Level 3: Glacies Deep
Europa is the Empire's water world. Glacies Deep is a tunnel works cut down through the ice shell to the ocean beneath: heat pumps, melt-shafts that bring up water, and survey-lamp arrays strung along the vaults. The floor is Terran hex-grid decking, large interlocking ice-bonded tiles laid over black water. The outer colonies drank from it. Like Ferrum Basin, it was a machine, not a settlement. Crews rotated and nobody called it home.
What the Nihil did to it
The Nihil came up this time. A seed rode the melt-shafts from the ocean and took the tunnel works. It does with cold what it did with rust and regolith: it grows its own ice. Nihil on Europa wear smoked-glacier plating, dark blue-black with a pale steel-blue rime on the edges, over the usual obsidian, purple veins and bio-green eyes. Terran light stays cyan and white. The Nihil's ice is never either. Frost is the local weapon: it slows, and it bites. The brood is shaped by the place. It armors in ice (Shale), fires the survey lamps' light off the walls (Glint) and lays frost from the air (Rime).
The Europa brood
| Kind | Name | Taxonomy line | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| ice-shell | Shale | Frost-plated bulk · Nihilis glacialis | A slow, wide bruiser in separate slabs of grown ice. The slabs shatter and expose the soft body. |
| ricochet | Glint | Lens-caster · Nihilis refringens | A gaunt ranged biped. A crystal lens grown on its forearm turns shots into rays that rebound off the tunnel walls. |
| frost drone | Rime | Frost-spinner · Nihilis nivalis | A small hovering flyer lifted by a jellyfish-like bladder. Spinnerets in its palms lay frost patches that slow and give frostbite. |
| weaver | The Sub-Zero Weaver | Node-class · Nihilis algor | The boss of the Deep. |
The Sub-Zero Weaver
The body. A hive node grown from the tunnel works' survey-lamp array and tile-laying gantry. It is a tall, spindly biped on two stilt legs with broad hexagonal-plated feet, so it stands over the hex decking it fractures. It has a narrow ribbed thorax of wet obsidian, two very long arms, and four fingers each tipped with a spinneret that trails frost silk. Its head is a blank obsidian wedge with two small green eyes, crowned by a ring of six crystal lenses, the survey array turned into an organ. Plates of smoked ice cover its back, shoulders and thighs. Like the Goliath and the Ironback, it never speaks.
How it fights. First the Weaver fractures tiles, stamping the decking open to black water, so the floor shrinks. Then it lays frost, thick silk and ice over the arena, and plates crust over its thorax and arms. Last, the crown overloads and fires ricochet lasers: the survey lamps' light bounced off the walls in lines that carom, the counterpart of the Goliath's refracted mining laser. The ice cracks away and the body burns bright. The lenses are the weak point. Ice is armor, the crown is the organ.
The Ice Plate. The shell the Weaver grows in its second phase. Break it and the Weaver staggers and takes more damage. It re-forms later in the phase.
The silk is real. The Weaver's thread lines and the Rime's latching thread can be snapped by a dash or a hit. When a Sentinel is ordered to "cut the threads", the order means to end the node that spins them.
Defeat line. "Threads cut. The ice goes quiet." Its Latin epithet, algor, means cold.
Objectives
Hold the Pump: a heat pump whose melt, if it runs, clears the shaft, so the brood rushes it. Clear the Cocoons: frost cocoons that seal the side tunnels. Both are Terran tasks on Terran machinery, and the caches they release are sealed drop-ship stores.