The Dust, Between Prime Dome and Crossroads
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.16 Interstellar
The road sped by in the dark. Lira was a small point of light a kilometer ahead, scouting the way. They were connected by the suit-to-suit as closely as if they were sitting side by side, and yet Janus refrained from talking to his teammate.
The road was long enough.
The path that the Cult of the Survivor had charted for the Prime Dome team ran 14,652 kilometers across the dust, three-quarters of the way around the inhabitable zone of the upper hemisphere. Janus had known the path because it was the reverse of the journey his uncle had made with Janus and Callie, twelve years ago. The longest leg of the trip would take them several hundred kilometers south of and past the ruins of Prometheus Base.
The place held a lot of meaning for him, and none at all. He could not return there. The people there—his parents, the children he’d grown up with—they could never welcome him home. He longed for a place that only existed at a different time.
Maybe that made him like most people.
“You need to speed up!” Lira said over the comm.
“I know how fast we need to go,” Janus answered.
Twenty-eight days to reach their destination. Six habitats, each with problems to solve, a minimum of eight days off the road if they wanted to sleep at the settlements. They would need to drive an average of 732 kilometers a day, and that path would not be straight. There would be detours, impassable ground, mechanical failure… One day missed would add thirty-nine kilometers to their daily target. Two days brought that number to eighty-two. There was no room for mistakes. Any deviation would either cause them to fail or force them to take risks that would leave them dead.
They stopped for food and water after two hours of hard driving. It was the first time Janus and Lira were visor to visor on the outside, and she used the opportunity to tell him everything he was doing wrong.
“We only made two hundred kilometers in two hours. That’s going to leave us over a hundred short, driving six hours a night.”
“Then we’ll have to drive longer,” Janus said.
“Okay, great,” Lira said, leaning forward so he could see her face through the glass plate. Her expression was full of scorn. “That’ll work for the first few days, but what about when we can’t go fast? What about if one of the buggies breaks down, and we have to spend half the night fixing it?”
“I can keep the buggies running,” Janus said. “But you’re right, we need to bank more distance during the easy stretches.”
“So we go faster?” Lira asked.
“As fast as we can safely go,” Janus answered.
They made better time on the second leg. In two hours, they made 242 kilometers, then 260 in the two hours after that. Lira was quiet at that third stop, and Janus couldn’t resist saying, “First time putting in a full shift’s work?”
“Screw you, Invarian,” she said.
After the fourth leg, even Janus was tired from the constant vigilance and the vibrations. They could only drive at a hundred kilometers per hour with the capacitors drained and relying on the MFCs for power, but even at that speed Janus almost flipped the trailer and he called for them to slow down further.
“One more hour, then we stop,” he told Lira between gulps of water.
“Fine,” she said.
He knew she was hurting, that she wanted to stop, and part of him was happy about it after what she’d put him through. The rest of him was just as tired, and he admired her for keeping up. “You’re doing great.”
“Frag off,” she answered.
An hour later, they stopped for the day by the side of the road, hidden behind a rocky outcrop.
Janus checked over the vehicles and the trailer, doing what basic maintenance checks he could while Lira set up the day tent.
They were 952 kilometers from home.
***
Lira took her helmet off as soon as the tent was pressurized, and Janus did too, albeit a bit more cautiously. The day tent was shiny on the outside, double-skinned, with enough heavy metals on the inner layer to keep out the worst of the radiation. It was tall enough to stoop in. Janus sat down as soon as his bedroll was set up. The air inside was cold, for now, and fresh for now, too. Once he took his suit off and the sun was up, odds were things would become less comfortable.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Lira pulled up the environmental controls.
“What are you doing?” Janus asked.
“Making sure the tent stays cool through the day.”
“That’s going to waste energy.”
“So what?” Lira asked him. “You have lights you need to power? Food processor? You saving up in case of an outage?”
“We’re just better off not running the radiators at full. If the pump gives out—”
“Then you’ll fix it,” Lira said, cutting him off. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? If you’re going to push us to drive extra hours, we’re going to need a good night’s sleep.”
“Strength through struggle, Ms. Allencourt,” Janus said with a straight face.
Lira looked at him, trying to figure out if he was serious.
Janus laughed.
“You’re a dick,” Lira said, digging into her pack for the ration kit, but there was at least a trace of humor in her voice.
“Seriously, though,” Janus said, reaching for his. “Why did you always come after me like that, back in Prime Dome? Was it something I did?”
Lira didn't respond, not right away, and it made Janus’s skin crawl. With the short time frame, and Lira spending time with her dad, there hadn’t been time for them to truly make peace, and Janus worried he’d be spending nights next to someone who hated him.
“I don’t hate you personally, Janus,” Lira said, any warmth gone from her voice. “Your people thought they were better than everyone else on this planet, and they died. Call it pride, call it sloppiness, whatever. There’s a taint inside you, and one day, if you let it, it’s going to get better people than you hurt.”
Janus felt like he couldn’t breathe. He’d known Lira had some kind of poison eating away at her, inside. He just didn’t understand the depth of it, or how much it would burn to be exposed to it directly.
“At least you don’t deny it,” Lira said, completely misreading his reaction.
“I’m not agreeing with you,” Janus said. “I’m just trying to find a way to deal with the bigoted crap you just sprayed in my direction.”
“Bigoted?” Lira said. “I’m sorry, did you not come from a dome that committed mass suicide through incompetence?”
“I have no idea what happened to Prometheus Base. No one does. What the hell did we ever do to you?”
“Nothing,” Lira said, turning her attention back to her pack.
“Bullshit. Where does this stuff even come from, huh? Your father? I took you on my team!”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t do that out of kindness, did you? You want my skills, you live with my opinions,” Lira said, rounding on him. “As if an outsider like you could do better.”
Janus wanted to punch her. They were in a temporary shelter, nothing but the two layers of materials between them and the vacuum and the rising sun, and his blood was boiling, but he forced himself to stay calm. “Eat and get some rest, Allencourt. We have another long night ahead of us, and we’re going to have to use part of the day in Crossroads preparing for the next leg.”
“That’s what I was going to do anyway.”
“Good,” Janus said, digging a ration pack out of his kit.
Stay calm, he told himself. Stay cold and methodical. He thought of Callie and Uncle Ivan. He thought of Ryler leaving the dome, and even of old man Bennin, putting his hopes on him as a surrogate for his son. He thought of the sorters at the recycling plant, and Barry who’d trusted him from the start. He thought of Meg and knew he could do this for her, for all of them.
“I’m not a bigot,” Lira said. “You can’t be bigoted toward a people who don’t exist anymore.”
Janus closed his eyes and counted to ten before continuing with his chores. He wasn’t resigned to this. He wasn’t just going to take it for twenty-eight days, but he wasn’t going to lose it on the first one. Lira was broken, somehow, maybe permanently, but like any machine he needed to understand the problem, see if he could fix it.
If he couldn’t, he’d find a way to replace her, but he’d prefer not to. He did need her skills.
They’d made good time on their first night, but the road to Crossroads had never felt longer.
***
Janus had trouble sleeping that day. It was his second time stuck outside while the sun was up, and he felt just as alone as he had the first time. He couldn’t pull up the VI of his parents—didn’t want to give Lira any kind of edge—so he turned his back on her and lay there, staring.
He must have slept.
It only felt like he was awake the whole time.
Two hours before sunset, he checked his gear, packed his kit, and prepped the day tent for packing. Lira woke up at some point, but he didn’t speak to her, and she didn’t attempt to break the silence. As soon as she’d finished checking her suit, he said, “I’m going to decompress the tent.”
“It’s still daylight.”
“I parked us east of that rock formation. We’re in shadow, check the readout.”
She accessed her wrist-comm, because of course she wouldn’t trust him. He scoffed and activated the pump, cooling and compressing the room’s air while Lira scrambled to get her helmet on.
As soon as the air was gone, Janus shouldered his pack, broke the seal on the tent, and stepped outside.
He checked both buggies and the trailer, but they were untouched. Only the Hunters’ heavy crawlers had the shielding to keep moving during the day. Triliths had a silicon-based nervous system, they slowed down until they became completely non-conductive in the heat. He went through the motions anyway, because it calmed him, and then he drained the wastewater and solids from his suit, feeding them into his buggy’s MFC.
“Look, I know what I said upset you,” Lira started.
“I’m not interested,” Janus said.
“What? You’re going to give me the silent treatment for twenty-eight days, or are you going to open the tent while I’m sleeping next time?”
Janus ignored her. Since she was out of the day tent, he started packing it up, disconnecting it from the buggy’s environmental system, and breaking it down by the numbers. He stowed it on the trailer, making sure to clean it of any dust that got caught in the folds, then sat on his buggy and waited.
The terrain was blindingly bright outside the shadow of the rocks, made bearable only by the polarization of his visor. It was the same kind of technology that made the domes bearable in daylight, only at a scale far smaller than Janus had ever thought possible. It made him wonder what other kinds of tech the Cult of the Survivor was hiding, and why they might do it when it could save so many lives.
“You’re being childish, you know that?” Lira said.
You make me regret saving your life, Janus thought, but he didn’t say it. Lira would just fight back, say something even uglier. And he didn’t mean it. Saving her had been about who he was, not about her.
The light of the sun was cut off all at once as the star passed below the horizon.
Janus started his buggy up and drove.