Last Days of New Prometheus
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.10 Interstellar
The next three-and-a-half days were a blur of planning, working, and making calls to other colonies within the Reef and beyond. Lira seemed to be everywhere, throwing herself into the monumental task of getting them what they needed to pack two hundred people into submarines with close to no notice or preparation. Elsbeth, the Pugarian trader, helped with most of the commercial aspects, plying her skills with zeal when it came to squeezing every last bit of equipment and supplies out of the factions and settlements they’d helped over the past year. The former compartmentalist aspirant, the only one to join them from Brago’s team on Krandermore, had earned her stay with them several times over.
After one particularly intense meeting with the fabricators—the settlement across the now-ruined passageway that had hosted the compartmentalists before they tried to blow them all up—Janus looked at Lira and said, “You look happy.”
She was clearly both tired and wired from stims, and she’d just had to squeeze people who were grieving for their lost loved ones, but she looked at him through that haze and laughed. “I think I am happy. Isn’t that just the worst thing ever?”
“Strength through struggle, Lira,” Janus said with a grin.
As for Janus, he did his best to learn from the short-lived mutiny and fix past mistakes. He spent time talking to people, not as the aloof and untouchable emissary dictating their futures, but as a fellow colonist discussing their future.
“What will we do if we can’t make it to the Core in time?” one woman named Astrix asked him in a small group discussion.
“We have to,” Janus started to say, but Astrix crossed her arms and set her chin. “But I recognize we might not be able to.”
“I’m sure you’d find a way, Janus,” she said. “I just want to make sure you’re not expecting us to take the kinds of risk an aspirant would.”
Janus nodded slowly, genuinely thinking about the problem. Astrix had been a caravan mistress out of Crossroads back on Irkalla, and she’d had to make her share of decisions when it came to taking risks—broken vehicles, dust bandits, and triliths had forced her to make her share of hard choices. “We may not be able to stop,” he said, choosing to be honest with the group. “The Alignment only lasts for a set amount of time, and if we’re caught between ports, we could get crushed by the ice or, worse, trapped until we starve. The ports themselves are closed systems; they may not want to let us stay, and they may not be able to, but I can promise you I’ll make the best choice I can for all of us and that I’ll talk to all of you first.”
“That’s all we ask,” Astrix said, visibly relieved. “We know you’re doing your best. We’d just like to be able to do our best, too.”
“And make our own choices,” someone grumbled in the crowd to Janus’s left.
Janus turned to look, but he couldn’t tell who’d spoken. “You aren’t prisoners,” he said. “You can stay here or head out onto the ice if you want to. I just think, especially after what happened three days ago, we’re safer if we stick together.
Several people looked at each other and nodded, starting their own side conversations. A few faces in the crowd still looked skeptical.
That’s fine, Janus thought. Unlike the version of him Callie and the old Prometheans had put forward, Janus didn’t actually want to dictate how people should live their lives. They would have died if he’d left them on Irkally. How they survived on Lumiara was up to them.
***
He found Callie and Matthias working with a group of mechs that were trying to make more of the space livable by ducting waste heat into living spaces. It would have been a good project if they’d decided to stay in defiance of the Reef’s pronouncement. It was still a good project to keep idle hands busy.
Callie glanced at him as he walked up to stand beside her, then went right back to applying sealant to pipe threads while Matthias struggled to tighten an already treated set of fittings with a pipe wrench.
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“Showing him the ropes?” Janus asked.
“Not much jury-rigging on Lumiara,” Callie said.
Janus nodded. “Not in the Reef, anyway. Plenty of patchwork in the farther settlements.”
Callie looked at him for a steady three seconds, then gestured to one of the other workers to bring the next length of pipe over to be mated with her end.
“Thinking of staying?” Janus asked gently.
“Didn’t think you’d let me.”
“If you want to,” Janus said. He would hate it if she did, but he also wasn’t going to force her to go on the trip.
Callie huffed. “But Matthias doesn’t get a choice, does he?”
“He made his choices.”
Janus saw the boy stiffen out of the corner of his eye, but Matthias shook his head and kept working.
“He had nothing to do with the bombing!” Callie said in a low, tight voice.
Janus was pretty sure she was right. According to the information Nikandros had grudgingly shared with them, the man had been a purgationist agent who had threatened his way onto the compartmentalist team. Matthias had been genuinely surprised when one of the members of the delegation had been swapped out at the last minute. He’d commented on it in private, right after the attack, but he couldn’t agree with her now, in public. Doing that would compromise his leverage over Nikandros, and the idea that the compartmentalists might still want peace would poison whatever unity his people felt right now.
“There are some crimes severe enough the intention of the perpetrator doesn’t matter,” he said, echoing Nikandros’s words.
Callie clenched her jaw, and Janus met her glare, neither one of them willing to budge an inch.
“You still think you were right?” Janus asked. “After everything that happened?”
“No,” Callie said. “I know I was wrong. Twenty-two people died because of me, and I’m going to have to live with that. But my being wrong doesn’t make you right, Janus.”
“You didn’t see Red Donnika hunt us for over a month and then murder a man on her team out of spite.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t see Nikandros tear through a compartmentalist hit squad with his bare hands because you weren’t there! You never are!”
“Unbelievable,” Janus said, regretting he’d come to visit.
“I’m giving people choices! Real ones!” Callie said. “That used to matter to you!”
Half the room glared at Callie. The other half glared at him.
Janus walked away. Choices, he thought. Like I ever had any of those. He had bad choices forced on him by everyone, growing up, from supporting his uncle and sister to getting crapped on by both Primers and immigrants who were higher on the pecking order of undesirables. He wasn’t going to feel bad because he offered his people a better option, even if he only offered them one.
***
“How are we looking?” Janus asked, joining the others in Lira’s office at the end of the day.
“Most of the aspirants who defected have come slinking back,” Ivan said with his arms crossed.
“Only most?” Mick said, surprised. “Thought it was about protecting their families?”
Ivan sucked his teeth and said, “Cowards. Just needed an excuse.”
“We have the supplies we need,” Elsbeth said, eyes glowing blue as she consulted the tallies. “Everyone seems glad to see us go.”
“The purgationists are screaming foul,” Lira said. “Apparently, they didn’t expect us to worm our way deeper into their holy planet.”
“Is this really a religious thing?” Syn asked. “I thought they were secular.”
“I think it’s just a hate thing,” Ryler said.
“What about the submarines?” Janus said, not sure if he agreed that the Cult was secular, even if Ryler was.
“The fabricators came through,” Ryler said.
Elsbeth nodded. “We’ve got three subs and enough crew to run them as long as we split the aspirants between them. Two problems, though, and I’m not sure how to solve them.”
“It’s never easy, is it?” Janus asked, smiling. “What monumental tasks do we have to overcome?”
“The subs are full of cargo destined for settlements along the route to the Core. We’ll have to deliver the goods and trade them for items of similar size and weight. Trading, loading out, and loading in are going to make our schedule very tight.”
“We can handle that, Elsbeth,” Lira said confidently. “What are you really worried about?”
“No captain is willing to lead a convoy of three cargo-laden ships to the Core in a single Alignment, and both the fabricators and crews refuse to get underway without them.”
Janus felt his throat tighten. It seemed ridiculous that this would be the one thing standing in their way on a planet that was so technically advanced. “Is this a real problem, or is it an excuse they’ve come up with to not let us go?”
“I’m afraid this one’s real,” Nikandros said, speaking up for the first time. “Most submarines only run for one or two stops around their home ports. It takes decades to master the full route, and there are only a few dozen captains alive who have made the Core run all the way from the Reef. Even fewer have done it in a single Alignment, no matter the equipment, and they do it in specialized vehicles.”
“Like the one we planned to use,” Janus said. “But that won’t fit all or people, no matter what we leave on the docks. You’re going to tell me we should leave them behind.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Emissary,” Nikandros said with exaggerated respect. “But we will take that sub and leave you if you can’t come up with a solution.”
Janus looked at Ryler.
Ryler winced. “There is one person I can think of who might be willing to try.”
Nikandros’s usually pleasant demeanor faltered, and he made no attempt to hide his disgust.
“Am I wrong?” Ryler asked.
“No,” Nikandros said, smoothing his features. “It seems we are going to have to drag the Apostate out of whatever hole he’s trying to drown himself in.”
Janus sighed. It was never easy, but maybe this Apostate would somehow counterbalance Nikandros if he had that much effect on him, or maybe, more likely, the two of them would add up to something worse.