The Forum, New Prometheus

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.7 Interstellar

Janus and his people huddled in the forum and in the adjoining rooms, families clustered in storage spaces and shops. People were dressed in whatever warm clothing they had, and Janus’s breath fogged the air in front of him. New Prometheus had no power and water beyond what they had stored in the gray water systems and backup generators. The settlement above them had cut through the deck plating and security buffer to get them some basic feeds, but most of the colony was non-functional. Their access to the noosphere was blocked on an individual basis, and Syn had been told by the other colonies in no uncertain terms that if she touched any systems, even a holo-display or personal terminal, she would be arrested and sentenced to the Deeps.

The Reef had convened an emergency meeting to discuss the attack and resulting damage. Janus and his people had not been invited.

They waited, blinded and freezing.

“How long do you think this will take?” Janus asked.

“You’ll know when I know,” Lira said irritably.

Janus put a hand on her shoulder, and she gave him a hard look, but she patted his hand before moving to check on her constituents.

“She’s just upset because she’s going to have to fix all this,” Lee said.

“We’re all upset,” Janus answered, although thinking about it, Lee and the other Hunters were remarkably calm.

The rebellion was over. There were a few people among the colonists who muttered that Janus had somehow been responsible for the explosion, but most people seemed to realize he’d saved their lives. The colony’s outer door had been burning hot for several minutes, and they’d had to burn out two motors to get it open again. The old Prometheans were dead, killed instantly by the explosion. Callie and her boyfriend, Matthias, had gone from celebrities to pariahs. She was sitting on a bench with him across the room, largely ignored except for the occasional dirty look.

“Are you going to go talk to her?” Lee asked.

“Not yet,” Janus said. He needed to know where the colony stood first, and he needed to cool down. She’d put Xander and herself in danger. If he were to talk to Callie now, he’d say something he’d regret.

“Still think we’re safer up here?” Lee asked, with Xander strapped to her chest, napping on her shoulder.

“I’m not ready to have that conversation yet,” Janus said.

“Okay, mate,” Lee said. “But you know we have to have that conversation, right? They dented our front door.”

“They did, and I do,” Janus said. He wasn’t sure of the extent of the damage yet, but it was clear they’d narrowly avoided a catastrophe.

The door on the far side of the room slid open, and Nikandros and Ryler walked through. The aspirants on duty let them pass. Janus put an arm around Lee, surprising her by giving both her and Xander a squeeze, but she leaned into him. He looked into her eyes briefly, then walked down the short flight of stairs to meet their visitors on the floor of the small amphitheater.

“It was a hab-buster,” Ryler said as Mick and Lira joined them. “Designed to burn out a colony by breaking down weak inner doors and filling the whole space with pressure and heat.”

“How bad was the damage?” Janus asked, since they were getting straight to business.

“Most of the explosion went outward, through the glass,” Ryler said. “Knocked out the security drone, which crashed on one of the docks and damaged a tugboat. Six dead in the passageway, another dozen in the crafter colony across from you, and the elevator shaft is going to be offline for a month. There’s some instability in the ice wall, but Reef engineers are working on stabilizing it.”

“What about the compartmentalists?” Lira asked. “Are they going to be held accountable for this?”

Nikandros, unmasked this time, gave her an apologetic smile. “It’s hard to hold a whole faction responsible for the unsanctioned actions of a few. There were those who knew about the ‘peace talks,’ but all deny they knew about a bomb plot. There wasn’t enough left of the perpetrators to run forensics on their implants. The Consensus is forced to assume they acted alone.”

“Matthias,” Janus said, nodding toward Callie and her compartmentalist friend. “He said he didn’t recognize one of them.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Ryler nodded. “We have the saved footage but no definite ID code, and it’s easy to swap out a face.”

Janus knew that, although it had taken some getting used to. The level of body modification, cybernetic or biological, that most Cult members had access to was still something he was coming to grips with.

“Matthias has been disavowed by his faction,” Ryler added. “The general assumption is that he knew what was being planned, or that he should have known. The Reef leadership sentenced him to the Deeps. We’re supposed to take him with us.”

Mick whistled. “No trial and no mercy, eh?”

Nikandros looked at the Hunter. “There are some crimes severe enough the intention of the perpetrator doesn’t matter.”

“And where does that leave us?” Lira asked.

“Persona non grata,” Nikandros said.

“They’re exiling us?” Janus asked. “Isn’t that exactly what the comps and purgationists wanted?”

“You’re not being exiled,” Nikandros said, “if only because certain parties brought up the danger of giving in to terrorists.”

“But you’re giving in to them anyway,” Lira said, crossing her arms.

“Yes,” Nikandros said. “The power and utility feeds will not be repaired, and after a month, even the limited connection you have with your neighbors will be cut off.”

“We won’t have the means to support ourselves by then,” Janus said. “It’s murder.”

“It would be murder not to,” Nikandros said patiently. “The explosion came a little too close to doing structural damage to the borehole. The number of lives that would be lost if part of the Reef collapsed and the importance of the port below to the undersea colonies made it a simple calculation. You will be given supplies to set up a basic but self-sufficient colony on the surface.”

Nikandros paused, waiting for them to respond. There was a familiar feeling to the architect’s expression that Janus now recognized from experience. There were consequences to all this, unavoidable consequences, that would play in Nikandros’s favor, and he’d thought all of it through. He was just waiting for Janus, Mick, and Lira to catch up and acknowledge whatever concession he expected to have.

Janus would have admired him if they hadn’t so often been on the losing end of such chains of events.

“Is a surface colony feasible?” Lira asked Janus. “You’ve spent more time out there than any of us.”

“Depends on what the Cult qualifies as enough supplies to be self-sufficient,” Janus answered. “The Luddites have closed-loop systems that can be sustained with minimal external inputs, but they have more people, they’ve been at it for longer, and no one is trying to kill them.”

It would also force Janus to either abandon the trip to the Core or make matters worse by taking the fittest and best-trained people away. Part of him wanted to punish the colonists for turning on him and the others, but he didn’t want them dead.

“The exceptionalists would welcome your people in our habitats,” Nikandros said.

“No,” Janus said automatically, and Nikandros gave him a patient smile.

“Janus…” Lira said.

Janus wracked his brain, trying to think like the Cult architect. He couldn’t match Nikandros, not exactly; the leader of the exceptionalists had cranial implants and hundreds of years of experience to rely on. But Janus could put himself in the place of someone who systematically cultivated power. “He’ll break us up, send five or ten of us to each settlement so we can’t band together and defend ourselves.”

“It’s a good number,” Nikandros acknowledged. “Not as big a target as New Prometheus, and it keeps families together.”

“It destroys our identity as Irkallans,” Janus said. “We’d be treated well, involved in local matters, and our voting patterns would align with the settlement and the faction. We’d be true exceptionalists in a matter of years.”

“At most,” Nikandros confirmed, inclining his head slightly in acknowledgment.

“We could go mobile,” Mick said. “Worked well enough on Irkalla, and Hunters did it for the same reasons.”

“People are scared to trade with us,” Lira said, “and there aren’t any triliths here for you to hunt as leverage.”

“Ryler?” Nikandros said. “I know you want to tell them. It’s okay.”

Ryler looked torn, and Janus sympathized. It was an obvious trap, but Ryler walked into it anyway. “There are dangers on the outskirts, far from the borehole and the Reef. Settlers disappear, and new settlements need help getting established. You could make a living there, moving around the edges.”

And Nikandros would allow it because it would make us irrelevant, Janus knew. Toppling the compartmentalists had been the architect’s white whale for centuries. Now that the other faction was wounded and short an architect of his own, he wouldn’t let anything get in the way of finishing the job. “You knew.”

Nikandros gave nothing away, but Ryler instantly looked guilty.

“You bastards,” Lira said, almost shaking with anger. “Do you have any idea what it cost me to get this place up and running while everyone else did whatever they wanted?”

Ouch, Janus thought, but he also felt better about the situation. For what was maybe the first time, he felt like he could see all the threads coming together. He wondered if this was how Nikandros felt about everything all the time, but in this case, Janus had the home-court advantage. “Syn! You’re going to want to hear this!”

The Betan hacker broke off her conversation and jogged over. “What did I miss?”

“You weren’t eavesdropping?” Mick asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Syn said. “Nikandros knew, we’re all out of a home, yadda yadda.”

“Good,” Janus said. “Nikandros has also been in our systems for months. He might have all of the Reef under surveillance.”

Nikandros’s face did twitch slightly at that pronouncement.

“Wow,” Syn said seriously. “If that’s true, it’s impressive.”

“Uncanny,” Nikandros agreed, looking at Janus.

“How can you possibly know all this?” Lira asked. “And if you did, why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t know until now. I’m not sure I do know, but I just asked myself, if Nikandros wanted to be sure the expedition was going to go off without a hitch, what would he need?”

Lira rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Okay. Great insight. Gives us leverage over Nikandros if we can prove it.”

“We don’t have to,” Syn said. “We just have to circulate the rumor.”

“Perfect,” Lira said. “But it’s not a solution to our problem. We’re obviously not handing our people over to him, and I’m not living like a Hunter—no offense.”

“None taken, mate,” Mick said. “Not for everyone.”

Janus grinned, feeling a bit manic as he did so. “You’re right. The only way we win is by doing what no one is expecting. We don’t go into exile, and we don’t cancel the expedition.”

“That doesn’t leave us a lot of choices, boss,” Mick said.

“It does, actually,” Lira said. “It’s insane, and I don’t know how we’re going to do it in five days, but it’s fairly simple. We take everyone.”