New Prometheus, The Reef

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.3 Interstellar

The inner door to New Prometheus opened smoothly, somewhat allaying Janus’s fears that everything had gone to the void in the weeks he’d been gone. The interior did the rest. While the Irkallan expatriates had come from settlements across the northern hemisphere of their homeworld, they’d decided to pattern New Prometheus after the old. The walls had a base coat of white and were covered with murals, many of them modeled after the footage Janus and his team had brought back from Irkalla. There were paintings of engineers building ships, aspirants lifting people out of the dust, and Prometheus stealing fire from the hearth of the gods. There were also Crossroads traders, Mercurian scavengers, Gracian exemplars, and a number of other representatives of settlements Janus had never visited. The rooms in Cult colonies had squared corners; New Prometheus was built to Irkallan standards, with rounded corners that were easier to keep clean.

Janus stood there, letting the sights, sounds, and smells of New Prometheus wash over him. There weren’t as many unknowns here as in the crevasses and cracks of the pseudo-temperate zone outside the borehole or of any of the micro-biomes out in the snow, but there was more color for his eyes to latch on to, familiar faces to recognize, and the sound of running, laughing children.

“The snow gets to you, doesn’t it?” Mick asked.

Janus nodded. The surface of Lumiara was beautiful, but it was too pristine. After a few weeks, it started to blur together, an endless field of white—the padded walls of a cell for an active mind.

“Smells like asparagus, doesn’t it?” Syn said.

“Yeah,” Mick said.

“That’s the air filters,” Janus said. “Either that or aeroponics overproduced, the mess hall served it, and the smell is coming from the water drains.”

“Ew,” Syn said.

Janus grinned. He’d cleaned his share of gray water systems back on Irkalla. Asparagus was near-luxurious compared to some of the things he’d smelled.

The four of them walked deeper into the colony. New Prometheus had seventy-five meters of frontage facing the borehole, but it was dug over one hundred and twenty meters into the ice. That was space enough for the two hundred refugees the Cult had moved from Irkalla. That was enough room for residences, offices, maintenance facilities, green spaces, and recreational facilities. They depended on the rest of The Reef for power and heat, and Janus hated that, but they were still digging—carefully—to close the gap to self-sufficiency.

The people they came across greeted them, although few actually approached Janus to talk to him. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly. When people engaged with them, he called them by name and asked them about their time in the colony, with the same interest they had in his trips. It all came from an app Syn programmed for him, and the residents probably knew he didn’t know all of them, but at least using the software didn’t make his eyes light up.

Then again, he knew he’d been overawed the first time he’d met people like Architect Nikandros or Councilor Bennin, and they’d probably used the same type of trick.

“What are you smirking about?” Syn asked.

“Nothing,” Janus said. “Just remembering how dumb I was two and a half years ago.”

“Still smarter than Mick,” Syn said.

Janus smirked. “Fury’s smarter than Mick.”

Fury chirped happily.

“S’truth, mates, although I’m too dumb to know what you’re talking about.”

The path to colony admin took them through the market. It was a simple affair, mostly simple tables made from scrap so the better materials could be used elsewhere.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You’re back,” a large woman in Pugarian brown said from her stand.

“Hey, Elsbeth,” Janus said. “I brought the shock net back.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course it worked,” Janus said with a grin. “I snapped some stills of a very stunned yeti. Want to see?”

“I want the rights to them,” the trader said, then looked at Mick’s bag. “You bring me anything?”

“Synth oil,” Janus said, handing her the shock net from his pack. “It’s for maintenance, not trading. Thanks for the trap.”

Elsbeth grunted. The Pugarian had come with them from Krandermore, and she’d been a little lost, at first, until Lira got overwhelmed by running the colony, and someone had to step in on inter-settlement trade. “You’re costing me money. I bet Lira you wouldn’t get the egalitarians to trade with you.”

“I didn’t. This fell off the back of a grav cart,” Janus said with a wink.

Elsbeth tapped the side of her nose. “Profit be with you, Janus Invarian.”

“Prosperous trades, El,” he answered.

He meant it. Not everyone was happy that a bunch of non-Cult savages had moved onto their precious temple world. It would have been perfectly understandable if they’d been religious fanatics instead of the descendants of scientists and engineers who got here on starships—the same people Janus descended from—but apparently, hate knew no boundaries as simple as a rational argument. Since the Cult ran on a form of digital direct democracy, it wasn’t just useful to trade with the other factions. Their survival depended on it.

Mick gave him a nudge. “You want to drop your stuff off first or go straight to colony admin?”

“Is Lee at the apartment?” Janus asked.

“You haven’t messaged her?” Syn asked. She punched him in the shoulder.

“Colony admin it is,” Mick said, shaking his head.

Janus gave Syn what he hoped was a comical apologetic shrug. The truth was, he was torn up about it. When Lira called for him, he’d wanted to ignore her and go straight home to see his son, Xander, and his sister, Callie. They were the two people who mattered the most to him in the world. It actually surprised him that he dreaded an encounter with Lee enough to delay that reunion. He couldn’t avoid it—even a yeti couldn’t get between him and his kid. He just couldn’t seem to win with Xander’s mother. If they hadn’t had a child together, he wouldn’t talk to her at all.

They continued past the environmental and maintenance sections, which included waste reclamation, and Janus stopped by to tell them about the smell and the incident at the front gate. There were smiles all around when he walked into the control room—after all, he was one of them, a mech who’d risen through hard work and some luck—and he spent a good ten minutes just talking to them before Lira comm’ed.

“What’s the holdup?” Lira asked.

“I’m on my way.”

“I can see you’re in environmentals, Janus. Did you need to borrow a wrench on your way to my office?”

Janus looked at the others and pointed to the ceiling, then at his eyes. Big Sister is watching us, he mouthed.

“Stop that,” Lira said. “Do you need time to recover from your trip before we talk?”

Janus hesitated, then said, “No. I’m fine.”

“Then get up here. I need you,” Lira said curtly before ending the call.

Janus said his goodbyes and hurried toward the administrative heart of the colony. It wasn’t like Lira to be this short with him. Normally, she was the first to tell him to rest after a trip. He mentally kicked himself for being complacent and, once he started looking for it, he picked up on the nervous tension in the air and the way the people who didn’t approach or greet him seemed to tense as he entered a compartment. It was something he would never have missed if he’d been visiting another settlement. Somehow, he’d fooled himself into thinking he didn’t need to be as alert when he came home.

“How bad is it?” he asked Syn.

“It’s not great,” she said. “Attacks on our systems are up. Most of it’s just probing—hackers trying to size us up without crossing any lines. Some of it’s been a little less friendly.”

“Any physical breaches?” he asked Mick.

The Hunter shook his head. “You know the Cult rules on violence between factions. Even the purgationists aren’t stupid enough to come near us, not after what you did to Red Donnika.”

The purgationists, Janus thought with a mental hiss. Factions rose and fell all the time within the Cult’s governance body, called the Consensus. The New Prometheans were an official voting faction; the purgationists had risen as a response, advocating for their expulsion from Lumiara without much caring about what happened after that.

They reached colony admin, and Janus stopped in front of the doors to gather his thoughts and switch gears from the intrepid aspirant to the more calculated emissary. Whatever was going on inside or outside the colony, he needed to deal with it fast. The Alignment only happened once a year, and they would need to leave the moment it started to give the expedition even a slim chance of reaching the Oracle and the Core in a single run.

He reached for the door panel, but it opened before his hand got that far, and the next thing he knew, he was face to face with fifteen-month-old Xander, swaddled in a Hunter wrap and slung to his mother’s chest. Xander’s face bloomed into a big grin as he reached for his father.

“Janus,” Lee said coolly. “I figured you’d come straight here instead of stopping by the apartment.”

“Lira’s waiting for us,” Janus said stiffly. “Can we talk later?”

“We can talk now,” she said, crossing her arms.

Janus felt himself go taut as his temper tussled with his sense of familial obligation. “Fine,” he said.

His attempt to avoid domestic strife out on the ice had failed. The war had come to him.