The drop-ship's altitude warning had been going off for about ninety seconds.
Nobody in the cabin had asked the pilot to turn it off.
Caleb watched the red interior strip lights pulse against the inside of his visor, syncing to the warning rhythm in a way the engineers had probably thought was reassuring and was not. Across the aisle Hiro was breathing through his nose in short measured pulls. The kid had a system. Caleb did not ask what it was.
Iharu was looking up at the bay-door ceiling like he was bored by it. That was Iharu's system.
Kikaru, two seats down, had her plasma rifle held barrel-up between her knees. Her gloved fingers were not curled around the grip. They were pressed flat against the receiver, palm down, the way you press a hand against a table to make sure the table is still there.
The pilot's voice came over the cabin speakers, faint under the rotors.
"Surface is not stable. Reading sub-surface displacement at three to five meters per minute. Best I can give you is a sixty-second window on the rocks east of the deployment marker. You'll have to jump the last twenty feet."
Nobody answered.
Kikaru tapped her comms-chip once. "Acknowledged. East rocks. We jump."
The drop-ship banked. Through the open bay door Caleb saw the corruption from inside it for the first time, and the inside of it was worse than the long view had been from miles out. The valley below them was not ground. The valley was a slow-moving mass of dark veined material that pulsed in a rhythm just slightly off from a heartbeat, and the mist coming off it carried specks of something Caleb did not let himself identify. The mountain shoulder they were aiming for was rock. He could see that. The rock was an island.
A red bolt of lightning went up past the cabin door from below, which was the wrong direction for lightning to go. Iharu had stopped looking bored.
"Boots in fifteen," Kikaru said.
The bay's hydraulic ramp dropped open.
The smell that hit them was not air. Air did not smell like that. It was the back of his throat first and the lungs second, and the lungs only because he had not learned yet to keep his mouth closed in this place. He learned in the first breath. Hiro learned in the second. Iharu had been holding his breath since the bay opened, which was the only thing Iharu had ever done that suggested he was smarter than he pretended.
"Go."
Kikaru jumped first.
Caleb went after her, because his rifle was the second-loudest in the squad and you wanted the loud rifles forward in a place where you couldn't see your feet.
The drop was short. He hit the rocks hard. The new suit's lower lining took most of it; his knees took the rest. He went down to a crouch, scanned, and got his back against a stone outcrop that was the only thing on the shoulder that did not feel wrong.
Hiro and Iharu hit the rocks behind him.
The drop-ship pulled up and out almost before Iharu had cleared the ramp. The rotor wash kicked the mist back away from them for a few seconds and Caleb used the visibility to count: four bodies, four rifles, four sets of boots, one ridge, one path. The path led down off the rocks and into the valley. The valley did not have a good place to stand.
"What's the move," Iharu said, low.
He was looking at Kikaru.
Caleb noticed that. He filed it. Iharu, who had spent the last month pretending Kikaru was a corporate billboard with a rifle, was looking to her now. The deployment had clarified the chain in his head.
Kikaru did not waste it.
"The path on the right looks like it's been used. The path on the left is shorter. We take the right. The reason we take the right is that something has been using it and I would rather walk into a thing I can fight than fall into a thing I can't see."
"Copy," Iharu said.
Hiro nodded twice, too fast.
Caleb kept his rifle low across his chest.
He had been quiet long enough that Kikaru turned her head a quarter toward him. She did not ask. The question was in the angle.
"My nose is going to be useful here," Caleb said. "Five years of pulling apart dead things teaches you which kinds of dead things smell wrong. This place is not one smell. It's three. I want point."
She considered him for a beat. He could see her doing the calculation behind the visor. Disposal-yard scrubber, no commission, the kind of asset her division was going to spend before it spent her. Versus the same scrubber who had walked away from an apex predator and a Class-8 transport shell in the same week.
"Point," she said. "Iharu second. I'm third. Hiro on the rear."
Hiro started to object on principle. He stopped, because he was not stupid, and being rear meant he could keep his back to the rocks for as long as the path allowed.
They moved.
-----
The path was the bad kind of path.
The rock under the boots was real for the first forty meters. Then it wasn't.
The transition was not visible. Caleb felt it through his soles before he saw it. The rock he'd been walking on stopped being rock and became something that gave half a centimeter under his weight. He stopped where he was. The other three stopped where they were.
He crouched. He put his gloved palm flat against the path.
It was warm.
"Don't put your full weight," he said. "Walk on the balls of your feet. If you feel it give more than the suit will take, you go to your knees and you wait. It probably won't drop. It might drop."
"That's a great briefing," Iharu muttered.
"Best I've got."
They moved again.
The mist closed in.
Visibility dropped to about four meters. The path went left around a slow rise. Caleb did not let himself look at the things growing out of the path's edge. He had not asked for the briefing on what was growing there. He had agreed to find a nexus and destroy it and the things growing out of the path's edge were not the nexus.
Iharu's voice from behind him, quiet.
"You smelling the second thing or the third thing?"
"Second."
"What's the second."
"Cold metal."
"Like rust?"
"Like a knife that hasn't been used yet."
Iharu was quiet for a step.
"That's a worse answer than I wanted."
"Wasn't trying to make you feel better."
-----
The first one came out of the mist on Caleb's left.
Nothing in any rank chart matched what it was.
It was a shape the corruption had decided to make: low, four-limbed, sized about like a large dog, with a head that had not finished being a head. There were too many places on it that looked like eyes and not enough that looked like a mouth. It moved by sliding the front limbs forward and then dragging the back ones, which meant it was fast on flat ground and would be slow on the rocks.
He did not raise the rifle.
He shifted the phase-dagger from his belt to his right hand and let the rifle hang on the sling.
The thing came.
It moved exactly the way he'd expected it to move. It was made out of the valley and it was made out of the valley's rules. He stepped left of its lunge, drove the phase-dagger up under the angle where the front limb attached to the body, and felt the blade open something soft that should not have been soft on a creature this size. The thing did not screech. It made a sound like wet rope under tension. He kicked it off the blade and onto the path.
It did not get up.
Two more came out behind it.
"Right side, two on the right," Kikaru called.
Caleb pivoted.
Iharu's scatter-gun went off twice. The first round took the head off the closer one. The second round was wide because Iharu had flinched, and Iharu never flinched, which told Caleb something about Iharu that he was going to think about later.
The second creature came at Iharu.
Caleb closed the distance in three steps and put the phase-dagger into the second creature's neck at an angle he had used a hundred times on a hundred carcasses, and the creature went down on top of Iharu's boot.
Iharu kicked it off.
"Thanks."
"Don't flinch."
"I'm not going to flinch."
"You just did."
"I'm not going to flinch again."
The mist settled.
Three creatures. None of them moving. Hiro had not fired a round. Kikaru had not fired a round. The work had been done by the scatter-gun and the knife.
Then Caleb's HUD did something it was not supposed to do.
A small gold square flickered into the upper right corner of his visor for less than a second. Long enough to register. Not long enough to react to.
It was the same color as the override that had come down in the simulation arena.
The same color as the panel that had taken the kill-switch off Kikaru's face the day Hacker had decided she did not want Kikaru breathing anymore.
He did not say anything about it.
He could not see the thing on his HUD, because the gold square was gone. But somewhere on the ridge above this valley, or below it, or behind it, the man who had said *apologies for the static, recruit* was watching him work.
The mist began moving again.
Not the way wind moved mist.
The mist was being displaced from below.
"Down the slope," Kikaru said.
She had seen it too.
Down the slope was the valley floor. Down the slope was the heartbeat. Down the slope was whatever was big enough to displace the air this far up the path.
Caleb wiped the phase-dagger against the leg of his suit and put it back on his belt. He brought the rifle up to his shoulder.
His finger settled inside the trigger guard the way a finger settled when it had done this before and had not enjoyed it.
The mist below them went thin in a wide circle.
Something was clearing the air.
He thought, very briefly, about his mother's door, and his brother's machines, and the collection agent's terminal that would tick over at midnight tonight whether he was alive to see it or not.
Then he stopped thinking about them, because that was for later.
He waited for the circle to finish opening.
Below the circle, in the cleared air, the surface of the valley floor was not soil and was not flesh and was not anything he had words for, and at the center of it something the size of a transport truck was rising slowly out of the ground with the kind of unhurried patience of a thing that had been waiting to be looked at.
It was looking at him.
He could not see eyes.
It was looking at him.