Amid glitching electronics and mutilated lens displays, her outer armor rang like a bell from the impacts. She tumbled anarchically, punched by the disintegrating splinters. Beneath her the ice flash-evaporated from the energy deluge, forming a secondary blast wave. She hit the seething ground and plowed through the superheated slush.

Red danger graphics plagued her vision. She rolled along chaotically, banging elbows and legs as the solar-bright light dissipated. Finally the universe stabilized. Eclipsing the passive gas giant above, a scintillating debris cloud formed a spectacular short-lived galaxy of coral-pink embers that curved delicately back toward the ground.

Kandara groaned from the pain. Icons stabilized in her vision. Five red-hot fragments had pierced her hardened armor, stabbing through the suit layers underneath to sear into her flesh. No major blood vessels or organs punctured, Zapata reported. The suit’s self-sealing layer was already closing, cutting off the flow of air and blood into space. Inside her backpack, the medical kit injected a coagulant agent, helping stanch the flow of blood from the wounds.

She winced as she attempted to sit up. The parts of her body spared lacerations seemed to be a single giant bruise. Where the harvester had been, a steam-cloaked crater had been blasted into the ice ocean, nearly twenty meters deep. A hazy aurora cavorted over it like a demonic will-o’-the-wisp. She watched in astonishment as effervescent geysers pirouetted around the jagged rim, their spume freezing before it even reached the ground. Within a few seconds the phenomena had abated, and the aurora’s phosphorescence grounded out.

Larger chunks of wreckage started to tumble out of the clearing sky. They were scattered over kilometers, shining brightly in infrared, kicking up sprays of ice as they thudded down into the granules.

After a while, Zapata picked up a signal.

“Kandara? Are you receiving this? Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

“I’m here,” she replied.

A burst of cheering came along the comms channel.

“A harvester is on its way,” Tyle said. “I’ve diverted it to you. It’s not fast, but we’re dispatching a recovery team through an ice-feed portal. They’ll be with you in ten minutes. Can you last that long? How bad are you hurt?”

“I can last ten minutes.”

“What the fuck happened?” Jessika asked.

“You were right about shorting the quantum batteries. She didn’t want to give us her employer, so she suicided.”

“That’s just twisted. You offered her a way out.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t like the odds. There are a lot of powerful people who’d like to act out some medieval-level vengeance on her. She’d probably never have made it to Zagreus, no matter how sincere Emilja was about the offer.”

“So we still don’t know who was paying her?”

“No. You’ll have to wait until next time, and hope you make a better job of apprehending them than I did.”

Juloss

JULOSS

YEAR 593 AA