Empire of Lies (Farsight Book 2) by Phil Kelly

Author:Phil Kelly [Kelly, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

SALASH’HEI

Farsight thanked the genius of the earth caste for the tenth time that day. His Coldstar sunk ever lower into the pitch-black oceans of Salash’hei, triggering memories of Vior’los’ own deep and tropical seas. Not only had the fio made refinements to their ZFR drives that had borne him from one enclave world to another in record time, they had also provided the technology needed to plumb the deepest oceans in the entire sector.

The oceanic spread of Vior’los was shallow by comparison to that of Salash’hei, for the depths of the water planet reached down for miles. A pressure warning was steel grey on his environment suite, reddening gradually to full alert as the Coldstar sank further still.

The seismic fibrillator nodes he had mag-tethered to his XV8’s waist acted like the weight belt of an ancestral por pearl diver. In conjunction with the sheer heaviness of the battlesuit and the ballast of water he had taken into his purge cells, they were enough to bear him downwards at speed. It had got very dark, very quickly, to the point that even his blacksun filter was struggling to provide a picture of the sea around him. He had switched to sonar imaging instead, and the ghostly forms of pelagic fish and snaking ocean-serpents flickered on his distribution suite. Now and again, he heard the deep, mournful cry of a Salash’heian leviathan roaming the depths.

Watching his pressure alert flicker bright red, Farsight was beginning to fear that the Coldstar’s hull would split when a proximity alert sounded. Its bip-bip-bip increased in tempo until he settled on the seabed amidst a cloud of silt. Thermal designators blossomed over the sonic landscape across his distribution suite, showing the undersea topography that O’Vesa’s colleague Worldshaper had told him was key to his plan. He turned slowly, and the informationals revealed a network of thick cracks in the seabed, disguised somewhat by layers of silt but nonetheless clearly defined.

Extending a hand from the XV8’s right arm, Farsight detached one of the seismic fibrillators and placed it on a hard shelf of rock, mag-spiking it to the iron ore of the underlying mineral structure with a controlled pulse of electromagnetic energy. It was an earth caste technique he had once had O’Vesa describe to him, but down here, there were none to disapprove of it. Walking slowly, carefully, along the undersea ridge, he found another viable point and set in place another of the flat discs.

Pre-prepared fio subroutines rippled along his data screens, guiding his progress. By cross-referencing them with the geological samples from the punch-cylinders he extruded from the battlesuit’s heels, and with the Coldstar’s processors doing the rest, the unstitching of the tectonic fault line was as simple as deploying the large, flat discs at the requisite points.

After several decs of slow, methodical work, the deed was done. Farsight ran a finger along the activation bar attached to the fibrillator chain, his sensor antenna sending out the precise frequency that would start the process. He was rewarded almost immediately with a deep, subsonic rhythm, pounding and insistent.

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