The thornback had not been subtle about its passage through the countryside.
Briar flew low over the treeline and found the trail immediately, a corridor of destruction running northeast through the agricultural land with the directness of something that had no interest in going around obstacles. A vineyard had been walked through rather than around, the old wooden trellis frameworks snapped at their bases, grapevines pulled from their moorings and left in tangled heaps. A stone boundary wall that had probably stood for several centuries had been reduced to a scattered line of rubble. Somewhere in the darkness beneath a hedgerow, a guard animal was making the specific sound of a creature that had encountered something its entire evolutionary history had not prepared it for and was not going to recover its composure quickly.
Then she flew over what remained of the livestock enclosure.
Briar had read the incident files on thornback surface events. She had reviewed the documentation with the thorough attention she applied to anything operationally relevant. The files had photographs.
The photographs had not been adequate preparation.
She adjusted her flight path to clear the area and kept moving, following the locator's strengthening pulse toward the settlement ahead.
Crestwall sat on a low hill in the way that old fortified settlements always did, because the people who had built it several centuries ago had understood that elevation was security and had acted accordingly. A crenellated wall ran the perimeter, medieval stonework that had been maintained with the particular care that communities devoted to structures that defined their identity even after the original military necessity had passed. Lights burned in most of the windows. The town was still awake, carrying on whatever the evening's ordinary business was, entirely unaware that the locator on Briar's wrist was pulsing with the rapid insistence of a target that had arrived at the settlement's outer wall.
She engaged her shimmer-field and felt it catch with the slight strain of a cultivation base that was running below its optimal charge. A thin film of effort-sweat formed at her temples. The shimmer-field required sustained mana output to maintain, and her reserves were not what they should have been.
She was going to do the Renewal the moment this operation was concluded. She committed to this firmly and completely, in the way she had been committing to it for several lunar cycles.
Below her, at the base of Crestwall's eastern perimeter, the thornback had found the wall and was testing it with the systematic thoroughness of something that wanted to be on the other side. Its massive hands worked at the old stonework, fingers finding mortar joints, and the wall was coming away in sections, the medieval construction encountering a force that its original engineers had not factored into their design calculations.
Briar circled above it, taking in the full dimensions of the problem.
The files had listed the mass estimate at one hundred and eighty kilos. Seeing it directly, with no documentation between herself and the reality of it, she thought the estimate was conservative. It was broader than a doorway, its shaggy bulk carrying the particular density of something that had been built by the deep labyrinth's pressures over a long developmental arc. Its tusks caught the town's ambient light as it moved, curved and heavy, and its hands were doing to the perimeter wall what the files had described in clinical language and what the clinical language had failed to fully convey.
She keyed her communications channel. "Control, I have visual confirmation on the runner. Situation is critical. Current status is active breach of settlement perimeter. What is the Retrieval team's position?"
Reeve's voice came back with the quality of someone who was already moving. "Retrieval is in transit. Estimated arrival is five minutes minimum. We are still in the shuttle."
Briar looked at the wall. A section approximately two meters wide was actively failing under the thornback's attention, mortar dust falling in a continuous pale cascade.
"Five minutes is too long, Commander. Breach is imminent. There are civilian residents on the other side of this wall."
"Hold your position, Flint. Reconnaissance and assessment only. That is your authorization and it is still your authorization. Retrieval will handle the extraction."
Briar held her position for approximately four seconds.
The wall section gave way.
Not slowly, not progressively, but all at once, the way old stonework failed when the structural coherence finally let go, a two-meter section folding outward in a cascade of old stone and mortar dust. The thornback shouldered through the gap with the committed momentum of something that had been working toward this outcome and was now executing it.
From inside the settlement, through the breach, came the sounds of an ordinary evening interrupted by something that did not belong in it. The specific quality of crowd noise shifting from ambient to alarmed. Furniture moving. Glass breaking.
And then, cutting through everything else with the clarity of something that was not muffled by walls or distance, a child's voice.
One word. The surface-world's northern coastal dialect, which Briar had studied for field preparation, rendered the word as a cry for help in the particular register of someone who meant it with complete sincerity.
Help.
An invitation, technically. At a considerable stretch, legally speaking, but technically an invitation nonetheless, and the Deep People's law on surface-world intervention was built around that precise distinction.
Briar thought about this for approximately one second.
"Commander, I'm going in. The thornback is light-disoriented and there are children present."
Reeve's voice came back at a volume that her earpiece managed with difficulty. "You are absolutely not authorized, Flint. You hold your position and you wait for Retrieval. If you go through that wall I will have you transferred to the lowest assignment in the entire LEPfield roster and you will spend the next century processing vehicle violations in the deepest sub-level Transit Division I can find. Do you understand me? Flint? FLINT—"
Briar disconnected the channel, angled her wings toward the breach, and went through.
The Dragonfly engines protested the tight clearance and she cleared the fallen stonework with centimeters to spare, the petrol motor coughing in the dust cloud, and came out the other side into a restaurant.
It was full. A celebration of some kind, the evidence of it distributed across every table: candles in elaborate holders, food in various stages of consumption, paper decorations strung between the ceiling beams. Perhaps forty surface-worlders, all adult except for three children at a large central table who were wearing the small paper crowns that this culture associated with festive occasions.
The thornback stood in the center of the room, having come through the restaurant's exterior wall approximately one meter to the left of the breach Briar had used, and was experiencing what the files described as light-confusion and what the reality of it looked like: a massive creature blinded by the restaurant's electric lighting after the darkness of its transit, stumbling and disoriented, its threat response fully activated but without a coherent target to direct it toward.
The room was in the state that always preceded the next state. Everyone frozen. The shocked suspension of people who had not yet processed what they were looking at well enough to produce an appropriate response.
A wine bottle at the edge of a table worked its way to the rim and fell.
The sound of it breaking on the stone floor was apparently the exact threshold the room needed, because the silence ended and the screaming began, and the screaming was precisely the worst possible input for a light-disoriented apex predator already operating at maximum threat response.
The thornback's retractable claws extended from its fingers with a sound that Briar had read described in the incident files and that the files had, once again, not adequately conveyed. A slow, deliberate mechanical slide, each claw deploying with the weight of something that had been specifically developed by millions of years of evolutionary pressure for one purpose.
Briar drew the Deepstrike Radiant and moved the selector to the middle setting. She could not use terminal output on the thornback regardless of circumstances. The Deep People's law on surface-world fauna was specific, and a thornback, however much the current situation argued for a simpler solution, was still covered by it. Incapacitation only.
She targeted the base of the skull, where the thornback's neural architecture was densest and where a concentrated mana-discharge would have the best chance of producing a clean shutdown rather than a partial suppression that would just make it angrier.
She held the shimmer-field steady and fired.
The discharge hit. The thornback staggered, three heavy steps forward, and Briar allowed herself exactly one moment of thinking this was going to work, and then the creature found its footing and turned with the particular quality of something that has just been hurt and wants very much to address the source of that hurt.
It can't see me, Briar reminded herself. The shimmer-field renders me invisible. I am vibrating at a frequency that human eyes and thornback eyes alike cannot register. I am not here, as far as anything in this room is concerned. I am a slight disturbance in the air.
The thornback picked up a table.
Invisible, Briar thought. Completely invisible.
It pulled back one massive arm with the focused intent of something that had identified a target through means other than sight, which the files noted thornbacks were capable of at close range under threat conditions, which the files perhaps should have mentioned more prominently.
And threw.
Briar was already moving when the table came, and moving was the correct decision, and she was almost fast enough, and almost was the operative problem.
The table's edge caught the Dragonfly's fuel housing at the back of her rig. The impact tore it free entirely, a sharp, definitive separation, and the housing spun across the room trailing petrol in a looping arc and passed directly through the nearest candelabrum.
The results were immediate and comprehensive.
The burning petrol landed primarily on the thornback, which was the best available outcome of a set of outcomes that were all bad, but it also took Briar's shimmer-field down in the mana disruption of the impact, and the shimmer-field going down meant her cultivation output dropped to zero, and zero output meant she was no longer vibrating above the visible spectrum, and not vibrating above the visible spectrum meant that when the thornback looked down through the flames and the chaos for the thing that had been hurting it, she was exactly where it was looking.
The thornback looked at her.
She looked at the thornback.
Its hand closed around her with the certainty of something that had been doing this its entire life.
The fingers were each the diameter of a cultivation staff and had considerably less give, and the grip had the quality of structural certainty, the kind of force that did not leave much room for the concept of escape.
Briar twisted anyway. This was not optimism. It was professional obligation.
The Deepstrike Radiant was still in her hand. The selector was still on incapacitation. The thornback's grip was tightening with the systematic patience of something that was not in a hurry, its small eyes finding focus on her face through the smoke and the chaos and the ongoing sound of forty surface-worlders expressing their distress at high volume.
The candles in the ruined candelabrum continued to burn.
The children in their paper crowns were still at the central table, because children in crisis often went still rather than mobile, which was a documented response and which was, right now, the only thing keeping them out of the thornback's attention.
Briar looked at the grip on her frame, looked at the Deepstrike's selector, and made a rapid calculation about what happened if she switched to terminal output on a creature that was currently holding her against its own body.
The calculation was not favorable.
She needed another option.
She needed it in approximately the next four seconds.
She began looking for one with the focused urgency of someone for whom the available time was very concrete and very limited, while the restaurant burned around her and the Retrieval team was still four minutes away.