Chapter Five-Hundred Five (Patreon)

The prototype sub is just about done.  There’s a few minor things to finish, but enough is ready to start using it as a template.  While the delvers prepare for the raid on Poe, and the kids prepare for their trial, my denizens are putting the prototype through its paces to ensure we didn't miss anything important.

Rocky, Doppler, and Slash are acting as the test delvers, and are poking around the interior while the denizens load up in their sections.  Vines have holds all through the outer hull to help with the steering and spatial tricks, the poppers and scarabs are loaded up in their bays, and the tunnelbore is settled down into its compartment in the front.

Inside, a few putrid slimes are on expedition from Violet, happy to just be along for the ride.  While they won’t get any use from my scions, they’ll be invaluable for actual delvers.  Food stores are checked, heating and cooling runes tested, maneuverability diagnosed, and everything is coming back green for the test launch.

Rocky will be playing the part of navigator, mostly because he’s not as good with sonic affinity as Doppler and Slash.  I want to make sure the entire sensing and display system works without anyone needing the affinity.  Doppler and Slash are too in tune to make good test pilots, but Rocky can leave the affinity alone to give a test, and embrace it if anything goes wrong.

Coda is eying all the reports critically, along with Thing.  Between the two of them, they know how everything is supposed to be working.  I’m feeling pretty confident, myself.  The hull is holding, the heat is staying out, and the sensors are providing feedback.  Definitely a good thing to let them make sure the entire checklist is good before we try anything, though.  If it were just me, I’d definitely forget something.

The test dive will be a pretty simple one, shouldn’t take more than a few hours if things go well, and not more than a day if things go poorly.  If the whole thing breaks, it might only take a few minutes, but that’s the nice thing about scions and denizens: they respawn.  I really hope it doesn't come to that.  Not only would I imagine it’d be unpleasant for all involved, but we don’t really have the time to do a full redesign.

Coda and Thing finish with the checklist, with my bat giving a cry at the upper end of audible, and my hand giving a thumbs up.

“Alright, looks like we’re go to launch, guys,” relays Teemo, using a modified version of the recording stones Tarl likes to use.  Communication affinity is another odd one to me, but I’m not going to question how it relays information through liquid magma.  Maybe later, but for now, I’m just going to accept that it works… and wonder how much it would be to give the affinity to a spawner.

“Mission is to dive through the volcanic area to a large flooded cavern about a mile down.  Once there, use the sonar to get a detailed map of the cavern, then come back.  Got it?”

Rocky grunts as Doppler speaks.  “Understood, Voice.  Slash and I will be testing the amenities while Rocky navigates.”

“Roger that, Doppler.  Good luck guys, have a boring trip!”

The scions chuckle as the mooring chains are released from the outside, and Rocky eases it out into the little harbor we have.  The pressure drive seems to be working just fine, the acceleration smooth.  A few globs of magma want to stick to the hull, but that’s just another thing for the vines to keep an eye on and clear up as we go.

If we can get the magma protection stuff mass produced, I’d love to use some of Hullbreak’s denizens for this sort of thing.  He’s been very interested in helping, but the enchantments to make sealife comfortable in magma is even more complex than it is for terrestrial life. Hullbreak’s merfolk have been working on it, because they’d like to come as well, but it’s looking like it’ll take them too long to get anything working.

A shame.  Magma sharks and seaslugs would be really useful.  Slugs to keep the hulls clean, and sharks because… well, magma sharks.  Do I need to say more?

The sub doesn’t explode, so they submerge it, and it still doesn’t explode.  A good sign, so Rocky eases it out into the lava pool.  I watch through his eyes and listen in on Doppler and Slash, and it doesn’t take long for me to nudge Teemo.

“Got it, Boss.  Nova, take a few wyrms to provide escort.”  My dragon scion nods and quickly gathers a few of the milling wyrms to follow the sub.  From Rocky’s navigation, and what the others could hear, it’s clear the magma isn’t going to be as easy to get through as water.

I had been expecting to escort the subs when available, but I think it’s going to be important for more than just defense.  Water is more or less the same through the whole ocean, pressure aside.  But the magma isn’t so homogeneous, and there are cooler and warmer globs throughout.  While the sub should be able to handle a change in viscosity, why make it harder on the sub?

With a few wyrms around, they can help make the magma more uniform.  In a fight, it’d be tipping our hands to clean things up where we want to go, but I think it’s worth it when we want a smooth and quick ride.

Relatively quick, at least.  I don’t remember the conversion from MpH to knots, but I do know that 60 on a highway is a moderate speed, but 60 knots on the water would be utter insanity.  I think 6 knots for my subs would be a pretty fast pace.  Even at that, I think we could reach the mantle in a couple hours, if we had a straight line.

We do not have a straight line.  Even going through the passage through the lava pool, the vines are having to shrink the sub quite a bit to make it comfortably fit.  Rocky takes it nice and slow, but still needs the wyrms to give him a push every so often.  I’m not too worried about that.  We’ll just need to make sure the delvers get plenty of opportunities to practice before they get anywhere near the Betrayer.

Slash and Doppler are doing their part as well, testing everything they can.  It looks like Coda and Thing gave them their own checklist, and they’re diligently working through it.  It starts simple, just making things work like they’re supposed to, before moving on to testing accidents.  Dropping food into a putrid ooze is refreshingly boring, but spilling various things on the various exposed runeworks is a bit more nerve-wracking, at least for me.

Thankfully, it looks like runes are a lot more resistant to liquids than circuits, and those tests pass without any incident, either.  Then comes the tests where they use things wrong.  Leave the cooking runes on for too long, long enough to burn the food and make some smoke.  The filtration system handles it like it’s supposed to, and the pan can be cleaned properly without any fuss.

They mess with runes all over the place, taking a swipe or a hammer swing and seeing if they still work well.  While I can’t imagine any of the delvers deliberately sabotaging the thing they’re inside, I could definitely see someone trying to train and misjudging something.

The runes handle blunt force without a hitch, but slashes are a different story.  Minor scratches don’t do too much, but they manage to completely disable the cooking array with a reasonable ‘accidental’ swipe.

I’m also not too worried about that, because the runes will not just be bare in the completed subs.  An accidental swing could disable the controls for various systems, but I hope the delvers are smart enough to know not to be playing around those.  I give Teemo a constant stream of what I’m seeing and hearing, with Coda and Thing both scribbling away.

Their designs are pretty robust, so a few basic shielding efforts should keep the simple chaos of living from disabling a sub.

By the time Slash and Doppler break the kitchen, Rocky manages to pull the sub into the flooded cavern, giving him plenty of room to test the subs maneuverability properly.  My two sonic scions buckle up as Rocky puts the sub through its paces, and I’m reminded why all the cabinets and drawers close so securely.  He’s hardly doing dogfighting tricks, but a slow barrel roll is probably more disruptive to the interior than a fast one.

This earns the most scribbles from Coda and Thing, and for good reason.  We can’t assume the sub will be sitting level all the time.  I think actual subs just kinda have to deal with it, and make sure to have handholds and other things to secure loose objects all over the place.  We have our own option: gravity.  If the subjective down inside the sub is always the floor, it can maneuver however the driver wants and nobody should even notice!  Well, momentum is still a thing, so still sit down and hang on in a fight, but besides that, I don’t think tilting will be too much of a problem.

It takes Rocky maybe another hour to be satisfied with piloting the sub, then he moves in to start mapping the cavern.  While we know it has two ways in and out, and the basic shape, this is too good an opportunity to test the resolution of the sonar, and of the crystal mapping device.

See, the hardest part of mapping our way to the mantle is that drawing a three dimensional twisting path on a piece of paper is going to have problems.  Dwarves apparently have a system for it, which makes sense, but most people don’t know it.  We could try to adopt it, but there’s a better solution: store it as a 3-D model.  While we don’t have computers for something like that, we do have quartz that we can grow without much issue.

It takes a precise earth rune array to etch the interior of the quartz, but with that, we can have a realistic representation of an area!  It takes another array to read and project it, but that’s well within Thing’s ability to create, as well as my antkins’.  They’re already experimenting with using it as a crude drafting method, growing more refined by the day.  The engineering college is going to come up with some crazy stuff once they can start drafting things in three dimensions.

It takes close to three hours to map the whole cavern, then Rocky brings the sub home.  Teemo breathes a sigh of relief for me once it surfaces in the pool, and my denizens swarm over it before the mooring chains are even secured!  We still need to find something to deal with the heat buildup on the exterior, but that’s not going to be simple.  Rocky, Slash, and Doppler exit and give Coda and Thing their reports, all looking like they enjoyed the experience.

Nothing went obviously wrong, and the swarming denizens are going over everything to ensure nothing went quietly wrong, either.  A big dent is easy to notice and fix, but a loose bolt looks like any other, until it comes completely undone.  It’ll probably take them until after the fight with Poe and the trial to check everything, which is good.  By then, we’ll be ready to hit the ground running with sub production and the final phase of training.

I’m nervous about what we’re getting ready to do, but I’m even more nervous about what the Betrayer might do if we don’t stop it.