330 Far Future 40 – I’m a Traveling Hag, Made a lot of Stops... (1/2)

The scenery in this direction was... interesting, in its own way.

The original city had naturally been built outside the mines that drove the raw production power of the planet. Those mines had also been worked out over the millennia, all the metals and ore removed, forming monstrously big pits, dozens of miles across, and tunnels that snaked out into the mantle for miles in all directions.

But then it was on to the next dig site, and where better to put the waste then all this open space?

So, that's what happened. Every time the old mine was worked out, a new one would be opened, and the tailings dumped into the old one. This was neither unique nor strange, but what it did is breed its own kind of infestation, namely the Sand Wurms.

The Wurms existed behind the shielding mountains to the west, tunneling endlessly through the alkaline sands of the lands beyond. They should have had no presence here, as they dug through solids with only great difficulty and time... but the miners had, in effect, created the perfect environment for the wurms, with loose soil, many tunnels they didn't have to dig out, and potential prey at the periphery.

Nobody knew exactly how they got here, although the general agreement was Warp Cultists wanting to create some havoc had somehow found some eggs and brought them in. Within a few years, all the old mines became great lakes of Wurm spawning grounds.

With no natural predators from the greater desert here to prey on them, the Wurms grew as big as their food supply, and the massive vibrations from the city beyond were like giant meal signs blaring in the distance.

They REALLY hated how far down the Shield Wall went. Their tremblesense could identify any weak point, and they would work on it mindlessly until hunger forced them away, only to come back again to worry at it. Whole packs of wurms would take turns pounding at the duracrete mix, tearing at it with diamond-hard teeth and hissing acid, trying to get through it to the promise of the meals beyond.

Ergo, Sand Wurm incursions were a thing on the Shield Wall, and one of the more dangerous things Termites had to clean up down below. Dangerous because the Wurms were tough, not that they were all that adapted to burrowing through halls of plascrete and durasteel, looking for all those free meals echoing in their vibration-sensitive hides.

I'd killed a few of them in our territory. Now I was going to kill a few of them on theirs.

Random sand wurm kills were awarded a bounty by the mining corps, because every wurm was a potential miner-muncher and machine-eater. The problem was generally one of finding them, as the worms were not mindless, and normal lures rarely worked on them more than once. They were hard to track and follow in the scree and sands of this area. Naturally, going down on the ground here was close to a death sentence.

So that's what I was doing, running across these recessed sand lakes, where the grit and sand filtered down and filled in much of the scree, which was churned and cycled over endlessly by the wurms, rising, grinding away the intact stone around, and expanding slowly in area.

The only overland route was the rail lines, built on durasteel and high up on rock, away from the wurms, endlessly transporting loads of ore and workers to and fro from the city, feeding the vast machinery and furnaces of the underhive in their ceaseless output of materials. Trying to build a road was stupid, as any vehicles not force-sealed would just get corroded away, and attract all kinds of things looking for lunch. The metal tanks shielded inside a magno-tube, not so much.

Me going on foot, and especially just over the sand pit lakes, was just crazy.

Well, maybe not so much.

The Wave-Skating Steps worked perfectly well off my +10 Melee Attack Bonus, and I skimmed four inches above the sands, barely leaving a wake, and definitely leaving no sound of footsteps. So, I was invisible to them for all practical purposes, as they basically lived and died by tremblesense.

They were not, however, invisible to me.

I was playing holovid travel agent at the moment, in Markspace, and incidentally recording it on the Quanta just for fun. Those in Marklink were enraptured, because my eyes were far more acute than theirs, I saw more colors, and I could see right through the swirling sands and dust without a problem. The moan of the wind with the aggressive rasp of the sands hissing past around my Vajra and the little differences in intonations coming off mounds of wind-scoured rock left from mines of the past reverberated through the air in a complex mess of sonar. Electrical charges danced between the sands, occasionally discharging in snapping bolts and sparks, waves of heat bubbled and boiled in ceaseless rhythm, while below me, the lake of sand and scree peeled past in endless slow motion waves and currents, trailing out behind me and adding to my realspace lived-line.

I had no fear of getting lost, since my Visual File was literally tracking me in time and space, and I could retrace my steps perfectly across this shifting sand lake easily.

And then the long body flowed by in my tremblesense below. I /heard breaths hitch as they caught my visualization of the sand wurm lying below, and I let some of my weight rasp against the sands.

The bounty on the sand wurms was meh. To most hunters, it wasn't worth their time and ammo to hunt one, nor the danger. The real money was in two places... a nexal stone half again as big as usual for something their size, probably related to it processing and burrowing through so much crystalline gunk, and its teeth.

Its diamond-hard, symmetrical teeth, arranged in geometric rows on its trifold opening snout, were one of the very, very best things to make Focuses out of for Mindblades or Athame. The material was suitable for QL 40 workmanship, and so high-end psions could never get enough of them. Mechanists wanted them for psionic circuits for QL 15+ gear replacements. They were worth good money, if you could get them.

The problem was that if the sand wurm died violently, the combination of the death pulse of it dying plus an instinctive regurgitation of its digestive fluids totally ruined the teeth. Getting a wurm with full teeth was well-nigh impossible in normal circumstances, and you could only cry and dig out the nexal you hopefully hadn't blown apart with explosive rounds, go collect your bounty, and curse your luck.

I had discovered a much better method of harvesting them, although it admittedly was a little crazy.

==============

Some time ago...

It had all started with one of the wurms I followed into an access tunnel after it breached the Shield Wall. It was remarkably quicker and more agile then I thought it would be for a five-foot-high, eighty-foot scaled tube of flesh, and I noted it was using True Seeking to try and get a lock on me for an enveloping strike to swallow me whole. The problem was that I was Beyond Law and Chaos, and it couldn't future-see me to do that... so I let it.