The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Dedication

  For my mother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  Chapter One

  She’d never gone this deep.

  Gyre wriggled her armored body another centimeter into the crevice, then eased her bag of gear after her. The plating on the back of her calf scraped over the stone, and she winced at the noise. Nobody had warned her that the opening to the lower cave system was so small—or empty. To be fair, she hadn’t gotten a lot of warning or preparation. She’d been too eager to get below the surface to question if there should have been more than the limited orientation she’d received.

  Still, when she’d signed up for the expedition, she had assumed three things:

  One, that there would be a team assisting her, monitoring the readings from her suit from afar, pulling up maps for her when possible, and keeping her company in the dwindling light as she left the surface.

  Two, that she would enter through a giant borehole into a mining camp, and would stage in that camp before pressing deeper into the ground.

  And three, that the amount of money she was being offered would be directly related to the sophistication of the expedition.

  And yet here she was, alone in a tiny crevice in an unknown site, her helmet speakers silent.

  “Caver here,” she said for the fifth time. “Would appreciate contact, base.”

  For the fifth time, there was no response. The only sounds were her breathing inside her helmet, the soft pulsing of the alert system displayed in front of her face, and the groan of her suit against rock as she contorted her spine and pressed through another few centimeters.

  Gyre paused, leaning against the curved crevice wall. Maybe she should go back. Maybe her suit was malfunctioning. At the hospital where she had been fitted into it, she had gone through the regular check and double check of all systems, including communications transmission. Everything had been fine then, and her year of helping other cavers into similar suits told her that all systems were go. But she didn’t have a death wish, and going any farther without comms was suicide. Her eyes flicked over the readouts inside her suit again.

  Everything was normal.

  “Beginning to suspect suit is shot,” she said anyway, addressing the emptiness. “Preparing to abort.”

  The speakers in her helmet finally came to life. “Negative. Do not abort. Caver, continue.” The voice sounded female, clipped and authoritative. More important, it sounded real—not a computerized response.

  Well, that got a reaction. Gyre’s lips twisted into a bitter approximation of a smile. “Roger,” she muttered, and shuffled another few centimeters.

  The crevice widened abruptly about half a meter farther in, and Gyre stumbled out, reflexively moving to dust herself off. But carbon polymer just scraped over carbon polymer, a frustrating reminder that for the next several weeks—or even months—she wouldn’t be able to feel her own skin. She shook her head.

  Rookie.

  The suit was her new skin, filled with sensors and support functions, dampening her heat and strengthening her already powerful muscles with an articulated exoskeleton designed to keep climbing as natural as possible. She wouldn’t even remove her helmet to eat or sleep. Her large intestine had been rerouted to collect waste for easy removal and a feeding tube had been implanted through her abdominal wall ten days ago. A port on the outside of her suit would connect to nutrition canisters. All liquid waste would be recycled by the suit. All solid waste would be compacted and cooled to ambient temperature, then either carried with her or stored in caches to be retrieved on her trip out. Everything was painstakingly, extensively designed to protect her from . . . elements in the cave.

  And, all the while, her handlers would be monitoring her vitals and surveying her surroundings for her. It was Gyre’s job to move and climb and explore; it was her handlers’ job to document.

  “Caver, continue,” repeated the woman from before.

  Gyre scowled, then straightened up and looked around the cavern. Her suit used a combination of infrared and sonar pulses to generate readings on the surrounding topography, which was reconstructed into what looked like a well-lit but colorless scene on the screen in front of her. In an emergency, the reconstruction could be turned off and a normal light turned on, but it wasn’t advisable to have a lamp burning, giving off heat, attracting attention down in the cold darkness of the caves.

  There was a reason, after all, that cavers could demand enough money that they’d be able to get off-world after only two jobs, maybe three.

  Too many cavers didn’t make it that long.

  Just one of the many reasons Gyre was going to do it in one.

  “Continuing,” she acknowledged, but paused first to drink in the space. The ceiling was high and vaulted, the ground even and dry. Far off, she thought she could hear water. The surface had been in a near-constant drought since she was a child, but most of the deep caves in this area still had water flowing through them, and would periodically flood from harsh, sudden storms that destroyed settlements and washed away topsoil and structures on the surface. This was the first time she’d personally set foot in a chamber this deep.

  It was beautiful.

  It was also unnerving.

  She made her way to a marker blinking on her HUD, clambering down a wide natural staircase, a duffel full of equipment and food slung over her shoulder.

  “Where’s the mine, base?” she asked as she slid over one of the larger drops and landed in a haze of dust. “Is this new ground, or just a new entrance?”

  Base was, of course, silent.

  Maybe this was normal. She’d never heard of taciturn support teams from the senior cavers she’d talked to, but she also hadn’t been allowed in the topside command rooms. The problem was that if this was normal, the team would expect her to know that.

  They didn’t know this was her first time down.

  Gyre came to the edge of another, larger drop. Like the five she’d descended to get down to the initial crevice, this one had an anchor at the top, and a fresh, high-quality rope leading down. There had been other cavers here, and recently.

  “Base, requesting a topside search,” she said, considering the rope. “Confirm that there are no other cavers ahead of me. I’m seeing signs of—”

  “There is no mine, and no other cavers,” the woman said. “Equipment was put in
and caches established in anticipation of your descent.”

  Okay. No mine wasn’t ideal, but not unheard of; her boss must just be looking for deposits in new ground, sending people in one after the other. It wasn’t common these days, with most of the land already picked over, but in a true expedition like that, pre-stocked caches were a good idea. Given the pay rate on this mission and the sophistication of her equipment, this was clearly a high-end pursuit, and yet—

  And yet so far she could only be sure of one person in the support room, and the techs who had helped calibrate her suit hadn’t been chatty or worn the logo of any of the major mining concerns. She’d known from the beginning that this was an individual-run expedition, and at the time, money and the quality of the equipment had eclipsed all other considerations. They’d been worth falsifying her credentials here and there to make her look proven. They’d been worth hiring a surgeon to redirect her bowels for a month—something she really couldn’t afford, but the payout from this job would more than cover it—just so that she’d have the appropriate scars when the expedition’s doctors cut her open.

  But now that she was underground, she was beginning to wonder if she had made a giant mistake.

  Of course, there could still be five or ten techs. Maybe they were all shy. Maybe the woman with the mic was territorial and a total idiot. It was possible.

  If that was the case, she just had to keep going until shift change.

  In the meantime, she reassured herself that expeditions were always top-heavy. They could afford to be, had to be. They were standing on a veritable mint deep below the surface of Cassandra-V, the only thing keeping the colony halfway viable, and decades of mining had taught them a few things.

  Like the fact that early teams that went down to establish mines or take samples ended up dead. Ninety percent failure rate. Big groups, small groups, solo explorers . . . it didn’t matter. Something always killed them.

  Something always killed them, until somebody got smart enough or desperate enough to try wearing a drysuit down, alone, into a cave. Even now, nobody was sure if it was because it blocked heat rising from the body, or smell, or something else, but one person, in an enclosed suit, could survive. One person, though, needed help keeping watch while they slept, and the suits became more and more elaborate to provide for longer and longer survey missions. Now missions had at least five or ten techs topside. She’d seen it firsthand, working support on two medium-sized operations. A year ago, she’d helped her first caver into a similar suit—a hotshot guy with two expeditions already under his belt—and it hadn’t been nearly as elaborate and high-tech as this one. This was top-of-the-line and must have demanded an even larger crew.

  So where were they?

  The sensible thing would be to call off the mission and walk back out, while she still could. But she’d sacrificed too much to get here, this deep, with this much money on the line.

  She didn’t want to go through it all again. Next time, her embellished work history might not stand up to scrutiny. And if she was wrong, if there was a team, and she walked out? Nobody wanted to hire a caver who would breach contract. Not when there were so many others waiting to be picked.

  Not when there are a hundred other kids as desperate as I am.

  Gyre rolled her shoulders back to center herself, then clipped into the rope at hip level, attaching the duffel to her suit. It was the first of several she’d be ferrying in that day, the rest stacked and waiting for her on the other side of the narrow crevice she’d entered through. She reached behind her to the hump of hard carbon seated across her shoulders. All her equipment was slotted into the suit itself, and the storage space on her back protruded almost like a satchel. As she ghosted her fingers over the release sensors, her HUD displayed what was stored there. Her rappel rack was within easy reach, and she released it from its slot, then hitched it to the front of her suit and threaded the rope through its bars. Once it was secure, she glanced over the edge again.

  Her readout display blinked as it measured the distance down with a few sonar pulses: 70 meters. In normal light, the bottom would’ve been pitch black, but her HUD’s reconstruction showed it in full detail as if it were only a few meters away. She crouched to check the anchor, even though she’d already practiced this hundreds of times since signing on to this project.

  Nothing about cave exploration should be done on autopilot.

  Everything looked fine. She’d been trained—or rather, she’d taught herself—to place her own anchors every time, but the other, shorter drops she’d already done had been anchored correctly.

  Base had confirmed this one had been placed for her.

  “Caver, continue,” her handler said, her voice flat. Emotionless.

  Gyre straightened, checked her device one last time, then stepped off the edge.

  Chapter Two

  Her first camp was just shy of a quarter kilometer from the entrance slot, and five hundred or so meters below the surface. Just as her handler had said, she’d found a cache waiting for her, but additional fresh supplies would still be necessary. Even with high-density, compact nutritional canisters, she’d need more than the few stashed here if she was going to stay under for longer than a month, and then make the climb back out.

  She spent two days making three trips back to the surface to retrieve gear. The topside base said nothing else after the beginning of her second trip. At first, Gyre was relieved; the woman on the other side of her comm line, so far her only contact, was abrasive and cold. Her silence left Gyre to make her own decisions. It was comforting for a few hours, as if this job were just like all her solo practice runs. But then the overbearing quiet became too much. Five hundred meters of stone separated her from human contact, and she felt it in her bones. She’d never been under for more than a day on her own before—one of the many small details she hadn’t exactly been forthright about when signing on.

  So she murmured and sang to herself, trying to distract her itching nerves, the sound never leaving the confines of her helmet as she settled into camp at the end of the second day. It was a quick task. No fire, no sleeping bag, no cooking. Instead, she patrolled the perimeter, administered her meal for the night, then tried to get comfortable.

  The suit had some limited internal padding and support; it served as a moving sleeping roll as well as armor and structural enhancement. But that was like saying a metal stool was furniture, and therefore equivalent to a bed. She positioned herself as comfortably as she could, locked her armor in place to lessen the load on her muscles, and powered down the visuals in her helmet.

  “Going to sleep, base. You got my back?” she asked the black emptiness.

  “Affirmative.”

  The same woman. She’d been there—probably—the whole time. No shift change.

  No team.

  Fantastic.

  “Does base have a name?” Gyre asked, trying to ignore the alarms going off in her head.

  Nothing.

  Trying to keep her voice light, she said, “Does base care to tell me why an expedition this expensive isn’t giving me a full crew?” It was a risky move; if her handler got angry, Gyre would be screwed.

  “You are adequately supported,” the woman said.

  “But it’s just you, right?”

  Silence. Then: “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t in my contract.”

  “Your contract,” the woman said firmly, “promised adequate support.”

  Gyre twitched, jaw clenching. She breathed through her nose, counting up to ten. “This is highly unusual,” she said. “I’d feel more comfortable if I knew you had relief up there.”

  The handler said nothing.

  Which left Gyre facing the same choice as before: be smart and leave, or stay and make it work.

  She shouldn’t risk staying. But she couldn’t risk leaving.

  “Does base have some music she can pipe in, or a book I can read?” she asked grudgingly.

  “Go to sleep, caver,”
her handler replied. “I will keep watch.”

  Yeah, Gyre thought, scowling, until you pass out yourself because you’ve got no relief up there.

  But biology won out over her better judgment. She was exhausted, muscles sore and mind foggy, and it wasn’t long before her thoughts began to drift. Back when she’d started exploring the slot canyons and pseudocaves near her home ten years ago, she’d just been a twelve-year-old girl expertly avoiding her house and her dad. The pseudocaves, which could almost reach the depth she was at now, didn’t require suits. They had the usual risks: cave-ins, flash floods, falls, lack of food. Some of them were wickedly difficult to navigate, demanding top-tier skill. But two or three people could go down for the day without a suit, or with just an old-fashioned simple drysuit with no intestinal rearrangement and no catheters if they were really worried. Nothing would come out of the blackness and kill them. But the pseudocaves also didn’t have minerals. They were economically useless, and usually empty.

  So she’d played in them, first for fun, then to build the skills she’d need to sign on with a true cave expedition and earn enough money to get herself off the planet.

  She still remembered, vividly, the day she’d nearly broken her legs on a fall. She’d been just shy of her thirteenth birthday and had been descending in pitch darkness, her headlamp extinguished by the spray of an early rains waterfall now dominating far more of the cavern than it usually did. She’d been too arrogant that day to abort, or switch to a different lamp, so certain she could navigate the rest of the descent by touch and memory.

  And she’d been able to, until about six or seven meters above the bottom—close enough to not be in life-threatening danger, but far enough to cause a problem if something went wrong. The roaring of the waterfall had gotten louder, and she’d assumed that was because she was getting closer to the bottom. She hadn’t realized that the recent rains had knocked free a bit of stone and the waterfall had changed trajectory just enough that as she lowered herself another meter—too fast, much too fast—she was caught in the thundering torrent. She’d lost her grip on her rappel rack and slid down the rope, pushed by the force of the water, unable to arrest.