Second District, Sector Five, The Carver Institute
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.4 Interstellar
The five constructive interference charges went off in two stages, creating an overlapping pattern of vibrations that first cracked and then shattered the portion of the dome within the frame. The five rangers went in, carbines and bullpups raised, while Janus and the rest of the team followed. The rangers collapsed the temporary airlock behind them, creating a more durable seal around the opening they’d just cut into the structure.
Janus hoped the Carverites discovered it before it failed.
He checked his hazard indicators reflexively. “That’s odd.”
“What?” Vincent asked.
“Air pressure’s lower than standard in here,” Janus said.
Vincent swore.
“What does that mean?” Janus asked.
“It means Red Donnika knows what she’s about,” Mick said. “They know where we are.”
“We need to move,” Vincent said, directing his rangers with hand signals. “The more distance we put between us and the breach, the better the odds we have of surviving.”
They’d entered the district in an industrial zone, behind a warehouse. The rangers led the way, keeping watch and covering the team as they moved forward at a half-jog. They pushed along the dome’s edge until they found a place to cut inward. The streets were deserted, which both helped with not getting spotted and made them stand out.
“Cross! Faster!” Vincent said as his team guarded the intersection.
Janus and the others ran across the street.
The last ranger joined them just as a group of almost ten Carverite dome-sec officers rounded the corner and started taking position to cover the warehouse.
One of them shouted and snapped off a shot.
“Keep moving,” Vincent said, grabbing Janus by the back of the suit and pushing them farther from the breach site.
Janus heard shouting from the next street over. The rangers led them through two more turns, taking a smaller passage between two large factories. They were fast and smooth, herding the Irkallans along, but Janus couldn’t help but feel like a noose was being closed around them.
Then he realized what the factory to their right was. “Stop!”
“No time!” Vincent said.
Janus yanked the door open. “Get in here! We can argue about it later!”
Mick, Ryler, Koni, and Lira reacted immediately, following Janus’s command to enter the building.
With only the barest hesitation, the veteran and his rangers followed suit.
Snap!
Janus ducked as a shot tugged on his shoulder, barely missing him but creasing his void suit.
“They’re here!” a Carverite guard shouted.
Janus scrambled inside, pulling the door shut as the last ranger scooted in.
“What now?” the veteran ranger asked, clearly uncomfortable to have put his team’s safety in Janus’s hands.
Janus ignored that for a moment and looked around. The building was what he’d expected from labeling on his heads-up display: a waste management facility. In a sun-side settlement, that would have meant anything from microbial tanks, wind-powered stills, or something as primitive as a gutter and sewage system, but in a settlement surrounded by vacuum, things were a little more involved. “This way,” Janus said.
A sun-sider wouldn’t know this—or maybe Vincent did but hadn’t thought of it on the fly—but decaying matter produced gas and heat, both of which were bad for closed systems unless handled correctly. The ground floor would primarily be storage—no sense pumping things up or down if it wasn’t necessary—and Janus led them through the rows of storage tanks where liquid and semi-liquid waste was broken up and allowed to settle.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
The door they’d come in through slammed open, but Janus was focused on looking for an access point. There. He found a gated ladder to the facility’s sublevels and cut the lock with a short burst from his new toolkit’s laser cutter.
“They’re going to be on us any second,” Vincent said, on edge.
“Try to keep up,” Janus said with a grin, grabbing both rails of the ladder and sliding down ten meters to the first sublevel.
His suit’s smart fabric helped brace his legs for the landing, although Fury was starting to wake back up, and she whimpered from the landing. “Sorry, girl,” Janus said, backing away to let the next person slide down. A few gunshots rang out above—Janus recognized the fast but controlled cadence as Mick’s—but Janus focused on swapping out one of his grenade charges and rigging it with a tripwire.
As the last member of their group stepped clear of the ladder, Janus attached the grenade to the left rail and strung the tripwire across the third step from the bottom.
“What’s that do?” Vincent asked.
“It’s my own composition,” Janus said, looking for some sort of control room. “Melts polymers and fuses carbon together. Ruins void suits and gas masks.” He found the room he was looking for and headed in that direction. “I’m going to need time.”
“How much time?”
“Only a minute if the Carverites are good engineers, longer if they’re smart ones.”
The first sublevel was designed to break down the products of the settling tanks. Solids were macerated and sent to anaerobic tanks to be broken down by bacteria, while liquids were sent straight to bioreactors, where they were harvested for hydrocarbons and heat. As Janus stepped into the processing center’s control room, he saw the Carverites were above-average engineers. Their panels were laid out intuitively in reference to the space visible out the windows, and all the switches and labels were properly labeled.
They weren’t smart engineers because they’d favored control over stopping someone like him from doing something stupid.
A shot rang out, and then several more. Janus hurried through the steps, first turning off the space’s ventilation and then disabling the gas detection and emergency vent system. He could have done something more elegant with that if he’d had more time, but for now, he just made sure that the top levels of the facility were turned into a sealed box.
Then, he started unsealing the bioreactors.
“They’re starting to come through in numbers, Janus!” Mick said.
“I’m done!” Janus said, eyeballing the facility map and unlocking the path to the maintenance tunnels. “Everybody, stop shooting!”
His hazard indicators sounded as soon as he stepped out of the control room. More worryingly, he smelled it faintly—the smell of soil, rot, and fermentation. It told him the shot earlier had done more than crease his suit; it had breached it. It also confirmed there was a rising concentration of methane gas in the air.
Crack! Boom! A Carverite shot at them from the cover of a bioreactor and ignited a small patch of gas, creating an impressive fireball but not that much force.
“Cease fire!” someone shouted. “Stunners only!”
Vincent nodded to Janus as Janus passed to lead the group toward the maintenance access he’d just unlocked.
The path to the maintenance tunnels was a small, secure door that would follow the main runoff and feed lines that left the facility. Janus got the team inside, then closed and locked the doors down behind him.
He rigged a second grenade to go off if the Carverites forced the doors open. He saw Vincent, the veteran Motragi ranger, watching and guarding him. “Incendiary,” Janus explained.
“That’ll slow them down,” Vincent said, sounding far more confident than he had only minutes before.
“It’ll do more than that,” Janus said, fighting his aversion to doing so destructive within a dome. He slapped the public address panel by the door and said, “To all Carverite security personnel, this is Janus Invarian. I have turned this facility into a bomb. The smell you’re smelling is methane gas. Right now, it will only singe your eyebrows if you set it off. At above five percent concentration in air, it will explode. Once it reaches ten percent concentration, it will damage the surrounding buildings, and past about fifteen percent, it will burn uncontrollably. This facility’s lower levels extract phosphorus, and if that ignites, it will start a fire that will burn through metal and damage the whole district. Fall back, call in engineers to clear the gas, or die. It’s your choice.”
“Holy hells, Invarian,” Vincent said.
Janus took a moment to unstrap Fury from his pack. The jungle dragon was groggy, but she could stand up on her own. “We’re fighting a particular branch of the Cult, Vincent. Once we’re past all this, I’ll tell you about what they did to my people—what they still plan to do to my people. For now, just know I won’t be pulling any punches.”
“Fine by me, Emissary,” Vincent said.
Janus nodded. He gave Fury a quick pat, and then the two of them squeezed past the rest of the team, leading the group deeper into the bowels of the Carver Institute.
***
Outside the waste treatment facility, a corpo-sec sergeant found Donnika and gave her the news. “What do we do, ma’am? Do you want us to go after them?”
Donnika slipped her hands into the sleeves of her robes. “No. I don’t think he’s bluffing. He’s a madman. He’s destroyed facilities like this before.” Of course, he’d evacuated the Pugarian drug lab before setting fire to it, but portraying Invarian as a terrorist and showing restraint suited her needs. “Pull your people back, sergeant. The important thing is keeping the Carver Institute safe.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Donnika smiled behind her architect’s mask. The Carverite corporate security personnel weren’t close to competent enough to face Invarian, and most of her remaining aspirant teams were out of their element, made up of non-Krandermorans. Of those that were from Krandermore, most were from sun-side.
It was Brago’s erstwhile teammate, the coldsider loyalist, who had suggested Invarian might go to ground in the city’s substructure if cornered, and Donnika had given her leave to set her ambush below. Invarian and Abraxxis were walking straight into a trap, and the report Donnika would give to the Consensus about them threatening to crack the dome open might just spare her from punishment.
“I’m heading back to dome-sec HQ,” she said, turning to walk away without waiting for the Carverites’ acknowledgment.
Donnika’s thoughts were already focused on the next steps: the rewards she would heap at the coldsider aspirant’s feet, the narrative she would present to her peers within and without the faction. Moments like these could turn the tide of Cult sentiment. After all, it was the ethos of the compartmentalist faction to use specialists in the environments and situations best suited to them, the right tools for the right tasks, and what could be more fitting than Nikandros’ supposed champion meeting his end because of it?