Port L’Évèque, Nineteen Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.19 Interstellar
The convoy docked at Port L’Évèque, another floating colony that served as a transshipment port at the end of Chandler’s Reach, although, unlike the City of the Bells, Janus would never have thought to call this place a monastery. From the moment the Seraphine docked with the city, Janus was assailed by a flurry of aggressive advertisements for the “many pleasures of the deep,” from recreational substances to recreational people. Some of the messages were graphic and inventive enough to make a Hunter blush.
“Sorry, everyone,” Syn said as she isolated the ship’s network, and Janus’s calm returned, if not his innocence.
“Remind me why we have to stop here?” Janus asked Lira.
“It was a condition of us taking the Chapo and the Deep Rider,” Lira said, looking harassed. “We couldn’t just take two cargo subs out of play without someone down here coming up short.”
“Right,” Janus said. “What do we do about the net noise?”
“I’d go autonomous,” Lira said. “This place is notorious for implant hacks.”
“Great,” Janus said.
He knew she was right, of course. He’d known it before he asked. He just hated the feeling of being cut off from any network or comm capability. The colorful ads had been a warning, however. Anything that could bypass the ship firewall and Syn’s added security that fast would still get slowed by a wrist comm’s personal encryption ciphers, but not indefinitely.
“Let’s go,” Lira said, her eyes dimming from implant bright to a more natural shade of Nordic blue.
Janus sighed and turned on autonomous mode, cutting himself off from the ship’s net.
The two of them headed out through crew berthing. As they reached the other end of the compartment, Janus saw that Callie was standing by her bunk talking to Matthias, and on a whim, he said, “Hey, bug. We’re heading ashore. Want to come with?”
Callie looked at him in surprise, and if he was honest, he surprised himself. “I’m not suited up,” she said.
“Don’t need to be,” Lira answered. “This place is dirty, but it’s not unsanitary.”
Janus hesitated. “I wouldn’t bet on that.”
“I was making a joke, Janus,” Lira said, rolling her eyes. “She’ll be fine. Come on, Callie. It will do you good to get off the ship.”
“You should go,” Matthias told her, giving her hand a squeeze.
“Are you sure?” Callie asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m about to go on shift anyway.”
He put a brave face on it. No one was talking about the fact that Matthias couldn’t leave the ship if he wanted to, not until they reached the Deeps.
The kid was such a damned martyr it made Janus want to knock some sense into him.
Callie turned to join them, and she noticed Janus’s balled fists. Her eyebrows shot up, but before she could ask or comment about it, Janus turned toward the door and said, “Let’s go.”
***
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Invasive malware and predatory advertisements aside, Port L’Évèque wasn’t that bad. Sure, things were openly sold there that would have been illegal on Irkalla and probably should be, but this was also a Cult world, and it seemed like most of the sins on display on the main floors were compensated for by the use of better ingredients, cybernetics, and medical nanites.
Janus could only guess because he was completely cut off from any of the usual information sources he would have, walking through an environment like this one. Connecting to the station’s network was out of the question, and scanning any of the codes or interactive displays felt even more risky. But after some initial discomfort, Janus found that most of the cultists visiting Port L’Évèque seemed to be sightseeing and exploring rather than delving into the depths of depravity.
“It’s all bark and no bite, isn’t it?” Lira said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Callie said.
Janus looked at his kid sister, eyebrow raised. “What’s your basis of comparison?”
“Mercuria, Gaffer’s Lode, Survivor’s Grace, Gamma Hab,” Callie said without hesitation. “Gamma was probably the worst. The hallucinogenics were so thick in the air, we had to wear rebreathers the whole time.”
“This was while you were spreading the data from the Promethean memory drives?” Janus asked.
Callie nodded, and Janus frowned, sucking on his lower lip.
“What?” Callie asked.
He stopped and scratched his nose before answering. “I had a conversation with the captain.”
“Oh?” Lira said, taking her attention off their surroundings to listen.
Janus told them about the captain’s theory of the “survivor’s choice,” the path that would result in the longest possible lifetime through the avoidance of uncontrolled risk.
“So what were you supposed to do?” Callie asked, crossing her arms. “Force us all out of the colony when we rebelled? Or just walk away?”
“I don’t think the captain walks away from much,” Janus said, glancing at Lira, who was listening carefully. Because it wasn’t that the Apostate didn’t take risks—his acceptance of the role of convoy leader showed that. But he approached it with the ruthlessness of a feudal dictator, whether it was executing a pair of pirate submarines or threatening the Irkallan champion who’d dared doubt him in the control room. “I’m still thinking about it, but I think it’s an extension of what I learned during my first and second Trials. I needed to know more, and I needed to act, but when I acted, I should have done so in a way that only allowed for a positive outcome.”
“You mean, I should have taken control of the colony after you were gone,” Callie said, staring at him, and Janus knew she was partially trying to provoke him, but he’d also had some time to distance himself from the hurt he’d felt in the moment.
“Maybe,” Janus said. “That would have meant losing me, most likely, and based on how things turned out, losing the colony. I can’t pretend to know how he would have done it, but by the time I realized he was against the trip, it would have been over.”
“By the same reasoning, he knew what we were going to ask him before we met him in that bar,” Lira said.
“That would explain his reaction, wouldn’t it?” Janus asked.
“It would,” Lira agreed.
“I don’t buy it,” Callie said, shoving her hands in her pockets, although some of the belligerence was gone from her stance and her tone. “I mean, the theory is nice. That’s what maintenance management is all about: dealing with problems in the order and method that minimizes the chance of a worst-case event. But it’s never perfect. People make mistakes. Parts break. You were one of the most careful people I knew back on Irkalla, and you were still involved in an airlock breach.”
Janus licked his lips, flashing back to that heart-pounding moment when the Sector Six airlock had blown, counting down the seconds to reach the wounded and the dying before they ran out of air.
“He didn’t have to, though,” Lira said, looking at Janus. “If he’d just kept his distance, or even better, done what was expected of him and no more, he never would have been imprisoned or judged by the council. I would have died, and so would other people, but Janus would have come home to you that night.”
“He would never have been an aspirant.”
Janus winced. “Uncle Ivan was going to enroll me in a year or two. I guess that’s… now.”
“Can you imagine?” Callie said, on the verge of laughing.
“All too easily,” Lira said more grimly.
Janus put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug. “No regrets. And I’m not saying I’ve wrapped my head around it or that I agree. But there’s something about how Nikandros has been ahead of us at every turn that we should be able to learn from. We could all live a very long time, but not if we don’t change how we think.”
Janus also realized something else, talking to Lira and Callie about his impromptu mentoring session with the captain: the reason the Apostate had taken such an appalling risk in using Dr. Jahangir’s research on himself and his people. The captain had known that, over time, even careful margins got impossibly thin, and so he’d taken the one step he had available to him to reduce them to zero by making himself very, very hard to kill.
“The port authority’s office should be this way,” Lira said. “Hopefully, we can just drop off the cargo, check if we need any new crew members, and move on to the next point on our route.”
Janus grinned. He was no architect—or whatever rank the Apostate had held before his faction fell from grace—but he had figured out enough about life in this universe to know that nothing was ever that easy.