Tim Akers - Dead of Veridon

"Your girlfriend never came back," he yelled, so I could hear through the thick faceplate.

"Not my girlfriend. And she knows what she needs to do. I trust her." I checked the gauges that lined the collar under my chin. "What are you going to do, while we're in there?"

"Stay out of the way," Valentine said. "Today seems like a good day for a cruise up the river."

"So you fish me out of the river, demand that I accept your assistance, then once we have a plan together you're going to drop me back in the water and head up the river to hide."

"'Hide' is a tricky word. I'm staying clear of the potential damage, Jacob."

"Right," I said. My checks were done. There was nothing left but to get into the river. "Well, Valentine, let me be the first to say that I can appreciate a little situational cowardice."

I stepped into the water and sank, fast and straight. Again, those ghost faces came out of the water. Vaunt, and his smiling, popcorn teeth. Hands gripped the heavily armored shoulders of my suit and pulled me effortlessly forward, into the river. Into the dark.

The Mother Fehn was farther down the river than I expected. Quite near the waterfall, in fact. Near enough that I was nervous. The current tugged at my suit, the great mass of water rushing over me, dragging silt and debris along the river bottom like a sandstorm. Vaunt and his companions would only take me so far. Abruptly, their hands were gone and I was drifting in the current. I looked back and saw their rapidly receding forms. I panicked.

What if they just brought me out here and dropped me in the current? Valentine wasn't tracking my progress. There was no way for him to know that I failed because his associates dropped me off the waterfall, rather than because I took a bullet in some subterranean chamber or something. Maybe I shouldn't have told them that I might have to kill the Mother. My mistake.

The water here was much darker, the silt stirred up by the current clouding my vision. The lights on my helmet were nothing more than cones of cloud in front of my face. It was like walking through a fire. I quickly lost all sense of up or down. All I could tell was that I was falling forward, ever forward, the waterfall sucking me down to its horrible mouth.

My boot bounced off something hard, and I spun head over heels. A brief flash of stone and iron, then I was past it. I thrashed my arms, trying desperately to sink to the bottom of the river, but I could no longer tell which way that was. I finally got my feet aligned to the direction of the current. This meant I was either facing straight down, or straight up. Or sideways, I suppose. I was lost. Completely lost.

Faces flittered past my lights. Crushed heads, mouths gaping in horror, teeth bright in the fog of silt and sludge. I grabbed out for them, and my fingers crushed them like they were china-delicate. The bones turned to dust and joined the current, falling down. I scissored my legs and found purchase. Like a strongman towing a train, I strained against my feet, leaning forward, slipping in the raging current. My hands and feet found the river floor. It was littered with bodies that were barely husks. Ribs and skulls burst when I touched them, only their skin left. The hollow husks of beetles burst out from the crushed remains, slipping downstream like bullets. I was still losing ground, barely able to find any sort of purchase on this terrain. My hands were digging through the hollow remains of the Fehn like plows. Their skin was soft under my hands, and no matter how deeply I thrust into them, all I found were more bodies, more yielding skulls, more beetles. The river was choked with the dead.

Just as I was making enough traction to slow down, my feet fell off the edge. I looked back, expecting to see the bright edge of the waterfall. But no, the current wasn't that strong, not yet. I was on some kind of ledge, the river bed falling away for some distance before slowly sloping up. The water was clearer here. Before I could figure out what was going on I was over the ledge and in open water again. The current eddied down and I sank, the force of the water driving me into the pit. I landed flat, driving the air out of me. I gasped into the burning hot air of the suit, trying to choke down even a breath of that forge. Slowly my breathing calmed, and I forced myself to my hands and knees.

The floor here was just as morbid as it had been before the gap. Crushed bodies around me, the hollow shells of the Fehn scattering from my impact. They were all lying face up, arms reaching back upriver. I looked up, and the beams of my lights played off an iron door, round and black, inset below the ridge I had just fallen over. There was almost no turbulence here, despite the current all around. Unnatural. The Fehn lay here in perfect, dead, peace. They were all reaching for that door, the ones closest to it even dying with their fingers scratching at its cold metal. Trying to get in, trying to get away from the river, from the virus I had apparently unleashed upon them.

Trying to get back to the Mother.

This part I hadn't really planned for. Since the Mother was apparently so ancient, I imagined her living in some cave, deep beneath the river. Hadn't expected something quite so… technological. And this door was some serious technology. There were muted panes of frosted glass in the center, a circular window cut into slices like a pie, that undulated with warm blue light. Something like a piano keyboard lay flush beneath the pie. Everything looked clean and new, not as if it had been lying at the bottom of a river for the last dozen generations. Longer, probably. Unless Crane did something to clean them when he got here. I looked around at all the dead Fehn. No, this door was shut during the attack. Probably as soon as the Mother figured out what was going on, before these Fehn could get inside. Some kind of emergency procedure, like the pressure doors in warships. But if that was true, and Valentine's companion Fehn had somehow been in communication with those inside after the attack, only to lose contact later… how did Crane get in there? Assuming he was in here at all, that I wasn't wasting my time down here while Camilla picked the city apart up top.

I rested my hand against the door. Valentine said that Crane got access to the Mother because he controlled some critical mass of the Fehn, what I had taken to calling the cog-dead. I thought about the rows of them standing along the shoreline beneath Water Street. Maybe I was wrong about them. Maybe they weren't guarding the shoreline, but rather projecting Crane's consciousness into the river. Into this bunker, deep beneath the Reine.

There was a sudden vibration in the door. I jerked my hand back, even though I could barely feel the movement through the iron suit. As soon as I was out of contact with the door, the vibration stopped. Carefully, I returned my hand. The vibration started up again. It was like the scratching of a record, the sound you might hear if a towel was stuffed down the speaker horn. I closed my eyes and listened.

A voice. Voices. It was Crane. I remembered that whenever we were near a possession, his voice would come scratching through those pipes. Which meant he was either in there, projecting out, or he was somewhere else, broadcasting into the bunker.

Neither of which mattered, if I couldn't get this door open.

Traveling hand over hand, I pulled myself along the edge of the door to see if there was a seam between the metal and the rock. In the suit it was impossible to get any tactile sense of my surroundings, but it seemed like the join was smooth. As my hands drifted over the door the vibration-voices continued. I paused when it seemed like they were getting louder. Sure enough, the higher I went, the louder the voices and the clearer their words. By the time I got to the top of the door, the words were clear enough for me to be sure it was Crane talking. Crane, and something else that spoke in perfect monotone. I couldn't understand the nature of their conversation. Something about servitors, and initiation sequences.