The sound sensor buoys deployed by the Sovereign Chimera Order didn’t merely track sound returns. They acted as living pheromone beacons.
Titus glided past the first floating sensor buoy at minus nineteen thousand five hundred meters. Then, the canister blew up with a dull, muffled thud. A thick, crimson plume of packed hungry attractant—blended from the processed adrenal bile of slaughtered deep-sea whales—erupted into the freezing water column. It scattered rapidly across the hadal currents.
Within thirty seconds, the deep pit around them came alive.
From the dark fissures and dark rock caves lining the trench walls, dozens of bio-glowing hunting eyes ignited in the black water.
PASSIVE SONAR ALERT: MULTIPLE SPLICER CONTACTS SWARM COMPOSITION: 60x SHARK-CENTIPEDES, 24x GLIDER-VIPERS TARGET VECTOR: 360-DEGREE CONVERGENT ENVELOPE ESTIMATED TIME TO HULL IMPACT: 00:00:18
“They’re coming from all vectors!” Toby shouted, his hands working the sound counter-measure dispensers. “Top, bottom, and flanks! The whole trench is crawling with them!”
The sense assault of ninety-four converging hadal hunting beasts was a study in timed together horror.
Through his Zeiss Loupe, Arthur observed the coordinated swimming patterns of the approaching swarm. These were not random wild animals hunting for food. Their brainstems were linked through a sound command network broadcasting from the sensor buoys. The shark-centipedes were using their segmented hard shell bodies to create a timed together sound interference pattern, masking their single positions behind a wall of high-pitched white noise.
