suit stuff

The saline ocean of Vior’los was beautiful, a sun-dappled vista of surging waves that seemed to stay strangely motionless as Farsight rocketed above them in O’Vesa’s newest iteration of the Coldstar battlesuit. Rather than affording the impressive but short-range mobility of the Crisis XV8, the sleek machine was capable of true flight. It could function at extreme pressures, and even in the cold void of space; the Coldstar had been pivotal to his pyrrhic victory over an Imperial ambush the first time they crossed the Damocles Gulf, and to his rescue of the Wing of Blades.
…
Farsight sat on the seabed, his battlesuit in cross-legged pyramid stance with its sampler cylinders deployed as makeshift anchors. Inside its confines, he too was in a position of meditation. He had been there for some seven cycles now, and his eyes had been closed for so long they were gummed shut. The suit’s internal speakers relayed the subsonics of the sea around him, and he had purposefully dialled the atmospherics all the way down to keep the interior cold and damp. The hex-screen display was but a single image of the ocean around him, bathed in yellow-grey light by the Coldstar’s exterior beams. It was as close to being on the ocean’s floor as he could make it, and still live – for should he open the hatch, the pressure would soon crush him to death.
…
Adjusting his thrust/vector suite for maximum yield, Farsight triggered his jets and climbed through the dark water.
…
The oceanic spread of Vior’los was shallow by comparison to that of Salash’hei, for the depths of the water planet reached down for miles. A pressure warning was steel grey on his environment suite, reddening gradually to full alert as the Coldstar sank further still.
The seismic fibrillator nodes he had mag-tethered to his XV8’s waist acted like the weight belt of an ancestral por pearl diver. In conjunction with the sheer heaviness of the battlesuit and the ballast of water he had taken into his purge cells, they were enough to bear him downwards at speed. It had got very dark, very quickly, to the point that even his blacksun filter was struggling to provide a picture of the sea around him. He had switched to sonar imaging instead, and the ghostly forms of pelagic fish and snaking ocean-serpents flickered on his distribution suite. Now and again, he heard the deep, mournful cry of a Salash’heian leviathan roaming the depths.
Watching his pressure alert flicker bright red, Farsight was beginning to fear that the Coldstar’s hull would split when a proximity alert sounded. Its bip-bip-bip increased in tempo until he settled on the seabed amidst a cloud of silt.

Farsight: Empire of Lies