The Nexus didn’t scream. Instead of a gentle blaze, it exploded, far hotter than expected, reduced to ashes barring metallic tendrils that wilted in the heat. Ranja blinked tears from aching eyes, glad that she hadn't let down her shields.
“Node’s toast,” the Private said. “Drones shouldn't be as much of a bother.” It was too much to expect them to shut up and shutdown after the central node was decapitated. Even rudimentary drones were remarkably capable of fighting on without further command, but now they'd have to do so alone or in packs communicating through line of sight.
Ranja sat down, wincing. She'd been too slow to throw up her shields, and had suffered minor thermal burns. Nothing that would put her out of a fight. Around them, the remaining friendly drones, mostly more hulking Goliath combat vehicles, stood sentinel over the smoldering remains of Centauri forces. The battle wasn’t won—smoke still billowed from a dozen fresh craters, and the ice trembled with distant artillery—but the tide had turned.
“Casualties?” she rasped.
“Kael’s gone. Mikko’s half cooked—Medevac’s inbound. Lyn’s…”
They both turned. The Pyrokinetic sat against the tunnel wall, her eyes vacant. The skin of her hands hung in charred strips, but she still smiled as faint embers danced between her fingers.
“Worth it,” Lyn whispered. “Tell Yossarian… tell him the oven’s still hot.”
Ranja opened her mouth - to yell at Lyn, to order a retreat, to call for reinforcements, to say anything - when the ice beneath them screamed.
The floor dissolved.
A Centauri leviathan erupted from the depths - a mining rig turned war machine, its drill-head spinning with hunger for frozen dessert. Goliaths vanished into its maw, armor shredding like tissue paper.
“Fall back!” Ranja roared.
But the leviathan was faster. Its tail - a kilometer-long whip of monomolecular filaments - scythed through the chamber. Cho died mid-sprint, bisected at the waist. Lyn’s flames died despite her desperate effort to rekindle them. She was buried under ice, only saved from being crushed by the fact that gravity on the moonlet was trivial. Mikko's unconscious body was less lucky, tumbling down into the gaping hole left by the eruption and squashed by the thrashing machine.
Ranja’s shield held - barely. She skidded across the ice, her visor cracked, blood frosting in her eyelashes. The leviathan loomed above her, drills singing a dirge in B-flat minor.
A shadow fell across the ice.
Ryan Chungho landed like a comet, his cryokinetic aura flash-freezing the air into diamond dust. The Class 5 raised a hand, and absolute zero swallowed the world.
The leviathan’s drills froze mid-spin. Ryan clenched his fist, and the machine shattered—a glacier calving, its fragments scattering across the ice.
“You’re late,” Ranja croaked.
Ryan shrugged. “Had to defrost a popsicle.” He nodded towards the rest of her team, moon-hopping down a slope. To her relief, they were all there.
“Command would have preferred the Nexus intact,” Ryan said, eyeing the smoldering chamber. “We haven't had much luck getting anything that large out intact.”
Ranja spat blood. “Tell Command it’s scrap. I had to take it out, and I bet it would have self-destructed if we'd tried to recover it.”
“I could have frozen it.” Ryan said glibly. She looked at him as with disdain.
"If you'd shown up in time to be useful."
As a sort of half-apology, he reached out to help Ranja to her feet. She ignored his proferred hand, and managed to lift herself up with ease in the low gravity. Around them, fresh waves of drones marched over the horizon, disturbing the barely settled ice. Somewhere, a surviving Centauri railgun battery fired—a streak of light ascending to join the maelstrom above. She didn't look back as Ryan was teleported away, beginning the process of digging out Lyn before her oxygen ran out.
The battle for Hymir-Alpha was far from over. But for now, in this frozen corner of hell, the humans held the line. She hoped that Yossarian wouldn't be so much of a hardass and let her down a few drinks while still on duty.
Every one of Yossarian agreed, gently holding the faux-Ranja as it dissolved into dust.