---Ocean---

---Brunhilda’s perspective---

It’s time to pay the piper…

This is my comeuppance for having been excused from the monster spider hunt(!)

Victor (who’s done all of Miraala’s previous expeditions on his own, being a strong swimmer from a wet part of a wet planet) is still laid up from getting several centilitres of a powerful paralytic stabbed into his neck.

Even if Thran was at 100%, her negative buoyancy meant that she was excused from her planet’s mandatory swimming lessons as a kid and, as a result, never learned to swim.

Xon has several broken ribs right now.

It’s not really Thran or Xon’s job, either… Guess I’m just kind of used to thinking of both of them as part of the team at this point.

It’s just me and Tuun here now (weighed down with ballasts attached to the outside of her suit to make her neutrally buoyant.)

Neither of us are amazing swimmers.

She comes from a frigid planet that was being settled and developed through her childhood and didn’t have ready access to heated indoor swimming pools.

She at least learned at school though.

The Black Cat didn’t have a swimming pool aboard, funnily enough(!)

I only learned to swim in prison, just before I got my diving certification for my Security Officer course!

I readily remember the discomfort and fear I had of deep water into my early adulthood.

Don’t get me wrong though, demon spider vs oceanic reef dive is no contest!

“I’m putting us down over the reef.” announces Twila’s voice “Get ready you three!”

I activate my suit’s watertightness, checking to make sure Tuun’s done the same properly while she checks me.

Unlike her, who’s had to add weight to herself to make sure she sinks, I’m having to be here without the heavy armour I normally wear over my chest and legs and with flippers where I normally wear heavily armoured boots.

It leaves me feeling a little nude!

I clutch my firearm to my chest… the unfamiliar feeling it has with its unrifled, underwater barrel and loaded with flechette ammunition not giving me as much comfort as I’d like(!)

The door opens onto an ocean without the smallest speck of land in sight.

We’re about 100km away from the supercontinent to our West and about 50km from the island that Kas, Mage and Felicity are looking at as a candidate to move that captured monster to, to our North. Both well over the horizon.

The major naval power of the Spider people is on the far side of the continent and there’s a desert peninsular to their South and an icecapped pole to their North, blocking their way here.

Vrakhand settlements are sparser on this end of the continent and the Twigg don’t really sail, so there’s a good chance we’re the first sapients to ever know about this reef or that island!

Miraala manoeuvres her hoverchair to over the water and takes off her collar, exposing her gill slits before stowing the aquarespirator inside the mobility craft.

She begins rotating it forwards to put her upper body horizontal to the water’s surface before sliding out.

The way her long, fishy tail seems to be birthed from the egg shaped device does not put me at ease!

Not giving myself time to think about it, I step forward with a flippered foot and plunge into the briny deep!

Once my head is submerged, I immediately cast around, looking for horrors as Tuun splashes down beside me.

Thankfully, I see none.

The water is not crystal clear.

Field of view is down to what looks like about 35-40m before detail is completely lost to the murk.

Beneath us, half obscured by the biotic haze, is a reef, crowded with alien corals and alien fish.

Miraala, back in her element after more than a week of having to make do with her respirator collar and copious quantities of retention gel, is doing aquabatic somersaults through the water.

“Happy?” I ask, wryly cocking an eyebrow through the polymer of my rebreather mask.

“Exceedingly!” she answers in her flowy sign language, her contentment obvious.

Holding back a sigh and an eyeroll, I proceed downward.

The +3m Mermaid woman easily outaccelerates me and Tuun, treating me to a view of her robust bulge of muscle (where a Human would have a pelvis) powering her through the watercolumn in a (not at all sexual looking(!)) up and down undulation… the way that Terran Whales and Dolphins swim and unlike the way Terran fish do.

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I’m not blushing right now! Shut up!

Early on in my relationship with Dormouse, before her attack of jealousy on Neonesia, I’d’ve said she’d be happy to hear about me noticing another woman like this… I decide not to mention it to her.

I look over to Tuun to get my mind off the Osiyul woman ahead of us.

I can see her face concentrating hard ahead of her, through her mask, her helmet’s ear protrusions still looking a tiny bit silly to my eyes.

Her quadrimanous torso gives her an interesting looking swimming style, her lower arms extending forward under her uppers as they pull back in a double breaststroke.

We hit about 20m deep and the shoals of tiny vertebrate fish dart away to hide in the coral from the three comparatively large creatures descending down on them.

As a general rule, fish look like fish no matter what planet you find them on.

Anything that swims needs to be hydrodynamic and being hydrodynamic ends up making an animal look like a fish.

That being said, there’s still an enormous variety possible in size, shape and colour that does mean fish from the same planet look more like eachother than they do fish from others.

With the exception of lampreys and hagfish (who really look alien) most Terran fish have the look of Terran fish… These guys have the look of Graom-Wakhkortan fish, their scales pigmented mostly with vibrant greens and purples.

At this point I catch sight of a school of long, conical shelled, squiddy creatures, coasting over the reef, swimming (to my mind) backwards.

You know what… this is not so bad…

I can breathe, I’m dry inside my suit, this reef is a little magical… this is definitely preferable to fighting the monster spider.

Miraala floating above a large rock platform (curiously bare of coral) already has her holo out and is furiously scribbling notes in a fluid cursive script, her W shaped pupils darting between the reef and her writing.

She’s a Class 7 (Terran Security Officer 101; know what Class every one of the people you’re in charge of is!) like the Captain, so she’s not so fragile and naïve as she could be but I still need to make sure nothing large enough to hurt her decides to try its luck while she’s distracted with her notetaking.

Things like that 2m long, armoured shark that’s drifting lazily towards her right now(!)

I swim to position myself between the woman and the inquisitive invertebrate.

Unlike the Vrakhand, this thing’s toothshields aren’t hidden behind a pair of fleshy looking lips, they’re bare on the front of its head.

Ten fins line its long serpentine body with the front two limbs being adapted as a set of gripping mandibles, presumably for holding onto its prey.

Something I remember from uni is that land based vertebrates like Humans are not particularly appetising to marine predators who are used to eating fatty/oily/blubbery marine animals and so, when bites happen, it’s typically because they were just investigating the victim.

Their mouths are their main means of interacting with the environment and determining what is and what is not food.

If a great white was attacking you to kill, it would charge up from beneath you at 56kmph and you’d probably never know what hit you(!)

Regardless, I don’t want to receive even an investigatory bite from this guy so, as he drifts towards me, I reach out to the left side of his head (safely clear of his mouth) with my nondominant right hand (my left holding my gun) and give him a firm, redirecting push away.

With a speed that makes my heart skip a beat and my blood adrenaline spike immediately, he darts away through the water before swinging back for me and the Osiyul woman.

I’m briefly terrified into thinking he’s going to go for her (I’m sure she wouldn’t be very nutritious for him but I don’t know how she’d taste) but, to my relief, he makes for me again.

I give him another firm push, redirecting him over my head this time.

He frolics through the water, causing me to understand that this is a fun game to him(!)

“Fascinating!” comes the translated word from the Merwoman who briefly releases her stylus to sign the gesture for it.

I spend the next few minutes desperately trying to maintain situational awareness of my surroundings as I float over this coralless outcropping of the reef, indulging this insistent, playful armoured shark and Miraala takes notes and photos.

Luckily, Tuun’s still got her eyes out, so we hopefully won’t be completely blindsided by anything!

Then, all of a sudden, my aquatic playmate breaks from the game and drifts away into a crag in the reef.

I frown as I see him go.

Not that I’m unhappy he’s done distracting me but… something’s giving me the creeps about how sudden that was…

I look around and see that there are far fewer fish visible on the reef now than there were when we got here and basically none of the larger squid and invertebrate fish…

I turn around to look out into the boundless murk beyond the reef.

At first, I see nothing…

Then, I see something that freezes my blood and sends lightning through my nervous system.

I see the shadow of something absolutely, unfathomably enormous, appearing through the murk!

My mind silent to every issue which is not related to our immediate survival, it takes me a fraction of a second to work out that heading up, back to the ship, is useless.

Miraala might make it but Tuun and I swim too slowly! We’d be totally exposed!

Only one thing for it!

“Guys!” I say, my tone deadly serious “Hide! In the reef! Now!”

I turn and see that Miraala, rather than using the fifth of a second since the command was issued to get a headstart, is just looking at me confused.

“I said NOW!” I hiss, gesturing for the same crag that the shark made for a minute ago and giving her a push towards it.

She breaks from her stupor and darts for the crevice, getting there before Tuun.

I’m the last in and I turn around to the single most horrifying sight I’ve ever seen!

A gigantic pair of shiny, red, metallic looking jaws is barrelling towards us at a terrifying speed!

My mind briefly shows me a flash of them just crashing into the corals protecting us and demolishing them like a derailed monorail train destroying a flimsy building!

Mercifully, the (what looks like) 50 tonne monster reduces its speed and skids up the bare rock where we just were (solving the mystery of what was keeping it coral free).

Eight eyes stare down at us, inaccessible to it in our hiding spot, with an unreadable expression.

The creature’s rounded snout rests on the rock, nearly twice as tall as I am!

There follows what feels like an eternity of us just frozen, staring at one of exactly the horrors of the deep I was apprehensive about running into.

Then, there is a great metallic screech that I’m quickly able to determine is coming from its two massive upper toothshields grinding against one another as they retract away from its single lower one.

The giant mouth (that I could easily stand fully upright inside) opens, revealing four rows of conical teeth, each longer than my hand!

“What’s… what’s it doing?” I ask the other two, gripping tight onto a sturdy feeling piece of coral and getting ready to catch Miraala in case it unleashes some monstrous suction feeding attack that irresistibly sweeps her into its mouth.

“Symbiotic mutualism…” she signs, her tone rendered fascinated.

“What?”

“It’s here to be cleaned…” she says, pointing to the army of tiny fish, tentatively edging forward into the leviathan’s mouth where they begin sucking away at the crevices between its teeth.

I breathe a sigh of relief that it’s apparently not here to hunt and ask “How long will it be before its satisfied with its cleanliness, do you think?”

She signs a negative “No idea… Could be [hours]!” not seeming the slightest bit disturbed by being trapped here for that long.

I sigh “Guess we should let Twila know that we’re going to be a bit delayed then… while giving her a bollocking for the lack of a headsup on that(!)”