The Deep

No one was permitted into the Deep without first passing through Korvan Gate. It hung in orbit above Kharad, and every ship was inspected there before it went any farther. Farian had been inspected there four hundred and six times, and each time there had been no incident.

The inspection hall smelled of rubber and the scorched tea the Kharadi drank on shift. It was an offensive smell to anyone from offworld, Farian included. Forty crews stood in its lines with their gear at their feet. Above them the corridor lights ran blue and steady the length of the ceiling, with the occasional flicker that had never been fixed.

“Bag,” said the inspector.

He set it on the table. She was a broad woman with a scar through her chin who had worked this table for eleven of his years. Over those years, he had tried to joke with her, but she was all business. She went through the bag as if she expected to find nothing and would be sorry to be wrong. Clean coveralls. Sealant tape. A tin of the dried fish that Hobb asked him to bring every posting and had never once paid him for.

She shut the bag. “Still eating that?”

“Hobb eats it. I carry it.”

“Then Hobb can carry it.” She pushed the bag back across the table and was already looking past him. “Next.”

He had never carried anything through this hall that he would have minded her finding.

Tamsin was waiting at the clearance window with the crew’s papers in her fist. Ever since she had been made chief, she waited the exact same way. She counted them off as they came through: Hobb, grumbling; Pell, stifling a yawn; Ressa, their Abider, mid-stretch; six more he could have named in his sleep; and Farian, last.

Their convoy came up on the board overhead about fifteen minutes later, and their launch window three hours after that. They spent the wait on the concourse, where the food counters sold the same three dishes they had sold for years and the crews ate them anyway, however grudgingly. Then they sat on their kit along the walls to play cards or sleep. Hobb told the story about the pump seal at Station Four that he had told at least twenty times, and Pell laughed because he’d heard it fewer times than the others. Pell had come onto the crew six years ago on Hobb’s recommendation, and on Dhorak’s hiring boards Hobb’s word was worth more than most.

When the window opened they boarded their carrier and left with the rest of the convoy: a column of crew carriers and supply ships, with two harvesting craft heading back down empty. The Gate sent them out one ship at a time, each on its own heading. Farian took a seat by a window. Pell sat across from him and ran through the transfer checklist on his slate, which no one had ever asked him to do.

Kharad fell away behind them. Ahead, Oranth filled the view.

Like the others, Farian had long since stopped looking at it. A pump hand who stared at the giant was a pump hand who hadn’t been down long. From here it looked like work, and nothing else. It certainly did not look like anything that could feel a wound, and that, his mother had told him once, was exactly the point. The Sky Father did not have to look like what he was.

He looked at Pell’s slate instead.

“Your people say anything about the bands?” Pell said, without looking up.

It was an old joke on the crew. Farian was the only one of them born on Rethis, and in thirty-one years on the crew nobody had tired of asking him for the weather.

“My people say what Seldran says,” he said. “You know that by now.”

“And what does the Array say?”

“Ask me at the Cup.”

Pell chuckled and went back to his list. The route inward took seven hours and most of the crew slept through it. Ressa and Farian played tiles on the fold-down table, and she beat him three games out of five, about her usual share, and complained about the two she lost. Somewhere past the fourth hour Hobb woke long enough to ask whether Farian had brought the fish, and went back to sleep before he could answer.

Oranth’s Cup was crossing the planet’s shadow when they closed on it, so that for a while they could see nothing of it but its lights in the dark. They docked as it reached the shadow’s edge, and the glow came back around the curve of Oranth and made it a platform again. Its rim was lined with cargo arms, and below them, in their open bays, the atmospheric craft waited to carry them down into the Deep. Farian felt the Cup’s maintained weight settle into his knees as he stood.

The Cup’s relay held crew messages until a shift docked, and Farian’s slate chimed as he came through the lock. One was from his sister on Rethis. He let it wait and followed the others up to the forecast room.

The forecast room was the only place on the Cup where crews went quiet without being told to. The board took up one whole wall: the bands, the corridors, the windows, each station’s name with its numbers beside it and Seldran Array’s seal at the foot. Tamsin went straight to it and found Station Seven with her finger.

“Clear,” she said. “Three days clear, no holds.” She turned around. “We’ll have our work done before the weather turns.”

Hobb said something rude under his breath. Pell said, “Farian, Seldran says clear,” and a few of them laughed.

Farian opened his sister’s message. It was mostly what her messages were. The roof on their mother’s house. A neighbor’s wedding. Her son had passed his examinations at the Anchorage, which Farian had already heard. Near the end she wrote: The trouble with your cousin on Tiravel has been seen to, so you needn’t worry about that any longer. And under it: The weather should hold for you this time.

He had no cousin on Tiravel. He read the two lines again. Then he closed it and put the slate away, and looked up at the board, where Seldran’s seal said clear in the plain square letters it used for everything.

Somewhere on Rethis there was a warning that said otherwise, and it would not reach this board in time. The Observer had known that before his sister ever sat down to write.

Eight months ago the word had come through the usual channels that the work was waiting on one thing. There was someone on Tiravel, the Observer said, who might see it coming. That had to be seen to first. When it was, he would hear about a cousin. When the weather was right, he would hear that too. Farian hadn’t asked who it was, or what seeing to them would involve. He had gone on with his postings and his tiles and Hobb’s fish, and waited in silence. Now he didn’t have to wait anymore.

“Farian.” Tamsin was at the door. “You coming down, or staying up here to talk to the weather?”

“Coming,” he said.

The atmospheric craft sat in its bay with its ramp lowered, scorched dark along its belly from more descents than anyone aboard had made. Hobb went first because he liked the seat by the hatch, and Pell went in ahead of Farian. Tamsin stood at the foot of the ramp and counted them up.

“Eleven,” she said, when Farian reached her. “Let’s go.”

The descent into the Deep was familiar by now, but never easy on the body. The Cup kept its weight at something a person could live with. Below it, Oranth’s pull grew heavier with every minute they fell into the clouds. It started as a weight against Farian’s chest, until every breath had to be lifted, and his arms lay along the rests of his harness as if they had been filled with sand. Ressa reached out her hands, as she had on every descent, and began to Abide with them. The weight did not lift. It became something they could carry, and Ressa’s face went gray and tired with what it cost her.

That started the clock. She couldn’t Abide forever, and the farther down they went, the harder it became for her to endure. Years of descents had toughened her gift, but they had not made her invincible.

Farian sat strapped in with the others for the rest of the drop. After an uneventful thirty minutes, they reached Station Seven and docked. The station was loud with the wind outside, and Tamsin shouted her orders over it anyway, though none of them needed telling. Hobb went to the control panels next to the intake chambers and began powering them up for cleaning. Pell still had his slate in his hand, keeping an eye on the weather outside. Ressa sat against the bulkhead with her eyes half closed, holding all of them, her face the color of ash. She could hold a crew for six hours, eight on a good day. The whole job took four, and the charges came first. The others went into the storage rooms to bring out the containers for the halcyne.

Tamsin and Farian moved quickly to a sealed door on the far side. Tamsin produced a key from inside her jacket, and Farian did the same. Each set theirs in the locks on opposite sides of the door and gave it a twist to the right. The light above the door went from red to green, and the door opened with a push of air. Behind it lay the cleaning charges. Weeks of disuse left the intakes caked with residue, and no halcyne could be drawn until it was cleared. The charges were loaded into the intake chambers to blast the buildup outward.

Tamsin signed her slate and handed it to Farian, who followed suit. Every charge had to be accounted for and counted against the work done. Routine. They’d done it hundreds of times.

“Okay, you’re good,” said Tamsin over the roar of the wind. Farian nodded as he grabbed a case of charges and walked to the nearest chamber, which Hobb had just finished powering up.

“All yours,” said Hobb as he patted him on the shoulder. “Hey, do you have my fish?”

“You know I do. I’ll give it to you after.”

Hobb nodded and left him alone to do his work. He unlocked the clasps that kept the case shut and opened it to reveal the charges inside. Four of them, one for each chamber. Each would be loaded in, and then detonated at the same time to clear the buildup. Just as he had done on every descent before.

As he reached for the first charge, a stray thought came to his mind, and it gave him pause. He had never met the Observer, and in thirty-one years he had never asked to. Everything the Array knew came from instruments trained on Oranth. They watched its storms, not people. So what was this business on Tiravel, and how had the Observer known?

It was not his to know. The Observer watched the Sky Father so that people like Farian did not have to, and every word that had ever come down had been true. He let the question go and went back to his work. Every other time, he would load the charges, then open the exterior vents so the blast would push outward toward the clouds. Then he and the rest of the crew would move to the storage rooms and close the doors while the charges detonated. This time, he loaded each charge, but left the vents shut. He left the firing lines unshielded, too. A surge could do what Tamsin’s slate did, if nothing stood in its way.

He then went to the panels near the storage room doors. The automatic controls for the doors were within easy reach. Anyone could have opened them from there. Behind one of the panels was the manual isolation lock. It sealed the storage rooms when the station sat empty between postings, so that a breach could not take the stored gear with it. Once it was engaged, the doors would not open for anyone. Few knew it was there, and fewer would think to look for it in a panic. While the others were occupied with their tasks, he quickly removed the panel, engaged the isolation lock, and placed the panel back. Ressa hadn’t moved from the bulkhead beside the doors, her eyes still half closed. No one had noticed him. Why would they?

“Farian, are we good?” he heard Tamsin say a few moments later.

He gave a quick thumbs up. The vent readings were on Hobb’s panel. Once Farian said they were good, nobody had looked at Hobb’s panel in years.

“Pell, weather still clear?” she asked.

Pell held up his slate. Seldran said clear.

“Right. Countdown, then everyone in the storage rooms.” She made a few quick taps on her slate. Then again. And then again. Nothing happened. Her screen had filled with static. The lights along the ceiling stuttered, and the roar outside changed pitch. Pell looked down at his slate and frowned.

“Something is wrong,” he said.

“What is it?” Tamsin asked.

“It’s the station’s readings. They’re climbing. It’s a surge.”

“Seldran says clear,” Tamsin said.

“Not out there it doesn’t,” said Hobb.

Farian had been waiting eight months to hear someone say it. Somewhere along the band, on other stations under the same surge, other hands were hearing it too. He didn’t know how many. That had never been his to know either.

“When?” Tamsin asked.

“Now.”

The station lurched. Farian was thrown against one of the intake chambers. Hobb fell to the ground and didn’t try to get up right away. Ressa’s eyes went wide as she counted them, all eleven, scattered across the floor.

The rocking continued. Blue light crawled along the seams of the bulkheads, and every loose piece of metal in the room hummed. Each time the surge hit, the lights went white and then dark.

“Get into the storage rooms. Now!” Tamsin yelled. Ten bodies got up with difficulty from where they had fallen and made their way to the storage room doors. Farian stayed where he was. One of the crew reached for the controls. Nothing happened.

“It won’t open!”

“Try again.”

“I can’t get it open!” said the crew member. He began banging on the door as the surge hit again and threw everyone to the floor.

He could still stop it. All he needed to do was shield the firing lines, and the surge wouldn’t reach the charges. They would have to ride out the surge, but they could, if Ressa held.

But for thirty-one years Farian had carried the knife. Every charge he had ever loaded had cut the Sky Father a little deeper, and every crew that came home safe came back down to cut again. Hobb, Pell, Tamsin, all of them. Himself most of all. Now the cutting at Station Seven would stop, and the hands that had held the knife would go with it. That was the debt, and this was how it was paid.

He put his back against an empty bulkhead while his crewmates pounded on the door again.

Across the station, at the far intake chamber, the surge reached the charges. The blast took those at the door off their feet, and several did not get back up. The room filled with flames and smoke. Tamsin was on the ground, her eyes staring his way. She didn’t move.

Hobb and Pell were back at the door, trying in vain to force it. It was made to withstand these blasts. They weren’t getting in.

Through the smoke, Farian could see Ressa on her knees by the doors, hands out, straining to hold those who were still alive. Then she couldn’t. The weight came back all at once, the whole of Oranth’s pull, and pressed him flat where he sat. Hobb and Pell went down at the door and stayed down.

Then another intake chamber ruptured, tearing through the chamber room like paper, and it was almost over. His last thought was of the tin, still in his bag. He had told Hobb after.