Cosmogen Manufacturing

Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge

4453.2.29 Interstellar

Janus waited in the crowded airlock while the inner lock cycled, and all new arrivals were hit with high-intensity UV lamps from multiple angles as part of the decontamination process. The space pressurized and, after a much longer delay than Janus would have thought necessary, the inner lock rotated open. Janus and the rest of the team stepped into Cosmogen Manufacturing.

It was strange being in a coldside settlement after living a year in the lush jungles of sun-side. Cosmo, as the locals called it, was built into the side of a cliff. New hab blocks, cave farms, and factories were dug into the rock every year as the population grew, meaning that the oldest and most prestigious buildings were here, near the half-domed merchant’s quarter.

“Where did you get that suit, outsider?” someone asked.

Janus turned to see two members of dome-sec, or whatever the local equivalent was called, waiting for his answer.

A little over a year ago, an encounter like this would have filled Janus with mixed anger and fear, but he sensed only polite curiosity from the two corporate enforcers, and the word outsider felt less weaponized than it had in Prime Dome.

He unsealed his helmet, and the dome-sec officers’ eyebrows shot up in surprise and recognition. “You’re Janus Invarian! The coldsider running for the tribals!”

“Yes, that’s me,” Janus said, trying to process their reactions and words. It was a lot to take in at once.

“Mind if I record a holo with you, sir?” one of the guards asked. “The girls at the station won’t get over it.”

“Is it true you made yourself a custom environment suit to survive over there?” her patrol mate asked.

Janus posed for two holos with them and then excused himself after shaking their hands for the third time. He found the rest of the team waiting for him to the side, looking amused.

“If I’d known we had a celebrity traveling with us, I would have sold tickets,” Lira said.

“Yeah…” Janus said. “I cannot begin to tell you how weird that was.”

“We did get a Triumph in Veraz,” Mick said.

Yes, Janus thought, but that was for Koni and the whole team. This was the first time someone recognized me.

Koni seemed to sense his thoughts and said, “You look the part of a coldsider champion, Janus. You are almost as pale as them.”

Janus looked around at the people in the arrival terminal and realized that was true. There were sun-siders in the crowd, some of them looking downright comical in ill-fitting safety suits meant only for moving from a crawler to the safety of the settlement, but on average, the people here had a dome-dweller’s pallor. On Irkalla, the presence of a day cycle and inter-dome mixing led to more variety, and on the sun-side, the differences between him and the shorter-lived, hyper-immune clan members had been so large and on so many functional levels, he’d, of course, noticed that he had a different color of skin, but it never occurred to him that he was different because of the color of his skin.

“You all right, mate?” Mick asked.

“Yeah, just a weird thought. Let’s go grab Fury and head for the pedestal.”

Getting Fury through quarantine turned out to be a little more complicated. Janus had detached the sidecar cargo compartment and passed it through security as a pet carrier, but her registration chip still marked Fury as a specimen. This normally triggered a series of corporate nondisclosure forms and intellectual property contracts since both the settlement and dome-security were run by the Cosmogen Manufacturing corporation, but Lira was able to get all that waived for them because they were aspirants actively engaged in the Trials.

“I would have thought they’d be more worried about pandemics and invasive species,” Janus said quietly, and only over their encrypted team comm channel.

“They are between the merchant district and the rest of the habitat,” Lira said. “I’m actually interested to see what their protocols are; it might be good to bring those back to Irkalla if we ever go home.”

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“We can’t,” Ryler said, and the three other Irkallans stared at him. “I thought you knew. The sun-siders’ strong immune systems and short lifespans. It’s the plague from First Landing. Even the coldsiders are infected.”

“Ryler,” Mick growled, grabbing the cultist’s upper arm. “Explain fast. Small words. What the hell are you talking about, mate?”

“I thought your Dr. Jahangir discovered a cure,” Janus said.

Ryler shook Mick off and shook his head. “She never did, or at least the treatment she did come up with was rejected by most of the Cult as worse than the disease.”

“So we never beat it,” Janus said, feeling his heart drop.

“No,” Ryler said. “This is Krandermore. It was killing us too fast, so it adapted to us, and we adapted to it—sun-siders more than coldsiders. The whole reason Irkalla was settled was to leave a remnant of uninfected humanity in case the plague turned lethal again.”

Janus’s eyes stung, and Fury leaned against his leg in sympathy.

No matter what they did, no matter how many Trials they won, they could never go home.

***

The news of their infection put a damper on the team’s spirits, so much so that Ryler and Koni offered to go connect the data cube to the local pedestal alone, and Janus let them go.

Relieved of their mission, if only for a moment, Janus, Lira, and Mick decided to get a meal together—a sort of second wake for their lives on Irkalla. Mick asked around, and Lira combed the noosphere for reviews and food sanitation scores. After twenty minutes of walking, they settled on a literal hole in the wall near the workers’ cliffside sectors, the kind of place where people stared at them when they walked in but forgot about them once they settled in a booth and Fury curled up under the table.

“Bowl of water for your animal?” the server asked.

“Thanks,” Janus said. “Beers for us?”

“Just got a local draft,” the server said. “It’s not great.”

“We’ll be fine, mate,” Mick said with a wink. “Got some salty stuff to go with it? Nuts, chips, anything will do.” Mick slid a hundred-credit chip over.

“Coming right up,” the server said, making the chip disappear into his apron.

Janus sat back against the worn synthetic leather booth seat and closed his eyes, letting himself feel the ache of the moment. We’re never going home.

“Why now?” Lira asked angrily. “Why would he tell us now when we’re so close to the end?”

“I don’t know him that well,” Mick said. “Boss?”

Janus cracked his eyes open, looking at Mick across from him and Lira to his right. “I don’t think the timing was planned,” he said. “I asked him to be more open with us. Sometimes, I think his mods make him assume we know more than we do.”

“So, he just thought we knew?” Lira asked.

“I’m just guessing,” Janus said, closing his eyes again.

It made a kind of sense. Even in his lifetime, Janus had heard of domes on Irkalla losing more than ten or twenty percent of their population to pandemics. A dome was a better place to handle something like that than others—you could seal sections off, enforce quarantine, and even, Survivor forbid, open a district to the vacuum if the sick threatened the settlement’s safety. From what they’d learned, though, the plague that hit the colonists on First Landing had almost wiped their ancestors out, even with full access to technology that seemed like it belonged in a children’s story today.

He, of all people, should have known. Outbreak procedures were something they’d drilled into him in the Cofan labs.

“What do we do?” Mick asked.

Janus took a deep breath and opened his eyes. His team needed him. “About what?”

“Getting home, boss!” Mick said, looking at Janus and then at Lira. “We can’t just… We’re not…”

The server came back with a large tray loaded with smudged glasses, bowls of snacks, and a frothy pitcher of beer. He set the food and drinks out efficiently. “Let me know when you’re ready to order more, or just comm the bar,” he said, linking them to their tab.

“Thanks,” Janus said, grabbing the pitcher and pouring a beer for Mick and Lira before serving himself. “To good friends and bad news!”

The others clinked glasses with him before drinking.

“Pfah!” Lira said. “He didn’t lie about the beer not being great.”

“We’ve had worse,” Janus said. “Remember that place Mick took us in Mercuria?”

“What?” Mick said in mock outrage. “That was a classy establishment! They only spit in your food if you ask them to.”

Janus looked at the Hunter while taking a handful of some kind of baked appetizer. Mick’s humor had been reflexive and strained, and Janus was well aware their conversation about Mick feeling homesick only made matters worse. “Look, I know we just got bad news, but we’ll deal with it the same way we handle everything, starting with getting more information.”

“It seemed pretty cut and dry, Janus,” Lira said. “I don’t want to be the wet blanket here, but the Cult is pretty serious about keeping Irkalla isolated.”

Janus put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “That doesn’t mean we can’t find a solution. Do you really want to go back to Irkalla—” He postponed Mick’s automatic response by raising his index finger. “—or do you just want to live somewhere where we’re left alone with our families and Mick can see the stars at night?”

Mick closed his mouth and thought about it.

“There are things I don’t hate about Krandermore,” Lira said. “And to be honest with you, never ever having to get revived after a suit breach is one of them.”

“Amen,” Janus said, clinking her glass.

“I could live without almost dying of radiation poisoning every time the sun came up,” Mick admitted. “You thinking of Ryler’s offer if we take him to the Eastern Labs?”

Janus nodded. “He said we could take up to two hundred people. I don’t think we’d have to bring them here. There has to be somewhere else we could live in this system that is not Irkalla and not Krandermore.”

“Ryler said Lumiara,” Lira pointed out. “I don’t know if that’s negotiable, and I don’t know how I’d feel about moving to the Cult homeworld.”

“It’s got to be better than here,” Mick said, and Lira looked at him in surprise.

Janus tapped her shoulder with his fist. “Mick’s fine. We’re all tired, and we shouldn’t make this decision right now, but we have options.”

“There you are,” Koni said, walking into the bar with Ryler, both looking serious.

“What’s wrong?” Janus asked.

“Scores are shifting again,” Ryler said. “And I’ll be damned if I understand it.”