Chapter 10 — The Debt of Rescue

Three days later, the ruin-canyon outside Emberfall Camp.

Dark-red clouds pressed low on the sky; the air was thick with tar, rust, and a stinging sulfur reek. Great starship-rib wrecks stood like toppled metal towers, jammed at crazy angles into the black slag-waste.

Wind threaded the narrow canyon, piping through mottled metal hollows in a ghostly, wolf-like shriek.

Elias wore an oversized old leather windbreaker, a heavy industrial cutting-blade with a ratchet lanyard at his belt. His face was still pale from hypoxia and antifreeze, but deep in those lake-green eyes the wolf's keenness and cold hardness had returned. Beside him, Caleb hefted a heavy electromagnetic pry-bar; the red ring in his mechanical left eye spun fast in the dark ruin-corners, ticking a faint, rhythmic gear-beat.

And some three paces behind them, the woman who called herself an amnesiac refugee — Vespera, the Dark God Umbra — followed in silence.

She wore a slightly loose black coarse-cloth hooded cloak; waist-length black hair drifted in the biting wind. Though she suppressed her aura to play a frail, amnesiac mortal, those too-perfect features and a skin near-transparent white stood out, garish, against this filthy wasteland of scrap-iron and blood.

"There's a heavy mining-ship power-core ahead that crashed down — should still be a few un-burnt high-pressure energy-crystals in it," Caleb wiped black oil from his brow and slapped the wall-tall scrap-iron plating beside him. "With those, we can raise the camp's anti-air gravity field again. The blind spot's been restless; who knows when the Divine Court's patrol craft will sweep through."

Elias nodded, said nothing, but his gaze swept the surroundings, eagle-sharp and wary.

This canyon was a famous death-zone near Emberfall, called the Gap of the Dead. Years back, a Divine Court patrol fleet and a band of ore-pirates had fought a great battle here, leaving behind huge amounts of unstable higher-dimensional particles and heavy waste-radiation. An ordinary scavenger without thick lead shielding would, in half an hour here, start necrotizing and rotting from the subcutaneous tissue out.

Suddenly, the air temperature plummeted!

"Wait — pressure and particle density are wrong!" Caleb jolted to a halt; his mechanical eye spun wildly, its ring flaring, screeching a harsh gear-grind.

Rrrrumble—!

The low dark-red clouds above boiled like boiling water! Black-violet physical arcs raged and roared between the cloud-layers; the slag-particles on the ground, bent by a gravity anomaly, began — against all physics — to drift slowly upward toward the sky.

"Damn it! A dark-matter black storm!" Caleb went white as a sheet, cursing at the top of his lungs. "No short-wave radar warning — this thing blew in straight from a void-fissure! Move! Into that deep mine-cave up ahead!"

"We can't go in there!" Elias glared at the black cave mouth. "That cave's ceiling is already twisted by gravity — the moment the black storm passes, ten thousand tons of slag will seal the mouth and bury us alive into jerky!"

"Then what? Dead either way!" Caleb smashed his pry-bar down; the metal floor threw a string of dazzling sparks.

The black storm closed fast. A wall of black-violet storm, thick with annihilation dark-particles and overdose radiation, came crushing down the canyon at hundreds of meters per second! The micro-pressure life-support gas in the air was rapidly dissociating; breathing it was like swallowing ice-shards and glass-grit.

Just as Caleb, sweating, was about to force his way into that deadly cave to gamble for life —

Vespera, who had trailed silent behind, slowly lifted her head.

Her black hood blew off in the gale, revealing a cold, untroubled profile. Deep in those night-black eyes, the faintest flicker passed — gravity-flows and vector-tracks visible only to a higher-dimensional god.

In a storm that could shred mortals to pieces and flatten the canyon entire, her divine sense saw at a glance three impossibly tiny gravity dead-zones — physical shelter-blinds formed where higher-dimensional law, piercing the three-dimensional ruins, met the dead angles of a few great starship hulls.

"Go under the third scrap-beam on the left."

Vespera spoke. Her voice was light, level — yet through the storm's raging howl it pierced each eardrum with eerie clarity.

"There… three slanting wild-paths run along the ruin dead-angles. The storm's particle-flow will deflect upward off the heavy pressure-plates. It won't reach below."

Caleb froze, whirled to look at this "amnesiac woman." "What? Left? That's a dump of loose rock — walk in and it's a dead end!"

"Listen to her. Left!"

Elias barked the order suddenly.

He looked hard at Vespera. The instant she spoke the route, the half star-core pendant at his chest flared scalding hot! At the same moment, the dark-energy vein lurking under his skin fell into a near-perfect cold-hot resonance with the faint wavelength radiating off this woman!

Without a beat of hesitation, he grabbed Caleb's arm and dragged him toward the seemingly chaotic rock-dump on the left.

BOOM!

The instant they ducked under the narrow scrap-beam dead-angle of the rock-dump, the raging black storm tore down the canyon! The deep mine-cave Caleb had meant to enter collapsed in the storm's first second; tens of thousands of tons of rock and slag sealed the mouth dead, punching a terrible pit!

And below the rock-dump.

As Vespera said, several heavy starship pressure-plates jammed at forty-five degrees formed a perfect physical gravity-barrier. The black-violet storm-particle flow screamed up the curved plate-shells toward the sky; the three huddled below heard only the storm roaring like thunder in their ears — not a single front of black-particle radiation touched them.

"My god…" Caleb slumped under the scrap-beam, watched the world-ending storm scream past overhead, wiped cold sweat from his face; his mechanical eye's gears spun frantic. "What freak luck! Even an old hide like me, thirty years in the blind spot, never knew this rock-dump had a natural wind-shelter!"

He turned, disbelief all over his face, to Vespera leaning by the stone wall. "Miss, how'd you know this spot shelters? You been here before?"

Vespera — Umbra — slowly lifted her head; a flicker of perfectly real confusion and puzzlement crossed those night-black eyes:

"I… I don't remember. Just now, watching the storm-particle flows… the routes just came into my head."

"Instinct from a head-injury?" Caleb rubbed his chin, supplied a reasonable wasteland explanation on his own. "Makes sense — some route-pilots who've spent too long on starships get an instinctive sensitivity to storm-particle flows."

Caleb doubted no more, pulled out his water-flask and drank deep.

But Elias, standing silent to the side, went utterly dark and cold in the eyes.

A route-pilot's instinct? A hunch?

To hell with instinct.

Elias leaned against the cold metal wall, eyes locked on Vespera, quietly brushing black dust from her sleeve.

He was no thick-lined old soldier like Caleb. He had just watched Vespera run this steep, rubble-littered path — this woman who claimed an escape-pod crash, frail and amnesiac, had moved with a near-uncanny steadiness!

Every step had precisely avoided the unstable rolling rubble; her breath hadn't quickened a fraction from the hard run; and worse — the instant the world-ending storm came crashing down, there was not a shred of a mortal's panic at death in her eyes!

That was no refugee's gaze.

That was the gaze of one looking down — watching a trivial breeze brush past her feet. A god's gaze!

And the half star-core pendant's tremor at his chest…

Elias touched the fading heat there. He could feel it clearly: the cold dark-energy that had kept him alive was tied, by some absolutely unseverable hidden source, to this woman named Vespera!

"A life saved…"

Elias smiled a cold smile in his heart.

Days back at the rescue site, not knowing, he'd taken her for a suffering refugee who needed protecting, overruled the others and had Caleb bring her to camp. But now — who was the victim, who the predator, the answer was likely the reverse!

But Elias did not expose her on the spot.

He slowly drew back his cold gaze, walked casual to Caleb's side, took the flask and drank. In this eat-or-be-eaten astral blind spot, exposing a terrifying, uncanny hidden threat on the spot was plain stupidity. Since she was willing to disguise herself as a mortal woman and lurk at his side, he would play along.

He wanted to see what this cold woman, hiding a heaven-shaking secret, meant to take from a blind-spot survivor who had nothing at all!

Beneath the shelter-beam, the storm still howled.

And the three — each with their own thoughts, god and mortals — pressed down, in the dim dead-angle, the deepest ripple in their hearts.