Torvin pulled up the live Deepwatch feed and began his briefing with the focused efficiency of someone who had learned that Briar's operational windows were not long.
"The thornback is here." He tapped the red marker on the display. "Moving toward Crestwall, a fortified settlement approximately twelve kilometers inland from the eastern coast. Population around forty thousand. The vent it came through was in post-discharge cooldown, which is why we're not looking at ash and bone fragments right now."
Briar studied the movement vector. "How long before it reaches the settlement boundary?"
"Current pace, fifteen minutes to the outer agricultural structures. Twenty to the residential boundary." Torvin adjusted something on his secondary screen. "We've had one piece of luck. The thornback encountered a livestock enclosure about three kilometers from the vent exit. Two large animals. It stopped to feed."
"How large is this individual?"
Torvin pulled up the signature profile. "Adult male. Upper mass range for the species. Approximately one hundred and eighty kilos, with full tusk development. Tusk span on a fully grown male thornback reaches roughly the width of a doorframe." He paused. "A wide doorframe."
Briar was quiet for a moment. "And Retrieval assembly is ninety minutes."
"Eighty-seven, currently."
She looked at the fifteen-minute estimate on the movement tracker and did not say anything about the discrepancy, because Torvin had already done the arithmetic and the expression on his face confirmed he found it equally troubling.
"Equipment," she said. "What have you got for me?"
Torvin moved to the field equipment station with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been pulling together deployment packages for eleven years of Briar's operational career. He selected a flat band of reinforced cultivation-leather from the tracking array shelf.
"Positional locator, integrated with the Deepwatch relay. You mark your location, we have you on screen in real time." He clipped a small cylindrical attachment to the receiver groove on Briar's helmet. "Live visual feed, mana-cell powered, no duration limit. Voice-activated audio. We'll have everything you're seeing and hearing in Ops."
"And the sidearm I drew from equipment?"
"The standard field unit you have is adequate for most situations." Torvin hesitated with the particular quality of someone deciding whether to say the next thing. Then he reached to the back of the equipment shelf and produced a handgun that was clearly not standard field issue. Its casing was pale mana-alloy, its design compact and purposeful, with a three-position selector on the grip. "This is a Deepstrike Radiant. Current generation. The field teams don't have these yet. Three output settings: suppression, incapacitation, terminal. Mana-cell core, essentially unlimited discharge capacity within operational parameters."
Briar took it, checked the selector, tested the balance, and holstered it alongside the standard unit. "Reeve said recon only."
"He did," Torvin agreed.
"I'm taking it anyway."
"I assumed so." He did not appear troubled by this assumption, which said something about eleven years of working with Briar.
She checked the locator band, confirmed the visual feed was transmitting, and moved toward the transit bay.
"Flint." Torvin's voice stopped her at the door. He was not looking at her directly, which was how he delivered the things he actually meant. "Confidence is a liability if it's standing in for information you don't have. Whatever you think you know about thornbacks from the incident files, the real thing is worse. The files don't capture the speed."
Briar considered this. She had been about to say something dismissive and stopped herself, because Torvin's paranoia was specific and earned and he did not issue operational warnings for conversational purposes.
"Noted," she said.
"I mean it. The Hamburg incident at least gave you a stationary target and preparation time. This is a hundred and eighty kilos of apex predator that has just survived a transit shaft discharge and is in significant pain and has no neurological capacity for anything except forward momentum and destruction." He finally looked at her directly. "Reconnaissance only would genuinely be the correct approach."
"It would be," Briar agreed, "if the timeline permitted it."
She went through the doors before he could respond to this.
The transit bay for vent corridor E7 was at the far end of the chute network, past twenty-three other bay doors in varying states of operational readiness, and when Briar reached it she understood immediately why Torvin had described the assigned pod with the specific tone he had used.
It sat in its launch clamp looking like something that had survived several significant experiences and was prepared, with diminishing enthusiasm, to survive more. Its hull showed the cosmetic record of fifty years of transit work: surface scorch patterning on the underside where magma-stream heat had done its long-term work, minor impact pockmarks from debris encounters, and the general quality of an object that had been maintained past the point where replacement would have been the more straightforward choice.
Torvin had followed her down and now slapped the pod's fender with the affection of someone who had personally serviced the vehicle in question for most of its operational life. "Fifty years in active service. Oldest unit still running in the chute network."
Briar looked at it. "And its scheduled retirement?"
Torvin scratched the back of his neck. "The budget cycle doesn't support replacement until the current unit experiences a disqualifying incident."
"Define disqualifying."
"A fatality connected to equipment failure rather than operational circumstance."
"Excellent," Briar said, and opened the heavy door, the pressure seal releasing with a hiss that she chose not to interpret as an editorial comment.
The interior was not designed around comfort. The restraint seat occupied most of the available space, surrounded by the electronics suite on three sides and the navigation array below the front viewport. There was barely room for a field officer in full kit to settle in without making personal compromises with the equipment housing. Briar threaded herself through the wire management array and settled into the seat.
"What's this?" She pointed at a grayish discoloration on the headrest immediately behind where her helmet would sit.
Torvin became briefly interested in the door seal. "Pressure irregularity on a previous mission. There was a brief seal failure. Brief and resolved."
"And the officer?"
"Alive. Fully functional for most operational purposes." A pause. "Slightly reduced processing speed, but able to manage standard assignments without difficulty."
"Well," Briar said, "that's a very specific reassurance."
She settled back against the headrest with the deliberate equanimity of someone who had made peace with the operational conditions available to them, and Torvin ran through the harness checks with the thorough attention of a man who had decided that he was personally responsible for every fastening point.
"All secure," he said, stepping back toward the door. He tapped the audio receiver on her helmet. "Keep the channel open. We need positional updates every five minutes, and if the situation changes—"
"It'll be the first thing I transmit," Briar said.
Torvin pulled the door closed. The seal engaged with a solid, pressurized thunk that was either reassuring or the opposite, depending on one's relationship with enclosed spaces and magma-stream transit.
The interior went quiet except for the electronics suite cycling through its pre-launch sequence and the distant, felt-rather-than-heard thrum of the transit shaft above her, the geothermal column that would carry her from the deep levels to the surface in approximately ninety seconds of conditions that the transit documentation described as intense and that field officers described in language that didn't belong in documentation.
Briar looked at the forward screen, which was showing the external camera feed. The mouth of E7's main shaft was visible above the launch clamp: a column of shimmering heated air rising into darkness, the walls of the shaft glowing faintly with residual geothermal light, white sparks tumbling downward against the upward current in slow spirals.
She could not hear the shaft from inside the sealed pod, but she knew the sound from prior transits: a sustained pressure roar that the operations manual compared to standing at the base of a waterfall and that field officers compared to something rather louder and less pastoral.
Torvin's voice arrived in her earpiece. "Transit authorization confirmed. We're on a shielded channel, surface-signal isolation protocol active. The surface-world's monitoring networks have been showing increased underground signal interest. I have documentation."
"Torvin."
"Right. Yes. Apologies." A brief pause to reorient. "You're queued for the next thermal surge, estimated ninety seconds. The surge will carry you through the first hundred kilometers of transit. After that you have independent drive and navigational control."
Briar wrapped her fingers around the twin control handles and checked the navigation overlay. The surface destination coordinates were locked, the shimmer-field was primed for activation the moment she cleared the vent exit, and the Deepstrike Radiant was seated in its holster with the selector on suppression.
She pulled a bite-guard from the emergency kit in the dash storage and set it between her teeth. Operational precaution. The transit forces were not kind to involuntary jaw movement.
The pod shuddered in its clamp as the thermal surge built in the shaft above her. The shuddering intensified, a full-body vibration that worked through the hull and the restraint harness and the seat structure and arrived in her bones as something that was not quite sound and not quite force but had qualities of both.
"Surge incoming," Torvin said. "Get ready, Flint."
On the external camera feed, the shaft entrance was shifting from a shimmer to something brighter, the leading edge of the thermal column descending to meet the launch point.
Don't think about it, Briar told herself with the pragmatic resignation of someone who had given this instruction before. Don't think about the geothermal column that's going to accelerate this pod to transit speed in approximately four seconds. Don't think about the mana-pressure forces that the documentation describes as significant and that your last transit left you unable to speak coherently for eleven minutes afterward.
And absolutely do not think about the hundred-and-eighty-kilo thornback on the surface with a tusk span the width of a doorframe that you are traveling toward with a recon-only authorization and a completely inadequate timeline.
Too late.
The surge hit.
The launch clamp released, and Briar's world became a sustained white roar of force and acceleration, and the ancient pod that was fifty years old and had survived everything the chute network had administered to it launched upward through E7's main shaft toward the surface with the committed momentum of something that had decided, long ago, that forward was the only available direction.