Ossian hit the bottom of the nest with his left shoulder out of its socket. He knew it from the shape of his arm before the pain reached him.
His comm unit lay in pieces two body lengths away, still carrying Ruan's channel out of the wreckage.
"We can drop a line, it's four minutes of winch time," Perris argued somewhere above him, his voice shaking on the open channel.
Ruan answered by reading the addendum out loud, all the way down to the words recoverable support asset.
'He's reading my own contract back at me... he's doing that for the recording, the man is building a file,' Ossian pressed his good hand into the silt, 'nobody's coming down here.'
Water came over the lip of the nest floor in a wide sheet, carrying the smell of hot metal off the cracked Heart above him.
'They hand the badge to somebody else on Monday... and I get a line on an incident sheet,' the flood reached his knees, 'that is what I am angry about.'
'Survey sheet gave this room twelve minutes to flood... call it eight, nothing on that paper has been right yet,' the water stung the split in his palm, 'shoulder first.'
He looped a cargo strap around a wall anchor and put the loop under his elbow, then leaned his weight away from the iron.
The pain came up through his jaw and stopped him before the joint moved, leaving the arm out of its socket.
'I can't do it on my own... it needs one hard pull with something behind it, and I'm out of volunteers,' his breath went shallow in the dark, 'shit, find a reason not to stop.'
Claws scratched on wet stone somewhere to his left, then quit the moment he went still.
A Carrion Jackal came out of the water with its jaw hanging open, one ear taken off years ago by something that scarred that whole side of its head.
'That thing is built for pursuit... it runs prey down over distance, so running is off the menu,' Ossian took the anchor loop in his teeth, 'now, while it's deciding.'
He threw his whole weight backward at the moment the jackal came at him. The shoulder went into its socket with a sound he felt in his back teeth.
The jackal broke off four paces short and started circling him instead, hunting on something other than its eyes.
Core fluid pulls in whatever else happens to be living inside a Gate. Every crate rig in the guild carried a canister of scent neutralizer for that reason.
Ossian emptied the whole canister across the route toward the flooded exit, then smeared larval fluid down the west ladder run to give the jackal two false trails.
Perris had cut the harness high enough to leave two workable lengths, which Ossian ran over a freight anchor bolted into the ceiling to make a crude pulley.
'The jackal walked past both trails... it went straight to the stones I bled on, perfect,' the animal licked at a smear he had left during the fall, 'so it hunts damage, not smell.'
Every hurt hunter he ever carried out of a Gate drew something up the tunnel behind them, a rule he had watched work for four years.
He cut the transferred wound on his forearm open with the tong edge and stood still, letting the smell reach the jackal.
'One pass under the anchor... and if it swerves, well, that's the whole plan gone,' the water was at his shins with a pull in it now, 'walk, don't run.'
Ossian walked the blood trail beneath the freight anchor, matching the jackal's stride against his own bad leg.
He dropped the team's abandoned core case onto its spine, and the weight of a loaded pallet folded the animal's back legs under its body.
'That should've finished it... and it still has a working spine, brilliant,' the jackal got its front feet under itself while the water climbed his knees, 'damn it, it's getting up.'
He put the cut harness around its throat and hauled on the pulley line with his good arm, letting the jackal's own charge pull the loop shut.
Its claws opened four lines down his chest before the harness took the air out of it.
Ossian drove the broken core tong up through the soft palate with both hands on the shaft, holding it there until the legs stopped working.
'Jackal's done... and the egg's been sitting there watching the whole time,' he wiped his face on his shoulder without letting go of the tong, 'hell, water's at my thigh.'
The larva had swallowed the Heart the guild came here to take. A pulse moved through the egg in slow sweeps, with the shell thin enough to show the shape inside.
Ruan's voice came through the broken comm asking for a reading on the core signature.
"It's still climbing," a recovery hunter reported, calling the number off a handheld somewhere up the shaft.
'That whole channel can hear this... nobody opens a route for a line item, not in this budget,' the shell flexed against his foot, 'get something between me and that thing.'
The ceremonial face sat in the wall where his flare had shown it, old enough for the carving to go soft at the edges.
Ossian worked the carved face out of the stone with his one good hand. The larva pulled its head back the moment that carving came loose, which told him the old residue still meant something.
'The larva flinched at this carving... whatever's on it buys me a metre, and I'm not proud,' he held the face out at arm's length while the water pushed him sideways, 'go, now.'
Perris's shock spear lay where the squad had dumped it during the retreat, with the charge indicator on the handle down to one bar.
Ossian put the blade through the shell above the head and let the charge run, which turned the light inside the egg white for a second.
The charge died two thirds of the way in, leaving the shell split open with the core still too deep in the wound for the blade to reach.
'One bar of charge... the rest of it went on lighting their way out, naturally,' the shell was grinding as it tried to close over the split, 'hands, get them in there.'
Water came over the rim of the nest in a run and took the loose tools off the floor around him.
Ossian put both porter gloves into the split and pulled, feeling the shell edges bite through reinforced canvas at his fingers.
The core came out wet in both hands while larval shell went liquid where it touched the gloves, running down over his knuckles.
'That shell is setting onto my hands... my fingers won't open and it keeps getting hotter,' the heat of it went through the canvas into the bone, 'pull, it's coming free.'
The ceremonial carving broke against his wrist as the fluid took it, sealing those pieces into the backs of both gloves.
Then the larva stopped moving, and nothing at all had arrived from the surface to help him.
'The larva's dead... and nobody up there had a hand in it,' Ossian sat down in the water with the core fused against his palm, 'eight minutes, maybe six.'
A line of text opened in the air over the flood at the height of his face, bright enough to light the water underneath it.
[Apex Masquerade System online]
[Attempting to register the intended apex host]
The system was waiting on something in the ruined egg, and the thing inside that egg had stopped answering it.
[Host located inside a ceremonial identity seal]
[Registering]
That ceremonial seal sat on Ossian's hands now, welded there by the shell. The system read the living body wearing it instead of the dead one it came for.
[Error]
[This host's biology does not match any known apex line]
[Registration incomplete]
'It thinks I'm the thing in the egg... a system this old can't tell a man from a monster,' the water pushed his knees out from under him, 'move, the ladder run's west.'
[You are bleeding out inside a collapsing lair]
[Wear the Carrion Jackal Mask and the lair will not be permitted to keep you]
The system did nothing at all about his shoulder or his open chest. The only item it put on offer to him was a single mask.
'No stitches, no splint, no painkiller... one item on the menu and it's a mask,' Ossian looked at the bone shape rising out of the water, 'that's the jackal I just killed, no less.'
'Whatever this costs me... water's at my chest, so the negotiation's over,' he put his face into the wet inside of the mask, 'take it.'
His shoulder seated with a click he felt in his back teeth, and his jaw pushed forward past his lips.