Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 50: A Toast to the Fallen (Patreon)

Our restroom was private, but the showers were shared, at the end of a long corridor of identical standard rooms. Only two cubicles were working, though, which made me wonder whether I'd evacuated from Verdis too early. It didn't look great if other teams were still out there.

But as soon as I stepped under the stream, the hot water washed away the stray thoughts and a fatigue I hadn't felt until then. My battle-ready body finally let its muscles relax, and I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. I definitely wouldn't have minded a few hours' kip, but before I'd even turned off the water, my interface flagged an incoming call from Zola.

I turned off the water and pressed the virtual button.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"In the shower. Why?" I asked, stepping out of the cubicle into the changing room, where a green jumpsuit, standard for the complex, was waiting for me.

"Bao's here. I was going through my contacts, hoping to find acquaintances from my past, horned life, when his contact came online. He's going through decontamination right now, but he should be free in an hour."

"Where are we meeting?"

"Someone recommended a cafe. I'll send a tag."

"Recommended? Found one of your old thinhorns?"

"Yes."

"Diana?" I asked.

"No, she's not here."

"OK," I said, not pressing her. "Send the tag and tell the team not to wait; they can have fun without us. Just be polite, Zola!"

"You're doing my head in! I've been good these past few days, even though it's a pain in the arse!" she exploded.

The cafe turned out to be a small room halfway down a corridor of similar, identical premises. What set it apart from the others was decidedly unclear. The same ten tables in the same arrangement, the same smell of coffee and fresh pastries, live staff in every establishment. From the point of view of optimising space and resources, it wasn't the best solution. Though maybe it mattered psychologically. Passing the empty places, I noticed that in each one only a table or two were occupied, and the cultivators were trying to keep as far from one another as possible.

A big hall wouldn't have given that sense of separation.

Nor would fake windows have given a sense of exclusivity. There were even open balconies here! Granted, they looked out onto nothing but desert, yellow dunes, but we couldn't have afforded anything like that on Verdis. Another thing that would have been unthinkable there, was staff made up of ordinary mortals. The waitresses didn't show up in the interface, so they weren't cultivators.

Zola and I ordered and were surprised to learn that everything here was free. Real coffee with milk from an actual cow and a cheesecake would have cost me a fortune at Marco's. Although prices had dropped a bit since my second year, once full-scale portal logistics were up and running, they were still a long way from free!

Bao arrived ten minutes late, when I was finishing my third cheesecake and my second latte.

Our friend didn't look good. His face had gone mostly grey; shadows sat under his eyes, and the skin on his cheeks and forehead had pale red stains, as if sunburnt. He sat down without saying hello and, first thing, waved to the waitress.

"You look like shit," Zola said.

Bao raised angry eyes to her.

"We lost two!" he hissed.

That didn't just make Zola shut up; she even apologised.

"Sorry."

Bao let out a loud, exhausted breath, placed his order, and began to tell us.

He'd been assigned to Drexin. Verdis was closer to the meat grinder; our 'rain' had begun almost right after the battle, while the debris still had to travel to Drexin. For about an hour, Bao and his team watched the sky and the overall map of events in space, and listened to reports from Verdis. Bao admitted he'd envied us. We were already working, while they were forced to wait and worry.

By the time the peak hit Verdis and we specifically were already evacuating, things were only starting for them. With the first piece of wreckage, the radiation sensor in his interface went off the scale.

"All of them," Bao said, shaking his head. "Every single one. I didn't see a single clean piece."

For some reason, most of it was stuff caught by nuclear fire and flown toward Drexin. Or maybe the demon ships closer to Drexin had taken more than the ones above Verdis. Who knows.

There wasn't even a thin atmosphere there to slow the wreckage down, heat it, and turn it into fireballs visible from dozens of kilometres away. The debris arrived dark, at the full speed with which it had been flung out of the battle, and it couldn't be seen until it slammed into the surface. No fiery streaks in the sky, no plumes of smoke, no rumbling. Just a sudden flash of impact where a second earlier there had been a flat grey plain, a fountain of dust of every size shooting up in perfectly regular arcs, and a jolt that came through the ground and the soles of their boots.

The detection system only caught them at the start. But at that speed, even accurate data gave seconds, not minutes.

Bao deflected what he could. With gravity, he shifted the trajectories of small fragments and pushed aside everything that was flying at his team, but at that speed it was like a mortal trying to catch bullets. He managed with one in two, maybe three in four.

The dust from the impacts didn't hang in the air as it did for us, because there was no air. It flew up in ballistic arcs, scattered for kilometres in the weak gravity, and settled in an even layer over everything: the ground, the cover, the armour. Where Verdis's atmosphere offered at least a little protection, Drexin offered nothing. Not from the dust, not from the debris, not from what fell from the sky along with it.

Bao lost the first member of his team twenty-three minutes after the rain began. A fist-sized fragment that Bao hadn't managed to deflect. The armour and formations couldn't withstand the insane speed. Bao didn't go into detail, and we didn't ask.

He blamed himself for not pulling back sooner, while I silently thanked every god there was for my luck and for having had the sense not to hold out to the last.

The second member of his team died literally a few minutes later.

An escape pod full of demons came down almost on top of them. It had been trying to brake, so its engines and formations gave it away against Drexin's black sky. Besides, the warning system was still working, so the team, furious after the random loss of a teammate, got ready to fight.

Five demons climbed out. Battered and scorched, but on their feet, armed, and armoured.

Bao's first tactical move was the equivalent of my opening a fight with Hale's sniper shot. They had a Finger too, a Finger-Lightning. He stunned the demon who looked the most dangerous, and their Air-Blade finished him off, slicing his neck open and drawing the air out of his lungs through the cut throat.

The demon didn't die instantly, but he could no longer fight.

It wasn't easy for the team; they had to hit the demons while dodging debris raining down from the sky. Protecting his team from the space junk, Bao barely took part in the attacks. Unless you counted deflecting debris onto the demons with gravity as an attack. At the same time, it changed the gravity where they stood and broke the demons' rhythm.

Bao's team, on the other hand, knew how to use that; they'd trained for it, so all the humans' attacks hit their targets, and three more demons went down in seconds. Unfortunately, Bao's medic was just as hungry for praise as Zola. But Zola knew how to keep herself in check in a crisis. Bao's medic, on top of everything else, fancied himself a great sabreur and decided to claim the last kill for himself, leaping at the demon with his sabre.

The demon parried the sabre with his sword and performed something vaguely like my old Iron Head, except instead of a forehead and Fist Qi, he used a horn and Point. He ran the man through the neck.

Everything they had immediately flew into the demon's open back, but the medic was already beyond saving.

Weighing up their losses and the dose of radiation they'd all taken, Bao decided to withdraw.

He had to break off his story, because a trio of newcomers in the same green jumpsuits was clearly heading our way. Bao saw them first, but we all noticed.

The leader was a tall, fair-haired man with a close-cropped head and posture as straight as if drawn with a ruler. Beside him walked a copy of his build in negative: black skin, coal-black hair. The third was a young woman, younger than both, smaller, with patches of fresh ointment on her cheeks and forehead and a plaster peeking out from under the collar at her neck.

"Excuse me," the blond man said. "Sullivan? The team from Verdis?"

The interface labelled him as M. M. Strom.

"That's me," I said cautiously. "And you are…"

"Sergeant Mikael Strom, Corporal Niko Varga, Private Tessa Renn, boarding team of the High Velocity."

"The pod," Zola remembered, and showed a sensitivity quite unusual for her. "I'm sorry for your loss. I couldn't help those three."

"That's understood," Strom nodded. "You got us out quite quickly, as it was. Was there anyone else?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"Apart from you, just a few demons."

"So you got lucky enough to see some action!" Renn said, with a touch of envy.

Bao snorted irritably at that.

"My friend has just lost two members of his team," I explained, so as not to offend the combat-hungry boarders.

With a look, Sergeant Strom ordered Renn to shut up.

"Please forgive us. We lost our ship, and we didn't even see any fighting," he said.

"We all did what the moment demanded of us," Zola said, smoothing over a possible conflict with remarkable and unusual philosophy.

"A toast to the fallen?" the sergeant suggested, and a bottle of bourbon appeared in his hands.

We exchanged glances and nodded. It was an offer you didn't refuse.

We had to squeeze up and bring over more chairs, as the table was meant for four. The cafe had no shot glasses, so we asked for ordinary cups.

We ceremonially raised one each. Then I took a bottle from the demons out of my pocket. Zola warned me to be careful with it. Still, I thought this trophy ought to lift our spirits somewhat, as a nod to victory, so we drank another round and unanimously agreed that it was absolute shit, bitter and tarry.

The sergeant asked about our adventures, then told us his own.

After evacuation, the fleet personnel had been run through the same minimum of procedures, plus a report to command, which was collecting data on survivors. At least half the crew of the High Velocity had survived and evacuated to the fleet base through the ship's portals. Some others had been in pods. In theory, they should have come down on Verdis, which was closest to where the ship had been lost.

Overall, Verdis had been closest to the meat grinder. On Drexin, the rain had started an hour later. Kairea was still clear for now, but HQ expected the debris to reach it in about a day. They were already preparing there.

Earth had been hit only by the odd shipwreck, the ones that had tried to warp straight out of the meat grinder. The bulk of the scrap would rain down on Earth in a week. The planetary atmosphere was dense so that the small stuff would burn up, but big chunks would get through if the fleet and orbital stations didn't break them up first. The sergeant was waiting to be assigned to one of the clean-up teams, since the fleet currently had far more personnel than ships.

We waited for the call to return to Verdis and Drexin, as soon as the warning systems were back up. The peak of the scrap rain on Verdis should have passed by now, so it all came down to how many observation satellites had survived and when the order would be given.