The Seraphine, Twenty-Four Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.23 Interstellar
Another two days passed in a blur. Ever since his conversation with Nikandros, Janus had been forced to keep the aspirants’ training more circumspect. At the same time, more than ever, he felt they needed to pursue it. If his interactions with both the captain and Nikandros had made anything clear, it was that his best chance of survival lay in having the overwhelming ability to defend it, although he wasn’t prepared to be as ruthless and preemptive as the captain in exercising that capability.
It was Syn who came up with a solution from her younger gaming days.
On one side, the combat-rated aspirants trained tirelessly against simulations of the mob of miners that had tried to swarm Janus’s team, even going as far as getting pointers from Nikandros’s cyborgs.
On the other, they used the secure terminals to play out endless tactical scenarios against the cyborgs in three-dimensional turn-based simulations, analyzing possible engagement configurations on the convoy subs, floating monasteries, or mining stations until any one of them could glance at setup and give a cold estimate of the outcome.
Meanwhile, the convoy was pushing hard to make up for lost time. They’d descended another two kilometers, and the submarines were all voicing their protests with the odd creaks and groans from the hulls. There were other sounds, too—strange scraping sounds in the lower decks and, sometimes, what seemed like the sound of music coming from outside the hull.
One of the ronin sailors told Janus that the songs were deep sea creatures calling to each other or, in some cases, mimicking the sounds of their prey. The thought of animals that could survive twenty-four kilometers of water column pressure terrified Janus, and he woke up on the second night having dreamed of an unprotected city on the ocean floor filled with creatures like those he’d seen in Dr. Jahangir’s lab and ruled over by the captain.
On a rare occasion that their schedules matched up, he had breakfast with Mick and Lira.
“Hey, XO,” Janus said jokingly. “Question for you.”
“What?” Lira said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“I’m pretty sure I know what Deep Rider means—”
Mick snickered.
“—but what does Chapo stand for?”
Lira finished chewing her cereal and set her spoon down. “It’s short for chapodiphobia. Fear of squids.”
Janus frowned. “Why would anyone be afraid of… oh void. Down here? How big do they get?” He remembered one of the largest specimen tubes in the Eastern Labs on Krandermore. The thing’s body had been over ten meters long, with three-petaled appendages at the end of long tentacles, and in the palm of each hand had been an eye.
Lira smirked and stared at him as she crunched through another bite of cereal.
When he wasn’t working on making them all safe from potential betrayal or getting spooked by the increasing array of strange noises from the ship or odd habits from the crew, Janus kept looking for his phantom damage in the lower reaches of the sub. Over the past three days, it had become somewhat of a source of amusement for the crew of the Seraphine to see him prowling the decks with a variety of tools and detectors.
Only the former residents of Prime Dome who remembered the airlock disaster of 4452 frowned. They worried and made a variety of superstitious gestures as if Janus was a bad omen.
On the third day, during the evening watch when he should have been sleeping, he finally found what he was looking for.
***
“What is it?” Callie said, bleary-eyed, pulling the top of her coveralls on as she climbed out of her bunk.
“You told me to find something. I found something.”
“Void damn it, brother,” Callie said, pinching her nose. “Okay. What did you find?”
“I think one of the hull seams was damaged when we hit that growler.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Why didn’t we see when the impact occurred?”
Janus shrugged.
“That’s not helpful,” Callie said.
“We’re on an ice planet, twenty-four kilometers below the surface. Manufacturing flaw? A hit at just the right angle to uniformly damage the weld. High-acidity supercritical water from volcanic activity and the ungodly amount of pressure?”
“That still doesn’t tell me how you know a hull seam was damaged.”
“I unpacked a hydraulic system chip detector, connected it to different parts of the bilge collection system, and ran it. I found rust.”
“Okay…” Callie said. “I’m impressed by your determination, but a little rust is normal.”
“I found more than usual in the engine room, port side lower section, near the main drive components.”
“That’s not where we got hit.”
Janus shrugged.
Callie shook her head and sighed. “I forget. You’re a mechanic, not an engineer. You don’t care.”
Janus beamed. “Bingo. So, I rigged up a set of AEM sensors, focusing them on the welds between plates—”
“They’re not designed to do that.”
“Syn helped reconfigure them,” Janus admitted. “Anyway, the pattern was there. Micro-fractures. The metal is starting to fail.”
Callie turned even paler than she normally was. “We need to tell the captain.”
Janus frowned. “I can just get a team to reinforce it.”
“I love you, big brother, but this is one of the situations where being an engineer matters. If the weld is failing but the vibration is coming from somewhere farther forward, we’re looking at a complex material failure with unpredictable consequences. We need to stop for repairs now.”
***
“Remarkable,” the chief engineer said, looking at the drone feed over Syn’s shoulder.
Janus sighed. “I really wish people would stop saying that about me. It makes it sound like I’m an idiot.”
“On the contrary,” the chief engineer said, giving him an openly assessing look. “I’m not saying that you weren’t expected to find this, emissary. I’d say that no one should have. Out of all the things that could have caught your attention, you latched onto a feeling that both instrumentation and people told you was wrong,” she said, glancing at Callie, “and you kept digging until you found a solution.”
“It wasn’t that complicated,” Janus protested.
“No, it wasn’t,” the captain said, although his tone was less mocking than usual, even verging on respectful. “But the fact remains. This would have killed us.”
Janus swallowed.
Syn’s terminal lit up as the drone started to lay another weld over the defective one.
The Seraphine had come to a stop relative to the local current in order to effect the repairs. Callie’s teams had rigged supporting braces along the affected portion of the hull. They were sitting targets for pirates and megafauna, but the captain and chief engineer had been adamant that this was something that couldn’t wait.
There had, indeed, been a growler impact near the weld, one that had not damaged the hull plates but that had scraped off the protective coating and damaged the points of contact between the weld and plate along the heat-affected zone. Specifically, the leading edge of the unprotected weld had gotten corroded by the constant passing of seawater in spite of the cathodic protection system that was supposed to prevent it.
It was an easily fixable problem, especially in port, but the unpredictable factor had been a material flaw in the crystalline matrix of the adjoining hull plate, which made it more prone to flex than specifications allowed.
The combined failure of the weld and the plate would have sunk the ship. Maybe the Chapo and the Deep Rider could have organized some sort of rescue, but many people would have died in the process, and it would have been up to the captains of the surviving ships to determine if a rescue was worth the risk.
“Good job!” the captain said cheerily, slapping him on the back. “I can see why Nikandros is so eager to control you.”
“Thanks,” Janus said sarcastically.
The captain smiled, which, in spite of their deeper understanding of each other in the past days, remained a sharp and uncomfortable sight. “Get some rest, Janus,” the captain said, using his first name for the first time that Janus could remember. “We’ll reach the Deeps tomorrow and then on to the Inner Sea. You’ll want to be at your best.”
***
It had taken Janus until the latest stages of the planning to understand that Lumiara wasn’t an ordinary planet, even by the standards of humans living under the seas of an ice world. It was an arrangement of layers, of full and partial spheres.
The first sphere was the atmosphere, surprisingly breathable, although colder and denser than the humid air of Krandermore.
The second sphere was the ice layer of the surface. Ten kilometers thick on average, the solid outer shell of Lumiara featured mountain ranges, valleys, frozen rivers, and a number of other normal planetary features, most of them rendered in ice. Janus knew that some of the landscape had been altered and shaped by the Cult, but some of it had already been there—terrain where there should have been none, at least unless the planet’s composition had changed at some point in the relatively recent past.
The third sphere was the undersea, although, in truth, it was a seemingly chaotic tapestry of warm and cold currents that nevertheless formed a cyclical pattern—a pattern which some Cult scientists dared to suggest was responsible for the macro-terrain on the surface, a cycle that perpetuated a constant version of Lumiara, preserved for millennia.
It would have been ludicrous if it hadn’t been true.
It was this discovery that drove the Cult to collect the necessary metals from Survivor’s Refuge’s asteroid belt and push the science of pressure-resistant materials and configurations beyond what had ever been required on Old Earth. They dove deeper and deeper until they could collect the necessary metals on the ocean floor and, from there, expanded across the underside of their world.
It took them a thousand years to discover that the ocean floor, already more than four times deeper than any ocean on Earth, was, in fact, only the fourth sphere of their layered world and the place where their comprehension of Lumiara ended.
The Core of Lumiara was a hollow shell, and on the edge of the known and unknown, the Cult built a prison where the worst among them could reflect on the limits of their knowledge and on the hubris of humanity.
“Janus, wake up,” Lee said, touching his shoulder, and he almost hit his head on the bunk above them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, disoriented.
“The captain wants everyone at stations,” she said, pulling on her coveralls. “We’ve made it to the Deeps.”