Snow cut in swirling spirals down from the sky, howling wind driving spikes of ice through their little group as they walked, heads down and bent over against the driving wind. With every step, the ice below Adam's feet cracked and splintered, giving way under the huge weight of his armor. The little ice blades they had been using earlier, were retracted back into his boots, now useless in such heavy wind.

Beside him, Maverick, Sunny, Ramirez and Etium trudged with heavy footsteps. For Krill's part, he seemed perfectly at east sitting inside his climate controlled globe, allowing Adam to ferry him along like some kind of armor clad sherpa. Adam would have argued against Sunny coming, but he had seen in her head that that would have been a bad idea. Drev aren't usually argumentative against logic, but they have a huge pride when it comes to their prowess in war. To suggest she stay behind would have hurt her pride.

Granted if he thought she would be a liability, he would have asked her to stay back anyway, but luckily for him he didn't foresee that as a problem. Even considering her current state, she was a better warrior than anyone on the ship, and his concern for her was more a concern for what she carried.

But with Drev, the way they view childbearing was somewhat different from the way humans viewed it. While Drev are heavily invested in having large families, the idea of losing a child to a miscarriage isn't as problematic for them. For some human couples the loss of a child before it is born can have adverse consequences on the marriage and be otherwise devastating. For Drev it's almost a relief, better the body terminate something that has gone wrong, than be forced to sacrifice the babe to the fire. Now that that practice was ended, that thought process wasn't needed anymore, but it still remained as a vestigial trait of Drev in general. He was concerned about her losing them, she was not.

What would happen would happen, though after a mild argument she had been willing to make some concession for him, but only once she was a few more months along. By then she argued she wouldn't want to go out on missions with him anyway.

"Does anyone know where we are going!" Ramirez said, "I can't see shit in this snow."

Inside his helmet Fealty pinged him, and the map in his visor zoomed in on their location. Still within comms reach of the Empyrean, Adam could feel her lurking around in his suit as well, gently adjusting the temperature to keep him warm. He wasn't sure how she managed to invade the inside of his suit, but she did, and she did it quietly. He might not have noticed her if he couldn't hear fealty and the Empyrean talking to each other, or see it, flickering across his visor on occasion, not in an intrusive way, but definitely noticeable: strings of code and symbols that only they could understand .

"Almost there." He said, just as the group of them cut through the worst of the storm. The clouds overhead seemed to thin, and the air around them brightened as the snow pulled back. The wind was still there, causing snow flurries to kick up and cut across the landscape before them in little white waves.

Adam kicked his heels out, feeling the the energy blades snick into place.

Ramirez cut out ahead of them, the most comfortable on the ice.

Sunny and Maverick were both only passable at skating, but at least they could stay upright. And with their armor, falling was a nonissue, so together, they increased their speed over the white expanse, the energy blades cutting into the ice with a sharp hissing noise.

It was hard to tell if Etium was any good at skating because the furry little bastard didn't even bother to try. Insead he grabbed his gravity enabled chain gun for support at let it stabilize him as he moved across the ice.

"We're getting close."

"How close is close." Ramirez called back.

"Within the next hundred meters or so, I think. The feed keeps cutting out with all this snow, so my signal isn't great."

"What exactly are we looking for again? Underground caves right? I doubt there is going to be a conveniently waiting entrance for us." maverick waved her hand over the ice field, "I don't see shit."

"Mav has a point." Sunny began, "What do we do when we find these ice caves?"

"We will figure that out when we get there." Adam said

Sunny snorted inside her helmet and turned her head to view the surrounding landscape, "Well we are almost there so better start thinking about it."

Inside his helmet, fealty pinged, and Adam drew to a halt. The ice field around them was quiet and barren except for the gusting wind. The others drew to a halt around him pulling into a huddle. None of them were cold or anything, but the instinct to huddle was still there.

"Okay, what now?" Maverick asked.

"Now we-"

Something splintered underneath his feet.

There were six of them all together, and while Krill's weight was practically negligible, the combined weight of three armored humans, one armored drev, and a similarly armored tesraki was more than they had taken into their calculations, and certainly more than the delicate ice shelf below their feet could handle. Without their armor, they most certainly wouldn't have been heavy enough to cut through he ice

But that certainly was not the case now.

The group of them barely had time to acknowledge what was happening before the ground beneath their feet fractured.

And collapsed.

Shouts of terror filled the air as their feet dropped out from under them. Arms flailed and shards of ice scattered everywhere as six bodies fell the the now jagged hole in the ice kicking and flailing. Inside his helmet fealty roared to life, and the Empyrean's signal was cut completely.

Fealty fired faster than Adam could have reacted, and the jetpack on his back deployed, or perhaps it would have if the internal mechanism hadn't frozen the wings together, preventing them from deploying, a defect in the armor that developers hadn't noticed because it happened under very specific circumstances.

Adam flailed and shouted as his visor flashed red with a warning.

Etium was the luckiest, gripping onto his chain gun and riding it downwards like ran angel riding down on a cloud. The rest of them plunged from the air amidst a shaft of light and falling crystal.

Adam stomach dropped into his throat.

He had enough time to shout Sunny's name before his legs impacted something hard.

Fealty was first to react along with the SE exosuit, locking and cushioning his fall which turned from a fall into a skid. Adam scrabbled, trying to gain purchase, but the ice below him was hard and cold and very slippery.

He plunged downard legs flailing trying to dig into the icy slope before he could go any further, but the action was futile.

Something caught him by the wrist, and he looked up to see Sunny had caught him. She was skidding too, but now they were sliding together

Adam was pretty sure he had seen this sequence in a movie somewhere, but didn't have time to have too many thoughts about it as they came over a shallow rise and plunged downward into an ice tunnel. The entire thing would have been fun if he had ben able to get over his sheer terror.

He and sunny held onto each other with Krill hanging on at the back.

Maverick and Ramirez came skidding along after Ramirez somehow managing to end up in Maverick's lap with his arms around her neck, and together they skidded downwards after Adam and Sunny.

Adam retracted the blade on his wrist jamming it downwards towards the ice, the blade caught momentarily, hauling them to a stop just before Ramirez and Maverick slammed into them, breaking the ice and causing them to go spinning forward again.

The screaming did not stop as they came over another shallow rise and.

Then nothing.

Again they were airborne falling out and into darkness.

The fall was long enough for Ramirez to spew out a string of curses in spanish, which adam didn't understand but doubted he really needed to before, there was an eruption of water, and he plunged straight down into black water.

Fealty tried again, and this time they had a bit more luck as his wings broke free and his engines started up.

Warm golden light illuminated the black water around them.

And Adamwas more than disconcerted to find himself floating in a black abyss , nothing below him but miles and miles of black darkness, cut through by a single beam of light which eventually diffused against a wall of impenetrable night. Sunny continued to sink, but Adam grabbed her by the armor and hauled her upwards. Both Maverick and Ramirez's armor had activated just fine, and together they swam upwards towards the surface.

Adam did his best not to look down.

Some might see it as strange that water scared him more than space did, but he argued that space was never fully black. There were always stars or nebulae or something to look at. Space was not empty, not mean.

But the ocean.

Now that was an inhospitable place if he had ever seen one.

Black and evil.

Luckily their heads breached the surface before he could think about it too much.

"Is everyone okay/'

The sound of the others panting came through his comms

"Yeah I'm good, think I twisted my ankle though." Ramirez said.

"None of this would have happened if you were as heavily armed as me." Etium said, drifting lazily down from above riding on the back of his gun like he was riding a horse. Adam made a face at him that the little Tesraki couldn't see, but it made him feel better.

"Where are we?" Maverick asked looking around at the scene before them.

Adam followed her gaze. The room was massive and dark, lit only by the diffused light leaking in from the snow above, a sort of diffused green blue. From here he could see thick wads of snow above, blocking out the light,and he could also see where the ice was at its thinnest. The hole that they had come through caused a shaft of light to spill downward into the room illuminating strange structures of ice in the same diffused blue green color.

The water in which they sat was black as ink.

"We must have fallen into the underground sea." Adam said skin itching as he thought about the miles of black water below them, sure there was something with too many tentacles lurking there in the deep, and it wasn't an incorrect assumption. As long as it was warm enough for liquid water, there was always the possibility of life.

"We should get moving, if we use the ice picks we can probably explore those tunnels and find what we are looking for." No one made an argument, and using the blades on their suits, they clambered up out of the water, leaving Adam with a great sense of relief as he glanced back at the inky blackness.

There was something he would like to avoid as long as possible.

Hopefully, he wouldn't have to experience that again.