We’re back on more Descent, which is like a whacky road trip with an odd couple only our hilarious mismatched personalities are a soulless killing machine and an adolescent apex void predator and instead of Vegas, they’re headed to a lifeless star cluster filled with the remains of a murdered civilization.
No, the Naiads didn’t kill them. Why are you asking such flagrantly bigoted questions? How dare you accuse them of wiping out an ‘insect’ species that might have rivalled their own power. The very idea, they would never do that.
Below is a snippet showing the last leg of the journey to these not-suspiciously-dead worlds. For the full chapter, check out the link above and enjoy!
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<this way,> Bathory replied, the words accompanied by calculations and datastreams that would burn out the processing power of lesser civilizations, equations that would take the Naiad and her often-silent companion away from the light of their new home and into the wild, open Ocean. It would lead them towards what her sister had aptly described as a path through the dead and the unquiet things that dwelt there.
Reality tore into an ingress point. It was a single breach, both vessels using the same nav data. Trickier to calculate, but it assured that either all ships involved arrived at the destination or none of them did, but they were well beyond the nebula now and this dive was safe enough. Construct minds and insect navigators could have done a competent job here, though Bathory knew her calculations were far faster and more elegant than anything deadtone could accomplish.
From the ragged edges of the delve point, the Current howled, bathing Bathory and IKaggen in roiling waves of otherspace energy. For all that raw power, delving points were dim against the backdrop of space, though they shone brighter than stars to those that could see them. Even the deadtone with the dullest senses possible could see delving points like this, but none so clearly as a Naiad. Every dive into the Current was, for Bathory, a show of colour and light that could not be described, let alone seen by those smaller, lesser things.
She wondered what Mute Intent saw in these same moments. Was it beauty of crashing waves of gravitic surges and electromagnetic spasms, or was it just data to the other mind? Variables to be accounted for, parameters to be measured and status to be confirmed?
As she fell towards the writhing tear in realspace, her FTL systems holding the aperture open like fingers prying a gushing wound apart, Bathory hesitated. Not enough to matter; it was more a pause of thought and conviction than any physical reaction. This would be the dive that truly took her away from the nebula and to the stars of the Silenced Speakers. She was committed, caught by a choice of her own making.
So be it.
The predator-ship’s thrusters fired, an act of self-assurance as she drove headlong into the seething hole in space and time. IKaggen was right next to her, the ships’FTL systems taking over from sublight navigation as they entered the egression point, sustaining it in turn. Once IKaggen was through, reality pulled the breach shut like the closing of a portcullis. Once it had, it was like it and the ships that had entered had never been there at all but within the Current, those vessels now hurtled across the light-years towards a handful of distant lights.
The dead were waiting, but so were those that had made them that way.
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