Decoherence Cascade

CHAPTER 06

Three minutes.

The canister hummed at Leo’s side, the vacuum intake gulping raw Flux from the shimmering fissure with a sound like a wounded animal. The display ticked upward—eighty-one percent. Eighty-three. Eighty-four. The green rain was falling harder now, streaking his visor with acidic trails that the suit’s self-cleaning layer struggled to repel.

The remaining Scourgebirds circled overhead, dark shapes against the violet clouds, their amber eyes tracking his every movement.

ECHO said.

“Reassessing means they’re learning.”

“Small victories.”

Kaelen stood at his back, her kinetic driver sweeping the sky. She hadn’t stopped moving since the second Scourgebird fell. “One’s breaking off. The larger one to the north—it’s climbing.”

Leo risked a glance upward. The biggest of the three remaining Scourgebirds was ascending, its wings hammering the acid mist, climbing toward the cloud layer. The other two continued to circle, but their shrieks had changed—lower, more guttural. Communicating.

“It’s not retreating,” Leo said. “It’s repositioning.”

“They’re pack hunters. Of course they coordinate.” Kaelen’s voice was tight through the comm. “Two minutes on the canister. Keep your eyes up.”

Eighty-nine percent. Ninety.

The climbing Scourgebird vanished into the cloud layer. Leo tracked it, but the green mist swallowed everything above a hundred meters. He could hear it, though—the heavy whump of its wings, growing fainter, then silent.

“Can you estimate where it’ll come from?”

“Keep calculating.”

Ninety-three percent.

The ground trembled. Not the constant bass note of the tectonic plates—something sharper, closer. Leo felt it through his boots, a vibration that climbed his legs and settled in his chest.

“That wasn’t seismic,” Kaelen said.

A second tremor. Then a third. Rhythmic. Pounding.

The clouds split.

The Scourgebird that emerged was not the same creature that had ascended. It was massive—a wing-swept monster twice the size of the others, its hide scarred with old wounds that had healed into ridges of knotted flesh. Its amber eyes burned with a deeper light, almost gold, and its shriek split the air like a physical blow.

ECHO said.

“Of course there’s an alpha,” Leo muttered.

Kaelen fired first. Her kinetic driver roared, a slug punching into the alpha’s chest and tearing a crater of dark ichor. The creature didn’t slow. Its wings folded, and it dove—not at Kaelen, but at the canister.

“It’s going for the Flux!” Leo threw himself between the alpha and the canister, weapon raised. He fired twice, aiming for the eyes, but the alpha twisted mid-dive, and both shots buried themselves in its shoulder. The creature hit the ground ten meters away with an impact that shook the valley floor, and its massive head swung toward Leo with a predator’s patience.

“I noticed.”

Ninety-seven percent. The canister was almost full. Almost.

The alpha charged.

It didn’t fly—it ran, legs pumping, wings half-spread, the amber eyes blazing with a light that seemed to brighten as it drew closer to the vent. Leo fired again, and this time the shot caught the creature just below the eye socket. The alpha roared, its head snapping sideways, but it kept coming. The wound was already knitting.

“Kaelen, it’s too close!”

“Get the canister!”

“It’s at ninety-eight percent!”

The alpha lunged. Leo dove, rolling across the black rock, and the creature’s jaws closed on the air where he’d been standing. He felt the displacement of air, the heat of its breath even through his suit. The canister was still beside the vent, still humming, the display flickering to ninety-nine.

Kaelen’s driver thundered. Three shots in rapid succession, all aimed at the alpha’s head. One shattered a wing joint. Another tore through its throat. The third—

The third punched through its right eye.

The golden light died instantly. The alpha convulsed, its massive body seizing, and then it collapsed with a crash that sent tremors through the rock. The remaining two Scourgebirds screamed—a sound that was part grief, part fury—and fled, their dark shapes dissolving into the green rain.

Leo scrambled to his feet, grabbed the canister’s handles, and pulled it back from the vent. The humming cut off as the vacuum intake disengaged, and the sudden silence was deafening.

“Move!” Kaelen was already wheeling her own canister toward the ship. “The alpha’s death might draw more of them, and the seismic cycle isn’t waiting!”

They ran.

The Sable Wind’s cargo bay door was still open, a rectangle of amber light in the green murk. Leo’s boots slipped on the wet rock, his muscles screaming, the canister’s weight fighting him with every step. The rain was coming down in sheets now, etching lines into his visor that made the world a blur. Behind him, he could hear something—a new sound, rising above the storm.

A deep, grinding roar.

“How far to the ship?”

“We can make thirty meters.”

“We can make it!”

They made it in twenty seconds. Leo shoved his canister up the cargo ramp, Kaelen right behind him, and she slammed the door control as soon as they were inside. The cargo bay sealed with a hiss, and then—

The world outside went white.

The flare erupted from the central vent like a geyser of impossible light, a column of raw Flux that punched through the green clouds and turned the valley into a landscape of burning shadows. The shockwave hit the Sable Wind a heartbeat later, lifting the ship off its landing struts and slamming it down again with a screech of tortured metal. Leo was thrown across the cargo bay, crashing into a stack of storage crates that exploded into splinters.

The ship settled. The light faded. The only sound was the hiss of acid rain on the hull and the ragged rasp of Leo’s own breathing.

Leo groaned, rolling onto his back. The ceiling of the cargo bay swam above him. “Which rib?”

“Noted.”

Kaelen appeared above him, helmet off, dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She didn’t offer a hand. She just looked down at him, breathing hard, and said: “You jumped in front of an alpha Scourgebird.”

“The canister was at ninety-eight percent.”

“That was stupid.”

“It worked.”

She stared at him for a long, unreadable moment. Then she turned away, heading for the cockpit, but not before Leo caught the flicker of something at the corner of her mouth. Something that might have been—almost—the ghost of a smile.

---

The med-bay was barely a closet, but it had an analgesic dispenser and a diagnostic scanner that confirmed ECHO’s assessment in clinical Dominion script. Leo sat on the edge of the narrow bunk, pressing a cold compress against his ribs, while Kaelen ran systems checks from the cockpit.

ECHO said.

“Two hours. That’s shorter than I expected.”

“So two hours, and don’t touch anything.”

Kaelen’s footsteps approached, and she appeared in the med-bay hatchway. She’d shed the environment suit, replaced it with a worn grey tunic, and her hair was pulled back into its usual utilitarian knot. The tension of the planet-side fight was still visible in the set of her shoulders.

“Ship’s intact,” she said. “Intakes held. Your bandage trick worked. The hull needs a patch, but nothing urgent.” She paused. “The processor’s running. Two hours until we can inject.”

“ECHO told me.”

“Then you know we’re not done. Two canisters will get us operational, but not full. To reach a safe margin for a long-range jump, we need a third.”

Leo lowered the compress. “You want to go back out there.”

“I want to survive the next escape. That means full reserves. There are two more vents further south. Smaller, but still active. The seismic cycle will peak in about four hours. If we go now, we can fill one more canister and be off-planet before the worst hits.”

“You said four hours.”

“The flare accelerated the cycle. The valley floor is more unstable than I thought. We have less time.”

Leo sat up, wincing as his rib protested. “I’m coming with you.”

“You have a cracked rib.”

“I have two hands and I can still shoot. You said the Scourgebirds might come back. You can’t handle a pack alone and manage a canister at the same time.”

Kaelen’s jaw tightened. “This isn’t your fight, Earth pilot.”

“You’re wrong.” Leo met her eyes. “It became my fight the moment you pulled me out of that wreck. I don’t know your Dominion, I don’t know your politics, and I don’t know what’s on that encrypted core you’re chasing. But I know that if you die on this planet, I die too. So I’m coming.”

The silence stretched. The ship’s systems hummed around them, the distant vibration of the Flux processor a reminder of the clock they were racing.

“You’re stubborn,” Kaelen said.

“Test pilots usually are.”

“You keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true.”

Kaelen exhaled—a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. “Twenty minutes. Painkillers. Food. Then we go.”

She left the hatchway, and Leo lay back against the bunk, the compress pressed against his ribs, the ache in his chest sharper now but somehow more bearable than it had been a moment ago.

ECHO said.

“I know.”

“ECHO?”

“Thanks for the eye thing.”

Leo closed his eyes. “I know.”