The Seraphine, Twenty-Six Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.24 Interstellar
True to the captain’s prediction, they’d finished the repairs to the Seraphine’s hull and would make it to the Deeps, albeit two days behind schedule. As Janus watched from the control room, at the captain’s invitation, a strong sonar pulse traced the ground beneath them in a wireframe, and Janus was able to see the immensity of the terrain around them, sketched out through the hull via the link between his retinal implant and the holo tank.
They were approaching Fuller’s Rent.
The rugged, lifeless terrain of the abyssal floor stretched out for another six kilometers, then suddenly dropped off, and while Janus had intellectually grasped what the feature should look like when he’d seen the charts, back on the surface, with the sound of the water rushing and the tension among the control room crew members, it was another matter entirely. The chasm was almost twenty kilometers wide and nearly a hundred kilometers deep, leading from the undersea to the inner sea, and from there to the Core facility and the Oracle. The gash extended to the curved horizon on both sides, making the scientific curiosity that was Lumiara viscerally real: the core of the planet was cracked and hollow, and not even the Cult, with all their lofty technology, knew how or why.
The captain walked over to the holo tank, hands clasped behind his back as usual. “Bring up the external feeds, please.”
“Aye, captain,” Syn said.
Janus glanced over at the tank. He’d known the Seraphine had hull cameras, but they were only used when they were docking with one of the monasteries because it was darker than the void down here, without even starlight to show the way, at least until now. Several members of the crew gasped. They could see the Deeps from the other side of Fuller’s Rent, still some fifty kilometers away. It shone with cool, blue-white light, like a lighthouse in the endless dark. Fuller’s Rent also glowed, although more faintly, with ghostly light shining up from the trench. The Deeps was like a fairytale city, built on the shores of a river made of moonlight.
“I’m sure you’ll find this fascinating, Mr. Invarian,” the captain said. “Bioluminescent plankton, glowing jellyfish, translucent scavengers, underlit filter fish… There are entire ecosystems down there built around exchanges of light.”
“They shouldn’t exist at all,” Janus said. “Twenty-six kilometers down, and our hull can barely withstand the pressure. What kind of animal can live down here?”
“The answer is simpler than you think, and will be obvious to you once we arrive,” the captain said. “I will, therefore, refrain from spoiling the surprise.”
Janus laughed. He didn’t begrudge the secret. Rather, he stood there coming up with theories for why life might flourish in the desert. He was more than familiar with extremophiles and nature’s eccentricities, starting with the triliths of Irkalla, who were themselves engineered by the late Dr. Jahangir based on the rockjaws of Krandermore. The planet Krandermore had been home to annihilation zones, areas of chaotic and incomprehensible forms of radiation that had killed most living things that entered it but also given rise to countless others.
Janus had always thought that the annihilation zones were a mystery to the Cult, just like Lumiara’s core, but had a Cult scientist managed to engineer these incredible creatures?
How would Janus do it, given unlimited means? The triliths had gone dormant during the overwhelming and unrestrained heat of the Irkallan day. It was possible that life down here had a similar capability, an ability to hibernate until a specific set of conditions arose here at the border zone between two seas. Who was to say that the water down here behaved the way scientists had predicted? The conditions here had never been observed, to Janus’s knowledge, except by the Cult.
It would certainly explain how the captain and Nikandros intended to take them more than a hundred kilometers deeper into the inner sea.
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Barring dormancy or an unknown scientific phenomenon, there was always life’s ability to surprise the forces that sought dominion over it. Rockjaws were native to Krandermore, as far as Janus knew, so there was no reason alternative forms of life might not have evolved in the depths of Lumiara. They could be like giant-sized tardigrades, or maybe they incorporated carbon nanotubes into their skeletal structures. Or they might not have bones at all but rather exist as a sort of deformable gel that could withstand the enormous pressure because there was nothing to break.
And how were they producing light? Did they absorb radiation from the Core? Perhaps they were even able to spin that energy into some sort of localized magnetic field, creating a small bubble of safety to exist within.
The possibilities were endless. Janus felt genuinely excited for the first time since the research camps around Cofan. “Thank you,” he said to the captain quietly.
“No, Janus,” the captain said. “I can see it in your eyes. You expect to find a world of wonder down here, and this world is going to disappoint you. There is, however, an invaluable lesson for you to learn in the Deeps. Keep your eyes open.”
The captain placed a hand on Janus’s shoulder—a gesture meant to be comforting or, perhaps, to express sympathy—then he moved on to talk to the pilot about arrival procedures.
As was often the case after his interactions with the captain, Janus got the sense the man was trying to prepare him for something. At first, Janus thought the captain was pushing for some sort of conflict between Janus and Nikandros for the sake of his own entertainment, and in a way, Janus was grateful. The captain had reminded him of the price he’d paid every time he’d trusted the Cult—or underestimated them.
But now that their training regimen was in place, the aspirants were getting faster and sharper with the threat of combat against cyborgs hanging over them. Nikandros had noticed. Janus wouldn’t go as far as to say the Cult architect had been nervous, but it was the first time Janus had felt that Nikandros was forced to adapt his plans to what Janus might do.
And yet, the captain continued to push him, to try to make him see something before it was too late.
***
Half an hour later, the Seraphine, Chapo, and Deep Rider were passing over Fuller’s Rent. Janus was off shift, just a spectator now, and linked to the holo tank and the external cameras as he was, he truly felt like the submarine was flying over a moonlit river, like a trio of airships in the night sky. The Deeps were closer now, and Janus could see that the penal colony extended for several kilometers along the shoreline, although its largest and most impressive building was near the center.
It also appeared to have no dome or external structure, standing unprotected from the crushing power of the ocean, yet holding it at bay through some kind of technology. “Is that a kinetic barrier?”
“Of a sort,” the chief engineer said, surprised. “It would have to be many times stronger than anything mounted on a starship.”
“Or built up over an extended period of time?” Syn suggested.
“Yes,” the chief engineer agreed. “The water around the city would have to be bonded together and continually reinforced. It’s pretty risky.”
“It’s designed to fail,” the captain said, looking at them before turning his attention back to the pilot stations. “The only people there are people who are dangers to the Consensus and people who swore to protect it.”
“And soon us,” Janus said. “What about visitors?”
“Collateral damage,” the captain said with a shrug.
Janus wondered at the man’s apathy. He’d been a prisoner of the Deeps for nearly a century for a crime that had hurt only himself and his followers. Had his time there convinced him he deserved it? “It’s an odd name, the Deeps.”
“Its full designation is Abyssal Depths Rehabilitation Facility One,” Syn said.
Janus made a face. “I suppose the Deeps isn’t that bad.”
As the Seraphine descended, Janus’s eyes were drawn to movement in the trench. A massive creature, easily the size of their submarine, was swimming through the layer of glowing plankton, its massive spotted back and twin flukes easily distinguishable as his view zoomed in on it. Smaller fish swarmed around its barnacled back, like a moving reef, although no part of the great creature or its smaller denizens crossed above a certain point, like a tidal line. Janus watched in fascination as some sort of fast-moving ray skimmed the banks of Fuller’s Rent while a school of long, fluted fish swam in complex, interweaving patterns.
The convoy continued to get closer, descending as they approached the city so that they would pass into the light before they reached the city.
“How will we make it through the barrier?” Janus asked.
The captain didn’t look away from the pilot station, one hand on the pilot’s shoulder as she increased the angle of their dive. “It doesn’t extend into the inner sea.”
Janus frowned. If the barrier didn’t extend all around, how did they stop the water from gushing up from below? A Standard atmosphere wasn’t enough to hold back that great weight of water, and humans couldn’t survive much more than five atmospheres.
“Should I reduce our descent, captain?” the pilot asked.
“It’s better to just plow through,” he said. His eyes glowed, and his voice came in over the ship’s net. “All hands, brace for transition to the inner sea.”
Janus was about to ask what was going on when the bow of the Seraphine passed through the boundary between dark and light, and the whole submarine trembled. Hull plates groaned and popped, alarms sounded, and then went silent. Janus felt the strangest sense of getting pulled in all directions, and two of the crew members threw up.