Port L’Évèque, Nineteen Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.19 Interstellar
The captain adjusted the alignment of his uniform and checked his sharp, pointed teeth before leaving his stateroom. Of all the decisions he’d made over the centuries, the teeth had been one of the most impractical and the most personally gratifying. They were all people could see when talking to him. It distracted them from his ongoing struggle for self-control.
He clasped his hands behind his back and made his way toward the control room. The posture was an affectation, but it kept the beast at bay. At this point of his existence, the captain viewed his body much as he viewed the ships he commanded, a useful vehicle and enactor of his will, but he also had a constant awareness that the many interests they carried might turn on him, and so he had to be ever watchful.
He ignored the crew as he walked through berthing, with a few exceptions. There were two of Nikandros’s people on the ship: the comms officer and the chief engineer. They were the only ones skilled enough to fill the roles, but he would have done things differently. As for Abraxxis, Nikandros’s librarian, his loyalties were still in question by both sides. He felt a slight awareness as he moved to the ladderwell; Invarian’s pet was keeping track of him as he moved about the ship, never far but always out of sight. There was a kinship between them he hadn’t felt in a long time, not since he’d returned to his people after his long imprisonment before the culls sent the survivors fleeing into the icy waters of the inner sea. He allowed a passing curiosity for how they’d fared—whether they still fought to stay human or had completely given themselves over to their baser instincts, as he might have if he’d spent hundreds of years living and hunting in the icy dark. Immortality was no guarantee of sanity, and it was not protection from the other creatures that roamed the depths.
In a way, the captain was the last of his kind. Well, he thought with an inner chuckle, I always did want to be special.
He climbed the steep metal steps to the control room.
Nikandros had the watch, and the exceptionalist architect turned to face him as the captain entered the room. The architect wore his robes instead of coveralls, as usual, and his posture aped that of the captain’s in a way that made the Apostate feel like he was looking at a younger version of himself. Was I ever that driven and that hasty? He had to make the assumption, because of the changes he wrought against the overwhelming opposition of the Consensus, but the truth was his memories of that time had gotten jumbled because of the trauma of gene conversion followed by long isolation.
He wondered what it would have been like to go down the mechanical path of soulless composites and objective recall. The digital flexors in his fingers flexed as the predatory parts of his mind recognized Nikandros as other and longed to settle their supremacy in a physical fight.
“Captain,” Nikandros said cooly.
“Architect,” the captain said, giving the younger faction leader a small concession while he focused on his inner fight. As the leader of what was perhaps, by now, the leading faction within the Consensus, Nikandros had some level of seniority over him, although as long as they were on the Seraphine, the captain’s word was absolute. “Anything to report?”
“The ground team is taking longer than expected.”
The captain smiled. “That must make you anxious.”
“Not in the slightest,” Nikandros said, his body language indicating he spoke the truth, but he couldn’t hide the smell of frustration.
There’s still a bit of the animal left in you, the captain thought.
“It’s not too late to join us,” Nikandros said testily. “You, of all people, know the value of allowing exceptions to the rule.”
The captain stared at the faction leader. It was not the first time the exceptionalists—and Nikandros in particular—had tried to recruit him, but there was an immediacy to this particular request, as if the architect expected his faction and the Cult would be crossing some sort of threshold at the end of this journey, one that might put the captain at odds with them. “I appreciate the offer. My answer remains no.”
“I would push for the restoration of your rank within the Consensus,” Nikandros insisted in a low voice. “Think on it. We might even be able to track down the lost evolutionists and return them to humankind.”
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Rage burned behind the captain’s eyes, and he was tempted to let it loose, to test flesh against machine until one broke. Fortunately for him, his former faction members were beyond reach, and the knowledge required to “save” them was lost when Invarian had purged the facility of Dr. Jahangir’s knowledge and her failed experiments. He wondered if Invarian knew how close he’d come to handing Nikandros an army of barely-human monsters. “My rank was never revoked, young man. So while I appreciate and even admire your ambition, I remain the only ordinal in the Cult of the Survivor, at least for now.”
That last part was a bit of flattery. He found the probability of Nikandros being promoted to the highest rank in the Cult unlikely since the title had fallen into disuse after the Apostate himself disgraced it. He found the probability of being of higher rank within the faction than Nikandros and surviving even smaller, which told him the arrogant bastard just wanted to keep him quiet and complacent until their mission was done, and that everyone would be expendable beyond that point.
Invarian chose that moment to walk in. “Is everything okay?”
“Just handing over the watch,” the captain said. “Eleven more of your people decided to leave the ship, which means you’ve lost twenty-three in total. Any complications to your visit?”
“No,” Invarian said, taking the news as well as could be expected. “But we do need to make an unplanned stop.”
“We’re on a strict deadline. I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Nikandros said.
“You’ll have to make do,” Janus said brusquely. “Lira contracted the subs, the crew, and the captain, and the same contracts require us to make the stop.” He looked at the captain.
“I’m a post-human of my commitments,” the captain said almost cheerily at Nikandros’s discomfiture.
It appeared the idea he’d planted in Nikandros’s emissary was already bearing fruit.
***
Janus walked behind a team of four aspirants, chem pistol drawn, as they swept from the engine room toward the reactor. The Seraphine was on its way to mining station alpha-twenty-one, and that meant the aspirant teams were about to get a first taste of a different kind of fight than they were used to. Once he’d briefed the captain and Ivan, they’d agreed that they should use every minute of the transit to train them. It wasn’t as if Ivan hadn’t covered the principles of fighting in an enclosed facility like this one, but things were about to become very, very real.
They’d had to make some changes as a result. Janus and Ivan had transferred all their combat-designated aspirants to the Seraphine, shifting some of their families to the Chapo and reassigning crew-capable team members.
It had the added benefit of transferring the exceptionalist chief engineer to the Deep Rider while bringing two of Nikandros’s more combat-oriented cultists to join in the drills.
“Look out!” the point woman said, firing her weapon a fraction of a second too late.
Lights flashed and simulated shotgun pellets sparked off the walls, turning the passageway into a maelstrom of injury and death. Janus and his team took cover where they could, the point woman collapsing as her suit locked to simulate a casualty. Janus grabbed the aspirant at the tail of the team and pushed him down a side passage to try to flank the “pirate,” only to come face to face with an exceptionalist coming the other way. The Irkallan aspirant got a shot off before the exceptionalist took him out, but Janus was able to use that split second to hit the exceptionalist with three nerve gas pellets that dropped her. He knelt next to the downed aspirant to see if he could render aid, and the scenario ended.
“Reset!” Ivan said over the comm. “We’re doing that again! Iris, shoot first, warning later. Your team will know there’s an enemy ahead by the loud noises.”
“Yes, boss,” the point woman said.
Janus gave the fallen aspirant a hand up, and the two of them jogged back to their initial positions for the exercise.
They were suffering about seventy-five percent casualties every time they ran through. Part of that was to be expected—they were practicing worst-case scenarios against full-conversion cyborgs, and the only way flesh and blood could compete against synthetic muscle and fiber optics was through teamwork and overwhelming firepower. They were limited in the latter by the nature of underwater facilities, which were even worse than they’d been on Irkalla. They were nineteen kilometers down. A breach of the mining station’s bulkhead wouldn’t just force them to breathe suit air. It would crush them and possibly cause a chain reaction of structural damage that would kill everyone inside.
“Let’s go, everybody!” Janus told the others. “We need to be faster. Has to be perfect.”
“Sir?” the point woman asked.
“What is it?”
“Are we expecting the pirates to be full cyborgs, like Nikandros’s people?”
It was a good question. Unfortunately, Janus couldn’t share the real answer with her, not on this ship, so a plausible alternate would have to do. “We’re not sure if pirates have taken over the station, how many of them there might be, or if the crew just had a maintenance problem and are already on their way to Port L’Évèque. If there are pirates there, we know the Cult is pretty tight with combat mod licenses, so we can at least hope that not all of them will be mech’ed up, and if they are, they’ll have jury-rigged prosthetics.”
“But we don’t know that, so we have to train to the worst-case scenario,” she said.
“Exactly,” Janus lied.
Because the truth was, if there were pirates, he expected them to be long gone. The right time to hit the mining right would have been after they resupplied from Port L’Évèque, unless they were after the rig’s main product, structural polysteel, in which case they should have struck before the Alignment. The only thing stopping the port director from sending his own people to investigate was that the logistical network that had formed around the pleasure station, to the point of subsuming its original function, was completely overloaded. Even crazy, desperate pirates would know to be gone before the situation normalized.
But in the meantime, Janus was sharpening his teams for their real mission, the one he hoped they would never have to go on because he’d lose half of them in the best of cases.
He wasn’t training them to kill pirates. He was training them to stop Nikandros if they had to.