The Seraphine, Sixteen Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.16 Interstellar
Damage Control Central, or DCC, was a small, two-station room across the main ladderwell from the control room. It included the main breaker panel, the damage control station, a small, screenless terminal that Janus could use to boost the processing power of his implants, and the security station, which included a small biometrically locked weapons locker.
It was the middle of his watch, and Mick was off patrolling the ship—which mostly meant the Hunter had gotten stir-crazy and needed to go talk to people—and there were no damage control or firefighting drills in progress, so Janus opened the security logs and checked up on Callie. His sister appeared to be earning her space aboard the ship, working under the chief engineer and conducting most of the basic engineering training needed to make the civilian crew members useful. She’d been placed in the role both because of her skills in maintenance management, and because her boss was one of Nikandros’s exceptionalists who was therefore unlikely to condone any further acts of sedition. According to the chief engineer’s weekly report on her, she was diligent and professional, if standoffish with her and the rest of the crew.
It was one of life’s bitter ironies that, as the last surviving member of the mutiny’s leadership cadre, Callie was more likely to find sympathy among the exceptionalists on board than she was from the people she’d led.
She continued to spend much of her free time with Matthias, which included time spent in the same bunk with the privacy curtains drawn, according to Lee. Janus was reasonably sure they weren’t doing more than talking or kissing, but it still made him want to stuff Matthias into one of the Seraphine’s torpedo tubes and fire.
Lee made it clear to him that doing that would add years to any reconciliation with Callie, so Janus ground his teeth and kept his distance. Thank the Void we’re not Hunters, he thought.
Then again, if they’d been raised according to Hunter customs, maybe he wouldn’t care.
As for Matthias, he was now spending his work shift in the mess, serving food and tending to the sub’s small hydroponic farming unit. Since Janus was the ship’s only biologist, he had a valid reason to check in on the young man, but he’d avoided it until now except to send him feedback on nutrient and pH levels as well as the daily sanitation and harvesting logs.
Part of that was because Janus didn’t trust his temper. No matter what Callie said, the boy was somehow part of what had influenced Callie to rebel against her family—maybe a significant part—and Janus hated him for it.
The other part was that Matthias was, in essence, a decent guy. He worked hard. He didn’t complain that he was being taken to the Deeps for a crime he didn’t commit and may not have had anything to do with. He was affable and polite, even when people confronted or threatened him—which the Irkallans did daily—and it all reminded Janus a little too much of being an outsider in Prime Dome.
Janus was this close to stepping in to defend Matthias, politics and the situation with his sister be damned, and he couldn’t do that, so he kept his distance. The less he sympathized with the boy, the easier it would be when they inevitably had to turn him over to serve out his sentence.
A jungle dragon snout nudged him in the leg.
“Hey, girl!” Janus said. “How did you get out of officer berthing? Did you miss me?”
Fury shoved her head into his lap, and Janus closed his terminal screens before giving the big animal a serious scratch around the head scales, along the jawline, and down the mane that ran along her back. Fury made a happy grumbling noise and leaned into him, almost shoving him partway out of his seat, and Janus laughed.
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“How’d she get up here?” Mick asked, returning from his patrol
“I guess she figured out hatch wheels.”
“Too smart for her own good, that one,” Mick said, sitting down.
Fury let out a small woof of disagreement, but she stayed where she was.
The captain’s voice came in over the ship’s net. “All hands, secure for silent running. Off-watch personnel, return to crew berthing and stand by. DCA to the control room.”
Fury lifted her head, sensing the tension in Janus and Mick as the two men exchanged a look.
Silent running meant there was something out there that the captain didn’t want to find them.
***
The atmosphere in the control room was tense. The captain, of course, was as imperturbably as always, or at least he was, until Fury stepped into the control room.
There was a moment of pure animal terror that passed through the command crew in a way Janus had never felt before. The hairs on Janus’s forearm stood on end. Fury went stock still next to him, dropping down into a half crouch, and the captain turned around with what Janus could only have described as the delight of a man meeting a disgraced rival. He cocked one hairless eyebrow.
Fury kept her head lowered and slowly backed out of the control room.
The tension every human in the room had felt, like some throwback to antediluvian days, left with her.
“Remarkable,” the captain said. “I thought I’d smelled her about the ship.”
Janus still couldn’t get over it. “I have never seen her back down from anything! She faced down a rock crab once!”
“I’m assuming that’s a vicious predator where you’re from?”
Janus was about to answer when a faint ping rang throughout the hull, a sound unlike any Janus had heard until that point.
“Captain, Sonar. New contact.”
“Designate Sierra One,” the captain said.
“What was that?” Janus asked.
“That’s someone letting us know they’re here,” the captain answered. He pulled up the holo tank image, and Janus was surprised to find the Seraphine was not in the lead of the convoy, as he would have expected, but instead, she was tucked under the Chapo’s proverbial wing, just aft of her bow planes and slightly below. “Did the XO brief you on Chandler’s Reach?”
“Lira? Must have slipped her mind.” As far as Janus could tell, Lira had been working two shifts every day since they’d left. She didn’t participate in drills unless she was on watch as the ship’s XO, but she did more work than anyone on the ship except the chief engineer.
“Chandler’s Reach is a fast-moving current that runs from the City of the Bells to Highport during this time of year. We’re picking up six knots by riding it, but it makes us an easy target for pirates.”
“Lumiara has pirates?” Janus asked.
The captain looked at him, once again amused. “Of course we have pirates. Did you think we had terrorist bombings, but we were too enlightened to have lesser forms of crime?”
Janus supposed that had been silly of him. He’d spent a good bit of his time traveling between surface colonies, and on those occasions when he’d visited a Cult settlement, he’d been on high alert because of who he was, not because he’d been afraid to have his things swiped. “I just thought with the Cult’s general stance on surveillance, it might be hard to commit that sort of crime twice.”
“Most of them are harmless,” the captain said. “They dock with unarmed ships, threaten them for supplies, and then go on about their way. They use credential spoofers and signal blockers to stay anonymous, and some of them have specific body mods to make them hard to identify.”
“Like the nameless.”
“Yes,” the captain said. “Although, in my day, they were called the hashless, and they advocated for greater privacy without turning it into a religion.”
Janus heard a great deal of bitterness in the captain’s voice, and he wished he had the time and nerve to ask about it, but the captain had already turned his attention back to the holo tank, and the ghosts of several possible subs appeared on the plot some forty kilometers ahead of them.
“You said most of them were harmless?” Janus asked.
“Yes,” the captain said, baring his needle-like teeth. “Some of them are too stupid or brazen to hide their identities, and they end up killing the crews or damaging the submarines, which amounts to the same. Some of them have developed a taste for it. They don’t usually come up this far to play in the shallows, but the Alignment is a special time.”
Janus nodded. Since some colonies were only safely accessible during the Alignment, at least for the bigger, slower cargo submarines, it meant that there was a flurry of activity across the whole subsurface of Lumiara to get large shipments of harder-to-produce goods to the more remote monasteries.
A second, weaker ping rang throughout the hull.
“Ah,” the captain said.
“What does that mean?”
“Sierra Two. Unless they’ve discovered a way to teleport or they’re very, very fast, there are several of them. Means they’re prepared to attack armed convoys, and it significantly expands the tactical scenarios we might be dealing with.”
“What do we do?” Janus asked.
The captain grinned. “We engage in a tradition human and post-human navies have engaged in for millennia. We hunt the pirates down and kill them.”