The most recent damage assessments have confirmed that despite initial destruction from nuclear strikes, enemy-occupied areas are, for lack of better description, reverting to a previous physical state. Destroyed alien structures and human buildings are anomalously reassembling themselves, and radiation from fallout is decreasing via an unknown mechanism. It is the Department's assessment that long-ranged strategic nuclear weaponry is at best only useful for temporarily suppressing the enemy.
Department of Defense Report on Effectiveness of Strategic Weapons on Chromatic Entity Infection Regions, 2024
Chapter 2
The tunnel was breathing.
It wasn't something humans could detect. Snow and the other Thaumata could pick it up in their lattice, a tiny pressure against the skin and organs and metallic internal construction. A slight amount of force pushing out and then pulling back in toward the light deeper in at the heart of the nest. The chromacrystal that protected her from Delirium also put her in tune with the life patterns of the Color.
"That's a fun-f*cking-feeling," Claymore rasped. "Never going to get used to that pulling sensation on my lungs."
They advanced down the rough-hewn passage, weapons shouldered and ready to fire. Snow's eyes whirred and clicked faintly as she switched between normal and thermal modes.
The team wore their suppression cloaks up with hoods over their helmets. A thin layer of chromacrystal was woven into the camouflage fabric to break up their shapes to the Color's senses. It worked reasonably against the aliens, especially inside places infested by them, but was less useful against human eyes unless they went still.
There wasn't any movement in the passage, and aside from the phantom air sensation of whatever lurked down below. Snow didn't spot anything holding still either, but that didn't put her at ease. Everything about this place was setting off alarms in her mind.
Twenty meters down the passage began to level out but also twist slightly to the left. The pale light reflected off of cool mist that hung low at knee height, and the temperature began dropping. Wisps of glowing light drifted between the blue and green crystals growing out of the cavern walls, bits of pseudo-life that moved in arcs too smooth and perfectly curved to be natural. The tiny particles seemed deeper than they should have been, and if one spent too long staring at one it would stop, and the depths would welcome whoever gazed upon them.
Snow and her team knew better than to look too close.
"It's been down here a while," Whisper murmured, and Hatchback nodded.
"Began colonizing," she grunted. "Watch for spine growths or more Possessed."
The volume of illuminated crystal tumors grew with every meter, and hard growths rooted them to the stone, resembling a mixture of carapace and volcanic rock. The blisters were large enough that the Thaumata had to skirt furtively around them, with the crystals themselves rising up to chest height.
Another couple of minutes down, Snow saw the passage abruptly turn to the right, a rocky corner festooned with glittering, glowing crystals. The light particles were growing more numerous, clustering at the sharp bend in the passageway. Snow held up a hand to signal the others to halt, and she drew a handheld scanner from a chest pouch. The Scout edged up to the sharp curving bend, activated the scanner's camera, and held it out. As she rounded the bend, she saw what she feared.
Twenty meters down the passage was the first spine mound. It was slowly undulating, akin to a sleeping beast, covered in ferrous carapace with a pale green light leaking from seams in the biological armor. It was hard to see among the other glowing crystals throughout the passage. Switching to thermals didn't help; the mound matched the cool ambient temperature exactly.
She looked closely, but the tiny illuminated wisps made it hard to pick out the exact locations of other mounds. Snow suspected at least two more, spread out along the passage's walls. More importantly, the cavern floor right where the bend turned was mostly covered with smaller hand-sized crystal growths, which were densely packed enough that anyone entering would have to pick their steps carefully.
Multiple defensive emplacements set up to cover a corner with a cleared killing field and no cover.
The Color understood what worked.
Snow relayed the ambush position back to the squad as they gathered behind her. Hatchback's standard-issue scowl remained unchanged. There wasn't any option but through, but three spine mounds were not to be taken lightly.
"Load armor-piercing," she ordered. "Take them hard and fast."
She glanced to Javelin, who took another Eraser launcher off his back and adjusted the safety. The other Thaumata were swapping to magazines with red-tipped ammunition and sliding them into their weapons.
As they did so, Snow felt that hint of chilly nostalgia again, and frowned. She edged back up to the bend and took out her scanner. Something about the layout of those spine mounds was nagging her.
"Jav, kill the one on the ground, closest to us," Hatchback was saying. Snow leaned up to the corner, and on impulse she pulled her hood tight over her helmet and then stuck her head around to look at the spine mounds with her own eyes.
She zoomed in, not on the visible mounds, but above them. She switched between low light and thermal modes, looking carefully. The crystals were thicker and longer the further down the tunnel she looked, but as she scanned them, there was an irregularity. A gap that would allow a clear line of fire from a spot in the ceiling. Hard to spot, especially if one were distracted by the more visible mounds closer in.
"Snow?" Hatchback called. "Something wrong?"
She pulled back.
"There's a fourth mound further back," she warned. "Concealed." She frowned, shaking her head. That feeling of familiarity came back again. She'd seen this before, but couldn't place precisely where.
"Sneaky," Cutter said, her mouth quirking up in a slight grin. "If we target the visible mounds, the hidden one further back can shoot us. Didn't expect that out of a Leshy or Behemoth nest."
Color strains were divided up based on a number of factors, including location, behaviors, tactics, and the methods they xenoformed the planet to suit their needs. This one had been using ambush-focused behaviors so far, and that bothered Snow. The three Norway strains they knew of - Leshy, Behemoth, and Koschei - were far more aggressive.
"This could be a new mutation," Snow said as she swapped to armor-piercing rounds. "Or an offshoot of a different one from the Norway variants."
Javelin frowned as she was speaking.
"I know that look, Snow," he said. "That paranoid Scout brain of yours is thinking too hard."
"Hopefully," she said with a shrug.
"Leave figuring out the strain for intel," Hatchback stated, her standard-issue scowl unwavering. "Pop chroma-smoke. Jav, take out the rear spine mound with that Eraser. Then we take the others with grenades."
Snow reached up to her tactical vest and pulled out a fist-sized cylinder. It looked similar to a conventional smoke grenade, save for a slot on the bottom which matched the plugs that the Thaumata used to connect their spectra-cores to their focus blades.
"Who's got the uptime to spare?" Claymore asked, and Snow concentrated for a moment on her spectra-core. The act was similar to a diagnostic query for a computer, but she wasn't entirely mechanical so the analogy wasn't perfect. No screen appeared before her to report the results, just a general impression on the core's state.
"Hundred eighty-three hours," she replied. A little over a week of uptime remaining before she would need to go in for core maintenance. The others reported similar, but with lower numbers, so it fell to Snow to charge the chroma-smoke grenade. She connected the slot on the grenade to the plug on the side of her armor, which itself connected to a socket on the side of her body, just above where the kidneys would be on a human.
There was an unpleasant tugging sensation in the center of her chest where the spectra-core sat right next to her synthetic heart, and the beats quickened when the disorientation struck. Chromatic power, the same energy that their enemies used, flowed down through fiber and crystal cabling that intertwined with titanium bones and organic blood vessels, and entered the smoke grenade to charge the ultra-fine compressed alien dust inside.
She glanced down at the grenade, which now housed an hour of her lifetime in it.
"Charged," she reported as the others readied their weapons.
"Execute," Hatchback ordered.
***
The group of spine mounds didn't respond as the smoke grenade flew around the corner. At least, not at first. But as the grenade passed over the cleared killing field, the trio of closer mounds erupted.
Green light spilled over the passage. Crustacean-like armor plates rose up in riot barricades across the rocky corridor while spiny appendages tipped with malformed bulbous masses of crystalline spines uncoiled behind the mounds. In an instant the silent passage became a slithering, glowing garden of carapace and murderous thorns that pointed toward the killbox.
Finger-length spikes of bright green crystal flashed down the passage, chasing the grenade as it arched through the air. Most of the spines missed, hitting the far wall hard enough to send stone shrapnel flying. But one spike did hit the grenade, detonating the cylinder.
A typical smoke grenade created an expanding opaque cloud to obscure movement, but the chroma-smoke grenade detonated violently, expelling a rainbow-hued stormcloud that filled the passage. Streams and bolts of flickering, rapidly-changing color flew through the smoke.
The spine mounds abruptly ceased fire, their tendrils dipping in hesitation at the confusing display in front of them. The smoke was dazzling to creatures of the Color, but thin enough that humans and Thaumata could vaguely see through it.
Further back, hidden among the growths and floating wisps on the ceiling, the fourth mound opened up languidly, tendrils taking aim through the smoke. The appendages were thicker and the spikes were longer, the length of a man's hand.
Javelin and Whisper were in the lead, with the big heavy weapons specialist hefting the Eraser. He stepped forward with the launcher shouldered and rounded the corner, but as he did so Whisper co*cked his head. His left arm shot up, grabbing the back of Javelin's armor, and he yanked his squadmate back into cover.
Javelin jerked and spun, a hand-long spike of crystal embedded in his bicep.
"Ah sh*t," he remarked.
"They reacted too quickly," Whisper snapped, head turning to look around the tunnel while Javelin stumbled and muttered quiet curses at the spike lodged in his arm. "They know we're here."
Snow joined Whisper in scanning the tunnel while Claymore covered the corner. The glittering array of crystals and the mind-bending lights weaving between them made hunting for irregularities hard, until she looked straight up.
"There's some kind of growth up there," she said, shouldering her rifle and taking aim. "Sensory organ, I think."
It was almost impossible to see, nestled in an innocuous cluster of other crystals: a fleshy mass the same dark color of the mounds with an array of tiny, wire-like appendages tipped with flickering blue lights. She thought she saw something metallic buried within the organic mass.
She opened fire, putting bullets into the overhead growths, and the deafening reports of her rifle echoed down the passageway. Splatters of fleshy goop dropped from the ceiling along with sprays of iridescent Color. Something made of metal cluttered to the ground.
Hatchback scooped up Javelin's dropped rocket and moved to the corner, with Claymore and Cutter behind her.
"Any more spotters?" she asked.
"Checking," Snow said, and Whisper echoed. The ceiling looked clear, as best they could tell. Time was short; chroma-smoke was heavier than conventional smoke and would settle quickly. "Probably clear."
"Good enough," Hatchback said, and rolled around the corner, trusting her Scout's assessment. Snow felt her artificial heart and spectra-core both clench as their squad leader took the risk and stepped out into enemy fire.
No response. No barrage of spines impaling her body. They were blind.
Hatchback took aim at the ambiguous shapes through the smoke and shouted to clear the area beyond her, then pressed the firing button. The rocket lanced through the smoke, disturbing the dust and causing the flowing chromatic energy to shift in angry, fitful patterns. The Eraser rocket speared the rear spine mound, punching through the armor and blasting it into a fountaining spray of goop and twisting Color.
The other spine mounds twitched and jerked, their launcher appendages trying to find her through the dazzling smoke. Claymore and Cutter rounded the corner when the hot gasses from the Eraser dissipated, and hurled fragmentation grenades at the other three mounds. They were still open and their plates deployed to protect against gunfire from the front, but that left the fleshy components within exposed to attack from the rear.
Two of the grenades hit home, detonating behind the raised armor plates of a pair of the spine mounds. The cracking detonations were chased by a low rumble, and the Thaumata could feel the pain of the living weapon emplacements as shrapnel ripped through the alien flesh. They were torn asunder, chromatic life bursting from their rent bodies.
One of them remained intact, and it started shooting again. Spines hissed past the squad as it tried to zero in on their position, until Claymore opened fire. His machinegun raked the plating and the projectile appendages with a long burst of armor-piercing rounds that broke through the outer shell. Light burst free, wafting through the air, but the creature kept shooting back, forcing him to sidestep. It kept pumping out crystal spines through the chromatic smoke, trying to locate and hit him.
Until Cutter burst through the cloud, her tail whipping loose and the edged tip glowing with the same purple light that shone in her eyes. The spinal appendage whipped toward her in an eyeblink, but before it could fire a booming report split the thing in half, courtesy of Whisper's rifle. The mound recoiled, giving Cutter enough time to close in. Claymore ceased shooting before she crossed his line of fire.
The focus blade on the tip of her tail sank in and ripped through alien flesh and crystal; paper would have offered more resistance as she twisted and tore, a psychedelic light show flying from the mound along with the mixture of stone and bizarre flesh. She jumped up and clambered over the plates, striking and cutting with relentless zeal.
And amidst the dying empathic pain of the spine mound, they could hear Cutter's laughter.
***
"Well, this is a bit of a sh*t, isn't it?" Javelin muttered as Hatchback examined his wound. The crystal spike was embedded in the upper arm, faintly glowing where it wasn't stained with his synthetic blood. The bleeding had stopped very quickly thanks to the nanoclotters which sealed up ruptured blood vessels in seconds. They still had to extract the spike, though. The chromacrystal lattice that was woven into their bodies at the cellular level protected them from Delirium, but it didn't make them immune to it.
"Pack of medgel should seal it up," Hatchback remarked as her gaze roamed over the wound. Her red eyes were turned pale by the eerie blue glow of the tunnel. "Can you fight?"
"It hit the mech-fibers and did some damage, feels like," Javelin said. "I can hold my shield at least. Won't be at one hundred but I can make things bang."
"Fair enough. Doc Claymore, your patient."
Claymore nodded and Hatchback held Javelin's arm still. She held up a spent magazine from her rifle, and Javelin nodded. He took it and put it between his teeth, then bit down.
Claymore grabbed the spike, and with a single sharp motion, pulled it out of Javelin's arm.
Hatchback's harsh expression shifted fractionally at the agonized groan that escaped from Javelin's clenched teeth. Claymore wasted no time, pulling out a sleek tube that looked more like a package of toothpaste than anything medicinal. He popped off the cap to reveal a narrow nozzle, and jabbed it into the bleeding wound. A hard squeeze pumped the medfoam into the wound, and Javelin gasped, then relaxed as it flooded his systems, overriding the local pain receptors in the fleshy parts and calming the diagnostics that were screaming about the mechanical damage. Several seconds passed, and blood gave way to the antiseptic white goop that remained when the medfoam hardened.
"You got a hell of a bedside manner, doc," Javelin growled once he took the magazine from between his teeth.
In response, Claymore hauled Javelin to his feet and slapped him on his wounded arm, making him wince. But only slightly. Javelin moved his arm a bit; it was stiff, but he could partially bend his elbow.
"Won't be punching any cultists with a left hook until I can see a gearhead, but I can fight," he finally concluded. He took out a bandage roll and quickly wrapped the wound to make sure no gel leaked.
"Good enough," Hatchback said with the slightest of nods.
***
"Look at this," Whisper said as he poked the remnants of the strange sensory organ that had been watching them from the ceiling. "Looks like a spotter cluster from a Color-infected zone, but shrunk down."
Snow crouched down and pulled out her knife, then rooted through the crystals growing out of the floor until she found something dull but metallic. She carefully picked it up and held it for Whisper to see.
"A cell phone," she muttered. Or at least part of one. It was a flat plane of metal and plastic, the screen broken and tiny wire-like fleshy veins covered with sand grain-sized crystals. The camera lens on the old phone was surrounded by the tubes.
"That thing has to be, what, thirty years old?" Whisper asked.
Snow nodded. Cell phones weren't used much these days, since cell tower coverage had collapsed when wide swathes of the globe were rendered uninhabitable, nuked, or infested by Color strains. The model she was holding was an older one that had been popular in the North American Security Zone, where cell towers still stood.
She frowned, and glanced to Whisper, who was looking troubled. There weren't any cell phones in use in Iceland as far as they knew; the Icelandic towns and cities were tied into Arcadia's orbital communications network. Human devices Possessed by the Color tended to be local machinery co-opted by the alien intelligence, but this cell phone seemed to have been brought with this Color entity from elsewhere and used specifically for surveillance.
That wasn't exactly new, but it didn't fit with any of the Norway strains' patterns. They were too direct and brutal, often leveling human cities and then rebuilding them to suit their image, and integrating surviving machinery and population piecemeal. This was more deliberate and subtle.
Something about that was familiar, and it bothered her.
"This feels like a different strain. Not Norway. One of the Ontario strains?"
Whisper scowled in thought.
"Reminds me of Nightmare, I'd say," he muttered. "But they nuked that strain's nexus twenty years ago. It's been dormant ever since."
"Could be another Ontario offshoot," Snow said. "Red Mountain or Nagual, maybe. Intel will want to know either way."
"Weird-box it and let's move," Whisper said, and Snow nodded. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a "weird-box" - a small, rugged plastic sample container. Thaumata teams often encountered Something Weird whenever they went into Color-infested zones, so it was standard practice to grab a piece, put it in a sealed sample box, and bring it back for analysis. Snow dumped the remains of the Possessed cell phone into the weird-box, sealed it, then stowed it in her backpack.
"You two done poking the goop?" Cutter asked as they stood up. Snow nodded, and gestured to her armor.
"You got some stuck on you," she said, pointing to a chunk of dead material lodged between two of Cutter's magazine pouches. The Assault glanced down, and her tail coiled around to spear the dead black flesh and toss it away.
"Show off," Whisper remarked, and Cutter chuckled, the bladed tip of the tail wagging at him. "You never said how much it cost to upgrade your spine to fit that."
"More than I'd like to admit," Cutter replied. "But less than other parts I've had installed."
Behind her, Snow could see Javelin bandaging his wound and then giving a thumbs-up to the others. Hatchback waved the trio over and pointed down the passage.
"Same as before," she barked. "Snow, Whisper, in the lead. Claymore, stay with Javelin in the rear. Move."
***
They continued down another hundred and eleven meters down the tunneled corridor, the slope gentle and easy to traverse. The walls became smoother, the crystal mounds further melding with the rock until the passageway became a reflective broken mirror of glittering stained glass periodically broken by molded carapace-stone. The man-height crystals that randomly dotted the passage earlier gave way to a single row of obelisks of pale blue, which ran down the center and stretched up nearly to the ceiling of the tunnel.
"Nest coming up," Snow reported as she led the way. "Seeing a threshold about fifty meters down."
The threshold was the mouth of an expanding cavern. Masses of multi-faceted white chromacrystal grew around it, each surrounded by swirling, flickering lights which lead to spaces beyond normal comprehension. She couldn't quite see through it, as the light was distorted. She could make out a large chamber beyond, but everything seemed displaced and twisted. That wasn't unusual around major concentrations of the Color. The presence of the alien altered time and space by its mere existence. The stone and crystal walls of the cavern close to the threshold flickered and wavered, with cracks forming and vanishing, mold appearing and then dying, and water running down the sides only to evaporate and condense in the span between breaths.
"Top up, Cutter first," Hatchback ordered, and one by one they checked their magazines and loaded fresh ammunition into their weapons. Cutter went first so the rest of the squad kept their weapons trained down the passage. Then they advanced, tense and weapons raised.
They couldn't tell what lay beyond, and shooting through the threshold was unlikely to be useful. The distortion sabotaged advanced weaponry and smart munitions, which was a major part of why the Thaumata were carrying ballistic rifles that wouldn't have been out of place in a brushfire insurrection sixty years ago. The more advanced the tech, the faster it broke or was transformed by Delirium. Only something made with chromacrystal was safe.
Snow wavered at the edge of the wall of temporal distortion. The presence caused her body to shiver uncontrollably, but the lattice built into her body protected her. Tiny microscopic veins of alien minerals, running parallel to the blood vessels in her organics and wiring in her machinery, were the fragile line of defense that kept her from madness.
Hatchback tapped her on the shoulder, indicating the others were ready to breach. Snow took a steadying breath and plunged through.
Electricity slid along her skin, and ethereal winds blew past in a wintry burst that felt as if they would leave icicles crackling on her uniform. For a brief instant she saw behind herself, looking into a lensed, distorted view of her own body as she advanced down the cavern. Her eyes bled green fluid that shifted hues a hundred times in a millisecond. The drifting lights that opened to other places solidified and she felt something else looking back, able to see every inch of her construction, her body, and her memory. Her boots, her weapon, her uniform, her equipment all rotted away into nothing and then snapped back almost before she could register it.
Then she was through, and stepping to the right to let her squadmates enter as well.
They weren't in normal reality anymore. The room beyond was a long, diamond-shaped corridor with ribbed walls and alcoves in shadow. The surfaces were all pitch black obsidian polished to a mirror sheen, and large rectangular blocks about three meters long and a meter wide and tall were evenly spaced in the center of the corridor. Light came from glowing blue crystals set in hanging lanterns from the ceiling. The air carried a hint of ozone and a strong aroma of incense, and along with the scent was a low droning chant, constant and distant from somewhere in the pale blue light emanating from further down the passage.
The entryway was as devoid of life as the makeshift village above, except this time it was because the structures were too neat and perfect. Precise geometry and exactly-centered placement of the stone blocks indicated the alien hands that had made this. There was an unnerving perfection that wasn't obvious at first glance but which still was noticeable, especially to Snow's eyes. It was machine-level exactness, but what made this place wasn't a machine.
Technically, they were still in Iceland, but this corridor and the places beyond it didn't fit perfectly into space and time. A chunk of ground beneath the island had been broken off, molded, and repurposed through the Color's overpowering capacity to break space-time. Volcanic rock and invasive alien life gave way to a cathedral of ominous polished stone.
Snow raised her rifle to her shoulder and peered down the scope, which was similar to an ancient ACOG sight from sixty years ago, and then cursed. The lens was opaque, damaged during the transit through the threshold, and she quickly removed it from the rifle's rail.
"Down to iron sights," she reported, and Hatchback made a slight grumble in her throat.
"Gear check, Snow first," Hatchback said. The squad ran a quick check of their weapons one by one to make sure nothing else was changed by passing through the threshold. The vast majority of the time their equipment would revert to its original state when they finished, but every now and then something would be broken, like with Snow's scope.
When Claymore's turn came up he shook his squad machinegun and muttered a curse. He dropped the box magazine and slid a new one in place.
"Bullets rusted in the box," he muttered in annoyance. "That's a couple hundred fewer rounds. This one looks fine, though."
"We'll make do," Hatchback grunted. "Anything else get ruined?"
"Nothing I can tell," he stated as he slid the ammo belt into the top of the machinegun and closed the weapon. He racked the bolt and nodded with practiced understanding, then checked the other boxes of ammunition in his backpack. "Ammo and weapons are functional."
"Any other accidents?" Hatchback asked.
"No, I'm good." The others echoed Claymore's assessment. As far as they could tell, the rest of their gear seemed to be okay.
They pushed on, spread out across the corridor with their suppression cloaks close and hoods up. They kept their weapons pointed down so the cloaks could cover as much of their bodies as possible.
***
No side passages or branching corridors were visible as far as they could discern. Deep Color construction tended to vary by strain, and cultists who had initiative would often cut side passages. Neither seemed to have occurred here; only mirror-polished obsidian and crystal was visible. Snow still checked but found no seams or breaks in the perfectly-smooth architecture. The only irregularity was that the rectangular boxes in the center of the hall abruptly ceased.
The droning chants grew louder as the squad advanced down the corridor. Along with it was a clicking sound. As soon as Snow heard the latter she held up a fist and gestured to go to cover. The squad scattered to the walls, taking cover behind the alcoves. Snow pressed herself up against the smooth surface, and could feel a curious, pulsing heat from the obsidian.
The clicking resembled metal tapping on thick glass, and a moment later she saw the source moving through the omnipresent mist. A truck-sized, angular shape that vaguely resembled a crab made of obsidian was crawling down the corridor, hanging from the ceiling on dozens of spindly legs that were tipped in tiny ten-digit claws. Pale, glowing blue crystals sprouted from the pitch-black alien's carapace. With every step the creature's claws sank into the obsidian ceiling, merging with it and then detaching. It made a regular clicking sound as it walked down the corridor, caused by black teeth tapping a metal plate beneath its maw. There was a smooth, mechanical procession to its steps.
Dangling beneath it, held in sinuous, wormlike tentacles, was another of the rectangular black blocks.
"Castellan," Snow whispered over the radio, and the others nodded.
"The Color's been here longer than we thought," Whisper remarked as the bizarre ceiling crab slowly trundled past them.
Castellans generally only showed up in a nest that had been established for a while. They varied widely based on strain, but they generally served as the heavy lifters, construction, and maintenance constructs of a Color nest.
And, when necessary, they would fight to the death to protect their creators.
"Can't let it walk up on us from behind," Hatchback muttered while the creature passed them. The moment it heard gunfire it would head for the source, and join any fight they were engaged in.
"Only got one Eraser left," Javelin warned. "And if we shoot it the whole nest will wake up. Don't fancy pushing against the rest of the cult in this corridor."
"Take it with blades," Hatchback ordered. "Hit it fast, all at once. Cut it and bleed it."
The squad stowed their weapons and drew their focus blades. Most of them carried a seventy centimeter-long, single-edged focus sword, save for Javelin's axe and Cutter's tail. Snow plugged her sword's cord into her side slot, endured the heartbeat of vertigo as it charged off of her spectra-core, and signaled she was ready.
As one, the Thaumata squad rose and stalked after the Castellan.
The clicking of its legs merging with the ceiling sounded above them as they followed it, and after a few moments it reached the end of the line of stone blocks in the center of the passage. It paused there, positioning itself so that the block was precisely spaced to match the others. The ceiling legs extended, lowering the crab-like being so it could carefully set the block down.
Cutter crouched next to it, her tail coiling underneath her and pressing to the floor. The Castellan was focused entirely on the task of precisely placing the stone block, leaving it briefly oblivious as the rest of the squad surrounded it.
Hatchback gave the go order. Cutter leapt up, using her tail as a third leg, and landed atop the Castellan's body. Her tail jabbed down and drove deep into alien flesh, iridescent light spewing in a spiraling display of rapidly-shifting luminescence. Snow and the rest of the squad closed in at the same moment, the glowing edges of their weapons flashing and slicing into the obsidian shell.
She rammed her blade in up to the hilt and swept it out, drawing as deep and wide a cut as possible. There was barely any resistance; the focus blade sliced through non-chromatic material that touched the edge, and damaged chromacrystal it contacted as well, though to a far lesser degree. Color erupted from the wound, harmlessly washing over her and dispersing like smoke in a strong wind.
There was no delay from the Castellan. The instant Cutter's tail penetrated its carapace, it dropped the obsidian block and lashed out with its tentacles. Snow had barely managed to complete her first cut before one of the creature's sinuous limbs whipped into her and sent her tumbling to the floor. She rolled as she slid and dug her heels and focus blade into the smooth obsidian, bringing herself to a quick halt. Pain rolled up along her chest, but she ignored it as she pulled the blade out of the floor.
Whisper slammed into the wall next to her and let out a wheezing groan of pain. His focus blade was still lodged in the Castellan's side, the cord yanked from his side socket.
Javelin raised his shield and took multiple hammering blows head-on and retaliated with equally brutal cuts. Hatchback's sword chopped into the tentacles as they whirled and struck, drawing deep rents in the black glassy carapace. Claymore had clambered up onto the side of the creature and was sawing at the legs attaching it to the ceiling. Cutter lived to her name, her tail flashing and ripping along the Castellan's back. Snow rushed in and rejoined her comrades, and Whisper was right beside her one arm hanging limp while the other tore his sword free, plugged it back in, and resumed cutting.
Above, they had been swift but methodical in killing humans. But down here, there was nothing clever or tactical about the savagery of melee slaughter. The Thaumata were wolves tearing into a moose, with shimmering epileptic color in place of hot blood.
Cutter sensed the Castellan's death first and hissed a warning. The others leapt or scrambled back a moment before the legs went slack and the remaining tentacles dropped to the floor. Color flowed from the wounds for a few moments, pooling on the floor like heavy vapor before vanishing. The Castellan went deathly still, its legs still merged with the strange ceiling, and a few moments later it was little more than a bizarre effigy of obsidian, crystal, and barely visible flesh underneath.
The obsidian block it had been laying down was cracked down the middle where it had fallen. Snow's eyes immediately jumped to it while the others were taking stock of the damage.
"Gonna need a splint," Claymore was saying, while examining Whisper. The Sniper TA's arm was slack, and when he tried to move it there was only whirring of actuators and winces of pain. Hatchback was checking the others, making sure Cutter and Javelin weren't hurt.
Snow heard everything they were discussing - it was impossible not to, a Scout picked up everything around them - but the broken rectangle of pitch-black glass drew her inexplicably closer. She lifted her sword and slid it into the broken crack, which ran horizontally along the block's length.
No, not a crack. It was too even. It was a lid.
She abruptly realized what this was, and slid her blade along the top of the block to separate part of the lid in order to get a look inside. Obsidian parted before the sword's edge like cut silk.
It was a coffin.
Inside lay the shriveled corpse of a human man, his skin leathery and cracked, and pale green crystals growing out of his eye sockets and mouth. The visible parts of his body, beneath ragged and torn civilian clothing, were riddled with more gleaming mineral growths. They glowed faintly with the tiniest hint of Color.
She looked back up the corridor, and counted at least forty more of the coffins, lined up like a macabre set of trophies. A shudder ran through her, and heat blossomed from Snow's spectra-core. Again, that sense of familiarity washed over her. She had seen this before, but precisely where she couldn't remember.
Cutter wandered over next to her and looked down into the obsidian casket.
"The f*ck is this?" she muttered, raising an eyebrow. Her tail came up and poked at the dead man's skull, tapping the crystals that grew where the eyes once were. "Looks like he got his mind eaten. But they usually dump the body after snacking on a human's thoughts and let the corpse get recycled."
"They're trophies," Snow muttered.
"Color doesn't collect trophies, Snow," Cutter said. "It just eats and copies." But as she said it, her purple eyes trailed over the coffins down the corridor.
That was true for the Norway strains, but Snow didn't think this was any of the variants that were spawned from that Color nexus.
"Don't bother analyzing the Color," Hatchback said, and the pair glanced back at their squadleader. Behind her, Claymore had finished tying a pair of collapsable splints to Whisper's broken arm. "It's not human. Don't try to make sense of it. Scan everything and we'll pass it to intel. Let them go insane figuring it all out."
Hatchback powered off her focus blade, then unplugged and sheathed it.
"Focus on what matters," she continued. Hatchback's typical clipped tone was usually controlled, but it wavered slightly as she spoke.
Snow could hear the hatred lurking under her words, and the harsh promise of violence in her glowing red eyes.
"Kill the cult and the Color," she growled, venom disguised deep underneath. She pointed to the dead man and the lights glowing in his empty, crystal-covered eye sockets.
"Make sure no one else ends up like them."
Then she turned and continued down the dark, blue-lit passage, and the squad fell in behind her. Whisper held his rifle in his left arm now, his right hanging limp.
"Can you shoot?" Snow asked him, and he nodded. He hefted the rifle; a bipod had been deployed.
"Just need to get prone," he stated. "Get the arm fixed by a gearhead when we get back. Until then we've still got a monster to kill."
As they passed the limp, hanging body of the Castellan, Cutter's tail casually flew out and stabbed the dead creature in the flank a couple of times, for no reason except spite toward the enemy they had been fighting all their lives. The enemy they had been created to kill.
None of the Thaumata objected. She was acting unprofessional, but Cutter's brutality spoke for them all.
