Diminishing Power

Which access conduit would Harifat's breachers cut first? In the total blackness of the radar spire vault, Marimat stood motionless beside the dead auxiliary console, counting the seconds between the metal ticks of cooling copper pipes. She set her tactical slate flat on the shelf, a useless brick of dormant silicon in the dark. If she could not track the strike team before they reached the inner bulkhead, she and Shadimat were cornered rats in an iron trap.

The air grew cold with unnatural speed. Without the humming relays of the starport power sub-station, the circular room felt smaller, stripped of its electronic life.

A sharp, ragged exhalation broke the silence near the base of the ladder.

\"Shadimat?\" Marimat pitched her voice low, keeping her boots anchored on the diamond-tread deck.

The sound that answered was the scrape of linen against rivets, followed by a heavy thud. It was the weight of a broad-shouldered man sliding down a bulkhead until his hips struck the floor.

She took three cautious steps through the pitch, her outstretched left fingers brushing the rim of the console until her knuckles touched coarse cloth. His shoulder was beneath her hand. The skin of his neck, which had radiated desert sun only minutes earlier, was cold.

\"The sun is dead in here,\" Shadimat murmured. His voice had lost its smooth, ringing authority, rough at the edges and strained by shallow breathing. \"The darkness eats the fire in the blood.\"

Marimat lowered herself into a crouch. Even in the absolute dark, she could sense the alteration. The faint, amber bioluminescence that had illuminated his irises on the cab floor was gone. His bronze skin gave off no thermal vapor. When her fingers brushed his jawline, a tremor passed through his frame.

\"You're shivering,\" she said.

\"A dormant vessel carries no strength,\" he said, his teeth clicking faintly together. \"Without solar photons to charge the cells, our blood grows heavy as river silt. My reflexes are no faster than an unaugmented clerk's. My blade weighs ten times what it did in the sun.\"

\"Can you stand?\"

\"If an enemy breaches that hatch, I can die on my feet,\" he replied, though the effort to lift his head drew a harsh wheeze from his chest. \"Beyond that, I am an anchor dragged along the floor.\"

\"Don't get poetic on me,\" Marimat said, her voice brisk and level. \"Poetry doesn't stop composite-carbide rounds.\"

She rose to her feet, staring into the impenetrable black. Her mind ran through the architectural schematics of Terminal Two. The main maintenance hatch above was welded shut by Shadimat's earlier burst of solar heat, but the radar spire was not an isolated cylinder. Secondary cooling trunks, fiber-optic conduits, and emergency depressurization vents honeycombed the outer shell. Harifat had designed this sector; he knew every weak seam in the housing.

With the terminal grid severed, her radar repeaters were dead. Her encrypted transponder was dead. Her eyes were useless.

She reached behind her neck, her fingertips finding the cool, ridged casing at the base of her skull.

The federal neural-dampener sat snugly over her cervical vertebrae, its ceramic band locked in place by a tamper-evident lead seal. Every licensed civilian traffic controller wore one. It was designed to choke macro-kinetic impulses down to micro-fractions of a gram, ensuring that an exhausted controller could nudge a shuttle flap without accidentally shearing off a landing gear assembly.

Unsealing a Class-Four dampener without an air-marshal's direct authorization was a felony under Article Nine of the Inter-System Navigation Code.

\"What are you doing?\" Shadimat's voice rose from the darkness beside her knees. The metallic click of the safety clasp had carried across the quiet.

\"Committing several career-ending federal offenses,\" Marimat said, gripping the locking bracket. \"Ten years in a federal penitentiary. Permanent revocation of my flight license. And a seventy-thousand-credit fine garnished from my pension.\"

\"A warrior shedding her ceremonial seals before battle,\" Shadimat murmured with reverent gravity from the floor. \"An ancient rite of unbinding.\"

\"It's an administrative fine schedule, Shadimat,\" she said, applying a sharp, counter-clockwise twist.

The lead seal parted with a sharp crack that echoed off the circular copper bulkheads. The ceramic collar split along its hinged seam and fell away, clattering against the deck plates.

The sensory flood struck her instantly.

Without the dampener's electronic choke, her telekinetic field detonated outward. It did not hit as light or sound, but as an overwhelming tactile pressure that washed through the vault. Every microscopic surface inside the spire registered against her central nervous system with unbearable clarity. She felt the cold grain of the copper plating, the microscopic pitting in the deck rivets, the faint settling of dust mites on the console glass.

Nausea rose in her throat. Her knees buckled under the weight of unbuffered perception. For twelve years, her mind had lived behind a thick pane of regulatory glass, and now the glass was gone.

She closed her eyes in the dark, forcing her lungs into the steady, four-second cadence of a terminal controller working an orbital collision emergency. She clamped down on the wild psychic bloom, dragging the boundaries inward until the field took the shape of a tight, disciplined dome.

\"Marimat?\" Shadimat called out, alarm cutting through his fatigue.

\"Be quiet,\" she whispered.

She did not open her eyes. She did not need them.

Marimat placed the palms of both hands against the raw steel frame of the primary console. Instead of letting her telekinesis bleed into the empty air, she channeled the pressure wave directly into the spire's structural skeleton.

The steel conducted her intent like an acoustic wire.

Her awareness climbed up the central vertical truss, raced through the bolted cross-beams, and branched into the outer maintenance sleeves. The whole spire became an extension of her tactile nerves. She felt the desert wind buffeting the shattered quartz of the cab directly overhead. She felt the cooling contraction of the antenna pedestal.

Then, along the maintenance chase just outside the upper deck, she felt a foreign rhythm.

It was not wind. It was the deliberate, rhythmic impact of magnetic boot soles against an exterior service gantry.

Marimat tightened her focus, tracing the vibrations along the conduit chase.

Three distinct masses. Each moved with the disciplined, spaced cadence of tactical breachers. The lead operative carried roughly eighty pounds of equipment, his footsteps heavier on the starboard rung. The second and third followed at four-meter intervals, their weapon slings tapping against ceramic breastplates.

\"They aren't taking the main stairwell,\" Marimat said quietly, her eyes still shut as she tracked the vibrations. \"They know the upper cab hatch is slagged.\"

Shadimat shifted against the plates, the dry rustle of his clothing sharp in the quiet. \"The lower trunk?\"

\"Secondary cooling conduit four,\" she said, feeling the faint, rhythmic scraping of an ungreased hinge in the outer wall. \"They bypassed the cab's exterior maintenance grille. They are inside the conduit pipe now, crawling down the air line toward our filtration bank.\"

She followed their progress through the steel. One of the operatives paused, bracing against a vertical junction box. A metallic clink reverberated through the frame: a high-pressure valve being threaded into an oxygen manifold.

\"They brought a portable thermal lance,\" Marimat said. Her pulse remained steady, locked into the mechanical rhythm of directing approach vectors. \"They aren't going to blow the door with explosives. A detonation in this shaft would cause structural collapse. They're going to burn through the emergency airlock seal and enter through the filter grille.\"

\"How far?\" Shadimat asked, his hand finding the hilt of his obsidian blade on the floor.

\"Forty feet along the intake pipe,\" she said. \"They just reached the secondary dog-latch. Two minutes before they reach our level.\"

She pulled her hands from the console. The telekinetic field stayed active around her skin, a crisp, electric hum that made the fine hairs on her arms stand upright. The pitch-black room was no longer a blind cage. She knew the exact distance to every wall, the location of every bolt, and the ragged, shallow rise of Shadimat's chest three feet to her left.

She stepped over to where he sat, kneeling beside him. Her bare right hand reached down, finding his shoulder. His skin was dangerously cold, the muscles underneath stiff with photon depletion.

\"Can you hold your blade?\" she asked.

\"I can hold it,\" Shadimat said. He gripped the obsidian hilt, though his knuckles showed the strain of keeping it steady. \"When they breach, I will take the first man through the frame.\"

\"You won't have to take him blind,\" Marimat said, her voice taut with grim confidence. \"I have the entire corridor logged on my screen. Even without power.\"

Before Shadimat could reply, a harsh, pressurized hiss cut through the darkness from the far wall.

Ten feet above the floor, behind the heavy iron slats of the air intake grille, the steel began to glow.

A pinprick of violent orange appeared against the black, bubbling as the alloy melted. Within three seconds, the orange point erupted into a searing jet of white-blue magnesium flame. Sizzling sparks sprayed outward through the iron slats, raining down across the copper deck plates in a blinding shower of chemical light.

The cutting lance had arrived.