Amidst the sea of destruction, Tessa’s Seindrive stood out like a trapped, aluminum eagle. A closer glance told her all she needed to know, told her instantly how extensive the damage had been, how suddenly unlikely her rig was to fly. Didn’t matter– all that mattered was the running, the trying, the distance between her and the rig, between her and freedom.

“Status!” She yelled, and the Seindrive’s display panel lit up obediently, polyquid surface hot with the colors of damaged hull sections, non-functional systems, probable workarounds. In the upper left hand corner, cast in brilliant crimson, numbers ticked down from fifty-seven. Seconds until detonation.

So close.

Swallowing apprehensively, she closed the distance between herself and the rig as quick as she could, eyes flying across the readouts. The deep scorching from the transport’s thrusters and the damage that both debris and Gilgamesh had done was considerable– entire control surfaces were crushed and mangled, the switch-over assembly that facilitated the change from conventional to stardrive gave back intermittent and disturbingly unreliable readings, and enough of the interconnecting hardware had been toasted to make even getting off the ground unlikely. Her good hand found the panel as eyes flicked across the timer. Thirty four. She closed her eyes, sucked in a deep, shaky breath. One chance. In her mind, she found the hazy triggers for her implant lacings, forced them into action. Make it work.

And then, reality froze. All at once, she felt the Seindrive as if it were her own body, felt the connection that the experimental Kvasir implant hooked into her mind, a cable of thought bridging her brain to every system on the Seindrive. Seconds ticked past like hours, and as her mind hunted through the displays, she felt the meat of her body reacting sluggishly, the Horus implant coming online through mental static, surging through hands, reacting with the metals within the Seindrive.

One chance.

In a single, desperate move, she bridged the gap between the two implants and willed the Seindrive to fly, willed it to kick into action and rise beyond the torn and gaping mouth of the bay’s roof and into the sky. Broken connections knitted like eager fibers, assemblies reorienting themselves, bypassing at the speed of reflex, uncaring of what they damaged, what they destroyed in their relentless reforging of all that made the Seindrive quick and agile. The resident AI screamed as her mind ripped through it, sectioned it and used it like a buffer for her brain, burning it out almost instantly as it was forced and cauterized into a new network of artificial neurons, control lines. All that mattered in the moment was the escape, was getting free. No matter how many systems her ascent mangled within the rig, she would get free.

Engines and maneuvering thrusters flared, S-Vectoring panels shifted and dilated into N-space. Within seconds, she was in the air, her arms, wings blurring as they tasted the frigid air, felt the bitter bite of strong, icy winds. Tortured fuselage creaked with the effort of lift, and then the final connection found its mark, pumped new heat and new power into the drive that throbbed within her metal body like a massive, mechanical heart.

Seven seconds. The thought came instinctive as she leveled out, ten meters over the complex’s roof. Somewhere, distantly, she licked her lips, felt her hand punch the throttle to max. Engines flared. Seconds.

She was three hundred and forty-one meters from the edge of the effect radius when Erebus disappeared, swallowed in a flash of light and cracking, shattering ice. Teeth bared as wings strained against the sudden pull, the pressures of a suckback which was designed to forcibly contain anything that the lab might unwittingly spawn. New-forged connections in her Seindrive body flared, caught fire, split, and as the yanking shockwave of the wake matrix reached its crescendo, every system in her rig flared suddenly and went dark. Within seconds, she was falling, screaming, sliding back toward the hungry hole in the ice as she dropped. Eyes closed, and then the jarring impact, the smashing of plating and paneling against glacial ice as the wake dragged her backwards, pulled her dead rig steadily faster and faster toward the open mouth of the rip in space and time which had swallowed Erebus. Snow and ice flew in chunks past the canopy as the dented and scarred nose of her rig carved a wide trench, digging into white like fingers clawing, desperate to catch hold of something, anything, before it was too late. In her mind, movement and reflex fell into a hazy cache between her body and the dead rig, too tired, too weak and beaten to engage with or disengage from either. Instead, she watched blankly, blearily, as the hungry edge of the crater the implosion wave had torn into reality got closer and closer, became everything, inevitable.

And then, as suddenly as it had opened, the implosion pinhole to N-space winked out of existence, leaving only Tessa’s rig perched precariously in the snow, dead thrusters poking out into eerily clean air over the massive crater where Erebus base and six kilometers of glacial ice had stood calm and undisturbed only moments ago. She breathed raggedly, let her good hand disengage from the dead systems, fall back to the side.

All around her was white desolation. Tessa’s rig was dark, silent, cooling as the mangled life within it bled away, and for a moment, even the howling, icy wind seemed to wait and take notice, quietly stunned by the devastation Erebus had left in its wake.

Tessa pulled in a deep breath, collapsed backward into her seat, closed her eyes.

Now all I have to do is wait. She thought.

Just wait.

She swallowed.

Death will be here soon.