Village of Hayyam

Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge

4453.2.15 Interstellar

Three days later, the two vehicles rolled out of the jungle and into the outskirts of Hayyam. It was raining and hazy, and the tires kept slipping in the mud.

Janus was tired, jittery from the stims Mick had handed out to the team. Janus wondered what had been in them. He was the team medic and had used the past year to greatly reinforce his knowledge of biology and chemistry, but when it came to recreational pharma, Mick’s enthusiasm for the subject made him the hands-down expert.

“Are we there yet?” Lira said sleepily from the passenger seat.

“Yes, we’re here,” Janus said.

The village of Hayyam was sprawling and unimpressive at the same time. The forest had been clear-cut, as was usual for a settlement on Krandermore, but it had been done in a sloppy way, with stumps left in place and some of the wood left to rot or serve as nesting material for pests. Janus caught sight of some of the locals walking across the ugly landscape. They wore faded brown and gray clothing, with wide-brimmed straw hats keeping the rain out of their faces.

The outskirts were nothing more than a shanty town—small plots with smaller huts made of woven sticks and palms that were rotting because of the constant rain. The mud in the courtyards and streets was reddish brown, and a few scraggly animals sniffed or pecked at scraps that had been thrown on the ground.

“It’s worse than I thought it would be,” Lira said, sitting up and looking out the window.

“Don’t they have access to better materials?” Janus asked.

“Of course they do,” Lira answered.

Janus’s hands tightened on the wheel. He saw into one of the houses, and it was packed, nearly standing-room only. He couldn’t tell if they lived there or if they were just visiting, but it reminded him of the first place he, Callie, and Uncle Ivan had lived when they first got to Prime Dome. Or was it before that? Was he flashing back to when Uncle Ivan hid them in a box while the Cult killed their parents?

“Janus!” Lira yelled.

He slammed on the brakes, stopping centimeters short from running over one of the local mayeques. The laborer looked at them with glazed eyes, as if the near miss hadn’t registered, and then she finished shuffling across the road.

“What in the Void?” Janus asked, watching the woman’s hunched back disappear between the last row of hovels and the settlement wall.

Lira sat back in her seat and sighed. “Let’s just get to the pedestal, do what we have to do, and get out of this trash heap.”

The village of Hayyam had a somewhat impressive wooden wall ringing the settlement proper. It was a double layer of horizontal logs held between posts and piled three meters tall. Inside the wall, the homes were made of the more standard pre-fabricated construction board. It was solid enough and would insulate the occupants from the heat and the rain. Janus had just never seen it without at least a coat of paint.

There were entire blocks of the pre-fabbed homes laid out in parallel lines along the wall. Clearly, they had a housing problem. The construction board could easily be broken down and moved or recycled, at least until more materials were layered on top of it.

“Pugarian villages use a lot of migrant labor,” Lira said. “These aren’t permanent residents. Actually, the people outside the wall are more likely to have been born here.”

“I’m sorry, but what?” Janus said.

Lira smiled at him. Janus had grown up as an outsider in their home of Prime Dome, living in the sixth and final sector, while Lira’s family had lived in the Hub. “Everything in Pugarian society is done on the basis of trade. People exchange goods, services, and labor. Even education is done on barter. People with capital buy up the land inside the walls, and people with skills move between settlements to get better deals. People without either of those things get pushed out.”

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“That’s messed up,” Janus said.

Lira shrugged. “They can’t afford to support people who don’t earn. People who want more hustle harder.”

“Do you seriously believe that?” Janus said.

Lira looked at him. “It’s my job to be able to see things from other peoples’ perspectives. Even yours.”

“Even Prime Dome educated and housed people,” Janus grumbled.

Within the walls, especially once they got past the migrant housing, it was slow going on the crowded streets. They drove around clusters of villagers dressed head to toe in thin, long-sleeved brown rags, and more than once, Janus had to use the horn or nudge a particularly obstinate pedestrian with his bumper. Animals sat in the street in clusters of six or twelve, roped together.

“Is today a market day?” Janus asked.

“Every day is a market day,” Lira answered, her eyes glowing blue as she accessed the village network.

The closer they got to the center of the village, the bigger the buildings got. They were still made of the pre-fab, but they were two- and sometimes three-stories tall, painted, and sometimes plastered. Many of the buildings had an outer wall and a small courtyard, which struck Janus as a waste of space in the crowded village center, but he also didn’t see many common areas that weren’t marketplaces, restaurants, or workshops.

There was also a lot of trash. Villagers stepped over garbage heaps that lined the road as a group of feral scrats—lizards with grasping hands and flat, thumping tails—fought over a corpse of some formerly domesticated animal. Most of the other vehicles on the street seemed to be rickshaws and smaller cabs pulling open carts loaded with raw materials or goods to bring to the markets. On one occasion, a larger, armored transport rolled by, guarded by coldside corporate security, and everyone scattered out of their way.

“Take the next left,” Lira said, uploading their destination to the map.

Following Lira’s directions, Janus pulled up to a beaten-down garage where Lira had negotiated safe and secure storage while they got some rest and explored. The paint was peeling, and there were piles of garbage in the alley next to it, but the rolling garage shutter looked heavy, the walls were thick, and there was an armed guard outside.

“Is it going to be okay to leave our stuff here?” Janus asked Lira.

She shrugged. “We’re paying a lot for the place, but if anything goes missing, they’ll have to replace it new at local rates, no questions asked.”

“And you believe they’ll do that?” Janus asked.

Lira gave him a crooked grin. “Smart contract. The credit value of our stuff is already deposited. They only get them back after we check out.” She opened the garage door with her wrist comm, and Janus pulled in.

The interior was better looking than the exterior. The floor was polished concrete, with a hydraulic lift in case they needed to work on one of the buggies. There were toolboxes and workbenches in the far right corner, as well as several steel lockers for storage. On the left side was a bunk room, some kind of office, and two more guards playing cards at a small folding table.

Janus locked the buggy down so only someone in the team could drive it, and he got out.

He checked his hazard indicators, and they were green-green-green. “We’re safe,” Janus said, and then he laughed.

Things on Krandermore rarely stayed that way.

Janus took his helmet off and looked around the garage. It was a solid, secure structure with all the tools they needed to maintain the vehicles, and it was clean.

“Nice place,” Mick said to him, looking around.

Janus yawned and nodded. “Yeah. Be nice to sleep in a cot instead of the passenger seat for a couple hours.”

“You think the other teams are pushing as hard as we are?” Mick asked.

Janus shrugged. “It’s the Trials. Even if the regular teams are stopping to make camp, I can’t imagine the compartmentalists are.”

“We’ll find out when we make the upload,” Ryler said, approaching the two of them with the data cube in his hand.

Each team had been given a data cube by the Cult of the Survivor to place on a pedestal at their designated waypoints. Unlike in the Irkallan Trials, the Cult didn’t have the ability to scan all the different settlements from orbit. Data was gathered by wayfinders on the ground and brought to the pedestals, which both served as a secure storage device and a transmitter when atmospheric conditions and satellite positioning allowed. When they placed the cube on the pedestal, they would upload their data and download all the teams’ scores.

That would tell them if they could afford to slow down. Janus doubted it this early in the race. Inexperienced teams would blow themselves out trying to take the lead, and Janus wasn’t about to push that far, but with the compartmentalists in the race and the lives of their families at risk, they couldn’t afford to fall behind.

“We’re staying here?” Koni asked.

“Not for long,” Janus said. “We’ll go to the pedestal, get some supplies, and see if this settlement has any problems we can solve.”

Koni looked at him as if he’d just farted in her face. “Why would we solve their problems?”

Janus frowned. “That’s how you win, by staying in the lead and having the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time possible.”

“That’s how you win back home,” Ryler said. “The scoring system here is the same, but the Krandermorans have found a uniquely local way of optimizing it.”

Janus had a sinking feeling he knew what it was. “The people in the lead turn around and kill the teams with higher scores, don’t they?”

Koni smirked. “I told you that your people were soft, Janus.”

Janus wiped his face with his hand. I should just tell her, he thought. He should tell her they were from another world, a more dangerous world, a world where the Void didn’t give second chances, where you couldn’t screw around at petty war games because both sides would die. “You’re probably right, Koni,” he said.

If he told her the truth about Irkalla, her life would be over. Worst case, they’d kill her. Best case, she’d be exiled, like him, and he couldn’t do that to her, even if she was being an ass about it.

Koni looked at him suspiciously. “You’re a strange man, Janus Invarian.”

Janus smiled at her. “Come on. Let’s find out how far behind we are.”