He lets me finish, unimpressed. “I once saw a man try to ride a shark….”
“Where the hell did you see that?”
“Europa.”
“When?”
“Callin’ me a liar?” He glares at me. “Point is we won’t be able to control him.”
“Then we kill him.”
“That’s my job.”
“Sure, if you down more guards than me. If I win, I get the honor.”
We shake on it.
Outside the door to the submersible, I pause, hesitating before ducking into the narrow hatchway. Once I was a creature of tunnels and caverns. I felt safe in close confines. The Jackal twisted that nature in me. My body itself remembers the cold walls of his table and rebels against me every time I approach narrow spaces. I hide my fear from my men and slip through the hatch.
Thirty minutes later, the submersible sinks into the sea. With the Obsidians absent, we’ve had to combine my unit heavy knight with Sevro’s Ghosts—Alexandar, Clown, Thraxa, Pebble, and Milia. Their multiRifles carry nonlethal spider venom munitions for meat targets and electrical rounds for armor. Ink black in their scarabSkin, they’re packed behind me in the passenger hold. It’ll be a tight fit on the ride up with our cargo. Min-Min steers the submersible from her seat in the nose with her hands in gel controls. Through the reinforced forward viewports, there’s nothing but gray water. As we dive deeper, out of reach of the sun’s rays, the hull creaks. The pressure builds and the water blackens as the ocean squeezes us into its fist and drags us down and down.
It takes us an hour to reach the abyssal plain at the bottom of the sea. A halo of lights around the front of the submersible illuminates the sand of the ocean floor. Out there in the darkness, three Poseidon-class Republic submarines patrol the Porcupine Abyssal Plain that stretches from the west coast of the British Isles to the slopes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Up on the deck of the crab trawler, under protection by Rhonna and the others, Winkle is embedded deep in the cyberscape, linked in to the Republic’s Starhall mainframe through a back door Theodora had her men prepare for him. The location of the sentinel submarines blinks on a holographic display to the right of Min-Min’s navigation controls. The nearest one is two hundred kilometers southeast, patrolling in a circular arc around her charge.
We creep along the bottom of the ocean, undetected. Designed for future war on Europa, this prototype—stolen by Sevro last week—was built with sonar-resistant skin in a Republic lab on Earth. He disguised the theft by detonating explosives in the warehouse. I had Winkle issue a false press release from the Red Hand taking credit for the sabotage. By the time the authorities clear the rubble and the Red Hand disavows, we’ll already be on our way to Venus and they’ll think this was all the work of Society commandos and their Securitas agents. So I hope.
Fifty kilometers from our destination, we enter into the drone defense grid and cut our lights. Up on the boat, Winkle accesses the drones via the mainframe and puts the data acquisition from the drones on loop. We pass through the defense grid.
Clown shifts uncomfortably between Milia and Thraxa. “If Winkle’s wrong and they spot us…”
“Shut up,” Sevro mutters.
“I’m just saying dying here at the bottom of the sea, caged by lung-crushing pressure, is not how I expected to go.”
“How did you expect to go?”
“Well, smothered under tits, actually.”
“Thraxa, I can’t reach my husband. Hit him for me?” Pebble says.
Clown holds up his hands. “A joke, darling! All I’m saying is that this is essentially a metal coffin.” Milia looks at him with sullen eyes and Clown smiles awkwardly.
The thought of this being a metal coffin makes my skin crawl again. But no torpedo comes and we press through the grid. After this, Republic cyber forensics will discover Winkle’s back door and we’ll be severed from the Republic’s information network. It’s a hard price to pay, but worth it if it gets us onto Venus. I only hope Theodora isn’t incriminated. With her position in Starhall’s intelligence bureau, she’s too valuable to my wife to be spent on me.
“You hear that?” Sevro asks. I strain my ears, hearing nothing at first, then something like a heartbeat. It vibrates softly through the hull of the ship. The heartbeat grows louder. Thickening, multiplying till it sounds like a wooden stick dragged down a rib cage. Then we see it through shadow and silt.
Our quarry.
Deep in the darkness of the ocean moves a huge, humped behemoth. A shadow that glitters with lights upon its dark crest. The lights bathe its metal carapace in pale blue. I’ve seen it on schematics before, but in the metal flesh, it’s a dreadful sight of an older age. The prison is like a giant primordial crab crawling along the abyssal plain. A dome ribbed with intake vents and docking stations and barbed with antennae monopolizes its cephalothoric bulk. The dome sits upon a legion of barnacle-covered hydraulic metal legs that thump against the sand as they drag the station across the ocean floor. Several long umbilical tubes hang from the belly of the dome to suck refuse and litter into her recycling processors and incinerators. Inside her belly, she holds trash of a fouler sort.
For four hundred years, Deepgrave Prison has crawled the abyssal plains of Earth’s oceans, sucking up the sins of Old Earth and punishing the sinners of the Society—murderers, rapists, terrorists, political prisoners. Now, war criminals.
One of Mustang’s many reforms in her first days of power was the abolition of the death penalty in the Republic. Informed by revolutions of Old Earth, she feared that it would be abused to mete out fraudulent justice to deposed or innocent Golds and mark the Republic with a stain of genocide that could never be washed out. But she couldn’t pass it while the Jackal was alive. It would be seen as nepotistic. The day she pulled Adrius’s feet, she abolished capital punishment. All the war criminals, all the oppressors, slavers, and murderers whom I would have hanged, are here.
And now I’ve come to free one of the worst.
Min-Min guides our submersible through the legs of Deepgrave, banking us up to the underside of the dome. The hull shudders violently as she engages the magnetic couplers and the submersible’s top hull locks into place, creating a pressurized seal between our thermal drill and the prison’s hull. The drill whirs above us as energy from the engines funnels into the drill’s heat coils.