Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.28 Interstellar
It took the ten members of the away team nearly two hours to walk nearly five kilometers to the compartmentalist base. Janus walked, at least. Fury and the captain swam, darting around and through the group with graceful glee while the rest of them put one foot after the other, upside down, pressed against the underside of the planet’s crust by modular air bladders and kept downright by a system of automated jets.
Janus understood the reasons for it. Walking was one of the most energy-efficient non-mechanical modes of travel, and only activating the jets when they were needed to stabilize him used less power, but he was pissed off and worn out when they took their first break, floating right-side up in a cluster of rocky undercrops and sucking down water and protein paste through straws.
Mick floated over to him slowly, drifting over on his suit jets, and gently bumped into him.
“You okay?” Mick asked.
“Fine.”
“Boss…”
“I hate it out here,” Janus said. This was nothing like the airless landscape of Irkalla. The vacuum didn’t distort things. Starlight was clear. The night might be dark, but shine a light in any direction and you could see as far as the horizon. Down here, everything was graduated to dark, with rippling, shifting shadows that constantly caught the corner of his eyes, held up by a couple of bladders with his feet hanging over nothing.
“Can’t even see the stars,” Mick said, which Janus took for agreement.
Fury swam up and knocked into both of them, wedging herself between the two of them and wrapping her paws around Janus and her tail around Mick.
Mick laughed and wrapped his arms around both of them, which made Fury nuzzle into Janus’s side, and then she squirmed and shot off again into the dark.
Janus sighed, and his mouth pulled up into a half-smile. “All right, everyone. Finish up, and let’s get moving.”
“You in a hurry to face those turrets, big brother?” Callie asked.
Janus clicked his shoulder lamp off and on in an Irkallan duster’s wink. “Anywhere but here, bug. Anywhere but here.”
***
After another hour of walking upside down, the suit’s second skin squeezing his body like a throat swallowing to keep the blood from pooling in his head, Janus noticed the glow. It was an ugly purple line on their curved horizon, like an alien sun waiting to rise. Small crabs and other multi-limbed ceiling feeders skittered and slid across the shadows around them, peeking out of and hiding among the rocks. Janus had meant what he’d said: he’d truly rather be anywhere but here. They finally saw the first of the turrets, or at least the base of one. The targeting sonar was on the surface, but the turret itself appeared to be behind some sort of protective cover.
“We sure these things won’t fire on us?” Janus asked.
They would have done it by now, the captain sent via comm, coming to join them out of the gloom. The fishman swam in a strange, undulating motion that made full use of his webbed hands and feet, a serpentine that nonetheless looked eerily natural for him. Janus figured any motion practiced for over a thousand years would probably look that smooth, but still, there was a part of his mammal brain that was more than a little freaked out by the whole experience. “What do we do now?”
The captain stopped in their midst, floating right-side up while they still stood on the bottom of the crust, and he started to sign with his hands, which his implant translated into text. The turrets will be set to cover each other, two for every one. That way, if something smaller than their usual targets starts messing with them, that something gets redesignated as a target.
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Janus nodded. “Probably a good thing for the maintenance crews. So we go in?”
Rightside up, and float to the base.
“Thank the Void,” Janus said, activating his suit and feeling instant relief as the jets and air bladders reconfigured to turn him around.
The turret next to them snapped out of its silo in a rush of bubbles, rotating toward them, and everyone froze and held their breath. It stayed that way for ten seconds, then ten more, until finally, after half an agonizing minute, it returned to its compartment.
“Let’s take this nice and slow,” Janus said.
***
The Seraphine, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.28 Interstellar
The control room was quiet and heavy with waiting. Syn fidgeted with her stylus while they all watched for news from the away team, be it the deactivation of the defense system or some kind of signal. They had no information on the destructiveness of the turrets’ weapons, whether they would target something like a submarine, and what the effect of such targeting would be. What would they do if the away team asked for extraction before the defense system was down?
Perhaps more worrying were the reasons for the turrets’ emplacement and activation. While the away team had been within signal range, Syn had clocked the captain and Fury moving at speeds of up to twenty knots, as fast as a glow shark, and she suspected they could go faster. Worse, they would be all but impossible to target using the submarine’s weapons. A sonar pulse might work, she thought, but it would also draw the attention of everything else out here, and it would be useless if they were already on the hull. If the Apostate’s lost faction was out there, with human or greater-than-human intelligence twisted by predatory impulses, the Seraphine and her crew would be in great danger.
She glanced over at the sonar techs, who had doubled up for this shift, listening to the surrounding waters on passive. If they heard signs of something approaching the stationary submarine, the officer of the watch would have to make some hard choices. Did they leave the away team behind, or did they rush forward to seek safety within the radius of the defense system?
Syn decided a more productive use of her time would be to research what tactics the Cult had developed for dealing with aggressive lifeforms that attacked the hull of a submarine directly. She used her wrist comm to connect to the ship’s net and opened the ship’s training library, or at least she tried to. The interface for navigating the Seraphine’s noosphere was unresponsive, like a still image instead of a user interface. It was almost as if…
Syn felt a chill run through her. She stood, turning toward the officer of the watch to shout a warning, when the exceptionalists surged into the control room and attacked.
Before Syn could speak, she was almost bowled over by one of the combat cyborgs. She threw her stylus at him, and he weaved out of the way according to some kind of automated dodging program, which bought her a second to breathe before a reinforced synthetic fist smashed into her abdomen. The air whooshed out of her lungs, and burning pain radiated out from her solar plexus. She dropped to her knees, one hand out in warding as she tried unsuccessfully to draw breath, and the cyborg drove her down onto her stomach before fastening her wrists together.
Syn saw stars. The pain in her gut and the knee on her back were suffocating her, and she kicked her legs in panic.
The cyborg rolled her onto her side, and she was able to gasp in a lungful of air.
“Bridge secured, architect,” one of the cyborgs reported to Nikandros, who stood with Ryler while the other exceptionalists finished securing the crew.
Ryler’s eyes were glowing gold, and Syn realized what had been done to them. The Cult librarian had breached network security—security she was responsible for. Once he was inside, he’d taken control of enough nodes to subvert the entire network, and he’d built simulated front-ends between the crew and the actual systems. Syn would have called it an incredible feat of programming if she hadn’t wanted him dead. We should have dropped Ryler into the moonpool without a suit.
But that didn’t change what she needed to do. With the Seraphine under their control, the exceptionalists would be able to force the two cargo vessels and their civilian crews to surrender—the very thing they had been trying to avoid when they took Nikandros and his people prisoner. Blocked off from network access, Syn couldn’t trigger all the bombs they’d placed around the ship, but she could connect directly to the one closest to the control room.
She opened her wrist comm, knowing her eyes would glow blue and not caring if they did. She was about to be beyond reprisal.
She sent the signal.
“That won’t work,” Ryler said sympathetically, eyes glowing gold, and Syn sagged on the floor.
Ryler turned his attention back to Nikandros. “What now?”
“Send the remora over to the Chapo. I want Janus’s partner and child secured before we order the other ships to stand down.”
“How many should we send?”
“Two should suffice.”
Ryler nodded.
Syn quietly tried to work against her restraints, the polymer bands digging into her wrists, silent tears of frustration running across her face.
She’d failed. She’d let everyone down, especially the away team.
No matter what Janus and the others accomplished out there, they would come back to the Seraphine to find they’d already lost everything that mattered.