by Julian North
Nythan nodded, troubled—as he should be. He left his terminal to speak with Anise and Rhett about maneuvering details. I moved closer to Alexander. His face was frozen as always, but its exterior wall hid turmoil inside, I was certain.
“Thank you for being here,” I told him, placing a hand on his shoulder. He was warm. It was a comforting heat.
“There is no thanks necessary. I would be here for you alone, if it was just your fight, but it is not. We fight for a cause, something more than ourselves.”
I hoped my guilty flush wasn’t visible. His words, his ideals… they were so different than my own. Alexander wanted a just world. He saw himself as a small cog in something greater. In some ways, he was an Orderist—a real one. He desired rules and honor. He would fight for it. I was selfish—I wanted my friends and family safe. I didn’t care how I made it happen.
“You don’t agree with my tactics,” I said to him.
We both looked forward to where Nythan and Anise were conversing, with hands in the air and voices barely controlled.
“You do what needs to be done.” Alexander made it sound like a bad thing, but then he took a deep breath. “I know you think I am naive in the principles I strive for, that my upbringing allows me luxuries others cannot afford. Perhaps there is some truth in that. I hope you will have the confidence to trust me with your plans in the future, just as you ask that I trust you.”
I flushed at the rebuke. “As you say, I did what I thought needed to be done.” I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.
I would’ve been furious at me. Alexander merely blinked. “The better world we’re trying to bring about cannot be built on a foundation of deception.”
“I’m not trying to fix the world,” I said.
“You should be. The future needs people like you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was unworthy. I shrank back under the azure storm of his stare. We were both quiet for a time as we traveled the ocean floor surrounded by the strange sounds of the submersible. A commotion in the front compartment ended those precious moments of peace.
“Jackin-A,” Nythan said as he scrambled back to his seat.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Anise sneered. “The resident genius directed too much energy at the platform. The patrol ships appear to have picked up the anomaly. They’re looking for us.”
“Not us,” Nythan corrected, as if it mattered. “Something. They have no idea what.”
Alexander and I moved the short distance back to the front portion of the submersible to have a better look at the screens and data. Two crimson hull bottoms appeared on the screen in front of Nythan. Similar images, along with other data, streamed into the submarine cockpit.
“Arrakis-class frigates,” Rhett said, impressed. “Top-of-the-line. Two of them. These people are serious.”
“Can they see us?” I asked.
“Look there—they’ve put deep pole sonar arrays into the water.” Rhett pointed at his screen. “Anise, put us down on the bottom and power down. Those are sensitive instruments. The navy pukes I knew used to say they could hear a kid peeing in the water on the beach with those things.”
“I can’t do that,” Anise said.
“What?” Nythan and Rhett said in unison. My heart accelerated.
“The Gaia was not designed to park on the surface. Its instrumentation is impossibly delicate. I can’t just put her down on the rocks, trash, or other debris that’s down there. And anyway, the Gaia can’t be shut off. It isn’t a car.”
Jackin’ merchant’s kid. She’s worried about damaging the family’s new toy.
“I’m sorry, Anise, but we have to risk some damage,” Rhett told her, more gently than I would have. “There’s no other choice. Those ships will destroy us with explosive charges if they detect us.”
Anise shook her head. “It’s not just the damage. We need energy to run the environmental systems. And the hull—it’s reinforced by a force charge that strengthens the alloy. I’m… I’m not sure if it will withstand the pressure at this depth if we power the generator down. Damn you, Nythan.”
“I saw emergency breathing units and diving suits in the back,” Alexander said. “We can use those if we need to keep the life support systems off for a prolonged period.”
Anise focused her ire-filled eyes on me. “What about the hull? If it breaches, we’ll die. Those suits are top-of-the-line diamond skin—completely resistant to heat and cold. But we’re several miles down. At this depth, even with the suits, the pressure will be too much. We’ll be crushed.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Neither did anyone else. And what came next was worse.
“Incoming!” Rhett yelled, looking at the blinking red dot of death sinking from the top of his screen toward us. “Five thousand feet and closing fast.”
Anise turned away from me and grabbed the control throttle. “Jamming it hard to starboard, everything she’s got.”
“No, don’t!” Nythan yelled from behind. “They’ll see a power surge for sure.”
My gaze fixed on Rhett’s screen. Three thousand feet. Heading straight for us.
“We’re dead if we don’t. Its trajectory will put it within one hundred feet of our position—close enough for the explosive charge to destroy us. I’m ignoring Nythan and running so we don’t get killed.”
One thousand feet.
“Dammit, wait, you highborn princess. It’s not a frakkin’ explosive. Power this thing down—now.”
“Explain yourself, Nythan.” Even now, Alexander spoke as if this were just another pep talk before a track meet.
“It’s a sensor pulse probe—like a super sensitive sonar signal. But it only works once, then it burns itself out. It’ll pick up any artificial energy or heat source. I’m right about this; the Gaia’s array can see the density in any object. Explosives would be less dense. That thing is packed with equipment—heavy metals and electronics.”
Five hundred feet.
“Says the nope who got us into this mess in the first place,” Anise screeched. “It’s my ship. We’re going.”
I turned to Nythan. He who had trusted Alissa and Havelock, but who had also stood with me in the Ziggurat, who worked to cure the Waste, who came with me to Bronx City. My decision was easy.
“Power it down, Anise.”
She twirled to face me, an angry curl on her lips. But she didn’t speak. Heavy glares met her defiance: Alexander, Rhett, Nythan, and me. A surge of icy strength pumped through me. Anise paused before a wall of loyalty. No trill was necessary. These people were mine, somehow.
“Powering down.” Her voice was laced with something that let me know this wasn’t over.
The hum of the Gaia faded. The lights went out so only a few instrument panels pierced the blackness, like colorful stars in the night. Then they too burned out, and we sat in a void.
“Viser lights should work,” Nythan said. “Get the breathers too, although I think we won’t need them.”
Alexander and I flicked on our viser lights. There was a worried look on Rhett’s face, a confident one on Nythan’s, while Anise’s eyes were narrow, smoldering like ash.
The world shook as a single angry push shoved the Gaia. The crunch of something hard vibrated through the hull—like a dozen light bulbs breaking. There was a second sound, higher in pitch—something unnatural. My hands shot to my ears as a stabbing pain ripped into my head. The others did the same. But it was over in a second, although the water continued to rock the Gaia, like the lingering aftershock of an earthquake. A conventionally shaped vessel probably would’ve toppled over. But the Gaia’s unusual wings kept her stable and upright even as the ocean trembled. In less than a minute, the waves stilled. An infuriatingly arrogant look of satisfaction appeared on Nythan’s face.
“We can power up again. Glad you didn’t bother getting out of your seats,” he pronounced.
“How do you know they won’t send another one?” Rhett asked.
Those minutes ticked off in uneasy silence. Anise mumbled something under her breath when she finally restarted the Gaia’s generator. When the sensors came back online we saw that the ships had returned to their normal patrol position. We had our internal map and a clear path to the research platform.
“Take us in,” I told her.
Chapter 32
We glided toward the extraction facility.
It was like a nightmarish beast given form; four impossibly long, thick legs extended from near the corners of the platform to the floor of the ocean. According to Rhett, the legs were expandable and used both mechanical anchors and powered magnetic vacuums to anchor themselves to the ocean floor. The structure’s extraction and drilling equipment had been replaced with other, more complex machines that even Nythan could not identify based on the Gaia’s sensor scans.
“Whatever they’ve got on there, they are using a huge amount of power. Highly specialized fabricators use a lot of energy, which I would expect for a chipping facility. But whatever they are running goes beyond that. It looks like they’ve got a heat-exchange fusion generator running on that thing—which would be another reason why they kept this whole thing offshore. The licensing process would’ve been long, expensive, and messy if they did this within the country, or anywhere else for that matter. It also explains why they don’t need fuel deliveries.”
“How many people on board?”
Nythan squished his lips back and forth in contemplation. “I’d think less than a hundred. The building sitting on that platform is eight stories, but a lot of the space is consumed by equipment.”
“How do we get on board?” Rhett asked.
Nythan flicked a few fingers and a schematic of the facility appeared on the Gaia’s projection screen. It was incomplete in certain places, but there was enough to get a sense of the layout, which was just a series of stacked squares; research labs were located in the center of each level, with what looked like offices hugging the exterior spaces. Part of the ground floor and the area on the north side of the platform pulsed like sapphire hearts on the screen.
“What are those blue flashes?” I asked.
“Intense energy readings. The area to the north is the fusion reactor. I’m not sure what is causing the readings within the building—only that it involves a huge amount of power. Most of what that reactor is producing is being utilized in that area.”
Nythan pointed to the bottom of the platform, just east of the center.
“While removing most of the extraction-related equipment, the bones of that place are still that of a deep-sea extraction platform. There are gaps underneath the platform where the drills and other equipment used to be located. We can enter from there.”
“I can’t get the Gaia in that close,” Anise said. “The current is too strong to try to maneuver underneath the legs. That thing is so big it changes the ocean current in unpredictable ways.”
“The Gaia’s got magnetic drill bits and grapples on those giant arms,” Nythan said with a sly smirk. He was enjoying poking Anise—showing off how he knew more about how to utilize her machine than she did. “Just get in close to one of the legs. We can use the arms to anchor ourselves to the platform. That will keep her stable in the current. The arms can grab hold a few feet under the water so we can keep the Gaia hidden and muffle any noise the docking might make.”
I looked over my shoulder at the fancy skin suits, already guessing the rest of Nythan’s plan. “Then we float to the surface.” I frowned.
“You don’t sound happy,” Nythan said.
“Where would I learn to swim growing up in Bronx City?”
My companions looked uneasily at one another as the hum of the Gaia’s engines provided background music. Surprisingly, it was Anise who spoke first.
“There is a button on the suits that pumps air into the vest. It’ll carry you to the surface. No swimming necessary. You won’t even feel the water—you could swim in a boiling soup pot in that thing and not feel it. It makes its own air too. You’ll be fine.”
“I will be beside you the whole way,” Alexander said, somehow managing not to sound like a jack-A when he said it.
There was something more terrifying than the thought of drowning: being completely dependent on others. Even if the other person was Alexander. My mouth was dry. It was too late for regrets now, too late to do anything but succeed. I forced myself to nod.
“Let’s get our suits on,” Alexander said. “Anise, can you handle the controls by yourself?”
“I got it,” she assured him.
I was waiting for the demand to accompany us, but it didn’t come—at least not yet. There weren’t enough suits anyway.
I had never worn a skin suit, of course. It was stiff, unwieldy, and uncomfortable—a bit like trying to wear wall insulation. It seemed hard to believe anyone could swim in this thing. Alexander showed me the controls on my wrist to adjust the suit buoyancy.
“We’ll come out of the Gaia’s bottom hatch. I’ll help you swim clear of the submarine, then you press the orange button for about two seconds. The suit will do the rest. Keep hold of me the whole time. Nothing to worry about.”
Except drowning. And trust issues. And whatever is on this platform.
As I tried to get accustomed to the stiff hide I had wrapped myself in, the Gaia slid closer to the ominous goliath, its amorphous form filling the cockpit’s sonar display. Anise reduced our speed and came closer to the surface. We held onto the walls as the ocean’s current rocked the Gaia.
Nythan still didn’t have his suit on. He was fiddling with his viser, his eyes and fingers dancing as only Nythan’s could.
“Are you going too?” I asked him.
He nodded but didn’t say anything. He kept at whatever he was doing.
“I’m pulling in next to the southeast leg,” Anise said.
The sounds of hydraulics at work echoed through the hull, followed by the ringing of metal upon metal as Gaia’s twin arms locked onto the platform like a leech to its prey.
“The clamps are secure. You can release the seal on the bottom dive hatch.”
Nythan had finished whatever he was doing and manipulated a control panel on the rear wall of Gaia. After a moment of fumbling, the hissing of a pressure lock sounded, and a circular metal hatch opened in the floor of the submarine. I peered warily into the narrow, pit-like chamber below. A ladder led into its depths. There was a second hatch below.
Anise walked over from the cockpit. “It’s only big enough for one person at a time. The exterior hatch won’t open while this one is open. You go in, close the top behind you, then open the bottom hatch. The water’s damn cold, but you won’t feel it. Take a few kicks to get clear of Gaia, then let the air float you to the surface. Try not to make too much noise. The suits have transmitters, but the signals will be picked up. I’m shutting them off.”
One person at a time.
I grabbed the top rungs of the ladder.
“What are you doing?” Alexander asked.
“I’m going down before I lose my nerve.”
“Daniela, I will go first,” he said as if I was crazy to suggest otherwise, which perhaps I was. “I will be just outside the hatch. The only thing you need to do is breathe. You don’t need to do this on your own.”
I forced my head to nod. It wasn’t easy—my neck, and everywhere else, had become stiff looking at the hole leading to the ocean. The only place to swim in BC was the river—and the only people in that water were corpses. My skin crawled at the thought.
Alexander lowered himself into the metal pit. Anise stepped toward him. She looked at me, then at Alexander. It was a peculiar look I hadn’t seen before—one shaped by a h
istory I still didn’t really understand. He froze on the ladder, waiting for Anise to say what she wanted to say.
“Alexander…” I expected her to demand that she come. That she wasn’t about to sit in the Gaia while we risked our lives, but she didn’t. I’m not sure if that made me relieved or disappointed. Perhaps both. “Take care of yourself.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll protect him,” Nythan said, grinning impishly.
Anise snapped back to herself, her expression morphing into one of genuine concern and embarrassment. “Of course, I meant all of you should be careful. The Gaia will be here, waiting.”
“We won’t be able to bring the rifles,” Rhett noted unhappily. “The water will blow out the power cells.” He handed a force pistol to Alexander. “Tuck this inside your suit.”
Alexander did it without comment. I hadn’t even thought about bringing a weapon, and I doubted Alexander had either. He had the trill, same as me. I wondered if the cold power of his altered genes sang to him the way it did to me. Did he hunger for the cold power as I did?
Once Alexander had his suit ready, he climbed the rest of the way into the pit so the top of his golden hair was below our feet. The scene reminded me of some criminal condemned to die in that tube. But I wasn’t going to let that happen.
“I’ll see you soon,” I told him.
“I’ll be waiting outside the exterior hatch. Just let yourself drop, and I’ll grab you. Don’t panic. We’ll all meet at the designated location beneath the platform.”
He put his helmet on.
Rhett knelt next to the pit and closed the hatch. It sealed with a chilling exhale of air. Through the small window above, we could see dark ocean water slosh eagerly into the compartment. I knew Alexander was an excellent swimmer and had breathing unit, but I still cringed at the thought of him down there, alone in the murky depths. As I would soon be, even if only for a moment.
Next it was my turn. The airlock drained itself, the hatch reopened, and I came to the precipice. Rhett put the helmet over my head and checked my breathing unit before I went down the ladder.