Rain turned the refinery steps into a slick chute.

  Vega hit the outside air at a run, boots skidding for half a heartbeat before the armor’s stabilizers bit in. The storm had grown worse. Wind howled between the towers, ripping at loose panels and driving sheets of water sideways hard enough to sting even through the suit’s impact sensors.

  “Helios Three, report,” she snapped, opening the squad net wide.

  Static clawed at the channel. Then Park’s voice cut through, harsh but clear enough. “Alpha clear of the tower. No immediate hostiles on the plaza. Growth is thicker than before.”

  “Bravo?” Vega demanded.

  “Here,” Watson answered, a half breath behind. “We are good. I think.”

  They moved.

  The plaza that had been littered with bodies on the way in looked worse now. The corpses were still there, but the Vectar growth had begun to creep over them in earnest. Filaments had found exposed skin and melted fabric, winding around limbs and torsos. In places, the mat had split and flowed up over a body like hungry mold.

  “Keep clear,” Vega said. “Do not step where it is thick. Take the hard surfaces.”

  They cut across the safest visible route, weaving between fallen civilians and patches where the growth had overrun the ferrocrete. The rain helped, washing some of the thinner strands back and diluting surface residues, but it also made everything slick.

  “Captain,” Ito said, breath rough in her ear, “the organism is spiking across the grid. Whatever we did down there woke it up everywhere.”

  “Can you see the landing zone?” Vega asked.

  “Not yet,” Park said. “Visibility is—”

  Something flashed at the edge of Vega’s vision.

  She turned.

  Above the refinery’s outer rim, beyond the storm churn, a brief orange spear of light stabbed down, then vanished. A second later, a dull concussion rolled across the complex, too deep and heavy to be thunder.

  “Was that orbital?” Watson asked, startled.

  “No,” Ito said. “Too small, too close. That was a surface explosion. Direction: Kappa.”

  “The pads,” Vega said. “Move!”

  They hit the access fence at a run and pushed through the same gap they had used on the way in. Beyond, the slope up to the landing zone was a river of mud and runoff, streaked black where Vectar residue had mixed in.

  “Watch the footing!” Vega shouted. “If you fall, you call it!”

  They climbed.

  Halfway up, a shape loomed out of the rain.

  For one disorienting second, Vega thought it was a shuttle on final approach, nose down, engines flared. Then her HUD resolved it into the shattered rear half of a descent craft lying on its side, torn nearly in two. Fire licked along its ruptured fuel lines, blue and white against the gray.

  “Shuttle Four,” Ito said, voice tight. “Taggart’s element.”

  The wreck had cut a gouge in the mud where it skidded off the pad and into the slope. Debris littered the incline—armor plates, hull fragments, the limp, twisted forms of Marines hurled clear in the impact.

  Vega forced herself not to slow.

  “Do we check—” Watson began.

  “Later,” Vega said, sharper than she meant. “If there is a later. We make the zone first, then see who is left to pull.”

  They crested the rise.

  The landing zone was no longer secure.

  Two of the shuttles were gone, nothing left but burned rectangles on the ferrocrete where their landing struts had stood. The third—Shuttle Three, their own—stood at a crooked angle, one leg buckled, hull peppered with impact scars and acid burns. Its ramp was down, but no one moved near it.

  The perimeter Helios had set was in ruins.

  Barriers lay overturned. Portable turrets were dark, housings melted or crushed. Scorched craters pocked the pad where something had detonated, leaving ripples of fused stone.

  And bodies.

  Fleet black armor lay scattered across the landing zone, some grouped where lines had broken, others alone where they had been taken from behind. Acid had punched through plates, leaving ugly, gaping holes. Limbs were missing. In some cases, only twisted torsos remained.

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  For a heartbeat, the storm seemed to hush.

  “Jesus,” Watson whispered.

  “Count helmets later,” Vega said, forcing steel into her voice. “Where is Taggart?”

  “Here,” a voice answered, ragged and close.

  Vega snapped her rifle toward the sound.

  Major Taggart sat slumped against the base of a half-melted barricade, one leg twisted at an angle that said broken even before the suit’s medic display confirmed it. His chest plate was cratered on one side, armor blackened around the edges. His helmet lay cracked beside him, face exposed.

  He looked older.

  Not in years, but in the new deep lines in his skin. His eyes were bloodshot, but clear.

  “Captain,” he said. “You took your time.”

  “We had to find where the infection started,” Vega said, moving to him. “What happened here?”

  “The ground,” Taggart said. He coughed, grimaced. “It opened. They came up under us.”

  He gestured weakly toward the edge of the pad.

  Vega looked.

  Cracks had split the ferrocrete near the slope, radiating from several ragged holes where something had punched through from below. Around each, the Vectar growth glistened fresh and bright, as if tasting open air for the first time. Chunks of concrete and rebar lay scattered like broken shells.

  “Vectars?” Vega asked.

  “A lot of them,” Taggart said. “Big. Small. Did not stop to count.”

  “How many of Helios are left?” she asked.

  Taggart hesitated.

  “Enough,” he said finally.

  Her HUD disagreed: a bare handful of green pips still pulsed on the pad, a few more fading out in the wreckage.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Shuttle,” Taggart said. “Whoever was still mobile fell back when the first wave hit. We tried to hold them off, but… you can see how that went.”

  “You called us to pull out,” Vega said. “We lost you in the interference.”

  “I told you to stay out of that hole,” he said, jaw tightening. “You did not listen.”

  “Good thing,” she said. “We know what is down there now. We can hurt it.”

  Taggart managed a short, humorless laugh that turned into a hiss of pain. “You think this is just down there?” he asked. “Look around you, Captain. It is under the whole site. Maybe further.”

  “Then we make sure it does not spread beyond that,” Vega said. “We planted charges on the spine. We can light it up.”

  “You and what fleet?” Taggart asked. “We lost stable contact with Zheng He fifteen minutes after you went under. All we have from orbit are garbled pings and static. For all we know, the storms ate their sensors like they ate ours.”

  “Admiral Szeto is not blind,” Vega said. “If nothing else, she will see the thermal bloom when we shoot this thing in the heart.”

  “If your heart shot does not bring the whole place down on our heads first,” Taggart said. “You thinking of doing that from down here, or are we getting off this pad first?”

  “Can we get off this pad?” Vega asked. “How bad is Shuttle Three?”

  “Bad,” Taggart said. “Skid took a hit. Left thruster is running at sixty percent. She can lift, maybe hop, but she is not getting us through that storm to orbit. Not with Vectars climbing the hull.”

  “So evac is out,” Vega said.

  “For now,” Ito said quietly. “Unless the storm clears or orbit gets creative, we are stuck groundside.”

  “Which means this pad is not a lifeboat,” Vega said. “It is just high ground.”

  “Not high enough,” Park said.

  Vega followed her line of sight.

  At the far edge of the landing zone, near the largest breach, the growth was swelling. The mat there rose in slow, obscene bulges, like something breathing under a too-thin skin. Cracks popped as the concrete strained.

  More Vectars would come.

  “How many charges did you bring up from the shuttles?” Vega asked Taggart.

  “Enough to drop a building,” he said. “Not enough to glass a continent.”

  “Between those and what we planted below,” Vega said, “we might have enough to break the spine and set off a chain reaction. If we are lucky, the organism collapses inward instead of outward. If we are not, at least we make sure it does not have a clear road to the habitats.”

  Taggart’s eyes narrowed. Rain ran down his face, tracing lines through grime.

  “You are talking about using the colony infrastructure as a fuse,” he said. “Rerouting power, blowing transformers, cooking the grid from the inside.”

  “Yes,” Ito said. “If we spike enough points at once, the overload could propagate through the Vectar mass faster than it can compensate. It is using the grid already. We turn its highway into a fire.”

  “And kill whoever is still alive in the habitats,” Taggart said.

  Silence held for a heartbeat. Rain hammered on armor and metal. Lightning strobed across the clouds, freezing wreckage and heaving growth in stark snapshots.

  “We do not know how many are left,” Vega said. “They may already be gone. Or worse.”

  “You do not know that,” Taggart said.

  “No,” Vega agreed. “I do not. But I know what happens if this thing gets off Nemea Nine. You have seen it on other rocks. I have. Park has.”

  Park did not argue.

  “We still have to try to save whoever we can,” Taggart said stubbornly. “That is the job.”

  “The job is to protect human life,” Vega said. “All human life. Not just the ones under our boots right now. You let this get to another colony, another system, and you have a problem you cannot solve with a battalion. You have a problem you solve with a sterilization order.”

  “Orbital fire,” Ito said softly.

  Taggart’s jaw worked.

  “You want to be the one who tells Admiral Szeto to burn thirty-two thousand civilians?” he asked.

  The question hit exactly where Vega had been avoiding looking.

  “I want to be the one who tells her exactly where to aim,” she said. “So she does not have to burn thirty million later.”

  Behind them, the mat bulged higher.

  A fissure tore open in the cracked ferrocrete. Fresh growth pushed through, gleaming wetly. A Vectar limb followed, clawed and searching.

  “Conversation later,” Park said. “They are coming.”

  Vega stepped back, shouldering her rifle.

  “Helios survivors,” she said over the wide channel, boosting her signal as high as it would go. “All units on Kappa, this is Captain Vega. Fall back to Shuttle Three. We are forming a last line, and we are going to hurt this thing as much as we can before it takes us.”

  A handful of green pips moved on her HUD, arcing in from the edges of the pad, ducking behind wreckage and barriers. Smoke-blackened, acid-scored armor. Limping gaits. One Marine half carried another.

  Maybe a dozen left.

  “Park, Alpha front left. Ito, center with me. Watson, right flank. Taggart, you stay where you are unless you plan to sprint, which you do not.”

  “Not today,” he said through his teeth.

  “Set the remaining shuttle charges along the pad’s edge,” Vega said. “We turn this whole zone into one big shaped blast aimed down, not out. When Ito lights the spine, we hit the pad at the same time. If the planet is going to bleed, we make sure the heart is here, not under the habitats.”

  “And us?” Watson asked.

  “We will be here too,” Vega said. “Unless you had a better vacation spot in mind.”

  He did not.

  The first Vectar hauled itself fully out of the new breach.

  It was smaller than the adult below but quicker, with less armored limbs and sharper movements. Darts glistened at the tip of its tail. Its eyes glittered in the stormlight.

  “Target one,” Vega said. “Do not get tunnel vision. There will be more.”

  The creature screamed and charged.

  Helios met it with a wall of fire.