The wind hit different at this altitude.
Not the controlled recycled air of the Eternal Pyre that she had been breathing for weeks on end. This was actual wind, moving because it wanted to, carrying things in it, temperature and moisture and the sll of sothing green and alive below. Diana had forgotten what real wind felt like. She hadn’t realized she’d forgotten until right now with it pushing against her face and her hair doing things it hadn’t done in months.
She was flying.
Well. She was sitting on sothing that was flying. Sothing that wasn’t there if you looked directly at it, just a shimr in the air that could be heat distortion or nothing at all depending on how hard you were paying attention. The saddle Kelvin had rigged for her was practical and nothing else, just sothing to grip and sothing to sit on, strapped across a back that didn’t exist to anyone watching from the ground.
She looked down.
The planet spread out below her in every direction and the first thing that struck her was how much it looked like ho. Not identical. The blue of the sky was slightly deeper than Earth’s, sitting at the edge of what you’d call cerulean, and the clouds had a different texture to them, denser sohow, like they had more opinion about being clouds than the ones back ho. The mountains ahead of her were wrong in a way she couldn’t imdiately na, the angles of them slightly too sharp, the peaks clustered in groupings that Earth mountains didn’t cluster in.
But the green. The green was the sa. Spread across the lower altitudes in every direction, forest and grassland and sothing that could be farmland if you squinted at the right parts of it. Four hundred million people living down there in all of that green. Going about whatever their version of normal was. Having no idea.
Diana pulled the oxygen mask from her face and breathed.
The air was fine. Better than fine. Clean in the only way that air was clean sowhere that hadn’t been industrialized past a certain point, the kind of clean that Earth’s outer territories still had in patches. She clipped the mask to her chest rig and looked at the altiter on her wrist.
Two thousand ters. Still descending.
She had been in the air for forty minutes since Shade broke through the upper atmosphere on the dark side of the planet and started his descent on a long shallow angle that kept them well clear of anything that could have been a settlent or a population center. The trajectory Kelvin had mapped out before they left the fleet. Co in from the uninhabited southern polar region, cut northeast along the mountain range, drop into the river valley on the eastern side where the nearest city was still sixty kiloters away.
She looked at her wrist display. The map Kelvin had built from the scout drone data, small and detailed, the landing zone marked in green.
Still on track.
She leaned forward slightly and put her palm flat against Shade’s neck, the scales invisible but solid under her hand, the warmth of him coming through even with the altitude cold around her.
He dropped a wing slightly in response. Not a flinch. Just an acknowledgnt.
"Almost there," she said, to nothing visible.
---
The landing zone was a flat stretch of ground in the shadow of the mountain range, sheltered on three sides by rock and on the fourth by tree line dense enough that anything more than thirty ters inside it was completely invisible from the air. Shade touched down without a sound, the way he always touched down, like the ground was sothing he was doing a favor rather than sothing he was falling toward.
Diana climbed off and her boots hit actual soil for the first ti in months.
She stood there for a second.
Just stood. Feeling the ground under her. Feeling the weight of the planet’s gravity which was close to Earth standard but not quite, maybe five percent heavier, enough that her legs registered it after weeks of ship floors.
She looked around the landing zone. Empty. No movent in the tree line. No sound beyond wind and the distant call of sothing that was almost a bird and probably wasn’t.
She unslung the Shoal Shield from her back and put it on her arm. The orbital fragnts resud their slow circuit automatically, the weapon waking up the mont she made contact with it. She checked the display on her wrist. The comms were on but she wasn’t using them yet. Not until she was established. Not until she had sothing worth saying.
She turned to where Shade was and said "mask."
The air in front of her rippled once.
And then Shade was there. All of him, the dark scales catching the alien sunlight and holding it differently from how Earth light worked on them, the pale amber eyes finding her imdiately, the tail doing its slow sweep across the ground. He was looking at her with the particular attention he gave her these days which was different from how he looked at everything else, more present sohow, more like a person looking and less like a predator assessing.
She reached into her pack and pulled out a beast core. Category four, one of six she had brought specifically for this. She held it out.
Shade looked at it.
Then at her.
"You’ve been flying for six hours straight through a planet’s atmosphere on a trajectory Kelvin designed," Diana said. "Take the core."
He took it. Not gently, not carefully, just opened his mouth and she dropped it in and he swallowed it and the faint glow of it was visible for a second through the scales at his throat before it disappeared.
She put her hand on the side of his jaw.
He let her. He always let her now.
"Good boy," she said.
Shade looked at her with those amber eyes and said absolutely nothing because Shade never said anything. But he didn’t move away from her hand either.
"Don’t read into it," she told him. "You did well. I’m allowed to say that." She dropped her hand. "Okay. Next part." She pulled up the wrist display and expanded the map. "We need to get to this coastline. Sixty kiloters northeast. There’s a city on the other side of the bay." She looked at the map. "We’re going through the water."
Shade looked at the direction she indicated.
She looked at him. "I know you’re not a water dragon. I know. But the route overland is through populated territory and we can’t do that yet." She looked back at the map. "The bay is twelve kiloters across at the narrowest point. We go under. You can do twelve kiloters."
Shade looked at the water’s direction for another mont.
Then he lowered himself onto his belly and turned so his back was accessible.
"That’s what I thought," Diana said.
She climbed on, settled into the saddle, pulled the oxygen mask back over her face, checked the seal, checked the display. Everything green. She patted the side of his neck twice.
Shade walked to the water’s edge. Looked at it. Then walked in.
---
The cold hit the exposed parts of her imdiately, the backs of her hands and the strip of skin between her gloves and her sleeve, the thermal regulator in her suit doing its job for everything else but the gaps were gaps. She pulled her sleeves down and gripped the saddle and Shade kept walking until the water was over his back and over her boots and over her knees and then he simply stopped walking and started swimming and the surface closed over both of them and the world went quiet.
Underwater quiet was different from space quiet. Space was the absence of dium. This was the presence of it, all that water around her with its own sounds, its own light, the way everything above was visible as a rippling ceiling of green-gold where the sunlight pushed down through it. Shade moved beneath her with a full body motion, his whole spine rolling in sequence from head to tail, and the speed he generated from it was not what you would expect from a dragon that had never been designed for this.
He wasn’t fast like a fish was fast. He was fast like sothing large and powerful had decided that water resistance was a suggestion and was ignoring it. The water pushed past Diana in a continuous rush and the pressure of it against her visor was constant and she watched the depth counter on her wrist display tick downward as Shade went deeper, finding the layer where the current was less and the visibility opened up.
Twenty ters down the water was a different color. Less gold, more green, the light from above scattered and softened by the distance. The plant life down here was enormous, towers of sothing that wasn’t quite kelp reaching up from the floor in dense clusters, the fronds of it moving in the current Shade was generating as he passed through them.
Diana looked at her tir. Eighteen minutes in.
She looked at the depth. Twenty-three ters.
She looked at Shade’s spine moving beneath her, that rolling propulsive motion, steady and continuous and showing no sign of any kind of distress. She had asked Kelvin before they left how long Shade could hold his breath. Kelvin had said he didn’t know. He said the umbral fang species had no docunted aquatic data. Data available to him from Noah’s perspective.
She had said that was helpful. He had said he was doing his best.
Forty minutes in and Shade had not surfaced. Had not slowed. Had not given any indication that the water around him was anything other than a dium he was moving through efficiently.
Diana checked her oxygen. Sixty percent. Fine. She had four hours of supply. The crossing was twelve kiloters at this depth and speed, maybe ninety minutes. She had margin.
She looked ahead through the green-dark water.
The plant towers were thinning. The floor below her, visible at this depth in broad strokes, was transitioning from the rocky shelf of the coastline to sothing flatter and deeper, the open basin of the bay proper. Less cover. More open water.
She noted it and filed it and kept watching.
Eighty minutes in and sothing happened.
That was when she saw the first one.
Not clearly. Just a shape, at the edge of her visibility in the green murk to the left, moving parallel to their course. Large. The kind of large that registered before you had finished processing what you were looking at because the brain had already done the size calculation and was already sending signals before the eyes had the full picture.
She looked at it.
It looked back.
Then three more appeared to the right.
They were enormous.
Each one roughly Shade’s size, maybe slightly smaller, built for the water in a way Shade absolutely was not. The body was thick and heavily armored, the scales greenish-gold and overlapping in dense layers. Four legs, heavily muscled, each one ending in a spread of hooked claws that were clearly not for walking. The head was low and wide, elongated, the jaw massive, rows of teeth visible even at distance because the jaw didn’t fully close, the teeth too large for the mouth to contain. Two long tendrils extended from the lower jaw, teal colored, trailing behind the creature as it moved, and the tail was wide and flat and the source of its propulsion, a slow powerful sweep that covered distance without apparent effort.
They were not attacking yet.
They were assessing.
Diana kept her hand on the shield and kept very still and watched them and counted.
Four visible. Which ant there were probably more she couldn’t see.
Shade had felt them before she saw them. She could feel the change in his movent beneath her, subtle, the propulsive roll of his spine shifting slightly, weight redistributing, the body language of sothing that had just registered a threat and was deciding.
Then one of them moved.
It ca from the left and it ca fast, faster than sothing that size had any right to move, the tail sweep accelerating it in a straight line directly toward Shade’s flank. Diana had maybe two seconds of warning from the shift in the water pressure before contact and she used both of them to tighten her grip and brace.
Shade rolled.
Not away. Into it. He turned into the incoming creature and hit it with his shoulder and the impact sent a shockwave through the water that Diana felt in her chest even through the suit, and the creature veered off course and the two of them separated and circled and Diana looked left and right and the other three were moving now.
One ca from below.
She saw it coming up from the dark beneath them, that wide flat tail driving it upward, and she pulled the Shoal Shield around and activated Coral Fortress and the shield expanded, the layered segnts fanning outward, and it hit the expanded shield face instead of Shade’s underbelly and the Living Reef absorbed the impact and the Tidal Rebound sent it sideways with a force that surprised it, the creature spinning in the water before righting itself.
Two seconds later the orbital fragnts broke formation.
Diana sent them in three directions, not trying to kill, trying to create space, the razor edges finding the creatures’ snouts and the soft tissue at the base of the jaw tendrils and the creatures pulled back from those specific points the way anything pulled back from unexpected pain.
Shade hit the one that had co from below while it was still disoriented from the Tidal Rebound.
His corroding burst hit its flank and Diana saw the acid compound working even through the water, the creature’s armored scales not immune to sothing designed to eat through even dragon armor, the surface of its hide going dark at the contact point.
It scread.
Underwater the sound was wrong. The frequency of it hit Diana’s chest and vibrated her sternum and she gritted her teeth and kept her eyes moving.
Three on Shade. One coming for her.
It ca fast and from the right and she got the shield up but it hit the edge of it and knocked it sideways and knocked her sideways with it and suddenly she was off Shade’s back and in the open water and the creature was circling back for a second pass and she was sinking.
She activated the suit’s ergency buoyancy. Nothing happened. The impact had clipped the system on her left side.
She was sinking and Shade was thirty ters away with three creatures on him and she was sinking.
She looked down.
The bottom was sixty ters below. Visible in the green murk, covered in the massive plant towers, their fronds reaching up toward her as she descended.
She looked at the creature circling above her.
It was positioning for a straight dive. She recognized the posture, the body alignnt, the way the tail stopped its lateral sweep and reoriented for a downward drive.
She let herself sink.
It dove.
She pulled the shield up over her head and above her in the sa motion, full Coral Fortress expansion, and the creature hit the expanded shield face at full diving speed and the Tidal Rebound released everything it had stored from every impact in the last four minutes simultaneously.
The force that ca back into the creature stopped it dead and then drove it upward, back the way it had co, the creature tumbling in the water, disoriented, the teal tendrils flailing.
Diana was still sinking.
She looked at the plant towers below her and grabbed the nearest one as it ca in reach, the frond thick and fibrous in her grip, and she held on and stopped her descent and hung there thirty ters from the floor and looked up at the creature regaining itself above her.
Then she looked at where Shade was.
He had two of them off him. She could see their shapes in the murk, retreating to a distance, the corroding burst having done enough that they were reassessing. But the third one had its jaws on his tail and it was pulling and Shade was twisting to get an angle on it and two more were coming in from the left.
Three more. New ones. Coming from deeper water.
Shade saw them coming.
He looked at Diana across the distance between them.
She looked back at him.
Then she looked at the plant towers around her.
She put both hands on the shield and activated Shoal Swarm and sent every orbital fragnt outward simultaneously, all of them, the full complent, driving them into the three incoming creatures from multiple angles at once. Not deep strikes. Surface hits, the razor edges finding eyes and jaw tendrils and the softer tissue at the joint where the legs t the body.
All three creatures pulled up. Veered. The fragnts recalled and she sent them again before they had fully returned, using the montum of the recall as part of the next launch, cycling the attack continuously.
Shade hit the one on his tail with a full corroding burst at contact range.
The creature let go.
And Shade moved. Fast, faster than he had moved the entire crossing, the full body propulsion working at sothing closer to his actual capacity now that he wasn’t trying to be quiet about it, and he crossed the distance between them in seconds and she grabbed the saddle as he ca past and pulled herself up and he was already accelerating before she had both hands on.
The creatures followed for maybe three minutes.
Then they didn’t.
Diana looked back. The green murk had swallowed them. Just open water behind her and the distant fading shapes retreating into the depth.
She checked her tir.
Ninety four minutes.
She checked her position. The far coastline was three minutes ahead.
She checked Shade. The scales at his tail had so damage from the jaw grip, the surface roughed and darkened, but he was moving normally. She put her hand on his neck.
He didn’t slow down.
"Good boy," she said again, into the water, into the oxygen mask, to nobody.
They hit the shallows six minutes later and Shade walked up out of the surf and onto a rocky shore and stood there with water running off his scales in streams and looked at the coastline ahead of them with those amber eyes.
Diana climbed off.
She pulled the oxygen mask off her face and breathed real air again and looked at the city visible in the middle distance. Not close. Maybe eight kiloters. The structures were different from anything she’d seen, the architecture wrong in the interesting way that things were wrong when they had been built by people who never saw human buildings and arrived at their own answers.
She looked at her wrist display.
Comms. Green.
She opened the channel.
"In position," she said.
A purple light appeared beside her before she finished the sentence.
Noah stepped through it and looked at the city in the distance and then at her and then at Shade still shedding water beside them.
"You’re wet," he said.
"There were things in the water," she said.
He looked at her for a mont. Then he opened the comms and looked at the city ahead of them and the alien sky above it and the planet that had no idea what was about to happen to it.
"All units," he said. "We are in."
The purple portal behind him expanded.
People started coming through.
"Operation Null Hour has begun."
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