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[X] Run for the coral reef

The sub changes course rapidly, not yet with a destination in mind but just moving away from where the initial detection was made. On the screen you watch as the Ekranoplan comes in. You can imagine it clearly. The alien shape of the GEV racing across the water. The crew neurally wired into its command system. Hunting.

"The Ekranoplan is staying with us."

"Point defense package is active. Passive sensors only."

"Head for the coral reef. The less time we spend exposed the better. We'll lose them there and continue."

Diraen grips hold of the clarity of your commands and the submarine moves with tangible relief. Or maybe it's just your own sense of having a grip on the situation again. A quiet pervades the crew chambers, this one not from the tension of betrayal but the simple psychology of being under stealth. It's not really rational - you'd have to make an awful lot of noise to get it past the hull's buffers in silent mode - but standard practice is to let these habits play out rather than pursue a false perfection. For people to think alongside everything they do 'can I do this quietly' is a good way to avoid slips.

"Enemy continuing course change," Celebrian, running sensors says "They are converging on our vector. Active ping.

"It's a Puffin." You say. A very modern model mostly only accessible to Chrysanthemum affiliates. "They probably have a Chrysanthemum Remote Resonance Array. It'll lose us when we hit the complex environment of the reef." Then, to have something to say. "Reizay, can you find the network trail from the Ekrano to the sub?"

"Already looking. I think they're using satellite relay though. It must have a wicked lag time but it stopsus finding the hunter-killer."

Too much to imagine that your enemy would make a sloppy mistake. You join the tense silence, willing yourself closer, trying to drag the outer polyps of the forest to you by sheer will. In the engineering section, Lanaiatte is mouthing a prayer to Diana, the prayer of the hunted prey. And then, with seeming suddenness, you're within them. Spindly outer reaches that envelop you as you plunge into the depths and their welcome opacity. Soon the reef is all you see.

The fractals of the coral produce a continuous nesting of scales. Cavities defined by branches through which the submersible picks a slowly curving route, breaking its outline in medium upon medium on the calcinated flesh. For a moment, in the shifting colours of the spindles and layers around you, you think you see the Diplomat, and flinch away, but it passes. Alex didn't move.

The reef is inhabited. Big predatory fish analogues, moving in hunter groups coordinated by light pulses, large balloon shaped animals that adjust their depth with gas venting, even huge, sinister looking leviathans that propel themselves with great tail strokes. Strangest of all are beings that look quite like the Nereidi, with almost humanoid top parts and waves of tentacles behind. Perhaps some ancestor or offshoot or descendant. They do not pay the sub any attention.

It's a delicate task not to disturb the undersea forest too much, or not in a way that will stand out from the rest of its motion, but it's still better than the void. Pseudofish flinch away when they see you emerge from countermeasures far later than they would have thought possible for such a large creature, but they themselves and all their predators and prey are part of the same dance of secrecy. A continuous one that you are only guest-starring in. So they conceal their own alarm at your concealment, and your drifting vanishes in the noise of the reef.

It would be nice to stop and take it in but that isn't possible. Above you, the ekranoplan's shadow crosses the shimmering sky. The hunt is on.

"Do they have us localised?" Luya asks.

"I don't think so." Reizay says. "They just know we went into the coral. Or they're holding us here so the hunter-killer can get us."

There's the bleep of an alarm. "Fish in the water! She's launched!"

"They're going Cobra. They don't have our location."

Twin streams of drones emerge from the ekranoplan and split and spray over the reef, first in neat geometries parcelling neutral space and then more and more chaotically as they approach the coral and align themselves to the details of its arrangement. No countermeasures, because why would they? They want you to shoot.

"New subsurface contact! Multiple new contacts. Here's that ECHO CHAMBER sub."

The big submarine pulls over the top of the forest, with its own drone swarm. The biggest predator in the sea, dwarfing even the largest of the sea monsters here, sublimely unconcerned with anything you might do as it joins the hunt.

You head deeper. Something you hadn't quite appreciated before was how deep the reef goes. There's no hard border with the rock, just a porous boundary beyond which voids become the exception rather than the rule. But they're still cavernous, and in fact remain so in violation of the reef's scaling logic. There's a kind of structure down there. It's hard to get a clear view without giving away your position, but the enemy makes your job a little easier when, free of your constraints, they begin to carve open the coral. Seismic charges and arc-en-ciel cutters fill the reef with alarm and vibrations that will be revealing to their operators much more of its geometry, and which your own Reizay and Liya grip with sudden glee for the use of their own maps. You're not so gleeful.

Whoever is running the job in the Ekranoplan knows her work. The drones are operating as a slowly tightening noose that you just can't slip. You make several attempts to clear toward the edge of the zone and always find yourself driven back inward, toward the ECHO CHAMBER submarine.

"Anyone have any ideas?" You ask.

"I think we could fit into one of the caves." Diraen says.

"If the roof collapses we'll be trapped in there." Mirareki murmurs.

"We're trapped now," says Diraen. "If we go out into clear water."

"Do it, Diraen."

"Say, Celebrian, do you think that this'll count towards my master level sub-piloting certificate?" asks Diraen as she feathers the sub's engines and drops you into one of the caves. Reizay reels out a set of drones, extended back to you by flickering beams of laser light towards the outer edge of the cave. "Woh. What the fuck?"

The cave extends away below, not just an cave by an entire tunnel system, extending off under the rock.

"Did you pick this up on the scan?" You ask Reizay.

"No way." Liya answers. "This has to be ancient Nereidi make. It's fully baffled, hard to detect. Probably another part of the survival systems for whatever happened to their planet."

The submarine's combat system beeps again. "Enemy weapon launch."

"What the hell?" Celebrian yelps. "How'd they track us?"

"Point defense is up and rolling. No solution. I'll have to– wait, what the hell?"

You al stare at the weapon tracks. They're not coming at you at all. They're aimed at another point on the reef. A full spread of weapons, designed to kill, not flush out.

There's a shudder as the sea trembles with the strikes. Both ECHO CHAMBER units are already launching a second wave. "What the hell–" Mirareki asks. T

The computer answers: "Hostile cloaking field collapsing." The new contact is saucer shaped, a giant disk, larger even than the hunter-killer. It manoeuvres free of its discarded camouflage, letting the torpedoes burst across the gossamer shield around it. In turn, it pops out a series of brightly glowing projectiles which race towards the surface. The Ekranoplan pops decoys and pulls into a hard evasion as the sky fills with fire.

"A Chakram." Luyu says. "That's a Riverine combat ship." The thought fires your consciousness and you flash on a memory. The River. The largest alien society that humanity has encountered. A sprawling and rivalrous array of nations that use the logic of value to intermediate the uncountable diversity of the stars. Traders and slavers. Legend has it they were the same people who traded for human souls with the corrupt elders of Earth and provoked the Exile. Their natural territory is defined by the long band of FTL fast-zone that ends in the Garden, but they have never settled to natural borders. (Not for themselves. They have many borders for others.)

Sometimes they have dominated the Garden and ruled their concessions like queens. Other times vast wars have been fought. Now is a middle phase. When either side could–

You blink, feeling Alex's hand steering you back to the present, out of the cul de sac of your own disconnected memoires. She needs you paying attention.

You knew the River were supplying the Nereidi with advanced weapons but the presence of actual River military vessels is something else entirely. ECHO CHAMBER apparently thinks so too, as your repeater for Reizay's board lights up with dozens of incoming signals. The water steams and bubbles as the alien vessel spits out a wave of red and green plasma into the wave of incoming munitions.

A flash of white. A drop harpoon with its aura still hot from the atmosphere pierces the water. Not from the Ekranoplan, from an orbital weapon. The Saucer shudders as the gravity warhead detonates, but fires again, ignoring the racing Puffin to engage the weapons satellite. The hunter-killer sees an opening and pulls in for its own shot, then is yanked aside. The shimmering distortion of a tractor beam is extending from one of the tunnel mouths, pulling the hunter-killer in and down. The Chakram continues to manoeuvre and shoot, one blast bomb after another whipping up on a series of perfect ninety degree corners.

Reizay glances up at your projection next to her. "There's River signals in the tunnels. I think they might have some kind of a base in, well, maybe some kind of nexus or crossroads down there. If I'm interpreting this right. There must be another ship, or maybe even a whole outpost down there." She sends you a map of recorded signals. The entire reef and far beyond it are full of tunnels, some small enough that it would be claustrophobic for you to get through them, others large enough that the Chakram could fit.

"It's a shame." Diraen says. "We could use these tunnels to get the hell out of here without getting shot up by ECHO CHAMBER. They're going to bring everything they can to kill a Chakram."

Luyu frowns. "I kind of want to take a look at that base at the tunnel nexus. This is a big deployment and I want to know what they're doing. They weren't expecting to get randomly rumbled, their tits will be hanging right out."

"I'm also curious," says Alex in your head.

"There are side tunnels that might bypass the nexus too." Liya pipes up, then frowns. "But they won't be unguarded.."

"Or we could just use all this distraction to run." Selko says. "Though I don't really fancy that with all the ordinance being thrown around up there… and the tractor beam."

"Not to mention," says Luyu, "there'll be two sets of eyes looking for hostiles, and we won't be able to run as silent. But if we do slip we'll be out quickly."

[ ] Make a run across the reef outside the tunnels, and get clear quickly despite the risks
[ ] Try to use the side passages to bypass the River base at the tunnel nexus
[ ] Hide here and wait the battle out, or at least move off when everyone is more distracted
[ ] Send some eyes closer to the nexus to get a look at what the River are up to, then possibly send in a team if it looks viable.