Experimental Dome, 210 Kilometers from Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.14 Interstellar
“Uncle Ivan? Are you there?” Janus asked over the comm channel.
He could see his uncle’s tracks clearly in the dust, both arriving and departing. There were bootprints around Janus’s buggy and the occasional round mark where a hard-suited duster had taken a knee. Were there several of them, or just one? It must have taken some time to strip Janus’s buggy. How the hell had Ivan missed it?
Unless he was taken. Bandits could be holding him hostage. When you were in a hard suit, any sharp edge was a death threat, any fight could be fatal. They could have him cuffed or locked down, comm disabled, crouching just out of sight and debating on how they would take him. But why had they parked their own buggies elsewhere, unless they were hiding out nearby, in one of the secondary buildings?
“How are you doing, Janus?” Uncle Ivan said over the comm. “Make it to your buggy yet?”
Janus’s heart jumped, and he turned in every direction. There was no dome comm mast around to extend their range, and no atmosphere to reflect a radio signal, so comms were line-of-sight—four kilometers to the horizon at most. “Uncle? Where are you?”
“I’m gone, Janus. Headed back to Prime Dome with the only functional buggy. If you’d been paying attention instead of having your head jammed up that carbon seeder’s casing, you’d have noticed.”
It didn’t matter that he was undergoing aspirant training and that he knew his uncle was probably trying to make some kind of twisted point. The words punched Janus right in the gut. “Why would you do that?”
“Because you’re not ready for this, Janus,” Uncle Ivan said, confirming Janus’s worst fears. “Bennin and the rest of the Council want to use you as some sort of symbol of the useful outsider, the good outsider who can save the dome and fit in with the Hub, but they’re going to get you killed, and you’re too stubborn or noble to say no, so I’m saving you. There’s food and air out here, and you can scavenge water from the irrigation system. I’ll come get you in a couple days, when it’s clear you don’t belong in the program, and we’ll let someone else save Prime Dome from their short-termed thinking.”
Janus felt mortified, like he was actually dying of shame. Ivan had been encouraging at first, but now it was clear he’d only been setting Janus up for this moment, to be betrayed the same way he’d been betrayed by dome admin and Barry at the recycling center. He’d been proud of the work he’d done on the carbon seeder, and because of that he had trusted his Uncle Ivan’s request at face value—go to the remote experimental farm and fix the carbon seeder, why not? It was a job that needed doing, and who better than an aspirant to do a vital job fast and then head on? It had felt like a perfect use of his skills, even though he’d been uncomfortable with the timeline and the imperfect fix.
All a distraction.
All to prove he wasn’t fit for this.
“Uncle? Come back!” Janus said over the comm. “Uncle?”
There was no answer. Of course, his uncle couldn’t afford to come back, now, could he? Because if he did, he’d be stuck at the experimental facility over-day with Janus, at the very least. Janus looked at the damage to the buggy and knew it was more than an hour’s work of reassembly, even if he’d had the parts, which he didn’t. MFCs were dead, it needed new hoses, tire’s gone… He could get by on his suit’s life-support system for the trip back, but the lump in front of him didn’t even have a functional power plant anymore. Janus was stuck.
Ivan had won. Or maybe Janus had won, because he was never worthy of being the dome’s aspirant. He was just convenient, and someone like Bennin would pivot quickly, find a good Primer to save the dome’s pet outsider from his own inadequacy, confirming what they’d known all along.
The thought of it ached. It was the kind of thought that made him understand why Ivan drank so much, because maybe his uncle had known all along, known for years, that Janus just wasn’t good enough to do what he’d done for Prometheus Base.
He worked the airlock controls numbly, got back inside, and tore his helmet off, taking deep breaths of the fresh, mulchy air.
Okay, Janus. Okay, he told himself. The air was cool and rich, like standing in a real garden on a world without the void all around them. He’d done fixes in hydroponics before, but this was different because the geodome had real soil in it, real plants reaching for real sunlight. It was going to get hot in here during the day, which was fine for certain varieties of plant but would take the water out of him faster than he could replace it. He needed a plan, because even if his uncle had left him in a verdant cage, this was still Irkalla, and the void would still take him if he let it. Three hours to daylight or less. That felt like something solid to latch on to.
What did he need to survive? Air, water, shelter, and food, in that order. He pulled up his retinal display and added those four things to a list.
He couldn’t just breathe what was in this dome. Hyperoxia, or too much oxygen, in small doses wasn’t an issue, and could actually be good for him, good for old people or premies who dropped from the birthing sack too soon, too. But breathing even a little too much oxygen for too long could cause all kinds of problems, from damaged lungs to full-blown seizures. He’d have to spend at least some of his time in his suit, between now and whenever Ivan came back to get him, at least until the patch job he’d done on the carbon seeder took hold. There’d be a melting unit down there somewhere, beneath the plants, burrowing into the frozen CO2 at a rate the plants could handle and process, releasing more carbon into the system.
Where was the excess oxygen going, though? They had to be doing something with it. What would Janus do with it, if he had all that oxygen just lying around with no humans to breathe it, and a whole dome at his disposal with no humans to draw power from it?
He’d bottle it, that’s what he’d do. He’d make LOx with it. Liquid oxygen could be used to rapidly break down organic matter, which this facility had in abundance, and it could make just about anything burn. Mixed with methane from a fermentation tank, it would even produce old-fashioned rocket fuel.
His emotional meltdown interrupted by a technical problem, Janus stowed his helmet in the nearby suit locker, then stripped off his gloves, chest-piece, and hard suit legs. The geodesic dome couldn’t even compare to the main habitat at Prime Dome where two hundred thousand residents lived and worked, but it was still a large space, almost three hundred meters in diameter. Most of that area was filled with crops that were more than head height, but it had all the same requirements as a regular dome—power, light, environmentals, and of course heat management. The temperature in the dome was cool but easily tolerable, because crops didn’t deal well with freezing temperatures any better than burning ones, so there were heat exchangers somewhere or the whole dome would be an oven. Carbon was being turned into plant matter before being brought back to Prime Dome as biomass; that meant excess oxygen that could be vented through a pressure valve system, but venting gases were easily detected by any duster with a spectrometer, and this facility was meant to be secret.
The pieces of the system were coming together in Janus’s head. He wasn’t sure what they all meant yet, but there was something there, something he could use. He just needed to figure out how.
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The first thing he did was go to the central pillar he’d worked in. The bag of tools Uncle Ivan had brought with them was still there, along with some dehydrated rations and nutrient paste tubes. There were more than would have been needed for a single day, even if Janus had been doing heavy lifting the whole time, and maybe that should have clued Janus in that something was wrong. Fine, I screwed up, he thought, and grabbed a short crowbar and a mallet before heading back out.
The carbon seeder was drawing dome air into the central pillar before pumping it back out, which made it the best place for a cooling system as well, especially since the machinery and computers within the central strut would also need to be cooled. Janus walked around the central pillar and found the cooling pipes where they sunk into the ground, then followed an imaginary line from there to the dome exterior.
There was a shed about two-thirds of the way there. That’s what I need. As he made his way through the fields of modified wheat and corn, he continued to piece the imaginary system together in his head.
There was a dome full of plants, and plants took in CO2, light, and nutrients and produced plant matter and oxygen. If the seeder failed, or if the CO2 harvesters beneath the dome shut down for whatever reason, the dome would end up in an oxygen surplus. Any environmental engineer could figure that much out. And since this dome was so far removed from Prime Dome, and known only to a few, then it would have to be able to survive that kind of malfunction.
There was also no signal between here and Prime Dome, unless there was a buried cable somewhere—another thing rogue dusters looked for.
There had to be systems in place to handle hyper-oxygenation for long enough that regular maintenance could come in and fix the problem. What does this dome already have? Plants. Plants break down and return their minerals to the soil, and with the right thermal and electrical conditions, produce methane. Methane burns when exposed to heat and oxygen, forming water and CO2, which is exactly what this dome needs.
That was the safety valve. Janus was almost sure of it. If it wasn’t, he was going to have a talk with sector maintenance when he got home. He reached the shed and tried the door code Uncle Ivan had given him, which didn’t work, as expected. So he positioned the crowbar and used the mallet to hammer it into place before breaking in.
Inside the shed, he more or less found what he’d been expecting. There was an oxygen reclamation system that chilled and bottled liquid O2, currently full. There was a methane storage system that was fed from biofuel tanks, also full. They were currently on standby. Both systems required refrigeration, which tied into the experimental dome’s main heat sink, which was why he hadn’t needed to search every shed, just this one. If he’d just thought of it earlier, he could have solved the “problem” his uncle had clearly instigated with a flip of a switch. He did that now.
A klaxon sounded, and a smooth, computerized voice sounded from the dome’s internal speakers. “Emergency thermogenesis activated. All visitors are advised to vacate the dome until oxygen levels return to normal.”
Janus nodded. He understood the reasoning; the system was burning fuel in an oxygen-rich environment. Too much heat or a stray spark would set off an explosion. Stuck between the oncoming light of day and a system that had—so far—failed to blow up, Janus decided staying inside was the better part of valor.
He retrieved a bottle of LOx and a bottle of methane, lugging them back to the central pillar one at a time, the beginnings of an idea forming in his mind.
The problem wasn’t that his uncle thought he wasn’t good enough to be an aspirant. Janus wholeheartedly agreed. He’d felt so completely out of his depth during the studying and the hand-to-hand training with his uncle. Even the dreams he’d had in the rejuvenation tank had thrown him off balance. But there was Callie to think about. She was worthy of living in the Hub, and being mentored by an administrator, and the best education Prime Dome could provide. Janus wasn’t just going to give those up, not without assurances, and he had no confidence Ivan could guarantee those things or that Bennin would provide them if he didn’t at least try to pass his candidature.
And he was mad at having been tricked. Screw Uncle Ivan, he thought. If Janus was going to wash out of the aspirant training program, it was going to be on his own terms.
***
Janus was exhausted by the time he settled back down in the central pillar. He’d been up since night-break, dumped from the rejuvenation tank and working nonstop since then. He had a pile of scavenged supplies—the improvised fuel, ready to be mixed in the buggy’s turbine, some wheels from a utility vehicle, hoses from a non-essential fuel cell, photo-voltaic strips from an external sensor, and capacitors from a control system this dome could live without. He’d been thoughtfully selfish about it, placing his survival first without causing needless damage. Ivan would be proud. He’d have to install all of it tomorrow because after what happened, he wasn’t comfortable leaving even a partially assembled buggy out there. The only thing he’d installed were the solar cells and capacitors so they’d have time to charge, but he’d hidden them as best he could.
Best he could would have to be enough.
And he’d taken the extra two hours to finish fixing the carbon seeder, which was now showing all greens except for two indicators, because he was tired of people telling him to rush things and he needed the win.
Now was the long hours of the day. He’d tampered with the building’s thermostat to make himself comfortable without overstressing the systems. He recognized that was a necessity, because he’d be racing across the dust in an untested rig tomorrow evening and getting good rest was important, but it was also a little bit of defiance for having been placed in the situation to begin with. If his uncle didn’t think he was up to it, why did he even get him to start training? Was it just politics, and trying to get a little leverage so they could live somewhere bigger in a better sector, or had Ivan seen something in him that confirmed he couldn’t make it? Janus wished his uncle had just told him instead of marooning him out here with his fears and doubts.
He made himself his favorite meal out of the rehydrated packs. The water tasted funny, because of the different mineralization in the irrigation systems, although his suit’s filtration systems told him it was fine to drink. He turned on the AR program his mother had written for him, just so he’d have company while he ate. He was surprised to see neither his mother or father appear, but a man not much older than himself, seated on top of the carbon seeder across from him. The man looked tired, defeated, eyes bloodshot and hands hanging between his legs. As the unknown man raised his head, Janus sat up, too, because he recognized him.
It was Uncle Ivan, still square-jawed and built like a trash compactor, but at least a decade younger.
“Hey, scrub,” Ivan said, and Janus felt it like a knife wound. His uncle hadn’t called him that in years. “I guess I’m dead, or whatever. Anika, your mom, she said this would only activate if we were separated, and the only reason I’d leave you and Bug is if I’m headed to the recycler. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I couldn’t…” His uncle choked up, and he cursed before fiddling with his wrist-comm.
The scene jumped, and Ivan seemed more collected, and angry. “There are things you need to know. I plan to get us to Crossroads—got some Hunter friends there who might take us on. Either that, or we’ll head to Prime Dome. Those stuck-up assholes would love to get their hands on a Promethean aspirant, not that they’d ever admit it. Maybe that’ll give us enough leverage to disappear. Now, I don’t know how I died but I sure as hell didn’t see it coming… Don’t trust the wayfinders is all I’m saying. I’ll tell you more about it some other time. Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep you and Bug safe.”
What the void was that? Janus thought, trying to get the recording to play again, but he could only find the usual ones of his parents listed. His separation from Ivan—being cut off from the same noosphere—must have triggered some sort of dead-man’s switch. That had to have been right after… after Mom and Dad died. He swallowed. It had been shocking to see Ivan as he’d been back then. He’d had a few years on Janus, maybe a whole ten years at most, but they’d been more similar than Janus had thought, or liked to think.
Ivan had been a broken man in that recording. He’d been running scared. It wasn’t the heroic escape across the dust dragging two children Janus had imagined, the one Ryler talked about when he asked Janus about “Emissary Invarian.” Strangely, it made Janus feel like he wasn’t such a screwup. Like if his uncle, who was an aspirant, could be that dragged under by his situation, maybe it wasn’t so crazy for Janus to feel that way, too.
Another new piece of information was that Uncle Ivan had been paranoid about wayfinders even back then, to the point of thinking they were after him, or maybe that they’d had something to do with the collapse of Prometheus Base. That wasn’t surprising to Janus, who’d spent the last twelve years listening to Ivan grumble about the Cult of the Survivor and its representatives, accusing them of everything from tampering with the Trials to make them more dangerous to spying on people through the dome networks. But he had never indicated the wayfinders were responsible for the death of Janus’s parents, of their entire dome. I’ll have to ask him about that when I get back. He knew enough about Ivan to know what the surly older man didn’t say was as important as what he did—maybe more important, since he’d hidden so much from Janus and Callie over the past years.
Janus laid back on his suit and played the next video of his mother and father. They were just talking to each other as if Janus wasn’t there, being themselves, and that was comforting.
Still, sleep didn’t come easy. Janus had one more reason to make it back to confront his uncle. If what the recording had implied was true, the world of Irkalla and the Trials were even more dangerous than Janus realized.