The Deeps, Twenty-Six Kilometers Below

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.24 Interstellar

Lira pulled Janus aside as soon as the “tour” portion of their visit started, although she stayed quiet until the rest of the group had walked some twenty paces ahead. The soft blue light from the phosphorescent sea life and the lights used to illuminate the Deeps plunged the grounds in rippling shadow as if they were truly walking under a shallow sea.

“What in the void were you thinking, Janus?” she hissed. “I just want to know how that worked out in your head. ‘Things are going really well. I should offer to go to prison instead of my sister’s boyfriend.’”

Janus threw a side glance at Lira, but he didn’t speak right away. He still needed to think about everything that had happened, and living on the submarine for the past two weeks, with the certainty that all his words were being listened to, had only reinforced the habit of silence he’d first acquired working in a void suit and reinforced on his excursions from the research camps and his longer treks across the ice.

“Janus?” Lira said, punching him lightly in the shoulder.

“I didn’t think about it,” he said. “It was just the right thing to do.”

“For whom?”

“For Matthias. For Callie. For myself, come to think of it. How could I look myself in the mirror if I let someone else take the fall for a corrupt system?”

“It’s like you’ve regressed,” Lira said, running her hand through her short hair. “You’re Janus Invarian. You don’t allow corrupt systems to persecute you, you take them apart.”

“It’s too big, Lira,” Janus said, and he felt the hopelessness finally break through. He’d accepted that, if worse came to worst, his people would have to fight Nikandros’s people, and that many of them would die. What he hadn’t expected was some sort of fundamental upheaval that would unsettle the rule of law throughout the Cult entirely. He’d been fixated on removing the compartmentalists as a threat. He hadn’t realized that, if the master preceptor’s comparison to Matthias was truly aimed at him, he’d been the unwitting participant in a greater pattern of destruction.

“You mean that nonsense the master preceptor spouted?” Lira asked.

“I don’t think it was nonsense.”

“You didn’t think. That, we agree on,” Lira said.

Janus stopped and looked at her. “Are you okay? You’re being—”

“Mean? Cruel?” Lira asked, looking at him with a flat expression. He hadn’t noticed how deep the circles under her eyes had gotten. “I know. I can’t help it. I’m exhausted, and I can’t believe you’re only thinking of this now.”

Janus flinched.

Lira sighed and lowered her voice. “There are almost six million people registered within the Consensus. Nikandros leads the largest faction. If we go by voting percentages alone, there are probably somewhere close to two hundred and fifty thousand exceptionalists on Lumiara, and fighting ten of them might get us all killed. What were you planning to do with the rest of them?”

“We took down Red Donnika.”

“She broke faith with the Consensus and the arbitration committee. At best, she would have wound up here, and her faction persisted.”

“It was weakened,” Janus pointed out. “Maybe too much.”

Lira turned her palms up. “If the compartmentalists had been less damaged, they would have come after us and our people.”

“And now that they are damaged, the exceptionalists are the threat.” He grunted. “Guess I shouldn’t beat myself up over it. We were dead from the start.”

“Wrong,” Lira said. “Beat yourself up over it. You suck.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Invarian. If I’d know I was going to get ‘pity-party Janus,’ I wouldn’t have agreed to be your second two years ago.”

“I… hadn’t seen this side of you for a while.”

“Comes from running a colony that you abandoned, so now you get to fix it.”

Holy void preserve me, Janus thought. She’s really had enough. And Janus didn’t blame her. He’d chosen the fight, but she’d shouldered the weight. He’d gotten to avoid the colony’s problems, so she’d had to stand her ground. Had she chosen that burden? Yes, she had, but Janus couldn’t bring himself to disagree with what she was saying, or her feelings—if they were real and not just an attempt to prod him into motion. They’d come too far and suffered too much to let something like overwhelming odds get in the way of them winning. “Nikandros was pretty nervous when we started training to kill him.”

“He was,” Lira agreed cautiously.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Why is that?”

“You mean, aside from any rational being’s desire to stay alive?”

“Yeah,” Janus said. “He has to know we wouldn’t attack him unless he threatened us.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Janus,” Lira said sharply, a little genuine acid seeping back into her tone. “I can think of a number of reasons you might decide to put Nikandros down.”

“Like what?”

“Experimenting on us. Wiping out Irkalla. Putting orphans to work in a factory. I’m pretty sure you blew up a drug lab, once.”

“I evacuated it first. Mostly.”

“Mostly,” Lira agreed. “So, pretty much any of the stuff the compartmentalists used to do. You know, the faction he worked so hard to replace.”

Janus sighed. “Then why not just leave us behind? If he was behind the purgationists—”

“Which wouldn’t surprise me for one second,” Lira added.

“Agreed,” Janus said, looking toward the tour group, who had stopped to wait for them. “So, if he was behind the purgationists, why didn’t he just use the excuse of the bombing to leave us all behind? He had the trained people. He could have taken the Seraphine and avoided all this complication.”

“He didn’t stop anyone from deserting the expedition,” Lira said.

“He did try to stop me from taking Matthias’s place,” Janus said thoughtfully. “I think he’d rather have me alive than dead.”

“You have your uses,” Lira growled. “You know who I haven’t seen lately? Ryler.”

“Neither have I,” Janus said. “It’s not like Nikandros got rid of him; I’d have seen that from DCC. He’s been going to his shifts in engineering.”

“Which means he’s avoiding us.”

“Which means he feels guilty,” Janus said.

Lira crossed her arms. “After everything that happened on Krandermore, Ryler could have joined us in New Prometheus. No one would have turned him away. He chose to stay with Nikandros, and he chose to come on this trip. Nikandros is down here, with us, even though his faction is apparently pushing the Cult to the brink of war. Why would he do that from twenty-six kilometers under the surface?”

“Instead of on a starship, where he could communicate with the whole system?” Janus asked. “The captain asked me the same thing, although he said he was talking about the Survivor.”

“Pfft,” Lira said. “He was talking about Nikandros. There’s no such thing as the Survivor, or at least there hasn’t been in thousands of years.”

Janus wasn’t so sure about that. There were too many people who expected them to meet the mythical figure at the end of their journey, and he wasn’t about to fall for the old “there’s no such thing as big triliths” trap again.

“There’s something big down at the Core facility. Something more important than the whole rest of the Cult and the habitats,” Lira said. “Maybe it’s your Survivor. Maybe it’s the Oracle. Nikandros wants it and needs at least some of us to get it.”

“Everything all right?” Mick asked, walking over. “You’re making people nervous. Not me, you know. Got ice in my veins.”

“Lira and I were just fighting over how much of a complete jerk she can be.”

“I was just telling Janus we wouldn’t be in this situation if he had a single useful thought in that thick Promethean skull.”

“So, we’re pulling a Survivor’s Grace?” Mick asked, putting his hands on his belt.

“No,” Janus said.

“Kind of,” Lira said. “We’re in trouble.”

“Deep trouble?” Mick asked, then grinned. He pointed at the buildings. “Because we’re in the—”

“We get it,” Janus and Lira both said.

Mick looked insufferably pleased with himself.

“We should see if the master preceptor is willing to offer more help than veiled hints,” Lira said.

“Good idea,” Janus said with a nod. He didn’t know how much Petra would be willing to risk if she’d already concluded that the survivalists wouldn’t intervene directly, but Nikandros couldn’t have missed their exchange on the docks, and he would be watching any interaction she had with the team. “You take care of that. I’ll catch up with you at the celebration.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Lira asked.

“Trying to catch up with an old friend.”

***

Once the convoy command team was off the submarine, the rest of the three crews set about unloading cargo and getting off the subs to stretch their legs. Friends and families, some of whom had been separated during the reshuffling of the crew assignments, were reunited on the docks. Many of them only made it as far as the weather decks, gawping at the suspended wall of water held up as if by magic in a tall half-cylinder along the edge of the trench.

Ryler made his way across the boarding ramp and down the docks. He’d studied the Deeps as part of his early training, including the details of its construction. The facility had initially been a memorial to all those who’d been lost mapping the patterns of the undersea and testing the increasingly sophisticated materials required to survive the pressure of the deep waters. It had also been a staging base for those first explorers of the inner sea.

It should have been a culmination of sorts, to Ryler, to have traveled from Irkalla to the depths of Lumiara, where even the Cult’s knowledge of the galaxy had found a frontier it had yet to cross. He’d felt that way when he’d connected his implants to Dr. Jahangir’s mainframe, back on Krandermore—the thrill of uncovering and rediscovering knowledge that had been lost, or that had never been known—until Janus ordered him to delete the data and he’d been left with the imperfect organic impressions of having touched on her brilliance and madness. The weight of water above him should have moved him in the same way—the years of labor to build several redundant reactors under obscene pressure, using a combination of pre-fabricated structures and mining technology to get the first habitats in place, and then slowly expanding the “bubble” of protected space so that buildings, gardens, and self-sustaining systems could be put in place. A thousand years to reach this place, another seventy-three to build this facility, and it leaves me cold.

Ryler wrapped his arms around himself and walked down the gravel path parallel to the trench, away from Janus and the rest of the Irkallans.

He’d always believed in the cause. Even when he was little, it had been obvious to him. The compartmentalists had seemed like storybook villains to him, in his parents’ stories, stealing the best and the brightest from each of the habitats with promises of riches and other favors, only to put them in cryo for up to three generations.

Later, Ryler had seen the data on the aspirants’ families. The boons they gained never made up for the loss of a parent, a sibling, a child, or a friend.

He’d thought he’d been chosen by the Survivor when Ivan fled to Prime Dome from Prometheus Base, and the Architect Nikandros himself had asked Ryler to observe Janus. As he got older and got to know Janus as a friend, as he grew to think of Callie as a younger sister, and as he saw the toll being an aspirant and emissary had taken from Ivan, Ryler had begun to question his role in all this.

“You’re Nikandros’s brat, aren’t you?” someone said, bitterness dripping from their voice.

Ryler turned toward the speaker, an older man in white robes sitting on a bench by the path, and he gaped.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” the old man grumbled.

“I’m sorry, architect,” Ryler said, retrieving the man’s face and history from his extensive internal stores. This was Nikandros’s former rival, Red Donnika’s mentor, the former and, he supposed, current leader of the compartmentalists, although his own faction didn’t know it. He had to use his ocular implants in the soft, dim light, but Architect Lindgren’s features were unmistakable. “I thought you were dead.”