Pasha’s Emporium, Crossroads
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.20 Interstellar
They walked back to the lobby, which had emptied out quite a bit as sunset depolarized the dome and exposed the stars. Janus and Lira found Pasha in conversation with a cowled figure.
No, not just any figure.
That was a wayfinder. He turned when the aspirants approached, revealing a grotesquely modified face. Thin wires extended out from a control box fused into his skin just above his ear and connected to another box fused just above his right eye. Another wire connected the control box to a thin frame over his eye, and a final one was grafted just above his chin. The skin around the implants was red and irritated, like they’d just been drilled in without care for the cultist’s health.
“Just as I told you, honored wayfinder, they are right here,” Pasha said with that same effusive smile he displayed earlier. Then, to them, “How did everything work out?”
“Great,” Janus started. “Lira got what we came for and sold what we needed to.”
“We even got a good deal on some replacement parts for the buggies,” Lira added, and while Janus would never have admitted it to her, it felt good to be recognized.
“Excellent,” Pasha responded. “Why don’t you two go get some much-needed rest and relaxation at your room? If you give me the parts, I’ll have my people install them for you.” He gave Lira a conspiratorial look and added, “I also gave my regrets to the buyer of your PrimeGro, because I got you a better offer.”
Lira’s eyes narrowed. “How much of a better offer?”
“Substantially better,” Pasha said with a smug smile. He swiped the file to Lira whose eyes widened.
“That is better,” Lira admitted, shaking her head.
“I know!” Pasha exclaimed. “It’s daylight robbery, I tell you! I would brag to my friends, but they wouldn’t believe me.”
Lira gave Pasha a final hug. “Thanks, Uncle Pasha. For everything.”
Pasha slapped Janus’s shoulder and was about to say something when he saw two loaders bringing a pallet in on a handcart. “No, not here!” he yelled and walked over to redirect them.
“Your uncle is an interesting guy,” Janus said.
“So is yours,” Lira said, self-consciously touching the bruise on her face.
“Congratulations on the completion of the first leg of your journey, Aspirants,” the wayfinder said, startling them. Janus had almost forgotten he was there. The cultist spoke with a rasping breath, like he was breathing with an artificial lung. “How do you fare?”
“So far so good,” Janus responded, less enthused about talking to the cultist than he was about spending time with Lira’s uncle.
“It is customary for aspirants to check in with the Cult of the Survivor at their assigned waypoints,” the wayfinder said. “We can provide counsel and tasks that will favorably impact your evaluation. It would be wise to seek us out.”
“Of course, honored wayfinder,” Lira said with a small dip of her head. “We would have sought you out before we left.”
Janus was more interested to find out how they could get ahead than sparing the cultist’s feelings. “Any requests, then? We got here early, so we’ve got time for an errand or two.”
The wayfinder looked him up and down. “Your second has already done an admirable job of demonstrating your adaptability and strength, Janus Invarian. Deception, intelligence gathering, and trade are all blessed by the Survivor, as is a strong constitution and the skill to spot a treasure in a junkyard.”
Janus swallowed. It was as if the wayfinder had been watching the two of them the whole time they were downstairs. Maybe he had, either through their suits or through the dome’s security systems.
“You may find comfort in the thought that you are neither behind nor ahead of the other aspirant teams, based on how ranking is determined,” the wayfinder wheezed.
Janus didn’t find being in the middle of the pack comforting at all when they needed to win, but the way the wayfinder phrased the comment caught Janus’s attention. “Can you tell us more about how the winner of the Trials is chosen?”
“I cannot, as we must remain impartial and not push you into unnatural patterns of behavior,” the wayfinder said, tucking his hands in his sleeves. “A bit of advice, though: do more. Find broken things and fix them. Gain strength through struggle. Your actions in this regard will be taken as acts of worship, and the Survivor will smile upon you. This is the spirit of the Trials.”
The religious mumbo-jumbo was the kind of thing Uncle Ivan would have pitched a fit over, but Janus got the idea that the cultist was trying to give them a hint without breaking the rules.
“Thank you for your advice, honored wayfinder,” Lira said, inclining her head more deeply.
The wayfinder nodded and shuffled off, breath wheezing at a steady pace.
“Did you understand what that last bit meant?” Janus asked as they headed toward their room.
Lira shook her head. “You didn’t study this? No one knows exactly how it works, but just because you finish first in the Trials doesn’t mean you automatically win. The wayfinders examine each team’s actions and evaluate their impact on the domes they visited. Strength through struggle, honorable aspirant.”
Janus snorted. The void could take the lot of them, as far as he was concerned.
The room was bigger than Janus expected, as well as clean and with quality fixtures and appliances. Janus took the second shower, and when he got out, a delicious smell had filled the room, and his mouth watered immediately. Lira was adding fresh ingredients to a flash-pot on the burner, tasting the mixture, and adding seasoning from small shakers she kept in one of her suit pouches.
There were two bowls and place settings on the table.
“You made dinner,” Janus said after a moment.
Lira raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m not sure if that was a question or a statement.”
“Neither am I,” Janus said, still not sure what to think. “I didn’t know you cooked.”
“Why wouldn’t I? Aspirants need to know how to prepare food,” Lira started. “It’s not like we have a support staff to cater to our whims.”
It was like there was a chasm between them. She thought he was surprised because she didn’t have servants to cook for her, and Janus was too embarrassed to explain he and his family had been too poor to afford anything but the premade rehydrated stuff except for celebrations or on the rare occasions he’d gone to other people’s homes. The other refugee communities had developed culinary traditions based on the availability of ingredients and what they grew themselves, and they helped each other in dozens of small ways every day. Janus and Callie had Uncle Ivan, who had apparently been training them for deprivation on purpose.
“I didn’t think anyone cooked,” Janus muttered as Lira ladled a spoonful of chunky soup into each bowl. Janus sat down, waiting for Lira to join him and trying hard not to just shovel the food into his face.
She sat across from him and said, “Thanks for waiting.”
He grunted and took his first spoonful. It was rich and meaty, like the protein supplements, but the flavor was better than most of the food he’d ever tasted, except maybe at Administrator Bennin’s in the days leading up to the Trials. There was a complexity to it that he couldn’t put his finger on, and she’d done all that in the time he was in the shower—although he’d taken a long rinse since the water was free. He was impressed with how good the food was. It was incredibly flavorful, especially considering how quickly she’d assembled it.
“Wow. This is really good,” Janus said, shaking off any misgivings he might have. She’d grown up privileged, he’d been poor, and there was nothing either of them could do about it. The best thing to do was just enjoy the food.
Both of them were quiet for a while as they ate.
“Fresh spices,” Lira said, breaking the silence. “This is actually better than anything you can get back home. Can’t beat the variety in Crossroads.”
“Where’d you learn to cook like this?” Janus asked.
Lira shrugged. “My mom. I told you she was an aspirant. She used to travel more than just during the Trials, though. Long routes, representing the dome to habitats all over Irkalla.”
“That’s a lot of time suited up, sucking down protein paste.”
Lira nodded. “Anyway, she said that after eating the same thing over and over again, day after day, the small touches were what made life livable. She’d cook for me and my dad when she was home, and she taught me, so here we are.”
Janus chuckled. “All my uncle taught me to do in the kitchen was pour a beer and reheat a premade. He wasn’t big on frills.”
“I know. He designed my training program, remember?”
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Janus grinned. “Mine, too. I guess we have that in common.”
“Dear old Ivan Invarian, bringing us both together,” Lira said. “Who would have thought?”
Speaking of Uncle Ivan, there was something else he’d meant to ask Lira about. “What did you think of the wayfinder coming to meet us?”
The sense of humor left Lira’s eyes. “About the one we met, or wayfinders in general?”
Janus shrugged.
Lira put her spoon down. “In general, I think wayfinders are useful. They made our suits, after all, and I think the advice that one gave us is accurate: that winning the Trials is about more than arriving before the other teams. I’m sure they’ll be keeping an eye on us,” she said, emphasizing that last sentence in case Janus had missed the point.
The Cult of the Survivor was effectively the sponsor of the Trials, and they deployed a staggering amount of resources during this time of year, from the grand prize to the advanced soft suits Ivan and Lira had been given. He took her words and the wayfinder showing up when he did as confirmation that the suits were being tracked and maybe recording everything they said.
He’d spent twelve years listening to Ivan tell him the cult couldn’t be trusted. He wasn’t about to start now.
They ate the rest of the meal in silence. Janus offered to clean up while Lira took some time alone, accessing the dome’s noosphere with her wrist-comm, retinal implant glowing blue. There was no way to transmit a message directly to Prime Dome, but they could send an encrypted file to one of the outbound caravans, and it would unpack and send itself when it reached the right network.
When he was done, Janus changed out of his underclothes, stripping and dressing with Lira in the room. There was nowhere to get real privacy except the toilet and they were going to be seeing and smelling each other a lot over the next month, so there was no sense being bashful about it. He pulled a retractable single bed out from the wall and lay in it.
Fifteen minutes, later Lira did the same on the other side of the room.
The meal had been nice. They hadn’t fought. Janus couldn’t quite figure Lira out, but he didn’t have a lot of experience with Primers other than Ryler, who it turned out may have been spying on him the whole time. Lira had definitely proved her value to the team, so there was that. Now they just had to get through the next days and thousands of kilometers, watch each other’s backs, and try to keep ahead of the other teams without piling on so many risks it killed them.
For now, he was grateful for a day’s sleep off the ground, clean and out of his suit, without having to worry about triliths or bandits breaching their day tent. He drafted a quick message for Callie, letting her know he was okay, and then quickly fell asleep.
***
They were on the road to Mercuria as soon as the sun slipped below the horizon. Pasha was busy talking to the other merchants during the daylight hours, and when Lira and Janus accelerated out of Crossroads, a lane had been cleared of traffic for them in the exact direction they needed to go.
“Safe travels, Aspirants!” Pasha said over the radio.
“Get some rest, old man!” Lira answered. “You must have been up all day to get the others to agree to this!”
“Money is made while others sleep!” Pasha answered, and he broke the connection.
Before long, they were clear of the caldera and speeding across the dust.
The first day of driving wasn’t that different from the route they’d taken from Prime Dome to Crossroads. They drove as fast as they could, following the tracks left by previous caravans and smaller vehicles going west and then slowly turning north. The “road” was wider than the route to Prime Dome, and more than once they had to avoid Crossroads-bound caravans that had continued rolling during the day.
They stopped after two hours to shake their legs out, drink water, and down a little protein.
“How are the new shock absorbers holding up?” Lira asked conversationally.
Janus waited for the rest of it—some mention that she hoped they were worth it, with how much he’d spent—but it never came. “Good. I know it doesn’t seem like we’re going much faster, but the parts you traded for to sell in Mercuria are heavier than the PrimeGro was. We would’ve had to go much slower if we hadn’t upgraded the trailer.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear her take offense through the tension in her voice. “That wouldn’t be a problem if you disabled the auto-disconnect—”
Janus raised his hand to stop her. “I wasn’t criticizing your choice of cargo.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised.
Thanks to their early arrival and Pasha’s efforts, they were able to get a full day’s sleep, with time left over for her to explain her trading strategy while they ate breakfast and waited for sunset. It wasn’t how Janus expected most of their stops to go. If anything, he expected them to have to make increasingly dangerous compromises between progress and prevention the more they moved forward. The margin of error would be fine and brittle indeed by the time they reached the last settlement on their route.
That was why it was important to work out the friction between them now, while it was merely annoying instead of fatal. “You explained your plan for trading between the domes this morning, and I trust you,” Janus told her. “I’m just glad I got lucky at that bar, and that Pasha’s mechanics did a good job installing them.”
Lira didn’t answer. He hoped he’d said the right thing; it’s what he would have wanted to hear.
They got back on their buggies and drove on.
For part of the second leg, Janus slaved his buggy to Lira’s and used the time to check the diagnostics on both their machines while they were running. It meant driving a little bit slower, but he found a small fault in Lira’s MFC that would have gotten worse in time, as well as some small adjustments needed to balance out his own buggy’s suspension with the change in the trailer load.
Four hours and 274 kilometers from Crossroads, he took some extra time to tune his vehicle.
Lira paced impatiently, but she didn’t complain. It felt like they’d really turned the corner on their relationship.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.
He mostly needed her to keep watch. They were still within a day’s travel of Crossroads, although they’d been pushing hard. They’d started to pass dusters and void runners on buggies and cycles during the second leg, as well as crawlers moving in both directions. The road was well traveled and cleared, minimizing the risk of a trilith chewing on their equipment, but they gave each group a wide berth. They were too far to signal for help if they ran across someone ill-intentioned.
But he understood she wanted to contribute, so he treated her the same way he would have any junior mechanic joining him on the job. “I measured the travel on the shocks based on the load, speed, and terrain we’ve been going over, and that provided me with some adjustments to make to both the buggy and the trailer that will keep the ride smooth without the risk of either of them bottoming out. You see this O-ring?” he said, pointing.
“Yes?” Lira said, leaning in.
He handed her the spanner wrench. “Turn the adjuster nut clockwise until it barely touches that ring. I’ll keep watch.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, surprised.
He smiled at her through his helmet visor. “Gotta start somewhere. Hell, maybe you can teach me a thing or two about trading while we’re out here. The more we know about what each of us does, the more we can support each other.”
Lira thought about it a moment, then nodded. She knelt by the trailer’s rear wheel and got to work.
He’d check it, Janus knew. Of course, he’d check it. But she’d said trust was earned, and he agreed with that, but they had to start somewhere.
While Lira worked and Janus watched for threats, he thought about what he’d already learned on his journey away from Prime Dome and into the dust. He thought about the differences between the Primers and Crossers, about how the Hub and the Council back home wouldn’t have allowed the untidy marketing and predatory trading that had been prevalent in Pasha’s Emporium, and about how vibrant and involved everyone had been. The whole population of Crossroads seemed to be a seething bed of inventiveness—most of it oriented toward separating travelers from their money, but that also meant understanding what they needed and at least giving the appearance of providing it.
He also thought about Pasha and the other great merchants, the ones wealthy enough to run their own facilities. Pasha had talked a big game about “cents over sentiment,” but Janus got the impression he cared deeply about Lira, about his business, and about his employees. Maybe that wasn’t how it worked in all of Crossroads, but there was something valuable there, something about taking care of each other beyond dome, district, or family that he needed to take back with him once the Trials were done.
Winning the Trials would buy Prime Dome time to make changes, but bridging the gap between him and Lira, seeing their world, and learning more about the different ways Irkallans kept the void at bay would determine if his and Lira’s home truly had a future.
A little over an hour into the third leg of the day’s journey, they left the main route and its wide, well-worn tracks and turned west again. From here on out, they were committed to traversing the Scar or having to backtrack and take the long way around.
The terrain got rougher. Gray and dark gray rocks, streaked with mineral deposits, rose out of the dust, and then the dust gave way to harder, rocky terrain that rose onto a plateau. They had to slow to 100 kilometers per hour, both because of the terrain and because their capacitors were drained and the MFCs alone couldn’t maintain a full charge. They saw signs of damaged or abandoned vehicles—nothing intact since either scavengers or triliths would strip anything clean within a day or two—as well as the occasional set of footprints heading back toward the main route.
Janus wondered if those lost dusters had found a convoy to take them on or been caught by the dawn. Of all the sights he’d seen so far, those footprints haunted him most of all.
“How long are you planning to keep us going?” Lira asked. She sounded as tired as he felt, and stiffening the suspension on his vehicle meant that the constant vibrations were hitting him even harder.
“I’d like to get down into the canyons, if we can make it. We’re going to have to go slow in there, and there’s no guarantee the map I was given is accurate. But I think that if we can make enough progress today, and take it slow and safe through the Scar tomorrow, we could cut an entire day cycle off our trip.”
She stared at him in silence, and he could tell she didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to do it, for void’s sake.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“You’re the lead aspirant,” she said. It was a reflexive statement, but he could sense she actually believed it this time. “And I trust you,” she added.
He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Thanks.” He really hoped this was the right call. He didn’t want them to be the ones leaving two sets of footprints for the next dusters to see.
***
“Survivor have mercy…” Lira said as they looked down at what the woman in Crossroads called the Scar.
The map hadn’t done it justice, or given Janus a true idea of its scale.
The Scar was a jagged wound in Irkalla’s side, a series of deep fissures and canyons that ran from north to south as far as the eye could see. Some of the passages were a kilometer wide, while others were barely wide enough for the buggies or for a duster to walk. The walks were mostly hard stone and razor-sharp crystal formations, although fine, ankle-deep dust covered the floor of some of the passages he could see.
And they were deep, some of them hundreds of meters below where they stood. There was no chance of trying to find a way across the top. Once they descended into the Scar, they would be locked in and blind to danger until they emerged from one side or the other.
“The Scar is one of the wonders of Irkalla,” Janus’s mother said as the VI self-activated. “The rock and crystal formations are unique to this specific region, because while the planet is still geologically active and retains sufficient heat for the use of geothermal reactors, the damage to the landscape is too violent, too localized, and too recent to be natural.”
Janus frowned and asked. “What else could it be?”
His mother smiled as if she was answering his question, although he knew that level of interaction was impossible beyond the VI’s initial program and that his mother had just anticipated him. “Your father and I disagree on this, but I think it was an orbital strike from some sort of energy weapon, around the time our people first settled on the planet. I don’t know if they did it because of a factional dispute, to expose the deeper strata for mining, or just for target practice. If I’m right about the capabilities of our ancestors, it raises an important question: of all the places in the galaxy they could have gone, why did they settle here, and why is there no sign of the ship that could have done this?”
Janus looked at the terrain with new eyes. Irkalla had always seemed absolute, both jailer and executioner for so many of his people. They’d lost so much in the war, the Survivor’s exodus, and the three millennia since then. For the first time, Janus saw himself not as a shipwrecked survivor clinging to an inhospitable world, but as an explorer who had decided to claim Irkalla as his own.
“It looks like some kind of creature clawed up the ground from up here, doesn’t it?” Lira finally said, crossing her arms.
“Yes,” Janus said. A giant interstellar beast with molten claws.
He grinned. He and Lira might be small, weak creatures seeking shelter below ground from the sun, but they were the descendants of dragons, and maybe one day they’d fly again.