Outside Seafall, One Hundred and Five Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.29 Interstellar
Janus fell into the dark, holding Callie in his arms. The twice-purple lights of Seafall had been extinguished, and the post-humans swirled around them as they fled.
Most of them fled.
Some of them attacked disabled turret emplacements.
Some of them swam up toward the upper reaches of the structure. Were they confused, or would they damage it?
The only thing that mattered to Janus was in his arms, although, somewhere, he knew the deep regret of having to have made a choice with two unacceptable outcomes.
He’d chosen a galaxy with Callie still in it. At least, he hoped that was what he’d chosen. Otherwise, his regrets would swallow him, because now, as he fell through the dark toward the approaching ships of the convoy, a treacherous part of his mind whispered that he’d chosen his sister over his people, over his uncle, and over his partner and son.
He was tied into her suit vitals, watching every twitch of her life signs, and they were weakening.
The fall felt like it lasted forever.
The captain guided the two of them into the moonpool, and that was where, as the pressure returned to Standard and the dive room door opened, he found out they had truly lost.
The away team surrendered their weapons, and Janus got his sister to the medbay.
***
The Seraphine, One Hundred and Twenty Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.3.4 Interstellar
Failure was a layered thing, Janus was discovering. Nikandros and his cyborgs controlled the fleet. The captain had not opposed them, obeying the architect with the same indifference he’d shown toward Janus, except in moments when the convoy might be threatened. As Janus understood it, the convoy was almost caught in a Core collapse and had to fight off a gigantic sea creature that wrapped itself around the Chapo.
There was talk about renaming that submarine, as the current one was deemed ill-fated.
He hadn’t seen Lee, Xander, Mick, or Lira in days.
They were alive. They were all alive. Callie was in a drug-induced coma, as the damage had been so extensive even the cult’s technology was strained. Ivan was walking, although grudgingly. They were allowed to eat together, which Janus took to be a concession to Janus’s deteriorating mental state.
He kept seeing Seafall go dark. In his dreams, he heard the screams of thousands of men and women through the water as he fell farther and farther away.
“You don’t know they’re dead,” Ivan said to him, over a bowl of fabricated soup. “In all likelihood, the fish creatures damaged some external compartments and a few turrets, and then the comps got the lights back on.”
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“In all likelihood?” Janus asked weakly.
Ivan huffed. “They were soldiers, Janus. Operating the base defenses was the one thing they would absolutely know.”
Even if that was true, they were still trapped there in a damaged base, and no one was coming to save them.
Or maybe they were. Maybe a scheduled compartmentalist convoy had only been days away.
Failure meant being the victim of fate.
Nikandros had undone the concentration of forces on the Seraphine. Families had been reunited. The aspirants were scattered and placed on ships where any misstep would threaten their loved ones and friends. All except Janus. His people had been scattered, perhaps in recognition of his influence.
It was peaceful at least, except for the dreams, and the looks the cult ronin and the other Irkallans gave him when he crossed them in the passageways.
On the day they were scheduled to arrive at the Core facility, Nikandros called him down to his stateroom.
Janus went down, as meek as a lamb.
***
Janus knocked on the door,
“Come in, Janus! Come in!”
He took a steadying breath, then pushed the door open.
Nikandros was in his architect robes, and Ryler was also in his formal Cult of the Survivor attire. There was an energy to Nikandros that Janus hadn’t seen before.
“Thank you for joining us, Janus.”
Janus didn’t answer with a quip or sarcasm, he just waited.
Nikandros’s smile became more strained. “I thought you might like to know what this has all been about.”
Janus shrugged. “As far as I was concerned, it was about protecting my people.”
“All of them?” Nikandros asked, some of his good humor returning.
Janus looked away. He had no right to respond to the challenge. He’d surrendered that right when he’d chosen his own good over that of others.
Nikandros sighed. “Have we broken you, Janus? Is this the limit of what an outlier can absorb?”
“Was that what this meant to you?” Janus asked. “A final test of my usefulness?”
“Our faction exists to empower the outlier,” Ryler said.
Janus looked at his best and oldest friend and saw much of what he saw in himself these days. A shell. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who’d been broken by the weight of his duties.
Nikandros scowled. “This isn’t the first time you’ve surrendered in the face of resistance, Janus. You’ve always had another play when that happens.”
“Where has it gotten me, Nikandros?” Janus said. “Wasn’t it you who said my best defense against you was to be irrelevant?”
Nikandros watched his face for several seconds, then waved his hand. “You may go.”
Janus bowed his head and left.
***
“What do you think?” Nikandros asked Ryler, once Janus was gone. “Is he really broken?”
“You couldn’t tell?” Ryler asked, sounding surprised.
Nikandros played the encounter back and forth, viewing it through his implants. There were no deception markers on Janus’s face, no words to indicate combativeness. There was a defiance to his refusal to oppose them, even in words, but it was like seeing shattered pieces gathered up in the shape of a man.
“What will you do if he is broken?” Ryler asked.
“Kill him,” Nikandros said without hesitation. “Better to douse the embers while people remember the fire. Maybe one of his followers will rise as a result.”
“That would have interesting implications for our model. We already knew that hardship plays a factor.”
Nikandros looked at the librarian and nodded. “Yes. Not as scalable. Not everyone has a loved one to lose.”
“We can adjust for that,” Ryler said. “After all, we gave Janus a friend, and then we took him away.”
***
Back at his bunk, Janus finally let the shakes play out. He’d failed. But his people were alive. Life allowed for new possibilities. Death allowed for none. It was, perhaps, an acknowledgment of the captain’s philosophy.
The survivor’s choice, made consistently, felt like letting the void into his heart.
But it did not have to be the only answer.
For example, his wrist comm had been carefully designed over thousands of years to integrate perfectly with human physiology, and it was almost unheard of for someone to have suffered implant rejection that wasn’t tied to contamination or a manufacturing defect.
Implanting the pre-biotech circuitry of the Port L’Évèque handsets into his torso, sealed into a biologically neutral pouch, was far riskier, but it gave him options where they might otherwise not have existed.
Options like communicating with the post-humans attached to the hull.
Are you still with us, Emersus?
Still with you, Emissary.
Janus shuddered, stifling his hope before it could catch, betraying vital possibilities to their enemy. Because the key to lying to someone who couldn’t be lied to when you could no longer resort to half-truths was to believe what you said was true.
Failure was a layered thing.