Cosmosis

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(Starspeak)

“[Kinda surprised you found time for little old me,]” Ingrid said. “[I would have thought you were busy doing your whole Ocean’s Eleven schtick.]”

She was lounging in a hammock hung from the Jack’s cargo bay ceiling.

“[Well I didn’t want to head down to Davy Jones’ locker without talking to you,]” I said.

Ingrid gave an appreciative nod, but I quashed what she was thinking.

“[…Because I wanted to make sure you aren’t just going to ditch us and run back to Cadrune’s place as soon as I’m gone.]”

I was pretty sure she’d stick around. Spending even a little time around other humans would make it harder for her to just walk away. But I wasn’t above reinforcing that idea with some classic reverse psychology.

“[Seeing me doesn’t really prevent that,]” Ingrid pointed out.

“[Then are you?]” I asked. “[Thinking about going back to Cadrune?]”

“[…Depends if you tell me what you talked about with them,]” she said. “[Not just about the corpse, but about me.]”

“[I…don’t want to rush into that discussion,]” I admitted.

Ingrid just kept her eyes locked on to me, implicitly asking ‘why?’

“[Frankly you’ve shown a bit of a suicidal streak in a weird, kinda upbeat way,]” I said. “[Whether you intended it or not, you’re someone I think I need to spend time ‘handling’.]”

“[Seriously?]” she scoffed.

“[Your friend Christina was worried sick for you, but you seem pretty content to stay here until you died, without telling your fellow abductees back on Hashtin’s moons a damn thing. Would you really describe yourself as ‘cooperative’, considering the last week or two?]”

“[That’s a really shitty way to put it,]” Ingrid frowned. “[Don’t ‘handle’ me.]”

“[Then put some work in proving we don’t need to,]” I said, holding out a psionic file package for her.

“[What is it?]” she asked, beginning to peruse the data.

“[An investigation,]” I said. “[When we came to Kraknor, our visas were conditional upon helping a government task force find a certain fugitive. The rak in question is a psionic whiz, so Peudra offered our expertise in exchange.]”

“[These docs are all classified,]” Ingrid noticed. The documents weren’t just labeled in their contents. There was a psionic ‘stamp’ pressed into each document. You couldn’t alter the contents without altering the stamp. “[Are you allowed to be sharing these with me?]”

I had actually gotten the okay from Agent Avi, but Ingrid would be less likely to share the classified material if she didn’t know if she was allowed to have it.

So, I just gave her a coy look.

“[Don’t share these,]” I warned. “[With anyone.]”

“[What exactly am I looking for?]” she asked.

“[Our fugitive has been on the lam for months now, but they’ve been able to lay a very complex series of traps and false trails that would be impossible to pull off alone; they’ve got help. We need to know who.]”

“[Pretty open-ended question,]” Ingrid said, frowning.

“[Welcome to our kind of work,]” I shrugged. “[You think that’s bad, just wait until you hear how the search for Earth is going.]”

“[I’ll do it,]” she said. “[…If you tell me what the hell you and Cadrune are keeping from me.]”

Did I take this chance?

Cadrune was slime, but I couldn’t totally disagree when they’d worried about Ingrid’s reaction. That fatalistic resignation she had was a red flag in anyone.

…But trust needed to go both ways if we really wanted to win her over.

“[…Okay. You are…probably not dying,]” I said. “[Your heart’s probably fine because of your Adeptry.]”

She kept anything from showing on her face, but it was impossible for my psionics to miss the erratic crackle that ran through her emotions. Hope? Shock? Confusion? It was impossible to know exactly what emotion had suddenly welled up in her, but whatever she was feeling, it was intense.

I didn’t like that she was keeping it off her face so much.

“[You talked about this with Cadrune?]” she said. “[You really think I’d kill myself because you think I’m not dying?]”

“[I don’t think it would unfold that neatly,]” I conceded. “[But I think you might let your emotions get the better of you and engage in some activity recklessly, without taking the proper precautions. Like, say, flying a plane?]”

“[…You really think I’m that fragile?]” she asked.

That response had been slow. She was covering exactly how shocked she was. The silence had stretched, prodding at her to say something. Defend herself. Anything.

“[No,]” I admitted. “[But we both know you could be. Anyone can, even me. You of all people should understand how impossible it is to predict how people will react to radical changes in prognosis.]”

“[Well, I’ll thank you to not to assume you know more about my health than I do,]” she grumbled. “[Don’t think I didn’t notice how much heavy lifting the word ‘probably’ was doing there.]”

“[Odds that you’re fine after this long are well north of ninety-five percent,]” I said.

“[Great, one crit fail on a d20 and I’m still dying.]”

“[I said well north. The exact figure I was quoted was ‘several million-to-one’.]”

Ingrid snorted, making a show of turning more of her attention to the work I’d assigned her.

“[You’ve got another appointment at the Org to confirm,]” I said. “[And in case you were wondering why they didn’t catch it the first time, the chart Cadrune sent over was falsified to say you had an exotic reaction to the scanning ray.]”

“[You’re saying Cadrune lied to me…so I wouldn’t kill myself?]”

“[That rak’s a prick, but—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—they do…care…about you in their own fucked up way,]” I admitted.

“[But you still don’t like them,]” she accused.

“[They murdered their own kid, no I don’t like them. But I don’t have to like them to exploit them.]”

“[You don’t know the whole story there,]” she said, frowning.

“[I was being brief,]” I said. “[There’s a long laundry list of reasons I don’t like Harpe Cadrune, and I’ve killed people a lot better than Cadrune for a whole lot less than what they’ve done.]”

She bit off her retort at the mention of me killing aliens.

That’s right, I thought. This isn’t a game. What this alien does matters to us, even if it doesn’t harm you.

“[…Okay. You can quit bugging me now. Or don’t you want me working on this…’Shuma Norshun’ rak?]”

“[Thanks for agreeing to look over it,]” I said earnestly. “[We should be done with the job in two days, and once we are, that fugitive is the only outstanding business we’ve got on this planet.]”

That wasn’t strictly true. Peudra’s pow-wow had officially set a date: four days from now. But Ingrid wasn’t on that invite list. I could justify taking a risk trusting her with some of the manhunt psionics, but not the details of a meeting that might shape the future of the cosmos.

I barely trusted myself with those details. My hands started trembling if I let myself think about the implications too long.

Luckily, I had just the distraction to keep me from obsessing. Heisting an illicit underwater casino? That was more my speed.

·····

The most obvious hurdle was the water itself. How do you rob something under the sea?

Obviously you talk to your friends who have submarines.

Psionics were cool, and the Missionary Marines were the only aliens I’d come across in the cosmos that delved into them anywhere near as deeply as we did.

Their two submarines were kitted out with some of the coolest embedded psionics-tech I’d seen outside the Jack and Siegfried. They didn’t have the same complementing Earth-computer hardware, but they achieved some similar results just by sheer quantity of psionics and minds packed into one area.

Psionics embedded into inanimate matter were forced dormant unless connected to an active, awake mind. What the M&Ms had found, was that by having enough minds in a confined space, like, say, a submarine, you could begin forming gestalt networks of psionics that stayed active even while embedded so long as there were enough brains in said confined space to support their operation. The range wasn’t too good, and the brains in question couldn’t wander very far. But on a submarine?

Not a problem.

When the Flotilla had discovered similar setups were possible on our ships, Sid said it was like ‘decentralized computing’. Organic brains became passive firmware, mediating between the psionic software and inanimate hardware the constructs were embedded into. In a few obscure aspects, the M&Ms setup actually surpassed ours.

It was plain cool to behold.

I should have been like a kid in a candy store while the submarines slowly sank deeper beneath the Kraknor waves.

But I wasn’t.

Nai was standing in the other one, but that didn’t stop her.

she commented.

It was true just being in the submarine felt like I was being choked on all sides. But Nai knew firsthand how my mind moved on the inside. She also knew about the sinister clamshell laptop hidden in my quarters on the Jack.

I said ominously.

Nai said.

Nai, Tasser, Jordan, and Sid were the only ones I’d told about ENVY’s message. All four of them had picked up on the same thing I had: my handle.

SPARK had been the sibling meddling with my machine’s username. But now I’d been labeled ‘LIGHTBRINGER’. How long ago had that first conversation been? A week ago? Two, max.

Serral and Maddie were tangling with CENSOR out on Hashtin’s moons, and V1 was a hotbed of activity moving through the AI siblings’ network. So I couldn’t be too surprised that ENVY had surveillance drones on Kraknor.

But we’d been careful to stay attentive for them. Nai had engineered a psionic recognition construct to help her ordinarily fuzzy cascade recognize the drones specifically. I know Donnie and Ben had a pretty keen understanding of the drones’ broadcast frequencies.

There hadn’t been so much as a blip for any of us.

Could SPARK just be guessing that I’d learned what ‘Ajengita’ really meant? Just from the timing of when I got to the planet?

But then why was this message coming from ENVY?

Was it coming from ENVY, really?

Nora and the Mission crew were pretty sure ENVY was under CENSOR’s thumb, but they also made it sound like there was some exploitable wiggle-room.

It was maddening to think about, like too many things in my life.

Nai chuckled ruefully.

That was true. Our situation didn’t seem so murky at being reminded of just how much we had in our corner.

Mavriste and Macoru had volunteered every scrap of their Marines’ considerable personnel and equipment just upon hearing of our noble cause.

Dozens of rak ready to fight, skilled Adepts with some of the rarest tricks around, and an arsenal of customized equipment all at our beck and call…but it was still nerve wracking to look out the window.

So little light filtered down this far, you could barely see anything looking at the seafloor outside. But there was just enough to cast murky, constantly shifting, and deepening shadows across the continental slope as we descended.

In a way, it would have been better to launch in the dead of night. Then the view out the window would just be pitch black the whole time, not too different from space.

Watching the light slowly choke away?

So much worse.

“You’re scared…” a voice nearby realized.

I glanced to find Itun frowning. A beat passed, and he realized he’d said that out loud.

His jaw clapped shut, and you could almost see the impulse to panic run through him.

“And?” I asked accusingly.

“…And I’m just surprised,” he grumbled. “I keep hearing about how invincible you’ve gotten since…Ajengita, and all that.”

‘Back then’ went unsaid.

“I don’t have to be invincible to trounce you,” I said, taking no small amount of pleasure from the shudder that Itun tried to hide. “I beat you when I was just a novice. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I can do now…”

“Caleb, quit trying to make Itun vomit,” Mavriste chastised. He was constantly moving throughout the submarine, checking instruments over the shoulders of the rak at their stations, psionically distributing orders. This was his domain, and it showed. “I know this is your operation, but this is my boat, and reprehensible or not, Itun is one of mine.”

I nodded. Fair enough.

“On mission,” I agreed. “Where are we?”

Mavriste finally settled on a table-like captain’s console, a standing position near the center of the submarine’s bridge. The table lit up with all sorts of displayed information, depth, incoming radio signals, even sonar imaging—currently disabled.

He beckoned for me to place my handbook on the table, and I did so, activating the psionic hologram function. A live model of the continental shelf flickered into view as well as two icons showing both submarine’s locations.

“We’re about a hundred meters below the Diving Bell’s cleft in the shelf. I think we’ve got a nice spot picked out…here, to wait for the first stage,” he explained, showing a massive divot in the continental slope, as well as a sheltered spot to park while Nai laid our groundwork. “Macoru will take the Hebbivene and float it in from above, then it’s up to your Warlock to get us access.”

I checked our psionics, and queried Nai on their progress.

Instead of verbalizing an answer, she opened up her mind’s defenses. She wasn’t in control of my superconnector, not even a little. But she was the one I linked with most, and she understood how to ‘offer’ it a connection to observe through.

Nai was in the Hebbivene’s airlock along with Johnny, and the two of them were fastened into diving suits of truly comedic proportions.

The Diving Bell was built into a huge cleft in the continental slope—technically a submarine canyon—stretching between five and six-hundred meters below the ocean’s surface—assuming I was reading the readouts correct. Sid told me that the deepest any human had ever dove was in the range of three-hundred. And that was in Earth’s gravity. Kraknor’s water pressure at this depth was actually slightly higher than it would be at this depth back home.

So for Nai and Johnny to venture outside?

They needed protection literally never-before-seen to human history.

I’d first thought diving suits and space suits should have been similar. Both needed to contend with lethal pressures, but the M&Ms explained that they faced two opposite problems. Spacesuits contend with negative pressure, they need to keep the air and pressure in. Those pressures just weren’t comparable to sheer weight and pressure diving suits needed to keep out.

Pressure outside the diving suit could be opposed with pressure inside, but there were safe limits to that. You had to be able to survive the pressure inside the suit too.

In the end, Nai picked a devious solution: no diving suits at all.

Instead, Nai and Johnny would create a vacuum on the bottom of the ocean and just walk through that with space suits.

Long ago, Nai had cleverly shown the ability to abuse the immense force of emergence her Adetry benefitted from. When she created solid matter, it could shove aside obstacles in the process of forming.

It wasn’t an obstacle most Adepts faced, but the sheer weight and pressure of the water at these depths would mean you couldn’t materialize anything unless you could actually move the water out of the way.

Nai and Johnny were on a very short list of high-magnitude Adepts who could.

They started by having Johnny materialize raw iron on the exterior of the sub’s hull, adding to its growth in spurts. The pressure outside was so great, that even with their force of emergence, they couldn’t make more than a dozen kilograms or so at a time. It had to be done, gradually, in stages, pushing the water away from the submarine’s hull little by little.

Eventually, the sheer amount of metal glued to the outside was making the whole sub list dangerously close to the walls of the canyon.

Nobody but us would be insane enough to try invading the Diving Bell from the outside, but they would definitely at least have passive sonar. If we made a big thud smashing thirty-thousand tons of steel into the mantle, they’d hear us.

Eventually Johnny’s grotesque iron barnacle grew enough to make contact with the seafloor on its own. Once that happened, he could afford to widen it into a pillar, extending up from the seafloor to firmly affix to the sub.

Nai’s turn was next. Guided entirely by cascade, she materialized thick, dense crystal around Johnny’s iron. One solid material sheathed in another. Then, once Nai’s crystalline solid was in place?

Johnny dematerialized his iron.

Nai was cascading the crystal at all times, constantly feeling every corner of its structure to make sure it wasn’t about to buckle from the pressure. But our math was good. Ten inches of crystal could withstand these depths’ pressure even if it was hollow.

The crystal creaked, but didn’t crack or shatter.

All that was left was for Johnny and Nai to pull on their spacesuits, get fitted with oxygen, and haul open the airlock.

I hadn’t been prepared for Nai’s crystal to be transparent. Before, I’d only been watching the inky twilight of the seafloor through a narrow window, but seeing them drop into Nai’s crystal tube sent my brain for a shock.

It was the stuff of every horror movie brought to life, and a new flavor of fear I thought I’d conquered a long time ago. Jordan was watching our connection too, and I felt the same vibe from her. Part of training to live on a spaceship involved space-walks and rescues even in the horrific empty vacuum of space.

Coping with astrophobia was a dedicated part of training to live on a spaceship, but here reared the ugly head of its cousin: thalassophobia. Only we weren’t experiencing the terrifying depths of the ocean from the surface. We were actually under that very deep. All the way at the bottom, about to be crushed like ants at any second.

I’m going to need to shut my eyes going through the tunnel, I realized.

It wasn’t just a fear of the void. The emptiness was also pressing on you from all sides, strangling you just by proximity. Claustrophobia and kenophobia all at once.

To my surprise, Nai was shaken more than Johnny. Both of them were moving slowly and methodically, knowing that even one mistake would kill them both. But Nai’s hands were almost shaking as she set foot on the bottom of her crystal tube.

But she wasn’t claustrophobic…

She was catching leakage from me. Letting it through intentionally, even.

She was trying to be supportive. Comforting, even.

Thanks Nai.

She started materializing more crystal, taking charge of their progress across the bottom of the cleft as they came into view of—

“Whoa…”

My voice hadn’t been alone. Everyone crowded around me and Mavriste on this bridge and everyone doing the same to Macoru on the other submarine had remarked at the Diving Bell itself coming into view.

It really was shaped like a bell. A tall, tapered cylinder drawing narrower to a rounded top, covered in layers of thick glass and steel, all reinforced to withstand these depths. Lights within shone through the transparent layers, casting chaotic spears of brightness through the darkness of the seafloor canyon.

Like the Vegas strip stuffed into a jar at the bottom of the sea…

But there was no time to slow down or be intimidated by the spectacle.

Crucially, Nai didn’t dematerialize the crystal tunnel behind her as they drew closer. No, they needed to stay open, because since we weren’t coming in the intended, architectural ways, then these crystal tubes were our only avenue of escape too.

Nai parted ways from Johnny once they were a sufficient distance from Macoru’s submarine—the Hebbivene—and Johnny began forming a second tube to connect our submarine to.

“Helmsman,” Mavriste ordered in Tarassin, voice soft. “Take us up.”

“Aye, Captain,” the rak said and began pulling at the controls.

The sub was on silent running. Minimal power and engine usage to the point where we weren’t moving more than a meter a second, if even that.

Bit by bit we crept up through the ocean, sliding just a few meters away from the slope of the continental shelf, silently drifting into the cleft in terrain that housed the Diving Bell. It was a tricky process moving the Cyloboputs into place along side the Hebbivene, but it was essential we keep the submarines as low as possible in the continental cleft.

The glass on the diving Diving Bell gave a nearly unobstructed view of the continental slope and an ocean vista that was surely, not just one in the world, but one in the cosmos.

So at any given moment? Dozens of eyes were pointed right at us, and our only shield was the murky shadows of the sloping seafloor. The M&Ms had even repainted the subs and covered exterior lights to ensure we blended in.

Eventually, Mavriste left the maneuvering to the helmsman, and beckoned me, Itun, Jordan, and more to follow him to the airlock on the bottom of the submarine.

Strapping ourselves with oxygen, we hauled open the airlock once Johnny had affixed us to the network of solid tunnels he and Nai were building across the bottom of the cleft.

he asked.

he said.

One-by-one, more than a dozen rak and humans filed out of the submarines, marching right up to the Diving Bell’s exterior hull, where Nai’s crystal was making contact, encasing a section, and dematerializing to expose the metal to our touch.

It wasn’t until weeks later than I appreciated just how audacious this plan of ours would be in the minds of everyone who heard about it.

When we robbed the Diving Bell?

We walked in on dry land.