Pioneer’s Tower, Bennin Residence
Prime Dome, Planet Irkalla
4452.2.15 Interstellar
This time, Janus didn’t dream in the cryotherapy pod. Maybe he was too tired for it, or maybe he didn’t want to remember. He’d been rushed to medical, peeled out of his suit, washed, and immediately put on several nutrient and saline IVs. Doctors examined him. He’d torn his ACL and had a moderate case of rhabdomyolysis—his muscles had started to break down from the trauma. The two conditions would normally have required surgery and months of recovery, and Janus thought he was going to drop out of the Trials after all.
Architect Nikandros had other ideas. He offered to provide a single vial of medical nanites to clean Janus’s blood and repair the damaged tissues, which to Janus’s surprise, Uncle Ivan accepted without a fight. It was as if he’d expected it, and maybe he had. After all, Ivan had seen Janus’s condition entering the dome, and yet he’d announced him as the new aspirant without hesitation.
“It’s good to have found you again after all these years, Emissary,” Nikandros said. “You were once favored by the Survivor. There is no need for any enmity between us.”
“Tell it to the Promethean dead,” Ivan snapped.
Janus groaned, and the two men looked startled he was awake, or at least semi-conscious.
“We should talk somewhere else,” Nikandros said.
“Nothing to talk about, but I agree that you should leave,” Ivan answered, following the cult architect outside.
Things got hazy after that. Janus remembered snatches of nurses and doctors coming and going, of something that looked like a tube of mercury getting pumped into his arm. His skin crawled. He felt incredibly weak, but the discomfort was so intense he kicked and squirmed until his doctor added something else to his IV and he settled down into gray nothingness.
He woke up in one of Administrator Bennin’s cryotherapy pods, stripped down to a pair of mesh briefs and aching all over. For once, Ivan wasn’t there to give him a cheerful reveille, so he took ten minutes to take a hot shower on Bennin’s meter before putting on the clothes that had been left out for him, an off-white long-sleeved shirt with a waffled texture, a comfortable pair of gray pants, and a simple pair of white slippers, all of which were exactly his size.
He walked out into the main room to find Callie and Uncle Ivan sorting through piles of boxes and gear that had engulfed the large space like a rockslide. “What’s all this?” he asked.
“Janus!” Callie said, looking up from the table she’d been sorting through. “These are all gifts from your fans! You’re absurdly popular. If only they knew what my brother really was like, they’d have sent cheaper stuff!” She grinned at him, but Janus was too surprised to react to the joke. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“He’s just a little overwhelmed by Prime Dome’s sudden change of heart,” Ivan said, setting a box down. “Don’t worry, there was plenty of hate mail, too. I made a pile of the death threats. Some of them are entertaining.”
“That makes more sense,” Janus said, nodding slowly. It was still hard to take in the sheer amount of stuff that was covering the floor and the tables, some of it piled higher than head height. It cluttered the administrator’s main room, but it would have completely filled their apartment in Sector Six.
“How’s your leg?” Ivan asked, walking over. Janus noticed he still had a little swelling on his left cheek.
“It feels fine. Solid,” Janus said, putting all his weight on it, then leaning the other way and giving it a few experimental kicks. “What’d they do to me?”
“Nanites from your friend Nikandros. Little machines that go in and repair things at the cell level.”
“I know what nanites are, uncle. I thought they were lost tech.”
Uncle Ivan’s face darkened. “There are a lot of things the Cult of the Survivor has access to that are supposed to be lost.”
Normally, Janus would have disengaged from the conversation at that point because he was tired of listening to Uncle Ivan rant about his conspiracy theories around the wayfinders. He’d always thought it was paranoia, brought on by the constant drinking and the years of heartbreak and frustration. Seeing that video of Ivan talking about the cult only days after the fall of Prometheus, and knowing that he’d been an aspirant and an emissary, who were the champions of the Survivor on Irkalla, gave him a very different context. “We need to talk about that,” Janus said.
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“Oh?” Ivan said, surprised.
“Yeah. You know that program my mom wrote for me with the videos of her and Dad? I unlocked a video from you when I was marooned out at the experimental dome.”
Ivan’s expression went from playful to serious. “I forgot about that.” His eyes lit up in blue as he accessed his wrist-comm and typed in a series of commands.
A few seconds later, Janus got a notification. Program features locked.
“What did you do?” he asked his uncle.
“Those videos were meant to be if I died before you got old enough to talk about some things, but they’re not relevant anymore, so I disabled the separation key.”
“Okay, but I’m old enough now,” Janus said.
Ivan glanced at Callie, then shook his head. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I’d delete them if I could, but your mother didn’t give me access to do that, and the program is hard-coded into your wrist implant. You need to focus on what’s in front of you, not worry about something that happened twelve years ago.”
Janus couldn’t have disagreed more, but he also didn’t want to bring Callie into something dangerous if there was more to it than paranoia. “What about my second, then? I leave for the Trials tomorrow, and I don’t even know who I’m going to be making the trip with.”
“That, I can help with,” Administrator Bennin said, walking into the room. “Time to dress up, gentlemen. You’re about to meet the very cream of the crop of Prime Dome’s society.”
Callie hid a gagging gesture with her hand, and Janus suppressed a smile.
“Come on, Aspirant,” Uncle Ivan said, patting him on the back. “It’s time to try on your suit.”
***
The aspirant soft-suit was different from any kind of vacuum equipment Janus had ever experienced. It was tight to his body and mottled shades of gray, like the moonscape out in the dust. The suit was made of a rubbery material that reminded Janus of the wet suits tank divers used to survey and repair the large hydroponic tanks or, if they were less lucky, fix problems with the recycling vats if they couldn’t be drained before maintenance.
They were different from a wet suit in every way that mattered. The life support and power pack mounted on the back was the lightest and most efficient Janus had ever seen, able to sustain him for a full twelve hours without recharge instead of the usual eight. Smart materials at the joints lightly enhanced his movements by contracting or relaxing like muscles, making it feel like he wasn’t wearing anything—although like any piece of technology, the reverse feedback had its limitations. Regular hard suits could reclaim urine and used highly absorbent garments to deal with everything else, whereas the aspirant soft-suit could handle and process everything without the chafing and smell he usually associated with spending more than one day in vacuum.
“How does it feel?” Ivan asked.
Janus flexed his hands into fists, feeling the material in the gloves and forearms react to his motion. “It’s incredible,” he said. “Is this more lost wayfinder tech?”
“Not all of it,” the kinesiology doctor said, checking the suit diagnostics on a portable terminal. The suit was slaved to Janus’s wrist-comm, but he’d been glad to learn anyone else would have to plug in manually with the appropriate protocols to access the suit’s control systems. The high-tech garment was far more capable than a regular hard suit, but what it could do to him if someone ill-intentioned hacked into it was alarming. “We manufacture the outer fabric, the carbon scrubber, and some of the radiation shielding. That lets us do the fitting during aspirant training instead of waiting on the Cult of the Survivor, and you’ll see small aesthetic and functional differences between suits from different domes. The wayfinders provided the software, the smart fabric, the glass for the helmet, and a lot of the electrical equipment. I’m not sure how they’re manufacturing any of it, and we’ve been warned not to try reverse engineering it. Since doing so is both an irresistible challenge for any researcher and a quick way to ensure we never win the Trials again, we’re pretty careful about who is given access to it.”
“What about during the Trials?” Janus asked. “Has anyone tried to steal one, or kill an aspirant to get it?” With technology that valuable, he could see the temptation, especially in some of the less wealthy settlements.
The doctor looked at Ivan, and Ivan said, “Aspirants die all the time, but the cult always recovers the suits. Always,” he said.
That seemed impossible to Janus. Aspirants spent several days outside of the domes’ networks during their trips around the planet and were given freedom to choose their routes. How could the wayfinders track them across the dust, let alone know if someone had stolen one of the suits? He could believe that the cultists had added tracking and spying equipment to their futuristic vacuum wear, but that shouldn’t make a difference if they couldn’t transmit to the people listening in.
He picked up the helmet that went with the suit, which was a marvel in itself. Smaller and thinner than his hard-suit helmet, it had a half-bubble visor that not only gave him full visibility to the left and right, it let him look up and down. The seal at the neck didn’t just lock, it allowed him to turn his head, and the glass—or whatever magical material the wayfinders had provided—was supposedly able to block as much of the radiation as the dome that protected Prime Dome. When it was active, Janus could feel a sort of field around it that made the hair on the back of his hand stand on end.
“You can leave the helmet here,” Ivan said. "You won’t need it at the reception."