The Seraphine, Thirteen Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.15 Interstellar
Three days under the ice. Three days of eight-hour watches, eight hours of training and drills, and eight hours of sleep. Lee’s only training was in damage control, and since he was the Damage Control Assistant, they spent more time together than he was used to, and that was good. He squeezed in time for meals, time with Xander, and time to keep Fury company when he could.
The captain was an enigma. The flashes of rage came and went with no discernible pattern. Once Janus had recovered from the shock, he'd thought to confront the man, but other than threatening to kill Janus, the captain treated him with the unfailing courtesy that an emissary and the leader of the expedition’s ground team was due. He didn’t stand regular watches, but he always seemed to be around when something bad was about to happen, and he would either talk the watchstander through it or step in. He only ate in his stateroom and never seemed to need sleep.
Nikandros did everything he could never to be in the same room as him, and the captain seemed to be humoring the architect in that, even though Janus thought he once saw the ghost of a smirk twist the Apostate’s lips.
Janus finally broke down and asked Ryler about it late one night, during midrats, when they were the only ones in the mess.
Ryler frowned. “He told you when you first met. Dr. Jahangir.”
“He told me I’d destroyed her research,” Janus said.
Ryler winced, his eyes glowing blue as he accessed his long-term memory storage. “Not exactly.”
Janus waited for his childhood friend to tap into the implants he’d earned in service to the Cult. Janus wasn’t sure what else there was to learn, though. Dr. Jahangir had been a brilliant, desperate, and ultimately unhinged researcher during the years of the Krandermore plague. She’d done years of research on the disease that was killing the colonists, persevering past the point when her fellow scientists abandoned her, and she was left alone. She failed again and again while the colonists died in their hundreds every day.
The pressure and the isolation drove her mad.
But she did it. She came up with a cure, but it was horrific, turning people into grotesque—
Janus gaped just as Ryler’s eyes stopped glowing.
“‘You were the one to finally purge Dr. Jahangir’s research,’” Ryler said.
“He is Dr. Jahangir’s research,” Janus said, his stomach roiling. “I thought you said Krandermore was the only place it was stored.”
“It is,” Ryler said. “It was. That doesn’t mean it was always that way. When Jahangir first made it back to Lumiara, she was hailed as the greatest scientist of her time.”
Janus felt like Ryler was speaking a foreign language. “Then why did we almost die keeping Red Donnika away from the facility? Why did Nikandros want the data if he had it to begin with?”
Ryler blew out a long sigh. “Okay, look, most people in the Cult don’t even know this, and there’s a simple reason why Red Donnika and Nikandros didn’t have access. They weren’t there. All of this boiled over and got sanitized away before they were even born.”
“But the captain was?”
Ryler gave him a slow nod.
“But that means he’s—”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Over a thousand years old,” Ryler said. “That’s still… One thousand three hundred and thirty-two years between him and Dr. Jahangir.”
Janus sat back. Just when he thought he had a handle on the Cult, the Consensus, the factions, and the Oracle, it always seemed like there was something new to uncover. “Explain this to me,” he said, putting his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “Fifteen hundred years ago, give or take, Dr. Jahangir’s knowledge is widespread on Lumiara.”
“Widespread is too strong a term. People were aware of it. Qualified researchers had controlled access to it, and this was closer to twelve hundred years ago, when he was in power.”
In power? Janus thought, then shook his head. “Let’s stay on track. The knowledge is available—available enough that he used it and is now a thousand-year-old fish-man—and then the knowledge was not available. Why?”
“Because, back then, the dominant factions were the evolutionists and the purists, of which the compartmentalists and exceptionalists are offshoots.”
“And the captain was an evolutionist,” Janus said.
“Yes,” Ryler said enthusiastically, also leaning forward. “He had the whole Consensus in an uproar over whether Dr. Jahangir’s research should continue to be studied or whether it should be used to bring about the next stage of human progress and return us to the stars. I saw a speech of his, a bootleg copy that survived the data wipe. He was still a Standard back then, or at least only conventionally augmented, and he explained his vision of enhanced humanity slowly repopulating the galaxy, able to survive in environments where our ancient enemies wouldn’t think to find us.”
“Sounds like compelling stuff,” Janus said, giving Ryler an eye roll. “What happened? The Consensus obviously let him try.”
“They didn’t. The vast majority voted against it, but he and the core members of his faction did it anyway. They used Dr. Jahangir’s research on themselves. That’s why he’s called the Apostate.”
Janus smirked and shook his head. “So, there are what, hundreds of these centuries-old fish guys walking around Lumiara being shunned by the Cult.”
Ryler wrinkled his nose. “Things got a little darker than that. Radicals within the purists demanded the abhumans be put down—that is a very bad word for eccentrics, by the way—and the converted Cult members fought back. Some died. Others went insane. Most of the survivors disappeared, although sailors say that sometimes they hear knocking on the hulls of their submarines and that it’s the lost evolutionists trying to get in.”
Janus swallowed. Once upon a time, he hadn’t believed that triliths could grow big enough to threaten a person, let alone a dome. Within weeks of saying so to Mick, they’d had to flee a trilith so big it took several orbital strikes from a Cult warship to kill.
“Tink tink, Janus,” Ryler said, grinning.
Janus laughed. “Tink tink.”
***
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Janus said, waving the firefighting team into the battery compartment.
The fire was spreading, and the room was choked with a layer of thick, gray smoke that was starting to take on a worrying bluish tinge. Blue meant that some of the metals and exotics in the battery bank had started to combust. If the fire got too hot, the fire would shift from a Class C to a Class D fire, and there would be no stopping the burning metal from melting a hole through the submarine’s hull.
“Affected batteries isolated,” Lee said over the comm.
“Which one is it?” the firefighting team leader asked.
“Fourth row, units forty-six, forty-seven, and forty-eight,” Lee said. “Temps on fifty-five and fifty-six are rising.”
“Kill the power to both rows,” the FTL said.
Janus winced. It was the right call in terms of slowing the fire, but with the reactor offline, it was going to have consequences someone should have foreseen.
“Done,” Lee said, and then the lights went out.
The FTL swore, but at least the glow of the burning batteries was clearly visible in the otherwise pitch-black compartment. Emergency lighting strips switched on, and the compartment was bathed in a dull red glow.
The sixty-eight batteries were arranged in six rows of ten and two rows of four. They were broken up into redundant blocks of four to power the various primary and backup systems of the submarine. Unfortunately, taking two entire rows out meant removing five redundant pairs and isolating the backup pairs from the main system, and that meant minor inconveniences like losing the main lighting in the middle of an emergency.
Shoulder lights flicked on, stabbing crazily through the smoke and the dark, and jets of CO2 washed over the affected battery banks.
“Temperature’s dropping,” Lee reported.
“Let’s get the affected batteries disconnected,” the FTL said. “DCC, firefighting team one reports fire under control. The affected batteries were sprayed down with CO2 and disconnected. Damage appears to have started in number forty-seven and spread from there.” The FTL continued to give his report as the different members of her team—the plugman, the boundaryman, and the investigator—continued to secure the space.
Suddenly, the smoke, the fire damage, and the emergency lighting all reverted to the state they’d been in before the exercise started.
“Mr. Invarian?” the captain said the ship’s net.
“Yes, Captain?”
“Secure from damage control drills. We’ve arrived at our first destination.”
“Understood,” Janus said. “Securing from damage control drills.”
By now, he was able to tell from the sound that the Seraphine’s engine had reduced to one-third of full.
The submarine was approaching the City of the Bells.