The inside of Drainage Conduit Beta was an underground sewer of ancient proportions.
Fourteen meters in width, the circular tunnel was forged from linked rings of dark star-iron, engineered to channel millions of gallons of living runoff from the nursery pools above. But decades of sub-ice-slow solitude and the total breach of 2082 had turned the drainage system into a stale, lightless swamp.
Arthur waded through knee-deep amniotic slush, his magnetic boots sinking into a thick, jelly-like settled mud that smelled of decaying kelp, stone sulfur, and frozen formaldehyde.
The surrounding heat hovered at minus eighteen degrees. The liquid was prevented from freezing solid only by the intense, pulsing concentration of dissolved Zone 5 aether that radiated from the walls:
“Cell Gamma, take point,” Arthur ordered quietly through the squad link. “Vesper, scout the waterline. Echo, keep the time drag active. I don’t want anything latching onto our boots from the sludge.”
Vesper prowled along a narrow upkeep ledge running two feet above the water level, her sleek white body moving with ghost-like silence. Her whiskers twitched continuously as her heightened hungry senses filtered the dripping echoes of the pipe.
Behind her, Echo’s pink head protruded from his chest flask. His outer gills glowed with steady turquoise soft glow. The axolotl generated a low-intensity time slowdown field that extended five yards around Arthur’s legs. Any liquid or debris that entered the field had its thickness multiplied tenfold. That turned sudden aquatic lunges into slow-motion crawls.
