Dome Administration, The Carver Institute
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.5 Interstellar
The Carverite CEO had lent Janus her office so he could collect himself. It was an elegant space furnished in ebony, brought in from sun-side, that seemed to drink in the soft white light. The curved panoramic window gave Janus a sweeping view of the dome and the dark, barren landscape beyond. The Carverites had used programmable lighting to paint the city’s white structures in red, ochre, and earthy tones tonight.
It would have been quite beautiful under other circumstances.
Janus stared at the city emptily, shaken and tired down to his bones. The ache brought back unpleasant memories of driving away from Prometheus Base, sick from the radiation, and heading to what they thought would be their deaths. At some point in the night, another day had slipped by. Fury had stayed by Mick’s side while the Carverite doctors fussed over him—Janus had encouraged her to. Maybe he regretted it, but part of him needed to be alone.
Red Donnika and her teams of aspirants had almost succeeded. Mick was maimed. Three of Vincent’s rangers died. Brago lost a man, too—a Verazlan Janus hadn’t met—on top of the Pugarian mercenaries who’d died chasing Team Invarian into the aberration zone. Janus had killed people in Veraz and most likely in Hayyam before that.
It wore on him.
And yet, they’d won. Inserting the data cube into the pedestal after Donnika was arrested had more than vindicated their efforts. Half of the other teams had already reached Midnight Hollow, but Team Invarian still had an over-six-thousand-point lead. Brago’s team had reaped some of the rewards of their actions, but the former Verazlan champion had officially withdrawn his team from the Trials.
Team Invarian just needed to finish the race, and the people of Irkalla would be safe.
That left the matter of whether they should accept emigration to Lumiara or stay here. Krandermore was now the devil they knew; Lumiara would hold new challenges, but they would face those together, and they could reunite with their families. Janus missed his sister very much, and even Uncle Ivan would be a comfortingly familiar presence. Lumiara would also give him the chance to meet his son, something he still hadn’t fully come to grips with. Was bringing the people they loved together the best way to keep them all safe, or was it selfish to take more people from their homes, the same as what had been done to him?
The doors to the office slid open with a faint hiss.
“Emissary?” a Carverite VP of something said in a respectful tone of voice that bordered on awe. “They’re bringing her in.”
“Thank you,” Janus said, rubbing his eyes before picking up his helmet. Get it together, Janus. Sometimes, he felt like he was still an aspirant candidate running across the dust toward the airlock as his suit failed and the crowd watched. Sometimes, that thought would bring him back to almost dying in Prometheus Base—not the second time, the first, when a stray bullet punctured the container he and his sister were hidden in. He had so many awful memories because of Uncle Ivan—because of the Cult, even if Ivan was responsible for his own actions.
He stood like a man fighting gravity and winning, but only because his suit helped.
He remembered being in a dark place for the weeks and months after the first trials. On Irkalla, he’d kept going in spite of the difficulty and danger of the work and the abuse of the Primers because Callie and Uncle Ivan had needed him. On Krandermore, he’d had only himself. He’d sat in that empty house back in Cofan, feeling miserable, until Lira’s cajoling and Mick’s mockery had driven him outside. He’d studied this world, made a name for himself, and bought a rug that really tied that one-bedroom flat together.
All gone now. Gone again. One loss after another.
Could he do it again, knowing he’d be risking more than his own life but the lives of his team and their families?
He took a step forward and then another. He pulled his shoulders back; again, the suit helped. He was an Emissary, a champion of Irkalla, one of the last scions of Prometheus.
Even if he didn’t feel like it, he could damned well play the part.
Uncovering Krandermore’s past had helped him accept the title of Emissary beyond just getting what he wanted from Ryler. He knew what it had represented before the Cult co-opted it. He’d seen the awful toll the plague had claimed on the original settlers. He’d understood at least some of their sacrifices. He couldn’t fault the Pugarians, Motragi, and Verazlans for becoming what they’d become. What little he’d seen of the coldsiders made sense to him. What differentiated Janus from people like Donnika was that in understanding the Krandermorans’ history, he hadn’t reduced them to something less. To the contrary, he was convinced that the stories and hardships that made them into what they were, that acceptance of necessary choices, it made them more, and he could use that to change himself and others. If they could adjust to a world trying to kill them, how much more would they thrive under a system that wanted them to live?
All across the region, citizens of all the corporations and clans were confronting their resident wayfinders—peacefully, so far—and asking uncomfortable questions. They were not numbers, and they were not lab animals. They demanded to be heard. Janus wasn’t so naive to think that things would fundamentally change because of this. The wayfinders of the different factions would make small concessions that would seem large because of their technological advantage. The Motragi were cooperating because Janus gave them the Western Research Hub—what better way was there to coordinate their research? And Janus had handed the Carverites access to the Eastern Labs, who prized it more for its mundane features like advanced air filtration and cooling systems.
Lira had balked at giving away that much leverage and trading value, but for Janus, it had been an easy choice. It was simply the most Promethean thing he could do.
The compartmentalists were going to be ruined in the process, and that was what mattered to Janus. The pressure on planet-bound Cultists, the stripping away of their mysticism, the deletion of the Eastern Labs data, and Team Invarian’s victory in the Trials… There wasn’t a faction in the Consensus that hadn’t somehow been affected, even those who never left Lumiara.
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Donnika had thought herself above the rest of them, above the Cult, even, and Janus had been the one to melt her wings.
Part of him wished they’d just killed her when they’d taken her, but that would have weakened his leverage with the Consensus. Besides, he thought darkly, destroying her plans and her faction will hurt more.
He made his way out and took the executive elevator to the ground floor.
Lira and Ryler were waiting for him in the lobby, and the three of them met Koni and her new entourage—the remnants of Brago’s team. Brago had appointed himself as Koni’s bodyguard. His eyes and the set of his shoulders reminded Janus of Uncle Ivan. It was that same guilt, that same determination to make amends, that same inexcusable sin.
Janus wondered if Koni would forgive Brago and his treacherous family. He wasn’t sure he could have, even with the Cult’s lies and his own history to excuse them.
Koni would have to make her own decisions on that.
“Is this goodbye?” she asked.
Janus raised his palms in the universal void-suited shrug. “You’re welcome to join us on the winner’s podium, but I get the feeling you’re headed elsewhere.”
Koni nodded solemnly. “To be a champion would be to validate the Cult. A Verazlan refusing to be honored will speak loudly.”
“It will,” Janus agreed with a wry grin. “Wish I could join you in your defiance, but they’re holding my people hostage.”
“No one will think less of you, Janus. We each have our own course to chart.”
“Have you decided what you’re going to do about the boon you earned from us?” Ryler asked. “Nikandros won’t be happy about the data getting deleted, but the deal was to get me to the Eastern Labs, and you did.”
“I know,” Janus said. He could tell Lira and Ryler were intent on his next words, and he could have given them an answer then and there. They would probably even abide by it without argument, but this was one decision he wanted them all to have a voice in. “Let’s talk about it once Mick can participate. I have some ideas, but I want us all to agree on the best way forward.”
Lira looked relieved; Ryler looked disappointed.
The group followed their corporate escorts over to the main airlock, where Architect Donnika was being loaded onto a transport that would take her to the shuttle pick-up point. The arbitration committee, now led by Nikandros, had issued a statement of condemnation for Donnika’s actions, as well as a promise she would be dealt with by the Cult.
Janus had trouble believing that. Maybe he’d get to see it if they went to Lumiara. In the meantime, he’d content himself with seeing her marched to a shuttle and exiled from his adoptive world.
***
Donnika watched with outer calm as the two teams of aspirants approached to see her sent off in shame. The two groups were intermingled already, united in their opposition of the Cult, or of her. She’d had some time to internalize her errors, and she understood where she’d gone wrong. By betraying Brago, the ideal tool for the situation, she’d gone against her own principles.
She had done it because Nikandros had told her not to. Had the old man manipulated her into the mistake on purpose? She would likely never know.
The local wayfinder had been less than courteous, and one of the corpo-sec grunts had thought to “rough her up” a bit. Sticks and stones could hardly break her bones, but she’d made a good show of being hurt just so her assailant would stop wasting her time.
The aspirants moved closer. Brago, Mackenzie, and Condori. These had been hers, and she’d wasted them. Invarian, Allencourt, Abraxxis, and Mickel Traceson. Of course, there would be a Hunter among the spanners in her gears. Then there was the real problem: Koni Atl-Verazlan, the outlier. A savage capable of mercy was the last thing Donnika had expected.
What should she do?
Abraxxis met her eyes, and she saw Nikandros’ protégé clearly thought he’d won. He wasn’t wrong. If Donnika was brought back to Lumiara, she would be personally censured for disobeying the arbitration committee. She would be isolated for a time, maybe up to several decades, but that wasn’t her chief concern. With the Oracle’s attention on this region and the aggregate scores higher than they had been for centuries, the Consensus would conclude that Nikandros and his faction were correct, that the policy of segregation and control of the population was faulty, and that their vaunted outliers should be encouraged and enabled to uplift humanity.
It would be chaos, and she wouldn’t be there to stop it. By the time she was released from confinement, a generation of the flock would have gotten used to autonomy, and bringing them back under the Cult’s guidance would require even more bloodshed.
What should she do?
She wasn’t really constrained. Her supposed suffering during her beating had left her guards complacent, and besides, their feeble restraints couldn’t hold her. She was almost a full conversion cyborg—only thirty-three percent of organic matter remained, and not all of that was original. Her internal capacitors were fully charged. The mag bottle in her right shoulder was stable. The linear accelerators in her right arm were functional. She would get one shot.
She had to think like an aspirant. She had to create the greatest impact in the least amount of time. If her removal and imprisonment led to a local crisis, her faction could limit the damage.
What should she do? It all came down to a single question: who should she kill?
Abraxxis was out of the question. Killing a fellow Cult member wouldn’t just get her imprisoned; it would mobilize the Consensus against her faction. It might even get her banished to the deeps.
Brago and his team were similarly invalid. At best, their deaths would seem petty. At worst, Nikandros would use their “murder” to corrupt other aspirants.
Allencourt was capable but not a threat. She preferred to work within the accepted structures of the system. She could be reasoned with.
Traceson was out of her reach and too much of a likable idiot. Donnika didn’t need to make the Hunter into a martyr.
Janus Invarian was the obvious target. He was less likable than Traceson and twice as stubborn. He also had an unnerving ability to affect the world around him, an outlier who would prove Nikandros’s thesis if he weren’t anecdotal.
But Koni Verazlan was the proof of the exceptionalists’ view, that change and growth could be spread like a bioweapon, a virus of the mind. Killing her would negate the Oracle’s predictions for the region. Team Invarian might even lose the Trials. The only thing that gave her pause was Koni’s clan, united in grief and weaponized against the Cult.
Invarian or Verazlan? Donnika asked herself.
She could only kill one of them, and she was almost out of time.
“Architect Donnika!” Abraxxis called out, his young voice full of solemnity. “You have caused great harm to this world and the Cult of the Survivor’s standing among these people by your actions. Do you have any final words you wish to say to explain yourself or make amends?”
“Oh, yes,” Donnika said, grinning madly at the upstart’s self-importance. “Consider this my apology.”
She pulled cuffs apart like they’d been tied together with vines instead of steel, pointed her right arm, and triggered the firing circuit.
Her arm split open.
The magnetic bottle released the contained plasma.
Capacitors discharged, and the collapsing bolt of compressed superheated hydrogen accelerated toward the target, exiting through the opening in her palm in a flash of blue-white light.
Donnika laughed as weapons fired in response, over three hundred milliseconds too late. Primitive bullets smashed into her armature, cracked her face, and burst the organ bag in her chest.
Two bodies lay on the ground outside the dome’s main airlock, one shattered and pierced by hundreds of rounds, the other cooked from the inside by a bubble of unleashed energy. Donnika’s cracked and broken face continued to grin, twitching spasmodically as Ryler Abraxxis stepped into view.
She’d won.
The primitives couldn’t know she was still alive, preserved in the hard casing of her skull. Abraxxis would bring her back for judgment, and she would wait out her years of confinement, knowing that she would return to a strong and still dominant faction.
***
Ryler stood over the fallen architect, confirming she was still intact, and he brought the butt of his staff down, crushing what remained of the cyborg. It was a violation of Cult rules and something he would have to explain to the arbitration committee, but he felt no qualms about it, not after what she’d just done.