The Vectar came off the wall with terrible grace.

  One moment, it was part of the pulsing landscape; the next, it was all motion, weight, and intention, surging forward on six hooked limbs that dug into the growth as if it were solid ground. Each step made a wet, tearing sound, as roots ripped from the earth.

  "Do not wait!" Vega snapped. "Fire!"

  Park was already moving. Her rifle spat white lances into the cavern, each shot punching into the advancing bulk. Impacts flared, making its translucent armor flash like glass under a welding torch.

  The Vectar screamed.

  The sound was not a single note but a layered shriek, high and low at once, vibrating in Vega's helmet. It charged anyway, fluids splattering from fresh holes, green light flickering madly along its internal lines.

  Vega fired in short, controlled bursts.

  Rounds took the thorax, shoulder joints, and the base of the tail. Where they hit, armor spiderwebbed—some shots punched through, others skidded off toward the cavern walls in ricochets of blue light.

  "It is bleeding," Watson shouted. "But it is not slowing!"

  "Aim for the legs and joints," Ito yelled. "Take away its mobility!"

  The Vectar's tail snapped forward.

  A fan of darts shot across the space, fast enough that Vega barely saw them before they were past. Her HUD flared with proximity warnings.

  One dart hit the floor a meter from her boot. It sank to the fletching, then hissed, disgorging a puddle of smoking fluid that ate into rock and growth alike. The mat recoiled from the contact like burned flesh, inner lights flaring red.

  Another dart hit a support beam, punched through, and left a sizzling hole that dripped molten metal.

  "Do not let that touch you!" Vega barked. "Keep moving!"

  Park broke left, sliding across the pulsing mat to flank the Vectar, firing as she moved to exploit its blind spots.

  Vega thumbed the control on her left forearm.

  The buckler flared to life, a round, translucent disc blooming in front of her wrist. Rainbows crawled along its edge where it bent light.

  The Vectar's tail lashed again.

  Three darts struck the buckler in rapid succession. The shield flared white, energy rippling across its surface. The first dart disintegrated in a spray of sparks and acid vapor. The second ricocheted off at a wild angle. The third punched through, slowed but not stopped, and grazed Vega's shoulder plate.

  Suit alarms screamed.

  Her left side went numb for a heartbeat as the armor dumped energy and tried to isolate the breach. Readouts flashed red, then orange, along the edge of her vision.

  "Status?" Ito demanded.

  "Glancing hit," Vega snarled. "Plate took most of it. No penetration. Keep shooting!"

  The Vectar reared, front limbs lifting, revealing a softer, less-armored underbelly with dark nodules clustered around it.

  "Underbody!" she shouted. "There! Park, now!"

  Park saw it too.

  She rolled, came up on one knee, and poured a tight burst into the exposed tissue. The rounds tore through, popping nodules like overripe fruit. A thicker, darker fluid gushed out, splattering across the mat and sending up a hissing cloud.

  The Vectar convulsed.

  Its scream went up an octave, shredding. The front part of its body slammed down, limbs scrabbling. The tail whipped wildly, darts firing in every direction.

  One of Bravo went down without a sound, armor punched in three places at once. The corrosive load chewed into composite and flesh. His vitals flatlined almost instantly on Vega's HUD.

  "Bravo Two is gone," Ito said, voice clipped. "No time."

  "Keep it on the ground!" Vega roared. "We stick to the plan!"

  She dropped the rifle to its mag catch, drew her energy knife in one smooth motion, and charged.

  The blade woke with a hungry hum, a line of hard white light flickering along its edge. The growth flexed under her boots, trying to adjust to her weight, but she was already committed, buckler raised, knife low.

  The Vectar saw her coming.

  Its tail tried to track her, but the damage Park had done to its ventral side had thrown off its coordination. The cluster of eyes turned her way instead, mandibles flexing.

  It lunged.

  Vega hit the buckler control again, pouring more power into the disc. The Vectar's remaining good leg crashed against it. Force field met alien armor in an explosion of light and noise. The impact drove her back a step, boots sliding on the mat, but the shield held.

  She ducked under the limb and drove the knife up.

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  The blade sank into the joint where leg met body. There was almost no resistance. The energized edge parted whatever the armor was made of as if it were heavy cloth. Heat and a surge of alien current washed up her arm.

  The Vectar spasmed.

  Green light inside its carapace flared, then stuttered. The wounded limb went limp, half-severed, flopping uselessly.

  Vega ripped the knife free and stabbed again, higher, angling for where she guessed a primary nerve cluster might run. The blade went in to the hilt. For an instant, she saw her own reflection in one of the thing's eyes, distorted by its curvature.

  "Die," she said, and twisted.

  The scream cut off mid-pitch.

  The lights inside its armor flickered wildly, then went dark in a wave that ran from head to tail. The massive body shuddered once more and collapsed, crashing down onto the mat with a wet, final sound.

  For a moment, the whole cavern reacted.

  The growth around them pulsed crimson, all other colors washed away. Tendrils writhed, coiling tighter around supports. The hanging sacks in the ceiling contracted violently. The pulse in the air spiked, sending a wave of dizziness through Vega.

  Then, gradually, the red faded back to green and blue. The motion slowed.

  It did not stop.

  "Contact down," Park said. Her voice was steady, but Vega heard the thin tightness under it.

  Watson let out a long, shaking breath. "One," he said. "That was one."

  "Do not get sentimental," Ito said. "We did not kill the system. We killed a node. Maybe a big one, but not the center."

  Vega pulled her knife free from the Vectar's body. The blade came out coated in a thin film of luminous fluid that hissed as it evaporated, leaving the metal clean.

  Her HUD showed minor armor damage on her left shoulder, increased environmental contamination, one KIA, no other immediate critical wounds.

  "Check yourselves," she said. "Suit integrity. Toxins. If anything flashes red, you say it."

  Status reports came back in quick sequence. Green. Amber. Green.

  "Bravo Two?" Watson said softly.

  Vega walked to the fallen Marine.

  The armor was warped and smoking where the darts had hit, plates eaten through to the underlayer. The faceplate had gone opaque when the suit's internal systems detected catastrophic failure. There was no pulse marker.

  She knelt, resting one gauntleted hand briefly on the ruined chest.

  "Mark the body," she said. "We retrieve him if we come back this way."

  Ito set a beacon beside the corpse. Its light was small and defiant in the glow of the growth.

  Vega rose.

  "Now we know what a Vectar looks like on the hoof," she said. "We know where to shoot and what to avoid. That is more than we had five minutes ago."

  "And if there are more?" Watson asked.

  "There will be," Park said.

  "There will," Vega agreed. "Which is why we are not lingering. Ito, start mapping charge placements. We cripple this spine and give orbit a flare they cannot miss. Then we climb out before this thing sends its cousins."

  Ito nodded, already pulling up schematics and overlays, eyes flicking as he tagged structural choke points where growth and power converged.

  "Four primary nodes in this cavern," he said. "Where the biggest veins meet. If we plant charges there and in the growth chamber, we will do serious damage. It might not kill the organism, but it will hurt it. A lot."

  "Do it," Vega said. "Park, cover him. Watson, you are with me. We are going to take a closer look at those hanging sacks."

  "Do I have to?" Watson said weakly.

  "Yes," Vega said.

  They moved.

  Up close, the ceiling sacs were worse than they had looked from the ladder.

  They were translucent, oblong structures hanging from thick growth cords, each about the size of a person. Fluid sloshed inside when they swayed. Silhouettes floated within some of them, shapes that might have been twisted limbs or something else entirely.

  Vega raised her rifle, then stopped a few centimeters short of lining up a shot.

  "Scan," she said.

  Watson swallowed and lifted his forearm unit, beams sweeping across the nearest sack.

  "I am seeing dense organic material," he said slowly. "Layered tissue. Fluid with high nutrient content. And… something that looks like a forming exoskeleton. Multiple segments. Tail bud. Limb buds. These are… incubators."

  "For more Vectars," Vega said.

  "Or for something like them," Watson said. "They are not all the same. Some are further along. Some are… different."

  "Different how?" she asked.

  "Different shape," Watson said. "One looks more… vertical. Limbs in a different orientation. Mass distributed up top."

  "Meaning?" Vega pressed.

  "Meaning I do not want to meet it when it hatches," he said.

  "Then we do not give it the chance," Vega said. "Tag these sacs as secondary targets for the charges. If we make anything fly down here, I want it to tear through this nursery."

  Ito's voice came over the channel. "Charges planted on the first two nodes," he said. "Working on the third. Timers are offline for now. We will link them to a remote trigger once everything is set."

  "How much time will we have after detonation?" Vega asked.

  "Down here?" Ito said. "A few seconds of confusion, maybe thirty seconds before structural failures start cascading in earnest. If we are still in this room when they go, we will not have to worry about what comes next."

  "So we make sure we are not," Vega said.

  She turned back toward the Vectar corpse.

  The growth had already started to creep over it, thin filaments extending from the mat to touch the dead armor. Where they made contact, readings spiked.

  "It is trying to reclaim its own," Ito said, noticing her focus. "Or study what killed it."

  "We will not give it that, either," Vega said. "Once the charges are set, we torch the corpse. Deny it data. Deny it mass."

  "Understood," Park said.

  Minutes passed, measured in the careful placement of explosives and the slow, sinister undulation of the growth.

  Vega moved through the cavern, watching for any new motion, any sign of another Vectar peeling itself away from the walls. Every creak of armor, every drip of condensed fluid, sounded too loud.

  At last, Ito spoke again.

  "Last charge is set," he said. "We have eight linked nodes, all synced to a single trigger. I have hard-linked backups on my rig and on yours, Captain, in case one of us eats a dart."

  "How generous," Watson said.

  "What kind of yield are we talking about?" Vega asked.

  "Enough to rip this chamber apart and send a shock up the spine," Ito said. "It will not be subtle."

  "Good," Vega said. "We did not come here to whisper."

  She stepped back to the Vectar corpse, thumbed her rifle over to a higher energy setting, and aimed at the center mass.

  "Burn," she said, and pulled the trigger.

  The beam chewed into the body, boiling internal fluids and igniting whatever passed for fat and connective tissue. The creature went up in a wash of green and blue flame, casting mad shadows over the walls. The growth recoiled from the heat, inner lights flaring red and white.

  "Time to leave," Vega said over the rising roar. "Now."

  They retraced their steps to the ladder shaft, the cavern's light strobing behind them as the corpse burned. The pulse in the air had gone chaotic, the slow rhythm shattered into erratic spikes.

  "Captain," Ito said as they reached the shaft, "the organism is reacting beyond this chamber. I am seeing fluctuations in the spine above us. It knows something is wrong."

  "Then we move," Vega said. "Park, up first. Watson, then Ito. I will take rear. If anything follows, I will introduce it to the knife."

  Park did not argue.

  She started up the ladder, armor dimming as she moved into the shaft's narrower light. Watson followed, breathing hard but steady. Ito came next, cradling his rig protectively as if it were a living thing.

  Vega took one last look into the cavern.

  The burning Vectar was collapsing in on itself, flames licking across its translucent plates. The sacs in the ceiling were twitching, some swelling, some shriveling. The thick veins along the walls pulsed in bright, angry colors.

  "See you soon," she said under her breath.

  Then she grabbed the ladder and began to climb, the growth brushing against her boots, the pulse chasing them up into the dark.