SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Everyone in Meraval knew within the hour.

You would have had to be deaf and blind to miss it. The pressure alarms went off across all five rings at once and stayed on. The transport tunnels stopped. Every lock in the harbour shut together, and every crew in the port came up out of their holds to watch a piece of the city vanish behind two plates of steel.

Nobody in the castle knew the cause yet. What they understood was the scale of it. Breaching a dome that had held for centuries took resources, access and time.

Lyren and Ithanne crossed into the second ring at a pace neither of them would have called running, and stopped at the edge of what was left.

Beyond the eastern bulkhead the sector stood full to the vaulting. The emergency lamps still burned, and through the observation ports the water was flat and green with shapes hanging in it. Cargo. Doors. Whole sections of walkway floating where they had torn loose.

And people. Hundreds of them, at every depth, turning slowly in a current with nowhere left to go.

Myrrhvale blood could breathe in water. That was the cruelty of it. Their race did not drown, and the ones strong enough could be alive somewhere in the rings beyond, wet and furious and counting their dead.

The ones who had not been strong enough met the pressure of the open ocean arriving at speed in a space built to keep it out.

The bodies showed what that did.

Ithanne looked at it for a long moment and said nothing.

”Where are the response crews?” Lyren asked.

”Coming.” An officer at the port answered without turning around. ”There’s nothing for them to do on this side, my lord. Everything on the other side is finished.”

They found the soldiers further along the service corridor. Nine of them, in a loose half-circle with weapons drawn, facing inward at somebody sitting on the floor of an alcove, and none of them sure what to do next.

Ithanne recognised him before Lyren did.

Trafalgar du Morgain, soaked through, unarmed, in the wreckage of an undersuit, with one eye swollen shut and dried blood down the left side of his face.

’He has broken every term of the oath he swore in front of me,’ she thought. ’Every one of them, and a piece of this city is underwater.’

Trafalgar saw them arrive and took the moment before anybody else could.

”It was self-defence,” he said. ”They cornered me and they struck first.”

Nobody answered for a second.

”All right.” Lyren stepped through the half-circle without looking at any of the soldiers, and two of them lowered their weapons purely because of how he did it. ”We’re going somewhere private and doing this properly. There are a great many questions, Trafalgar, and you’ll be answering all of them.”

”I’d expect that.”

”And I will be present for every one,” Ithanne said, ”to establish whether what you say is true.”

”I’d expect nothing less from you either.”

They got him up between them, and nobody treated him as a prisoner, which was deliberate on Ithanne’s part. An observer of one of the Eight remained a guest of the house until a hearing said otherwise, and the difference between a guest and a suspect was how wars started.

They walked him out and put him in a warm room in an administrative wing, with a physician and a table.

The physician worked on him for twenty minutes and spent most of it looking confused.

By the end Trafalgar could see out of both eyes and stand without holding anything. Under the bandages his body was closing and knitting at a rate that had no business being possible, and the physician wrote down what he saw and clearly intended to ask somebody about it later.

Then Trafalgar told them. Not all of it.

”I was down in the second ring. At some point I realised I was being followed, which surprised me. I took a few turns to be sure. By the time I was sure, I was in a service grid I didn’t know.”

”Who followed you?” Ithanne asked.

”Soldiers. Twenty of them, roughly. Commander Rhavel Sorn was leading them.” He let that name sit on the table. ”They told me I’d violated the terms of my oath and that they were detaining me. I asked to see the order.”

Lyren’s chin came up.

”There wasn’t one,” Trafalgar said. ”I asked twice. The second time I asked under whose authority he was holding me, and he didn’t answer, and that was when I understood what I was standing in. They attacked about four seconds later.”

”Attacked,” Ithanne repeated.

”To kill.” He set the cup down. ”Nobody brings twenty men into a sealed junction with no paperwork and no transport to arrest somebody. I still don’t know why. What I know is that the purpose of that evening was to leave me down there.”

Lyren had gone quiet in a particular way.

”Say the rest,” he said.

”The rest is the dome.”

”Yes.” Lyren pushed away from the table, walked two paces and came back, which was as agitated as Trafalgar had ever seen him. ”Ithanne, tell me I’m wrong.”

”About what?”

”Two pressure crossings sealed hours before any of this started. The maintenance rotas for that grid cleared the same afternoon. Twenty men posted underground with no posting order on file anywhere.”

Ithanne did not tell him he was wrong.

”Those are our gates,” Lyren said. ”Our rotas. Our authorisations, our seals, our people. Nobody outside this city could have arranged a single one of those things, let alone all four.”

He stopped, and made himself say it in a normal voice.

”This isn’t an attack on a foreign observer. Somebody turned the systems that keep Meraval alive into a weapon against Meraval, and they did it from inside this house.”

Nobody spoke for a while after that.

Ithanne had not spoken since the corridor. She sat with her hands folded, and when she finally moved it was to straighten a paper that did not need straightening.

”There will be a hearing,” she said. ”I’ll convene it myself, and quickly, because if I don’t then four factions will invent an account of tonight before morning.”

”Understood.”

”Until it sits, you don’t leave the castle district without telling my office.” She looked up at last. ”And you discuss none of it with anybody.”

”That’s going to be difficult.”

”It’s necessary,” Ithanne said. ”You are the only living witness to what happened down there. The moment your account starts arriving through other people’s mouths, it stops being worth anything.”