Cofan, Twilight Valley
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.1.25 Interstellar
Janus and Mick cooled their heels in the lobby while Lira talked to the town elders. It had already been over an hour. The two Irkallans were stripped down to casual clothes, their weapons locked up, their status in flux, still wired from the jungle chase and the epi shots Janus had made them all take.
They weren’t under arrest, per se, but they’d been told to stay put, and there were a couple extra rangers on duty in the building.
The problem wasn’t the thieves. They were seriously ill but alive, largely thanks to Janus’s medical care. It would have been a clean sweep—thieves caught red-handed so they could be forced into better terms, and their Verazlan accomplice jailed or perhaps traded back to her clan for advantage. If only the samples had turned out to be fakes.
The thieves had mistakenly stolen a failed strain of XB-53 that grew fast but was fatally vulnerable to both leaf rust and parasites. If the coldsiders had used the stolen varietal, they would have suffered a cascading colony failure in a matter of years.
The real XC-108 samples were safely back in the lab, conveniently mislabeled and stored where the XB-53 was supposed to be.
Janus was pretty sure their rogue Verazlan had something to do with it, but he had no proof, and that turned out to be a big problem because she was some sort of aristocrat. He’d expected the “ghost” to get hauled off to jail after a good beating. Instead, the town elders had her uncuffed, apologized for Lira hitting her, and invited her to their deliberations.
Lira had been furious, partly at herself for not seeing it coming.
The whole thing was giving Janus strong vibes of the time he’d been suspected of murder, back on Irkalla, waiting for the Prime Dome council to put him out of an airlock without a suit.
“I can get us out,” Mick said quietly.
“What?” Janus.
“I. Can. Get. Us. Out.”
“Oh, I heard you,” Janus hissed. “I just didn’t believe you said it out loud.”
The doors to the council chambers opened, and a cluster of elders and visitors from other clans milled around the entrance.
Janus caught sight of Lira. She broke away from a group of dignitaries and headed in their direction. Lira was dressed in Motragi clan colors, the cut of her robe identifying her as a senior member of the clan but not one of its leaders. Their time on Krandermore had aged her more than a year, but not in a bad way. She looked dignified, like she belonged, an honest-to-goodness politician in the prime of her career.
Some of that seriousness faded when she saw Janus and Mick going stir-crazy like a couple of toddlers. “We’re in the clear, for now.”
“What does ‘for now’ mean?” Janus said, standing up. “We did what they asked.”
Lira hugged her arms. “That Verazlan I pistol-whipped? Turns out she was important.”
“She was helping the coldsiders,” Mick said, frowning.
“Yeah,” Lira answered, although her tone meant, This is complicated and I don’t want to talk about it. “You know the Verazlans are the strongest of the three sun-side clans, whether that’s fair or not. We’ve been asked to stay in Cofan until everything’s been worked out. I’ll get things sorted. It’s just going to take some time.”
“Shiny,” Mick said. “Guess we get a couple days of soft living, right boss?”
Janus wasn’t feeling so easygoing about it. He had a history of privileged individuals putting him and the people he cared about at risk. “This feels uncomfortably familiar. I don’t want to just sit around and wait for the axe to fall on us.”
“I know that, Janus,” Lira said quietly. “Everything changed once another clan got involved. Reputations matter as much as the truth here, and we’re expendable.”
“We’re not,” Janus said. “Mick is one of the best ranger instructors, and I helped develop the samples they were supposed to have stolen. As for you, how much have Cofan’s trading agreements improved since you’ve been here? I think you’ve at least doubled their profits. Pasha would be proud.”
Stolen story; please report.
Lira looked like she was going to contradict him, but then she stopped herself, and he saw a little bit of that old Prime Dome Hub-dweller hardness creep back into your face. “You know what? You’re right. I just spent months helping them engineer this deal. You guys go ahead. I’m going back in there to make sure they have their priorities straight.”
“What can we do?” Janus asked.
Lira sighed and touched her forehead. “Get me leverage? Janus, you said you made a big discovery today, right? And Mick? The council leads Cofan, but they listen to the rangers. Wouldn’t hurt to have them weigh in.”
“I’ll go to the barracks,” Mick said.
“I’ll head to the lab,” Janus said with a smile. “The three of us against the world, right?”
“All the worlds,” Mick said.
“Right,” Lira said, smiling back and smoothing her robes.
“Go get ’em,” Mick said with a grin.
Lira walked back toward the council room, head up and shoulders squared.
Mick and Janus watched her go.
“That might have caused more trouble than it solved,” Mick said.
“Yep,” Janus said. “But we have to fight. Just because some Verazlan aristocrat decided to stick their nose in doesn’t mean we and all of Cofan should suffer for it.”
And if all people were equal, it would have worked that way, but Janus couldn’t be sure. Worst case, a pissed-off member of a main-branch family could get them booted from Cofan and marched out of clan territory. They could go to a coldside settlement, but they’d just dragged eight members of the Carver Initiative out of the jungle.
Lira had her work cut out for her.
“Strength through struggle, Mick,” Janus said.
The Hunter snorted. “Meet up for a beer later?”
“Sure thing,” Janus said, patting Mick on the shoulder. “Going to have to be a quick one, though. When that adrenaline shot wears off, we’re all going to be dead to the world for at least twelve hours.”
***
Janus connected to the town’s noosphere and confirmed the flame dog had been taken to his station in the Cofan labs. He also saw that Doctor Mbari had signaled and ordered a standard battery of specimen tests.
He was a little miffed about that until he saw her instructions had also included filing the find in his name, so no one got any ideas. It was hard for him to trust people in positions of authority and power, especially today, but Dr. Mbari was one of the good ones.
Once he’d signed into the lab and changed into his lab coat, he punched up the specimen code. The retrieval system fetched the cage and delivered it to his station a few seconds later.
“Hey, buddy,” Janus told the critter. “How are you doing?”
The flame dog growled, and fire flickered between its jaws.
“Oh, yeah, I know,” Janus said soothingly. “We’re riding the same buggy, my friend. Being locked up is no fun.”
He looked through the reports and found out a feeding regimen had not been part of the doctor’s instructions. Based on air sampling, the little guy’s resting metabolic rate was predictably high for a creature that could belch fire, so Janus ordered a bowl of juicy, sausage-thick grubs from the entomology section.
Soon, the flame dog was happily chowing down, making a soft, vibrating sound in its chest while the bugs crackled, popped, and disappeared down its throat.
Janus chuckled and turned back to the lab reports. There were multiple requests by other researchers to collaborate on the find, a licensing offer from one of the minor but wealthy families, and pages of preliminary results. He dug into the numbers, and he was able to draw a few conclusions.
First of all, the flame dog was a “she,” although she was sexually immature. Thirteen kilos, the size of a small but sturdy house pet, Janus noted. The zoology team estimated she was between one and two years old, but the results were strangely inconclusive. Her DNA was capped with strange, eight-branched telomeres instead of the usual four. Did she have abnormal cell-division processes as well as more obvious abnormalities?
It didn’t seem so. She was a scaleless reptile with intelligence and social habits similar to that of an old-Earth crow. Janus looked at the flame dog and found her looking back at him. He’d never seen a crow—they were extinct—but they’d been able to distinguish and remember human faces. There was a distinct chance the little animal knew who he was. He wondered if she held a grudge.
The flame dog kept her eyes on him, setting her head down between her paws.
For the next hour-and-a-half, Janus went through every line of the reports, from behavioral analyses to biopsies. He took notes and sent messages to colleagues, asking for their opinions on how to move forward. He’d worked with a lot of teams in the past year, and he was owed a lot of favors he intended to cash in. It was the first time he was the lead researcher on something like this, and he wanted to get it right.
He didn’t realize how long he’d been there until the fatigue hit him. It had been six hours since the shot of adrenaline during an already long day. There was still work to do, but he was crashing toward the point of diminishing returns, and he needed to see how the others had fared before he was too tired to do anything at all.
Janus said goodbye to the flame dog and sent her off to a small enclosure that contained more grubs and plants from the area he’d found her in.
He hung up his lab coat, signed out of the lab, and headed to the Sun-side Regrets, a small bar on the west side of town that the three exiles had made their after-work hangout.
There was an outsider waiting by the entrance to the tiki bar, or at least, he was someone most people in Cofan wouldn’t have recognized. Janus knew him better than he would have liked. He had ebony-dark skin, black hair pulled into tight braids that fell to his mid-back, and a new ceramic implant grafted onto his skull, running along his right eyebrow.
He was also wearing the robes of a mid-level member of the Cult of the Survivor.
“Hey, Janus,” Ryler Abraxxis said.
“No,” Janus said, ignoring his childhood friend and walking past him into the bar.