Chapter 11 What the Bond Costs #2
The second impact shakes the ground hard enough to stagger us. Krilly catches herself against the wall, and the bond transmits the jolt of pain in her ankle, the old injury protesting, and a wave of stubborn refusal to acknowledge it.
"Your ankle."
"Is fine."
"It's not fine."
"Then stop monitoring it and start running." She's already moving, limping slightly, jaw set. "We can discuss my ankle when we're not being chased by a building with legs."
A building with legs. I file the description alongside Stompy in my growing catalogue of Krilly Baxter's approach to existential threats.
The third impact is the worst. The sound of the northeast passage collapsing reaches us as a sustained, grinding roar, stone on stone, the architectural failure of a system that was never designed to withstand this kind of force. Dust billows through the tunnels, choking and blinding.
Then the bellowing starts. Closer. Inside the cave system.
"It's through," Bebo confirms, unnecessarily.
We burst from the secondary exit into the open canyon bowl. Purple dawn light. The hot spring steaming in its alcove. The wide, defensible space where we bathed yesterday and I traced a route down her throat with my finger and she asked me for a preview.
Yesterday. A lifetime ago.
The Stompy emerges from the collapsed passage thirty seconds behind us.
The first thing that registers is scale. I knew the dimensions from facility records. I've tracked its movements for three months, mapped its territory, calculated its mass from footprint depth and stride length. I thought I understood what I was dealing with.
I did not.
It fills the passage mouth like a ship filling a docking bay.
Armoured scales the color of oxidised iron, scarred from old territorial disputes and scored by fresh plasma burns where the drones have been harassing it.
Its head is broad and flat, cranial plating that functions as both weapon and shield, and the eyes set deep beneath the armour ridge are small, furious, and focused entirely on us.
The drones whine above the canyon rim. Three of them, running patterns that are clearly driving rather than hunting. They want the Stompy in this canyon. They want it angry and cornered and dangerous, and they want it pointed at us.
ApexCorp. Using the planet's apex predator as a weapon the same way they used me.
"Horgox." Krilly's hand finds my arm. Her fear is bright and honest, and underneath it the fierce clarity of a mind that's already solving the problem. "The canyon bowl is open. No narrow passages. Nothing between us and it."
"I know." My blade is in my hand. Inadequate against six metres of armour. "We need to reach the—"
A roar answers the Stompy's bellow. Not from the caves. From above, from the canyon rim where the bioluminescent vines drape and the morning light is just beginning to reach.
Snowball hits the Stompy's flank from the canyon rim.
Not the surgical precision of the tunnel fight. This is something rawer: a full-body collision, all her mass concentrated into the gap between armoured plates, claws finding purchase where the drone fire has already scored the scales. She doesn't try to bring it down. She makes it turn.
The Stompy screams. Turns. Tries to dislodge her.
A second shape streaks in from the opposite side. Pudding, darker, larger, hitting the wounded flank where the drone fire has already compromised the armour. Coordinated. Precise. Pack tactics executed by two beings who have been developing their combat synchronisation in the jungle for months.
They're not trying to kill it. They can't. The Stompy outmasses them both combined, and its armour would turn aside anything short of military-grade plasma. But they're doing what pack hunters do: redirecting, harassing, creating openings.
Driving it away from us.
"Snowball!" Krilly's voice cracks with recognition and relief. Pride surges through the bond, fierce and bright, the joy of watching creatures she freed choosing to protect her.
One of the drones breaks formation, targeting laser tracking Snowball. Weapons hot.
The fury that hits me is protective and absolute. My hand finds a chunk of fallen basalt, and the throw is instinct: arena-honed accuracy translating survival reflex into a stone that connects with the drone's sensor array at velocity.
The drone spirals. Clips the canyon wall. Snowball uses the opening to rake her claws along the Stompy's neck ridge, finding a gap in the plating.
Pudding takes the Stompy's other side, massive jaws closing on an armoured leg. The predator bellows, thrashing, but it's fighting on two fronts against opponents that are faster, more agile, and operating with the coordinated fury of beings who remember what it feels like to be collared.
The remaining drones pull back to observation altitude. Recording. Documenting. ApexCorp gathering evidence, or simply unable to get a clean shot with the specimens weaving around the Stompy at speed.
"The weakened passage," Krilly says, and the plan crystallises between us before she finishes speaking, the bond carrying her engineer's logic directly into my tactical processing. "The northeast section we mapped. The floor won't hold its weight. If we can drive it backward—"
"Confirmed," Bebo says. "The northeast passage floor has degraded to approximately thirty percent structural integrity. Estimated failure threshold: sustained load exceeding four metric tons. The Rexor Primus exceeds that by a significant margin."
"Draw it toward the passage mouth," Krilly says to me.
Her tactical clarity feeds into my muscles, and my arena instincts translate her engineering into combat positioning.
I put myself between the Stompy and the weakened passage, blade in hand, making myself the target.
Six metres of armoured predator focuses on the threat that's standing still instead of the smaller ones harassing its flanks.
It charges.
I hold position until the last second, then roll sideways.
Arena training. The thing they built me for, repurposed.
The Stompy's momentum carries it past me, onto the weakened passage floor, and Snowball and Pudding hit its hindquarters simultaneously from either side.
Not attacking. Pushing. Adding their combined mass to the predator's forward momentum at the exact point where the stone is weakest.
Krilly's engineering was right. The floor holds for one second, two, and then the stone gives with a grinding shriek that vibrates through the canyon.
The ground caves beneath the predator's hindquarters. Stone crumbling, the weakened passage floor unable to support six metres of armoured mass. The Stompy scrambles for purchase, claws gouging stone, and then slides backward into the collapse with a roar that echoes through the canyon system.
Not dead. Trapped. Buried in rubble up to its chest, thrashing but unable to extract itself, bellowing fury into a canyon that no longer cares.
Snowball and Pudding position themselves between the trapped predator and us. Not attacking further. Guarding. Twin pairs of luminous green eyes finding Krilly and me, confirming we're intact.
The relief that floods my chest isn't mine. Isn't entirely mine. Krilly's pride and fierce protective love layer over my own gratitude until I can't separate the sources, and my eyes sting with something that belongs to both of us.
"Good girl," she whispers. "Good boy. You're the best murder-capable apex predators anyone has ever named after desserts and weather phenomena."
Snowball rumbles. Softer than her threat vocalisations, softer than her territorial calls. Directed specifically at Krilly.
Acknowledgment. Pack bond. Ours.
"Bebo," I say, because the drones are still circling and the morning has just begun. "Status."
"Stompy is trapped but alive. Structural collapse makes re-entry to the cave system inadvisable.
The ApexCorp drones have pulled to observation altitude and are transmitting data; I recommend assuming that ApexCorp is now fully aware of your location, your survival, and the fact that their 'escaped specimens' are acting as an organised combat unit under the direction of a courier who names things.
" A pause. "Also, I'm detecting atmospheric entry signatures.
Multiple ships. At least two transponder configurations. "
"OOPS?"
"One signature matches OOPS emergency shuttle transponder codes. The other—" Bebo's tone shifts. "The other matches ApexCorp asset-retrieval transport configurations."
The drones. They weren't just driving Stompy toward us. They were herding us into the open, confirming our position, transmitting coordinates to the retrieval team.
Krilly's hand finds mine. Her determination reaches me through the connection, solid as the basalt walls around us. No fear. Anger, yes. The specific, focused anger of a woman who has survived too much to let a corporation take what she's chosen.
"They're coming for you," she says.
"Yes."
"Over my dead body."
"That is precisely what I'm trying to prevent."
She squeezes my hand. The claiming color brightens where our skin connects, visible even in full daylight. "We face it together."
The ships break through the cloud cover. Two of them. The OOPS shuttle first, orange-and-white with Stellar Togetherness Initiative security markings along the hull. Behind it, close enough to be aggressive, a black-hulled transport with the ApexCorp logo stamped on the side.
Snowball and Pudding melt into the canyon's shadows. Creatures of the jungle, not of whatever institutional storm is about to descend. They've given what they can. The rest is up to us.
Krilly's heartbeat in my chest. Steady. Certain. The heartbeat of a woman who is about to fight a corporation with nothing but a data implant, an AI's logs, and the absolute conviction that the male beside her is worth protecting.
The ships begin their descent.
Surviving the jungle, I'm beginning to realise, may have been the easy part.