บท 410: Far Future Ch. 120 – Down Where the Dark Things Dwell

Devilsight let me see through any darkness as if it were bright day. I could even see normal colors, straight through the spectrum.

Smokesight and cloudsight let me see through suspended particulate matter of water or earth, respectively, while Devasight would deal with light distortions from temperature or reflective surfaces.

Suspended salts in water with no light? No problem at all. My visual acuity was basically as clean and clear as if this was the clearest water in the world.

Oh, I could TELL it was pitch black. I could see the lights of the alka-shrimps or neo-plankton. But it basically looked like I was moving through a heavy sky, falling away below and above as I descended.

My Vajra was grabbing the water ahead of me, streaming it behind me, and reforming it. The water to my sides was simply suspended, like an ongoing tunnel... there was no cleaving of the water, no bow wave. My swimming was smooth, almost traceless, barely rippling anything despite the speed I was moving at.

I was heading for the underside of the city.

My pint-sized daughter Colby's deep raids with some Striker teams, senior Termites, and pissed off Undermobs had revealed that the cerevores had somehow blocked off a deeper layer of the stone the city was built atop of, and made some massive caverns down there to breed their Xenos in, helped by illicit biomass pumped down from the city above, and of course many, many lost humans over the years. They also fished the seas, and they had naturally started subverting a lot of the wildlife, as the xenos were very non-discriminatory in what they laid their syms into to replace.

So, the seas down here were even more dangerous than might be intimated in a warp-affected, alkaline sea of phrenic monstrosities.

They weren't going to see me coming, and they weren't going to psense a Null. My Vajra would suck in any sonar they used, so I was empty air as far as they were concerned... unless I needed to hide against something, at which point I'd be stone if I needed to be.

There wasn't a lot of life down here, which didn't surprise me at all. The cerevores would be catching and harvesting it for biomass to build xenos. What I had to be careful about where the things that WERE down here.

Aaaaand that looked like one of them.

It was the size of a whale, but eel-like, with grasping tentacles trailing after it. Its eyes were big to pick out even the faintest traces of light, and it was winding its way through the deep, occasionally opening needle-toothed jaws to snatch up a passing bundle of light.

And then it lunged forward, spinning as a great black mass three times its length hove out of the depths with great speed, carapace shell gleaming, a head part insect, part reptile opening wide to take a bite as it reached for the eel at great speed.

The eel almost got away when a truly massive claw scissored forward and down, and clamped onto the back third of its body. With awesome strength, the huge aquasym stopped the great eel in place, and lunged forward to get a big bite into the middle of its body.

No, no, I hadn't seen the little plunger in its mouth, driving deep into the hapless predator, and planting the egg.

I sighed and diverted course.

These two underwater behemoths were stirring up a lot of water, but the pressure waves blew past me as I drove in on their blind spot, came up on the eel's tail, and plunged in Chalice.

I flowed by underneath the long length of it, and a foot of leathery hide parted wetly before the silent edge of Chalice... silent, because her song would carry for literally miles down here, and I didn't need to announce myself.

The eel was pinned in the jaws of the aquasym, the paralytic excretions of the implanted egg taking hold, its motions becoming spastic. At the same time, its lower body was silently opening up and spilling its life out into the water.

Without a living host to nourish it for at least a short time, the egg would die, and wouldn't even be able to consume the biomass.

The aquasym was relying on pressure senses, some form of lateral line, and psensing life to tell what was nearby, in addition to rote light and hearing, and not getting any action off of any of those.

It was really, really surprised when Chalice drove into its eye like the point of a torpedo, and I fired off a Shard right through its brain when her point stopped a few inches short.

Acidic blood jetted out at high speed, making the water froth and sizzle as acid met base and both got excited to see one another. It let go of the dying eel, spinning and whirling even as I flowed out of place and reach, its brain already shredded by Sun Strikes ripping through it.

I circled it from a hundred feet away, flowing away from its writhing struggles. It started tearing at itself, and the sea started to get real frothy as more of that acidic blood started boiling in the brine, but I didn't care about its death struggles.

The cerevore ejected itself from under the aquasym's crest, telekinetically hurling itself away from the wounded biovore, yet was still swatted by the writhing body and went tumbling out into the water rather haplessly at the impact. It was the size of a pig, a five-legged fungoid brain as hard as stone, little manipulator tentacles flailing at the water as it fell towards the sea floor.

The pressure wouldn't bother it at all, and it could survive in a vacuum, it didn't need to breathe or worry about the cold or alkalines. Getting to wherever it wanted to go might take a while on foot, since it also couldn't swim for beans, but nigh-immortal aberrant brain-eaters had a surfeit of patience.

Or it would have, if I hadn't come down, impaled it with a Sun Strike, and then sent off three more with Shards inside it, blowing it into vivic-burning parts.

I looked back at the two huge carcasses also starting to slowly fall towards the ocean floor, also burning with unwhite flames. I could feel the power gouting through the water, purifying massive amounts of it into true water... which would naturally be instantly contaminated again, but which told me exactly how natural this alkaline sea was not.

Yep, the 'vores definitely had a presence out here. I checked my mental position, and continued on my way, wondering how many more aquasyms were out here waiting to get surprise-attacked and die.

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There was a huge net here, pressure-sensitive and psionic-charged. It would collapse on and cling to anything which swam into it, and then deliver a massive psychic shock generally enough to stun any unintelligent creature. Aquasyms would then come down to harvest it for either a sym-egg or just raw biomass, hauling it away for use.

A Null swimming by and deftly severing a strand so I could pass, not so much.

I located one of the underwater ports this way, seeing the slow traffic of the aquasyms moving in and out, and glowing lights of psychic Wards keeping out the water. Literally, the syms could just thrust themselves out of the sea and into a dry cave, delivering their goodies. I assumed the 'vores were mostly using aquasym transports, as they wouldn't have the infrastructure to really make much stuff, and the Xenos could be bred into many custom forms.

They didn't really have the place lit up, as they had limited darkvision, and that was enough for most purposes. I could see biotech lights and cables conveying psionic energy that could be illuminated with a touch, so scarce need for it.

However, when I drifted slowly around the Ward, placed the three fusion detonators, and slowly slam away, they didn't sense a thing, as who was going to guard against humans underwater here?

----

I gave myself three minutes, easily enough room to get a good mile away from the detonations. The linked detonators lit up in one second, went off in the next, and blew that Ward holding back the ocean apart like paper.

The ocean came in.

Now, I didn't know how much of their underground complex it would flood. If they were smart, they'd have airlocks and cutoffs for just this kind of situation. But what was happening was a wall of water was going to go crashing through these sublevels they'd made, sweeping up everything in its path as it did so. Most of the base xenos could not breathe water, nor could any sym made off of a human. That likely included any queens and the stronger hiveminders made off of captured psions.

The 'vores might get battered around or crushed, but likely not. What would happen is that their base of operations, troops, biotech, and all the good stuff was going to get flooded out with improbable speed.

The roar of the explosion transmitted to me loud and clear, as did the rumbling rush of the invading ocean expanding into the new areas. I could feel the currents around me altering as water was forced by hundreds of feet of ocean pressure into the new area, and wasn't going to be stopping soon.

As the waters around me began to hum with alien psychic messages calling out in alarm and confusion, I jetted silently through the darkness... and those calls gave me convenient places to home in on...

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I had some of the most convenient feeds for observations of battles across the whole city, and I made use of them as I homed in on the underground bases of operations.

Two of those bases were in winding tunnel networks buried under the sea, with aquasym traffic moving through them and making it somewhat annoying to get in and out.

My Stealth modifier was past +40. I might as well have been a ghost for all the wake I had as I flowed past them, with even less visual presence.

Now, I was a lot faster and more obvious on my way out, but when the Wards blew and suddenly the whole tunnel was being sucked haplessly backwards, it didn't really matter. They could get alarmed all they wanted to, it wasn't going to save them.

The ripple effects up top were noticed, as cohesion between units in areas affected began to drop noticeably. The decision-makers sitting pretty far below suddenly were rather occupied, and the guys on site didn't have all that much authority to make crucial decisions, especially when a number of screaming Rantha-born with Swords and Hammers were coming at them from all angles and modes suddenly.

My boys and girls showed me the xenos attacks faltering and growing indecisive under the sudden, relentless pressure, getting herded and pushed this way and that as Anatolia's Strategos Circle began to coordinate strikes from multiple vectors in a kind of mastery that just isn't supposed to happen on a battlefield. Forces were hitting here and there, the xenos were moving, or not moving; artillery came down; airstrikes pummeled; they fled, here, there, ran into more resistance and were pushed aside, trying to find something to fight in a city locked up behind Bloks and Spires, while their access points to Underspire were slagged over and over, leaving them with only minor and slow access points to flee down through... and those paths were easily predicted, and more often than not, turned into chokepoints of death that were soon obstructed by their own piles of dead trying to get through.

The only force of the invasion that wasn't truly affected by the troubles down very deep were the armored cavalry and war machine forces of the Xenos, who had their own problems of hyperaggressive Ranthas pairing up with extremely eager mech-drivers to blow them all away with ridiculous speed and efficiency. With their infantry support getting annihilated, the biomechs of the enemy were left exposed to this sort of attention that would normally not be any threat to them at all.

The Battle for Janus Prime was winding down.