Prometheus Base
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.3.13 Interstellar
The team split up, with Janus, Lira, and Syn in one group, Mick, Ava, and Raul in the other. The Hunters would clear a path to the vehicle hangar in case a western departure turned out to be more advantageous. Janus’s group headed for dome admin to find out what had happened to the people of the dome.
Prometheus Base was a different place entirely with the lights on. Dark passages that had swallowed their shoulder lamps turned out to just be spacious and airy. Walls with half-glimpsed images were actually covered in large murals depicting Prometheans working in factories and laboratories, or more idealistic depictions of people in space suits helping others climb or get up out of the dust.
Stealing fire and giving it to the men and women of Irkalla was a recurring theme. It was almost like they were daring the gods to strike them down.
Syn’s improvised program also produced eerie results. She looped the ghost images of the bodies they found through Janus’s VI and the holoprojection system to recreate the moments before their deaths.
Most of the time, all it produced were a few sparkles in the air where someone had been killed, but when they came across larger piles of bodies, they watched the citizens of Prometheus Base getting herded toward the hub by armed men and women in space activity suits.
Anyone who resisted was shot and dragged to the side.
“Can you use the security system to find out who they are?” Janus asked Syn, pointing at one of the attackers.
“Yes and no,” Syn said. “I’ve been looking, and they’re all aspirants, but some of them haven’t run in the Trials for a long time.”
“What’s a long time?” Lira asked.
“Fifty years,” Syn answered.
Janus looked at the frozen image of the attackers. They didn’t look much older than him—no more than ten years at the outside. Their skills, though… The killers seemed to be smooth and practiced in their work. On they drove the inhabitants of the dome, forcing them inward and down, responding with escalating violence when the Prometheans fought back.
And then it stopped.
No more bodies.
No more ghost images.
“What do you think happened?” Janus asked.
“Nothing good,” Lira said.
It was as if, by crossing into the hub of Prometheus Base, all those people had just disappeared. If the dome wasn’t intact, Janus might have believed in a sudden decompressive event. If the gas composition hadn’t been loaded with organic compounds, Janus could have told himself they’d just been taken away.
He was starting to think his dream of the underworld hadn’t been that far off. All that biomass beneath them had to have come from somewhere. In ten years, with the right access to water and light, it was feasible that it was just overgrowth of spilled algae-forms and vertical farms, but only just.
“Janus,” his father said as a recording cached in the hub noosphere downloaded to his wrist-comm. “I think your mother and I may have made a mistake. We gathered as many former aspirants here as we could, thinking that they would be able to help us without the cult interfering. We didn’t think so many of them would turn on us. There are people here I can only describe as zealots. I’m afraid something terrible is going to happen. Ivan tried to warn us… I hope he gets you out safely. We didn’t realize—”
The recording cut off, leaving them none the wiser to the doom that had come to Prometheus.
Then they found the empty crates, and the tunnels, and everything was made clear.
“Those bastards,” Lira said, looking into a steel shipping container that had been left open in the street.
Janus closed his eyes as his mind put the picture together. His dome, his parents, and dozens of aspirants from around Irkalla had gathered here to do something they’d known would displease the cult. It had been controversial enough that Uncle Ivan and maybe others had informed the cult, who had showed up in force with a small army of dusters who knew how to take control of a dome, something that hadn’t been done in a hundred years.
But there had been over a hundred thousand people in Prometheus Base, and while the initial shock of armed invaders had kept the population docile, it would only have been a matter of time before people started to fight back and escape.
So the cult soldiers released mature triliths inside the dome.
Janus didn’t know how they’d kept the triliths calm for shipment, or if the creatures had been grown and trained somehow, but the results were the same. The hub of Prometheus Base was a slaughterhouse. Doors were caved in with metal-tipped claws, and where the doors were successfully barricaded, the triliths went through the walls. Janus and the others found some wrist-comms in the mess, but never attached to their original bodies, and the ghost images of triliths as tall at the shoulder as Janus was standing up had them jumping at every turn. The creatures had gone into some kind of feeding frenzy before digging down through elevator shafts and hardened floors to get at the farming and recycling systems that sustained the settlement, as well as wrecking the bioreactors. Some of the cult soldiers had died, but most had just held the perimeter, cutting people down when they tried to flee.
“Well, this is it,” Janus said, looking up at the dome administration building, then at Lira. “This is where our parents died.”
“Yeah,” Lira said. She’d grown increasingly quiet as they’d made their way to the site.
Janus knew what he would find in the tower: some piece of his parents, murdered while they tried to protect as many people as they could. Would Lira’s mother be among the victims or the perpetrators? “We may not understand everything that happened here that day. We probably don’t have to. She was your mother. It’d be a shame to have come all this way without saying goodbye.”
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Lira nodded.
Janus opened the dome emergency interface and led them through the building.
There were bodies scattered throughout dome admin. The ones on the ground floor had been dragged away or at least partially eaten, but when they exited the elevator on the floor that had been home to the councilor’s offices, they found more intact bodies.
Most of them had been unarmed or had their weapons taken from them by their killers. Most of them had been shot in the back. They found Lira’s mother in front of the Council chambers, her desiccated hand still clutching a gun.
She’d been shot dozens of times from the front.
She’d been defending the Prometheans.
Janus touched Lira on the shoulder as she sank to her knees and wept. “I’m going to go check on my parents,” he said.
She sniffed and nodded, and Janus carefully walked around the two of them and into the place Prometheans had once looked to for leadership.
His parents were there, in the center of the room. It looked a lot like the Council room back in Prime Dome, where he’d been first deposed, then elevated. In this one, his parents had died. Janus laughed. He was no forensic scientist, but it looked like they’d died fighting over who would protect the other, and collapsed in each other’s arms. He felt tears in his eyes, and tried to look at his father and mother and think of the love they’d had for each other, for their children, and for Irkalla, instead of letting the hate of this moment stain him.
What was clear was that both sides believed in what they were doing. No amount of ghost footage or recordings could capture the amount of fear and pain that had been inflicted on this place for reasons that were still unclear. He walked back out into the hallway and found Lira standing, her tears wiped away, and her eyes steady. “We won’t learn anything more, here,” he told her. “Your mother was an aspirant. She spent her life helping people, and she died the same way.”
“Yeah,” Lira repeated, looking up. “The past is always messier than you imagine, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Janus agreed.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you all these years, Janus,” Lira said, her voice flat and lifeless. “I’ll try to make up for it if I can.”
“I know you will,” Janus said, punching her shoulder. “Come on. We know what they did. Let’s go find out why.”
***
It would take them another hour to reach the waypoint for the hidden lab. Mick and the two Hunters had already reached the hangar and confirmed there were enough vehicles there for them to use, if they needed them.
Janus had other worries, though. The biomass below them had shifted, and Janus had a bad feeling that he knew exactly what it was.
“Hey, Mick?” he said, over the comm.
“What’s up, Janus?”
“Imagine for a moment a herd of triliths were trapped inside a radius, unable to get out. What would they do?”
“Well, for starters, they’d consume all the biomass they could get their claws on, as well as any stone or metal they needed to molt into larger shells. There would be some infighting and cannibalism, and some of that would go toward reproduction as well, but they’d mostly go dormant once they ran out of food.”
“And what would it take to wake them up?” Janus asked.
Beneath them, the biomass shifted again, although it was no more than a few individuals shifting between rooms.
“It would take a lot,” Mick said. “They’re animals, after all. They’re only going to hunt if the energy gain is worth it.”
“But they could do it fast?” Janus asked.
“Oh, yeah!” Mick said. “I know at least two Hunters who nearly died when the rocks they’d decided to sit on woke up.”
“How many are we talking about?” Ava said, breaking in on the conversation.
Thousands, Janus realized. An entire herd gorged on the lives of my people. “Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out.”
They continued toward the lab, one sector over and four levels down, bringing them four levels closer to the horde of dormant triliths.
“Here we are,” Syn said, looking over at him. “This is the space between bulkheads six-twenty and six-twenty-one.”
The wall was decorated with another mural, this time a classical depiction of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus. “Most people get the story wrong,” Janus said, touching the mural. The wall sunk inward when he touched it before sliding out of the way.
Lights flickered on, revealing a small but well-appointed laboratory between the two public spaces.
It was a familiar space to Janus. His parents had recorded most of their videos here.
“So, what’s the real story?” Syn asked.
Janus smiled as he looked at his parents’ workspace. “Most people think humans were living in caves and that Prometheus’s transgression was giving technology to primates, but humans had already developed fire when Zeus took it from them. Prometheus just stole it back.”
Lira looked at him sideways. “That makes Prometheus seem like more of a good guy than the versions I’ve heard.”
Janus grinned. “Maybe that’s the local version. In any case, here we are,” he said, walking into the lab.
A hologram of his mother appeared, shoulders back and hands thrust into the pockets of her lab coat. “Welcome home, Janus.”
His father appeared in a desk chair closer to the research terminals. “Welcome home, son.”
His mother continued. “We hid this lab and made a duplicate of our experiment in case my brother’s warnings come to pass. We don’t know what the cult did to us; I’m hoping they were satisfied with abducting key personnel and left the dome intact, but there was always a risk they would try to erase us completely. You’ll find memory cards on this table with all our research pre-loaded onto them. Any one of them should be enough for a settlement like Beta Station or Prime Dome to reproduce our results.”
“We built a mass accelerator,” Janus’s father said. “You’ll have seen the maintenance access towers around the dome. It has the side effect of keeping triliths away, and we’ve encouraged the rumor that our work centered on chemical compounds, but the truth is far simpler.”
Anika Invarian looked at her husband and smiled before looking at Janus. “We rediscovered ion propulsion. It’s not enough to leave Survivor’s Refuge, but it would make us an interplanetary species again. We could leave this place and find somewhere humans could focus on advancement instead of only surviving!”
Janus could feel the optimism and excitement in the room as his parents continued to talk of the possibilities of new technology, from century-ships to more exotic rediscoveries like anti-matter and negative gravity. Everything had seemed possible to them.
It made him think of his conversation with Nikandros, over a month ago. Their hopes had exceeded their reach.
“What do we do?” Lira asked.
Janus looked at Syn, then at the memory cards plugged into the nearest research terminal. They were bulkier than the normal ones he was used to seeing, like they’d been made to survive the void and daylight and anything else the world could throw at them. “We steal fire.”
***
SSFG-04 Survivor’s Voice
Orbit of Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.3.13 Interstellar
On the bridge of the Survivor’s Voice, the captain of the ship looked up from his connection to the ship’s systems and said, “They’ve broken the administrative lock on the dome and opened the sealed lab. We can finally finish erasing the stain of Prometheus from the planet’s surface.”
“Now, now, Captain,” Architect Donnika said. “They were worthy children of the Survivor, brought into being on the wrong planet at the wrong time.”
“Yes, Architect,” the captain said. He didn’t agree. In his opinion, threats to the program had to be cleansed in fire, but Donnika’s word on doctrine was as absolute as his command of this ship. “Your will?”
“Deploy the beacon,” the architect said. “Let’s see what Nikandros’s emissary is made of.”
The frigate’s automated armory loaded a seismic charge into the port-side aft missile battery and fired with a mere impulse of the captain’s thoughts.
With no atmosphere to worry about, the missile was able to take a direct arc from the ship to the surface, saving its fuel for a short retro-burn that deployed the seismic charge as efficiently as possible, almost dead center in the defunct settlement known as Prometheus Base.