Experimental Dome, 210 Kilometers from Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.14 Interstellar
It took Janus four full hours to get the parts installed in the wrecked buggy and test it as best he could. The capacitors were charged. He ditched the solar cells, although he’d have kept them if he needed to make a more-than-one-day journey. He didn’t have a day tent or the knowledge to make one, so if he got caught out between the domes in daylight, he’d either have to find a nearby shelter or die.
The wheels he’d put on the buggy were slightly larger than the ones it was designed to use. He’d had to remove the dust guards to make them fit, and he would have been hesitant to take them on a long journey. The gas generator was supposed to be able to handle any kind of fuel up to certain tolerances, and he’d put temperature probes at the exhaust. It should be able to handle the methane and oxygen mixture, but it was all so much guesswork, so many things he would never have done under normal circumstances.
His best hope was for the buggy to break down within a few kilometers, close enough that he could make it back. It would be out of his hands, then. He’d used all the materials at hand to make this rig, and there was no replacing it without a fabricator and templates he didn’t have either. At least then, he’d have tried. It wouldn’t have been his fault he failed, and he’d have something to tell Callie when his uncle came to get him several days from now. He’d left most of the excess food and water behind, keeping just enough to get him through tonight.
Second best was for the improvised rocket fuel to detonate violently, killing him on the spot, because third best was getting stuck out there in the dust, with no shelter, no chance of making it to either dome, and cooking in his suit.
He didn’t even consider he might succeed as he assessed the risks. Doing this was inadvisable. There was a high chance of a catastrophic event. It was a red cell, through and through, and yet he still climbed onto the buggy and flipped on the power supply. All checks green, no excuses left. He glanced back at the experimental dome, then flipped the booster switch and fed a little of the methane and LOx mixture into the combustion chamber.
Because he was in vacuum, the gas turbine couldn’t function the way an atmospheric equivalent did. It had to keep the gas contained and under pressure, like a piston engine, until it was ignited and the turbine started producing power. From that point on, the gas had to be fed in continuously or the engine would stall—the same way an air-scooping engine flamed out, but with a harder restart.
As Janus hit the starter, the whole buggy lurched forward and he let go, allowing it to coast to a stop a few meters later. His heart was hammering, and he checked the gauges and the temperature sensor he’d installed for signs of instability, but everything was holding. Eight hours to make it back to Prime Dome. He swallowed, braced himself, and tried again.
The buggy threw itself forward like a man leaving the blocks at the sound of the starting gun. Janus gritted his teeth and held on, trying to follow the tracks that had led him here, wary of every shadow and dip revealed by the headlights. The generator was providing torque to the drive, voltage to the power supply, and air and water to the life-support system, although most of the latter was being vented. Janus kept the buggy going for several hundred meters before letting up. The engine stalled once more, the buggy rolled to a stop, and this time Janus quick-disconnected and got off to make an inspection of his work.
It was holding together. Survivor be praised, Janus said to himself without a trace of irony. The seals were intact—although he’d made sure to reinforce them beforehand—and the surface temperature of the exhaust was well within normal parameters, which was to say it would only burn a hole in his suit leg or hand if he touched it.
This was working. This was going to get him home.
He got back aboard, plugged in, and this time, he grinned. He was about to show Uncle Ivan and all those Primers what an outsider could do.
He opened the throttle, hit the starter, and the buggy took off, kicking up dust and swerving onto the tracks that Janus and his uncle had left just the day before.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Because he was using a mixture of methane and liquid oxygen instead of a purpose-made booster, and because he didn’t have an MFC to fall back on, Janus was forced to keep his feed rate and speed within narrow parameters. He had to keep the turbine turning at the most efficient rate it could handle without exceeding its heat tolerance, and he couldn’t stop. Starting the flow ate up nearly a whole percent of his fuel, so if he started and stopped over and over, he wouldn’t even make it halfway.
At the same time, that meant he was flying over the course at almost double the speed he’d done the previous night. Any bump or jar could be catastrophic, and the tight turns were a non-starter. That was the scariest part, having to go wide or cut inside the tracks over virgin dust without knowing if there was a sinkhole or rough ground underneath, all while keeping his eyes scanning across the gauges, trying to modulate the throttle before looking back up at where he was going in the jumping headlights and the dark.
It went surprisingly well. There were times when he felt the buggy skim across a pocket of deeper, fine sand, rear wheels dipping instead of getting stuck, simply because he was going so fast. On other spine-jarring occasions, he shook and was almost thrown by rocks and the hardened, undulating ground of an ancient lava flow, but he kept the engine needle near the red and somehow made it through. He knew the suspension was doing extra work to function with the jury-rigged wheels, and he silently praised the engineers for making the buggy more resilient than it needed to be. Somewhere, decades or centuries ago, a fellow wrench monkey had designed this thing like Janus’s life depended on it, and Janus was grateful.
He did stop after the first hour, because he was making good time, being more than halfway with 57 percent of his fuel remaining, and he was so tired after driving the vibrating, bouncing rig that he was starting to make mistakes. By his estimate, he’d maintained an average speed of 110 kilometers per hour, going as high as 130 in a straight, flat stretch that had been terrifying. He got off the buggy, swung his arms, kicked out his legs, then sat on the side of the buggy and downed a tube and a half of nutrient paste.
The stars above were breathtaking. It was his first time so far out as an adult, away from the lights of the dome and the demands of work, able to just sit and really look at the sky. He could make out the arc of the Milky Way, its hundreds of billions of stars that once were the locus of thousands of human-settled systems. According to the Cult of the Survivor, all those settlements were wiped out during the war that led to the exodus, but Janus wondered if that was true. Had they really faced an enemy so implacable and so thorough that humanity had been scoured from existence except for here, on a world they had no business surviving? Or was there a garden world out there, somewhere, maybe even Old Earth, where humans could breathe the air, drink the water, and not live like the court of Damocles, where every moment might be their last?
Something moved under the beam of the headlights. Janus could have sworn he saw it out of the corner of his visor, but when he looked, there was nothing but dust and rocks. It wasn’t uncommon for dusters to see things, out in the long stretches between settlements, and Janus had been up and stressed for the past two days. No, there! he thought, standing up, nutrient paste and stars forgotten.
One of the rocks had moved.
He watched it for a moment longer, to be sure, but just when he was almost sure he’d been seeing things, the trilith popped out its four pointed legs and ran forward a good ten meters toward him before settling down into the dust. It was the size of a kickball, or a craggy chicken.
Its behavior was decidedly predatory.
Janus suddenly understood where the rumors of giant triliths hunting caravans might come from. Now, in the middle of the night, the silicon-based lifeforms were at their most active, and they were also at their fastest. Probably not fast enough to keep up with a buggy, but maybe fast enough to run him down. He knew they needed to consume organics to grow and breed, and that they were drawn to both light and vibrations, but he’d never been stalked by one. What if it got to his buggy while he was daydreaming? What if several of them happened across him while he was alone out here, far from help? Even a little one was capable of tearing its way through metal. The one trying to hide in his headlights was the biggest he’d ever seen, and there could be more of them out here, especially on a secret route that the Hunters didn’t patrol.
He tossed the half-full tube of paste in its direction as an offering, climbed back into the saddle, and started the buggy rolling again.
The landscape blurred by. He was back to cycling his eyes between the speed, the throttle, the temperature, and the terrain. The encounter with the trilith had given him a jolt of adrenaline, but he was also physically worn out from spending the day marooned at the experimental dome and the stress of feeling like he couldn’t do this, followed by the need to prove himself and his uncle wrong. Any moment of inattention could kill him, could mean he didn’t make it back to Callie, could mean that Prime Dome wouldn’t get its outsider aspirant and people like him would continue to be stepped on by the ones who’d just been lucky enough to be born there.
In the end, it wasn’t lack of attention that got him. The track jinked left, and he was forced to go wide and turn back toward it. His forward right control arm snapped, the wheel flew off, and for what felt like a long time but was probably only a moment, it felt like the buggy might keep going, and then the strut dug into the ground and the buggy rolled.
Janus was thrown from the vehicle at 100 kilometers per hour. He bounced once, twice, then splashed into a deep drift of fine dust.
He was still over thirty kilometers from home.