Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.29 Interstellar
Suiting up and heading out into danger while her brother fretted was a new experience for Callie. She kind of liked it. It was amusing to see Janus fret and pace while she re-ran the diagnostics on her suit and Mick checked every seal and fitting. If anything, it helped distract her from the terrible, dangerous thing she was about to do.
“You’re sure this isn’t something I could do?” Janus asked.
“I’m sure,” Callie answered. “I’ll need to access the PSS’s command console from short range, and I’ll have Vix to help with simple tasks.”
“But—”
“That’s enough, Janus,” Lira said. “Callie’s fully capable of this. You’re just making her job harder by worrying.”
Callie gave Lira a grateful smile, and she turned her focus back to the system manual displayed in her retinal implants while the reinforced aspirant suit went through the rest of its self-diagnostic.
It had taken another two-and-a-half hours, but Callie had uncovered what killed the scientists during the invasion. Most of the post-humans assaulted the facility through the dive decks or the submarine docks, but some of them, more resistant to the debilitating effects of the twice-purple lights outside, had attacked the structure directly.
They’d breached the science wing.
Now, as an Irkallan, Callie was as wary as anyone of habitat breaches, but a breach on Irkalla took a space from between one and three atmospheres to zero. It was a catastrophic event for humans unless they managed to empty their lungs, but survivable in a variety of scenarios, and also relatively easy to recover from, except for the dead.
Not so at an equivalent of eight kilometers of depth. A breached space went from one to eight hundred atmospheres of pressure. Callie had run the math, and while the absolute pressure differential between the inside and outside wasn’t as much as, say, a cutting waterjet, the initial jet of water would be up to ten times more destructive, hitting inner surfaces at almost four kilometers per second, about four times faster than a high-powered rifle.
The pressure stabilization system had been the compartmentalists' ruthless if effective response. As soon as a breach was detected—or even likely—the PSS locked down all section airlock doors and rapidly raised the internal pressure to several hundred atmospheres. There was no delay or notification in its activation, and its effects on human beings were immediate. There might have been a brief moment of awareness—pain in the ears, or a feeling of euphoria—then pain and unconsciousness as lungs collapsed or ruptured while the pressure climbed through fifty atmospheres. From fifty to one hundred atmospheres, membranes, and cellular structures started to rupture; from one hundred to two hundred, organ compression and failure. At four hundred atmospheres, anyone but a post-human would be dead, and their bones would start to collapse as well.
The biological effects were more Janus’s field of study, and she knew they were on his mind as he paced.
Callie wasn’t like her brother, in this. She didn’t worry. She planned. From what she understood about their parents, she took after their father, while Janus was more like their mother and Uncle Ivan. Someone needs to keep a cool head. It was that coolness that allowed her and Syn to run a network of rebels on Irkalla for months before the Cult discovered them. It was that coolness that had, almost, allowed her to prevent this whole expedition from happening.
If she’d succeeded, would their people have been better off, or would they just have been unwitting victims of Nikandros’s takeover, or killed in a follow-on attack by the purgationists, who were under his control?
Stolen novel; please report.
“You ready, kid?” Mick asked.
“Yeah,” Callie said, giving him a lopsided grin. “No worries, mate.”
Mick beamed and tapped her shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”
“The second team will be ready to pull you out, just send word,” Janus said.
“I know,” Callie answered with a smirk. “I briefed the mission.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
Callie looked at her brother with undisguised affection. Still putting everyone else’s problems on his shoulders—whether we want him to or not.
“You ready, Vix?” Callie said.
“Let’s do this,” Vix said, extending her fist to the side.
Callie bumped it, then took five heavy, booted steps into the inter-section airlock, tool kit in her left hand.
Once Vix was in there with her, she closed the outer door and started the pressurization cycle.
Callie regretted a lot of things from the past months. She regretted the mutiny in New Prometheus, not because she wished she’d blindly agreed with Janus but because he’d ended up being right. She doubted he understood exactly how that happened, the instinct that made him an emissary in more than name alone, and she supposed it didn’t matter as long as he kept winning. But it wasn’t enough for Callie. She’d spent too many years watching Janus suffer in Prime Dome for no reason, or at least, for reasons that had turned out to be deceptions. So Callie didn’t regret following her own path, but she wished she hadn’t hurt her brother, fallen for Nikandros’s plans, and gotten her fellow conspirators killed. She wished she’d been smart enough to see past all that so they didn’t have to be down here, so Uncle Ivan hadn’t gotten hurt, and so Janus could have enjoyed his life with Lee and Xander instead of always being gone.
She’d studied the schematics and manuals. This was something she knew, and it was her opportunity to live up to her brother’s reputation in a way that was just hers.
***
“Brave kid,” the commander said, arms crossed, as Janus watched the airlock fill with water on the security feed.
“Yeah, she’s that,” Janus said, trapped between nauseous unease and overwhelming pride. “I understood the basics from Callie’s explanation—”
“That makes one of us,” the commander said, and Janus was surprised to hear a hint of humor in her voice.
He chuckled. “Yeah. Brainy brave kid. But what I don’t understand is why we can’t activate and troubleshoot the PSS from here.”
“Money.”
“Excuse me?” Janus said.
The commander ran her hand through her short, gunmetal gray hair and sighed. “The base isn’t finished. Initial plans call for two entire additional sections to be built outside the science wing.”
“Meaning it would have been an internal section.”
“Exactly. That’s why the posts were able to damage the hull. Otherwise, they could have scratched at the polysteel until they died of old age.”
“They don’t… Ah. I see what you mean.”
The commander smirked. “We would have made additional excavations into the crust once the full maintenance and engineering teams arrived, with continuous expansion to support population increases and additional submarines around the core, but we lost a lot of support when Architect Donnika died. We spent most of the last year trying to scrap together the resources to keep this place viable.”
Janus remembered Red Donnika’s last moments vividly, as the deranged cyborg fired her concealed weapon, murdering one of her former champions in an attempt to stop the Krandermore uprising. “I can’t say I’m sorry.”
The commander shrugged. “I went through training with her. Allies and enemies aside, Rachel was what Architect Lindgren made her, and he didn’t prepare her to lead. She took on too much when he died.”
The all-too-human assessment surprised Janus. Red Donnika had led the aspirant force that had wiped out New Prometheus fourteen years ago. He’d thought of her as a brutal zealot, and that perception had only been reinforced during their encounter on Krandermore. He’d been glad that Ryler crushed her skull. He still was. But he wished, among all the unseen maneuvers and pressures the Consensus had created in the factions’ struggle for dominance, that there had been another way.
“When would the base have been completed?” he asked.
“If not for you?” the commander asked, her tone light, eyebrow raised. “Two years from now. That’s when the Oracle determined it would be needed.”
“Is the Oracle often wrong?”
“No,” the commander said. “They’re heading in. Let’s get back to the command center.”
Janus nodded.
As they walked, he was struck by a particular thought. Two years from now. It was a time frame like any other, except that Ivan had planned on training him for the Trials around now, until the airlock breach in Sector Six moved up the timeline.
If it hadn’t been for a failed airlock pressure switch and Craig’s arrogance, Janus would still be on Irkalla.
He’d be running his first Trials and uncovering the fate of Prometheus base.
The compartmentalists would have completed their base in time to counter Nikandros’s takeover.
They would have dealt with the post-humans, and the inner sea would be closed to Janus and his people.
Was Janus the catastrophe the Oracle had predicted?
It was just a passing thought, and Janus harbored no illusions that his existence alone was sufficient to tip the scales at that level. Nikandros and Ryler had used him to create chaos inside the Consensus, Red Donnika had played into their schemes, and who was to say Janus would have had any part in all this if the timeline had been two years delayed?