No one in Karth Vire gave orders to go deeper anymore. Not since the incident on 814…
Not after the first full companies disappeared without signal, without wreckage, without even residue. The lower hive was no longer classified under battlefield, it had been designated as a Non-Recoverable asset Territory.
That did not stop the Guild Alliance Defense Force. It only changed how they entered. They sent Descent Team Kappa-12.
"Confirm anchor points," Captain Luro snapped. His voice was tinny, filtered through the rebreather of a Mk.IV Guild-pattern Hazard Suit.
"Anchors set, Captain," the tech-sergeant replied, slamming a magnetic spike into the rusted high tensile grade industrial plate of the shaft's lip.
"Tether's green 3 klicks of wire. If you go deeper than that, you're on your own."
Luro stood at the edge of the descent shaft. Below him, the walls opened into an abyss that reminded one of a digestive tract. The air rising from the depths tasted of copper and something sickly sweet, like rotting jasmine.
"We go to level marker Sigma-9," Luro told his squad.
Twelve men, clad in overlapping plates of reinforced ceramic and steel. Two carried heavy chemical-throwers. One was a witch asset, a woman whose eyes were covered by a blindfold on loan from the Ziggly Mex guild.
"We confirm anomaly growth. We collect the data-slugs and leave. I don't need heros."
They stepped into the void.
Their decent was slow with the assistance of gravity they passed the midway point very quickly. Soon the normal look of the hive city began to change…
The walls changed, they softened, steel bulkheads had become bulbous, rounded like the interior of a seashell. Pipes turned to veins as they pulse under the walls with breath.
They carry a viscous, bioluminescent sludge that throbbed in time with a heartbeat Captain Luro could feel in his own chest.
"Log-entry, level Alpha-Zero. Commencing descent" Luro whispered into his vox-link.
"The structure is undergoing... biological synthesis."
At sixty meters, the witch gasped. "The saturation... it's thick. Like oil in the air. Something is bleeding through from the Other-Space."
"Hold your nerve," Luro commanded.
At eighty meters, they saw the first Integrated.
It was a woman, or had been. She was fused into a junction box. Her ribs had been cracked open and elongated, woven into the structural supports of the wall. Her spine had become a data-conduit, her vertebrae glistening with wet, neural-fiber.
As the team descended past her she followed them with her head as her eyes were missing from the sockets.
"nEarEr," she rasped.
"nEarEr... nEarEr... to the wEavInG."
"Ignore her," Luro growled, though his hand shook on his rail-rifle.
"Drop speed constant, and do not look at the walls.."
The tether finally reached their intended floor. As the troopers dropped onto the platform of sigma-9, what they stepped on wasn't a floor. It felt warm even through their boots, flesh and metal combined, not as separate but as one thing.
The massive cooling towers of the district had been transformed into pillars of fused corpses. Thousands of bodies integrated into the very structure of the hive, arms formed the struts, femurs formed the rafters.
"Thermal scan," Luro ordered.
"Captain... there are no readings." The sensor-tech looked at his screen and began to hyperventilate.
"Explain."
"Internal ambient is locked at thirty-seve…." the tech now almost shouting
"...the walls, the air, the floor, the ceiling. There is no 'environment' anymore. The Hive is breathing, Luro, and WE'RE INSIDE IT" by the end the tech's eyes were bulging, viens pulsing on his forehead, and screamed at the top of his lungs.
The witch stepped forward, her blindfold smoking as her power flared.
"It's not just a lung, Luro. The Guild's workers... their brains are being networked. The anomaly is building a bio-computer the size of a city."
The chamber responded to her words. A low growl sounded out in response. She felt like the building was mocking her, it made her skiin crawl
"Interlocking fields!" Luro roared.
The floor split, with a slit opening on the floor with any warning or process a trooper fell in and vanished instantly. There was no scream, only the sound of wet snapping and teeth grinding bones was heared.
"Contact! 360 degrees!"
Figures emerged from the walls. They were workers, some were half-absorbed into the Hive, dragging long trails of intestines that acted like sensory feelers.
Their faces were frozen in expressions of blissful vacancy. Their limbs elongating like pulled taffy, sharpening into claws and spikes.
"Burn them!" Luro screamed.
Promethium washed over the advancing tide as flesh bubbled and charred, but the factory workers didn't stop.
They walked through the fire, their melting skin revealing the silver, machinery beneath. Even machinery should not be able to withstand this level of heat. Something was controlling this situation, a control node that needed to be eliminated.
"Egress! Recover the line! Lift! LIFT!"
The tether tensed up as Captain Luro and half his squad were pulled upward. But would what they saw let them leave as they liked…
…the answer is no. grabbing hands massed together and pounced toward them. A wave of energy washed over the group as the witch screamed. Her body froze in place as her blood and thought paused with her.
Her eyes burned with fire as blood leaked from he eyes. She had tried to hold out against the wave of energy, causing the very blood vessles in his eyes and brain to burst.
"They... they want us to stay..." the witch choked out. "They want us... to be the memory..."
Luro hit the upper platform, three levels up alone. He looked down and saw only a flat, seamless slab of pulsing metal where the shaft had been. The screams of his men were muffled, then silenced.
Yet a sound made its way to his ears, one that made Luro feel like he is the source of a great joke being told. Meanwhile deep within the heart of the sealed chamber, the biomass began to churn.
The deaths of the Kappa-12 squad provided a fresh infusion of neural energy. The 'Weaving' had enough so it began to assemble its centerpiece.
It used the memories of the dead, pulling a name from a dying brain. It pulled a face from a fading dream. And finally a drop of blood that had been gestating it for all this while completely integrated into it.
A pulse of energy washed out with it at the center.
Slowly, a shape rose from the floor, its ribs knitted together from discarded bone, muscle fibers wove themselves around a spine of pure, distorted silver.
Then the head was formed.
It was a face that has funtioned under the guild supervision for many years. A supervisor, a man who has done what the guild asked of him. A man onces known as Malcilius Nox…
"kHOras vEyL….i am…kHOras vEyL…kHOras vEyL... the name of the new song"
It spoke these word with a horse groan. He has been reborn to change. What once was, will be no longer. Then he tilted his head, with his opened eyes that burned with a cold, violet light, light that could only come from the changer
"Jorren, Jorren…who are you to reject the gifts of the gods. He offered you everything, your mother and i would not have had to suffer under the thumb of the…GUILDS"
The air simmered as he spoke, and at the mention of the guilds, lightning cracked within the chamber, burning through the flesh computer.
"You will return to the cradle, little one. The Master calls."
The mouth opened, and a sound that was half-static, half-human sigh escaped. It smiled. The ascension was nearly complete. Soon, the planet would rid itself of the ignorant and join our lord in the labrinth.
Far above, in the sterile, gold-leafed corridors of the High Spire, Jorren Nox stopped.
He was still trying to understand how would be able to find the guild master who had hidden himself in his vaults. Right now he was searching through business records of the guild to locate any place he might have built the hide out.
He has seen so much death that searching through the remains of dead people no longer phased him.
Taren on the another hand was hunched over in the corner relieving himself of the rations he had just consumed. Then they both felt it, Jorren more than Taren. A psychic wave that washed over the entire hive city, and maybe more
"We are out of time" Jorren said.