“Stop her—” the Serjeant of Police roars from behind, wrong-footed by her initial feint and still trying to catch up. “Don’t let her get—” The mermaid Queen dives, arms grabbing at the impostor’s feet. Beneath her, a barely darker circle of blue outlines a concealed underwater exit from the pool, debouching into a flooded tunneclass="underline" But the doppelgänger shakes herself clear of Medea’s grasp. She drops a fist-sized object as she races toward the overwater exit at the far end of the room.
There is a concussive blast from behind her, and a tower of water splashes against the ceiling, drenching everyone still standing. Then, as she reaches the exit, a crackling series of shaped-charge explosions crosshatch it with blinding flares of light.
Silence briefly falls above the bloody water, which is streaked with emerald green circulatory fluid. Courtiers are panicking and Cybelle’s delegation cower as the room fills with constables, the air above them a-bristle with quadrotor knives and combat hornets. A new door opens high in one wall, and a water slide extrudes above the pool. The seal shapes of hunter-killers slide down it, take up positions in the water to either side: Then another mermaid enters the pool, this time quite clearly in a towering rage.
“Bring us my sister’s soul chips!” she commands her minions, gesturing at the mortal wreckage of her sib. “Then retrieve the regicide.” Her glare takes in the visitors. “We will hold court with you later.”
“But the assassin’s dead”—the constable, still shocky, gestures at the smoking wreckage of the exit—“probably too chewed up to be any use.”
The newly arrived instance of Queen Medea bares her teeth. “This game has gone on for too long and is no longer a pleasant distraction. We have questions that urgently demand answers. And being dead won’t save Ms. Alizond—or whoever she is—from delivering them.”
I swam for what felt like years, although in all likelihood it must only have been a handful of days—in decimal, at that. At regular intervals, I found more buoys, with platforms suspended from them, laid out with guide capsules and comestibles to keep me fed during the trek. I do not know for a certainty, but I believe that at no point did I actually ascend from one buoy to the next: They were all positioned at ever-greater depths, so that by the time I reached the final platform I must have been at least forty and perhaps fifty kilometers below the surface.
There were no more mats of predatory worms, or blue smokers. As I dropped farther into the abyss, the clicking and chittering and wailing noises faded toward a barely audible background, almost entirely above me. While I knew that there was almost 150 kilometers of open water beneath me, what I fell through was almost empty: anoxic, gelid, mostly clear of turbidity in my guidance beam (which was increasingly difficult to follow due to the lack of scattering).
I became deathly afraid of losing my direction, of falling, or of swimming headlong into the depths. I knew that I was as close to crush-proof as it is possible to engineer a body to be: But when water itself comes under such pressure that strange, anomalous phases of ice that are denser than liquid are stable, who knows? I maintained the routine of pausing on each platform, waiting for equilibrium, waiting for the self-destruct warning that presaged each oasis’s collapse and slow descent toward the unseen graveyard floor of the world.
I had, as should be obvious, a very long time to think about recent events. My thoughts were not, for the most part, happy ones. When I commenced my study pilgrimage, I had expected to face years of privation and frequent loneliness punctuated by intense and rewarding study with my peers. I’d anticipated an interesting session with Ana, trying to trace the provenance of the furtively purloined slow money certificate that Andrea and our accomplices had abstracted from the dusty vaults of the bank: I had expected to return home in due course, still bearing the certificate from Atlantis, which could be returned to its resting place with no one the wiser.
I had not anticipated that word of its existence would leak; that an assassin wearing my face would chase me to an unexpected watery destination, that everybody would be unpleasantly interested in my activities, that word would come of Sondra herself turning her vigilant and vengeful gaze toward me.
The realization that my career in the lower levels of New California’s SystemBank was over was slowly sinking in. I would not be going back to my comfortable cloistered cell and my office next door to the library: I would be more than unwelcome there. One does not offend a person as august and terrible as Sondra Alizond-1 with impunity. Were I to attempt to return, I would be punished: That was not in question. But there is punishment meted out as training, to teach the recipient to avoid certain behaviors in future; and then there is punishment meted out to provide an object lesson for others—punishment that the recipient is not expected to survive, much less learn from. The appearance of my stalker strongly hinted that the latter was all I could expect. Sondra never credited her descendants with much independence beyond the minimum needed to act as extensions of her wilclass="underline" My continued autonomy had clearly become an irritant to her.
Which meant I would have to find something else to do with the rest of my life. But what? Nothing in my experience had prepared me for having to make such a decision, and so as I swam deeper into the world-ocean, my mind spun as if in a trap, baffled and repelled by hidden walls on every side.
Shortly after leaving the fourth platform—which Ana had assured me would be the last way station on my journey—I heard a faint susurration in the water. I asked my guide what it was. “Insufficient information,” it replied. “Proceed with caution.” So I did, and presently noticed that my guide beam was brightening and shortening, casting off a halo of phosphorescence.
Continuing—with caution—I found myself swimming headfirst into a shoal of almost invisibly small glowing pinpricks. They flickered and zipped around in the water, forming a glowing haze around me. Spooked, I prepared to turn and flee, but then my guide spoke up. “Identification achieved: These are feral, depth-adapted mechanocytes obeying a flocking meme and coordinated by optical beacons. They are saprophytes. They are probably harmless unless you linger. Krina, proceed with caution.” I swam on, until the faintly glowing cloud of wild corpse-eating cells dwindled and merged with the darkness above and behind me.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“Krina, estimated distance to destination: two kilometers laterally, four hundred meters vertically.” I startled: I was nearly there! “Commence visual and acoustic monitoring for destination. Proceed with caution.”
“What am I looking for?” I asked, but my guide said nothing.
Half an hour passed. “How much farther?” I murmured. Scanning the depths, I couldn’t see any traces of light. I couldn’t hear anything either.
“Krina, there is an inversion layer above your destination. Proceed straight down for fifty meters, then pause and commence visual monitoring. Proceed with—”
“Caution, right, I get it.” I followed the beam, flexed my hips and what had been my knees and ankles in turn. Felt a rush of warmer water across my face, then something else, a choking stratum of unbreathable gelatinous liquid. I flopped and kicked, then pushed my head down through the layer—it was less than a meter thick—and into the clear, cool water beneath.
And then I saw what lay below.
The Halls of Hades-4
There was a city at the bottom of the ocean, and in the middle of it, like a pearl in an abalone’s shell, there nestled a palace.