Leo isn’t sure how to kick in a door when it’s basically a sphincter of bio-engineered eukaryotic muscle. That means he has to be impatient while it opens.
Ji-a Lee is inside, speaking with one of the hybrid squid people. She turns and smiles. “Leo, hello!”
He takes a breath. “No time. We have to leave.”
She senses his distress, sees his perspiration, hears his rapid breathing. She says a quick goodbye to her lab partner, and jogs to the door.
There’s a distant noise, like a foghorn, that Leo interprets as an alarm.
“What’s going on?” Ji-a asks.
“That Saito guy. He thinks I’m a spy. I’m not - but I don’t think he’s willing to listen. But it’s complicated, sooo–”
Two armed hybrids, both clutching tridents, come round the corner at the end of the corridor. They raise their weapons, clearly on alert and recognizing their targets as such. Leo leaps, kicks off one wall, and lands a spinning roundhouse kick onto the armored head of one. He comes down in a crouch. As the other guard tries to spear him, he falls to the side, grabbing the trident’s haft and yanking it. The guard goes off-balance, and from the ground, Leo kicks him in the abdomen. He’s able to kip up faster than the guard can stand, and puts him out with a kick to the helmet.
“You fight very proficiently,” his mother observes, and Leo’s not sure if he hears pride or disapproval.
The front entrance of the Surface Science Center is well-guarded. Leo can spot the massed humanoids through one of the transparent membranes that serve as windows here. “Is there another way out?”
Ji-a nods. “There is a cargo entrance. That may be guarded as well, but it might be possible to sneak past the soldiers. There are always boxes and crates and things kept on the dock.”
“Perfect. Lead the way.”
The two descend the corridors of the Center. Leo must fight off three more soldiers, and Ji-a draws his attention to the small shells each of them wear. “Here, take one. These creatures react to UV fluorescence and turn it into sound. It’s how the central command sends orders to the solders. I don’t know the code, but if it screeches in your ear, that means soldiers are being given new instructions.”
Thus armed, and wary of further patrols, the two arrive in the cargo dock.
There are no soldiers. Instead, Doctor Zap is waiting for them. Leo is immediately wary, but Ji-a puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder and steps past him toward the doctor.
The squid pats a watertight container. “Saito has forced me to keep secrets. I have kept some from him, too.” The lid of the container comes off, revealing two sets of SCUBA gear. “The guards are searching for air-breathers. They won’t search the water.”
“Where should we go?” asks Leo.
“There is a haven for Reformists in the city. I have sent a message to them, to intercept your friends before they come here.”
“Will they have a source of air? Those tanks don’t last more than an hour.”
“They will be able to escort you to a safe place.”
Ji-a pats Doctor Zap gently. “Zpa-ka, there are questions I need answered, and only my son can do that for me. Right now, I need to go. Thank you for everything.”
The squid changes colors rapidly. “Ji-a, it has been a pleasure to collaborate you as a fellow scientist, and as a friend. Go. The soldiers will return soon from the fool’s errand I assigned them.”
Leo and Ji-a suit up, and with a farewell wave to the Doctor, they dive into the lightless depths of Atlantis.
Leo and his mother can’t speak, so must settle for gesture. When a light appears in the distance, they sign caution to each other. The light turns out to be coming from a True Atlantean carrying a waterproof flashlight and a dive slate. The slate clearly reads “DR. ZAP SAYS FOLLOW”. Good enough.
The True Atlantean swims ahead of the two divers. It takes twenty minutes, during which both humans get to experience the sights of Atlantean civil engineering and aesthetic development. Sometimes they lag behind their guide just to look at it all, and the impatient squid scurries back to wave frustrated tentacles in their direction.
The pair surface inside a building that seems to be a warehouse of some kind. Like the cargo dock, it’s full of containers, crates, and other surface storage solutions. Leo and Ji-a pull themselves out of the water and carefully unhook themselves from the SCUBA.
The True Atlantean who came with them writes a new message on the dive slate, tosses it out of the water behind them, and swims off in a huff.
Leo peeks down to read the message. “GOOD LUCK DON’T DIE.” He looks into the water at the fleeing shape. “Yeah, thanks a bunch, dude.”
Turning back, he sees a door in the corner open, and Trace and Fuko come through it.
The four humans exchange stories, under the watchful eyes of True Atlanteans and Blood citizens. The place they’re in is the equivalent of a smuggler’s den, bringing surface-world amenities and toys into Atlantis for the private enjoyment of privileged citizens. It seems even the Reformists have their vices, Leo decides.
The bad news comes first. Fuko got a message from Gun that Saito’s men have found and confiscated the mini-sub. “That means we have no ride home,” mutters Trace.
“They have cell phones,” says Leo. “And wi-fi at the Center. If we can get back there, we can get a message to the surface. Otto should be able to make it down here.”
Fuko nods. “I can sneak back there without interference. I can make the call.”
Trace nods. “Don’t count on any help from Nautilus. But if you got another option, great.”
Leo speaks up, looking at both Ji-a and Fuko. “I need to know something. When I was asked to come down here, Fuko said ‘a captive’, but she also said, ‘a favorite of the Emperor’. It felt like just a random detail at the time, but now it feels pretty fuckin’ important. Was that just a thing you made up, Fuko? Or is that a real thing? What’s the deal there?”
Fuko looks to Ji-a, who nods and turns her attention to Leo. “You must understand the situation of the human captives here in Atlantis, and what we are told.”
“For me, the surface world was at an end all those years ago. Comets, tsunamis, chaos. I had a husband, and a son, but I thought them lost. Every human captive who comes here is like this in a sense. Their old life is gone. Their new one has begun. How we react to our new captivity, in an alien world, is what’s different.”
“Some give up their old feelings. Some rebel. But I was unique. I knew this undersea world already, from my observations on the surface. Now, I was living among it. It was the experience of a lifetime, something any marine biologist would want. The Atlanteans are like that, but for us above. I learned, but I also taught. I was the ambassador of the surface. And the Emperor respected that.”
“We’ve spoken several times. He would ask questions about the surface, and what life was like for a human being, and I’d explain.”
Leo isn’t sure he likes where this is going. “So were you helping him plan an invasion of the surface world, and just didn’t know it?”
Ji-a laughs. “Not unless conquering the Earth has anything to do with how coffee tastes, or what cream and sugar do to it. Or the calendar. The idea of a holiday. Do you know how they keep track of time down here? It has nothing to do with the spin of the Earth, because they can’t see the sun and moon.”
Leo pulls back, thoughtful and silent. Ji-a continues.
“I want you to appreciate the situation here, all of you. These people are just like the surface people. They feel the emotions we feel. But at the same time, they are profoundly alien. I computed Doctor Zap’s age. He’s 4,500 years old. The Emperor is at least 80,000. Think about what that means.”
Ji-a leans forward. “When death isn’t a constant factor in your society’s existence, you stop needing to explain it. You don’t develop things like an afterlife, or a soul, or gods who shepherd souls to afterlives. You don’t think about things like dynastic succession, or primogeniture. People die, in accidents or through violence or due to illness, but it’s not the same thing. Those folk were just, uhh, unlucky you might say. The Atlanteans have a term for it. ‘Lost to the currents’.”
“And that is also why there is a caste system here. The True Atlanteans. Beneath them, the Blood, the hybrids, those who die, but also who can interface with the surface world. And beneath them, human captives, dolphins, bio-engineered organisms, natural sea life. Life here is stacked like a pyramid. The longest-lived are the wisest, because they’ve held fast against the current and have experience. In practice, it’s a function of luck and caution.”
Leo spots Fuko nodding along to much of this. He also finds a nagging question demanding to be spoken. “So if they’re so alien, and so cautious, and they’ve got this fantastic civilization down here, and my guy Zap is older than Korea, like, what’s their fucking play here? They’re gonna invade the surface world, and then what?”
He looks from face to face. “We got Sub Guy and Squid Ninja Girl and my mom the marine biologist who’s been hanging with these people for 20 years, and I ain’t heard shit about this. Seriously, what’s the play?”
Trace shrugs. “They’re just assholes. Well, not all of 'em. And that’s what my dad would say.” He peters off, aware of Ji-a’s presence. Leo can hear the words, but they lack conviction. He’s parroting his dad’s lines.
Fuko is the next to take a shot at it. She’s a lot more careful about her choice of words. “We - those of us serving on the front lines - always assumed that our superiors knew what they were doing. We were trained to take orders unquestioningly.”
Even Ji-a shakes her head. “They don’t really share military strategy with prisoners,” she admits. “I do know that the Surface Science Center isn’t popular with much of Atlantis. The surface has been polluting the ocean, dumping plastic and oil and other substances, for years.”
Leo is tense, and vibrating. He’s got thoughts. “There’s no way you can put the industrial genie back in the bottle, even if you have amazing military might. Unless the squids have nukes - which I guess they could, submarines sink too - but like unless they have 'em and are going to glass the Western world, it’s not going to be enough. And nuclear fallout on that scale would be way worse, environmentally speaking. Like maybe you just kinda hit one place, to make a point, but–”
A thought hits him like a hammer. “Mom. You were talking about these facts of biology, how they’re intersecting with societal development, right? Lack of senescence leading to different social values? Is this just deimatic behavior on a large scale?”
Ji-a looks both thoughtful and immensely proud. “Startle display? You are a scientist, Leonardo.” She thinks. “In other words, they don’t mean to invade and hold the surface world. They just want to intimidate it. They would find a casus belli such as pollution, identify a weak target responsible for some of it, and strike in a way that doesn’t demand overwhelming retribution. The predator defeats a weak member of the herd, and the rest flee. Yes, I could see it.”
“Would that really work?” Trace asks.
“They may believe that it would work. That is all that matters.”
Fuko hangs her head. “They’d already have a list of targets. We’ve-- Yes. We have infiltrated surface governments, allied with small groups within them. It’s only a matter of preparing the Atlantean military forces necessary to launch the attack.”
Trace lays a hand on her shoulder, and Leo spots his surprise as Fuko’s hand rises to meet it in turn. Leo returns to his point. “Okay. So they’re fearful. They’re angry. I mean, they have a right to be. But I don’t want to see people killed. In fact, I want to see everyone down here returned to their homes and families. How does that happen?”
Ji-a has composed her thoughts and has an answer. “Atlantis must no longer fear the surface world,” she says with a smile.
“How we gonna do that?”
Ji-a’s smile grows less warm and more steeled. “It means, Leonardo, that we must go our separate ways soon. You to the surface. I back to the Center, and to the Emperor.”
Fuko looks from face to face. “The original Reformist plan. Get you to plead with the Emperor for peace. Show the value of surface dwellers.”
Leo’s hands come down hard on his knees. “No! No. I’m taking you back. You deserve to go back.”
As much as he’s convinced of his declaration, he can’t meet Ji-a’s eyes. “Leonardo. If there is a chance to avert war, I will take it. I have studied these beings for almost two decades. I am no diplomat, but I can be an ambassador.”
Leo stands, and walks away, unable to handle what he’s hearing. With a glance at Trace and Fuko, Ji-a rises and follows.