Over the next few weeks, the researchers of Task Force Proxima conducted hundreds of different tests and learned a few things about the “root”. As it turned out, it was just one of an entire network of roots that covered the bottom of the entire ocean that they had jokingly named the New Australian Sea. After all, everything they knew lived in it had demonstrated that it was out to kill them, so the name seemed quite appropriate.The root network was incredibly dense, with nearly a hundred percent coverage of the ocean floor, and each root itself was equally dense. The water pressure in the deepest part of the ocean—which was a full twenty kilometers deep—applied over ten million PSI of water pressure. But even at that depth, they’d learned (at the cost of a few submersible drones loaded with mana batteries) that the roots could still move with the same blinding, predatorial speed as they had near the surface when one had attacked the crewed lander.Another incidental discovery was th

Two of the five squads of marines left their places on the perimeter of the landing zone and headed to the “decorated” containers. One by one, the containers cracked open, small clouds of fog drifting out of them and pooling in the low areas on the ground. The fog was the remains of the shock foam that researchers in Lab City had developed to allow for higher-speed impacts in yeet pods or cargo launched from mass drivers. The beauty of it was that it was a completely analog system; mechanical altimeters would detect when the pod or cargo container reached a set point—usually a hundred meters before impact—and trigger a valve that would allow two binary agents to mix. The resulting chemical formed a foam that expanded, bursting the relatively fragile containment tanks it was mixed in and allowing it to expand to fill whatever space it was in. It had a ridiculously high shock tolerance and would rapidly decay and sublimate into a gas composed primarily of nitrogen, helium, sulfur hexaf

TES Farsight, geosynchronous orbit over Research Base New New South Wales.A detachment of two corvettes, a destroyer, a heavy cruiser, and a drone tender that Fleet Admiral Bianchi had ordered to take up escort duties for the Farsight had finally arrived and slotted themselves around the exploration cruiser like a protective shield. Except this particular shield had teeth, and knew how to use them; their job was to provide overwatch with constant flights of drones, and orbital strikes from the cruiser and destroyer, if necessary. The corvettes would be on constant patrol of the shoreline of New Australia, ready to report any activity on the part of the being, or beings, that inhabited the ocean floor.Terran spaceships had excellent sensor suites in general, but as corvettes were meant for pickets and patrols by their very design, they had completely outsized sensor suites for ships of their size. In fact, the only ships with better sensors were the cityships, as they had the room to

(Ed note: Red Rover is a playground game that Gen X kids used to play. It isn’t played now, because, like most Gen X games, it was incredibly violent and kids would sometimes get serious injuries (like concussions, teeth being knocked out, the occasional broken bone, and bloody abrasions) and nowadays people prefer their children to come home from school uninjured. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rover )An hour ago.A team of seismologists had taken a rover filled with measuring equipment to install on what they believed was a fault line just off the coast of New Australia. It was considered research-worthy, as they had never seen a fault line run perpendicular from ocean to land before. Parallel, sure; there were plenty of fault lines on Earth that came within proverbial spitting distance of coastlines. The San Andreas fault in California, the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the American Pacific Northwest and Canada, and the Alpide Belt in the Mediterranean region, amo

Moments before Lee Joon-ho had been attacked, he was enjoying the feeling of unfettered flight kilometers above the surface of Proxima Centauri b. He had done it before, of course—at least in the simulation and on Earth—but there was something different, something special about doing it on an honest-to-god alien planet. And having been stuck in the research base without being able to fly on his own had been like sandpaper rubbing against his desire to exercise his superpower.Before he’d been blessed by mana, he had been lost. As restrictive as the Kim regime had been, at least he knew he had a place. He was a cog. A small cog, but a cog nonetheless, and cogs ALWAYS fit somewhere. But then China stuck its fingers in the North Korean pie and triggered an attack on South Korea, the retaliation for which had completely wiped out the dictatorship that ruled the northern half of the divided country.And his place had been wiped out with it.So he lost himself. He lost himself in food, in l