At 0530 hours, the Ark was completely dark and dead silent.
Catrin stood in her bedroom, staring into the mirror attached to her closet door. She wasn’t wearing her usual comfortable sweaters or sharp business clothes. She was dressed for war.
She had layered thick thermal leggings under reinforced tactical pants. Over her chest, she wore a lightweight Kevlar vest, topped with a heavy, fur-lined parka. She pulled her dark hair back into a tight, no-nonsense braid. Finally, she checked the magazine of her suppressed pistol and slid it into her thigh holster.
She turned to look at the bed.
Nico was sprawled out, snoring softly, clutching his favorite plush dinosaur. The soft blue glow of the nightlight cast a peaceful halo over him. He looked so incredibly normal.
"I’ll be right back, little boss," Catrin whispered, pressing a gentle kiss to his warm forehead.
She walked out of the room and quietly pulled the heavy door shut. Graves was standing right outside, looking like a statue carved from muscle and scars.
"Nobody goes in," Catrin said softly. "Nobody comes out."
"Except you, Boss," Graves replied, his hand resting on his sidearm. "Good luck out there."
Catrin took the elevator down to the ground floor.
The main airlock room was freezing. Jax and Quinn were already waiting for her. They looked tense. Quinn had wrapped the barrel of her massive sniper rifle in white thermal tape to keep the metal from freezing to her gloves. Jax was carrying an automatic shotgun and a wicked-looking machete strapped to his chest.
"Morning, Boss," Jax grunted, his breath pluming in the cold air. "Visibility is garbage. The fog is thick today. Quinn’s thermal scope can only see about fifty yards before the spore density scrambles the optics."
"Fifty yards is enough," Catrin said, pulling on a pair of thick tactical gloves. "We move fast. We stay close. No one speaks above a whisper."
Jax keyed his radio. "Briggs, open the outer gate. Manual override. Just wide enough for us to slip through."
The massive titanium doors groaned.
For the first time in two months, Catrin watched the impenetrable seal of her fortress crack open. A heavy, toxic blast of freezing air rushed into the airlock. The smell was awful, a mix of ozone, rotting vegetation, and copper.
"Let’s go," Catrin ordered.
Jax stepped out first, his shotgun raised, sweeping the fog. Catrin followed right behind him, with Quinn taking the rear.
The moment Catrin stepped onto the ash-covered dirt, a profound sense of vulnerability washed over her. Inside the Ark, she was a queen with absolute control. Out here, she was just a piece of meat in a freezing slaughterhouse.
They walked down the winding mountain road. The silence was unnerving. Every crunch of their boots in the snow felt as loud as a gunshot.
"Look," Quinn whispered, pointing her rifle barrel to the right.
Catrin looked. They were walking past the section of the road where the alien stealth ship had fired its laser yesterday. The dirt and ash were completely gone. In their place was a perfectly smooth, shimmering trench of black glass.
Catrin swallowed hard. She forced herself to look away and keep walking. Don’t think about the ship. Think about the pipe.
They reached the edge of the ravine exactly a hundred yards from the gate.
The external water filtration unit was bolted to the side of the rocky cliff face. It was a bulky, complicated piece of machinery. Just as Elias had said, the ground tremors from the mutated bear had shifted the rocks, crushing the primary intake pipe and jamming the main release valve with frozen mud.
"Cover me," Catrin said.
Jax and Quinn immediately turned their backs to her, facing the swirling purple fog with their weapons raised.
Catrin knelt in the freezing snow and got to work. She brushed the frozen dirt away from the maintenance panel and popped it open. She typed in the bypass codes to shut off the pressure.
Hiss. The pressure equalized.
She looked at the crushed valve. Elias had given her a bag of tools, but looking at the damage, she realized the wrench he provided wasn’t big enough to gain any leverage on the frozen metal. She needed a heavy-duty hydraulic wrench.
Catrin glanced over her shoulder. Jax and Quinn were intensely focused on the tree line, their backs completely turned to her.
Catrin closed her eyes and focused on her spatial dimension.
Retrieve.
Instantly, a heavy, pristine, battery-powered hydraulic wrench materialized perfectly into her gloved hand. She had looted an entire hardware store before the apocalypse. She had everything.
She clamped the wrench onto the frozen valve and pulled the trigger. The machine whirred quietly, snapping the ice and forcing the heavy metal valve open with zero effort.
Catrin quickly cleared the blockage, swapped the cracked seal with a spare from her pocket, and engaged the manual override. The deep, satisfying hum of rushing water vibrated through the metal pipe. The hydroponics bay was saved.
Store.
The hydraulic wrench vanished back into her spatial inventory.
"Done," Catrin whispered, standing up and brushing the snow off her knees. "The water is flowing. Let’s get back inside."
Jax let out a massive sigh of relief. "Thank God. Okay, Quinn, you take point on the way back. Let’s move."
They turned around and started the hundred-yard trek back up the road toward the looming black shape of the Ark.
Two miles further down the mountain, Zeviel was bleeding, but he was smiling.
He was leaning against the trunk of a dead pine tree, catching his breath. His human body was screaming in agony. His legs felt like lead, and the hound bite on his arm throbbed with a dull, hot ache.
But his enhanced hearing had just picked up something incredible.
Through the howling wind and the rustling branches, he heard the distinct, mechanical hum of a water pump engaging. And more importantly, he heard the faint, muffled crunch of boots on snow.
Humans. Zeviel pushed himself off the tree. He wiped the toxic ash from his silver hair. His golden eyes locked onto the steep incline ahead.
He was close. He could practically feel the warmth of the fortress. He could feel the faint, lingering resonance of his son’s power in the air.
He started walking faster, completely ignoring the pain. He didn’t care if she yelled at him. He didn’t care if she pointed a gun at his chest. He just wanted to see her face.
But as Zeviel climbed over a rocky ridge, he suddenly stopped.
His golden eyes narrowed. He looked down at the snow.
There were tracks. A lot of them.
They weren’t the erratic, clawed prints of Spore-Hounds. They were heavy, uniform boot prints. And they were fresh. Someone else was climbing the mountain, moving in a wide, tactical formation toward the peak.
Zeviel knelt down, pressing two fingers against one of the boot prints. The ash was still settling inside the impression.
"Scavengers," Zeviel murmured.
His blood ran cold. The alien warship had vaporized the mutant horde, but the blinding flash of light from the laser had acted like a beacon to every desperate human survivor in the valley. They had seen the power. They wanted it.
And they were currently between him and Catrin.
Zeviel stood up, his jaw clenching. The ten percent rule didn’t matter anymore. If anyone touched her, he was going to tear this mountain in half.
He broke into a dead sprint up the snowy incline.
"Fifty yards," Jax whispered, his eyes locked on the massive steel gates of the Ark looming in the fog ahead of them. "Almost there, Boss."
Catrin felt her heart rate start to slow down. They had done it. They fixed the pipe, maintained the lie, and nobody got hurt.
Suddenly, Quinn stopped walking.
She froze so fast that Catrin almost bumped into her. Quinn raised her heavy sniper rifle, pressing her eye against the thermal optic scope.
"Quinn?" Catrin asked quietly. "What is it?"
"Jax," Quinn said. Her voice was trembling. Catrin had never heard Quinn’s voice tremble before. "I’ve got heat signatures. Directly ahead of us."
Jax immediately raised his shotgun, stepping in front of Catrin to shield her. "Mutants? Did they get past the gate?"
"No," Quinn swallowed hard, her finger hovering over the trigger. "Not mutants. They’re human. And there are at least thirty of them. They’re blocking the road to the gate."
Catrin’s blood turned to ice.
They had walked right into a trap. While they were fixing the pipe, a massive scavenger crew had crept up the mountain and positioned themselves between the repair team and the safety of the fortress.
"Briggs!" Jax hissed into his radio. "Briggs, we have hostiles at the front gate! Give us covering fire from the wall!"
Static.
Jax hit the radio again, harder this time. "Aegis actual, do you copy? We are cut off!"
Only dead, crackling static answered him. The scavengers had brought a short-wave jammer.
Out of the thick purple fog, a dozen heavily armed men stepped forward. They were wearing scavenged military gear and gas masks. They had assault rifles raised and pointed directly at Catrin’s chest.
"Drop the guns," a harsh, muffled voice barked from behind one of the masks. "Or the billionaire dies right here in the snow."
Jax gritted his teeth, his finger tightening on the trigger of his shotgun. Quinn didn’t move an inch.
Catrin slowly unholstered her pistol. She wasn’t going to surrender. If she died out here, Nico was left alone in that fortress.
The wind howled around them, trapping them in the freezing whiteout. There was no cover. There was nowhere to run. They were completely surrounded.