Fuller’s Rent, Ninety-Three Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.26 Interstellar
Two days passed uneventfully. If anything, Janus was a little bored. Nikandros and his exceptionalists didn’t leave officer berthing except to use the showers or restrooms, for those who still did, and they did that one at a time.
Food was brought to them.
Janus was kept informed of every movement and interaction.
Since all the aspirants were on the Seraphine, and three of them were qualified to run DCC, Janus found himself mostly out of a job. He looked over engineering reports. He roamed the ship. Sometimes, Fury came with him or squeezed into his bunk with him for a nap. Sometimes, he walked alone. He found no technical faults, no strange readings, no signs that the crew wasn’t being exceedingly diligent. He had nothing to fix. He almost let himself get frustrated by it until he realized why he was stalking the hallways.
He missed Xander, and he missed Lee.
It had only been two days since he’d sent his son and his partner to the cargo ship for their safety and his. It was an itch in his brain and grit behind his eyelids when he tried to sleep. It had never bothered him this much, not when he’d first gone out on the ice and not when he’d gone ashore or been on opposite watches with Lee.
The only thing that had changed was their relationship. They were married, he guessed, in a strange way that wasn’t comfortable for either of them but which they had both wanted, acknowledged, and settled. The tension was gone between them and replaced with a simple and unrelenting magnetic pull. Sometimes, Janus would link to the Seraphine’s network, linking his retinal displays to the sonar data that showed the other ships in the convoy, and he would imagine he felt a slight pull toward the Chapo.
It made him ecstatic, and sad, and sometimes terribly afraid.
The environment of the trench provided some distraction, and Janus spent about half his waking hours observing and cataloging the creatures he saw. There were glowing drifters, the bioluminescent jellyfish he’d seen passing through the boundary between undersea and inner sea. The jellies were less dense here, presumably because of the number of animals that fed on them, but there were still enough of them, along with the green-glowing plankton, to give the water a clear blue color that allowed the observation of the rest of the environment.
Of the animals that preyed on the jellyfish, Janus identified two main categories: those that swam in the waters of the trench and those that scuttled or hovered near the cliff faces. Trench trundlers—slow-moving crabs with large, rock-like shells, settled into crags within the rock and snatched passing jellies and small fish as they passed by. There were wider openings in the passing rock, some of them big enough to swallow a submarine, and Janus well remembered the captain’s warning to keep their distance. He wondered what kind of megafauna might live inside—a bigger version of the trench trundlers? A giant eel? Some kind of squid, to give truth to the Chapo’s name? He saw smaller versions of these: sonic squids that moved in swarms of up to a dozen, using high-frequency soundwaves to communicate and stun their prey, and long, ribbon-like vortex worms that spun their flat, paddled bodies in swirls before scooping through the concentration of plankton, making it look like they were circling a faint light.
A glow shark, half the length of the Seraphine, swam alongside them for a few hours, easily keeping pace, before it abruptly turned and swam over them, heading back toward the upper reaches of Fuller’s Rent.
As they descended, new ecosystems formed around plays of light and stealth. Crystal crawlers on the cliffs reflected light in distracting displays. Phantom rays with translucent bodies and short, stubby wings propelled themselves through the water thanks to a kind of electromagnetic scoop on their undersides. More predatory glass stalkers, almost-invisible fish with long, toothy jaws, sprung from ambush to snap up echo shrimps, mud dancers, and orb blooms, while blink fish, their bodies flashing like strobes, nimbly evaded capture to feed on coral and sea grass near the thermal vents in the cliff face. Neon nettles—spherical tangles of free-floating vines—adopted the opposite approach, glowing the brightest out of all the local life forms. They stunned anything foolish enough to come near them, the glowing vines wrapping and constricting prey to be slowly digested by the colony.
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Janus would have loved to study them in particular, as there seemed to be multiple vines in each tangle, each with different colors and levels of brightness, which were either competing or collaborating in some sort of closed system.
A massive, whiskered catfish of some kind with thick, shale-like scales swallowed a tangle the size of a human being whole, the bright glow illuminating it from within.
The submarine creaked slightly, not as sharply as during their initial descent, but more like the settling of its plates. There was something wrong with the pressure out there. They had already gone almost four times as deep as they had previously gone, on the edge of failure, and yet, though the pressure was increasing linearly, as it should, it was only that of a few kilometers below the surface. Something down here was interfering with fundamental laws in an incomprehensible way. The cliff face they were passing was thicker than the crust of most planets—heavy and dense enough to produce geothermal activity—and yet Janus knew that beneath it was the expanse of the inner sea.
None of this should have been possible, and yet it was there before his eyes.
Outside the submarine, the light had dimmed to a deeper blue. Abyssal bloomers glowed gently on the cliffs, wrapping stinging tendrils around anything that swam near. Helix siphons shot out like nets and tangled passing prey. Gravity parasols, like upturned umbrellas, captured the falling detritus of the upper layers.
Emissary, the captain would like you to join him in the control room, the officer of the watch sent over the ship’s net.
Janus disconnected from the hull cameras, zipped up his coveralls, and heaved the sleeping jungle dragon off his waist before sliding out of his curtained bunk. He put his boots on, rolled his shoulders, and smiled. So far, so good, he thought.
They were about to pass the core’s crust and enter the open stretches of the inner sea.
***
Ryler’s eyes glowed gold as he sat at the desk, a cable snaking from his chest to the cabin’s built-in terminal. “We are not where we should be,” he said, his implants shedding heat as he struggled to bypass the Seraphine’s security without setting off alarms.
Nikandros looked at him from where he was sitting on the top bunk. “Should you be telling me this?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, young Abraxxis, I had assumed you had once again fully thrown in with your friend, the emissary.”
“Our cause is his cause,” Ryler said absently, his eyes still golden-hued and staring blankly at the data streaming in from the rest of the ship.
He was aware of Nikandros’s scrutiny, of course. It was to be expected. This “rebellion” of the other Irkallans had come less than an hour after Janus and Ryler had talked. It stood to reason that Ryler had some part in it, although Nikandros also had to know that Janus was unpredictably decisive when he got it into his head that something needed to be done.
“Advise me, then, Librarian,” Nikandros said dryly. “Have I made a mistake?”
“In failing to recruit Janus to what we know must be done?”
“In allowing the outlier to capture us,” Nikandros said. His voice had more of an edge to it this time, and Ryler caught a faint whisper of animal terror in it. Despite the redundancy of their plans, the resilience of their faction, and the inevitability of their cause, Nikandros didn’t want to die.
“Janus will not kill us unless we give him cause.”
“Cause being?”
“Threatening his family, threatening his people, or engaging in actions he deems evil.”
Nikandros chuckled. “I knew he was an idealist, but I didn’t think we had built him up to be some sort of spiritual leader.”
Ryler blinked, and the glow faded from his eyes. “It’s not like that, I don’t think. Do you remember the news we received about Koni Atl-Verazlan’s crusade on Krandermore before we left?”
Nikandros raised an eyebrow at him.
“Right, of course you do. Janus doesn’t have that in him. He’s not going to systematically take over an entire region by any means available and make that his life’s calling. He’s more emotional and reactive than that.”
“He caused the Atl-Verazlan crusade!” Nikandros said.
“I agree. But he spent a year on Krandermore without trying to fix the clan system until we locked him in a buggy with someone he had every reason to hate.”
Nikandros sighed. “Yes. The worst uprising in centuries, all triggered out of Janus’s sense of moral indignation.”
“Yes,” Ryler said with undisguised wonder. “He’s everything we thought an outlier would be. Not brittle like his uncle or blindly led like Brago.”
“Agreed. Let’s make sure he doesn’t see us as a threat until he has no better option than to join us.”