The Deeps, Twenty-Six Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.24 Interstellar
Ryler looked at Architect Lindgren’s face, olive skin and black ringlets of hair, and an overly thin hooked nose. The deep etching of lines around his thin-lipped mouth, twisted into a sneer, told Ryler this was a man who never smiled except out of vicious pleasure. “My mentor believes you died of old age.”
“I was deposed,” Lindgren spat. “The survivalists.”
“I see,” Ryler said, keeping his tone and expression cool, although in truth he was surprised by the revelation. The survivalists were known for their objectivity in their preservation of the Consensus. They didn’t interfere unless the integrity of the Consensus or the survival of humanity was at risk, and when they did, it went one of two ways: either the peaceful surrender of the culprit into their care or the full force of combat preceptors, equipped with the Cult’s best armament, carving their way through whatever defenses or opposition were foolishly thrown up against them.
He had never heard of them abducting anyone in secret, which was either a testament to the rarity of the act or to how good they were at making people disappear.
“Well, Librarian?” Lindgren said. “Are you satisfied with your master’s victory?”
“I said he was my mentor.”
“So you did,” Lindgren answered with teeth bared. “Guiding you on your own special path, is he? Nikandros never accepts anything less than supremacy.”
“I still have my own mind,” Ryler said. “What good is a librarian who can’t judge the merits by the data?”
“Funny thing for a book burner to say,” Lindgren mumbled.
Ryler winced. Book burner. Destroyer of knowledge. He’d accepted Janus’s command to erase Dr. Jahangir’s research, believing that doing so was consistent with his faction’s beliefs. Still, it had cost him. Nikandros and the exceptionalists had accepted the choice, more or less. Still, he’d faced unrelenting and seething condemnation from the other librarians of Lumiara, even though they’d all agreed the knowledge had to be sealed.
Lindgren had been sealed by the preceptors. Like librarians, they resisted the destruction of knowledge, even if it was dangerous. “Why did they depose you?” Ryler asked.
“That’s what you want to know?” the fallen architect asked. “Not how to free yourself from your master, or whether I’m upset you murdered Rachel Donnika in cold blood?”
Ryler had faced condemnation for that, too, from both the Cult and his own conscience, but he was leaning on his synthetic processing capability, now, and the jab merely registered as data.
Ryler had destroyed dangerous knowledge.
Ryler had destroyed a dangerous person.
Lindgren was a dangerous person. “You deserve to be here,” Ryler said. “You limited us.”
“I opposed your master’s faction in a single aspect, child. My opposition was a gift.”
“A waste of resources.”
“The preservation of diversity.”
“By boxing it in,” Ryler said, matching the old architect blow for blow. “The costs of preserving the status quo—of maintaining an artificial equity between the different approaches—was straining the resources of the entire program.”
Lindgren scoffed. “I’ve already had this argument with Nikandros, and you aren’t half as sly as he was.”
Ryler’s eyes glowed gold as he accessed hundreds of years of data in his hard storage banks. He stared through all that data at the sitting architect, and through all the datasets, transcripts, and simulations, an image formed in his organic mind. He no longer felt doubts about his present course of action; the machine took that away and turned it into lists of advantages and disadvantages. “This was not an accident. The preceptors hoped to provoke a reaction.”
The former architect of the compartmentalists sneered. “You—”
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“You planned to murder him.”
“Who?”
“Nikandros,” Ryler said. “You focused your faction on the development of military capability. Red Donnika was being groomed as the weapon. There is nothing on the habitats that requires a hidden plasma accelerator. An assassin’s weapon, useful only for killing cyborgs.”
“You forget—”
“Nothing,” Ryler said, the glow leaving his eyes, vast stores of knowledge receding and leaving a sad kind of humor in its place. In this new light, the former architect looked less disdainful and more watchful, as if he was waiting for the last piece to fall into place. Ryler tucked his hands into his sleeves and dipped his head. “Please thank the master preceptor for her instruction, sir. Your opposition was, indeed a gift.”
He turned to walk away, and Lindgren muttered something under his breath.
Ryler had always believed in the cause. Even when he was little, it had been obvious to him. The exceptionalists were going to harness the best and the brightest among them to lead humanity out of their lives of suffering. Janus, his friend, the subject of his observation, had seemed to be the avatar of that suffering, and Ryler had tried to help his friend through his actions in Prime Dome the same way he tried to help all of humanity through his contribution to the program.
He activated the team channel that had remained dormant for a year, the one they’d used on Krandermore, and used it to ping Janus’s location. Janus’s implants responded, displaying a marker on Ryler’s retinal display.
His old friend, the emissary, was already heading toward him, and that felt a little bit like fate—not that Ryler believed in anything like that.
Human history was a sequence of setbacks overcome by people with talent and means acting to shatter the status quo. Ryler had always believed that. He simply hadn’t realized that his time to act would come so soon, and against the cause he’d sworn to support.
***
Janus saw the ping from Ryler, and the answering echo of the librarian’s signal appeared in his display. It looked like Ryler was coming to find him.
He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. The past two years had dealt Janus and his team their share of betrayals. It had started with Lira getting him fired from his job, and then him possibly getting framed for the accident in Sector Six. Ivan had made matters worse by being Ivan, or so he thought, but it had turned out his uncle had been lying to him all along, and in far greater things than just his past as an aspirant. Janus had found out his parents were murdered, his people exterminated, and then his whole world had been threatened with cleansing by the compartmentalists.
Now, he almost wished Red Donnika had survived their battle. At least, there would have been someone to oppose Nikandros, even if Janus and his people would still have been left caught in the middle. Now, with the opposition in tatters, Nikandros appeared to be enacting the last stages of a decades-old plan, and Janus didn’t know where to begin to stop it.
He’d been hoping they’d both read too much into the master preceptor’s words when he got the ping from Ryler.
There had been some comfort in the thought that Ryler felt guilty. It validated Janus and Lira’s suspicions, but it also created the possibility that Ryler could be convinced to help. Now, all Janus could hope is that Ryler’s guilt was driving him to do so on his own, without convincing. It would restore a bit of the faith he’d once placed in his friend, and the limited trust they’d reached on Krandermore when Ryler supported him as the Emissary even though friendship was too thin a bond to earn his cooperation.
“Janus,” Ryler said, walking closer in the rippling blue light and shadows, his hands tucked into his sleeves.
“Ryler,” Janus, stopping and waiting for his childhood friend to come closer.
“We don’t have much time,” Ryler said. “Nikandros is too cautious to use active monitoring, here, not when the survivalists have spent centuries perfecting the art.”
“You’ve been avoiding us.”
“I have,” Ryler said with a nod. “I couldn’t reconcile how I felt about our friendship with my desire to improve the conditions in the habitats and our chances of surviving as a species.”
“And now?” Janus asked warily.
“I am no longer conflicted,” Ryler said, and Janus noted a certain glassy-eyedness in his expression. “I’ve discovered that our opposition is a gift to you, Emissary.”
“That’s… Ryler, what’s happened?”
“I had a of clarity,” Ryler said. There was an unhealthy zeal in his voice. “The compartmentalists were more threatened by our faction than I thought. Their control of the Consensus, the destruction of Prometheus Base, and even the militarization of both Cult members and aspirants, it was all building toward the day when they would have used violence to enforce their approach on the rest of us. They thought they were protecting humanity, but they were leading us down a path of stagnation and collapse. The cost of complete control would have forced unsustainable changes to our resource allocations.”
Janus’s stomach felt hollow. His friend was acting like he’d gone crazy.
“Don’t you see?” Ryler asked, his eyes flickering gold. “They made us stronger! Nikandros reacted to the threat, just like you’ve been preparing to fight against him!”
They know everything, Janus realized. He’d thought there would be suspicion, but not knowledge. Nikandros and his cyborgs would be prepared.
“Listen to me, Janus,” Ryler said, putting a hand on Janus’s shoulder. “You need to stop. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve practiced against our faction’s cyborgs. Nikandros is on a completely different level. He knew Donnika and the rest of her faction wanted him dead, and he systematically removed any weakness that would give them the upper hand. I’ve seen him take compartmentalist kill teams apart with his bare hands. He’s faster, stronger, and he won’t hesitate to destroy you to get what he wants.”
“How can you serve someone like that?” Janus asked.
“I don’t serve him,” Ryler said with eerie calm. “That was the other change the compartmentalists forced on us. You can’t beat us by killing any one person. Our faction is organized to shatter, each shard able to continue pursuing our goals independently within the framework of the Consensus, or outside of it.”
“You mean like the purgationists.”
“Yes,” Ryler said, unbothered by the accusation. “Another gift to you, Janus, so you wouldn’t become complacent. But you don’t need to fight, now, my friend. Just get us to the Core facility as we agreed. This struggle will not make you strong, it will only break you, and I’ll be the one to do it.”