Prometheus Base

Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge

4452.3.12 Interstellar

They almost cut it too close. Ava, the Hunter who took over after Fred died, gave them forty-five minutes to cross the remaining one hundred kilometers. It would have been a good pace if they’d been rolling straight into an open hangar. As it was, they were going so fast they almost ran into a numberless horde of triliths.

It must have been a migratory instinct of some kind, but one minute the landscape was clear, the next there were rock monsters as far as the eye could see. Janus had never seen a river except in holos of Old Earth, but this was a flash flood, or a mudslide. There was no stemming it, they could only crank the accelerators and hang on.

The Hunter outrider on their right flank was bowled over in seconds. Amazingly, the driver survived the crash, rolling to her feet and running three steps before getting cut in half by a scything forelimb. The lone Hunter who’d lost his partner turned his lights on and lit a flare, maybe hoping to replicate Fred’s sacrifice, but there was nowhere to turn. Even Janus veered left and the trick worked; there were so many of the rock monsters that the whole convoy was overrun moments later. Janus was stuck inside the stampede, fast juveniles and massive adults passing and being passed on either side.

“Follow me!” Ava said, lighting a flare so the convoy could see her.

Janus turned toward the Hunter leader. Syn did, too, but a trilith headbutted her buggy from the side and spilled her into the dust. Janus looked back in horror as an adult as big as the front of a crawler bore down on her, then Mick appeared out of the herd and pulled the Betan onto his vehicle just in time to speed away, kicking up large clouds of dust.

“I can see the main dome!” Lira yelled over the comm.

Janus looked forward and saw she was right.

Unfortunately, it was still too far. While the main herd crashed onward, heading south, a small group of twenty or thirty juveniles had split off and was gaining on them. There were only two Hunters from their escort left, Ava and Raul, her gunner, and while Mick had handed his shatter-gun to Syn, she was doing minimal damage to the onrushing creatures.

They were going to die.

Then, as if they ran into an invisible wall, the triliths skidded to a halt and turned away, some of them stumbling or tripping over themselves.

Mick laughed. “It was true! They found a way to keep triliths out!”

Janus felt a flurry of emotions: grief, pride, relief, fear, and resignation all at once. No matter what they found here, his life and his family were going to change. The convoy drove through a line of evenly spaced towers, heading for the main dome.

***

Janus parked his buggy next to the others’ and dismounted, grabbing his pack and his toolkit. They were minutes away from sunrise and anything left on the buggies would be inaccessible until the next evening when, presumably, they would be trying to make it to Gemini Point without dying. The dome’s glass was intact, although completely polarized as was usually the case when it was unpowered. No engineer wanted a brownout to also expose a dome’s population to overheating and radiation.

The first thing he saw were the bodies. There were maybe a dozen of them, completely dessicated inside their suits, nine adults and three kids. Some of them had patches on their suit, signs of emergency repairs. Janus knelt by one of them and checked its status. No air left. They’d been trapped outside between the triliths and whatever was waiting for Janus inside the dome.

“Syn! We need you!” Ava comm’ed from the emergency entrance.

The Betan programmer hurried over, kicking up little clouds of dust.

Every dome planned for the possibility of a widespread failure, from a power outage to a full-scale collapse, and every dome had one or more emergency entrances built for that occasion. Designs varied, but they generally had long-lasting independent power supplies and heavy security that only relaxed in case the system went down.

It shouldn’t have been locked.

It definitely shouldn’t have been actively blocking Syn out, but after two attempts, Syn looked up in near panic and said, “I can’t get in.”

“What do you mean you can’t get in?” Ava asked. “It’s a damned emergency entrance!”

“I don’t know what to tell you!” Syn said. “It’s like the main dome is still active!”

Janus pushed his way past Mick, Lira, and Raul to see if he could help.

As soon as he stepped inside the entryway, the red emergency lighting turned green and the airlock’s outer door split open.

“What did you do?” Ava asked Syn.

“Nothing,” Syn said, looking back and realizing Janus was there. “I think it recognized him.”

The first rays of sunlight splashed against the darkened dome.

“We’ll figure it out later. Everyone get inside!” Ava said.

The six survivors of their expedition crowded into the airlock, and the outer doors sealed automatically once they were in.

“Anybody else a little weirded out by the dead dome acting like a live dome?” Syn asked.

The chamber hissed as air was pumped in, bringing the pressure up to one-third of a Standard atmosphere.

“Think it’s breathable?” Mick asked.

“No one take their helmet off!” Ava snapped. The Hunter leader was on edge, and Janus could well understand why. She’d started as part of an eight-person escort and they were down to two.

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The inner doors to Prometheus Base split open. After twelve years, Janus had finally made it home.

“Void take me,” Ava said.

There were dozens of bodies, some in suits, some not. They were piled up to either side of the entrance. Most had been shot. Had they thought they could escape, only to find the door locked? Or had the danger come through the door to find them?

His VI activated, and his mother stood in the darkened open space beyond.

Ava drew a pistol and pointed it at the hologram.

“You can see that?” Janus said in surprise.

“Of course I can see it!” Ava snapped. “We can all see it!”

The others nodded. His VI was interfacing with the dome’s few active systems, including the emergency holoprojection system.

“Hello, Janus,” his mother said. Her voice was sad, unlike any of the recordings he had of her, or the recordings she’d made for him before. “It has been twelve years, nine months, and twelve days since you were last here. This station’s network is on standby, and I can’t find records of us interacting in that time. I can only assume that Ivan kept his promise to keep you and your sister safe, and that your father and I died for our ‘transgressions’ against the Survivor.”

Tears started to well in Janus’s eyes.

His mother continued. “I have a limited ability to interface with these systems. You’ll have to get power back online, then make your way to the space hidden between bulkheads six-twenty and six-twenty-one on sublevel four. Your father and I constructed a backup laboratory there. If it’s still intact, and the cult wasn’t as thorough in erasing us as they hoped, that’s where you’ll find our memorial and your legacy.”

The image cut out, replaced by two waypoints that floated in his retinal display—one for the nearest maintenance control room, and one for the hidden lab.

“Who was that?” Ava asked, keeping her pistol out. “And how is this station still active?”

“It was my mother,” Janus said. “As for how this place is active…” he looked at Syn.

The Betan shrugged. “Capacitors take a long time to degrade. There could be just enough power to run this failsafe loop, but nothing else.”

“So we shouldn’t expect other surprises?” Ava asked.

“I definitely didn’t say that,” Syn said, looking at Mick. “That barrier that kept the triliths out, that should have broken down by now, right?”

“From what I heard,” Mick said. “It wasn’t like the Prometheans to hold back something that could have protected other settlements if they figured out a way to do it at scale. Would have put us out of business,” he said, looking at Ava, “but I suppose we could have learned new tricks, and there would still have been the routes between domes.”

Janus hadn’t thought of that. He’d assumed the cult and his uncle were somehow responsible for what happened here, but if Mick was right, the Hunters had had a powerful incentive to stop Prometheus Base from sharing their discovery.

“At least we won’t have to deal with triliths in here,” Mick said, as if sensing the others’ apprehension.

“Right,” Lira said. “Because in twelve years they haven’t found a single way in.”

“Don’t forget the possibility of a scientific experiment gone wrong!” Syn said cheerfully.

“I’m more worried about the cult than triliths or nanites right now,” Janus said.

Ava looked to her companion, who nodded and drew his sidearm. “Any of you aside from Mickel know how to shoot?”

“I do,” Lira said, and Ava handed her a shatter-gun.

“Tink-tink,” Mick said, punching Lira in the shoulder before checking the charge on his weapon.

“Syn and Janus, keep an eye on environmentals and security systems. We’ve only got enough air for a few hours without plugging into some kind of scrubber. Mickel and Lira will handle the rock monsters. We’ll take care of any human ones.”

“Sounds good,” Janus said, pulling out a scanner.

“Move out,” Ava said.

With suit lights turned up bright and weapons ready, the team made their way through the defunct settlement toward the maintenance control room.

For Janus, the fear of any number of dangers Prometheus Base might throw at them battled with the elation of being here. The collapse of his birth dome had overshadowed almost every aspect of his life, at least the parts he could remember, but while the trauma and consequences were real, he’d known very little about the actual event. The same could be said for Lira, he supposed. She had to be just about shaking out of her suit with anticipation.

“How’s atmo?” Ava asked.

Janus looked down at his readout. “Thin, stale, and moldy. There’s a higher than normal concentration of carbon dioxide, dihydrogen, and methane hanging in the air.”

Ava stopped. “What does that mean?”

Janus grimaced. It had been more comfortable to talk about chemicals than effects and causes, but he’d worked in dome reclamation, and that meant he was intimately familiar with the processes involved. “If we take our helmets off, it’s going to smell bad and we’ll be short of breath. We might get sick. There was a widespread loss of pressure around the time environmental management broke or shut down. The dome polarization and low air pressure will have slowed down decomposition, but a lot of things decayed around that same time.”

“You mean people,” Lira said, steely voiced.

“I mean both animal and plant matter,” Janus said, although it would take more plant matter than meat to produce the same amount of gases. “But yes. It would take a lot more bodies than the ones we saw by the door to leave this kind of air composition after a decade. We’ve known from the start people died during the dome’s collapse. This is confirmation.”

The team looked at each other in silence for several moments.

“Let’s get to maintenance control,” Janus said. “The sooner we get power restored, the sooner we can clear the air and find out what happened.”

***

It was slow going, making their way through an unpowered dome in the dark. Some doors had manual cranks that could be used in case of emergency. Others, like the blast doors that sealed-off doomed sections in case of fire or breach, were too heavy to move and had to be bypassed. It meant backtracking several times to find a new route, but they gradually made progress toward their objective.

Prometheus Base itself was eerie in ways Beta Station hadn’t been. Aside from the first corpses they’d encountered near the emergency exit, they hadn’t seen anyone, living or dead. There were scorch marks and signs of gunfire, as well as places where the walls or deck plating had been scratched as if triliths had gotten into the dome after all, but if there had been a massacre here, the cult had done some kind of cleanup on their way out.

Finally, they reached that sector’s maintenance control room.

“You two, get this open,” Ava said, pointing to Janus and Syn.

Janus pulled a prybar from his toolkit without complaint. Under the circumstances, he preferred to leave the people with guns undistracted than shirk a little labor. He used the prybar to pop open the door control panel. He tried cranking the wheel, but it was stuck.

“Hold on,” Syn said, setting her prybar in the crack between the doors. “On three?”

“Three!” Janus said, putting all his weight into the crank while Syn pushed on the bar and the doors ground open about half a meter before they froze up. “Is that enough?”

Ava had already gone inside, with Mick and Lira close following. Syn went next. Janus looked at Raul, who tossed his head toward the door. “Get in there. I’ll go last,” he said.

Janus nodded and squeezed through.

The room was wrecked. There were six or seven bodies there, fallen to the ground or slumped over control panels, and gunfire had damaged most of the terminals and displays. “Damn,” Janus said.

“We’ll be fine,” Syn said, eyes glowing blue from using her wrist-comm and retinal display. “I mean, of course it’s not fine. These were people. But the damage to the room is superficial.” She made a swiping gesture in the air and several of the damaged terminals flickered.

Syn frowned. “There’s some sort of administrative lockdown. Janus?”

“I can try,” he said.

Syn shared her display with him. The room, as seen through his retinal implant, lit up with holographic panels that gave limited information on the status of the facility.

Janus tried logging in with his identity credential, the same way he would with any protected system, and the administrative lock was instantly lifted. “Okay, I’m in. Let me see what we can do to get this place running again.”