The Seraphine, Two Kilometers Below and Descending

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.12 Interstellar

The submarine was now moving forward at fifteen knots, in a fifteen-degree dive and a slow turn around the edge of the borehole. It was an uncomfortable forward tilt, and Janus found himself holding onto the navigation table for support. The captain was keeping them about a hundred meters from the ice wall, and the submerged part of the borehole was eight kilometers deep. He probably could have done the math, given time and a terminal, but the navigation holo-tank informed him it would take sixty-six minutes to make the descent and a little over eleven minutes for each rotation.

“Don’t get drawn too far into the data, young man,” the Apostate said, standing near him with his arms folded. “It’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Janus said.

“The Alignment,” the Apostate said. “No one knows why it happens, but it creates a momentary change in the undersea currents. You’ll already have noticed the surface ice of the borehole had melted by the time we departed.”

Janus nodded.

The captain looked at him expectantly and raised an eyebrow.

Janus felt like he was being pop-quizzed in the Primer prep school he’d gone to before he was assigned to be a mechanic instead of an engineer, like Callie. He’d come a long way in the past ten years, both in terms of the things he’d learned and the situations where he’d had to make snap judgments under pressure.

He was no sailor, but the captain had mentioned data, and he knew about outliers. “I’m guessing the data this model is built on doesn’t account for the Alignment.”

The captain gave him an encouraging smile. “A good guess. You’re wrong, but a good guess,” the captain said. “We have data on over a thousand Alignments, so while it is true that our general models are larger, we have an almost adequate knowledge of the currents that affect the route to the Core.”

With a gesture, the Apostate zoomed out, showing the next two kilometers of the borehole, and added historical current models to the display. The borehole was usually relatively placid. What he saw, in spirals of alternating bands of red and blue, looked more like they were diving into a whirlpool. “This gives us part of the story, and it’s why we need to maintain this uncomfortable incline. The sonar in the bow of the ship has better range and resolution. We’re mostly blind to things above and below the current we’re following. Moving at this speed and angle maximizes our chances to avoid anything rising beneath us.”

Rising beneath us? Janus thought, and then he put it all together. “Void, take me,” he said. The hot swirling currents, the melted surface ice, the speed… “We’re dodging icebergs ripped free of the borehole’s walls.”

The captain slapped his back. “They’re called growlers when they’re underwater, and they rise almost as fast as we’re going down. Most of them will have melted to ice cubes by the time they get up here, but farther down, it’s going to get challenging.”

Janus looked grimly at the display. The sonar pinged. It was quieter than the crew’s voices but louder than a whisper. Sure enough, the partial red wireframe of a “growler” rose out of a colder layer, and the captain issued a quick order to the pilot. They missed it by over fifty meters, but Janus felt like if he let out a sigh of relief, the captain would reveal some fresh horror. He could feel the same tension in the crew, both the Irkallans and, to a lesser extent, the Cult ronin and exceptionalists. This was some sort of test, the kind Nikandros liked to spring on him. Janus relaxed. “It’s a good thing we have such an experienced captain, then.”

“Quite right,” the Apostate said. Another flash of rage crossed his features and was smoothed over. “Tell the Deep Rider to sharpen up her track, if you please.”

“Aye, Captain,” the comm officer said.

***

Forty minutes later, things had indeed become “challenging.” The sonar ping went out more often. The temperature of the water within the warmer current had increased by one degree, and that had a drastic effect both on their track and their ability to see. The greater temperature differential between hot and cold currents meant the thermocline—the thin transitional layer between hot and cold currents that distorted and reflected sound—was both thicker and more opaque, reducing the time they had to react to the ever-increasing amount of small and sometimes very large growlers in their path. The warmer water also destabilized the borehole walls, creating small collapses that obscured their “view,” and the captain elected to bring the radius of their turn in tighter, angling the sub slightly inward.

They needed to maneuver more often, and they had less space to do it.

“Come left two-four-zero and hold.”

“Come left two-four-zero, aye!”

“Ahead one-third, resume station keeping.”

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“Ahead one-third, station keeping, aye!”

The captain was leaning against the navigation table, eyes darting between the display and the pilot’s station. Janus had no idea how he was plotting a way through the increasing flurries of red-shaded obstacles.

“Prepare to level off and decrease range from the wall to five-zero meters, and make your speed fifteen knots, on my mark.”

The pilot repeated the command, and the crew waited with bated breath.

“Mark!”

“Levelling off at depth six-eight-four-zero, captain!”

The submarine leveled off just in time for a monstrous growler the size of the sub to rise from the cold layer below them, and the Seraphine skirted just above and outside of it by a mere thirty meters.

“Chapo requesting orders, Captain!”

“Tell them to maintain their course and attitude, Comms.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Set the dive angle two-zero degrees down, pilot, and come about. Get us back to the center of the channel.”

“Coming about, aye, sir!” the pilot said, sweat running down the side of her face. At this point, she and the rest of the control room were a reflexive extension of the captain’s will, applying their skill and wit to the task but obeying his commands without question.

“Increase your speed, pilot!” the captain snapped. “The Chapo is closing the gap!”

“Aye, sir, making my speed two-zero knots until back in position.”

“Do so,” the captain said.

Janus swallowed. He hadn’t fully understood why the Cult mariners had insisted they needed a specific type of captain to command the convoy, but now he did. The three submarines had survived the transit so far, with the Apostate essentially steering all three ships, sometimes giving the Chapo and the Deep Rider direct commands that he kept track of and harangued them over while keeping full awareness of what was ahead and around them. The submarine had deployed a wired drone through the thermocline above them, which Syn was somehow managing to keep from running into things while giving them a more complete picture of what was going on, but even with the drone going and the sonar in full operation, they were running out of places to go.

“I just lost all contrast on the drone,” Syn said, puzzled.

Then, the worst thing happened. There was a crackling sound so loud it sounded like the pelting of hail on the submarine’s hull, and then, a quarter turn around the borehole, a massive wall of red descended in their path. Janus gaped, and the pilot reduced her throttle instinctively.

“Maintain your speed, damn you!” the captain snarled. He activated the ship’s net and said. “All hands, prepare for steep angle dive!”

“Captain?” the pilot said, alarmed.

Janus didn’t know what to do. An entire section of the borehole wall had just collapsed, and the area within and above the channel was filled with the fuzzy red wireframe that reminded Janus of the descending molten spear of an angry god, except instead of burning heat, it was deadly cold.

“Set your dive angle to twenty-seven degrees down,” the captain said calmly.

“I’m unable to comply, sir!” the woman said, terrified.

“Do it now, or we’re all dead,” the captain said.

The pilot looked at Janus in a panic, and Janus froze. All he could see was the wall of red getting closer at almost twenty knots. They had to stop!

“Get out of that seat,” the captain told the co-pilot, and he sat at the second set of controls. He pulled three breakers, cutting power to the pilot’s controls, then he pushed forward on the joystick, and Janus was thrown against the holo-tank as the whole sub angled down almost thirty degrees.

“Call out the depths by the hundreds, please,” the captain said, his voice as cool as a frozen lake.

“Passing seven-thousand one-hundred meters, sir,” the co-pilot said.

Every eye on the bridge was focused on the holo tank.

“Man your stations!” the captain snapped.

“Deploying second drone,” Syn said, recovering faster than the others.

Janus watched as Syn controlled two drones, extending one while bringing the second around and below the submarine. It was a race to get the drones below the layer before the captain drove the sub straight through it. The distances closed—from the sub to the collapse, from the bow to the bottom of the current. Syn got the first drone under the layer and almost immediately lost it as it plunged through the thermocline.

“Adjusting,” the captain said to himself, widening the turn and heading even closer to the borehole wall.

Janus wanted to stop the man, but he also didn’t know what to do. The control room was at the mercy of a man who acted like he knew what he was doing when he was clearly insane and who, besides, would likely survive exposure to the water if they weren’t instantly crushed.

The second drone got under the layer, and Syn was able to transmit several seconds of data before it, too, was lost. The massive piece of wall had started to break apart as it descended.

“Transmit that image to the Chapo, Comm. We’re going to lose them when we punch through.”

“Aye, Captain,” the communications officer said calmly.

Janus held his breath as they approached the bottom of the warm current and dove through the meters-thick thermocline into the cold below.

They lost all sight. The images of the collapsing wall grayed out from lack of data, and Janus white-knuckled the holo-tank as the sound of ice bouncing and scraping off the hull filled the air, and then the sonar pinged, and he could see it: the collapsed section of wall had slipped inward as it fell, drawn to the center, and as it broke into smaller pieces, buoyancy was starting to prevail. The biggest pieces were slowing, while all around them, smaller, broken pieces had started to rise.

The captain drove the sub through the gap between the ’berg and the wall, the Seraphine perfectly positioned to make it through.

Some of the control room crew cheered, but the captain continued as before, eventually slowing to the original fifteen knots and returning them to the original spiral once they’d cleared the collapsing wall. Janus saw first the Chapo and then the Deep Rider dip below the layer, although, at that point, they had the Seraphine’s data and plenty of room to maneuver. The captain relinquished the controls to the co-pilot, and they continued for the next seven minutes without incident, passing out of the borehole into the undersea below.

“Did I miss anything?” Nikandros asked, stepping onto the deck.

The pilot was still in her seat, in shock, and everyone seemed to be ignoring her.

“Nothing significant,” the Apostate. “You have the watch.”

“I have the watch,” Nikandros confirmed.

The Apostate nodded and clasped his hands behind his back, calmly walking toward the ladderwell and his quarters.

Janus saw that the oncoming watch was taking care of the stricken pilot, and he hurried after the Apostate.

“Captain!” he said, catching the man on the steep stairwell.

The Apostate looked at him, and again, Janus saw that deep, virulent rage in the man’s piscine features, but this time, it didn’t disappear. It burned into him as the mutant bared his fangs. “You hesitated. Almost cost the lives of your people and my crew. If you ever fail to obey another of my orders under-sea, I will gut you barehanded, Invarian. You have my oath on it.”

The captain didn’t wait for him to respond. He continued his descent toward crew berthing and his cabin.