The Extra's Rise

"Back," I said, already moving. Reika threw a strip of Cursed Script at the slope and the regolith obeyed the word Hold like it had grown up learning manners. Seraphina stepped past her, placed two palms on the ground, and drew cold out of the thin body of her qi into a lattice that mimicked frost. There's no water here, but ice isn't only water; it's a way of telling a thing to stop moving. The sliding slowed. Rachel's hand flashed. Purelight slid under the crust and made it want to be whole. The ossuary crane finished its swing, lowered the stone, and Erebus's porters settled it as if they'd been doing this since the moon cooled.

"Thank you," I said to all three of them and meant it.

We anchored the ward crystal and let the first ring hum. The Redeemers of Ash planted their obelisks around the overhang to make one clean cold room: a place where fear gets no echo and miasma grows bored. You could feel the tone shift even through a suit—the sense that a breath you didn't know you were holding had been put down.

We moved.

Plato Basin is a different old scar: dark floor, smooth enough to blade-shave, rim like the lip of a bowl giants forgot. We laid our anchor just under the rim on bedrock. The work repeated and did not feel repetitive. There is a satisfaction in things falling into their right place. Ian pinged us from high orbit—he's been mapping safe transits for pressure-sleds and bone-lifts like air lanes without air. "Leave me a hard lock at Serenitatis," he said. "I want to move three crates at once when the tide's right." He calls the timing of warp pads a tide as a joke. It isn't entirely a joke.

At Serenitatis Rim, the ground wanted to pretend it was friendlier than it was. Cecilia's chaos found a weak resonance and showed Kade where the basal layer thinned. He shifted the whole anchor two paces without anyone arguing. Rose ratified the change in three strokes. Rachel set a med cache in the shadow of the pedestal and told the Redeemers exactly how she wanted the stretchers stacked. "Head to the Earthside," she said. "People relax when they can see home."

We finished the Tycho West saddle under a noon that never moved. When the last pillar went up, Kade stood and listened with his ear against the stone. "Sing for me," he said out of habit. The line hummed a clean note you could feel more than hear.

"Mesh," I said.

The crew took three steps back and I lifted my hand.

Aegis Mesh isn't a net. Nets catch. This is a conversation the stone has with itself. We set it to speak along the spine we'd planted: Tycho to Clavius to Plato to Serenitatis and back again, a loop the size of a country that agreed it would be hard to hurt from above. Threads of light rose between the anchors like lines on a map no one else gets to read. The field touched my skin through the suit—a softness, then a firming. Here is held.

"Test," Kade said.

Cecilia lied to it, sweetly. The Mesh refused to be lied to. Seraphina nudged its balance with the edge of her will; it flexed and returned. Reika wrote Break in the dust and the dust misread its own letters and forgot the point. Rachel lifted her palm and Purelight leaned on it; the Mesh let her in and nothing else.

"Good," Kade said, which from him is a hymn.

We warped back to Tycho in three short breaths. The Yard had changed while we were out: new bulkheads in the east tunnel, an extra pressure door at the med wing, rails along the bone-lane so the Redeemers can tie down crates fast when the mood shifts. Elias and Captain Selene Vyr stood over a black-slate map of the base that updated itself when Erebus's porters walked across a threshold.

"Clavius is green," Elias said. "Plato green. Serenitatis green. West saddle green and—" He tapped a corner. "—extra green."

"That one tried to fuck with us," Cecilia said cheerfully.

Vyr's mouth twitched. For her, that's laughter. "Outer cordon stood. No untagged anything within a kilometer."

"Update the continents," I said, and Elias's pings went out—short, respectful: South (Viserions), North (Windwards and Creightons), West (Ashbluffs), East (Mount Hua and Kagu), Central (Slatemark). Not a request, not a boast. Just "We placed four anchors. Mesh is up. Tycho coverage expanded. No incidents." The answers came back in tones that matched their senders: the South's tidy gratitude, the North's cool "received," the West's "solid work," the East's brief "honor to witness," Central's "logged; forward projections updated."

I took my glove off and set my bare palm to Tycho's new anchor. The stone was warm with what we'd taught it.

"Arthur," Valeria murmured. "If you insist on building a fortress around the world, at least give me a window."

"You have one," I said, opening my eyes to Earth hanging fat and patient over the rim.

Reika drifted to my shoulder. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we lay the equatorial brace," I said. "Then we start tying the small stuff so all of this behaves like one thing instead of four proud stones."

She nodded. "I'll bring more heavy letters."

Rachel came to my other side, slid a bottle into my hand, and looked at my face the way she reads a patient's pulse. "Eat," she said. "Then tell Stella that the convex coverage you drew this morning actually worked. She'll be insufferable if you don't praise her properly."

"I live to keep her insufferable," I said, drinking. The water tasted like plastic and home.

We didn't stay to admire it. Base work rewards the ones who leave the ribbon-cutting to people who like ribbons. I made a last slow pass of the mesh with my senses, felt where it sagged and where it sang, and left Kade to hum at it until it was perfect.

Erebus's shadow lengthened behind me without a sun to cause it. " Spine holds," he said, voice like old paper. "Bone lanes can carry three times today's weight without complaint."

"Good," I said. "We'll fill them."

We stepped through the warp back to the Tycho Yard commons where the crew eats and forgets how to stand straight for a blessed ten minutes. Stella had set up at a corner table with a slate full of triangles and numbers and a braid that never stays put. She saw me, pointed at the calculations she'd titled mesh arcs—convex vs concave, and waited.

"Convex wins here," I said. "Your lane math's right."

She beamed like we'd lit a second sun.