[center][h2][b]Ilshar Ard’sabekh[/b][/h2][/center]


After the tense moments in the corner of the access room and the hurried rush through its door, what lay beyond struck Ilshar with an almost stupefying sense of eerie familiarity. If the chasmic scavengers fighting over their prize had been reminiscent of the sights of a sump-world, the corridor was like stepping back in time outright. The last traces of etheric-pull strain still lingering on the edges of his mind faded in the face of a moment’s genuine wonder. The damp, marshy ground underfoot, the putrid, drooping boughs, the foul undergrowth came together in a place whose kind he had had few occasions to visit for too many years now. Ghostly echoes of biosynaptic transmissions seemed as if designed to make him feel at home for once.

Two things broke the illusion - the starkly unnatural cyan colour that hung over everything, and the fact that nothing like this should have existed on a space station.

He did not need these reminders, however, to keep in mind a very basic truth - a swamp was a dangerous place. The shifting fog, disturbed by the movement of large bodies, had been a first warning, and Ilshar was already snapping up his weapon’s barrel when the hybrid monstrosity landed from above. King’s warning came before he could fire. In a moment, he swallowed his front-facing eyes into the outer layers of his flesh, a safer optical defense than anything his aged helmet’s visor could provide. Fully blinding himself like this was a risky move when hostels were nearby, but it was still safer than risking nerve damage from whatever esoteric flashbang that damned hologram was pulling out.

In those few sightless seconds, Ilshar’s other senses were free to focus on the ambient squirming of the ether field. If not for the absence of a physical nest-interface, he could almost have thought he was plugged into a data-station, though one that contained only gibberish scrap-code. The only patterns that emerged from it were directional, and they said nothing good. If the by now familiar pink vapour-trace meant anything, the giant amalgam - and the others he could now hear stirring around - were nothing but the appendages of the swamp’s real threat, like the battered corpse had been for the spheroid entity.

Sight returned. It had been short enough for repositioning to be unnecessary. Ilshar pressed the trigger, sending a semiautomatic burst into the fused corpse-mass, but left his finger uncoiled after it.

[b]“A central chasm-mind must be controlling these things,”[/b] he voiced, taking a step back, [b]“We’ll have better chances if we can disrupt it.”[/b]

Cyber-warfare had never been one of his specialties, but it did not take an expert to know commands that could sabotage a system from within. The Chasm presence’s similarity to a tarrhaidim data-sphere might make it vulnerable to an infotech attack if it was modulated through the ether. It was the sort of experimental technique it would have been foolhardy to try under fire, but the carcass-thralls’ attention was luckily elsewhere for now. Spanning short-lived neural bridges between his ether glands and the interface ports built into his limbs, Ilshar sent out quick, short pulses into the slithering mass of pseudodata all around, mimicking a disruptive code sequence. An engineer could perhaps have done more with an opportunity like this, but as the Nexus would have it, Ilshar would have to do.