The thornback's grip was systematic about it, which was somehow worse than if it had been frantic.
Frantic could be disrupted. Frantic had gaps. This was the steady, considered pressure of something that had been built by the deep labyrinth to do exactly this, that had no competing priorities and no interest in rushing, and Briar's ribcage was providing ongoing feedback about the structural limits of even LEPfield-grade cultivation armor.
The claws were the next problem. They were working at the reinforced material of her field suit with the exploratory patience of something testing for weak points, and the field suit had weak points, because everything had weak points, and the claws were going to find them.
Briar could not think clearly enough to construct a full plan. The restaurant was a continuous disorienting loop of noise and smoke and the smell of burning fur from the thornback's back, where the petrol fire was doing its uninvited work, and the thornback's own smell, which the incident files had referenced and which the incident files had not adequately communicated, and the green tongue that came across her visor with a rasping scrape that left the lower third completely opaque.
The visor.
Briar stopped trying to think in full sentences and let her training take the more direct route.
The helmet's illumination system. Standard field equipment, designed for subterranean operations in unlit terrain, twin high-output mana-lamps mounted above the eye line. Output: significant. Certified for tunnel work in conditions of total darkness. Adjustable from ambient to full beam.
The thornback's eyes were already in distress from the restaurant's electric lighting. A creature adapted to the complete darkness of the deep labyrinth, surfaced, transitioning from night to this.
She got her free hand to the helmet controls.
Found the illumination switch by touch, the way field training ensured you could find every control without looking at it, because there were operational circumstances in which looking at something was not available to you and this was one of them.
Full beam.
Eight hundred watts of concentrated mana-light, unfiltered, point-blank into the thornback's face.
The creature's reaction was not gradual. It was immediate, total, and loud, a sound that went through Briar's helmet audio dampeners and arrived in her skull as something she felt rather than heard, a frequency that cleared every occupied shelf of thought simultaneously. Every glass surface in the restaurant that had survived the preceding chaos addressed this deficit promptly.
The grip released.
Briar hit the floor, rolled clear of the falling bulk, felt a tusk pass through the air close enough to disturb the atmosphere against her cheek, and came up on her feet in the crouch the training had installed in her body as the default landing position.
The thornback was going down with the particular quality of something whose neural systems had simultaneously received too much information. The fire on its back, the discharge from her weapon, the grip, the light, all of it arriving at a processing architecture that was powerful but not built for complexity. It toppled with a stiffness that would have been almost funny in a different context, and the floor registered its arrival throughout the building.
Briar stood in the silence that followed.
The silence lasted approximately three seconds before she remembered the room.
Forty surface-worlders, all of them conscious, all of them looking directly at her. The shimmer-field was gone. Her cultivation output was at zero. She was standing in a restaurant in the northern continent in full LEPfield kit, completely visible, with a hundred and eighty kilos of unconscious thornback on the floor beside her and the evidence of the preceding ten minutes distributed across every surface in the establishment.
She raised both hands, palms open. The cross-cultural gesture for non-hostility was one of the more reliable pieces of cross-world behavioral data the anthropology division had documented.
"My apologies for the disruption," she said, in the local dialect, which she had studied for field preparation.
The surface-worlders, with the particular grace of a culture that had developed elaborate social protocols for managing unexpected situations, murmured collectively that it was quite all right.
Briar reached into her kit pouch and produced a concussion sphere, the standard-issue LEPfield containment tool for civilian crowd management, a small silver device that operated on a countdown detonation sequence producing a localized mana-pulse capable of rendering everyone within its radius unconscious for approximately forty minutes without lasting effects, except for headaches that the affected parties would attribute to whatever explanation seemed most personally plausible.
She placed it on the floor in the center of the room.
"If everyone could look at this for a moment," she said.
They looked. The sphere ticked, accelerating, and Briar turned her back to it.
Three. Two. One.
The pulse went out in a soft wave, and the restaurant's patrons sat down wherever they happened to be and went to sleep with the unhurried cooperation of people who had simply decided that now was the time for it.
Briar exhaled slowly.
She secured the door, latched it against the ongoing sound of the settlement's residents responding to the noise and the hole in their perimeter wall, and doused the thornback's residual fire with the restaurant's emergency extinguisher, watching the powder settle across the creature's broad back with the specific hope that cold would not function as a revival stimulus.
Then she looked at the room.
The honest assessment was that it was worse than the Saltmere Passage incident. Possibly worse than anything in her operational record. The wall breach, the unconscious civilians, the structural fire damage to the ceiling above where the candelabrum had been, the overturned furniture, the thornback occupying most of the central floor space. The Retrieval team was going to arrive and find a scene that was going to require significant documentation.
Reeve was going to have opinions about this.
The opinions were going to be loud and they were going to be long and they were not going to be wrong, which was the part that made them hardest to face.
Her ribs reported their assessment of the evening's events with the persistent specificity of bruised cartilage, and a pressure headache was building at the base of her skull with the patient escalation of something that intended to be significant. Briar considered looking for a chair and then decided that the floor was equally acceptable and more immediately available, and let her legs fold under her into a controlled descent to the chessboard-tiled floor.
She sat there in the smoke and the settling powder and the sound of forty surface-worlders breathing in the deep, even rhythm of induced unconsciousness, and allowed herself a brief moment of simply being in the aftermath.
The Retrieval team came through the wall breach eight minutes later, Reeve himself at the front, which confirmed that the shuttle had been closer than the five-minute estimate and that he had been receiving her disconnected channel's open audio feed the whole time. His face, when he found her sitting on the floor, moved through several distinct phases before settling on something that was not quite what she expected.
For perhaps two seconds, before the operational requirements of his rank reasserted themselves, Commander Reeve's expression held something that was not fury and not relief exactly, but occupied the narrow territory between them.
Then it was gone, and what replaced it was familiar and loud.
"Officer Flint! What in the name of the deep foundational law happened in this establishment?"
Briar got to her feet with the careful steadiness of someone managing bruised ribs and a significant headache. The sentences were not organizing themselves efficiently. "The thornback had breached the perimeter. There were civilians in direct contact range. A child called for assistance."
"You disobeyed a direct operational order and entered a civilian building without authorization."
"The child's call constitutes an invitation under the civilian contact provisions. Warden Ashford versus the Deep Compact, session forty-seven. The adjudicator ruled that a trapped civilian's verbal request for assistance was a valid invitation for field intervention purposes."
"You are on extraordinarily uncertain ground with that interpretation, Flint."
"There is precedent, Commander. And your team is here now, which means the invitation extended to authorized personnel more broadly." She paused. "Unless the entrance through the breach was also unauthorized, in which case we have a more complex discussion."
Reeve looked at her for a long moment with the expression of someone deciding which of several available responses was most appropriate. Around them, the Retrieval team moved through the restaurant with professional efficiency, attaching memory-wipe equipment to unconscious diners, assessing the structural situation, logging the damage for the incident report.
One officer emerged from the back of the restaurant at speed. "Commander. The concussion sphere's radius had a gap. There's a civilian in the back room who wasn't caught by the pulse. Coming around now."
"Shimmer, everyone," Reeve said.
Briar tried.
The shimmer-field activation was a cultivator's most basic reflex, the first technique taught, the one that was supposed to be as automatic as breathing. She reached for her mana reserve and found it at the level she had known it was at for four lunar cycles and had been carefully not officially acknowledging, which was to say: insufficient for sustained shimmer maintenance.
Nothing activated.
A small child walked out of the back room, moving with the unsteady confidence of a very young person who had been asleep and had now decided not to be. He surveyed the room with the equanimity that very young children brought to situations that would require adult processing time. His eyes traveled the space with calm interest and settled on Briar, the only person in the room who was fully visible, and he pointed one round finger at her with the directness available only to those too young to have learned social hesitation.
"Hello, little spark," he said, in the local dialect's term for a small supernatural creature. Then he climbed over the unconscious form of his father, arranged himself comfortably in the adjacent chair, and went back to sleep.
Reeve shimmered back into visibility. The expression he was wearing had achieved a new altitude.
"Your shimmer-field failed, Officer Flint."
Briar looked at the floor, then back at him. "Yes."
"When did you last complete the Renewal?"
The honest answer required a moment of genuine internal accounting. "Approximately five lunar cycles ago, sir."
"Five—" Reeve stopped. Restarted at a different point. "Five cycles. You have been operating in the field for five cycles without a completed Renewal. Without your full cultivation base. Without the fundamental mana-reserve that every field protocol requires before surface deployment, which you confirmed you had when I asked you this morning, directly, before I authorized your transit."
Briar did not have an improvement to offer on this summary.
"That is why the shimmer failed. That is why your discharge didn't drop the thornback cleanly. That is why—" He gestured broadly at the room, which expressed his point adequately without requiring further specification. He breathed carefully through his nose. "You are grounded from subsurface access until you have completed the Renewal and your cultivation base is certified at full charge."
"Understood, sir."
"There is, I am informed by Retrieval's equipment check, a set of Hummingbird wings in the shuttle bay. You will take them, proceed to the sacred grove site in the old country, perform the Renewal tonight under the full moon, and return below ground only when your charge reads at capacity."
"Yes, sir."
"And we will have a full operational review of this incident when you return. Every decision, every deviation from authorized protocol, every consequence. Documented, reviewed, and formally assessed."
"Yes, sir."
"Flint."
She stopped.
Reeve had turned away from her, which was how he managed expressions his rank did not officially permit him to have. His voice, when he continued, had lost some of its operational edge. "The thornback weighed a hundred and eighty kilos and had survived a transit shaft discharge, and you put it down without Retrieval support, with a compromised cultivation base, in an enclosed space full of civilians." A pause. "The outcome could have been significantly worse than it was."
Briar understood what he was not saying, and what it cost him to not say it, and allowed it to be what it was without pushing it further.
"Sir," she said.
"Get out of here. Come back full."
She found the Hummingbird wings in the Retrieval shuttle and strapped them on, and the difference was immediate and complete. Silent operation, mana-solar drive engaging with a whisper, the controls responsive under her hands in the way that the right equipment was always responsive, as though the technology had been built specifically for this use and had been waiting for someone to use it correctly.
She lifted out of the settlement through the hologram-patched wall breach and climbed into the northern night sky, the coast appearing below her as she gained altitude, the sea beyond it dark and vast and catching the moonlight in long silver movements.
The Renewal site was three hours east. A stand of old growth trees above a sanctified deep-water source, the kind of location where the mana-lines ran close enough to the surface that a cultivator could draw on them directly, replenishing what the months of depletion had drawn down. She had been putting it off for reasons that did not, in the current moment, seem as valid as they had seemed.
Her ribs ached. Her head ached. The operational review waiting on her return was going to be the most comprehensively documented conversation of her career.
The Hummingbird wings carried her east over the dark sea in perfect silence, and the moon was very bright on the water below, and Briar Flint, first female field officer in Deepfield Recon's history, who had just made a certified disaster out of a reconnaissance assignment and saved forty lives in the process, allowed herself the specific and complicated satisfaction of still being in the air.
The Renewal could not wait any longer. She knew it. She had always known it.
But she had one more hour of flight first, and the night was clear, and the stars above the northern continent were extraordinary, and for a little while there was nothing required of her except to move through the dark toward what came next.