Mining Station Alpha-Twenty-One, Twenty Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.20 Interstellar
It was late in the evening watch when Ryler looked up to see Nikandros walk into the reactor room. His mentor and leader looked as he always did to Ryler, apparently innocuous and endlessly watchful. “What is it?” Ryler asked.
“Something is different about the Irkallans,” Nikandros said. “They’re losing their fear.”
Ryler nodded. He’d noticed it, too. When they’d started the journey, the Irkallans on the ship had been suspicious of him and carefully respectful of the other exceptionalists. That caution had turned to outright fear when Janus had first started his “exercises,” but it was turning into something else.
The Irkallans—who were, in fact, a particular subset of Irkallans in that they were the ones who had most willingly joined Callie, Lee, and Syn’s insurrection when they revealed the lost Promethean data—had already gotten used to the speed and precision of the combat cyborgs. This was not the first time, after all, that they’d been confronted with things that were stronger and faster than them, especially the Hunters in their group. A trilith could rip a void suit in half and peel even a crawler’s armor plating open to get at the people inside.
Ryler’s fellow dusters acknowledged the threat, but they had adjusted to it.
Some of the looks he’d gotten lately concealed arrogance and even hostility.
“Well?” Nikandros asked.
“What do you want from me?” Ryler asked, a trace of irritation making it into his tone, although if Nikandros noticed, which he assuredly did, he didn’t show it.
“You’re the lead librarian of our faction. I’m its architect. Advise me.”
“They’re planning to neutralize us,” Ryler said. “Janus won’t strike first, but Lee or Lira might.”
“Do you think they have control of the decision?” Nikandros asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Janus has been usurped before,” Ryler said.
The deeper problem for Ryler was that Janus opposed them at all. He understood his friend’s suspicion of Nikandros’s motives. After all, Janus had spent most of his life suffering from the decisions of others, particularly members of the Cult of the Survivor. But Nikandros had been open about their goals—to reach the Oracle and use it to give more power to the outliers among them.
Why would Janus fight them when they were on his side?
“You are conflicted,” Nikandros stated.
“I am,” Ryler answered. “Our faction is supposed to empower the outliers, not fight them.”
“Handing a human power always carries the risk of that power being used against you,” Nikandros answered calmly. “It would be better if Janus cooperated, but we have no assurances of that.”
“And if I don’t cooperate?” Ryler asked, his thoughts on his parents, who had elected to join one of the exceptionalist colonies when they arrived on Lumiara instead of staying in New Prometheus.
“You are a member of the Cult of the Survivor, Ryler,” Nikandros said. “Do you believe in our faction’s purpose?”
“I do.”
“Then, act according to your conscience,” Nikandros said, tucking his hands into his sleeves and leaving Ryler with nothing but questions, doubts, and guilt.
***
They found the mining station where the port director said it would be. The Chapo and the Deep Rider held station twenty kilometers off while the Seraphine went in alone, crawling forward on passive sensors. The station’s navigational beacon was switched off, its main engines were idling, and its tracks, cutters, and crushers were silent and still.
“Deploy the drone,” the captain said.
Syn detached one of the Seraphine’s drones and approached the station.
They couldn’t use sonar without tipping the pirates, so Syn was using floodlights and cameras to map out their target. Alpha-twenty-one was a massive tracked vehicle, easily four times the size of the Seraphine. It was designed to grind its way across the ocean floor, scraping up surface ores and nodules to be processed and stored in the facility above. Those ores, broken up by the cutting rollers and routed through grinding and sorting by high-pressure water jets, were then picked up by cargo submarines and brought to even larger refineries to be turned into polysteel and other alloys, which were then used to repair and expand the Cult’s floating monasteries, submarine fleets, and industrial facilities.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
As the drone started to make its way around the silent facility, they confirmed that the supply sub was still docked, as were the two mini-subs that were used to make spot repairs to the facility. A third sub was docked, and this one was neither registered to the logistics fleet nor the mining rig.
“I’m going to take that as confirmation of pirates,” Janus said. “How do we get in? Any alternatives to the main dock?”
The captain entered a command, and the mining station’s schematics were overlaid on the live feed. “Nothing particularly usable… There are a few maintenance access points, but they’re only used when these rigs are in dry dock.”
Janus raised an eyebrow. That implied the station was occasionally returned for maintenance to a facility large enough to store it by a vehicle large enough to carry it. “As soon as we dock, everyone on the station is going to know, and they’ll either damage the sub or hurt the hostages.”
“You’re assuming they’re still alive,” the captain said quietly.
Janus clenched his jaw. “For the pirates’ sake, they’d better be. How do we get in?”
“I might have a way,” the captain said.
***
Space on any submarine was at a premium, but space on the remora launch was nonexistent. It was technically a drone with no controls and a payload of four very uncomfortable people.
Janus lay encased in his suit and a layer of crash gel. The bulkhead was pressed against his helmet visor. He couldn’t move an inch, not with how form-fitting an aspirant suit was.
For the next ten minutes, Janus’s world was discomfort and pain. It was an itch he couldn’t scratch and leg cramps he couldn’t stretch out. He was surrounded by the sound of rushing water and the faint, electrical hum of the magnetic propulsion drive.
The remora fastened onto one of the maintenance access points in a manner similar to its namesake, its movements organic and slow. Once it was latched on, it drilled through the hull and checked for nearby heat and movement, then compared the rig’s internal pressure against its own before equalizing the two and popping the hatch.
Mick was the first in, squirming through the opening like a snake, his weapon pointed at possible danger areas as he got clear and into cover. Ivan went next, followed by Janus and Syn.
The whole infiltration team made it in undetected.
Ivan closed the hatch, and the remora sealed its own probe point before detaching and swimming back toward the Seraphine.
From that point on, they were on their own.
“Where to first?” Ivan asked.
“We need information,” Janus said.
“There’s a security station two compartments down,” Syn said. “Similar to the damage control station on the Seraphine. Small crew, big station, so they do most of their diagnostics remotely.”
“I can get us there,” Mick said.
Janus nodded.
The four of them made their way down the passageway, stacked in a column, weapons drawn.
It was eerie making their way through the facility without the sound and activity that should have been there. Inactive, the mining station was like a maze of metal pipes and shadows that a pirate could leap out of, and the combination of that wrongness and the repeated drills they’d run against the exceptionalist cyborgs had Janus on edge. That, and the external readouts on his suit indicated that it was hot and humid inside the station, and that it was getting worse. He actually saw condensation on some of the pipes, and as Mick moved to climb over a safety barrier that had been placed across the passageway, Janus said, “Mick! Don’t move!”
The Hunter froze, one leg lifted.
“Move straight back,” Janus said, passing the others to get to the front of their little group. He holstered his chem pistol and picked up one of the yellow polymer board warning signs, noticing there was an open pipe repair kit set down and abandoned nearby. Swallowing, Janus climbed over the safety barrier and stepped forward, keeping the warning sign ahead of him as he advanced.
He stopped when the upper half of the warning sign fell to the ground, edges melted and cut. “There’s a pinhole leak in this pipe,” Janus said. “High-pressure steam. That’s why this passageway is so hot and humid.”
“Crikey,” Mick said. “That would have cut me in half.”
“Probably not,” Janus said, moving to the opposite side of the corridor and walking past the invisible leak. “But it might have damaged your suit and burned you. They were probably in the process of fixing it when the pirates broke in.”
Mick nodded and resumed his position as point man. The team headed for the security station.
Once there, Syn pulled out her portable diagnostic terminal, which had been customized as a hacking deck. She popped the panel on the side, disconnected the display from the hardwired network, and plugged her terminal in.
“How long will it take?” Mick asked.
“From sixty to two-hundred and forty seconds from the moment you stop talking,” Syn said under her breath.
Her eyes glowed blue as she interfaced with the station’s security system.
Janus and Ivan guarded the way they’d come while Mick pushed slightly ahead to take cover behind a crate.
“Slick move with the pipe,” Ivan said.
Janus snorted, but he was more pleased than he cared to say.
“Got it,” Syn said, disconnecting her deck and closing the panel.
“Don’t need to stay connected?” Janus asked.
“Not anymore,” Syn said. She opened a suit-to-suit connection and gave Janus and the others a feed from the station’s security system.
There were three people at the station docks and an unknown number of people on the pirate sub, since the security network didn’t extend into them. Additional people were scattered around the facility, usually in groups of two or three, with the exception of an ore storage bay that held maybe two dozen people.
“Any bodies?” Janus asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Syn said. She accessed the station’s personnel records, and the system started to overlay names to heat signatures. “Oh.”
“What do you mean, oh?” Janus said.
The names were mainly tagged to the people in the corridors and the ones on the docks. There were two members of station personnel in the room with the two dozen unknowns, but they were closest to the door.
“Looks like the miners already have the pirates under control,” Ivan said.
Janus bit his lower lip. “Something’s not right.
“Got it!” Syn said, and suddenly, names popped up over the two-dozen people in ore storage.
“How did you get the pirates’ names?” Mick asked.
“Those aren’t pirates,” Syn said. “Those are the sailors the port director told us to look out for. There are no pirates. The miners hijacked the supply ship.”