Devourer
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| Classification | |
|---|---|
| Structure | Field |
| Origin | Derived (Branch parasite) |
| Class | Primitive; Adapted |
| Characteristics | |
| Length | 8–14 m, including tentacles |
| Mass | 1–3 t |
| Habitat | Open ocean; coastal waters; rivers and canals |
| Group size | 1–2 (open ocean); 6–12 (coastal) |
| First recorded | 2021 |
The Devourer is an aquatic branch parasite, a tentacled field organism of Derived origin. It swims faster than any merchant ship and cannot support its own weight on land. Devourers have attacked shipping since 2021, and their attacks on merchant ships caused the marine insurance crisis of 2021 and 2022. A Devourer attack in 2023 caused the fall of Venice, the first major European city to fall. They are the earliest branch parasite recorded on Earth.
Description
A Devourer is 8 to 14 metres long including its tentacles, and weighs 1 to 3 tonnes. The body is a muscular, tapering sac about a third of that length, near-black, with a ring of eight to twelve tentacles at the front surrounding the mouth. It has no load-bearing skeleton and is close to neutrally buoyant, and out of the water it collapses under its own weight. It swims by jet propulsion and by undulating the body, with bursts above 60 km/h, faster than any merchant ship.
The body is fully coated in membrane gel, and small-arms fire has little effect on it. Devourers have no eyes. They locate prey by the vibration of engines, hulls and swimmers in the water, and by chemical traces.
Life cycle
Devourers are produced by Beckons and enter the water from infested coasts and shallows. Like other branch parasites, they occur in a Primitive and an Adapted form, the Adapted being a later reissue of the same blueprint.
Behaviour
Devourers in the open ocean travel alone or in pairs. Coastal Devourers gather by chemical signal into packs of 6 to 12. They attack anything in or on the water: swimmers, small boats, ships, and people on quays, bridges and decks. A Devourer can launch itself clear of the water to take prey from a deck or a quayside, and falls back into the water after the strike.
Against large ships, packs attack the stern. They foul and wrench the propellers and rudder and tear at the shaft seals and sea inlets below the waterline, and a ship disabled this way floods through its engine room. Ships that stopped to help were attacked in turn, and the practice of standing by a stricken ship was abandoned in 2021.
Devourers enter rivers, estuaries and canals, where the narrow water gives them access to people on the banks.
Genome variants
Most Devourers belong to the Tethysic genome, the aquatic genome found in all the oceans. Devourers of other genomes are limited to the coasts of their regions.
Control
Merchant shipping in infested waters sails in convoy under naval escort, which engages Devourers with deck guns and RTG rounds. Escorts and convoy ships carry propeller guards, and engines are run at varying speeds to make their vibration harder to follow. Where a waterway passes through held territory, locks are fitted with barriers and nets, and boat traffic is restricted to municipal and patrol vessels.
History
The first attacks by Devourers were recorded in early 2021, on small craft and coastal shipping off West Africa and South America. From mid-2021 packs attacked bulk carriers and container ships on open-ocean routes. About 120 merchant ships were sunk by the end of 2021 and about 450 by the end of 2022, and deep-sea container traffic fell by about 80% between 2021 and 2023.
In 2023 Devourers entered the lagoon of Venice from the Adriatic and moved through its canals in coordinated groups, attacking boats and people on the canal-side streets, the bridges and the ground floors of buildings. The city was evacuated over about two weeks and abandoned. Amsterdam closed its canals to unescorted boats and installed barriers at its locks the same year. Devourers have entered Amsterdam's waterways several times since, and the ferries across the IJ were suspended after they appeared in the river.