by Elsa Jade
She pulled the Tritonan robe tighter around her. Damiara’s underlings had stopped by their rooms the day, Estar with the new clothes in hand and Ariab curtly explaining the protocols for seeking the Abyssa’s omens. Marisol had tolerated enough foreign law and etiquette lessons to absorb the Tritonesse-na’s droning lecture while mostly thinking about what Damiara had revealed to Coriolis.
If their leader, the Helassia Abyssa, was dead, what did that mean for the council rep’s status assessment and Tritona’s future? The mood of the Tritonans was tense, understandably, but below that, she sensed darker undercurrents. If their sovereign was unreachable, who would make the choices for them all?
Finally, she let out a hard breath. “The only place we’re going right now,” she told Lana, “is down.”
With the engine backwash subsided, she strode toward the Bathyal, kicking the long hem out of her way with each step. Even with the ship powered off, the wind plucked at the delicate fabric like Ariab’s peevish fingers had tested Estar’s fittings, clearly disapproving of the cultural appropriation even if Marisol and Lana had been unknowingly part of their diaspora.
“Loose hair is a menace,” she’d sniffed, “and looks like a tentacle tangle. At least pretend to be a real Tritonan when we go to the Abyssa.”
After Ariab marched out, Estar lingered. “I can show you the traditional braids,” she offered Marisol shyly. But with a quick glance at Lana, she admitted, “I don’t know about yours!”
They’d spent part of the evening pleasantly enough with pixberry wine and the Swiss chocolates Thomas has packed. Both Estar and Lana were delighted with the chocolates.
“And I wasted my interstellar baggage allowance on styling gel,” Lana mourned.
Estar, who’d been playing with the goo, shook her head. “I think some of the Tritonesse would love this. Well, not exactly this since it would wash away instantly. But maybe we wouldn’t have to keep our hair so long.”
Lana dug through her toiletry bag. “Try this wax.”
The Tritonesse-na puckered her lips. “Maybe we could do something like this with mollusk mucus.”
“Uh… Maybe,” Lana said, apparently even her endless enthusiasm wavering in the face of mollusk mucus.
But Marisol had wanted to laugh. Interstellar diplomacy and development via hair woes—certainly a cause for which there was unlimited potential.
Now, with her hair bound into the Tritonesse layered braids, she would’ve happily gone to war for a simple scrunchie. Her scalp ached from the tension.
Or maybe that was just the dread of approaching Coriolis, nearer with every step.
He hadn’t come by her quarters last night. Or maybe he had while she was in Lana’s room with Estar. She refused to wonder about it and wasn’t going to ask him about it. Definitely not when they were about to embark on a daring journey into the dark heart of their treacherous waters—and definitely definitely not with all these nosey beings crammed onto the small ship.
If there’d been anything to say, she would’ve said it before he sneaked out of her quarters like a damn sea slug. Not that she’d ever had a sea slug in her bedrooms, but she could imagine.
He had left her a jar of lava-leaf though… When she clamped her elbow against the small bag at her side, the small vessel fashioned from a hinged shell nudged into her ribs. So she wouldn’t entirely ignore him for that.
To her mixed relief and annoyance, he slipped around the back of the Bathyal—very sea slug like!—leaving Gayo to usher her and Lana onto the ship. Once she was settled with the others on a row of seats mounted off the bulkhead, she had only a glimpse of the Tritonyri commander as he strode through the hatch and toward the cockpit before Damiara barged in, blocking the view.
The tall Tritonesse-ra paused at the front of the main compartment, hands on her hips as she surveyed the gathering. Marisol had already assessed the group herself: she and Lana, Damiara and her two underlings, the two Tritonyri assigned as their honor guard, and three more Tritonan males she didn’t recognize who were speaking quietly with Gayo and slanting intermittent glances at the Earthers. Plus Coriolis, of course, who’d apparently decided he wanted more fighters on this expedition.
For reasons, no doubt.
Damiara pivoted on her heel and stomped toward the cockpit.
“Go,” Lana hissed.
Marisol lifted one eyebrow at her. “I thought you said I shouldn’t run away anymore.”
“Run tooooo,” Lana countered, “Run at, run over, run through.”
With a snort, Marisol leaned back. The dropdown seats for the Tritonesse as well as hers and Lana’s were cushioned, which she appreciated even as the implication of frailty annoyed her. “I’m not fighting over the commander.”
Even as she said it, she wondered… So what was she fighting for?
Her life and Lana’s, she reminded herself tersely. And perhaps a solution to Tritona’s troubles at the same time. Wasn’t that enough?
Coriolis’s voice interrupted the roil of her thoughts. “Launch in ten. Restraints now.”
He sounded even more abrupt than her mental self-talk. But she could follow commands—when they made sense. And anyway, she wasn’t going to wrestle Damiara for the co-pilot chair.
Gayo checked their harnesses. Behind him, Kadyn blushed when Ariab simpered at the younger Tritonyri.
Marisol eyed the ray guns—as Ridley had called them—tucked unobtrusively into the belts of the Tritonyri’s ceremonial robes. “I had the impression that seeking omens was a common ritual. Why the weaponry?”
“We don’t know why the Abyssa has gone silent,” Gayo said quietly. “But even if this was a routine pilgrimage, there are always dangers in the deeps.”
Estar leaned forward, her expression earnest. “But don’t be afraid. The Tritonyri are the finest warriors. And the Tritonesse-ra has grappled hai-aku and invasive bonecrack clams out of the Grotto of Omens with her bare hands.”
Marisol twisted her lips to one side. Grappling sharks and clams wasn’t what Damiara wanted to do with her hands up in the cockpit. And the other woman was looking for more than just omens in her grotto.
“We rise to serve, Tritonesse,” Kadyn piped up.
At a warning chime from the ship, the Tritonyri returned to their hard seats with the other three. Those three were even more heavily armed, she noted. Their mantles were cut shorter, providing access to their battle skins.
Hunting omens was apparently very hazardous business.
Their flight in the Bathyal was little more than a commuter hop to the nearest harbor. From their seats, they had a quick view of the waterfront development but not the harbor itself before they dropped to the docks. She huffed out a thwarted breath; for a world that was almost entirely water, all she’d seen so far was rain.
Catching her attention and apparently her disappointment too, Gayo explained, “The Cretarni avoided the coasts during the war—for good reason—and let the wharfs fall into disrepair, so we have to land farther back. But this was the first place we started repairing once they left, so it’ll be a quick ride to the water.”
All the Tritonans seemed cheered by the nearness of their true home. They crowded the hatch impatiently until they could exit and just as anxiously piled onto a waiting vehicle that looked mostly like a glorified alien stretch golf cart. Until Coriolis took the controls and ignited the engines, and then the golf cart hovered before zooming them through the semi-rebuilt streets.
The smell hit her first. Not just the damp concrete stink from the port. This scent speared her sense memories like Coriolis’s tongue in her mouth.
Salty, musky, wild. The chill in the air sharpened the edge of the sea like a knife, and it opened something hidden within her. A yearning almost like the intimate contact she’d been missing during her sickness before her night with Coriolis, but somehow deeper too—as if it wasn’t just her body that had been isolated, but her soul too.
Instinctively, she sucked down a breath, trying to
fill her whole body with the taste.
Caught up in the moment, she didn’t notice when everyone else had disembarked and started walking between the last set of buildings, through which she caught a glimpse of the rainy-gray sky.
Coriolis lingered. His eyes matched that sky so closely that in her dazzled imagination she felt that she was looking into him…
“Are you all right?” His deep voice rumbled through her, making her shiver in a way even the chill couldn’t touch her.
So many people asked her that, which meant maybe she wasn’t. Maybe being “rich and powerful and beautiful” wasn’t actually enough and she had to seek more. Not the greedy sort of more, but the doing and being more. Her mind whirled like the churn of clouds, hiding whatever was behind the curtain. “It’s just hitting me again how strange this all is. The fake IDA handbook had a warning about disorientation and panic.” She forced herself to wave one hand in dismissal and gave him a painstaking smile. “Just those fake alien dating jitters.”
He gave her a look, not smiling back. “The handbook wasn’t fake,” he noted. “The Cretarni stole it from the IDA. So that part is real enough.” He took a step closer to her. “About our…date the other night—”
She hopped out of the vehicle, ducking him like Lana would avoid any touch. “That wasn’t a date,” she said with another too-high-pitched laugh. “That was just sleeping together.”
“You weren’t sleeping when I left.” His voice dropped a register, partly to keep it private but also she felt a nudge of pressure, like he was pushing toward her through chest-deep water. “You don’t have to lie like the Cretarni or poison the memory to force me away. If our night together meant nothing to you, that’s your choice. But I will treasure our night together.”
She stared up at him, her pulse racing, while the Tritonan word for treasure shimmered in her brain like a gold coin falling through water—half pirate plunder, half cherish. The word of a man who had fought savagely to save what little he had left to love.
While she, who had everything, had been too grudging to give herself.
“I didn’t mean—” She cut herself off even before Damiara called loudly back to them, her voice ringing between the patched buildings.
“The abyss awaits!”
Gray eyes more stormy than the sky, he stood back with a slight bow and a twist to gesture toward the gap. The motion flared his robe, revealing the battle skin beneath bristling with weaponry and whatever other secrets he had in those pouches—like the sweet spice.
She didn’t know much about omens or deep-sea diving for that matter, but probably the troubled waters in her own heart were in inauspicious launch to this endeavor. So she did as she’d always done: she buried her uncertainty as deep as she could, raised her chin as high as it went, and stepped up smoothly to join him,, her smile like a protective layer of wax across her mouth.
The mask cracked, just a bit, as she paced him between the dockside warehouses and emerged onto the wharf and Tritona’s waters spread out at her feet.
When she gasped, the primordial perfume of salt and amino acids—the building blocks of life—washed over her.
“The sea,” he whispered. “It wraps all the way around the world.”
On his other side, Lana took a step toward the edge. “What do you call it?”
“The Sea,” he repeated with a confused pucker of his brow.
Marisol and Lana exchanged looks.
He gave them a mock frown. “Are you people from Dirt going to tease the Sea?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Lana said solemnly.
Marisol glanced at her again, and they both burst into giggles.
Damiara strode past him, scowling. “Descending to the Grotto of Omens is no joke,” she said severely. “The submersible is that the end of the pier. Follow me.”
Lana rolled her eyes but fell into step behind the Tritonesse-ra’s underlings. Marisol lingered another moment, staring out of the water.
She’d seen the oceans of Earth, of course—all seven seas, actually. And Sea was very much a sea, with nothing to break the spell arc of the horizon of water. And yet somehow…
Maybe it was because Tritona was a smaller world then Dirt—ah, Earth. But she felt as if she was seeing all of it at once. Or maybe not all of it but an impossibly contradictory panorama. Though the wedge of sky and water closest to them rippled with all the shades of gray, farther out, almost beyond the horizon, the clouds broke, and streamers of pure golden light beamed down, igniting the water in scintillating pools of melted emerald and sapphire. A little farther along the arc, an unlikely refraction of light and airborne water shimmered in myriad rainbows between the bouffant layers of clouds. And at the farthest point to their west—at least she thought it was west—where the arc bent out of view, fiery hues marked some distant place where the sun was setting, if there was anyone there to see. And just beyond that, where Sea seemed to pour away over the edge of the world, a deepest purple shot through with sparkles of silver ruled the night.
“Storms are coming,” Gayo said quietly. “Not today, not tomorrow, but soon.”
There was a quaver in his voice at once ominous and yearning that sent a shiver through her. If those were lightning bolts, visible at that vast distance, she couldn’t imagine the ferocity of such a storm.
She glanced up to find Coriolis’s turbulent gaze resting on her. “We’ll be back from the grotto before the storms,” he said quietly. “You’ll have your answers before the first raindrops fall.”
Assuming the Abyssa really did have the old records of the exodus ships and an explanation for the Wavercrest syndrome. Was she really going to take those solutions and just leave? No, she’d made a commitment to meet with the council rep. While she wasn’t sure how much she could offer, she wouldn’t go back on her word.
And if the Abyssa didn’t answer, or was dead as Damiara seemed to fear, then what?
The restless crash of the waves on the riprap breakwater offered no answers.
At the end of the pier, their next ride awaited. The submersible was about the size of the Bathyal. Considering they were heading into the Tritonans’ natural environment, she supposed she should be grateful that they weren’t fitting her with an air tank and flippers for a scuba dive. But knowing that their home was as inimical to her survival as the deep reaches of space made her eye the small submarine with concern.
A Tritonyri—the oldest she’d met yet, judging from his long gray braid and even longer gray braided beard—stepped down from the hatch, just in time to catch her dubious expression.
Though she smoothed the look at once, he laughed out loud, more joyous than any Tritonan she’d heard, even though he must’ve seen more years of their terrible war. “The Earthlings!” he cried with delight. “Earthans? Earthers!”
He strode toward them with his arms wide, though he made no attempt to actually touch them. Heavy scarring marked his cheeks, like a breathing replica of the bombardment damage at the spaceport, and had left one of his bright blue eyes permanently clouded, and she remembered Coriolis’s descriptions of the toxins in the water.
But nothing marred the old Tritonyri’s wide smile. “I rise to serve,” he announced with another expansive gesture. “Your first dive into our beautiful Sea. And you aim for the deepest rift. May your courage be deeper than the abyss.”
Lana, who’d been watching him with bemused delight, gave herself a little shake. “Is…um, is that a hole in your submarine?”
“Is it?” He glanced over his shoulder with an exaggerated double take. “It is! Or was. But it’s getting better now.”
With a shake of his head, Coriolis stepped forward and clamped his hand on the older male’s shoulder. “Captain Flaude, our thanks for taking us down. But you are frightening our guests.”
“Frightening, drowning,” Lana muttered. “Whichever”
Coriolis smiled reassuringly at her. “The Ammil was damaged in battle, like most of our vessels—and our fighte
rs.” He cut a glance at the scarred captain. “But the hole is sealed at the inner bulkhead with biodynamic skin.” He peeled aside the neckline of his robe to indicate his wetsuit and tapped the point where the black strap crossed his broad shoulder. “Once the skin heals, it will help equalize pressure and temperature even at depth. It can deflect hostile scans and is more adaptable than any plasteel. But it needs to be exposed to the water until it’s mature. Then the hull can be sealed over.”
Marisol blinked. “The skins are alive?” Maybe she shouldn’t have tugged on his straps so hard when she was dragging him into her bed…
But he shook his head. “No more alive than the AI neural net, though it’s modeled after some of the features of living tissue.”
“Come aboard,” the captain urged. “The Ammil sensed a swarm of crystal rays, and the Earthlings won’t want to miss that.” He waved them all through the hatch like he was scooping minnows.
As they stepped inside, a ramp took them immediately down past what Marisol’s air-breathing subconscious knew was the waterline. So apparently the old captain wasn’t lying about the hole being fixed.
At least for now.
But they still had a long way to go. And all that way was down.
Chapter 12
Coriolis sat without interrupting at comms while Flaude took the Ammil out of the harbor. At the captain’s insistence, he activated the comm long enough to remind everyone to look out the viewport at the crystal rays as they passed to open water.
Before he toggled off, the ooh from Lana whispered through the bridge.
Flaude grinned. “Told you the Earthlings would like it.”
“That one likes everything,” Coriolis said. “Don’t make contact with her though.”
After he explained the Wavercrest syndrome electrical imbalance, the captain nodded. “I noticed she didn’t want to be touched. Same with the silver-haired one.”