Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.29 Interstellar
Visibility inside the flooded compartment was terrible. And disgusting. Callie and Vix’s shoulder lamps tried to pierce through the murk, but the water had been trapped in the space with minimal cycling since the initial breach, and in addition to the damage done to the walls, fixtures, furniture, and loose junk when the water burst in, there had been dozens of scientists and soldiers in the compartment when the PSS killed them all. It was a terrible tragedy that had probably saved the thousands of other soldiers and civilians who were trapped in Seafall.
Right now, it was just incredibly gross. They were wading through pickled people. Or pickled people juice, Callie thought. There really wasn’t anything that looked human left, except for clothing and grayish… stuff. She was doing her best not to look too hard.
Strangely, walking through the flooded yuck reminded her of the first time she’d stepped out of the airlock in Prime Dome when she was ten years old. She’d been in a void suit before, of course. Every child was taught how to put on both an emergency suit and a proper void suit, although most would never leave the dome, just like every kid on Lumiara was taught to dig a snow cave in case they got caught out in a blizzard. And Callie had already been outside of the dome, by that point, because she hadn’t been born in Prime Dome, but she didn’t remember that, and Janus and Ivan still refused to talk about it.
So she was ten when she’d first walked out into the void.
Janus had gone with her. It was one of the few times he’d asked for a day off. He’d been about twenty, she guessed, and painfully earnest. He’d tried to teach her how to walk like a proper duster, heel to toe, toe to heel, like you were moving through water, and now she found herself mimicking that same old gait to make her way on her first real aspirant mission.
It made her smile.
“This looks like the hydraulic control panel,” Vix said.
“Yep,” Callie said, looking at the panel through her facility overlay. “You jack in here, and I’ll head over to the PSS control station.”
“You got it,” Vix said, crossing in front of her.
Callie waited for her to pass, then walked forward on her own. As long as they didn’t get too far from each other, the suit-to-suit comm would work. Callie was more worried about the other woman’s attitude than she was about connectivity.
Vix was an environmental and hydraulics specialist, back in the colony, and she’d held the same role on the Seraphine. It was pretty close to the job Janus had done, back in the day, although he’d branched into a mechanical specialization and periodic maintenance while Vix seemed pretty content to stay where she was. Working in maintenance control, Callie had been senior to her, but since Callie was on the predictive maintenance side, the only orders Vix got from her were through the prioritization of work orders.
If Janus had been leading this mission, it would have been, “Yes, sir!” and “Right away, Emissary!” With Callie, Vix seemed to go out of her way to be informal.
It wasn’t Callie’s fault she was too young for her position and too good at it to be wasted on something else.
“I’ve got the interface up,” Vix said. “Ready when you are.”
“Don’t do anything until I tell you to.”
Vix paused, then said, “You got it, boss.”
And now, I feel childish and petty, Callie thought. She sighed. “Thanks, Vix.”
The PSS control station was right where the facility map said it would be and undamaged. Thank the void, Callie thought. If the station had been damaged, they would have had to find another way to access the system, maybe even splice in another terminal and load the control software onto it.
She stepped over what was probably a corpse in a labcoat, picked up the dead man or woman’s chair, and got to work.
***
Callie worked through the system slowly and methodically. While she’d gently pushed back against her brother’s protectiveness, she knew from her own training that risk profiles were at their highest when someone was doing something for the first time—like her—or when someone had been doing something for a long time—like Vix. It was another reason they weren’t an ideal team, but Callie had agreed with Lira that, since Vix was capable, it wasn’t worth risking Janus.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Not that they told him that.
After forty-five minutes of digging into both the interface and the code, having Vix open and close valves, and carefully testing the system response, Callie had a pretty good idea what had happened with that second flooded compartment.
The PSS was an incredibly robust battle damage control system, designed to handle both air pressure and seawater, with three layers of operation.
The first layer was at the compartment level, designed to react to breaches in the facility’s hull, which had functioned precisely according to design.
The second was the central control system, which she was accessing now, which had diagnostic oversight of the whole system as well as some small automation to keep the system in balance. For example, the initial breach had done significant damage to this compartment, and so, after a short time delay, the PSS preemptively flooded the next one to reduce the strain on the base’s structure. There were limits to this—the base was anchored in the bedrock above, but it was also designed to be composed of air-filled compartments, which was why these outer structures could be jettisoned if the damage was too great… Stay focused, Callie told herself. It probably would have been nice if the PSS had warned the commander and her people it was going to flood the compartment, but the integration with the base notification system hadn’t been implemented yet.
Callie sighed. Seafall had been an incredible project, the kind of thing she would have loved to work on. She wondered if it would ever get finished, or if it would be abandoned.
The third layer of the PSS was a fighting recovery system that allowed people in one compartment to access the PSS control system in another. It was designed with horrific battle damage in mind, and so there were cross linkages from one side of the base to the other, linkages built into the framework rather than the compartments, in order to recover what was left if significant parts of the base were lost—or overpressurize and flood the ones taken over by the enemy.
In fact, there were several features of the system that were designed to enable some sort of self-destructive last stand by someone who knew the system well in the face of a numerically superior enemy.
It was pretty bleak, but from what she understood, this entire base was meant to be a last stand.
Callie started switching off the automated components of the second layer so that she could work with Vix to manually recover the compartment. At the same time, she started putting linkages in place between this system and the commander’s maintenance control station. She wasn’t yet sure what was possible, but if she could at least stabilize the PSS and identify where any faults might have developed in either the routines or the sensors, they could transfer this station out of the compartment and give the commander control of her own systems.
***
Vix was bored. The flooded compartment had been interesting at first, if only because hearing Callie Invarian talk about what might have happened was less useful than seeing it with her own eyes.
The kid hadn’t been far off. There wasn’t just one breach in the hull, but three; the fish guys must have been swarming on the hull, trying to get in.
The joke was on them because she guessed that as soon as they broke through, they got squeezed through that tiny hole like paste through a feeding tube.
Other than that, there wasn’t much to do. There was a little novelty to wading through soup, but once the kid posted her at the valve control station, she became a glorified button pusher. The kid didn’t even ask her questions, just told her which pumps to turn on and off, and which valves to open or close.
She’d had to switch some on and off several times, a clear sign Callie didn’t know what she was doing if sitting here without any results for nearly an hour wasn’t enough evidence of that.
Vix wasn’t in love with the whole Invarian ruling class thing. Ivan controlled the aspirants, Callie had been in maintenance control and, now that they’d removed the cult chief engineer, she was the ChEng of the Seraphine. Lira Allencourt was basically under the Invarians’ thumb, and Mick and his Hunters were their muscle if the other aspirants stepped out of line.
She’d thought that Callie might be different during the mutiny. It almost seemed like the youngest Invarian was trying to keep them all from going on this insane quest to the bottom of the ocean, but it had all turned out to be a ploy—one last flushing out of traitors that left most of the old Prometheans dead, no longer able to challenge Invarian rule.
I should just have stayed on Irkalla, Vix thought. Should never have gotten mixed up with the Promethean movement in the first place.
“Can you open valves 24A and 36B? And turn on pumps 124 through 130,” Callie said.
“Yes, boss,” Vix said, activating the valve control system.
While she was following Callie’s instructions, Vix noticed that the automatic control system had been switched off. An oversight. Probably why the kid isn’t making any progress. Vix sighed. She probably wouldn’t get any credit for this, so she didn’t bother saying anything. She just turned the system back on.
***
Oh, no! Callie thought. Something had just happened, and the system was reversing the changes she’d painstakingly implemented. It was all happening faster than she could react. How…
Oh, Void! The automated control system! Callie shut it down, but it was already too late. There was a cascade failure of the PSS system ripping through the base—pump failures, valves getting stuck open or shut… Callie’s brain went into overdrive to try to understand what would happen. Would the system dampen itself out, or would it—
Her heart dropped as she saw the pattern. The PSS failures would threaten the upper base—currently unoccupied—and to protect what it thought was the heart of the base, it would have to flood the intervening compartments: the ones that currently held the compartmentalist survivors and the away team.
“Open valve 16C,” Callie told Vix.
“What—”
“Just shut up and do it now, Vix!” Callie snapped.
She didn’t wait to see if the other Irkallan complied. She killed the system so Janus would be able to fix this, kicked her chair clear, and ran toward the valve control station.
“It’s done!” Vix said. “Now, what are you—”
Callie wrapped her arms around Vix’s waist and tackled her at the same time as the pressure wave converged in the one place Callie could send it to limit the damage.
The compartment they were in.
Pipes burst and the entire inner bulkhead came apart. Callie felt a sharp tug in her suit, and then exploding pain, before everything went dark.