The eighth packet was incomplete and that was going to be the thing that killed the plan.
Kiran had decoded it in the small hours between Vorn's comm link and the decision to move, sitting against the worked stone of Floor 160 with Daveth sleeping across the chamber, the integration processing the last of the eight compressed biological data fragments that the other side of the door had sent through the immune system's seal. Packets five and six had given him the space's ecology: an independent biological system, self-sustaining, capable of maintaining the organisms within it without input from the Abyss or the wound. The space didn't need the wound to keep its inhabitants alive. It had its own mechanisms. Its own biology. Old. Older than the wound. Whatever had existed in that space before the wound formed around it had been running its own ecological processes for longer than human civilization.
Packet seven was a protocol. A set of biological instructions, encoded in the wound's tissue format but describing a communication method that wasn't the wound's. Instructions for how to interact with whatever had sent the response through the door. The protocol was complex, the biological equivalent of a handshake procedure, and Kiran filed it for later analysis.
Packet eight was fragments.
The eighth fragment had been the last received before Daveth pulled him from the wall. The signal had been collapsing, the immune system's acute response flooding the construction with counter-frequencies, and the data that came through was partial. Corrupted. Missing the structural markers that the integration needed to fully decode the content.
But the content that was readable, the forty percent of the packet that had survived the degraded transmission, contained coordinates.
Not surface coordinates. Not GPS. A biological location marker in the wound's notation system, the same navigational language that Marek had been learning, the same kind of mark he'd been cutting into the seam walls during his descent. The coordinates described a point within the Abyss's architecture. A floor, a seam connection, a location where the space behind the door was accessible.
Not the wound's cavity. Not the sealed organ system. A second access point. Somewhere in the Abyss where the space behind the door touched the Abyss's standard architecture, a place where the boundary between the two was thin enough to cross.
The coordinates were incomplete. The forty percent of readable data gave him a floor range, not a floor number. A seam network zone, not a junction. Enough to narrow the search to approximately ten floors of the Abyss's mid-depth architecture.
Floors 55 through 65.
---
"The plan," Daveth said.
They were ascending. Floor 155 to Floor 140. Floor 140 to Floor 120. Moving through the Abyss's standard architecture at the pace of two men who had a deadline, the entity density around them low — the migration toward the wound had stripped the mid-depth floors of their normal populations.
"The eighth packet contains coordinates for a second access point to the space behind the door," Kiran said. "Not the wound's cavity. A different location. Somewhere between Floor 55 and Floor 65."
"A back door."
"A secondary connection between the space and the Abyss. The space is older than the wound. It may have multiple points of contact with the Abyss's architecture, the way an underground river system touches the surface at multiple springs." He was moving as he talked, the void-skin's reduced glow providing light in the corridors that the migration-depleted bioluminescent panels couldn't adequately illuminate. "If we find the second access point, we have a route to the space that the immune system hasn't sealed."
"And then what?"
"Then I have evidence. Biological data from direct observation of the space and its inhabitants. Proof that the organisms behind the door are alive, stable, not in distress. Proof that the door isn't a destruction mechanism, it's a transition." He looked at Daveth. "Proof that Vorn can take to the board. Evidence that sealing the Abyss would be sealing people inside, not protecting the surface from a threat."
Daveth processed this as they moved through Floor 115. "The coordinates are fragmentary."
"Forty percent of the packet. Enough for a floor range. We search ten floors."
"In how many hours?"
"Thirty-eight before the board session."
"Search ten floors in thirty-eight hours. In mid-depth Abyss architecture. Without knowing exactly what we're looking for." Daveth was running the tactical math in his head, the way he always did, the automatic assessment of a military professional evaluating an operation's feasibility. "The floor range is above the sanity line. Entity density should be lower than the deep floors. The caretaker code won't function at that distance from the wound, but the entity profiles in the 55-65 range are surface-ecology types, less aggressive than what we've been operating in."
"That's my assessment."
"It's a bad plan."
"It's the only plan."
Daveth didn't argue. He adjusted his pack, checked his weapon, and kept climbing.
---
Floor 60 stopped Daveth cold.
They'd been descending from Floor 80, having ascended to 80 first and then worked back down through the target range. Floors 65 through 61 had been searched at speed, Kiran running the integration at maximum sensitivity looking for any biological anomaly that might indicate a thin boundary between the Abyss and the space behind the door. Nothing. Standard Abyss architecture, worked stone, seam connections, bioluminescent panels. No unusual biological signatures. No anomalous tissue. No sign that the space behind the door touched the Abyss in this section.
At Floor 60's upper seam entrance, Daveth stopped walking.
Kiran was four steps ahead before he realized. He turned.
Daveth was standing at the entrance threshold. His hand on the seam wall. His eyes on the floor's interior, the corridor stretching ahead of them into the worked stone chambers that made up Floor 60's standard layout.
"Daveth."
"This floor." His voice was flat. Not the tactical flat. A different kind. The flat of a voice being held down by something that wanted to make it shake. "This is where Sahra died."
Kiran came back to the threshold. He hadn't known. Daveth had mentioned his former squad leader in passing, the person he'd come to the deep floors to find, the body he'd intended to recover. He'd never mentioned the specific floor.
"Squad Leader Sahra Kost. My unit. The 12th Expeditionary." Daveth's hand was still on the wall. His fingers pressed into the stone. "She went in with six. Floor 60 killed four of them in the first chamber. Sahra got the other two to the lower seam before the floor's primary entity engaged. She held it while they extracted." He looked at the corridor. "They made it. She didn't."
"When?"
"Three years ago. The recovery team found the two survivors at Floor 55. They said Sahra's last comm transmission was her giving a position report on the entity's movement patterns so the extract team could navigate around it." He pulled his hand from the wall. Put it back. "I volunteered for the recovery dive. I was going to bring her back. Or bring back whatever was left." He looked at Kiran. "I never came down to this floor."
"Daveth."
"I made it to Floor 62 and I turned around. Told the team the route was compromised. Filed a report that said recovery was infeasible at current threat levels." His jaw worked. "The route wasn't compromised. I was."
Kiran stood at the threshold with him. Twenty-six hours until the board session. Ten floors to search. The integration running at maximum sensitivity, burning through the void-skin's biological reserves, finding nothing.
"We need to search this floor," he said.
"I know."
"Can you?"
Daveth's hand came off the wall. He adjusted his weapon. Checked the tactical display. His movements were precise, automatic, the muscle memory of a professional performing equipment checks while the rest of him was somewhere else.
"Yes," he said. The word had edges.
They entered Floor 60.
---
The floor had changed in three years.
Not the architecture. Worked stone, standard layout, the chambers and corridors of a mid-depth floor that the Abyss had built and maintained for millennia. What had changed was the population. The entities that normally occupied Floor 60, the surface-ecology hunters that the 12th Expeditionary had encountered three years ago, were gone.
In their place: everything else.
The tactical display lit up with signatures the moment they entered the first chamber. Not the floor's native population. Displaced organisms, the migration entities that had been pulled toward the wound during the broadcast's amplified phase and then left without a destination when the broadcast went silent. They hadn't returned to their original floors. They'd consolidated in the mid-depth range, clustering in the floors that offered the highest resource density and the most hospitable architecture.
Floors 55 through 65 were packed.
"Thirty-seven signatures in this chamber alone," Daveth said. He was reading the display with the mechanical focus of a man channeling everything he had into the task because the alternative was feeling what the floor made him feel. "Normal baseline for this floor is eight to twelve per chamber. These are displaced organisms from Floors 100 through 200. Deep-floor profiles." He looked up from the display. "We don't have the caretaker code at this depth."
The void-skin's markings were dim. Floor 60 was ninety floors above the wound's proximity threshold, well beyond the range where the caretaker code activated. Without the code, they had no biological defense against entity engagement. Without the protection protocol that the Abyss had been running around Kiran since before he crossed the sanity line, they had no immunity.
And the entities in this floor weren't the surface-ecology hunters that a competent diver could handle with training and equipment. They were deep-floor organisms, displaced from their native environments, operating in unfamiliar territory, their behavior unpredictable.
"Can we move through?" Kiran asked.
Daveth ran the display's predictive model. The signatures in the chamber were distributed in territorial clusters, the displaced organisms having established temporary boundaries in the space they'd occupied. Moving through meant crossing those boundaries. Without the code, crossing a territorial boundary meant engagement.
"Not without contact," Daveth said. "The chamber has three territorial zones. We'd cross at least two boundaries reaching the lower corridor. At thirty-seven signatures, with deep-floor profiles, contact means combat. Combat at this density means—" He didn't finish.
It meant they'd be fighting organisms designed for floors where the Abyss's biology ran at ten times the surface-level intensity. Organisms that Kiran's void-skin adaptations would normally give him an advantage against, but only in the wound's proximity, where the code and the integration and the full suite of biological tools the wound had built into him were active.
Up here, he was a man with dark markings on his skin and one artificial eye. Competent. But not invincible.
"The target range," he said. "The coordinates point to a location between Floors 55 and 65. This entire zone is occupied."
"Every floor. The displacement pattern covers the full range." Daveth zoomed the display out to show the broader picture. Floors 55 through 65, every one of them showing signature counts three to five times the normal baseline. The displaced organisms from the wound migration, consolidated in a band of mid-depth floors, blocking the exact zone where the eighth packet's fragmentary coordinates pointed. "We could fight through one floor. Maybe two. We don't have the supplies or the biological advantage to fight through ten."
"We don't need ten. We need the specific location."
"The specific location is somewhere in a ten-floor zone that's currently hosting approximately four hundred displaced deep-floor entities." Daveth set the display down. "Without the caretaker code, without the protection protocol, without any of the biological advantages that the wound's proximity gives you. We're above the line, Kiran. Up here, you're just a diver."
Kiran looked at the chamber. The signatures on the display, clustered and territorial. The deep-floor organisms that had been pulled toward the wound and then abandoned when the broadcast stopped. Stranded in mid-depth, confused, territorial, aggressive.
He looked at the time. Twenty-four hours until the board session. The coordinates fragmentary. The search zone impassable. Daveth standing in the floor where his squad leader died, holding himself together through operational discipline and nothing else.
The plan was dead.
He sat down on the floor of the chamber entrance, just inside the threshold, and he looked at the thirty-seven signatures between him and the lower corridor and he tried to think of another way.
"There's something else," Daveth said. He was standing at the wall of the first chamber, not looking at Kiran. Looking at something on the stone. "Third panel from the left. There are marks."
Kiran looked. On the worked stone of the chamber wall, at approximately shoulder height, a series of cuts in the stone. Not Marek's navigation notation. Not the wound's biological language.
Standard Dive Authority tactical notation. Three years old, the cuts weathered but legible.
*ENTITY PRIMARY - HOLD - EXTRACT SOUTH. — S. KOST*
Sahra's last tactical message. Cut into the wall as she held the floor's primary entity so her team could escape.
Daveth read it. His hand went to the wall beside the marks. His fingers touched the stone where Sahra's blade had cut the letters.
"She would have told me to stop standing here and start solving the problem," he said.
Kiran looked at the tactical display. At the entity density blocking their path. At the fragmentary coordinates pointing somewhere in the impassable zone.
Twenty-four hours. No route through. No code. No plan.
"There might be another way," Daveth said. He was still looking at the marks. "Sahra's extract route. South. The lower seam at the south end of this floor connects to an unmapped secondary network that the 12th used as emergency extraction corridors. They're narrow, too small for most entity profiles, and they run parallel to the main seam network for five or six floors." He looked at Kiran. "If the secondary network is still passable, we could bypass the occupied chambers and search the target zone through the corridors that the entities can't fit into."
"You know these corridors?"
"I studied the mission file for three years." He pulled his hand from the wall. "I studied everything about this floor for three years. I just never came back to use it."
He picked up the tactical display and started mapping.
