The Scar
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.21 Interstellar
Janus’s wrist-comm woke him up three hours before dawn. He felt tired and sore. They’d gone too far the day before, but it would be worth it to shave an entire day cycle from their journey. That was a day they might need later. It could save their lives.
He yawned, half sat up, propping himself on his elbows, and peed in his suit. I’ll be drinking you later, he thought, and he chuckled. There were very few advantages to being suited up for several days in a row, from the chafing to the slightly funky but probably all right smells and tastes of the water and air, but easy bathroom breaks were easily his favorite.
“Is it time?” Lira asked, also yawning.
Janus nodded. “I’m going to go install the MFC on your buggy. Pack up the tent?”
“How about you show me how to put it back in, and then we pack up the tent together?” Lira countered.
Janus looked at the readout on his retinal display. Fifteen hours until the next sunrise. Their little camp was already in shadow, although the rock would still be cooling. They could install the MFC together, break camp, and safely make it through the Scar with time to make it to Mercuria before first light. Besides, it would be good for them to work together on something like this. “All right, come on.”
They got the job done quickly, and Lira didn’t seem upset when he checked the tension on each of the connections she’d made. She’d done good work. Then they packed up the day tent together and stowed their gear on the trailer without fuss. As they had a protein tube and recycled water breakfast, Janus said, “I’m surprised we haven’t seen any triliths down here. Lots of minerals, plenty of shade… seems like an ideal environment for them.”
Lira nodded. “Hunters must clear them out regularly, or no one would come through here. I would have thought that was part of the map you got.”
“I got the map from a Mercurian, not a Hunter,” Janus said, and because of that, he was more afraid of some sort of bandit ambush than supposed monsters. “They’re not that big of a problem, are they? I mean, I’ve had them chew through a pipe or two, but they always run away from people.”
Lira gave him the look she saved for when she thought he was particularly unqualified to live, or at least that was the impression he got. “Look, Hunters are extortionists, plain and simple, and I’d like nothing better than to have each settlement provide for their own security, but since most of them can’t afford to both pay the Hunters and have patrols on the road, the Hunters get paid. But triliths are a problem. The big ones are supposed to be able to knock a crawler over.”
“Supposed to?” Janus asked. “How do you know the Hunters don’t spread those rumors to make sure people pay big prices? Have you ever seen a trilith that big?”
“No,” Lira said. “But my mother told me they get bad around failed domes, or on long roads that haven’t been cleared in a while.”
Janus was skeptical. Uncle Ivan hadn’t said quite the same thing, although he’d talked about big triliths before. Janus always thought it was a miner’s tale, like the guys in bars who said they found a gold nugget the size of their fist but someone stole it, so do a poor guy a favor and buy me a beer? Besides, triliths were part organic, but they were mainly rock. If they did get that big, they’d probably be too big to move or feed themselves. For all he knew, half the boulders they’d passed were “giant triliths” who’d grown to the point of immobility and starved to death.
“It was part of the training materials,” Lira added.
Janus disconnected the protein tube from his helmet and stowed what was left. “Let’s just get going. We should have a much easier ride than yesterday, and hopefully we can get some more rest in Mercuria. As for giant triliths, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
***
It had been hard to gauge the real magnitude of the Scar on a map, even after seeing it from above, but they’d spent an entire day and night down in the canyons, and it would be another half-night to get out of them.
Driving through the Scar was a tense experience. They were heading south, so for the first hour, there was enough light reflected off the eastern wall that they didn’t even need headlights. There was another half hour during which the setting sun outlined the upper lip of the canyon. After that, the only things Janus could see were the objects lit by the buggies’ forward lights.
As before, the crystals that lined the canyon walls or sometimes burst from the ground threw shifting reflections and shadows that made Lira and him nervous, especially after their conversation about the triliths.
“We’ve got to go faster,” Lira said during their next stop.
“I know,” Janus answered. The ground under the dust was hard and uneven, almost like melted glass, and that made it hard to keep the buggies from swerving at any kind of speed. The trailer disconnect had triggered once—not a big deal, since they’d only been doing 50 kilometers per hour at the time—but Lira’s silence on the matter when they had to stop was almost more deafening than her former complaints. “I’ll disable the auto-disconnect for the next leg,” he said. “Let’s try to get as close to one hundred KPH as we can.”
“You’re the one hauling the trailer,” Lira said with a shrug.
Slowing us down, Janus added on her behalf, but that was fine. He was slowing them down, but they needed the supplies in the trailer to trade in Mercuria, or the Trials were going to become much more difficult. And they were both tired. They’d driven hard on the first day out of Crossroads, and even longer on the previous day in the shade of the canyon walls. The darkness protected them, but it also felt oppressive, and Janus was eager to be out in the open again.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Driving that fast, even in the wide, central canyon, required focused attention and fast reflexes. Within half an hour, the air in Janus’s suit felt muggy from the environmental system struggling with the sweat and heat he was putting out. He and Lira were still fatigued from the previous day, and there was no way for either of them to get some rest by slaving one buggy to the other, but they were at least making progress.
Fatigue was setting in, and they were getting close to their next rest break when Lira’s buggy suddenly veered to the left. “Look out!” she said, and she shot forward.
Janus whipped his head to the right to see what had alarmed her when he saw it.
It was a giant trilith leaping at his buggy!
Janus cranked the steering handles to the left and hit the accelerator, almost tipping the trailer over, expecting to feel the impact of the massive creature at any moment. He twisted in the seat, looking back in the thin light of his suit lamps, then turned back forward and had to jam the brakes to avoid running into a crystal outcrop.
The buggy stopped in a shower of dust.
A shard of the massive crystal was centimeters from his helmet visor.
“Janus? Janus!” Lira said over the comm.
“I’m okay!” Janus said.
The question was, why was he okay? With a lump in his throat, he grabbed a pry bar from the buggy and dismounted, ready to face whatever was coming, but there was nothing there. His suit lights let him follow the erratic tracks back to where he’d made the turn, and he could faintly make out the outline of the monster they’d both tried to escape.
It was still frozen there in mid-leap.
“What in the void?” he said and started walking toward it.
“Janus? What’s going on?” Lira said, and her headlights swept over him. She’d come back.
“I think…” Janus started, jogging a few steps to confirm his hunch. “Yeah, it’s what I thought.”
The giant leaping trilith was a statue, a man-made sculpture made out of canyon crystal. It was skilled work, like an oversized version of the little triliths he’d seen around Prime Dome, except a little leaner and longer, with sharp, elongated legs.
“What is that?” Lira said, pulling up next to him.
“It’s a memorial,” Janus said. He knelt in the dust in front of the carving, brushing grit off a large plaque on its pedestal. It was a list of names that took up half the plaque, with room left to add more. Oliver Cross Jameson, Mattie Crux Zeodöttir, Leo Mercy Ellenson…
“Those are Hunter names,” Lira said.
“How do you know?” Janus asked.
“They name their kids after the most accomplished parent and the route they were born on. Most of the names on that list have some version of Mercuria or Crossroads in them, although you can see some of them were born near Beta Station or as far as Saphius,” she said, pointing. “See that one with Haven as a middle name? I think that means she was close to Prometheus Base when her mother gave birth.”
Janus felt a chill run down his spine. The fact that Hunters practiced live births in the void felt ancient, primitive in the way of cave women giving birth in water, but he could understand it. They were nomads, and what safer way to physically carry a child through the void and the dust? No, what shocked him was to discover he and his family weren’t alone. There were three people on the plaque who had Haven as their middle name. In a way, these were the first Prometheans he’d “seen” in twelve years, other than Ivan, Callie, and the VI of his parents.
“We’d better get going,” Lira said.
“Yeah,” Janus said, with one last look at the seven-foot-tall status. He shook his head.
“What?” Lira asked.
Janus grinned at her, visor to visor. “I think now we know where the rumors about giant triliths come from. I bet you everyone who passes this thing gets scared out of their wits.”
“Maybe,” Lira said, unconvinced.
Janus shrugged. There were a lot of names on the plaque, but not that many. If Hunters put these memorials in enough places, that would be enough to spread the rumor among travelers who would then tell even taller tales when they reached their destinations.
By the time the tale had been told and retold, he expected the trilith of the canyon would be as tall as a building and single-handedly able to take down a dome.
***
Seven hours into that leg of the trip, eight hours until sunrise, and Janus was more exhausted than he ever remembered being. It took all his willpower to focus on the road ahead, to stop himself from telling Lira they were done and lose the day they’d gained.
He was pretty sure Lira would agree. He was coming to appreciate that, after three days of traveling together, she wasn’t going to ask him to stop, not when she knew they were only three hours from their destination.
Lira, driving about forty meters ahead of him, took the last turn on their map. From there, they should be able to follow the road back up to ground level and it would be a straight run to Mercuria.
Janus turned right and caught sight of Lira again in his headlights. She was stopped and dismounted. “What’s wrong?” he asked, pulling up alongside her.
“See for yourself,” she said, pointing. “The path is blocked.”
Janus looked ahead and swore. She was right. A major landslide had blocked the road, although at some points the boulders looked like they might be spaced far enough for a buggy to make it through.
“What do we do?” Lira asked. “Try to find another path?”
Janus felt lost. If they’d discovered the map was unreliable at the beginning of their journey, they might have spent their time looking for another path, or taken the extra day to go around. The map had indicated most of the other passages were either blocked or wouldn’t get them to the surface. They could hunt for another path blindly for days and never find one. They could go back and around, ending up four or five days behind their planned schedule. They could abandon the buggies and climb over the landslide; they’d make it to Mercuria in two to three days, carrying the day tent for shelter, and they would be on schedule but broke.
Having come so far, it felt like there were fewer workable options than if they’d never gotten the map and gone down into the Scar at all.
“Janus?” Lira asked.
“I’m going to go check it out,” he said, getting off his buggy. “There might be a way through.”
“Is that a good idea?” she asked. “You got that map off a Mercurian. She could have led us straight into an ambush.”
Janus looked at the fallen rock, and at the walls of the canyon on either side. It did look like the landslide had happened at this specific point, and recently. Could this be a trap for anyone foolish enough to buy a map off a Mercurian in a bar? “Okay,” he said, balling his fists. “Let’s turn back. If we can’t find a path back up in the next hour, we’ll take the long way around.”
“It might be too late for that,” Lira said, looking behind him.
Janus turned and saw the suit lights of men in void suits approaching them on foot. They carried long-barreled rifles pointed at the ground but ready to be used. He turned to look back the way they came, but another set of suit lights was approaching from behind.
“Get your hands in the air and step away from the buggies,” the dusters sent them on the suit-to-suit radio.
Janus raised his hands and clenched his jaw. They were trapped.