Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

"Rook, get off the door."

Bram turned around. "There’s nothing at the—"

"I know. Get off the door."

Jin was already crossing the room toward the generator housing, one hand still trailing along Glitch’s back. He did not stop to explain, because the explanation would take eleven seconds and he did not want to spend them.

He hit the cutoff.

The hum stopped. All four yellow lights died, the seal indicators went dark, and the station dropped into a blackness so complete that Nia’s hand lamp coming on two seconds later felt like an intrusion.

"What are you doing?" Kellan called from the service door.

"They’re not coming through the doors."

"Then—"

"They’re coming through the floor, and I turned the beacon on myself." Jin was back on the ground beside Glitch. "Before I started the generator, nothing was converging on the station. Then I put the loudest continuous vibration in four kilometers on a solid slab in the middle of their nesting network."

Silence answered him.

"They tunnel around solid ground," Mira said from the office doorway. She had pulled herself upright against the frame, which she should not have done. "The station is here because this is the one place they can’t dig through."

"Yes."

"So the whole colony knows exactly where it is."

"Yes."

The Tunnelmaws did not stop immediately.

Jin had half expected that and disliked it anyway. He sat with his palm flat between Glitch’s shoulders, reading what came through the bond, while the nearest lines continued toward them long after the vibration ended.

Momentum. They had been travelling toward one point for more than ten minutes. A burrower nine meters down did not lose a signal and turn on the spot.

Then, gradually, the pattern changed.

"Two of them have slowed," Jin said. "Northwest pair. They’re still moving, but they’re not moving at us anymore."

"And the rest?"

"Coming."

Four minutes later, he had something better.

"The convergence is breaking apart. They’re not following the same lines anymore. Some are drifting, and one has turned back east." He worked through the impressions one at a time, because getting this wrong would be expensive. "None of them are hunting."

"How do you know?" Nia asked.

"Because a hunt looks different." He had learned that in a quarry from things that were very good at it. "Hunters converge, hold formation, and cut off routes. These are wandering in. They’re investigating something that appeared inside territory they consider theirs."

"That’s better," Kellan said.

"It’s better, but it isn’t safe." Jin sat back. "There are still more than a dozen within a few hundred meters. They know something is here, and I can’t make them forget it. Silence buys us time. It doesn’t buy us the night."

Mira said, "Extraction is fourteen hundred tomorrow."

"Around sixteen hours." Jin looked at the black ceiling. "Hoping a dozen burrowers get bored isn’t a plan."

"So what is?"

"Make noise somewhere else."

The antenna assembly had come down with the western wall and lay half buried in rubble. It took twenty minutes and three hand lamps to learn what remained usable.

Jin ran Appraisal across the wreckage.

[Positioner motor — functional. Bearings degraded.]

[Battery coupling — intact]

[Mounting collar, threaded — intact]

[Mast section, 1.4m — bent]

[Counterweight plate, 6kg — intact]

[Assessment: motor rated for slow continuous positioning. Not rated for sustained off-axis load.]

He read the last line twice, but it stayed the same.

So it’ll work. It’ll just destroy itself in the process.

"The motor turns slowly," he said. "If I bolt something heavy onto it off-center, the whole assembly will shake itself apart. Until it does, it’ll hammer whatever we mount it on."

"How long?" Bram asked.

"No idea. Half an hour if we’re lucky. It could be ten minutes."

"Is that enough?"

"Enough to get them moving. Once they commit to a direction, they don’t turn quickly. We just watched that."

Building it took an hour and a half, and none of it was elegant.

Jin could not lift the counterweight plate. Bram held it in position while Jin drilled through it with a hand tool from the maintenance locker, slow and awful work that left Jin’s forearms shaking.

The mounting collar needed to seat on the motor shaft. The collar was fine; the shaft had been bent by the wall collapse. Kellan used his two seconds on it twice, forty minutes apart, and on the second attempt got it straight enough to accept the collar.

Their first assembly failed on the bench. Jin had bolted the plate too far out, and the motor stalled the instant it took the load. He should have caught it. He had not.

"You said you were good at this," Kellan said.

"I said my talent tells me what things are. It doesn’t tell me where to put a bolt."

Jin moved the plate three centimeters inward, and the motor turned.

The assembly shrieked and hopped across the bench. Bram caught it before it went over the edge, while Nia stood in the doorway with one hand over an ear.

"That is the worst sound I have ever heard."

"Good," Jin said.

Mira chose the location.

She could not walk there and did not need to. Jin brought her the terrain notes and a lamp, and she studied them from a chair with her injured leg elevated.

"Not the flat. That’s soil over broken fill, so it’ll swallow the vibration." Her finger traced northeast. "There’s an exposed shelf here. Continuous bedrock, connected to the same formation the station sits on."

"How far?"

"Roughly two hundred and forty meters."

Jin studied the mark. It was far enough that the Tunnelmaws would pass the station to reach it, yet close enough for Glitch to read their response.

"That works."

"It’s also," Mira said, "the direction the hounds came from."

"Yeah. I know."

Bram carried the decoy.

He volunteered before Jin finished laying out the problem, stating it with his usual blunt certainty.

"I can brace. If the ground moves while I’m holding it, I won’t drop it."

That was true, and it was the entire reason. Jin had considered sending Glitch and discarded the idea within four seconds. Glitch was exhausted, he was their only underground sensor, and putting him two hundred and forty meters away would leave the station blind at the exact moment it most needed to see.

"Voss goes with you. Both combat beasts."

"I’m on it," Kellan said.

"You’re on timing. Nothing else. If something comes at you without fully committing, let Rook’s beast turn it."

The distance made shouted guidance unreliable, so Jin gave them the station’s two hand lamps and established signals before they left: halt, left, right, clear, danger, and return. Bram repeated them without error. Kellan needed one correction, scowled at the lamp, then got them right.

Jin remained in the doorway with Glitch stretched across the threshold slab, which connected to the foundation and let him listen through the entire rock formation. Nia stayed inside with Mira.

Bram and Kellan crossed the first hundred meters quickly. When Glitch caught movement eleven meters below their route, Jin flashed halt, then left four times. Bram stopped, shifted four meters, and waited until Jin signaled clear.

At a hundred and sixty meters, two drifting Tunnelmaw signatures changed direction. Jin’s stomach moved with them.

He flashed halt and held it.

Both students stopped. Jin listened for eleven seconds as two heavy grinding lines converged on a point thirty meters east of Bram, passed it, then continued toward the east.

Clear. Hurry.

At two hundred meters, a Carrion Hound slipped from the scrub on the northern side. Kellan’s distant voice cracked across the darkness.

"I’ve got—"

"No!" Jin shouted, close enough now for the word to carry. The hound was circling beyond the hand-lamp glow, judging them. "Wait for the gap by the low rock!"

Eleven seconds passed.

The hound came through that gap.

"Now!"

Kellan’s beast met it. Kellan’s two seconds arrived half a beat behind, and the hound broke away with a limp before vanishing into the scrub. Kellan did not pursue it.

That mattered more than landing the hit.

At two hundred and thirty meters, the ground shifted under Bram. It was not a breach, only soft fill collapsing over an old passage, but he dropped to one knee with sixteen kilograms of unbalanced metal in his arms. His talent rose around him. He neither released the machine nor sank any farther.

Bram stood and carried the decoy the final ten meters while Jin watched the two lamps reach the bedrock shelf.

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