Pioneer’s Tower, Bennin Residence
Prime Dome, Planet Irkalla
4452.2.13 Interstellar
They rode an elevator—an honest-to-goodness elevator—up to the twenty-eighth floor. The sight of the buildings up close had been a shock, but the idea that that much valuable real estate had been given over to letting wealthy Primers skip the stairs morning and evening and sit idle any time in between was truly mind-blowing. The doors opened directly into a luxurious apartment with ceilings two stories tall. A tall, arched window filled the wall opposite the room, letting more natural light into the room than Janus had ever experienced without having to worry about boiling in his hard suit, and yet the room was comfortably cool. Stone and polished brass were everywhere, as well as another material Janus had never seen that was a rich brown and lined like fingerprints.
“Ah,” Councilor Bennin said, looking up from digging through a pile of data tablets. “How was medical?”
“Fine,” Ivan said gruffly. “He’s healthy enough, though he’s going to need to spend a few nights in gene repair.”
Bennin gave him a slow nod before looking at Janus. “I hope you’ll be comfortable here, young man. It doesn’t excuse what my son did—”
“Sir,” Janus interrupted, mortified the councilor was once again accommodating to him. “We can’t stay here. You should be allowed to grieve your son, and I—”
His uncle began chuckling.
“What’s funny about that?” Janus asked.
Ivan shook his head. “Leave it to my dust-dwelling nephew to need to be convinced at length that he’s going to be our messiah. Most kids your age would pat themselves on the back and ask for a gold-plated suit as a reward for just getting selected, then expect everyone in the damn bar to buy them drinks immediately as they celebrate.”
“Janus!” Callie squealed, popping out of one of the several side rooms and running over to hug him. She gave him an impish grin. “I told you to apply for the aspirant program.”
“Is that so?” Janus said, putting one arm around her. He looked at their uncle. “Can you believe this girl? Her brother gets out of jail, and the first words out of her mouth are ‘I told you so.’”
“I told you so!” Callie said with a big smile.
It was good to see her that happy. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen her this giddy—maybe when she first got into the advanced class. It warmed his heart.
“I’m going to go upstairs and get things set up for the candidate, Benny,” Ivan said to the administrator with shocking familiarity.
“Sure,” Bennin said before looking at Callie. “And you need to get back to your studies, young lady.”
As was typical of Callie, she didn’t complain, although she did give Janus one more squeeze and said, “Talk after I’m done with work?”
“Sure thing, Bug,” Janus said, and next thing he knew she was rushing off through one of the doors to the left as if she’d lived in the palatial apartment all her life.
“Children adapt so quickly to change,” Bennin said, either guessing or echoing his thoughts.
Janus realized the two of them were alone, and despite the opulent furnishings and plentiful space—too much space for being indoors and out of his hard suit—it felt too close to be near the man he’d insulted in the home that not long ago must have been Craig’s as well.
Bennin set the slate down carefully. “Do you think my son died well, Janus?”
Janus swallowed.
“He didn’t,” Bennin touching his wrist to activate his comm, and flicking a file in Janus’s direction.
Janus accepted it reflexively, and the holo-recording opened automatically, filling the open space with the hard-suited figures of early-shift workers, rendered in blue by his retinal implant.
“That damned door’s jammed again,” Craig Bennin said, smacking his fist against the bulkhead. “I’m bypassing it.”
Lira put her hand on his padded shoulder. “Is that a good idea? This is the third time this week.”
Craig shrugged her off. “We’re done, you psychotic freak. Had to bring your mommy issues everywhere you go, didn’t you? They’re going to pull me from the aspirant program because you pushed the wrong man’s nephew around. And you know what? You’ll switch sides and be fine, won’t you? You’re already talking like an outsider.”
Lira balled her gloves into fists. “Just because I’m using common sense doesn’t make me—”
The chamber locked and air started to hiss into the room. “See?” Craig told her.
Some of the suited figures popped their helmets as soon as pressure passed one-third Standard, because that was what was in the suits. It saved them a moment’s discomfort, and it allowed them to talk, smile, and laugh more freely with the people getting off shift with them.
“Why isn’t the door unlocking?” Lira asked as the chamber passed one hundred kilopascals.
The hiss continued. More people removed their helmets, but some looked annoyed, or worried. As the pressure passed two Standard atmospheres, Craig started to panic. “I can’t get it to stop!”
Some people scrambled to get their helmets back on, while two more lunged past Craig and Lira to pry open the door controls.
There was a groan and a loud pop, and everyone was jerked to the left like a giant had blown them away. The recording ended, and Janus’s retinal implant shut off.
“I did that,” Bennin told him, back straight, eyes unwavering. “I taught my son to win. Never thought to teach him how to lose graciously, and it killed him.”
Janus couldn’t fully process what he’d just seen, let alone come up with an adequate answer to the administrator’s claim. Although more complex factors were to blame, Craig Bennin had triggered the accident. Lira Allencourt had defended Janus’s position. And in his last moments, Craig Bennin had called her a coward and resented Janus for who his uncle was—because of privilege of all things. The ridiculousness of it all, watching that happen in the midst of all the wealth of Craig’s childhood home, was almost too much for Janus to take. “Why would you show me that, sir?”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Because I want you to understand I’m not helping you, Janus. I have committed a terrible wrong against my dome, my son, and myself, one I will struggle to rectify in the time I have left. I need you to remember his pride, and his haste, and his arrogance. I need you to remember he trained for what you’re about to embark on for years, and that as you so eloquently put it, it is an aspirant’s job to die for their dome, if necessary. Craig’s memory, his mistakes, and my humiliation, those might just keep you alive.”
***
Janus found his uncle in what Administrator Bennin said was Janus’s bedroom, rifling through a cabinet. Most of Janus’s personal items from their old apartment, the things he’d miss, had already been put away far more neatly than Janus could have. Ivan was an island of disorder in the neat surroundings, the ground strewn with gear and equipment.
“What are you doing?” Janus asked.
Ivan stood up, hands akimbo, a toothy smile on his face. “Getting you ready. Are you ready?”
Janus chuckled. “We just got started. I’m training today?”
“The Trials begin in less than a week Janus. When else are you gonna train?”
“I still have to go to main shift,” Janus responded, realizing the futility of his words as they left his mouth.
Ivan began to chuckle. “I don't think sorting crap into smaller piles of crap is going to help you much in what's coming. No, Janus. We have real work to do. There's a lot you still need to learn.”
Janus nodded, agreeing with Ivan even though he felt bad for letting Barry down, and as for early shift, they were going to be both short on experience and leadership. “So we're heading out now?”
“We’re not going anywhere today, but your training has already begun. Maybe you don't get it. I have to cram several years of training into a week,” Ivan said.
“You have to?” Janus asked. “When did you become head aspirant trainer?”
“You got a better choice?”
“Who trained the other aspirants? Certainly not you.”
Ivan nodded. “Good point. We can go over to Prospect Sector and go through the proper channels, fill out some paperwork, wait in an office, and then you can start by learning to speak Vepo so you can effectively trade with the Vepians in their tiny sector in Crossroads. That'll take six months before you get the grammar down good enough to passably get fleeced. They do offer the best supplies, sure. Then maybe you could learn proper cultural etiquette for Babylon Refuge. Sure, they're laid back, but they judge the hell out of you if you don't do things how they like it. Might not help you survive, but it will definitely help you not hurt anyone's feelings. And the Survivor hates when people aren't polite to one another. A hell of a lot easier to slip a knife between someone's ribs if they let you get in close.”
“Why would I want to slip a knife between someone's ribs?” Janus asked.
“I'm saying they'll want to slip a knife between your ribs. Because you're an aspirant candidate, and you’re going to find out more accidents happen to people like us than is strictly probable.”
“You think there are people hunting aspirants?” Janus asked. “Why? To give their dome a better chance of winning?”
“Strength through struggle, Janus. Once you get through a couple close calls, you won’t blush about ripping a little copper wiring out of a construction site.”
Janus shook his head, wrapping his head around his uncle's words. “So I'm not going through the proper channels then? Won't that, uh, piss some important people off?”
Ivan winked at him. “Anyone worth pissing off also knows I dictated the book on those programs. But you’re getting a special program called Uncle Ivan's 'we only have one week and if you don't listen to me you're going to end up dead' expedited training.”
“And you’re basing this on your experience as a former aspirant?”
“Hell no!” Uncle Ivan looked up from his rummaging. “Only a lunatic would go out into the dust as ill-prepared as you’re going to have to.”
Uncle Ivan had always been hard to read, which made the conversation an off-balancing mixture of alarming and jovial to Janus. He was ready to accept that Uncle Ivan had been an aspirant, and possibly a good one since he’d rescued Janus and Callie when they were kids, and their present surroundings seemed to indicate he had connections at the highest levels of the dome, figuratively and literally. At the same time, it had been a solid Standard decade since Uncle Ivan had been an aspirant. “It might help me not panic if you took this a bit more seriously,” he said.
Uncle Ivan turned and pushed an armload of viewscreens into his arms. “You’ve had a busy day, so I want to start with something mental, not physical. There is a lot of material on there, but for now stick to the bookmarked sections. Perhaps later you can look at the rest.”
“Didn’t you always say this kind of stuff was a waste of time?” Janus asked as he checked the first volume’s index page. It didn’t seem to have any kind of theme, just a bunch of random information. One section was titled Signs of Dehydration, while the next tab read How to Build Your Own Rad Shield.
“No. I never said knowledge was a waste of time,” his uncle corrected. “I gave you as hands-on an education as you could get. I am saying we were going to have to cut a few corners. But you’re still going to need to know a lot of things you currently don’t.”
Janus grumbled but sat on the couch, which was shockingly comfortable, and began to read through his material all the while continuing to throw the odd question at Uncle Ivan. His uncle answered, sometimes by rote, other times by telling him which volume and chapter to consult. Janus was surprised to find at least two of the twelve volumes had in fact been dictated by Ivan Invarian. Janus guessed he really did write the book on this stuff.
After an hour, Uncle Ivan went to take care of some things for the next day’s training, and the concepts started slipping out of Janus’s head. The esoteric information combined with the shock of the day and his general fatigue had him needing to read passages over again.
The next section bookmarked was about oxygen levels and what to do if the carbon scrubbers on his suit died and his oxygen ran too low. Janus knew some of this, but it wasn’t something he’d spent a lot of time thinking about, even working the early shift, because his worst case was hooking into one of the other workers’ life-support units and hoofing it back to the airlock.
That wouldn’t be an option out in the dust between settlements, sheltering in a day tent during the sunlit hours and trying to watch out for bandits, rogue hunters, and apparently triliths, too. Reading that chapter suddenly made him realize what his life would be like out there, trying to make as much distance as he could each night when a suit breach or a broken buggy would mean the permanent end of his travels. He didn’t even know who his second would be, the person he would rely on to save him. After years of being an outsider both in name and in fact, he was going to have to trust someone with his life every moment of the time they were out in the dust.
He turned off the slate and rubbed his face. How was he supposed to learn all of this information in such a short period? How was he expected to survive, let alone win? Prime Dome really should have backups to train just in case something like this happened. Janus had seen Craig and Lira outside the domes training for nearly a year, and he'd seen some of the dangerous things they did. The Council should have taken this into account and had backups ready to go just in case.
His eyes narrowed. Of course they have backups. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did, just like sector maintenance had known about the Sector Six airlock, but they’d prioritized other seemingly more important work. Whatever was going on, it was important enough for Administrator Bennin to postpone grieving for his son. Janus wasn’t the only option, just the preferred one. It had to be a strong preference—they were putting an awful lot of resources, including a Hub administrator’s apartment, at his disposal. But it wasn’t certain, or his uncle wouldn’t be calling him a candidate.
His insecurity told him his uncle didn’t think he was up to the job. The care his uncle had shown him and Callie—greater than Janus had even thought—told him his uncle’s reluctance was an attempt to protect him.
Janus turned the slate back on. He knew enough to know he didn’t understand all that was going on, but it was a game played by administrators and former aspirants, and Janus wanted choices when the time came.
***
His uncle shook him awake. “Hey. You’re not sleeping in here.”
“What?” Janus said, lifting his head from the table. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
“It’s fine. You’ll learn to get your rest when and where you can. Now, come on.”
His uncle took him out of the room and away from the bed Janus thought he’d be sleeping in to a smaller, narrower room that was tiled in gleaming white. There was a drain in the middle of the floor. Two inclined tubes fitted with breathing masks, catheters, and sensors lay empty, their covers open.
“Strip and get in,” Ivan said, patting the one on the left.
“Is this how rich Primer’s sleep?” Janus asked, bending down to unzip his boots.
“Hell no,” Ivan said. “This is going to be cold, and uncomfortable, and the drugs are going to give you void-touched dreams, but we’ve got a few days to undo two-and-a-half decades of radiation damage. Consider it the one perk you’ll take with you if you wash out of training.”