"My record speaks for itself," Briar said. "Eleven successful surface operations. Not a single memory-wipe procedure, not a single time-suspension working, not a single civilian contact incident. Apart from Hamburg."
"Apart from Hamburg," Reeve agreed.
Briar pressed forward before she could think better of it. "If I were a sprite, Commander, we would not be having this conversation. I would have walked through that door forty seconds late and you would have signed off my morning report without looking up."
Reeve's head came up sharply. "Now just a moment, Officer Flint—"
The communications panel on his desk lit up. One line, then two, then a third in rapid succession, and the large tactical display on the wall behind Reeve crackled to life with the particular urgency that the system reserved for active field incidents.
Reeve stabbed the conference relay. "Talk to me."
"Runner confirmed." The first voice was clipped and fast, the cadence of someone reading from a live feed. "Surface transit, unauthorized departure through the eastern pressure corridor."
"Tracking coverage?" Reeve said.
"Deepwatch has it," said the second voice. Deepwatch was the station's name for the satellite-relay monitoring network that piggybacked on surface-world communications infrastructure. "Strong signal. Northern continent, coastal region. And Commander—" A brief pause with weight in it. "No shimmer-field active."
Reeve said something under his breath that did not belong in official documentation. An unshielded Deepwalker on the surface was visible to ordinary human senses. For humanoid species that was a manageable problem. For others it was considerably more serious.
"Classification?" Reeve said.
The third voice arrived with the reluctance of someone delivering news they had been hoping to delegate. "Commander, the signature profile is coming back as a deep-tunnel apex predator. Category one. We're looking at a rogue thornback."
The room went quiet in the way rooms went quiet when everyone in them was doing the same rapid calculation.
Thornbacks were the deep labyrinth's primary apex predators, the creatures that occupied the ecological tier that evolution had apparently decided should be occupied by something built entirely from aggression and structural damage. They wandered the deep passages preying on whatever they encountered with the systematic thoroughness of something that had no competing priorities. Their neural architecture had no meaningful space for behavioral restraint. Occasionally one blundered into a pressure transit shaft. The concentrated mana-current of the shaft typically incinerated them, which was the best available outcome. Sometimes one survived, and the pressure discharge launched it upward through the transit system and out through an unmonitored surface vent.
A thornback on the surface, in pain from the transit, disoriented by light, and entirely without the neurological infrastructure to moderate its response to either, would proceed to destroy everything within reach until it was stopped.
Reeve shook himself back to operational mode with the visible effort of a man who had handled bad situations before and was accessing that experience now.
He looked at Briar.
"Flint. You're running a full cultivation charge, I assume."
"Yes, sir," Briar said, and did not allow any change in her expression, because the accurate answer was considerably more complicated and would result in an immediate suspension pending a cultivation audit.
"Then draw a field sidearm from the equipment station and proceed to the target corridor. I'm authorizing surface transit." He turned to the tactical display, where Deepwatch was feeding live positional data on the thornback's movement pattern. A red marker was moving with purpose toward a cluster of population indicators on the coastal map. "Reconnaissance only. Assess the situation, establish a containment perimeter, and report in. You do not engage. Understood?"
Briar looked at the display. The red marker was not moving like something that was going to wait for a containment perimeter to be established.
"Understood, sir."
"Recon lost four officers to thornback incidents last season. Three of those were in familiar underground terrain with full tactical support. This is the surface, at night, in an uncontrolled environment."
"I understand."
"Have you ever observed thornback damage on a living target, Officer Flint?"
"Not directly, sir."
"I would like to keep it that way." Reeve held her gaze for a moment. "Reconnaissance and report. Nothing else."
"Understood."
Reeve's eyes narrowed slightly. "I've noticed that whenever you start agreeing with me in that particular tone, the subsequent operational report tends to require additional paperwork."
Briar said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
She turned and walked out of his office at a pace that was not technically running and functionally equivalent to it.
If Reeve had possessed complete information about how the next several hours were going to develop, the operational historians who later documented the incident were fairly confident he would have handled the morning's disciplinary conversation differently. Possibly he would have simply approved Briar's transfer to Transit, processed the paperwork, and spent the rest of the decade in the comfortable certainty that the decision had been correct.
Tonight was going to produce the kind of history that nobody involved was going to enjoy being part of. Not the variety of history that arrived clean and celebratory, something like a breakthrough cultivation discovery or a significant scientific achievement that everyone could feel good about in retrospect. The variety of history that arrived like a structural failure: sudden, loud, and with consequences distributed far beyond the original point of collapse.
Bad history. The kind that rewrote the surrounding events by existing.
Briar understood none of this as she moved through the station corridors toward the equipment station. What she understood was that she had one operational window to demonstrate that Reeve's continued trust in her was correctly placed, and that the window had opened in the form of a thornback on the northern continent's surface with no shimmer-field and a populated settlement in its movement path.
She would take what she had been given and she would not waste it.
The transit authorization queue stretched from the Elevator Plaza to the corner of the main thoroughfare, the daily accumulation of holiday visa applicants and authorized surface tourists waiting for their approved departure windows. Briar bypassed it with her field badge held at the appropriate angle, moving along the priority access lane without slowing.
A gnome near the front of the queue turned to watch her pass with the expression of someone calculating the fairness of the universe and finding it wanting.
"How does the LEPfield always get priority surface access? What's so important about you people?"
Briar breathed carefully through her nose. Courtesy at all times was the official departmental standard, and she was currently trying very hard to maintain her status as an officer in good standing. "Field operation, sir. If you could let me through."
The gnome crossed his arms. "I've heard LEPfield officers request surface access just to look at moonlight. Someone told me that. Someone who would know."
Briar achieved something in the vicinity of a professional smile. The result was not entirely convincing. "Whoever told you that has a very limited understanding of field operations, sir. Recon officers access the surface exclusively when operational necessity requires it." She paused precisely long enough to be technically courteous. "Exclusively."
The gnome's expression shifted into the slow consideration of someone working out whether he had just been called something. By the time the calculation completed, Briar was through the transit doors and they had closed behind her.
The operations center sat behind pneumatic security doors at the end of a corridor that branched off the main transit hub, and it was staffed, as it always was, by the individual who had built most of the systems it contained and trusted none of the people who used them.
Torvin was a cultivation engineer of the Deep People's specialist subspecies, built along a four-limbed configuration that included both a human-adjacent upper body and a powerful lower body structured for endurance movement across long distances, which gave him both the manual dexterity for detailed systems work and the ability to cross an operations center in three seconds when something required urgent attention. He was also the most comprehensively paranoid person Briar had encountered in eleven years of field work, which was saying something, because Deepfield Recon attracted a specific personality type.
He was wearing his signal-shielding hat. He wore it at all times. It was constructed from several layers of mana-reflective material pressed into a shape that suggested he had made it himself, which he had.
He looked up sharply when Briar came through the doors.
"Did anyone observe your approach to this facility?"
Briar considered the question with genuine attention. "The officer at the equipment station, four people in the transit queue, and everyone currently in the main corridor."
Torvin's expression indicated this was not the reassurance he had been seeking. "I'm serious, Flint. The surface-world intelligence networks have been showing unusual interest in deep-transit infrastructure. I have documentation."
"I know you do."
"Seventeen separate anomalous signal captures in the past month alone."
"Torvin." Briar pulled up a chair at the nearest tactical station. "The thornback. Fill me in."
Torvin held his concern about the surface-world intelligence networks for another moment, as a matter of principle, and then turned to the main display with the professional pivot of someone who knew when operational urgency outranked general anxiety.
The screen showed a live Deepwatch feed, the satellite relay rendering the northern surface in the grey-green of low-light enhancement. A red positional marker moved through what the overlay identified as the outskirts of a coastal settlement, agricultural territory transitioning into built environment, and it was moving at a speed that confirmed the thornback had recovered from the transit shock and was now operating at full capacity.
Which was a significant problem.
"Transit shaft discharge from the northern vent cluster, estimated forty minutes ago," Torvin said, pulling up the incident timeline. "The shaft current should have been terminal, but the signature mass profile on this individual is in the upper range for the species. Larger specimens have better survival rates against the discharge." He highlighted a section of the trajectory data. "It came down in an agricultural area, which is why we don't have civilian contact reports yet. But the movement vector points directly at the settlement boundary, and at current velocity it will reach the outer structures in approximately twenty minutes."
Briar studied the display. The settlement was not small. Population density indicators showed a concentration of residents in the direction the thornback was heading, and the time of day, surface-night, meant that most of them would be inside and unaware of what was approaching.
"What's the tactical recommendation from Recon command?"
"Reconnaissance and assessment," Torvin said, with the tone of someone reading from a document they found insufficient. "Establish visual confirmation, perimeter coordinates, and contact status. Full retrieval team is being assembled for deployment in approximately ninety minutes."
Briar looked at the twenty-minute estimate on the movement tracker.
"Ninety minutes," she said.
"Retrieval team assembly protocol requires full tactical briefing, equipment authorization, cultivation charge verification for all personnel—"
"Torvin." She stood up and checked the sidearm she had drawn from the equipment station, a compact mana-discharge unit designed for field carry, running a quick function test before holstering it. "Get me surface transit authorization and a live channel to this feed. I'll call in positional updates from the target area."
Torvin looked at the movement tracker. Then at Briar. Then at the movement tracker again, with the expression of a very intelligent person who had performed a calculation and found the result uncomfortable.
"Reeve said reconnaissance only."
"I heard him."
"You agreed."
"I did."
Torvin's signal-shielding hat shifted slightly as he tilted his head. "You know that whenever you agree with Reeve in that tone, the subsequent incident report—"
"Transit authorization, Torvin."
He turned to his console with a sigh that contained several distinct layers of resignation, and began processing her surface departure.
Briar sealed her helmet, engaged the shimmer-field at her wrists, and watched herself disappear from the visible spectrum.
One operational window. She did not intend to waste it.