Disclaimer: I do not own Subnautica. Unknown Worlds does.
Thanks to DevoutRelic for editing.
Chapter published 8/27/17.
Estimated Time to Death: 28 days, 22 hours, 10 minutes
Varien
Sleep was restless, with him tossing and turning. It didn't help that his nose was clogged to the point where he could only breathe through his mouth.
But eventually, exhaustion took over and he found himself in dreamless sleep. In what felt like an instant Varien stirred back into consciousness, hands clutching at the sheets. Like every day for the past week, everything hurt.
With a herculean effort he pulled himself out of the bed he'd made in his Cyclops and stretched. He slid down the ladder to the lower deck and, after making sure all his gear was in place, slid out the hatch and into the water. He cringed as the bitterly cold water nipped at him through his suit, like thousands of tiny needles all over his itching skin.
Outside, the river prowlers and ghost rays continued to warble and wail in the distance. Green strands of something like moss hung from the ceiling. Beneath his Cyclops the ground fell into a tunnel hundreds of meters deep, a waterfall of brine spilling into the inky depths. So far away from the ghostly trees, there was almost no light at all. His Cyclops was black, and the only real light was given off by Volara.
Speaking of which, the ampeel was still asleep on his sub, still as stone. They needed to get going. He considered swimming to her and shaking her head to wake her up, but then thought better of it. Instead, he found a safe distance and took a deep breath.
"Volara!" he shouted. The megafauna stirred. "Volara, wake up!" One of her emerald eyes cracked open. After a moment of staring at each other, her eyes flew open and she shot off from his Cyclops, coiling down beneath it to stare up at him.
"Varien!" she stammered. She looked around at the oppressive stone walls and brinefall. "We're... we're still alive!" she said, amazed.
"We are," he reassured. "Come on, let's get something to eat and start heading down." He glanced into the depths of the vertical tunnel, his head buzzing with light nausea. He'd gotten used to seeing deep places since the crash, but with his Cyclops floating above the tunnel, it almost felt like he was flying.
Flying, with wings that were about to stop working.
"Eat?!" she hissed. "Eat what?"
He gestured to the ghost forest. "The... spinefish? You eat those all the time, don't you?"
"Yes but that's in my territory! Not here!" the ampeel whined.
"Volara..."
She chomped her mouth angrily. "Fine. You go inside and eat your food, or whatever. I'll be back soon." Without further word she swam away to the forest of ghostly trees, hesitated, and began meekly hunting. Varien cringed. There was something so... wrong about Volara being so visibly terrified. Something deeply indignifying about powerful, confident, apex-predator Volara whimpering like a child scared of the dark. He'd have to find a way to make it up to her.
For the time being though, he needed to eat. Varien slipped back into his warm, air-conditioned Cyclops and ate a meal of salted nutrient block and water. Ugh, water day in and day out. What he wouldn't give for some milk. Or coffee.
Before long he was done, and Volara had returned from her hunt and swum around the front of his sub. "Ready?" he asked. "I'm going to start going down. This thing has a 'camera' on the bottom. It lets me see what's below me," he explained. ", but when I do I can't see out of this glass dome, so I'll be blind from here."
"I'll make sure to stay out of the way," Volara zapped, looking about fearfully. "Just be careful."
"Right. Here I go." He flicked his hand at one of the buttons, and his field of vision was taken up by the keel camera's feed. The tunnel yawned beneath him, wide and unknowable. Varien pushed the steering wheel in to descend, then turned left -
SMASH!
He slammed the tail of his ship into the rocks. "My bad!" He turned right and continued to descend -
CLANG!
He'd hit the ghostly plants. He saw in his camera as they came lose and tumbled into the abyss. "Argh, I hit that!" he whined. "Focus!"
After that, thank goodness, the tunnel widened and he stopped hitting everything. The rest of the descent went smoothly. He heard Volara's electricity somewhere above him, but he was more focused on the camera feed. Slowly but surely, as he went deeper and deeper, the bottom of the void came into view. The brinefall ended in a puddle, which overflowed into another shorter brinefall, which then terminated in another open cave. Varien stopped descending and ended the camera feed.
Volara swam back into view, and he got a good look at the cave. It had several exits to it, unlike the previous cave. There was a series of stepping cliffs up ahead, leading up and out of sight. There was a titanic hole in the walls to the right, and some kind of narrow ravine far to the left. The floor was shrouded in misty green brine, with a few islands of black stone sticking up. One of the larger such islands was covered in a handful of geothermal vents, spewing dense smoke into the water. River prowlers and ghost rays swam about in sparse packs, and a handful of ghostly trees sprouted from the brine lake.
It was fiendishly dark, too. The blue dome-plants barely pierced the gloom at all. But there was another source of dim light far more important. Not his sub's headlights, not Volara's natural glow, but a set of metal pillars far to the left, sitting at the opening of a narrow ravine. He gasped and leaned up against the glass, looking closer. "That's it!" he shouted, heart leaping into his throat from excitement. "It has to be! Look!" he bubbled, pointing at the pillars. He was just over eight hundred meters down, too. Perfect!
Volara turned, then reared back and opened her mouth in shock. "Varien, I've seen something like that before."
He blinked. "Wait, you have?" he asked dumbly.
She turned to him. "Yes. Just outside my territory are short glowing rocks that look just like those. Why, have you seen them before?" A pause. "Wait. The weapon that destroyed your rescue, was it made of the same stuff as those?"
"It was," he said, gripping the steering wheel tightly. "Eight hundred meters down, and alien technology. We've found it! Let me just park my Cyclops over this island, and I'll get out."
"Alright," she said, moving out of his path.
Varien slid the Cyclops over to the island with thermal vents. As he did, his headlights fell upon an enormous skeleton, laying on the stone amidst a patch of sparse blue grass. He blinked at the size and structure. It looked to have four eyes, a reptilian head, it even had arms. But it didn't have a lower body. It was like the skeleton below the ribcage simply ceased to exist. The size was more worrying; it was as large as a Reaper.
With translation tool in hand and alien artifact in his pack, Varien got into his docked exosuit and ordered it to eject. The Cyclops's docking bay opened and out he fell, gliding to the stone. He stomped over to the skeleton with Volara trembling quietly by his side. "What is that?" she asked.
"I don't know." He glanced at the P.R.A.W.N.'s thermometer. Twenty degrees, that was fairly warm. Thank goodness for black smokers. He climbed out of his suit and into the waters, scanner tool in hand. "Let me get a quick look."
Swimming to the skeleton's head made it all the more horrifyingly apparent how big it was. The eye sockets were the size of his torso, the claws as long as his body. If it were alive, it could snap him up like a bite-sized snack. It could slurp up Volara like a strand of spaghetti. A quick scan confirmed his fears; it was some kind of leviathan class predator. Not a Reaper, obviously. Apparently the pattern on top of its skull wasn't natural, but enormous head trauma; this creature apparently tried to headbutt a wall, and the wall won.
His PDA estimated the time of death to one thousand years ago. Varien held out hope that whatever this thing was, it was extinct.
"So, what is it?" Volara asked.
"Some kind of leviathan, died by hitting its head long ago." He got back into his exosuit and shivered at the thought that something that big once swam the oceans.
"Wait, that word. Some kind of... what?"
"Leviathan," he said, sounding it out. "It's a class of giant predator at the top of its food chain."
"Oh!" Volara's fear melted away for a second as she posed proudly. "So like me?"
Um. "No, actually. You're not big enough to be classed a leviathan." The ampeel glared at him and he held up his hands innocently. "Hey, I'm not the one who decides it! If it helps, you're a leviathan to me."
She considered that for a moment with a cute tilt of her head. "Alright. So now let's just..." She turned to the alien pillars and gulped. "... um, are you sure we need to go there?"
Varien turned to face the pillars too. There wasn't enough light to see into the ravine, but there was something there. He was sure of it. The Disease Research Facility laid just behind that section of stone, and there he could find the cure for this horrible disease.
A river prowler warbled around him. There was a metallic edge to its voice.
He steeled himself and gripped the suit's controls. "We do," he said. "Come on, Volara. We're so close. Nothing's happened to us, right?"
She gave a worried look at the ghost rays. "Yet." Then she sighed, sending a ripple of energy down her body. "Let's just get it over with."
That was that, then. Varien stomped his way across the black stone, using his thrusters to cross above the rivers of brine. Volara swam after him, eerily quiet. Before long he arrived at one of the towering metal pillars, a dull green light in its center. It was utterly untouched, as was the next one and the next one. They crossed the ravine, which had a river of brine for a floor, occasionally stopping for him to pick up a piece of silver or nickel. A few shattered skeletons, yellow with age, littered the land and he had to step over them.
Before long the ravine ended, opening into yet another cavern. His heart both flew and sunk as he took in the sights. There it was, his ultimate goal. The alien Disease Research Facility.
The good news was obvious. There was the facility, the place where the super-advanced aliens worked to develop a cure for disease currently killing him. He'd spent a week looking for it and now here it was, dominating the scene like a titan of ancient myth. It was shaped like a cube of strange alien metal, with multiple cables running up into the ceiling. He could even see what looked like a few openings.
The bad news was that the place was utterly trashed. Panels on the outside were peeled open, walls were smashed in. The structure had -
"This alien structure appears to have collapsed to the seafloor. Calculating possible causes," his PDA interjected.
- yes, that. It'd collapsed to the ocean floor, lopsided with green plants growing over the outside. A few stray cables still connected it to the stone, but most of them had come loose and hung limply in the water with chunks of the structure attached to them. More alien debris littered the walls of the surrounding cave, crushing the local plants beneath their frames.
"Oh fuck," he swore, placing his hands on his head. "Damn it! What?! HOW?! Didn't - wasn't there - what?!"
Volara swam up next to him. "Is this it? It looks dead."
"Yeah," he panted. "Something destroyed it, but what? What could possibly do this to aliens that advanced? I mean stars above, their batteries hold the energy of a nuke! But we're here and it's... this." He gestured to it. His heart began sinking deeper and deeper. If it was so ruined, what were the odds of him finding a cure at all? He sighed. "Let's just go in and check."
He stepped his exosuit forward, but Volara swam forward and stopped him. "Varien wait!" He did. "I think I hear..." She looked up and around, and he did the same. There were a handful of river prowlers swimming near the top of the cave. One of them was covered in the green cysts of the Carar, but the ampeel by his side didn't look at it. What was Volara looking for...?
Then he saw it. Something brilliant cut through the gloom. It was a blazing whirlpool of blue light, shoving the water away from it. The flash ended and in its place was a creature like nothing he'd ever seen, hovering by the bottom of the ruined alien base. It was purple, with a bizarre head with mandibles and a quartet of violet eyes. Between the mandibles was something like buck teeth. Its chest had a colossal portion that looked like glass, exposing pumping inner organs, veins, and what looked like wires. It had no legs or tail, but rather its lower half separated into multiple tentacles that pumped languidly behind it. Most alarmingly were its two arms, ending not in claws or fingers but each in an icy blue sickle the length of his torso.
"Them," Volara whispered, tensing up. "It's them!" she spat, her voice a black growl.
"Them?" he parroted.
"Summoners," she said, at the same time as which his PDA labeled them 'warpers'. "But why here?! Why now? Why would anything bring them... to..." She trailed off and looked his way, locking eyes with him.
At the same time, more warpers appeared from glowing portals, floating all around the ruined facility. One of them made a beeline for the infected river prowler, clicking and screaming entirely too much like a machine. The fish turned to hiss at it and snapped its jaws, and the two fought.
Well. 'Fought'.
In mere seconds, the warper's scythes tore the river prowler to bloody ribbons. It shot something at the corpse, and both warper and its victim vanished in twin vortexes.
His throat went dry at the sight. Oh, that wasn't good.
Finally, Volara seemed to come to a conclusion. She tore her gaze away and her voice lowered from a frightened tenor to dangerously black. "No!" she snarled, before shooting away like a cannonball. He jerked back in his seat as the ampeel closed in on the nearest warper, alight with electricity. The thing was slow to turn and face her, and she closed her jaws around one of its arms and bit down hard while simultaneously frying the water around her.
Whoosh! Another vortex lit up the waters, and then the warper was gone. Volara turned back to him and swam closer, mouth open angrily. "Um, wanna explain what that was about?" he asked.
"Summoners," she repeated. "The Green Weakness doesn't always just kill on its own, Varien. I don't know what these... things are. Unknown or unknown, nobody knows. What we do know is they can smell the Green Weakness in people. They hunt down the afflicted and kill them. When we're infected, we can fight them off at first. But the illness progresses and we get weaker and weaker, and half the time they find us and kill us before the Green Weakness itself can finish the job." She looked down morosely. "They followed you here," she bemoaned. "They'll hunt you down every waking moment until they get you."
"Wait," he said, reclining in his chair and holding up his hands. "So let me see if I understand this. These 'summoners', which can teleport themselves and other things, can detect the Carar. They hunt down and kill anything that has it. There's dozens of them around this alien facility which was set up to study the Carar. Volara, I think they're robots," he said, putting the pieces together.
"They're what?" she asked.
"Ro-bots. Basically, machines made to act on their own. Like, if my suit here could go around picking up metal without me needing to control it, then it'd be a robot. If what you're saying is right then these aliens made robots to kill anything infected," he said, looking up at the handful of warpers patrolling the water. He didn't like the implications. If they could affix teleportation devices to robots that small...
"Maybe," the ampeel muttered.
"We still need to go in," he said at last. "If there's even a chance there's still a cure inside, we need to look. Let's find an entrance."
"Right behind you," she said warily, eyes flicking between the river prowlers and warpers.
Varien walked a vast perimeter around the ruined facility, stepping over skeletons and alien cables. Volara didn't make any motion when the river prowlers were near, but if a warper so much as glanced in his general direction she ravaged it with breathtaking, animalistic ferocity. He soon found that the cave was not really a cave, but the end of a long and wide tunnel that stretched away into the darkness.
Soon, they found an entrance that wasn't collapsed with rubble. On one of the sides of the facility, high up on its structure, was an open way in. With his thrusters Varien soared up to it and landed inside the facility.
The slanted angle meant his exosuit had trouble finding its footing, leaving Varien lopsided. The inside of the ruined structure showed all the signs of damage the outside did; burst walls, moss growing from the ceiling, and dome-plants from the floor. Unlike the alien gun, everything was completely flooded. Pillars and support struts were gnarled and wrinkled, like some titanic hand has crushed them. An ion crystal sat on a nearby pedastle, and down a tilted ramp was a force field closing off a small room. Varien walked his suit inside, nabbing the ion crystal and examining the energy wall.
"Detecting an alien broadcast," his PDA said. "Translation reads: Warning, hazardous materials and lifeforms contained within."
Well, that made sense, if it was a research facility. He turned from the force field, resolving to open it later, and swam down a ramp. There was another ion crystal resting there, so he grabbed it. Then Varien turned around and saw Volara swimming in.
"Whoa," she whispered, looking about the place. Her titanic body dominated the cramped corridors. "Is this like the weapon you were talking about?"
"Exactly like it," he said. "But smaller, and destroyed. I see a ramp down here," he said, heading further down. At the end of it was an arching doorway, but black metal rods had collapsed across it, leaving barely any room past. He tried moving the debris out of the way with his exosuit, but it was stuck fast. Varien sighed and got out, leaving his P.R.A.W.N. to the side. "I'm going to have to go on my own from here," he said, turning to face the ampeel with his translator in hand.
"What?!" she shouted, her upper body rearing back. "Varien you can't be serious. Don't leave me alone out here with all the dead!"
Oh stars above, this again. "Volara, you'll be fine." He swam to the debris, squeezed through, and came out in the next room. It was as overgrown as everything else, with a shattered table and dim lights. In the middle was -
Awoooo! a ghost ray howled.
"AH!" Volara shouted, then came swimming towards him. Varien yelped in shock as her massive, grimacing face shoved itself into the collapsed doorway. He backed up as Volara continued beating her body against the metal outside, slowly but surely squeezing fifty tonnes of terrified fish into the suddenly crowded room.
He looked at her. She looked back at him. He sighed. "Damn it, Volara. Alright, just stay far enough away so we can talk. I need to look around."
She gave him a meek 'yes', and he got to exploring.
It was silent as the grave, unnervingly still and bitterly cold. The centerpiece of the room was the glass container in the center, holding some kind of egg. It was staggering in its size, as long as Varien was tall and colored like basalt. On one end it has a series of spikes like teeth crowning it, including one set of massive spikes in the center of all the others. He quickly scanned it.
"Analyzing data," his PDA said. "Genetic analysis indicates this is the egg of a massive, deep-dwelling predator of the leviathan class. Egg exhibits no signs of life." He let out a breath of relief. No signs of life. It wouldn't hatch on him.
To the right of the leviathan egg was a glass case with pinned creatures in it, like an insect display in a museum. One of the creatures was a rabbit ray from the shallows, a ghost ray from the underground cavern he was in right now, a spadefish and a hoopfish. The two other creatures he didn't recognize. One was a ray, but opaque and deep, blood red. The other was some kind of grub with crimson circles on its dusky skin. He tried to scan them, but the casing's glass interfered with his scanner. It must've been thicker than the leviathan egg's casing.
"Another egg," he told Volara, spinning around to see her pressed against the walls. "And a display of dead animals."
"They killed one of the wicked," she breathed, staring at the pinned ghost ray. "Good, good."
He shook his head, but said nothing and instead swam deeper. A series of ramps, useless with the flooding, terminated in a third ion crystal that he stored in his suit. His PDA spoke up again. "Interior walls are substantially reinforced. Unable to identify whether the purpose was to keep something out, or in. Whatever the intention of the designers, it failed."
Reinforced?
Ahead of him was a data terminal with a flickering, acidic green hologram above it. Past it was a glass window, tarnished to near opacity. He held his PDA up to the hologram and let it transfer the information. Once done, and with Volara at his back, he opened it up.
"Damage report," he read aloud. "Damage report, so what, is this about what trashed this place?" He read on. "Leviathan detected at facility perimeter, closing at high speed. Exterior wall impacted with massive force. Leviathan egg containment breached, structural integrity compromised, specimen destruction protocol initiated. Three hundred and fourteen terminated, one unaccounted for. Evacuating staff, initiating planetary quarantine procedures."
"So... what does that mean?" Volara asked, hovering above him.
"Leviathan closing," he said, awe and horror and disbelief battling for dominance. "Leviathan closing. Holy shit, Volara that skeleton we saw outside. It died from head trauma, right?" He spread his arms out and gestured to the facility around them. "It tried to get here because the aliens were studying its eggs. That skeleton did this to this place!" Volara could bite through solid plasteel like it was butter. A leviathan could mutilate super-advanced alien alloys. What kind of planet was this?!
Further on there was a hallway, and despite the dim lighting he could see a data terminal at the end. Before that, however, there was a shattered window to the left that revealed what must've been an aquarium. Laying on a slab of stone in the middle was a titanic skeleton shaped like a biter with nubby hands. Green moss grew from the inside of its jaws.
He swam in, and Volara followed him.
"Oh, wow," she whispered. "It's as big as me."
"Yeah." He scanned the skeleton and looked over the data. "I'm guessing this 'specimen destruction' protocol killed it." He looked around the aquarium, at the many overgrown plants and few shattered ribcages. "Looks kinda like a biter, or blighter, doesn't it?"
Volara nodded. "It does. But they don't grow that big. I'd know if they did."
"Maybe they used to," he supplied. "I mean, considering the leviathan skeleton outside, this would've been a thousand years ago. Come on, I saw another terminal." He swam for the shattered glass and back into the flooded hallway. "I want to see what - "
Volara chomped at the water. He yelped and turned to face her. "Varien! I just! I figured it out!"
"Figured what out?" he asked, the ampeel swimming in circles in front of him, above the skeleton.
"The Green Weakness is said to be a curse that came from the Underworld. You said these aliens were trying to study it, to find a way to destroy it, right? But they were attacked, this place was ruined - "
" - and the Carar escaped," he finished. "It all fits."
Volara growled. Not actually, but the translation of her stuttering arcs was a growl. "It's their fault. If they'd been more careful, or if they'd brought weapons to fend off that leviathan. Damnable death, my people existed back then! If they'd just asked us to guard this place for them, none of this would've ever happened! My family wouldn't... my eggs wouldn't - " She sunk, draping herself along the skeleton.
Something bitter coated his tongue at her words. His eyes softened and Varien swam over to the upset megafauna and wrapped his hands around her head. "Hey, hey, shh. It's in the past. If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure all the aliens working here died when the Carar was unleashed. Come on, let's keep looking. There has to be something."
He let go and backed off, letting her speak. "Right, you're right. Let's keep looking. There was something in the next room, right? One of those glowing things you can do stuff with."
"Data terminal, right." The two of them swam out of the aquarium and into the next chamber. There was still the glowing holographic terminal, and to the left a tarnished window that once would've looked into the aquarium, but to the right was what he could only describe as dissected warpers.
Purple guts and arms with scythes hung from the walls. Organs laid on tables with robotic arms poised above them, shelves contained purple body parts, and one of the shelves was knocked over. The centerpiece was a half built warper, with no betentacled lower half. It was suspended from the ceiling by a maze of green wires, which plugged into its open chest cavity. Its face looked straight up in a silent, unknowable expression.
"Biological evidence," his assistant chimed. ", suggests indigenous lifeforms were brought here to be subjected to intensive genetic manipulation."
Cyborgs, then. These 'precursor' aliens hadn't just built robots. They took some kind of native life and turned them into cyborgs. He wondered if he could scan the warper -
"NO!" Volara shouted, springing at the half-built cyborg. Her prongs flared to life and nearly blinded him as she crashed into the warper, tearing it from its place with her jaws. She thrashed her head around, smashing the robot into the walls, floor, and tables until it was little more than a mangled piece of purple fabric and metal. She opened her mouth and let its ruined corpse fall to the ground.
"Um, Volara, it wasn't active," he said. "What's with the hatred for warpers?"
Still facing away from him, Volara's head lowered. "Varien, I told you how I lost my eggs to the Green Weakness, right? That's only a half truth." What? Oh no, she didn't mean what he thought she did, did she? "While waiting for my eggs to hatch, I kept them in this small cave. I could close off its entrance with rocks easily, keep any chompers from getting in and eating them. Once, while I was out hunting, I came back and opened up the cave." Her voice grew tight and strained, and her body sunk to the floor.
"Volara, you don't need to - "
"There was a summoner in there with them. Their shells had green spots on them. It raised its arms and - all three of them - I could recognize them once the eggs broke I couldn't, and then it just left like it hadn't..." She trailed off, prongs quiet.
Varien let himself sink to the floor and sat cross-legged. "Oh stars, Volara that's awful. I'm so sorry you had to go through that." He couldn't even imagine. What if he and Silvia had been expecting, and he one day came home to find her... he wanted to give Volara a hug.
"It wasn't your fault," she muttered. "Just do your thing with that light and let's go."
He nodded. "Alright." Varien wasn't going to just drop it, though. He resolved to do something for Volara in the future.
Downloading the terminal's information didn't take long. He pulled up the entry and read through it; it was a profile of the Carar, describing the bacterium in excruciating detail. Luckily, his PDA gave him the important bits.
The precursor aliens had first discovered it during a routine expansion, and technology errors meant their quarantines failed. It got to their core worlds and ravaged them. At the time of the entry's creation it'd killed -
He nearly threw up.
One hundred and forty-three billion people.
Carar's symptoms were mostly in line with what his PDA had predicted. A symptomless incubation, then flu symptoms, immune system destruction, then wild genetic changes that caused organ failure and death. The treatment procedure was... nothing.
The aliens didn't know how to cure it. Damn it, damn it, damn it! This was a bust! They didn't have a cure, how was he supposed to save himself now?
Varien caught himself and took a deep breath through his mouth. No, no. Calm down. That was quitter talk. Looking around the room showed no other hallways, but he still had one last chance. "Volara," he said, grabbing the downtrodden eel's attention. "There's one last place in this building I want to check. Are you good to follow?"
She zapped her tusk prongs 'yes'. "Let's go," she muttered. "Lead the way."
After giving her another worried look, he did just that. They passed the aquarium, the first terminal, and the egg room. He and Volara both squeezed through the collapsed door and into the initial chamber, where his exosuit still leaned against the abused walls. As they swam, he kept glancing worriedly at the ampeel behind him. He didn't want to be here anymore. This place was clearly bringing up unpleasant memories for her, and that made his stomach churn. After all she'd done for him, given him food, protection and company, she deserved more than to have those kind of memories dug up.
In the main foyer, the force field still hummed, blindingly bright in the otherwise dark halls. Varien approached its terminal, summoned the purple artifact he'd spent a literal day fabricating, and held it out. The terminal opened and wrenched the artifact from his grip, then closed itself. With a quiet whir, the barrier faded. Volara gave an amazed hum of static behind him.
Inside was just a tiny room, a broom closet compared to the normally gigantic architecture in precursor bases. There was only a single terminal inside, and nothing more. Frowning, he waved his PDA through the hologram and waited for it to process the gigantic stores of data.
"Specimen research data," he read aloud, turning to face Volara. "Apparently they were injecting animals here with the Carar to see how they held up, if any of them had some kind of resistance they could then take advantage of. Um, lets see. Garryfish, dead in three days. Unidentified deep-sea leviathan, dead in three weeks. Wait. Eggs kept for high-priority leviathan egg hatching research?"
"They were trying to learn how eggs hatch?" Volara wondered.
"Apparently. Anyway, uh, peepers, no immunity but some capacity for learned behavior." He read another entry that chilled him. Ampeels, dead in five weeks. These precursors had captured, experimented on, and indirectly killed Volara's kind. He didn't read that aloud to her. "Hmm. Unidentified leviathan. Symbol translates to 'sea emperor' leviathan. Bone marrow suggests - " His breath caught in his throat. " - suggests potential immunity to Carar! Single specimen captured for study at purpose-built habitat in volcanic region, depths of twelve hundred plus meters. Assessment, while it is unlikely the emperor specimen is still alive, it may be possible to acquire further information on the aliens' attempts to create a vaccine. A signal for an alien power generator was found in the data, adding to PDA."
He flicked through the tabs on his data assistant and turned on the signal for this 'power generator'. His eye implants lit up with the mark, a blue symbol located right beneath him, over five hundred meters deeper from where he was.
"What does this mean?" Volara asked, glancing at the exit where ghost rays and warpers swam. "Is it good?"
Varien narrowed his eyes, struggling to decide how to feel. "Well, uh, good and bad. There's no cure here. Apparently they found something here that could resist the Carar, and kept it somewhere else. It's about four, five hundred meters down from here. This 'sea emperor' probably died, but maybe they have information down there about a cure."
Volara nudged her head at him. "But?"
"But, I can't go that far down. My P.R.A.W.N. can't go much more than nine hundred meters down. Even if I built a pressure compensator, that'll only make it good for a kilometer and that's nowhere near enough. And apparently it's in a volcanic place, so I can't just swim. I just, I can't get that far down!" he said, exasperated.
"What?" she asked, undulating around the cramped space. "But... you can do all these things! You can make metal speak like my kind. You can turn rocks into shells. Isn't there some way to make this 'pressure whatever' good enough to let you go that far down?"
Well... "There is one thing. A pressure compensator mark two, or mark three, would be enough."
"What's the problem then?" she asked. "Make one!"
"The problem is I can't!" he retorted, throwing his hands into the water above him. "I'd need a modification station to make the mark two and three, and my builder tool can't make one! I'm stuck, this is about as far as I can go!"
No modification station meant no advanced pressure compensators. Without those, no going to this 'sea emperor' facility. Without that, no cure. No cure, he died. Stars above, was he really going to die to something like databank corruption?
The two of them swam in silence for a few moments, staring at each other. Volara was the one who broke the silence.
"Well... can't you do something? Teach your builder-thing how to make one?"
He considered it. "My scanner," he said, summoning said spectroscope and showing it off. "The Aurora was carrying modification stations on it, they're pretty standard equipment. If I find a modification station it'll almost certainly be broken, but if I scan it then I'll be able to build one. The problem is, I don't know where the modification stations are. For all I knew, they were all destroyed when the Aurora's drive core blew up!"
"Oh," she said dumbly.
"Yeah, oh," he parroted dumbly. He brought his hands to the glass dome of his helmet and dragged them down. "I don't know what to do."
A ghost ray moaned in the distance, prompting Volara to jerk in fright. "Maybe, uh, we could start by getting out of the Underworld?" she pleaded.
"Alright." He swam over to his exosuit and climbed in. "Let's go. I'll lead."
The two of them made their way out of the titanic, ruined facility. He dropped to the ground far below, Volara swimming after him and mutilating any warpers even remotely in their path. Now that he knew what they'd done, he could hardly blame her.
They left the tunnel and passed through the ravine to the main chamber. Resting there, just like he'd left it, was his Cyclops. Even with the lights turned off it dominated the scene, with only the leviathan skeleton beneath to challenge its size. None of the river prowlers even came close to it. Strange. Did they know it was unappetizing metal? Or was it the size that put them off?
While he went to dock his exosuit, Volara swam next to its glass dome. Once Varien was inside, he headed to the bridge and came face to face with his fish friend. "Alright, we should be able to get back out before nightfall," he said, turning the engine and lights back on. His Cyclops shuddered to life. "Let's go."
"Please, let's," she insisted, glancing about at the local fauna. He rolled his eyes at her superstition. Varien knew that if Silvia were here with him she'd punch him for being rude, but he couldn't help it! It was so silly! They obviously weren't undead spirits or souls or whatever.
But she didn't like it down here, and they did need to leave, so Varien piloted his Cyclops back up the brinefall - carefully, so as not to hit anything - and across the forest of ghostly trees. After a few hours, and a break to eat, they left the underground river behind and were back in the blood kelp zone.
Volara sighed in relief once they were out, with open waters above them instead of crushing stone. "We did it," she stammered, amazed. "We actually did it! We're alive!" she cheered, doing loops and spirals in the water.
"Told you," he muttered, rubbing at his clogged sinuses. "Damn it. So... any plans?"
Volara hesitated. "I'm not sure. You said your modifying whatever might not be anywhere. Are you sure you can't get to this deeper place without it?"
"Confident." He had a terraformer sitting in his base, sure, but digging five hundred meters into a volcano would both take forever and probably kill him. "If I don't find a mod station, then..." He didn't want to say it.
"We'll find it," Volara growled. "I didn't believe you, but that building, it was real!" she said. "There must be a cure somewhere, we just need to make your powers even stronger. Go back to your home and get some rest, Varien. I'll ask around if anyone has seen any of your machines. What does this modifier look like?"
He struggled to recall. He hadn't exactly used a mod station often. "A... box. About this large," he said, holding out his hands. "Orange and white, with some black. It might be in pieces."
"Box, orange and white with black, probably broken," she recited. "Got it. I'll meet you tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," he agreed, gripping the steering wheel tight.
"Good! And Varien." She swam closer and bopped his windshield with her snout. "Stay strong, alright? You'll get through this." With that said, she did another spiral and swam away, her serpentine body undulating back and forth as her bioluminescence faded into the inky waters.
He sighed and slumped against the wheel. All of a sudden he felt exhausted. His limbs ached and trembled, everything felt awful, especially with the revelation that the cure he thought was so close was really so terribly far.
Four weeks. He had four weeks to find the blueprints for a mod station, make the pressure compensators, then get down to the lower alien structures, which might not even have a vaccine at all.
Four weeks to get everything. It was so much time, but also just so much space to cover.
For the first time since crashing on 4546B Varien genuinely, truly thought he might die.
Please do leave a review, let me know what you think.