The Seventh Division base was its own city.
Caleb walked through the noise of it on the way to the staging hangars. Transport rigs grinding past on bad suspensions, sending dust over everything. Food stalls on every corner running peanut oil hot enough to taste from the street. The smells stacked into something specific to this base, a stink no other place had managed to copy.
Off-duty soldiers loitered. Veterans drank early. Recruits hauled crates with their heads down. Two men in dented armor were yelling at each other over a holoscreen replaying clips of his own tunnel feed, and one of them was clearly losing the argument.
Caleb went around them without giving his own replay a glance.
Military police watched everything from the intersections, hands resting on the rifles slung across their chests with casual ownership of every exit.
It was a machine. Everyone here was a moving part in the machine. The machine ran on dead Kaiju.
He pushed through the canvas flap into the staging tent.
Hiro was pacing.
He had a new optic mounted to his rifle, and he was holding it up to the tent lamps like he was hoping a customer would walk in and ask him about it. He turned the magnification ring twice.
"Tier two," Hiro said. "Low-light filter on it is silly. Chat is going to love it."
"Good."
Iharu was on a crate cleaning his scatter-gun. When Caleb came in, he made a noise that lived somewhere between a grunt and a comment.
"Look at this guy."
"Hi, Iharu."
"Got promoted. Got fitted. Got a new shoulder, probably."
"Same shoulder."
"Try to keep up."
"Sure." Kikaru waited at the map table.
Her armor was repaired. He could see the seam where the Mimic blade had taken the breastplate apart. The replacement plate was a slightly different shade of white than the rest, which she had probably noticed and would not be told about by anyone she would not kill for telling her.
She came out from behind the table when he walked up.
She stopped close enough that he had to look down at her face. She reached up and put her finger on the seam at his collarbone, where Tali had laid the heavier weave in over the bandage.
She traced the seam.
"You finally look like something."
"You evaluating the gear or the meat under it."
"Both."
Her hand lingered a beat before she pulled it back.
"Spearhead squads depend on structural integrity," she said. Her voice was flatter than her usual flat. "Don't ruin the suit on the first drop. You expose my flank when you bleed out."
"I'll keep your flank clear, princess."
"Don't call me that."
"Sure."
Her mouth almost found a smile and thought better of it. She turned back to the map.
He had seen her hands shake. He had not said so.
The doors at the back of the tent banged open.
Iris came in already talking.
"Listen."
Everyone listened. Iris was the kind of person you listened to whether you meant to or not.
She slapped the datapad onto the table and a blue hologram lifted up out of it, a mountain range fifty miles outside the city walls.
"Command picked up a biological rupture in Sector Nine. Not a Kaiju incursion. The terrain itself is changing. Hyper-accelerated biological growth radiating out from a central point. Nexus formation."
Her finger went through the air to the middle of the hologram. A red dot pulsed there.
"That's the anchor. The terrain's shifting faster than the artillery mechs can plant their feet. They want boots on the ground to cut a path to it. You drop, you find the nexus, you destroy it before the corruption reaches the coast. Four divisions are deploying. We're the spearhead."
Caleb noticed the old word never left her mouth.
She pulled up a second window on the holo. A gold icon flared.
She let it sit there.
"Command attached an SSS-Rank operator to the theater."
Nobody said anything.
Iharu's hand was still on his scatter-gun barrel. It stayed still. Hiro had stopped breathing. Kikaru's posture, which had been at parade-rest for so long it had probably set, broke at the shoulders by half an inch.
"Will," Hiro started. "Will they be on our..."
"No," Iris said. "Separate net. Separate chain. No rescues, no warnings. If you see gold on your HUD, you turn around and you walk."
She let that sit too.
"Load the transports."
She left.
Caleb stood there longer than the others. He had heard the older voice on his earpiece in the simulation arena. The gold panel had come down on his HUD. A polite man with the kind of calm money bought had apologized for his stalker's inconvenience.
The keeper was attached to this theater, which meant Caleb was flying into more than a Kaiju nest. He was entering the keeper's hunting ground.
Out on the tarmac the drop-ships were already warm. The rotors threw gravel against the chain link. Tali was leaning against one of the hydraulic struts with a bag against her hip.
He stopped at the foot of the ramp.
She tossed the bag at his chest.
He caught it. It was heavy. Maybe twenty pounds of compressed fabric.
"That suit you're wearing is the rental."
"You said it was custom."
"I said it was a build. The build I gave you was the rental version. I rushed the real one. Swap before you drop or the kinetic multiplier is going to throw your spine out the back of your ribcage."
"Lovely."
"It's calibrated to you."
"I know what calibrated means now."
She popped a bubble. It was smaller than the one in the alley.
"Upload telemetry by nightfall."
"Yeah."
She skipped good luck and walked back across the tarmac to the artisan district. The wind off the rotors pulled her coveralls flat against her side.
He went up the ramp.
He swapped the suits in the cabin before strapping in.
The custom weave came up his legs and the fabric closed against his skin the way a hand closes around something it intends to hold. The pelvic nodes settled, and the chest panel aligned. The cold pinprick teeth across his ribs had been individually calibrated, each finding a slightly different home than the rental had managed.
The seam pressed against his heartbeat.
He sat down on the bench and let the restraint clack down across his chest.
The drop-ship lifted.
The ride was the bad kind. The cabin was uninsulated, the engines cared nothing for human comfort, and his back teeth rattled in his skull every time the airframe shifted. Iharu kept his attention on the floor. Hiro gripped his rifle tight enough to bleach his knuckles. Nobody talked.
The city shrank under them into a neat lit grid.
Then the wall.
Then the dark.
The smell coming up through the bay doors changed. The diesel went out of the air. Something else came in, metallic, bad, the smell of an old coin left in damp pocket lining for years.
Sector Nine showed up over the horizon before they reached the drop point.
Caleb leaned against his restraints to see it.
The mountain had become meat.
It still held the shape and size of a mountain in the place where a mountain was supposed to be, but bruised, twisted, vein-shot tissue now thrust up at the clouds in slow steady stages of growth. The surface flexed in slabs, as if bedrock had learned to breathe wrong. Red lightning ran between the peaks in the wrong direction, climbing instead of falling.
Veins as wide as roads ran through the valleys. They pulsed.
A red mist sat over everything. The drop-ships shrank against it. Caleb sat back in his restraints. He racked the bolt of his rifle.
The kinetic slug chambered in the dark cabin with the soft metallic certainty of a thing that was going to be used very soon.