The blackness was alive.
It pressed in on him, a physical weight that threatened to crush his bones, to pop his eyes from their sockets. It was a presence, an entity of pure pressure and cold that had existed for eons in this lightless trench, and it regarded his intrusion with ancient, abiotic hostility. The cold was a thousand needles stabbing through his soaked, thin uniform, a damp fabric that now felt like a shroud. Icarus gasped, the last pocket of air in the utility chamber rapidly disappearing as the abyssal water rose to his chin. The air was stale, tasting of metal and his own fear. His mind, usually a fortress of cold calculation, screamed with a primal terror he had never known. This was a fear older than logic, a deep-seated knowledge that this was not his element. There were no walls to break here. No guards to outmaneuver. Just an endless, hungry dark.
Move.
The instinct cut through the panic like his shiv through flesh. It was a spark in the void, a final command from a brain refusing to be extinguished. His eyes, painfully adjusted to the facility's sterile, migraine-inducing brightness, strained against the near-absolute darkness. Only the faint, ghostly glow of strange, drifting organisms provided any light, their lazy, bioluminescent pulses painting Rorschach blots of green and blue in the gloom. They were beautiful, and their beauty was terrifying, for it only emphasized the scale of the consuming night. His hand, splintered and bleeding from the brutal, repeated impact of breaking the portal's control panel, slammed against the cold, obsidian wall. His fingers, numb, fumbled over the sparking wreckage of the console. Wires spat feeble, dying arcs of electricity, illuminating his torn knuckles for a fractured second.
Useless.
His gaze darted around the flooding chamber, cataloging in seconds with the hyper-efficiency beaten into him. A rack of specialized tools, now drifting like metallic seaweed. A pair of dormant maintenance bots, their multi-jointed arms folded in a silent prayer. And there, on the far wall, almost obscured by a tangle of conduits: a recessed emergency locker, its hatch marked with the universal symbol for a hydrostatic suit. A flicker of something dangerously close to hope ignited in his chest.
He lunged for it, his body moving through the water with frustrating sluggishness. The water was at his nose now, its briny, chemical-tainted taste flooding his mouth. He tilted his head back, sucking one last, desperate breath from the shrinking pocket of air at the ceiling, then dove under, his fingers finding the latch. It was stiff, corroded. He set his feet against the wall, braced, and pulled with every ounce of strength his starved, battered body could muster. With a groan of protesting metal, it swung open.
Inside, nestled among redundant sensor arrays and a sealed medical kit, was a single, bulky suit. It was a Deep-Sea Maintenance Exosuit, its design archaic, a relic from the facility's initial construction. The rubberized material was stiff with age, the joints looking stubborn. But it was functional. It was life.
He had minutes, perhaps seconds. He scrambled into the stiff, unforgiving material, his movements a frantic, clumsy ballet hampered by the buoyancy and the rising water. He fought his legs into the reinforced pants, his arms into the sleeves. The helmet was the hardest, a large, bell-shaped dome of reinforced glass and plasteel. He sealed the neck ring with a hard, clockwise twist just as the water closed over the top of the helmet, plunging him into a terrifying silence broken only by the frantic, ragged sound of his own breathing, now amplified and echoed within the confines of his new shell.
A series of status lights flickered to life on his forearm display, casting a sickly green glow on his face. Pressure: stabilizing. Oxygen: 98%. A headlamp on the helmet sputtered, coughed, then cast a weak, jittering beam into the void. It was a pathetic spear of light in an ocean of night, but it was his.
His training had covered vacuum, fire, and radiation. It had sculpted him for orderly, known environments. Never this. Never the deep. The pressure was a constant, dull ache, a giant's hand slowly tightening its grip.
His light swept the chamber's exterior portal, the gaping wound he had torn in the side of the facility. The Cantor's stronghold was not a building; it was a monstrous, obsidian claw dug into the sheer wall of the trench. Its surfaces were covered in pulsating, bioluminescent runes that swam in his vision, their non-Euclidean patterns causing a low throb of pain behind his eyes. They seemed to drink the light from his lamp. To his left, the smooth, alien architecture stretched away into an impenetrable darkness. To his right, his beam caught a structure: a thick, insulated conduit, then another, leading to a larger, protruding section of the base. The hangar bay. The schematic he had memorized during a hundred sleepless nights in his cell burned in his mind. It was his only vector.
Gathering his resolve, he pushed off from the portal, entering the open abyss.
The sensation was profoundly wrong. There was no up, no down. Only the crushing, silent black. His inner ear, desperate for a horizon, sent conflicting, nauseating signals to his brain. He was a mote of dust in a cathedral whose dimensions were beyond comprehension. His beam cut a pathetic, narrow swath through the immense dark, illuminating swirling galaxies of sediment and the occasional, grotesque fish that drifted into view. They were things of nightmare, all needle teeth, dead, bulbous eyes, and flesh so translucent he could see the faint pulse of their internal organs. They stared at him with a blank, ancient indifference before fading back into the void.
He swam, the suit's thrusters providing a low, reassuring hum. The rhythmic hiss-clunk of the rebreather became the drumbeat of his existence. Fifty meters. One hundred. He focused on the steady, green blink of the hangar's external guidance beacon, a tiny star in his personal firmament.
It was then that a shadow detached itself from the greater darkness at the periphery of his light.
It was larger than him. Much larger. It moved with a fluid, boneless grace that was utterly alien, a sinuous coiling of limbs around a long, thin torso. It was a predator, and its every movement spoke of a supreme confidence in this environment. As it slid fully into the beam, Icarus's breath hitched. Its skin was a pale, sickly translucent white, like a grub that had never seen the light, revealing a complex, internal network of pulsing, cerulean veins. Its head was a nightmare of evolutionary efficiency: a gaping maw lined with rows of needle-like teeth, and three glowing, pupiless orbs arranged in a triangle, burning with a cold, blue light. It was one of the Cantor's creations, a deep-sea guardian, a hound bred for this liquid hell.
It didn't charge. It drifted, circling him with a slow, deliberate curiosity that was more terrifying than any immediate aggression. It was assessing him, this strange, clumsy, light-bearing creature that had invaded its domain. Icarus forced his body to be still, his mind to become cold, to become the weapon he was forged to be. He was not prey. He was the predator here. Even here.
The creature shot forward. The transition from stillness to motion was instantaneous, a bolt of pale lightning. There was no warning, no tensing of muscles. Icarus twisted in the water, but the resistance turned his normally graceful dodge into a sluggish, desperate roll. A barbed tentacle, previously unseen among its coiling limbs, whipped past his helmet with a force that vibrated through the plasteel. The screech of chitin on reinforced glass was a sound that set his teeth on edge. He had no weapon but the suit itself, a ton of obsolete technology and his own ruthless will.
He let it come again. He calculated its trajectory, a split-second estimation born of a thousand simulated combats. This time, he didn't dodge. As it lunged, its maw gaping wide enough to swallow his helmeted head whole, he did the unthinkable. He thrust his armored forearm directly into its throat.
The creature's head jerked back, a silent, surprised reflex. Its teeth, designed to rend flesh, screeched and sparked against the suit's composite material, failing to find purchase. The force of the impact drove him backward through the water. The three glowing orbs fixed on him, and in them he saw not anger, but a cold, analytical curiosity. It was studying him.
With his other hand, he grabbed a thick handful of the external wiring and fluid conduits that ran along the suit's own leg. He yanked, ignoring the warning shrieks from his internal systems, tearing them free in a spectacular shower of orange sparks that sizzled and died in the water. The suit's right leg went dead, the thruster sputtering out.
He didn't hesitate. He shoved the live, sparking ends of the torn conduits directly into the creature's gaping maw.
The effect was immediate and violent. A silent, horrific convulsion wracked its body. The blue veins under its skin flashed a blinding, agonized white, illuminating its entire skeleton in a brief, terrifying X-ray. Its limbs thrashed, its coils whipping against him with bone-jarring force. A cloud of black, ink-like fluid erupted from its pores, enveloping them both. For a moment, Icarus was blind, trapped in a swirling darkness with a dying leviathan. Then, the thrashing ceased. The glow in its veins faded to a dull, dead grey. The creature went limp, its form becoming just another piece of driftwood in the current, slowly beginning its long, final descent into the endless dark.
Icarus didn't wait. He didn't watch it fall. He turned, his heart a frantic bird hammering against the cage of his ribs, and swam, his progress now lopsided and clumsy with the dead thruster. The hangar bay entrance was a massive, circular maw, shielded by a shimmering, humming curtain of blue energy. A containment field. He was trapped outside, his goal visible, yet utterly inaccessible.
Despair began to frost the edges of his mind. But his eyes, ever searching, ever calculating, found a solution. A large, heavily insulated power conduit, as thick as his torso, ran along the trench wall, feeding the field generator. It was protected by a heavy, riveted casing, but a standard maintenance access panel was visible, its handle beckoning.
He swam to it, his movements growing more labored. He pried the panel open with his injured hand, the fresh burst of pain a welcome focus. Inside was a nest of color-coded wires and humming power cells. He had no tools for this, no specific knowledge of Atlantean field generator engineering. Only instinct. The instinct of a saboteur.
He remembered the tesla gun. The one he had taken from the guard after breaking his neck in the ventilation shaft. It was a close-quarters deterrent weapon, nearly depleted, its capacitor humming with a weak, fading charge. He pulled it from its makeshift holster on his suit. He didn't aim for the delicate wiring. He aimed for the main power relay, a heavy, shielded cylinder pulsing with dangerous levels of energy.
He fired.
A brilliant, blinding arc of blue-white electricity connected the gun to the conduit. The tesla gun vibrated violently in his hand, then sparked, hissed, and died, its internal components fried. But it was enough. The conduit overloaded. The blue energy field flickered, died for a critical three-second reset cycle, and the massive hangar door began to iris open a fraction.
It was enough. The differential in pressure did the rest. The ocean grabbed Icarus and threw him through the opening like a bullet from a gun.
He tumbled through the air in a whirl of limbs and spraying water, slamming onto the cold, hard deck of the hangar bay with a grunt of expelled air. Water cascaded in around him, a roaring torrent that flooded the chamber ankle-deep before internal bulkheads slammed shut with a definitive, thunderous clang, containing the breach. He lay on his back, gasping, the hydrostatic suit suddenly a prison of its own immense weight. He fumbled with the seals, his fingers slipping on the latches, finally pulling the helmet off and sucking in deep, ragged breaths of the hangar's recycled, metallic air. It was the sweetest scent he had ever known. He was out. He was… free?
The hangar was vast, a cathedral of technology dedicated to deep-sea travel. It housed several sleek, predatory-looking submersibles, their hulls like polished obsidian, resting on magnetic cradles. The lights were low, casting long, distorted shadows that danced like specters.
Then, a sound cut through the dripping silence and the hum of distant machinery. Not an alarm. Not the heavy tread of a boot on the deck.
It was the soft, melodic hum of a familiar tune. A lullaby she sometimes hummed during the Refinements, when the pain became a white-hot fire and her voice was the only anchor to consciousness.
From the shadow of the nearest submersible, a figure stepped into the dim light. The High Cantor. Her gown was pristine white, untouched by the water or the struggle, a stark contrast to his own battered, dripping form. Her face was a mask of serene amusement, her head tilted in gentle inquiry. In her hand, she held not a weapon, but a small, silver remote, her thumb resting casually on its single, prominent button.
"Hello, Icarus," she said, her voice echoing softly in the vast space, as intimate as a whisper in his ear. A gentle, almost proud smile graced her lips. "Did you enjoy your first swim? I was watching. You were magnificent. The way you used the suit's own systems against the leviathan... truly inspired. A testament to my design."
She took a step closer, her eyes gleaming with a terrifying, possessive warmth.
"Did you really think you could fly so far without me waiting at the sun?"