It split lengthwise and something started to slither out in a churning polluted mist of flickering colors. It was hideous and gigantic, flesh and smoke and steel mist. A spiraling thermonuclear furnace that was alive, a biological profusion that was burning and smoldering, its guts filled with writhing crystalline entrails that were dissolving into steam and gushing fire. A polychromatic nuclear chaos, a noxious creeping fungus set with leering yellow eyes like suns going supernova and a million undulating tentacles of translucent, energized tissue coiling and squirming and spreading out into a living forest of feelers. Like the abomination itself, they were composed of searing radioactive plasma, crystallized yet fluid, flesh but smoke. The thing came on, revealing more and more of itself in the strobing, radiant fire-storm of its own blazing anatomy.

Bell went nearly mad at the sight of it.

Something shattered inside him like white ice as he felt himself being drawn towards that anti-dimensional horror. He shook with involuntary spasms inside his hardsuit as if he were a hatchling trying to break free from an egg. Hot and cold sweat poured from him in rivers. He pissed himself. He vomited bile. And through it all, he managed to see Murphy get sucked in. He hit the vortex and the entire thing rippled, the image of that monstrous entity shivering. He was broken apart into a violent spray of colors as he was particulated.

And that’s when Bell knew that that entity was not close at all, probably miles distant, but so vast it filled the vortex.

A shockwave passed from the whirlpool and the water surged around him. The thrusters grabbed. There was a momentary displacement in the field, an interruption, and it was enough for him to pull away deeper into the chamber.

The vortex faded behind him.

And then, through the drifting silt, he passed over the outer edges of where the town must have been, Murphy’s town. But it wasn’t there. Below, there was a wavering field of luminous marine growths.

He was going to make it.

He told himself that he would indeed make it.

If the suit would hold out, if the batteries still had enough charge to get him back to the SDV outside the city. It was a long way, but he would make it. If the  Exosuit’s systems could just hold up until he got to the SDV. That’s all he would need. The back-up systems had like forty-eight hours of emergency life support.

The microwave net brought nothing but static. He cancelled it out, his head filled with a roaring sound. The city itself was silence: the thousand-mile silence of a moonlit summer night. A hive of shadows and shapes and stark memory bunching in black fibers. And—

Dear God, what was that?