The Cursed Bride Volume 8: Bonds Run Dry

Chloe’s breath was choked by the vast will surging upstream. That force directly clutched her throat along the quantum channel. The main console’s titanium alloy panel dented inward under the invisible squeeze. Giving a piercing, distorted metal mournful sound. She dug her bloodied knuckle into the virtual keyboard seam. Dark-red mixed with golden blood flowed along the key grain.

It boiled and evaporated the instant it touched the high-frequency current. Rising a stinging blood-colored steam. The acrid scent of scorched hemoglobin clawed at the back of her throat, and for one held breath the entire bridge seemed to tilt under the weight of that upstream will. Chloe’s spine locked rigid against the command-chair spine-rest, every muscle wound to the edge of snapping, yet her eyes never left the writhing data-stream on the main screen.

She had been drowned in stronger currents than this one. She would not break on a leash thrown by a dead god. The ancient mother-wolf’s phantom behind her surged and filled the bridge. The ten-meter phantom opened a fang-filled giant mouth. And savagely bit the black mental tentacle that crawled up the net cable into the mothership.

The phantom fangs sheared through the intrusion at the root, and the severed end convulsed like a decapitated snake before dissolving into static ash. A recoil of alien thought lashed back across the quantum link, a cold, oily spasm of hatred that scraped along Chloe’s skull and made her left ear ring with a sound no microphone could record.

She bared her teeth and drove the wolf’s will deeper, grinding the breach shut before the abyss could spit another hook into her network. The supercomputer overload alarm briefly lost voice in the mental collision. The dark-gold code waterfall pouring on the screen, seizing the gap. Reassembled into countless heavy armor-piercing cones and seized back the bottom-logic dominance.

The feed refocused after violent snowy EM interference. The nuclear-powered icebreaker, having lost power, was pushed toward the iceberg reef. The bottom cabin’s temperature was plummeting at a speed violating thermodynamics. Chloe locked all heating valves with highest-privilege code. The bottom cabin, having lost thermal balance, became a tiny steel prison. The cold was not the clean bite of open air but a wet, metallic suffocation that crept through the seams and settled in the marrow.

Breath left Chloe’s lips in pale ribbons that curled and died against the frost-webbed console. Somewhere below the deck plating, pipes ticked as they contracted, a slow, patient sound like a clock counting down the life of everyone trapped inside. She counted those ticks the way a soldier counts a sunrise she may not live to see, and used the rhythm to keep her hands steady on the keys.

The mixed-blood pup’s extreme-cold magnetic field finally showed its suppressive force. The origin force forcibly stripped from the sample flooded back wildly. The mercenary guards had no time to cry out before frost coated their brows. They raised Gauss rifles only to find the infrared scanner completely black-screened. They could only blindly pull triggers on survival instinct.

The high-explosive rounds struck the frozen cabin wall, sparking faintly. These counterattacks did not even break the outermost layer of ice skin. The mercenaries’ shouts had long since died into ragged panting, their warm breath fogging the visors of helmets that no longer read a single friendly signal. One of them kicked the frozen panel in blind frustration, only to yank his boot back with a choked curse as the ice burned through the sole.

They were not soldiers of the abyss, only hired meat who had thought a disabled Omega would be an easy harvest. The realization that they were already corpses, still breathing, showed in the way their rifle barrels began to shake. The ancient runes on the centrifuge were covered by black frost. The runaway jumping pressure gauge needle smashed the limit scale.

The special glass-steel shell cracked finely under the extreme temperature difference. Black ice crystals rapidly spread along the cables within seconds. Freezing the entire console into dead scrap iron. The dense shadow in the black-robed man’s eye sockets rapidly faded. The abyss main-brain, sensing the reverse trace, decisively cut the descent channel. Abandoning this believer doing dirty work in a coffin about to sink.

The black-robed man squeezed a warped, shrill scream from his throat. That withered body drew a dagger from under the ice-soaked robe. Both hands reverse-gripped the hilt and drove it hard at the glass-steel shell’s crack. After a dull impact, the special glass directly shattered. Shards mixed with ice-water splashed mercilessly into his eyes.

Black blood mixed with eyeball tissue fluid ran down his cheek. The believer, ignoring the sharp pain, directly thrust his palm into the core. And grabbed the micro vacuum tube holding Leo’s mixed-blood sample. The tube’s surface still carried the faint warmth of the pup’s living origin, a fragile pulse of heat that had survived the centrifuge, the frost, and the black-robed man’s filthy grip.

To Chloe, watching through the dead feed, that warmth was the only clean thing left in the sinking coffin. Leo was her blood, her claim, the one thread the abyss had never been allowed to cut. She let the black-robed man believe he had won it, and filed the location of his shaking hands into the trap she was already building around his throat.

The sample’s still-unfaded high heat burned through his palm flesh. A nauseating stench of roasted meat immediately filled the air. Chloe leaned back in the command chair, watching the monitor feed coldly. Her face, covered in cold sweat and blood, showed cruelty under the cold blue light. The alloy medical brace on her broken right leg was forcibly pried open.

The broken bone ground against the splint with a wet, grinding pop that would have dropped a lesser wolf to the floor, but Chloe only exhaled through her nose and let the pain sharpen her. The highly corrosive dark-gold toxin blood dripped down the seam. Burning black holes in the metal deck. She did not spare even a sidelong glance for that useless leg.

Her bloodstained right index finger hovered above the red physical key. Half an inch of knuckle pressure would make the nuclear reactor fully detonate. The entire icebreaker and the scum inside would burn to ash at the trench bottom. Chloe forcibly held down this most direct killing impulse. Physical destruction in the deep sea would certainly deal a heavy blow to the pup in the main-city ice chamber.

The bottom believer’s death was no loss. She would use this bird startled by the bow to fish out the venomous snake hidden deepest. Let the black-robed man think the escape corridor was mercy. Mercy was the sharpest hook she owned. The instant he crawled into the open, every node he touched would sing his position back to the mothership, and the abyss presence lurking behind him would be dragged into the light she controlled.

Chloe had played this game against older, crueler things than a drowned cultist. She was patient in a way the deep was not. The beating new command silently withdrew the stern passage firewall. The backup lighting system’s ghost-green light illuminated the escape path. She deliberately left the other side a faint illusion of survival in the dead end.

The one-eyed black-robed man stumbled over ice-sculpted corpses. And rushed toward the stern along the green-indicated emergency passage. Where a deep-diving escape submersible was moored. Knee-deep seawater kept pouring in through the cabin-wall cracks. He threw himself before the escape-hatch door and pressed the ancient comms array. His fingerprint, mixed with his own black blood, slid rapidly on the metal panel.

Outlining a distorted regular-hexagon coordinate.

“Master, the coordinate backfired. That Costa woman locked our position. Request opening the abyss channel for evacuation.

I kept the core sample!” The instant the array lit, Chloe’s chest bond contracted violently. Far in the mothership’s bottom, Victor sensed the abyss filth breath. This was the highest provocation to territory and mate for a Tyrant. The core hibernation pod’s high-concentration nutrient fluid boiled violently. The Tyrant’s unconsciously released gravity field went out of control in the narrow pod.

Squeezing the thick infusion lines and life-support cables to burst. Victor tried to tear open the just-stitched back flesh. That violent nest-protecting instinct wanted to take over the broken shell and shred the enemy. Chloe bit through her lower lip, letting the sweet blood drip down her chin. Her mental force condensed into a barbed chain and lashed across the closed loop.

Her voice, when it opened, carried the mother-wolf’s unique ferocity and pressure.

“Stay in your cage.

Since Costa’s authority is in my hands, this reckoning will be carried to the end by me.” The icebreaker bottom cabin’s comms array was lit by dark-red energy. A piercing high-frequency noise pierced the heavy armor. The mothership bridge’s listening equipment sprayed blinding sparks. A vast blurred black shadow twisted into shape before the escape-hatch door.

The abyss’s evil thought crossed dimensions, stalling Chloe’s breath. The black-robed man knelt in knee-deep seawater, holding the scalding sample high. That blood-stained face full of hope waited for the life door to open. A rolling dark-red halo rapidly gathered above his head. Finally condensing into a phantom execute-blade radiating thick death aura.

The blade edge clearly reflected the black-robed man’s ghastly pale face.

“You useless fucking waste. You could not even tear open a pup’s defense. You have no more use.”

She laughed, low and without mercy. Fuck, she thought, the bond between them throbbed hot as a brand, and she was goddamn done pretending.