The Pit, Mercuria
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.24 Interstellar
Fortunately for Janus and his team, the day was uneventful, because once he and Lira took the Hunter “downer” that Mick had given them, they were both catatonic for the next ten hours. Janus woke up to the smell of rehydrated protein and the sound of Mick talking to someone.
“Thanks, Maude. You’re a lifesaver,” Mick said, closing the suite door.
“Who was that?” Janus asked.
“My drug dealer,” Mick said, walking in with a small void-proof bag. “Got us some uppers, downers, painkillers, neuroleptics, hallucinogenics, and a couple doses of NO2.”
“What’s NO2?” Janus asked.
“Liquid air,” Mick said. “Lets you survive without breathing for a little bit. It’s expensive and I wouldn’t use it too often even if I could afford it, but it’s better than dying from a suit breach.”
Janus agreed with that last part wholeheartedly. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard of it before.”
Mick shrugged. “There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to Prime Dome, cobber. If you weren’t so tightfisted with what you do have, maybe you’d get more in return.”
Janus chuckled. Yeah, me and the other Primers, trying to keep the working man down.
“What’s that awful smell?” Lira asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Re-Pro,” Mick said with a grin. “I think it’s beef flavored. Want some?”
“No, and you shouldn’t either,” Lira said, throwing her blanket off. “Let me see if I can make it edible.”
“She cooks,” Janus said as part explanation, part apology.
“Gotcha,” Mick said, stowing his goodie bag in his main pack. “’Bout two hours until sundown, but since we’re headed to Beta Station, I went ahead and booked us passage on the cable.”
“What’s the cable?” Janus asked.
Mick grinned like a naughty child. “Boy, are you in for a treat.”
***
Janus tried not to focus on the swaying of the platform or the distance to the bottom of the chasm. They were riding an open platform hanging from a pair of three-centimeter-thick cables. Janus didn’t doubt the cable was strong enough to carry them, the three buggies, and the trailer full of feedstock. He was more concerned the poorly maintained motor was going to leave them stranded in the middle.
They’d been escorted to “the cable” by a frankly intimidating host of Mudrakers—good thing, too, based on the glares they’d gotten from people wearing mustard yellow. Their honor guard took them to the front of the line, strapped the buggies down, and sent them careening across the pit.
Behind them, lights lit up the face of Mercuria and the almost constant rain of trash falling from chutes on each level. The settlement was bigger than Janus had initially thought, going down dozens of levels to the pit floor. Layer upon layer of scrap, broken parts, and even organic waste had built up in great piles. “In a thousand years, they’ll have filled it completely,” Janus said jokingly.
“Bottom levels are already buried,” Mick said, following his gaze. “Might take less time than you think.”
***
With a night’s sleep and a few hours of pre-dusk preparation to allow the previous night’s events to settle in, Janus’s first concern had been some sort of reprisal by the Vipers, and his second had been Mick’s addition to the team. Lira was a volatile character to begin with, and Mick had already shown a strong independent streak combined with an irreverence that could be challenging to handle. He expected them to fight by the end of the first day, at best, and during the first leg of the drive if Murphy’s Law had its way.
What he should have worried about was the dust.
His first warning was a particular glow that dimmed the stars as they tilted and tipped their way across the pit. “What is that?” he asked.
“Moon rain,” Mick answered. “Haven’t you seen it before?”
Janus hadn’t. Dusk and dawn on an airless world were sudden, binary things. It was either day or night. The glow implied the presence of floating particulates, something that shouldn’t be possible in the absence of air.
As before, his VI activated without his having to ask. “A moon fountain is an electrostatic phenomenon,” Janus’s father explained. “Solar and cosmic rays knock electrons loose from the fine top layer of dust, which are then continuously repulsed several meters into the air. Sunset diminishes the fountaining effect which, in combination with gravity closer to Standard than Old Earth’s moon, results in what we call ‘Moon rain’ with predictable effects on maintenance and solar panel efficiency.”
Janus frowned. He understood the physics of it, and even guessed that it would be worse at this almost tropical latitude during the Irkallan summer. What he didn’t understand was why he’d never experienced something this dramatic back home.
Stolen novel; please report.
After four hours of slow, stop-and-go driving in the dust, Janus didn’t care why it was happening, he just wanted it to be over.
“You all right, boss?” Mick asked, walking over.
Janus resealed the buggy’s motor casing and shook his head. “I don’t even know how the dust is getting in here, let alone what to do with it.”
“I’ve got you,” Mick said, and he jogged back to his buggy.
He returned a few minutes later with a Hunter gel gun. “Seal, lubricate, protect—we call it SLiP grease. The dust sticks to the outer layer, the inner layer stays fluid, more or less. A shot of this should last most of the trip.”
Janus looked at the proffered can and hesitated. The Hunter machines would be designed to work with the sealant; the Prime Dome buggies weren’t. “Screw it,” he said, grabbing it from Mick’s hand. They were already having to stop every forty-five minutes to deal with dust infiltration and if the electrical motor got corroded, they could be dealing with complete drive failure several days away from help.
To Janus’s relief, it worked, and they were able to get their first, full-length leg of the night. It allowed him to focus on the route recommendation they’d gotten from Trace, which wound back and forth instead of angling straight for Beta Station, even though the terrain was so flat, Janus thought he could see the faint curvature of the distant horizon.
When he asked Mick about it, the Hunter laughed and answered, “The terrain isn’t flat. We’re driving from a plateau to lower-level plains. There are more direct routes, but we’d run the risk of crashing into dust drifts. Some of them can be up to twelve meters deep!”
If they hadn’t been so exhausted the day before, he might have been able to dig up topographical maps that gave them more options, but as it was, he didn’t want to think what sinking into even one meter of fine dust would do to a buggy.
Janus hoped they didn’t lose too much of the lead they’d developed between Crossroads and Mercuria.
The longer leg also gave him time to think about what had happened in that passageway, outside the Royal Bluff Resort. When he looked at the man who’d decided to stand his ground and fight even though they were outnumbered and out of their depth, he didn’t recognize himself.
He hadn’t tried to make waves in Crossroads. Back then, Lira had been in her element and they’d relied on her connection to Pasha. Janus had been happy just to have her working with him instead of riding his back.
Mercuria had been different. Mercuria had spoken to the deepest places within him, both the resentment and anger as well as the hope and hard work it took to climb out of the hole others had pushed him into. He’d thought of those families struggling and dying young for avoidable reasons, and they’d been his family.
And for the first time in his life, he’d known beyond doubt that he had the power to do something about it.
He’d been operating on less knowledge than he should have, his judgment compromised by the fatigue and the stims. Would he have risked his and Lira’s life under different circumstances? What if he’d failed? The fact that he hadn’t—that he’d either been lucky or subconsciously slotted into the Hunters’ and Mudrakers’ plans—would affect his decision-making going forward. He still wanted to have a plan, to win by consistently doing the right things until success emerged from flawless execution.
But now, there was a new part of him that knew it could be bold and win when it shouldn’t.
It reminded him of Ivan, and he wasn’t sure whether he should be pleased or not. It definitely explained some things about his uncle, both his confidence and, maybe, some of his secretiveness. The kind of duster who consistently made these spontaneous, difficult decisions would inevitably have some of them blow up in his face.
He wished he hadn’t told his uncle about the VI unlocking the extra videos he’d made. His uncle had looked tired and uncertain, no more than a few years older than Janus was now. It would have been good to understand what was going through his head at the time, warts and all.
It would have made him feel less alone.
They stopped after two hours and Janus checked the buggies, but they were all running within optimal parameters.
“Do you always travel with your mother?” Lira asked Mick on the team channel.
Mick gulped down some water, then answered, “Travel? Yes. Hunters usually follow their namesake around until they solo and get picked by a team leader.”
“When do you solo?” Lira asked.
“Ha! Did that years ago,” Mick said. “Trace is just good people, you know? Hard to find someone I’d rather work with, and there are plenty of people waiting to take my place when I do.” He paused for a moment, and added, “I guess they will, now that I’m going to be half a world away. Take my place, that is.”
“Oh,” Lira said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right,” Mick said. “I probably needed something to push me out of the crawler. I guess I was just really fortunate to have someone I looked up to and got along with for so long, you know?”
“I do know,” Lira said. “All too well.” And as her helmet turned to look toward Janus and he thought of how she’d talked to Pasha and now Mick, he realized Lira wasn’t a difficult person. She was just a sad rich kid who missed her mom and didn’t know how to act around outcasts and poor people. If her mother had been around, maybe she would have seen more of the dome and the world, and she would have been an easier pill to swallow.
But her mother was dead—had been dead for twelve years, just like Janus’s parents and all of Prometheus Base. Unlike Janus, who had grown up powerless and tried to protect himself by working harder to be perfect, Lira had been powerful from birth and still lost her mother. He still didn’t understand how, or why, and she didn’t want to talk about it. She resented the injustice of Prometheus Base’s collapse like Janus resented the unfairness of Prime Dome’s society.
Lira had been an active reminder of how much of an outcast he and his family were during the last decade.
And Janus was one of the only Prometheans left for her to blame.
He wondered if they’d ever be more than reluctant allies against the dangers of the void, or if that history would always leave them one step away from violence, like an Old Earth story about when humans lived in an environment so suited to them they could afford to hate.
“Time to get going?” Mick asked, seeing him turned their way.
“Yeah,” Janus said.
The next hour and a half was much the same. They were eight hours and 568 kilometers from Mercuria—barely more than half the distance Janus and Lira had managed on their first day—and Janus was getting worried. They needed to travel another 200 kilometers minimum to maintain their lead, and he’d hoped to get ahead not fall behind. The more he went over what had happened with the Pit Vipers and Mudrakers, the more he realized how much of an advantage the time to get the lay of the land would have given them.
His thoughts were interrupted by a quiet but insistent beeping. His wrist-comm, tied into his and Lira’s buggies’ systems, was alerting him that one of the drive parameters had been exceeded. A quick inspection showed that over the past half hour, the engine temps had risen from 80 to 135°C—hot but acceptable. More problematic were the anti-friction bearings, which were now operating near 115°C. Mick’s buggy was fine, but Janus and Lira’s ran the risk of damaging the seals on the engine casings if they got any hotter. “Stop the buggies!” he said over the team channel.
Lira and Mick pulled over, and Janus slowed to a mere 60 kilometers per hour to catch up to them.
“What’s wrong?” Lira asked.
“We’re done for the night,” Janus said. “I need to take the drive apart.”
“Did something happen?” Mick asked.
Janus shook his head. “I won’t know for sure until I get in there, but I’m guessing nothing good.”