Change
The world changes materially. Science makes advances in technology and understanding. But the world of humanity doesn’t change. —Pierre Schaeffer
The Seraphine, Twenty Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.21 Interstellar
Janus made his way aft, crew members bracing against the bulkheads to get out of his way. By now, word and footage of the fight Janus, Syn, Mick, and Ivan had fought on Mining Station Alpha-Twenty-One had circulated throughout the convoy, and he got more than one respectful nod from the members of the crew. He’d reviewed the footage himself, somewhat aghast at how close they’d come to being dragged out of the ore bay and torn apart by angry miners. The butcher’s tally when the dust and smoke cleared was twenty-four miners dead, twenty-one wounded, and Ivan taken to the Seraphine’s medbay with a ruptured gut.
The aspirants from the Seraphine had come in heavily with non-lethals, largely thanks to Syn’s report that most of the miners didn’t have proper weapons. There were no casualties on their side aside from some bruising.
The whole excursion had added ten hours to their journey, but to Janus, it was worth it. He’d sharpened his teams without losing anyone, and between the exercises and the footage of Nikandros’s people in action on the rig, his side had more than enough material to build simulations on how to fight against the exceptionalist cyborgs, as frightening a prospect that might be.
Janus walked into the medbay and found that Ivan was already sitting up and flirting with the medic.
“I was pretty sure you were faking,” Janus said.
Ivan smirked. “I thought you thought I was full of—”
“He should really be resting,” the medic said, somewhat reprovingly.
“Yes,” Ivan said with a twinkle of mischief. “That’s exactly what’s on my mind.”
The medic blushed.
Since Janus had worked as a biologist and medic on Krandermore, he knew that on any other planet in the Survivor’s Refuge system, the best Ivan could have hoped for was a painful death. It would have been about a forty to seventy percent chance of survival in a place like Prime Dome, where fast access to a clean medical facility would have made a difference, but on Krandermore, with sometimes hours to a settlement and few truly sterile environments, Janus would have put his uncle to sleep out of mercy.
Here, on Lumiara, they laparoscopically repaired Ivan’s intestine via micro-suture and then sync’ed Ivan’s implants with the medbay computer before flooding his body with nanophages. The ’phages attacked anything that negatively affected Ivan’s internal biome, which was to say they descended on an infection like locusts, devouring bacteria, toxins, and infected cells. Once Ivan’s condition was stable, they would flush themselves from his system—a far cry from Janus’s first encounter with nanotech at Beta Station, when the swarms had tried to devour him.
The process would still be taxing and painful for Ivan, and Janus knew the man was putting on a brave face. “I’ll come check on you later, then, Emissary. Thanks for watching my back.”
Ivan gave him a small, solemn nod, then went back to telling the medic one of his aspirant stories from before the fall of Prometheus.
Janus chuckled and headed back to crew berthing.
***
It was quiet on the ship, or at least the sounds, which by now had faded into the background, were soothingly familiar. There was the constant hum of electricity, the rasp of water sliding over the hull, the faint sound of footsteps, and the breathy sound of steam under pressure from the reactor. As Janus came down the stairs, he found Fury waiting for him below, and he sat down on the second to last step. “Hey, girl,” he said, and Fury slung over almost hesitantly to put her big head in his lap.
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“It’s okay,” Janus cooed, rubbing her scales and scratching her jawline. “I’ve hardly seen you for the past few days. Where have you been?”
Fury snorted and made a faint grumbling sound before laying the full weight of her head on his leg and pawing at his foot.
He’d known the answer to that question, of course. Something about the captain had spooked Fury. Spooked her hard. More than anything she’d ever run into, even the time she’d almost died from ingesting a psychoactive flower, back on Krandermore. “It’s all right, girl. He’s not that bad.”
Fury made a faint growling sound, pulling back and then sneezing.
A crew member came down the stairs, and Janus stood to get out of the way.
“Excuse me, sir,” the crew member said.
“No problem.”
Janus looked around, but the jungle dragon was gone. Maybe if I asked the captain to have a sit down with her… he thought. The whole idea seemed preposterous, like organizing a tea party for his pet, but it bothered him that part of Fury, his faithful companion for this past year and two months, was living like a creature afraid for her life, and that wasn’t anything like the Fury he knew.
Janus continued back through crew berthing, greeting people as he used to back in New Prometheus, although he found he was getting to know the people here more. He kept seeing the same faces, and through simple repetition, he stopped needing his implant’s assistance to recognize people. That was Mary, for example. She was a Beta Stationer, someone he’d helped when he tricked the nanites into going after the wealthy Betans’ secret vault. Francis and Monroe were both from Uzanka Helix, a settlement Janus had never visited, but they’d been some of the first to sign up when Callie took the data he’d stolen from the old Prometheus Base and spread it across the settlements of Irkalla. There was Jeffries and Patzek, Xondu and Chen, and Matthias giving him that beaten dog stare, but they were all part of Janus’s new normal, now, in a way New Prometheus hadn’t been, and Prime Dome never had, either. The closest he’d come were the research teams out of Cofan, and even then, it hadn’t felt like this.
These people felt like they were his, and they considered him their own.
He passed back into officer berthing, and he was surprised to find only Lee in their cabin. “Where’s Xander?”
“With his godmother, down on the mess deck. I convinced her and Mick we needed some alone time.”
“Oh?” Janus said, pausing in the doorway.
“Yeah,” Lee said, pinning him with her eyes. “You almost died, Janus. It got me thinking, maybe just Xander isn’t enough of a legacy.”
Janus blinked. His brain tried to come to grips with what she’d just said but failed, and he nodded to himself before stepping into the room and pulling the door shut behind him. He knew the Hunter view on managing their collective gene pool and that, from a biological standpoint, it made sense to have more than one descendant in case Xander—who would doubtlessly lead an adventurous life—didn’t live long enough to have kids of his own. It was logical and completely dehumanizing and unromantic.
The intensity of the look in Lee’s eyes increased, almost hypnotic, and Janus was brought back to the first time they’d met in a Hunter caravan on the road to Prometheus Base. There had been alcohol involved, and other additives Hunters laced their drinks with, but above all, there had been the certainty and unapologetic magnetism of the woman who was less than half a meter away from him in the cramped space.
Janus swallowed. “We need to talk.”
“We can do that, too.”
“We need to talk before anything else happens.”
A faint look of irritation crossed Lee’s expression. “Not everything needs to be an intellectual exercise, Janus. I’m just asking you to take me to bed.”
Janus blew air past his lips. Was he wrong here? It seemed like a pretty good deal, no matter how he framed it. He and Lee got along, worked well together, and he was attracted to her… “You know family’s important to me.”
Lee rolled her eyes. “This was a mistake.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Janus said.
“No,” Lee said, pushing past him. “This is just going to be another bullshit xeshenye attempt to assert control over my choices.”
Janus caught her upper arm, and she glared at his hand, then at him.
He let her go, raising his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying I’d like a relationship with the mother of my child, not just a one-night stand every time I almost die.”
Lee had her hand on the door handle, but she didn’t pull it open. She looked at Janus, undecided, and it felt like there were about a dozen decision-making processes running behind her eyes into which he had no insight. Her eyes gleamed blue, and Janus was notified that she’d started recording. “What do you want?”
“Exclusivity.”
“Preference,” she countered.
“Fine,” Janus said. As far he knew, she hadn’t been with anyone but him in the past year, anyway. “I also want a choice this time when it comes to having a kid.”
“What kind of choice? Gender? IQ? Eye color?”
“Timing,” Janus said.
Anger flared in Lee’s eyes, but she reined it in. “You get a two-year window, and I want backup materials on ice. You have no say about what I do with them if you leave or die.”
“Agreed,” Janus said, and Lee’s eyes flashed triumphantly.
She let go of the door handle, all traces of anger or conflict gone. The blue gleam went out of her eyes, the terms of their contract shared with Janus automatically, and she unzipped the front of her coveralls down to her navel.
“That’s it?” Janus asked, feeling once more that he didn’t understand Hunter culture and never would.
Lee grabbed his coveralls and pulled him down into a kiss. “You’ve got the terms you wanted, Janus. Now we just have to sign them.”