On the bridge, Thor’s emitter suddenly buzzed.

  ~We need to move. Darkspace hop, somewhere, nearby, right now. And point the stealth panels at where we’re currently sitting. We can postpone the landing for a bit, we’ve been here too long.~

  Kyle blinked… and looked at Thor. He almost started to ask why… but first things first. “Poisseux. Drop us into Darkspace and back again, as close to the planet as we can safely. And orient us as he asked, please.”

  Poisseux’s response was rapid. ~We’re too close to the planet. We came in about as close as we safely could. Starting evasive manuevers. Whats this about?~

  It took a few seconds for Thor to respond… as Poisseux immediately started to adjust angles of descent, rolling and shifting; it would take longer, and they’d absorb more heat from the minimal atmosphere, but they could get down faster.

  ~Fuck. Understood. To be clear, we were wrong about the Krakens. They don’t turn invisible. They make FTL hops. And can do it directly from a planet’s surface.~

  Even as his mind tried to jump into the possibilities, Kyle clamped it down. This… put them in an extremely dangerous position. “We’ve already got some combat drones and ordinance out in the void. I’m moving them a bit and leaving them prepped to go off. Shit. At least they can’t watch us in real time. How long til landing?”

  ~Two minutes.~

  “...Drones are waiting at the bay door. What's it like on the ground?”

  ~The two maintenance bots are able to pick it up, thanks to the low gravity. We’re walking out of the cave now, but it’ll take more than two minutes to reach the entrance.~

  “.... Elise, I want you to run though the arming process for the nuke. We might be about to use it. Thor… have them run. A bit of damage at this stage is better than being left behind.”

  Their careful consideration, which should have allowed this operation to be reasonably safe? Was completely out the window. There was no way in hell he would’ve risked the ship, and his friends, if he’d known.

  He looked at Elise’s face, as she turned to the console, activating the process. The same pretty red-head girl he’d known all his life, only she’d blossomed into a woman… sort-of. She’d died as a teenager. He’d dreamed of her even after she’d died. And now? They might be about to die.

  They…. Shouldn’t be out here. They should be back home, safe, inside one of their digital worlds. They could possibly live forever there, but instead? They were out here in the void, in danger, because of him.

  “...I should never have brought you here.”

  Suddenly, even as Elise was turning to look at him in confusion… right at the edge of the expected range, inside the massive debris cloud they’d created.. A Kraken appeared, with a blinding flash that they hadn’t seen on the previous appearance.

  A bulbous creature; a bit longer than the last one, but still a fat black orb, with its strange beak and numerous tentacles; hurling at the spot the Sapper had been moments before. Its body was covered with numerous tiny splotches.

  It tried to adjust its aim, but the Sapper had moved too far; and suddenly had something else to worry about, as a set of eight Mars-class drones swiveled, reacting faster than any human; or apparently space-monster; could, and made chase; opening fire first with gatling weapons… and then with a volley of missiles.

  The tiny orb-shaped craft focused in, bursts of light of rocket motors firing; and as the Kraken turned, focusing on the Sapper’s new location… three of the sabots slammed into its side, penetrating through the heat-resistant scales, burying themselves in its torso… and masses of hundreds of railgun rounds swept across its surface, shredding dozens of the smaller tendrils, but not sinking in anywhere but the two new wounds on the side facing the weapons fire.

  It tilted askew as it made its second jump, trying to aim for the Sapper… only to vanish. At first, they had no idea where the creature had gone, just continuing to dive for the planet, and the cave, tilting their trajectory again as they looked in every direction.

  Only… they didn’t see its new location. Only the results. On the horizon of the barren planet, a sudden pinprick of light… as an impact more powerful than any nuke he’d ever seen created a steadily expanding shockwave… with the mountain range it had impacted visibly starting to crack apart.

  Kyle stared at the expanding blast front. “....Fuck. Do we need to abort? Is there enough atmosphere for this to be a problem?”

  For a moment, Elise’s eyes closed. She’d just shut off her body, dropped into accelerated time; given the ship’s hardware, she could do several minutes of calculations in a few seconds to the normal world. “Sort-of. Not enough for an atmospheric shockwave to do damage, but we’re talking a ripple effect that is going to cause cataclysmic earthquakes.The ground is gonna be shaking itself apart, and that cave will collapse almost instantly.”

  She turned to Kyle. “...I don’t know if we can save them. It’ll be close. There’s gonna be a weaker shockwave before we get there. And a much, much stronger one maybe forty-five seconds after we land..”

  “This… might be too close…. Poisseux, speed up the descent. I built her to be damned tough. Lets use it.”

  ***

  Thor could see the flash of light through the drone’s sensors as they emerged into the light of the barren world… and for a moment, he thought he was looking at a nuclear detonation… before his comm updated.

  ~Thor, this is Kyle. Incoming shockwave in… eleven seconds. Are you still in the cave?~

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  He glanced at the surface overhead. “Exiting right now. We’re coming up on the drop pod. We should be able to load both pretty quick, but the way I’ve had the bots move there might be internal damage, we need to check the moment we can.”

  He could see it. The faint ripple in the ground. The spreading cracks. And… despite the almost complete lack of atmosphere, he could actually hear it, undoubtedly through his feet, as the ground started to shudder. He could also see… the Sapper. Her cargo bay already opening as she turned her back on him, dropping towards him far too quickly to be safe.

  ~We’re landing, right now. Shove the pods in. We don’t have time for niceties, we probably don’t have time for anything at all. Tomas, this is gonna get bumpy, hold on to something!~

  Down inside the cargo bay, facing out, a pair of maintenance drones stood, holding a pair of large, bulky cylinders that had been bolted to the deck; and as Thor looked up, he chuckled. “Boarding harpoons. Of course.”

  He grabbed onto the escape pod… and as the two maintenance bots on the ground started to push, and the Sapper slammed into the ground with an audible creak of metal… undoubtedly taking at least a little damage from the impact…

  Both boarding harpoons fired, slamming into the amalgamation of escape pod and ship parts; yanking it towards the ship, even as other maintenance drones rushed to grab it, pulling it aboard.

  As the drop pod visibly launched itself back into orbit behind him… containing the smaller flying drones… and the maintenance drones shoved the mass inside…

  He could see the next ripple, approaching. The already cracked and broken landscape was tearing itself apart, rising outward as it expanded across the globe. “Lift. Right now, lift!”

  The engines fired… and the ship started to lift off, the escape pods dangling precariously for just a moment, crushing one of the lifting drones… before sliding in the door.

  Thor’s last view of it from the drone was when the one he piloted slammed into the deck overhead; parts of it landing inside the deck, and others falling to the planet below… as the ground they were standing on seconds earlier started to visibly buckle, bulging upward as if it were trying to reach out and grab them.

  He could see the ship taking off from below, as the camera fell into the earth… and see a massive chunk of rock rebound off the side of the ship as it ascended, throwing it off-course… before the camera went black.

  ***

  Kyle could feel the way the ship abruptly shifted off to the left as something struck it on its way up… but Poisseux compensated smoothly, bringing her right back on course, getting them back into orbit… as he looked back at the barren world beneath them.

  “...What the hell was that?”

  Elise glanced down at her terminal… then up at Kyle. “Those tendrils on the Kraken? They must be how they steer. We broke like a third or more of them with the fighters. And when it tried to go after us…. It aimed wrong, and hit a mountain… while it was still going FTL.” She reached down; and activated the magnets on her boots.

  “I’m heading down to check out the cargo. We gave her a rough ride.”

  Kyle glanced at her, then the display. “Poisseux, you’re in charge. Load up what we can on the way out, especially the fighters and drop pod… but if it costs us more than thirty seconds, just get us the hell into darkspace. Don’t stop for anything.”

  A buzz from her emitter was the only response… she was undoubtedly already set on doing exactly that.

  Thor was already shaking himself, shifting his limbs as he got used to controlling his own body again.. While Barry glanced at Kyle. “I’ll handle the drop pod and fighters and aim them for our path. Poisseux, if you could make sure the docking bay faces the right direction.”

  Her thought for a moment… and as he rose to follow Elise down the hallway, he sent a message to his quarters….

  Activating the powered armor suit… just in case. It should be heading towards him as they moved.

  He ran forward, looking at his own escape pod… the starboard one… before grabbing the ladder and sliding down to the cargo hold, seeing Elise half-a-meter in front of him. “Helmets! The cargo bay is in vacuum right now!”

  She made a solid clang as she impacted the deck, and stepped forward into the airlock… grabbing a helmet off the rack, starting to attach it… even as Kyle did the same, and they could hear Sherry slamming down behind them, stumbling forward into the two of them for a moment…

  If not for the restrictor frame, Kyle might even have tumbled, but he stood firm, bracing her with one arm as he slid his own helmet on… and the airlock started to seal behind them.

  They were waiting just a moment, as Sherry secured her own… before popping open the cargo bay side of the airlock.

  As they stepped into the bay, the door still open to the vacuum of space, the trio of escape pods shaking on the cables holding onto them… Kyle grimaced.

  Atmosphere was leaking from it.

  He tapped the side of his wrist, and shifted to local comms. “Tomas, can you hear me? I’ve got the… structure you put together on board, but she’s leaking atmosphere and it’s gonna take a minute to pressurize the cargo bay. How are you and the other crew’s pods? Is your suit intact?”

  …There was no response. Just dead silence.

  He stared at it for a moment. The marine might be unconscious, or even dead. They’d roughed the thing up as they loaded it up. On the one hand, that would likely be good; if all of the survivors were still frozen, that would mean nobody could cause problems as they got them to civilization.

  He grimaced… Even if there weren’t gear left to retrieve, this cargo bay was massive. It would take a while to get to a livable atmosphere. Was he willing to risk the marine’s life on that timeline just to get some drones back?

  “Sherry, Elise. Grab the hull repair foam, and seal every leak you can find.”

  He turned… and yanked open the panel on the side of the cargo bay, pulling out one of his own; the meter-long device was mostly just a tube of expanding foam sealant, a substance which would harden into a semi-permanent barrier… which he immediately ran up to the pod, and started spraying at the leaks he could see….

  Of which there were many, albeit small; it looked as if most of them were along the rings where they’d welded the escape pods together, which meant that each of them was able to seal up dozens of leaks at a time….

  By the time the last of the drones was loaded, and the drop pod set itself down haphazardly a few meters away…. They’d caught all of the visible leaks.

  They could see it, outside… as the cloud of debris, and the view of the planet below, shifted, replaced by the dull void of darkspace.. As the cargo bay doors started to close.

  As the plumes of air flowing into the bay could be seen from dozens of vents, Kyle stared at the old hunk of metal.

  In the moment, when he could have reduced the risk of killing someone by abandoning a bit of hardware… granted, hundreds of thousands of credits worth… he’d compromised.

  He knew damned well that if it were any of his friends, or even just some random stranger, he would’ve sealed the cargo bay and abandoned the drones, cut every corner to get it done seconds faster..

  They started fixing the leaks as soon as they could. It was unlikely the timing would make much difference; Tomas was likely even wearing a suit.

  But… there was a chance the man could be dead because of that decision.