Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.28 Interstellar

They reached Seafall, the compartmentalist facility Matthias had told them about, a little over a day after they finished transiting through Fuller’s Rent. The journey had taken them seventy-nine kilometers down and nearly two thousand kilometers off their original course, although they would still be able to reach the Core facility a few days after their originally planned arrival if they chose to.

Nikandros and his cyborgs had been unusually quiet. No protests. No demands. Going out of their way to only leave their quarters one at a time. It made Janus’s skin crawl that things were going so well.

It was never easy during the Trials. Never. If it seemed that way, it was because he’d missed something. He was sure of it.

“Getting images from the drone,” Syn said.

Janus and the rest of the control room crew had their eyes on the holo-tank as the image came through. The Seraphine was hunkered near the ceiling, beneath the hollow crust of the empty planet, some fifteen kilometers from the compartmendalist base with fifteen kilometers of wire stretching between them and the drone.

“Survivor take us. They know how to build,” Lira said.

Seafall was a hanging city carved into the underside of the planet’s crust. The main excavation looked to be almost a kilometer across, or maybe the compartmentalists had expanded and dug into some sort of existing feature, like a dome collapse—although that name had particular connotations to Janus that made him uncomfortable. There were structures built into that depression, modules similar to the ones they had built into the ice around the borehole.

They’d had the same on Irkalla, for the smaller habitats that didn’t have the resources for a dome. If they hadn’t been a hundred kilometers under the surface, it might have been almost normal, just another human city built in an uninhabitable environment out of blocks.

The banality was somewhat ruined by the two-kilometer-long structures that extended from the hole and pointed toward the true core of the planet.

“What are those?” Mick asked. “Antennas?”

Syn shook her head. “Can’t transmit far underwater. They’d be a waste.”

“They’re radiators,” Janus said. “They built up into the rock. They have to cool the facility.”

“And they needed to make it look like a giant jellyfish for that?” Mick asked.

“Maybe,” Janus said. “Depends on how many people and machines they have dug in up there, and the temperature of the surrounding rock.”

“I bet they did it for the look,” Syn said.

“Me too,” Mick said, leaning over and giving the Betan drone operator a fist bump.

Janus chuckled. They might be right, he thought. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time human beings had used technological dominance over their environments to fashion the world after their own whims.

There were two main towers and several shorter, thinner ones, whose purpose Janus could only guess. Current sensors? Bi-metallic energy generation? “Can you get me a closer look at these?” Janus asked, pointing at several nodes along the upper reaches of the thinner towers.

“Sure,” Syn said. “Just let me—”

The feed froze, then cut off.

“Is there a problem with the tank?” Janus asked.

“No,” the captain said before Syn could answer. “Roll the footage back.”

Syn did. Just before the feed cut out, there was a lot of noise and bubbles heading straight for the drone.

“Get the ship to battle stations,” the captain said.

The compartmentalists had spotted and destroyed their drone.

***

Janus was suited up, his weapons and medkit packed into a hard-cased pack that was fasted to the back of his suit. There had been other modifications—armored plates across the shoulders and chest, support struts along the legs to bear the weight, and kevlar reinforcement at the joints.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

It made wearing the suit feel more like his days in an old-fashioned void suit, trudging through the dust of his homeworld. His body remembered that feeling. He might even have missed it. Maybe.

“You ready?” Callie asked.

“You bet,” Janus answered.

He was lying through his teeth. Further analysis of the lost drone’s footage had identified the culprits: a series of automated defense turrets with short-range underwater rockets designed to take out large sea creatures before their curiosity damaged the facility.

“They probably go off every couple of days,” Syn said. “There’s still plenty of wildlife at these depths, crazy as that seems.”

“I know,” Janus said.

“They weren’t worried about wildlife,” the captain said.

The Apostate was the only one of them not wearing a heavy aspirant suit, just a wetsuit and a snug, streamlined pack for his equipment. He didn’t look nervous. He looked more in his element than ever.

Janus’s understanding, enriched during the course of their trip, was that Dr. Jahangir’s gene therapies had varied results, especially when they’d been given almost a thousand years to settle in. No hard facts, just rumors, but some of them included slow transformations into things that didn’t look like they’d ever been human. Big ones.

“I didn’t realize so many of your people were down in the inner sea.”

“All those that survived the purges, to my knowledge,” the captain said. “Except for me.”

Janus looked at the Apostate. In the clean, white light of the dive room, he could see the seafoam green tint of the other man’s skin, the scales on the outside of his arms and legs, and the gills in the man’s neck. He was a monster, like the ones Janus had destroyed in Dr. Jahangir’s lab, rows upon rows of them in stasis, sealed into glass jars. Janus had just thought of them as dangerous specimens, both because of what they were and the knowledge they represented, but he had never wondered—never bothered to ask Ryler—if any of them had started out as human.

Just how far rogue had Dr. Jahangir gone in those last days?

Pumps whirred and the vents hissed as the dive room started to pressurize to the same level as the water around them.

“Helmets on,” Janus said, locking the clear dome helmet into the reinforced neck seal, and the rest of the team followed suit. The modified suits had a fixed-in-place half-sphere that allowed them to move their heads around because a regular neck seal wouldn’t hold up under these pressures.

The captain grinned at the suited humans, working his jaw to equalize the pressure in… Janus wasn’t actually sure how the fish-like humanoid’s ears worked, and he wasn’t about to ask.

Fury yawned and leaned against the captain’s leg.

Janus laughed and shook his head. He was doing his best not to feel bitter about it. Fury wasn’t a regular pet, anyway.

“Pressure equalized, away team,” the officer of the watch reported.

“Open the moon pool,” the captain said.

“Aye, sir.”

A few seconds later, the heavy polysteel plate that formed the floor of the diving deck slid aside, revealing the midnight blue water of the inner sea.

His breath felt unusually loud in the wide, clear dome.

Fury was the first to dive in, launching herself at the water with none of the concerns Janus felt gripping his heart, and the captain laughed out loud and dove in after her.

“All men are children,” Callie muttered over the comm. She crossed her arms and stepped off the platform.

Mick went next, then Lira, and then Duncan and Devere, two Hunters from Irkalla. Ivan was still recovering from his wound, and Syn needed to be in the control room helping run the sensors and their remaining drone. It was Janus’s team’s job to either get the sub clearance to dock, disable the defense system, or both, and hope to the Void the turrets wouldn’t track and target something as small as a suited man.

Vix and Egan jumped into the water, and Tamara looked at him from across the pool.

“Go on,” Janus said. “I’ll go last.”

“Yes, Emissary,” she said. She stepped forward, and the dark water closed over her.

Janus stared at that pool of darkness as the water sloshed around and then smoothed over.

He’d never dreamed of an ocean, growing up. The biggest pool of water he’d ever seen was an aquaculture tank, and those were kept round and shallow and relatively small to make them easier to clean, and to protect a colony’s food supply from getting wiped out by disease. On Krandermore, the rivers had mostly been shallow, fast-moving streams, except for the Iztacatl, the great river that ran past the great city of Veraz. Those deep silt-clouded waters hid monsters, one of which nearly capsized their boat, and a sailor had gone overboard, but Janus still hadn’t been afraid until now.

Janus clenched his jaw and took a quick breath. He’d stood, exposed to the vacuum of his world without a suit on, once, during his first Trials. He’d faced the Void.

The depths were worse.

With one last sigh, he stepped forward and dropped into the darkness of the inner sea.

He sank. He couldn’t see a thing. His arms and legs scooped at the water, but his suit could have been made out of lead for how fast he was dropping. Then the automated jets in the external frame kicked in, compensating for Janus’s struggles, and his suit slid out from under the Seraphine.

Air bladders inflated around his waist, under his arms, and behind his back. Janus was breathing hard, but he forced himself to relax. He was floating now, sliding up past the long cigar shape of the Seraphine, and he could see the suit lights of the rest of the team, floating upward above him. With a mental curse, he turned on his own lights, and the water around him became somewhat less inky, more like blue velvet, at least in a bubble a few meters around.

He floated up for the next three minutes. It was soothing, almost like being held. Then, the little jets in his suit kicked in again, and he was flipped upside down, still floating up, just in time to take a knee against the rocky crust above the sub.

The others were waiting, standing on the underside of the world, their suit lights pointed at him.

“You all right, boss?” Mick asked over a private channel.

“I’m fine,” Janus answered, rising to his feet.

A monstrous eye and curved, pointed teeth filled his view, and Janus batted his arms until he realized what had happened. “Void damn it, Fury!”

The jungle dragon was already slipping through the group and out of sight, her body as perfectly suited to the depths as they had been to the jungles and nearly airless steppes of her homeworld.

“Let’s move out,” Janus said, trudging across the rocks toward Seafall while the buoyancy system and jets kept him pressed to the ceiling. Never easy, he told himself, muttering curses against whatever phenomenon or species had hollowed out this world and against the Cult for having the insatiable curiosity to decide they should face the unknown.