>>5678815the archeology team is already getting a contingent packed up to go with the ship the orders leave your mic. they are, apparently, really wanting to study those skeletons.
the ship leaves orbit adequately enough, pinging and reporting back it sees an oddly large number of specter ships gathering near B5 on the B6 side, including one huge new type of vessel far larger then its packmates.
the bugs meanwhile point you and your team to a nearby ice cave used as a maintenance shaft by the workers. "ice cave" is bit of a misnomer, becuase the vast steep ice crevice down is more a mountain peak plunging into...well not the earth, there is no earth down there, but the world ocean lets say. after a genuine mountain climb downwards, you see a great pool of water, kept marked out by metal anchors trailing steel cables down into the water, some kind of diving aid it would appear.
you and the team don diving gear, and go below. gods and all heaven, you find out, polar diving is COLD, with the cable being a help immensely to even stay clinging to the ice sheet above, becuase below is...surreal.
it is dark. so dark, and below the light is swallowed up into darkness. rare points of light, those ways in, underwater evidence of larger melt holes not easily visible from the surface let in rare bursts of bright-ish sunlight, illuminating the top layers of water a lightly visible blue. swarms, literal SWARMS of workers swim like gigantic coordinated schools of fish, carrying huge cargo containers by themselves, moving entire submarine ships, same as the light green hexagon ones you ran into first, and...somehow *driving* large alien whales of bizarre alien biology carrying vast ships worth of goods on their back in cyclopean saddles or harnesses.
and then you spot the city. it is larger then any submerged object floating there has any right to be. it is, you estimate nearly the size of NYC or larger, contained inside a vast vehicle chassis/wall of bright green metal in the shape of, again, a hexagon containing the vast thick glass dome sealing the bug city into a place of at least some air, even so you still clearly see areas sunken into water pools inside the city deliberately, vast "public parks" containing ice chunks, canals instead of roads, and farm pools containing weirdly colored algae growths in a dizzying and worryingly poisonous shade of colors. along its walls on the outside you see hangar doors, docking bays, and from rare points on its bottom vast cyclopean machine limbs sticking outwards and down, aiming visibly large cones of bubbles, or efluvia, or dark liquid littered with dots of creatures falling deeper into the black below, where scavenger creatures and shoals of smaller, more distant bugs congregate. it is a glowing bright metal city island that breaks every human estimate of anything that should ever be in the water.
where do you even begin here? there is an entire ocean they could have vanished into cleanly here.
