Dust Flats, Northwest of Mercuria
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.22 Interstellar
Janus closed the inner seal of the day tent and popped the seal on his helmet. Lira had been cooking again, filling the tent with a rich smell of meat, vegetables, and spices that made Janus’s mouth water.
“Hold up!” Mick said, licking his fingers and slouching over with some sort of wand with a cable attached. The Hunter passed the wand over Janus’s suit, top to bottom, front and back. There was a funny smell and a crackle that made Janus’s hair stand on end, and a small rain of fine dust fell from Janus’s suit. “Portable degausser,” Mick explained. He grabbed the vac-tube from the airlock seal and got rid of most of the dust.
“Here,” Lira said, handing him a bowl of stew and some thin slices of flatbread. “How bad is it?”
“Could be worse,” Janus said, decoupling his gloves and digging into the food as fast as he could take a seat. He still had some bruising and a cut on his lip from the fight in Mercuria, but that didn’t stop him from inhaling his meal. “Survivor’s mercy, this is good.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lira said, although Janus could tell she was reluctantly pleased. “Compliments later, bad news now.”
Janus sucked his spoon clean, set the bowl down in his lap, and sighed. “Prime Dome bearings use a silicon-based friction-reducing coating, Hunters use metal on metal. When you apply the ultrafine dust sealant to Hunter bearings, it forms a hard outer shell while staying fluid at the center. When you apply it to our silicon-based coating, combined with heat, it forms cement.”
“Oh, crap,” Mick said.
Janus chuckled. “Actually, crap would be a better lubricant once that stuff cooks for a couple hours. We’re going to have to strip it off and reapply it every four hours—three-and-a-half to be safe. I’m guessing you’re not carrying enough of the stuff to use over and over on all our machines.”
“You guessed right,” Mick said, coming to sit with them. “How come you don’t have some kind of advanced Prime Dome sealant?”
“We do,” Janus said. “It just doesn’t work as well in this environment. It doesn’t congeal, but little bits of dust get into the casing, especially if we go fast or hit a dust hole, and eventually our motors will overheat and corrode. Too much corrosion and the whole engine will stop working for good.”
“So we have to use the Hunter sealant,” Lira said.
“Which we don’t have enough of,” Mick added.
“Or drive slow and stop often to clean the dust out of… everything,” Janus finished.
The other two were quiet, so Janus turned his attention back to his food. He’d already spent the last two hours thinking over the problem and he was stumped. He’d half expected Lira to tell him how worthless he was for not figuring something out, and the companionable silence and warm stew were a welcome surprise.
“This might sound stupid,” Lira said, “but couldn’t we just take the silicon coating off?”
“It’s not that stupid,” Janus said. “If I had a shop, a lathe, and some fine grain sandpaper or, better yet, a chemical stripping agent, I could have it done in less than an hour. We really just need to get north of the twenty-first parallel. Once we do, the space weathering won’t be as bad and our buggies will perform better than Mick’s.”
“Course they will. Because they’re Prime Dome buggies,” Mick said with a wink.
Janus chuckled. “A combined approach would have been ideal, but I’m guessing Primer and Hunter engineers don’t compare notes all that often.”
Lira remained silent, not participating but also not protesting.
“There might be something I can do,” Mick said after a moment. “There are Hunter caches scattered across Irkalla, especially in difficult areas like this, or near the southern reaches. I could check the nearest one, see if there’s enough S&L to get us out of the dust plains.”
“Is it on the way?” Janus asked.
“Not really,” Mick said. He stuck his chin out. “But if I leave now, while it’s still dark, I should be able to catch up to you tomorrow night.”
“Alone?” Janus said, and immediately thought of the test his uncle had put him through. They were more than 500 kilometers from help. If Mick had a problem, if his buggy broke down the way Janus’s had on his solo run, he would likely die.
“Only way you keep the lead, boss,” Mick said. “I can go faster without you, especially with you towing that trailer. And if it makes you feel any better, Hunters and caravans come this way every couple of days, or at least they did before Beta Station collapsed. I’ll probably survive if I get stuck, but I’ll be out of the Trials.”
Probably survive, Janus thought. Callie’s maintenance program had dealt with probabilities. It was a wholly inadequate measure when it concerned him sending Mick out to get stranded or, even improbably, die.
Janus looked at Lira, but she shook her head. “It’s your call, Janus. We have a day’s lead on a competitive schedule. It doesn’t guarantee us someone else didn’t also get ahead, and we might equally need to spend that day later in the race. None of that adds up to what Mick might do for our team, or the fact you need to live with yourself when this is over.”
“So you’d let Prime Dome lose the Trials over my conscience?” Janus said, surprised.
“No,” Lira said with a half snarl. “If it was up to me, I’d take the buggy, and go myself, and hope my death ate you alive, Promethean. But I don’t know where the cache is, and Mick’s the best person for the job.”
Janus smiled, pain struggling with familiarity. This was the Lira he knew. He looked at Mick and said, “Thank you for doing this. How long do you think it will take?”
Mick started to put his suit back on. “I should catch up with you in two nights, this one included, third stop, fourth stop at the latest.”
Janus nodded. “We’ll wait for you at the fourth stop of the second night. If you don’t make it there by daybreak…”
“Got it, boss,” Mick said with a wry grin.
If you don’t make it by daybreak, we’ll turn back for you, Janus had wanted to say, but they’d be hundreds of kilometers away from each other with no way to contact each other. The best he could do was not enough.
Later, once Mick was gone and it was just the two of them, Janus turned to Lira and said, “Thank you. I know we started in a bad place, but—”
“Shut up, Invarian,” Lira said. “I’m putting on a good show because we need that Hunter to do his job, not run off the second we turn our backs on him. That doesn’t change things between us. I’m doing this for Prime Dome. Your people killed my mother, and nothing’s ever going to change that.”
“What do you mean, we killed your mother? How?”
“The same way they killed themselves, Janus. I hate to crash your little orphan pity party, but my mother was there that day, too, when you escaped and everyone else died, except it wasn’t her messed up habitat that failed. She should have been home!”
Janus sat back, surprised and not surprised at the same time. There was something fragile about the way Lira had spoken—tissue-thin, like he could break through and reach her if he pushed hard enough, but that might also break her. The only thing that might fix things between him and Lira was figuring out what had really happened at Prometheus Base and give her a real target for her grief. Not only was that not an option during the Trials, but it might make things worse. What if his people—or even his parents specifically—were responsible for the dome’s collapse? There had always been a part of Janus that believed the scorn thrown at him by the Primers was justified, just like there had been a part of him that rose up in defense of his parents’ ghosts.
He needed Lira functional, and from what he’d learned in the past five days, living up to her mother’s legacy and hating the people “responsible” for her death were the motor that drove Lira forward. It didn’t make him feel great, but he was doing this for his family and all the other outsiders who’d had to live in a system designed to step on their necks. He would have liked to make this trip with a friend, but he’d settle for a competent partner who followed his lead.
***
The next night flew by. Making liberal use of the Hunter sealant and running fast for the next two legs, they managed to cover 474 kilometers in three-and-a-half hours before they were forced to stop. It took Janus and Lira forty minutes to clean the stuff off and reapply it. They were halfway through their planned route for the day, and it was tempting to pull out the day tent and take a break, but it was also full night in the middle of a dead route between a collapsed settlement and Mercuria.
“Let’s push on,” Janus said, once they’d sucked down protein and fluids.
Lira nodded.
They sped on in the dark.
Stop and go, stop and go, stop and go, and stop. The drive and the breaks were quieter without Mick around to bridge the gap between him and Lira, although they didn’t bicker like they had at first. It made him appreciate how the Hunter completed the team, bringing them together. He worried what the rest of the Trials would be like if Mick didn’t make it.
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“He’ll make it,” Lira said, as if reading his mind.
Janus nodded and turned the light off in the day tent.
The next night, something seemed to have relaxed between him and Lira, like the shared consciousness of Mick’s absence had given them some new and important common ground. They didn’t so much speak more as make small gestures, handing each other things without being asked, and going through the motions of checking each other’s equipment in small but noticeably improved ways.
Kilometer after kilometer of flat terrain streamed by, unchanging and hypnotic. It would have been easy to just drive in Lira’s tracks and zone out, but Janus fought to keep alert, to keep his mind engaged and focused. The terrain wasn’t actually flat. Except for the route Trace had given them, it was riddled with hidden traps that could wreck a buggy or flip the trailer, a fact that was only highlighted when a pair of small triliths, each no bigger than a suit helmet, exploded from the dust, chasing and tumbling in the fine powder like Old Earth cubs playing in snow.
The buggies were running well—he’d have to get a sample of the SLiP grease to Prime Dome’s engineers when they returned. He slaved his buggy to Lira’s during a straight stretch and jotted down a few notes about their trip, their equipment, and the people they’d met. He talked to his mother, or at least the VI of her, and tried to figure out why there was so much dust here and so little around Prime Dome. The eerily conversational program didn’t have any theories stored in her memory banks, but Janus suspected that Mercuria’s position just east of the pit and the Scar, which was apparently man-made, had something to do with it.
The road turned north. The stars wheeled around as Irkalla spun on its axis. Each star could be the anchor for several planets, and at least some of those planets would be naturally fit for human life. Why here? Janus thought as he had on many nights throughout his life since Prometheus Base’s collapse. There had to be millions of worlds out there where his people would have flourished instead of scraping a meager and often short existence on an airless, barren rock.
If Janus had the power to carve kilometers-long canyons into the surface of the planet, he would take his people somewhere else. Anywhere else. They could have stayed on the ship and been safe.
Lira’s voice crackled in his ears. “Janus? You’re veering off track.”
Janus hit the brakes. Somehow, in his musings, he’d left the route and started heading into the deeper dust. There were tracks ahead of him, but they weren’t Lira’s. “Sorry. Followed the wrong tracks.”
“It’s fine,” Lira said tersely, but he knew it wasn’t. “We’re almost at the third stop.”
It took a little longer than planned because Janus had to backtrack, but they were ahead of schedule overall, so Janus proposed they take a break to eat, drink, and shake their legs out.
Lira agreed.
They stopped, refreshed themselves, and waited. Janus took a detailed look at Lira’s buggy and the trailer, but it was mostly busy work.
Mick wasn’t there.
“We knew meeting at the third checkpoint was a longshot,” Lira said. “We should push on. If we miss him at the fourth checkpoint, he might think we went ahead, and then we won’t find him until we reach Beta Station.”
“Right,” Janus said, but he had a bad feeling about it. Deep down, he knew that the morning two nights ago had been the last time he’d see Mick, and that it was his fault. The void takes.
“Janus?” Lira said, sitting on her buggy.
“I’m coming,” he said, turning his drive system on and heading out with the unshakable image of Mick lying visor down in a deepening layer of dust.
***
They reached the fourth and last stop of the night three hours before dawn. That made it 900 kilometers for the day, an ambitious but attainable goal. They’d had to clean off the Hunter SLiP grease twice, but it also meant that, if Mick arrived in good time, they would be able to apply another coat and do one more leg at speed.
The Hunter didn’t show.
Two hours before dawn, Lira asked, “Should we wait for him or get the extra leg in?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Janus asked.
“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” Lira said. “Without those supplies, we’re going to be running hot and slow for the next couple days. Every extra kilometer puts us closer to our destination.”
“We’re waiting,” Janus said.
Lira stared at him for close to a full minute, and during every second of it, Janus felt himself get more and more angry. She was making this seem like a rational decision, but it was just more of Lira’s bullshit, doubting him, accusing him of making wrong choices and leaving Mick out there to die. He was about to say so when she tramped back over to the trailer and grabbed the day tent to get their shelter set up.
Janus clenched his jaw. There wasn’t much he could say. She was following his orders, so he walked over to his buggy and turned on the spotlight, sweeping it across the flat, motionless landscape.
“What are you doing?” Lira asked.
“Making sure triliths don’t sneak up on us,” Janus said.
He was lying. He was trying to make sure Mick could find them in case his comm system had failed. They were within five meters of the waypoint, though, so Mick’s whole navigation system had to have failed at the same time as the comm system. He would either find their tracks or not.
Lira had the day tent set up in ten minutes.
After twenty more minutes, Janus joined her.
“You want to talk about it?” Lira asked.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Janus said.
They both knew that, since they’d waited earlier and Mick didn’t have to tow a trailer or wait for one, he should have been waiting for them at the fourth checkpoint, not the other way around.
He decided to check his suit over in detail while they waited. Even with the degaussing rod, which Mick had left for their use, there was no telling what the dusty environment was doing to the joints and seals.
Even the most thorough inspection didn’t take longer than half an hour without disassembly, something Janus wasn’t fully confident doing with the wayfinder technology.
“Start making a plan about how we’re going to go on without him,” Lira said. Janus felt his temper flare again, but before he could put Lira in her place, she continued. “I’m not saying he won’t make it. He’s a Hunter. He’s already spent more time outside of a dome than we ever will. Go through the planning because it will keep you busy, because it will stop me from asking, and because, if he doesn’t show up tonight or tomorrow morning, we shouldn’t make decisions based on emotion.”
Janus looked at his teammate. There had been no hidden barb in the statement, except possibly the comment on emotional decisions, but Janus didn’t like emotional decisions either. He would almost have called the behavior supportive, had it been coming from anyone else.
In any case, he couldn’t think of a rational reason why he shouldn’t do what she’d suggested. “Thanks. That’s a good idea,” he said.
He used his wrist-comm to create a virtual workspace and laid out the map he’d gotten from Prime Dome and the additional route data he’d gotten from Trace. He started to think about how he would tell the Hunter her son was dead, but instead he focused on the map. Make a plan, Janus. Worry later.
Then, it occurred to him he wasn’t the only one in the tent, and while Lira might not feel as worried for Mick or guilty about sending him, she was at least dealing with the uncertainty of what tomorrow would bring. “Want to help me with this?” Janus asked.
“Um, sure,” she said, surprised.
Janus shared the display with her, and they looked at it side by side.
It came down to a choice between risks.
The route they were currently on would take them all the way to Beta Station. It hooked southwest for another two days’ travel before curving north, and since it was the shortest path between Beta and Mercuria, no one was using it right now.
At the point where their current route turned, it was possible to cross 100 kilometers of rough ground to another road, which was one of the more important trading routes on this side of the planet, and it ran just north of the dust line. Once they were on it, they wouldn’t need the Hunter SLiP grease and they could go faster, gaining back the losses from the previous days. “How slow do you think we’d have to go over the off-road part?” Janus asked.
Lira rubbed her wrist with her thumb. “No more than eighty? Fifty would be safer.”
Janus nodded. Two hours to save ten, another full day’s travel.
“Mick wouldn’t know to follow us,” she pointed out. “If he tried to catch up, that is.”
“You’re right,” Janus said, grateful she was staying optimistic—or humoring him—but annoyed by the situation. If they had SLiP grease, they could take the southern route, but the northern route would still be faster. If they didn’t have SLiP grease, they would almost double the time on the southern route, but to take the northern one, they would have to abandon Mick.
That the Hunter was beyond their help occurred to Janus again, but it wasn’t the same panicked feeling this time, only sadness and regret. It was Meg all over again, and it made Janus question whether he should have been made lead aspirant instead of Lira. He did fine when it came to fixing things, and maybe he’d gotten lucky once or twice, but the unquestionable pattern was that when Janus was under pressure, he made decisions that got other people killed.
With only ten minutes to spare before sunrise, Mick came through the zip airlock like nothing was wrong. He popped his neck seal and removed his helmet. “Heya, both. Did I miss dinner?”
Both Janus and Lira stared at him.
Mick looked down and half turned. “Do I have something on my suit?”
“What happened?” Lira asked.
Mick grabbed the degaussing rod and started getting the dust off himself. “Funny story, actually. I got to the first cache, but the last person to use it must not have sealed it properly, because triliths found it and tore everything to pieces.”
Janus frowned. “Then why were you late to reach us?”
“Ah ha! Well, I wasn’t about to show up empty-handed, was I? So, I knew there was a second cache not too far to the east. Hated to backtrack, but—”
“Mick,” Janus growled, interrupting him.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Don’t ever do that again,” Janus said.
Mick frowned. “Do what? We needed—”
“He thought you were dead,” Lira said. “We both did.”
“Oh,” Mick said, looking at the two of them. “Look, I appreciate the concern, but we needed the SLiP grease and I wasn’t about to back down because of a little extra travel time. I’d have caught up with you by tomorrow at the latest.”
It took all of Janus’s restraint, years of controlling his temper in Prime Dome, to keep from shouting at the Hunter. “We didn’t know that. We were worried. I felt like crap for sending you out there. Not only that, but we were thinking of changing routes, but we couldn’t because we had no way of communicating with you.”
“Thinking of crossing to the Great East–West north of here?” Mick said. “I’d have found you.”
Janus started to stand up, but Lira put a hand on his arm. She looked at Mick. “We get that you’re a Hunter, and you’re used to being out here, but we aren’t. Janus is the team leader, and he’s just told you how he prefers to operate, so that’s how you and I are going to act going forward, right?”
Mick pressed his lips together. Janus could tell he didn’t like the idea, and Janus understood that. He wouldn’t have liked someone telling him to check with them before changing his plans on a repair job. To his surprise, though, the Hunter said, “You’re right. Different team, different SOPs. I’ll shape up and fly right.”
“Thank you,” Janus said, feeling some of the anger and tension leak out of him. “Both of you. Lira’s right. If we’d been working together for years, like you and your mom, maybe things would have been different. But I’d appreciate it if we could talk things over more for now, and check in with each other if the plan falls apart.”
Mick laughed. “Actually, Trace would’ve had my hide if I pulled a stunt like that. Did I mention I’m starving?”
Lira smiled. “I’ll make dinner, jerk.”
Mick grinned, and Janus laughed. Things had been more stressful than he would have wanted, but they’d turned out okay.
The next evening, after clearing the moon rain from the buggies and applying what Janus hoped would be the last coat of SLiP grease, they headed north to the bend in the route and turned north by northeast, crawling across the rugged terrain at 50 kilometers per hour. Lira and Mick alternated in the lead, while Janus and the trailer stayed at the tail of the formation. It was slower than they needed to go, but they were still ahead of the par time for the course and likely to gain even more time once they got to the bigger road. On one occasion, Mick sunk up to his knees in dust and they had to tow him out and go around, but they were making good progress.
They were within sight of the road when a small gap in the underlying rock caught Lira’s front right tire at just the right angle and sheared it and part of the front axle off.