Rapid Transit Line 5A, Western Research Hub
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.2.25 Interstellar
Janus’s mind was ticking over as fast as the light strips zipped by the underground bullet train. Fury pawed at his arm, and he gave her head another scratch as she pressed her warm scales against his abdomen, her front paws on his lap, happy but exhausted.
The whole team was tired and hurt, dirty, and fighting off a variety of small infections he would have to deal with when they reached their destination. They couldn’t have been more different from the pristine vehicle they rode in, its clean and modern upholstery spotless and new despite the passage of time. “How is this thing in perfect condition?” he asked.
“It was never used,” Ryler said. “Not really. This was supposed to be one of the largest research facilities on the planet, home to hundreds of scientists and their families, but then the plague happened, and everyone was too busy dying or trying to keep their people alive. In the end, only a few dozen people ever set foot in the place, and only one person really worked here.”
“What a waste,” Janus said, leaning his head back.
Ryler shrugged. “Maybe it was enough, Janus. The discoveries she made here were vital to the colony’s survival. She was the greatest researcher of her time.”
Janus imagined that: a solitary but brilliant scientist riding the tube train from facility to facility, the labs quarantined against the outside world, her people dying by the thousands while she fought to find a cure in time. He thought of the coldness or steel will it must have taken to turn away refugees, the desperate pleas from failing settlement, the offers and threats she must have gotten, and the endless frustration as trial after trial failed and the people who’d remained on the ships—the ones who would become the modern Cult of the Survivor—refused to send help.
What kind of woman had she been?
A light strip flashed by, and then another. They were spaced a kilometer apart, so one passed every two to three seconds as the maglev shot through the ancient tunnels at an unimaginable speed.
“Where are we heading?” Lira asked.
“To the Western Research Hub,” Ryler said. “It’s not far off our original route. In fact, we should end up ahead of where we’d have been if we’d continued over land.”
“It’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?” Janus asked. “We get ambushed and pushed into the Dead Fields, and Ryler happens to find a transportation system there that happens to align with our route.”
“I don’t understand what you’re implying,” Ryler said carefully.
“Why don’t you tell us, Ryler? Why are we riding this train?” Janus asked.
Fury lifted her head and looked at Ryler, her chest getting noticeably warmer, and the others turned to look at him also when he didn’t immediately protest Janus’s accusation—unspecific though it might have been.
“The Trials follow the layout of the uplink pedestals, and so do the arms of this research facility. This place is usually off-limits, but we knew the compartmentalists would cheat and that their cheating would create opportunities.”
“How did you know?” Lira asked. “Why wouldn’t they just trust their aspirant team to get the job done?”
“Because Nikandros got under Architect Donnika’s skin,” Ryler said. “He’s probably up there right now, needling her, pushing her into making a bigger mistake.”
“And we get to deal with the consequences? Is that it?” Lira asked, anger starting to color her face.
“No, hold on,” Janus said. “That’s not the important question. Why did Nikandros need us to get in here in the first place?” He stared at Ryler.
Ryler stared back. It was a flat, mechanical look, one that reminded Janus that no matter how much he found Koni to be a cultural mystery and even repulsive sometimes in her willingness to accept violence as a solution, Ryler was also alien in his own way, and all the more so for having grown up in the same place as Janus under drastically different conditions. “This is the deal,” Ryler said to all of them. “I need to access the central computers here and in the Eastern Biology Labs. If you can help me do that, Nikandros authorized me to make you an offer.”
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“What the hell, mate,” Mick started to say, but Janus cut him off with a raised hand.
“Talk,” Janus told Ryler.
“Get me into this and the other facility, and Nikandros will get our families off Irkalla before the purge. Anyone you want, up to two hundred people and including you, relocated to the Cult homeworld of Lumiara.”
“You son of a garbage compactor,” Janus said. “It was never about winning the Trials, was it?”
Ryler swallowed and looked away. It was nice to know there was enough of him left to feel shame. “We weren’t sure you could make it. The compartmentalists may be wrong in their approach, but they have more means and more people than we do.”
“Nikandros thought we were a bad bet,” Mick said.
“No,” Janus said, shaking his head. “Nikandros thought we were good bait.”
The team looked at Ryler.
Ryler nodded.
“I understood about half of what you all are talking about,” Koni said, beads of sweat hanging from her forehead. The combat stims were losing effect. “Is this not a good thing? We are in an ancient facility full of unknown treasures, and you are being offered a bribe that would protect your families.”
“It wouldn’t save our people,” Janus said.
“It is better to have a poor choice than no choice, Janus,” Koni said, to which Janus could only bow his head in acknowledgment.
“There’s also the matter of Ryler hiding things from us again,” Janus said. “Who’s to say he couldn’t have used the leverage we got from fighting the comps’ pet river monster to avoid the ambush altogether?”
“I could have,” Ryler said, and Janus felt a flush of hot Invarian anger curl his hands into fists. “But that wouldn’t have given us the advantages using the transit system will.”
Janus was about to snap that twelve Verazlan rangers might feel otherwise, but he was stopped by Koni’s laughter. “I see your mistake, Janus Invarian, even though you are blind to it. You are a Promethean, yes? This colors your world in ways you are not aware of. Mick is a Hunter. Lira is more like you than you think, but she is noble-born, same as I am, while I am Verazlan with all my heart and soul.” She turned her gaze to Ryler, and Janus saw tiredness with hints of fury in her eyes. “This one belongs to the Cult. It is not his fault; it is yours for treating him as something other than what he aspires to be.”
The conversation continued, but Koni’s admonition stuck with Janus. It was true that he’d hoped Ryler was somehow being turned back into his childhood friend, just like he’d hoped the discovery she was the externality would sway Koni away from the more toxic parts of her heritage, but maybe that had been as foolish to expect as the Cult thinking a Promethean wouldn’t spread knowledge that might set the world on fire.
Again, he felt like he was feeling the pieces of some great engine in the dark and that if only he could figure out how they worked, he could put them together and make this world and many others a better place.
The more wishful part of him hoped that, if he did, they could all one day go home.
***
The train car slowed to a stop over several kilometers before pulling into a clean and spacious station. “How in the void is this place so clean?”
“Robots,” Ryler said, stepping out onto the platform.
“Not like ‘self-aware nanomachines that might swarm like living creatures and eat people” robots, right?” Mick asked. “Because we’ve done that one.”
“They’re simple virtual intelligences tied to a pre-programmed maintenance program,” Ryler said. “The ancients weren’t idiots. The program was probably written by an AI.”
Janus checked his wrist comm’s mapping function. There was a noosphere here, although it was passkey-protected, and Janus couldn’t log in. The dead-reckoning feature on his mapping application told him they were roughly where Ryler had said they’d be, well on their way to the border town of Qimmiq Port. “Do you know how this place is laid out?”
“I have the network’s encryption keys, hold on,” Ryler said.
“Looks like you planned for everything,” Lira said, giving Janus a sideways glance.
Janus nodded.
A moment later, the whole team received the codes.
Janus took Koni to the facility’s medical bay where, to his delight and after a short inspection, an auto-surgical suite put Koni under and opened her leg back up, repairing the hasty work he’d done and even replacing some of the missing chips of bone with synthetic bio-plastic.
Apparently, it could have printed actual bone, but the med-bay’s organic storage had apparently failed in the past two thousand years, which was actually reassuring.
“Boss,” Mick said over the comm. “You have to come see this.”
“Where are you?”
“Mission equipment vault,” Mick said.
Janus checked the facility map. It wasn’t far. He looked at Koni, who was just coming around, and said, “You going to be okay?”
Koni gave him a medicated thumbs up.
“I’ll be right back,” Janus said, patting her shoulder.
He followed the network’s directions past the main laboratories, the ops center, and the mess hall to reach the mission equipment vault on the facility side of the security checkpoint and the main exterior access.
The mission equipment vault contained everything the scientists and explorers of the ancient past thought they would need to study the planet and, later, fight the plague. There were advanced weapons, futuristic medical kits, adaptive tool kits, and scanners whose functions he could have spent days figuring out, but that wasn’t what stopped Janus less than a meter inside the doorway because there, stored in pods to preserve them possibly until the end of time, were aspirant suits, the same kind he’d worn on Irkalla or possibly more advanced.
There were dozens of them.
“Never thought I’d be so glad to see a void suit,” Janus said.
Mick’s grin looked like it might split his face open. “Wait until you see what’s in the vehicle bay.”