Sector Six Detainment Center, Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.13 Interstellar
“Is that really necessary?” Janus asked as the nurse loaded yet another capsule into the injector. “Ow!” he said as it discharged into his arm.
“Don’t be a baby,” Uncle Ivan said. “You need to be immunized against all the major diseases you’ll encounter in other domes. You also need to maintain your reputation after saving Sector Six from a major airlock breach.”
That was how dome admin was spinning the incident, that without Janus’s intervention, panicked rescuers might have broken through the airlock seal and caused a major loss of atmosphere. It would have been serious, certainly, although not the explosive venting of the original event since the dome was kept at slightly less than one Standard atmosphere. There was only a small mention of Meg’s courage, which made Janus deeply uncomfortable, although he’d been assured her family would be more than taken care of.
He was in the Hub’s primary medical center, the place where the most important people in Prime Dome went to receive care. It was nothing like the Sector Six infirmaries Janus had used when he had a minor injury. The walls were gleaming white, inlaid with light strips, and every room he passed was loaded to the neck-seals with high-end terminals, advanced robotics, and an array of scanning machines and tanks whose purpose he could only guess.
He’d also been told the entire second floor was given over to the artificial wombs that birthed the dome’s next generation. There were upward of 1,700 children gestating in the building at any given moment, being visited by their parents, being born at a rate of five to six per day. It seemed like every new building and encounter left Janus with more knowledge and more questions about how the dome really worked. He supposed he’d been born in a similar facility, back in Prometheus Base.
“Let’s go,” Uncle Ivan said, slapping his knees before standing up. “We need to keep this caravan in motion or you won’t be ready to start training tomorrow.”
Janus zipped his coveralls back up. “I’m still not sure what possessed the Council to put you in charge of aspirant training.”
“Same reason anyone teaches. I survived it, and I can’t do it anymore.”
The two of them left immunology and followed the signs to kinesiology.
It turned out that Uncle Ivan had been in charge of Prime Dome’s aspirant training program pretty much since they’d arrived twelve years prior. There were other former aspirants living under the dome, some of them from other settlements, but more than a dozen from Prime Dome, and yet from what Janus had gathered they deferred to Ivan. His uncle must have been a force of nature at one point in his life, and Janus was sorry to have missed it.
“Here we are,” Uncle Ivan said, stopping at the door to the kinesiology lab. “Go all out in there. You don’t want an ill-fitted suit.”
“It’s funny. I never had to go to a lab to get a functional suit before,” Janus said wryly.
“Well, get over that, and quick,” Uncle Ivan said. “In my day, if an aspirant died during the Trials, it was an event. People crying in the streets, and not just in the dome the aspirant came from. Nowadays, I’d be surprised if half of you make it. It’s not just about winning anymore. It’s about survival, and you’re going to need every advantage you can get.”
***
Five-and-a-half hours passed between Janus being taken into custody and his appointment as an aspirant candidate, and he had been cut off from the dome’s network for all of it, so he didn’t get to experience the ripples in Prime Dome’s social landscape as they happened. He was drowned in them all at once, or at least he would have been if he wasn’t immediately rushed to the most comprehensive and intrusive medical exam of his life, driven from appointment to appointment by his uncle with the relentlessness of the morning sun.
There had been several hours of outrage, of walkouts, of dome-sec officers in full riot gear forming lines in the streets. Security stations and dome administrative offices were overwhelmed with calls and visits from “concerned citizens” until they simply closed their doors and blocked any call that wasn’t an emergency. Workers went on strike only to find they were locked inside their work facilities. The fights that broke out as a result were at least constrained, although more than one manager or supervisor found themselves in the uncomfortable position of standing between militant Primers and outsiders who, by-and-large, had access to more power tools.
News was fed to the angry population as fast as it could be confirmed. The first bombshell was that Prime Dome was, in fact, experiencing a heat management crisis that went beyond handling the influx of new immigrants, but rather was the compounded effect of increased production and shortages in trained personnel. A few commentators pointed out that skilled plumbers, mechanics, and engineers were working below their qualifications in Sector Six, although most seemed to favor temporary work reassignment and commuter passes rather than see the existence of an “outsider’s sector” as a contributing factor, especially since an outsider was at the heart of the morning’s event. Backlash from the more conservative groups came in the form of insults, articles on failed settlements, and personal anecdotes. Caravan traders and retired dome-sec officers were among the most opinionated pundits. A few of the more aggressive network publications even went as far as to suggest that the “heat crisis” was an outsider plot.
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And then, Janus was a hero. Janus was dragging the lead aspirant’s second to safety. Janus had warned sector maintenance about the airlock days before, and he even recognized the time-is-money guy from that first incident telling a female anchor how he’d stood by Janus and defended him from an irate and shortsighted crowd. Janus was too stunned by the shift to be angry. It was like a dream he expected to wake from, punctuated by his uncle herding him to the next examination.
Between appointments, he tried to read through his messages, which had also followed the pattern of the morning’s news. There were a number of people who had blocked him, only to request contact again. He received nineteen threatening messages, which eleven people desperately tried to recall and two doubled-down on. From his more friendly acquaintances, he received messages of sorrow, then support, then congratulations, and Barry in particular used more than his weekly allotment of exclamation marks. He received a particularly touching message from the head sorter at the recycling plant, which he reread while he was waiting for Uncle Ivan to finish with the kinesiologists.
Invarian,
Don’t suppose you’ll be coming back to work. We’ll send you your share of CB recycling, although I guess that won’t matter to you much now, eh? I heard you had sector maintenance on the line during the whole thing and you were telling them what to do while people panicked. It’s got some of us thinking maybe circuit boards aren’t the only things that have untapped value in them. Maybe we do, too. And maybe next week they’ll shove you right back down with the rest of us, but you’ll be among friends and… thanks.
Lars Kristofferson, Head Sorter, Recycling Plant
Uncle Ivan snapped his fingers in front of Janus’s face. “Come on, we’re done.”
“Survivor be praised,” Janus said, earning himself a raised eyebrow from his uncle, and Janus grinned. He added the message to his favorites, swiped it closed, and deactivated his retinal display. “It’ll be good to get home.”
Uncle Ivan grunted and led him out the opposite side of the building they’d come in, deeper into the dome’s Hub.
“Follow me,” Ivan said as an aside, almost under his breath as they left the building. There were more people outside, a crowd. Apparently the news had spread already and everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of the new unknown aspirant. Janus stayed behind his uncle as the crowd pressed around him again. He looked around for people he knew, but while a few of the faces were familiar, they weren't familiar enough for him to recognize them.
Someone grabbed his arm and started talking, but Janus didn't hear a word as two other people started talking over the first person. Janus looked back and panicked a little when his uncle wasn't in front of him.
Janus stopped and looked around, but all he saw were the heads of the crowd, craning to get a better look at him.
He took a breath to try and calm himself down as he pushed through the throng, but the crowd stretched from one end of the corridor to the other.
Janus then felt a tug on his coveralls and he found himself on the other side of a door, away from the crowd.
He was face to face with his uncle.
“I told you to stay with me,” his uncle started, then quickly turned around and began walking down a very thin, poorly lit corridor. It was so thin that Janus's shoulders nearly touched the sides, and it seemed to be made of rock. “Now come on, before everyone realizes where you went.”
Ivan took off at a healthy pace and Janus found it was difficult to follow as he had to duck under things and make his way through quickly.
“Where are we?” Janus asked.
“It's one of the early miner tunnels. A hell of a lot easier to get through than those crowds would have been,” his uncle responded, his voice resonating off the walls.
“Do you use these a lot?” Janus asked, but by way of answer, his uncle ducked under something and disappeared.
Janus followed behind, finding he had to rock himself under an obstruction and into a tiny hole, but when he emerged, he found he was just behind his uncle, who was moving a boxy crate out of the way. After the box was moved, Janus realized he was looking at the innermost section of the Hub.
He looked from his uncle to the almost hallowed ground, but his uncle didn't have much else to say.
It wasn’t Janus’s first time visiting the Hub, but he’d only been allowed in once and briefly to fix a faulty fabricator. This time, he was allowed to be here as long as he wanted. Despite it being the end of main shift, him being mentally exhausted, and his muscles aching from the day of sorting followed by the heavy lifting he’d had to do in a hard suit, he still couldn’t stop himself from staring. The buildings, which he’d only ever seen from a distance, ranged from six to thirty or more floors above ground, and he knew from the dome’s maintenance schematics that even more of the dome’s critical infrastructure, from power to environmentals, was buried beneath the high-rises. In the event of the collapse of one or more of the outer sectors, the Hub could serve as a shelter for a significant portion of the population—but not all of it. He guessed they’d get all the Primers and not enough of the outsiders.
And speaking of Primers, the Hub citizens were in a privileged class of their own. Janus saw people in flowing clothes that never would have fit inside a hardsuit without compromising a seal. Few people wore coveralls, and those that did had pristine bespoke suits that combined colors and fabrics in a way Janus had never seen. It was like they liked the fashion of being a duster but had never been out in the black.
“Where are we going?” Janus asked after a few minutes of walking.
“We only lived in Sector Six because…” Uncle Ivan sighed. “For reasons I’ll explain maybe never, but that’s all been blown since you and your sister became famous. I got us a temporary place with good security and amenities that will facilitate your training. Your stuff’s already been moved, and Callie’s waiting for us there.”
“What sector are we assigned to?”
Uncle Ivan stopped in front of a thirty-story high-rise. This close to the dome’s center, the buildings rose almost to the apex. “There aren’t any sectors for you anymore, Janus. You could live anywhere you wanted, but for now, this is home.”