The Deeps, Twenty-Six Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.24 Interstellar
Janus was distraught and trying not to show it by the time the captain’s “celebration” of their passage into the inner sea began. Most of the crews had assembled; a fire watch made up of Hunters had been left behind, ostensibly because they had the fewest ties to what was happening, although the far simpler and widely understood truth was that no one trusted the exceptionalists to be left on the ships unattended.
“It’s a shame, really,” Mick said, sidling up to him at the back of the crowd.
“What is?”
“That most of the Hunters are on the subs, mate. Who else is going to be able to enjoy this party? You all look like you’ve swallowed a lifetime’s ration of spiders all at once.”
“That obvious, is it?” Janus asked.
Mick cocked his head at Janus, then turned back to look at the crowd. “Nah. I’d say, in your case, it looks like they crawled up your trousers.”
Janus managed a weak smile. Sometimes he envied Mick’s ability to whistle over the sound of the air getting sucked out of the room.
In the center of the small amphitheater that the master preceptor had made available to them, the captain and some of the more experienced ronin were putting on a show of transforming the paltry surface sailors into dwellers of the depths. The captain was displaying an even greater amount of gravitas than usual, which only served to make the crowd laugh—as intended, Janus had no doubt.
It was a kindness for the crews. A coming together.
Under different circumstances, Janus would have been right there in the front row, eager to experience and learn about this quirk of Cult culture that was far more human than many of their other habits would suggest.
“I take it the talk with Ryler didn’t go well,” Lira said, coming to stand on Janus’s right, opposite Mick.
Janus swallowed and tried to think of how to objectively quantify how much his conversation with Ryler had scared the crap out of him. It was as if the Ryler he knew had been replaced by a brain-hacked zealot who would adhere to his faction’s dictates if it meant betraying everyone he knew.
Janus couldn’t understand it, and he felt guilty for not speaking to Ryler earlier—for not dragging him away from Nikandros a year ago, and having him live with them in New Prometheus. The pressure of working for the megalomaniacal architect, probably with his parents held as hostages, had obviously broken Ryler’s mind.
“Let’s just be pragmatic about this,” Lira said. “What are our options?”
Janus looked at her. “You sound… calmer.”
“I lost my temper. Let’s move on. Forget good options. What’s possible?
Janus nodded. “We give up. Go along with whatever Nikandros is planning, and we hope that he sets us free in the end.”
“You’re joking, right?” Mick said. “That sounds like the line the villain speaks before killing everyone in a holo-film.”
“She asked what’s possible, not what was good,” Janus said.
“We know Nikandros wants our cooperation,” Lira said, “but we also know he was willing to go to the Core without us. This has to be about this ‘war’ the preceptor was talking about. Maybe he wants to take the Survivor hostage and control the Consensus as a result.”
Janus ground his teeth. He had never liked not knowing things, but the past two years of plots and false accusations had made him outright hate being powerless because he lacked vital information.
He wasn’t completely ignorant, though. “Let’s set aside the fact that we believe the Survivor exists and that he’s at the Core station. Not once have we heard about him intervening in Cult matters or even casting a vote. At best, he’s a spiritual leader, and at worst, some sort of figurehead made completely ineffective by age. What do we know is at the Core facility?”
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“The Oracle,” Lira said.
Janus nodded. “That has to be his objective. He told me we’d be left in peace because they would have hundreds of outliers to choose from. We know the Oracle is some sort of supercomputer, bordering on a general artificial intelligence, and that it’s able to determine the people and actions that will have the greatest impact on a habitat, like it did for Koni on Krandermore. He must be planning to use the Oracle to find outliers.”
“And we’re against that?” Mick asked.
“He used Janus to usurp the compartmentalists,” Lira said. “What do you think he’ll do with a dozen Januses?”
“I think usurp is a big word,” Mick said, crossing his arms. “And I’m against a dozen Januses on principle.”
Janus pinched the bridge of his nose and ignored Mick’s joke. “So we maroon him here.”
“He grabs a ride with the next sub and gets there anyway,” Lira countered.
“We take the Core and the Oracle.”
“The entire Cult turns against us—especially if he controls the purgationists.”
“Why is it never easy?” Janus muttered. “Or simple? How do we keep Nikandros from seizing the Oracle without taking it ourselves?”
“You don’t,” Matthias said, suddenly joining their conversation.
“Crikey!” Mick said.
“Sorry,” Matthias said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I was coming to tell Emissary Invarian thank you for offering to take my place.”
Janus sighed. “It’s fine. Apparently, Ryler and Nikandros are aware of all our plans. When you said, ‘You don’t,’ was that because you have a better idea, or was it a recommendation to give up?”
“You taking advice from kids, now?” Lira asked.
“I’m open to unexpected options,” Janus answered.
The three of them looked at Matthias.
“It’s not something that most people know,” Matthias said, “And it’s not something Nikandros will expect you to be aware of, but my faction was preparing for the large-scale settlement of the inner sea.”
Lira frowned. “That sounds… expensive.”
“It was,” Matthias said. “I wasn’t that involved, but it was something that was debated often by the leading delegates within our faction, and it almost caused a schism. Only the threat of the exceptionalists kept us together, and when Architect Donnika died, even that wasn’t enough.”
“I don’t see how this relates to us taking control of the Core,” Janus said.
“I do,” Lira said. “We don’t take control of the Core. We convince the compartmentalists to defend it.”
***
The master preceptor, the Apostate, and the fallen architect met in the shadow of the old geological building. They’d all aged since they were last together, although Lindgren wore it the worst, and the Apostate hardly looked different than he had when she’d been a girl, which left Petra feeling uncommonly irritated that she was somewhere in between.
“This is a disaster,” she said.
“It’s tradition, Petra,” the Apostate said. “I’m sure that boot was perfectly good to drink from.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Petra said, although she held scant hopes of the Apostate taking anyone seriously. She swung her eyes toward Lindgren. “What did you say to him?”
“What we agreed,” Lindgren said. “Thought I got through to him for a moment, and then the boy went mad.”
“Cracked like a teapot,” the Apostate suggested.
Petra could feel the tension rising inside her. It built, and it built, until she detected a faint snarly from the Apostate, who was sensitive to such things, after all, and then there was a series of faint sparks from the air as her ability discharged.
“How long do we have?” the Apostate asked.
“Minutes,” Petra said seriously. “The nerve of him, bugging my conversations. I could just lock him away forever.”
“Wouldn’t do any good,” Lindgren said, as irritable as ever. “Young Abraxxis was correct in his assessment. My past attempts to subdue the exceptionalists by force only broke them into smaller pieces.”
“Nikandros is still the magnet holding the metal shavings together,” the Apostate said.
Petra rolled her eyes. “You just want to kill him.”
“I do,” the ancient fish man said, baring his needle teeth. “Not sure I could do it, though. I hear he took out an entire kill team on Irkalla.”
“It was never supposed to come to this,” Petra said. “Putting him within reach of the labs on Krandermore was supposed to give us the leverage to send him here, not have him drop by for a visit.”
“You did train him,” Lindgren said.
“I did,” Petra said, not bothering to hide her pride. “What do we do?”
“Wait until Matthias is old enough to become his own flavor of problem?” the Apostate asked.
Lindgren snorted. “Mollusk. We can’t hide from everything.”
The Apostate quivered, eyes narrowing, and Petra suppressed a shudder at her memory of the recordings of him when he’d first recovered from the aggressive gene therapy that made him what he became.
“I apologize,” Lindgren said, although he did so without fear, and the Apostate managed to rein himself back in.
Petra let go of the breath she’d been holding. She understood as well as the Apostate probably did that Lindgren hadn’t been serious in calling him a shelled sea creature and hadn’t been apologizing for it, but rather for triggering the Apostate’s rage, which the ancient ordinal only kept contained through the constant imposition of his will.
The Apostate took a deep breath and said, “My proposal is a viable one. Two hundred years saw the end of my excesses, and a mere seventy saw the end of yours,” he said to Lindgren.
“If Nikandros takes control of the Oracle, millions will suffer,” Petra said.
“But they will survive,” Lindgren said. “We always come out stronger.
Petra wasn’t so sure this time. There had always been the backstop of the Consensus, before, to dampen the ambitions of the faction architects through common sense or, perhaps, simple bureaucratic inertia, but Nikandros had recruited aggressively among the younger generations, and his use of the purgationists as a violent cat’s paw was alarming.
She worried that the old checks and balances wouldn’t be enough.
Petra was about to say so when one of the Seraphine’s ronin, who was secretly a survivalist agent, interrupted their meeting. “Apologies, ma’am, sirs, but the captain is needed at the docks!”
“What for?” Lindgren asked, annoyed.
“It’s the Irkallans!” the ronin said. “They’re threatening to blow up the ship!”