Chapter 6
What Gets Named Gets Kept
Krilly
The beacon work goes slowly, because my hands won't cooperate.
Not a fine-motor issue. Not fatigue, not cold, not any of the practical explanations I'm offering myself while I fumble the third connection in a row.
The problem is that the seam pattern on this particular circuit junction matches the layout of his chest plate, and every time my fingers trace the connection path, my brain helpfully replays the feeling of his skin beneath my palms, the ridge of scar tissue under the metal, the way his whole body locked when I freed the first node and the sound that came out of him—
The circuit tester slips. Hits the stone surface with a clatter that echoes through the cave.
"Everything okay?" Horgox's voice from the entrance, where he's keeping watch with his back to me. Deliberately keeping his back to me. We've been very good about not facing each other this morning, which is either professional restraint or mutual cowardice.
"Fine. Just butterfingers." I retrieve the tester and press my cold knuckles against my cheeks. The heat there has nothing to do with the fire. "Bebo, how's the integration looking?"
"Component integration proceeding at sixty-seven percent.
Your connection accuracy has dropped fourteen percent since you began this session, which correlates with the seventeen occasions your breathing rhythm has disrupted in the past hour.
" A pause. "Shall I provide a breakdown of what you were looking at during each disruption? "
"No, Bebo."
"I have the data if you change your mind."
Horgox makes a sound from the entrance that could be a cough. It isn't a cough. His shoulders are doing something suspicious.
"The secondary array needs calibration before we can test transmission range," I say, aggressively professional. "I'll need to reconfigure the amplifier housing, which means accessing the—"
He turns to hand me a water canteen, and his forearm brushes my shoulder.
The contact lasts less than a second. My skin registers it like a circuit completing, and the sense-memory hits before I can block it: straddling his thigh, the drag of fabric against muscle as I shifted to reach that final connection, his hands gripping my hips with the kind of controlled strength that said I could move you wherever I wanted and I'm choosing to let you lead—
I drop the circuit tester again.
"You seem distracted," he says, and his voice is carefully neutral except for the faintest rough edge underneath, the harmonic undertone that I now know means he's controlling something.
"I'm not distracted. I'm calibrating."
"You've been calibrating that same junction for twelve minutes."
"It's a complicated junction."
Our eyes meet, and the air between us does something that shouldn't be physically possible. He looks away first. I look away second. The canteen sits between us, untouched, radiating a domestic intimacy that is somehow worse than the overt tension.
"We should scout the canyon," he says. "Map the escaped specimens' movement patterns. Understand what we're dealing with before the beacon window opens."
"Yes. Outside. Moving. Excellent plan." Anything that puts distance between me and the feel of his chest under my palms and the way he breathed little flare against my shoulder like it was pulled from somewhere he couldn't reach to stop it.
The canyon is beautiful in daylight, and I am trying very hard to appreciate it for its geological significance rather than for the fact that the narrow passages keep forcing us into proximity that makes my skin hum.
Purple-tinged basalt walls rise on either side, threaded with mineral veins that catch the light. Bioluminescent flora clings to the rock faces, pulsing faintly in response to our movement. Water trickles somewhere ahead, the sound softened by stone.
Horgox reads the canyon the way I read circuitry: without thinking, instinct and expertise braided together. He shows me claw marks gouged into the stone along the passage walls, deep grooves carved with methodical precision.
"Territory markers," he says, crouching to trace one with careful fingers. "Whatever escaped your cargo hold is claiming this section of the canyon system."
The grooves are nearly an inch deep. I kneel beside him, studying them. "How big does something have to be to carve stone like that?"
"Considerably larger than the scavengers we fought. The spacing between the claw marks suggests a bipedal gait, maybe seven or eight feet at full extension." He examines the pattern more closely. "And these aren't random. There's repetition, structure. This is communication, not destruction."
"Saying what?"
"Territory claimed. Others stay away." His jaw tightens. "ApexCorp doesn't create mindless animals. Whatever this is, it's intelligent enough to establish territory and communicate boundaries."
The word create sits badly in my mouth. Made, not born. Modified, not natural. The same thing they did to Horgox; the same thing they'd have done to whatever was in my cargo hold.
We round the next bend and I stop walking.
The canyon wall to our left has been destroyed.
Not gouged or marked. Destroyed. A section of basalt six feet wide has been smashed inward, rubble scattered across the passage floor, the rock face bearing impact damage that looks like something drove into it at full speed.
Above the impact point, claw marks dwarf the specimen's territory scratches.
These furrows are a foot wide and four inches deep, carved through solid stone with a force that my engineering brain calculates and then refuses to process.
"That's not the specimens," I say.
"No." Horgox's voice has gone flat. "That's the Rexor.
The one I told you about." He examines the damage with the assessment of someone who has spent three months respecting this creature's territory.
"These marks are recent. A few days old.
It's been expanding its range since the drones increased their search patterns. "
"The drones are driving it toward the canyon system."
"Possibly. Or it's hunting the escaped specimens. Either way, it's closer than it's been since I arrived." His jaw tightens. "The canyon entrances are still too narrow for it. But if the passages collapse from this kind of impact—"
"Then our safe zone isn't safe anymore." The sheer scale of the destruction.
Something hot and furious builds in my chest. This planet.
This endless, relentless planet with its acidic rain and its apex predators and its corporate drones and now a six-metre armoured nightmare casually smashing the walls of the only place we've been able to sleep. "Stompy."
"What?"
"That's its name. I'm not calling it Rexor Primus like it's a product designation. It's Stompy. Because it stomps things and I hate it."
Horgox stares at me for a long second. "You've named the most dangerous predator on this planet Stompy."
"If I can name my spare parts, I can name the thing trying to collapse our bedroom. At least Stompy's name is honest."
Something crosses his expression that might be exasperation or might be the realisation that he's stuck in a canyon with a woman who processes existential terror by assigning aggressive nicknames.
"Stop." His hand comes up. The predator-alert stillness, every line of him changing.
I freeze. Behind the nearest formation, pressed into a shallow alcove, his body shielding mine against the stone.
His chest against my back, his arms on either side, his breath warm against the top of my head.
The root cave all over again, except everything has changed.
In the root cave I was terrified of the stranger pinning me in the dark.
Now my body catalogues the position with an entirely different kind of awareness, and I have to fight to keep my breathing steady because the feel of his hips against my lower back is doing things to my concentration that no amount of professionalism can override.
"Movement," he breathes. "Southeast. Fast."
Through a gap in the rock, I see it.
The first clear look at something that was in my cargo hold, and every assumption I had about "biological specimens" evaporates.
It moves through the canyon with a fluid, rolling gait, and the first thing that registers is bear.
The proportions are there: massive shoulders, thick limbs, a bulk that suggests power built for endurance rather than speed.
Eight feet tall when it straightens to its full height, wider across the chest than Horgox.
But the wrongness starts in the arms. There's an extra joint between the elbow and the wrist, a secondary articulation that lets the forearm rotate in a way that makes my engineering brain itch.
When it drops to all fours to move faster, the limbs fold differently than any Earth animal; the legs are digitigrade, walking on elongated toe-joints like a dog rather than flat-footed.
The combination of bearlike bulk and wrong-angled movement is deeply, fundamentally unsettling.
The fur was white once. Maybe silver. Now it's stained with the planet's purple vegetation residue and streaked with rust-red smears that could be old blood or mud or both.
Matted and neglected, months without whatever grooming this species' biology requires.
Underneath the filth, faint lines of silver-blue run along the spine and shoulders, bioluminescent veins pulsing slowly, irregularly, like a heartbeat that keeps skipping.
The face turns in profile, and I stop breathing.
The eyes are wrong for an animal. Large, reflective green, glowing faintly with their own light, and the pupils are horizontal slits that scan the canyon with an awareness that is unmistakably, uncomfortably intelligent.
When its gaze sweeps our direction, I see recognition in those eyes. Assessment. Decision-making.