Tartarus, Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.10 Interstellar
Janus sighed. There were some problems you just couldn’t ignore. He knocked back his fourth shot, set it down, and turned to face his nemesis. “What do you want, Lira?”
She was a few inches shorter than him, so she had to lift her chin slightly to look down on him. “I just wanted to see what a loser looks like up close.”
Janus took in the hatred in Lira’s eyes, the scorn of her curled upper lip, her invasion of his space taunting him to shove her while twelve years of Prime Dome living told him dome-sec would blame him no matter who started the fight.
“Come on, Lira,” Ryler said, stepping between them. “It’s a big bar. We’re just here to have a drink.”
“I don’t need you to defend me,” Janus said, gently pulling Ryler back.
“Is there a problem?” Craig said, walking up to stand beside his second.
“Aren’t the two of you supposed to be training for the Trials?” Uncle Ivan asked.
“There’s no problem,” Janus said before Craig and Lira could focus on his uncle. “We’re just going to finish our drinks and go somewhere else.”
Lira looked at him with utter contempt. “You really are a coward, Invarian. You’re outsider trash. I guess it’s fitting you’re going to be sorting trash while Craig and I go win the Trials for Prime Dome.”
“What did you say?” Janus asked, blood rushing to his face. His hands balled into fists of their own accord, and he felt himself tensing to finally put Lira back into her place.
“She said she’s not worthy of being this dome’s aspirant, or even his second,” Uncle Ivan said, pulling Ryler aside to stand next to his nephew.
“Who in the void’s name are you?” Lira asked, glaring at him.
“Lira—” Craig started, apparently recognizing Uncle Ivan and turning pale, but Janus’s uncle cut him off.
“Getting my nephew bumped down to sorting? That was smart,” Uncle Ivan said. “You didn’t have the leverage to do it yourself, so you convinced your friend Craig to do it because his daddy is a sector administrator and he lets you look over personnel assignments.” He looked at Craig. “Did she tell you to assign an extra QA to this sector, or did you figure that out on your own?”
“You don’t have to answer that!” Lira snapped.
“We should go,” Craig said. For some reason, Janus’s uncle was scaring him, although all he was doing was talking.
Uncle Ivan grinned. It made the big man seem even bigger, and people around the group were starting to back away. “That’s the thing, Ms. Allencourt. Being smart and knowing how the system works was the right way to deal with Janus. He’s politically naive, just like his parents were. And even though there’s more to this than you think, and the cult is pulling your strings, I’d have let it slide and cleaned it up once you were gone, but you had to come over here and gloat, didn’t you?”
Janus looked at Ryler, and his friend shrugged. It was like an impostor had stolen his uncle’s identity. His words were sharp and authoritative, like he had the whole dome by the chassis and all he had to do was squeeze.
Lira sneered at Uncle Ivan, refusing to give ground. “If you know so much, you know I’m untouchable, so it doesn’t matter if—”
There was no warning. One minute, Lira was mouthing off to Janus’s uncle, and the next she was reeling back, almost falling to the floor until a woman behind her caught her by the arm. Blood was spurting from her nose, and her eyes had gone wild. “Security!” she screeched.
Janus stepped forward to… he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he had to stop this before it escalated.
“Security! I’ve been assaulted!” Lira yelled, activating the panic function on her wrist-comm.
Ryler pulled Janus back.
“I want that man arrested! And the people with him!” Lira snapped as two members of dome security pushed through the crowd. “I have witnesses!”
Craig wasn’t saying a word, he was just trying to pull Lira away but she was dripping blood and wouldn’t have it.
“You should take me in,” Uncle Ivan told the dome-sec officers, holding out the wrist implanted with his ID. “Just me.”
One officer grabbed his shoulder while the other scanned his wrist, then frowned and scanned it again.
“Take me in now, officers,” Uncle Ivan growled, and to Janus’s utter surprise the officers looked at each other, as worried as Craig, and obeyed, pulling Uncle Ivan through the crowd.
“That’s right!” Lira yelled as Craig dragged her the other way. “You’re trash, Invarian! You, and your whole outsider family, and the dome you came from, and I’m going to see that every one of you pays for what you did!”
“Come on, Janus,” Ryler said, paying the tab with a gesture and leading him toward the exit.
Janus let himself be led. He thought he was going to spend that night getting drunk, getting closer to Ryler and his uncle, and maybe coming up with a plan to fit the dome’s expectations for Callie’s sake. Instead, he’d found out he would never fit in, at least not if people like Lira had anything to say about it, and now his uncle was headed to jail.
***
The temperature was dropping, but things were already heating up inside the dome before Ryler and Janus had made it a block away. Janus heard the news spread, saw the residents’ eyes glowing blue as they accessed some blog post or video on the noosphere and jumped to their own conclusions.
Someone had attacked the lead aspirant! No, it was his second. Either that or the aspirant had gotten injured protecting someone else.
Who was responsible? An immigrant. A jilted lover. A saboteur from another dome, perhaps.
The rumors were running faster than facts.
Janus had thought this was the worst night of his life right up until the moment he saw a trio of outsiders—Beta Station survivors, from their coveralls—get surrounded by a group of angry locals, and he and Ryler had to duck down a side street instead of taking the direct route home. This night was going to hurt a lot more people than just him. He saw another group vandalizing a store, and a third group actually set fire to a waste collection unit. Those were just the incidents Janus and Ryler saw; hazard alerts were popping off all over the sector.
Callie pinged him on his comm, but Janus didn’t have the attention to spare. He sent her a short message. I’m safe. I’m heading home. Don’t leave the hab.
“This is crazy,” Ryler said.
Janus wished he was more surprised.
Over two hundred thousand residents lived in Prime Dome’s main enclosure, with an average of thirty thousand transients and another fifty to sixty thousand people squashed into outlying shelters and pressurized farms. It was a small population compared to what Janus’s history classes had taught him about Old Earth, but it had to be the largest single settlement humanity had left since the Survivor took the remnant and left the genocidal war with the machines behind.
Settlements like Prime Dome were more fragile than they looked, prone to cascade failures like the events that destroyed Prometheus Base. They lived on a narrow margin of safety, extinction dogging their steps, and if they didn’t place in that year’s Trials—if they couldn’t participate because the lead aspirant wasn’t vacuum qualified—then the entire dome would suffer.
“Why did he do it?” Ryler asked.
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“What?”
“Your uncle. He must have had a good reason.”
Janus looked around the corner of the warehousing facility they’d gone around, then waved Ryler forward. “You give the old man that much credit, Ryler? He was pounding shots as fast as he could order.”
“And you don’t accord him the respect he’s due,” Ryler said, more sharply than Janus was used to from his friend.
Was he right, or was it just his weird religious bias showing its head?
If he were to give Ivan more laurels than he deserved, he might say Janus had been about to take a swing at Lira and his uncle had done the job for him, including getting sent to jail. What Janus couldn’t account for were all those things he’d said about the Cult of the Survivor and Prime Dome politics. Where had that come from? Craig and Lira hadn’t tried to deny his accusations, but how would Ivan, an outsider like him, know anything about what a pair of Hub socialites were plotting the same day it happened? “Look, maybe there’s more to this than my uncle losing his temper, and maybe Lira had it coming, but none of that matters. He’s heading to jail, and I need to get back to Callie.”
“Agreed,” Ryler said. “For now.”
Janus’s heart rose into his throat as a pair of dome-sec troopers with stun rods rounded the corner and yelled. “You there! Stop!”
“Do we run?” Ryler asked.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Janus said, raising his hands. There were places to hide inside the dome, but not many, and Janus didn’t have that kind of contact with the underworld.
“Janus Invarian? We’ve been ordered to escort you back to your quarters,” the dome-sec troopers said, approaching.
“What? Why?” Janus asked, putting his hands back down.
“Didn’t ask and no one told me,” the trooper answered. “Now come on. Dome admin is about to slap a curfew down on this whole sector.”
“I’d better head home,” Ryler said.
The trooper looked him over, eyes glowing blue as he accessed Ryler’s personnel files. “You do that, Mr. Abraxxis. Maybe reconsider keeping company with outsiders in the future.”
Ryler looked at the trooper with contempt. “One of these days, trooper, you’re going to feel ashamed of what you just said. For your sake, I hope it’s soon.”
***
Callie looked up as Janus walked into the apartment and met his eyes. She looked relieved, then worried again. “Uncle Ivan?”
Janus shook his head and locked the door. “Dome security took him to lock up. He punched Lira.”
“What?” Callie said, sitting up. “Why?”
Janus wasn’t sure himself. He was coming down off his earlier buzz, and the alcohol drained the anger away with it, leaving him lost and a little nauseous. He needed food and sleep, and he still needed to be up for early shift in less than seven hours.
The last thing he wanted to do was explain to his sister the many ways in which he’d failed her, but hiding things didn’t fix them. The odds of this problem just “going away” had gone from slim to none.
He took a deep breath and told her everything, starting from his verbal battle with Lira and Craig that morning, to his getting demoted and the meaning behind it. Then he told her about their uncle and everything they had to deal with. He also told her about the groups of Prime Dome dwellers accosting outsiders on the streets, and how she’d have to be careful of her surroundings on her way to school.
Her new school.
He hadn’t been sure what to expect from her. His sister was a skinny little thing, but she was tough. She rarely asked for help, she got angry instead of scared, and she always fought when cornered.
The only thing he hadn’t expected from her was calm resignation. “It’s going to be okay.”
“What? How is any of this okay?” Janus asked incredulously.
“I’ve got until next week. I can finish my project.”
“Your…” Janus was dumbstruck. “Callie, screw the project. We’ve got bigger issues.”
“No, we don’t,” Callie said firmly, balling her hands into fists on her knees. “The people here have always hated us, and this planet has been trying to kill us since before we were born. We do what Mom always said: we do our best, and we make things better.”
“And we trust other people to do the same?” Janus asked, finishing the quote.
“No,” Callie said, looking up at him, and it broke his heart. “We survive. We fight. We steal if we have to, and we move on if we’re not wanted. But until then, until people let us down, we do our best because that’s what Mom and Dad would have wanted.”
“Who taught you that?”
“Uncle Ivan,” Callie said.
Janus felt a flush of heat at the thought of Uncle Ivan teaching his particular brand of misanthropy to Callie while Janus was at work. It pissed him off that they’d built that kind of connection while Janus worked two shifts, and it only made him madder that Uncle Ivan was probably right.
Hard to be right from inside a jail cell, though.
Janus crossed his arms and leaned against the kitchen counter. “I’m not sure either of us should be taking advice from him right now.”
Callie shrugged. “And I think you’re too hard on him. He took care of us. In his own way, he probably thought he was taking care of us by hitting that b—”
“Easy now…” Janus said with a small grin. His sister could cuss up a storm. “Even if she deserves it.”
Callie stuck her tongue out at him, and they laughed. It felt good to have something to laugh about. “Hey, Janus?”
“Sup, Bug?”
“You ever wonder what happened to Prometheus Base? I mean, if we’d grown up there, we’d be normal, right? I wonder what that would have been like, sometimes.”
“I wonder about that, too,” Janus said. Unlike Callie, he did have some memories left of Prometheus, although they were the vague memories of a child. He thought his parents had been important, or doing important work, and he had a child’s nostalgia for the life they might have had. He had no idea why that time had ended, and Uncle Ivan had always refused to discuss it.
Janus wasn’t sure what was worse, having lost their chance at a normal life or not knowing why they’d lost it.
“I need to eat something and go to bed,” Janus said. “You should, too.”
“I already ate, and I’ve got work,” Callie said, pulling her goggles out of their carrying case. Janus realized she hadn’t been working on her secret project when he came home. She must have been worried.
Janus pulled a food packet from the cupboard. “Your boyfriend was with us at the bar.”
“What? Who?”
“Ryler. He was right there with me. You’re lucky he’s not here giving us a sermon on strength through adversity, except maybe you’d like that.”
“Okay, for one, he’s not my boyfriend!”
“But you have a big crush on him.”
“For the void’s sake, brothers are the worst! That was one stupid post two years ago! I was a kid, and now I’m a young adult and I know better. Also, is he okay?”
***
The early-shift workers tried to maintain their usual ribbing and ball-busting, but there was a pall over the banter. Janus had read the news feeds. Beyond the usual resentment of immigrants, people were scared about the heat levels, a sign of deeper problems with dome maintenance. The incident with Lira set them off. There had been several assaults, and two large fights broke out before dome-sec could enforce the curfew. The outsiders, used to clinging to each other for protection, surprised some would-be victimizers by fighting back. They gave as good as they got, and as many people ended up in the hospital or the holding cells on both sides.
Both sides blamed Janus and his uncle. Janus had never fit in, but that morning, he felt particularly alone.
Since no one wanted to talk to him, he locked his helmet in place and headed out early. He made it most of the way to the airlock when Meg, his shift supervisor, pinged him on his suit comm.
“Damn it, Janus! Slow down!”
He turned around to see his shift supervisor. She was shorter than him by a head, but her personality made up for the height differential.
She pointed to his helmet and mimed unsealing it.
Janus sighed. He should have more than enough oxygen for the shift, but it was still wasteful. “What’s up?” he asked, popping the seal.
“I need you to sit this shift out.”
“What? Why?”
“Just take a day off, Janus. Think of it as a vacation. Go spend time with your sister, or see if you can find out when your uncle is going to be arraigned. Same for main shift. Barry and I talked. Go home.”
Janus just stared at her. He’d gotten up early, despite the lack of sleep, the worry, and the slight headache, and checked the maintenance logs. He planned his route so he could knock out some quick fixes between actual maintenance tasks. It wasn’t a full optimization, because that would have meant ignoring systems that genuinely needed fixing, but he’d been willing to compromise, to do what he had to. “I can’t lose this job.”
Meg looked at him with pity in her eyes. “It’s not like that. Things are just… tense after last night, and tense people say and do stupid things. I don’t want an accident or a fight I can avoid by giving you a day off. It’s probably overdue.” She ran her hand over her short steel-gray hair. “Truth is, they could probably use someone like you over in sector maintenance. I hear they’re up to their asses in coolant failures.”
Janus looked Meg in the eyes, trying to decide whether she meant it, whether she was really trying to help him or if she was just trying to make her life easier at his expense. It would be easy for her to forget this conversation, say he missed work, and get him fired or reassigned like Lira had. Uncle Ivan and Callie both thought he was too trusting—politically naive, his uncle had said. Janus’s mom and dad had been naive, too. Given the opportunity to help each other, humans banded together for the common good. That was what his mother had thought, and now Prometheus Base was dead.
“You’re not alone, Janus,” Meg said. “There are people trying to help you, if you’ll let us. I’ve talked to Barry. He’s really sticking his neck out for you, and I’m going to tell dome-sec about Lira going after you in the locker room yesterday. I don’t know if it will make a difference, but we’re trying anyway.”
“Okay,” Janus said, letting his shoulders drop. His uncle was probably right, but even if most of the people in the dome were selfish, that didn’t mean they all were, and Janus didn’t want to live in a world where everyone was an enemy waiting to be discovered.
He was powerless, but that didn’t mean he had to live without hope.
“I’ll head back to the locker room and see what I can do for my family.”
“Good man,” Meg said, punching him in the shoulder. “And listen, I know this sucks.”
“Better than dead,” Janus said with a shrug.
A smile spread across her face.
“What?” Janus asked.
“Sometimes, it’s very obvious you're from Prometheus Base.”
He wasn't exactly sure what she meant by that.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Janus.”
“Better believe it. You know you’re going to fall behind on quotas without me.”
Meg smirked. “We’ll have to find a way to go on without you. The Survivor provides.”
“The void takes,” Janus said automatically and headed back to the lockers.