Sector Six, Prime Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.10 Interstellar
With the locker room incident behind him and another full shift in front of him, Janus used the short walk back to his family’s quarters to try to clear his head. He walked with long, fast strides and the sleeves of his coveralls pushed up, trying to maintain a balance of speed and sweat. Fixing the airlock and fighting with Lira had cost him time he didn’t have, and he was mad as hell, but starting the main shift tired and grimy would only make his day miserable, sure as a clog in the recyclers would.
Most people in the dome thought the hardest thing about surviving in the void was getting enough water and breathable air, and it was true that exposure to vacuum was the fastest way to die. Likewise, the dome-city’s agronomists would boast that it was Prime Dome’s scaled biomass production facilities that allowed other dome-cities, cave habitats, and caravans to survive on their mostly barren world.
But heat was the deadliest mass murderer on the planet. Heat was the invisible threat that built up, that slowed things down and frayed tempers. You could speed up algae growth cycles or divert power to scrub excess carbon dioxide from the air, but without an atmosphere or bodies of open water, heat had to be reflected or radiated away, and that took time. It was a constant struggle against the system’s sun, against the press of the tens of thousands of human bodies living in each settlement, and that was why Janus made a point not to bring any of it into his home.
As the dome polarized like a giant helmet visor, shutting out the system primary and muting the distant stars, Janus let Lira Allencourt, Craig Bennin, and the jerk at the airlock go, radiating them back into the void to be someone else’s problem. He reached the hab building, took the stairs down to the fourth sublevel, and walked past six identical doors before coming to the apartment he shared with his little sister and uncle. He thought of Ryler’s suggestion one more time, that he should apply for a higher-level job within the maintenance division so he wouldn’t have to deal with frustrations like today, then shook his head. Ryler meant well, but ambition and resentment were both luxuries a Prometheus Base refugee couldn’t afford.
He palmed the keypad and the locking mechanism disengaged. He gently swung the door inwards. The main room combined cooking, dining, and living space, leaving one small room for his uncle to sleep in and one that Janus shared with his kid sister. His uncle was where Janus left him that morning, seated in his favorite chair with a mug of something strong in his hand. At some point during early shift, the older man had passed out, head back against the headrest, cup miraculously unspilled. Janus set his bag down and went to lift the cup from the man’s hands, but his uncle opened his left eye just a slit as he approached and said, “You’ve got dust around your boot seals.”
Janus looked down and felt his heart sink. The surface outside the dome had spent billions of years getting bombarded by the sun and broken down into particulates so fine they got into everything, even the seals of a hard suit. It wasn’t a problem if you cleaned them out, but if you tried to seal the suit with fines or, worse, ultra fines—particles even smaller than dust—in the locks, you were asking for a breach.
“It’s fine,” his uncle said, getting out of the chair, holding the mug like it was gyrostabilized. “Swap to a different set. I’ll wash them while you’re at work.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Don’t I?” his uncle said, leaning against the kitchen counter, eyes boring holes into Janus. “Hurry, now. You’ll be late.”
“Yes, uncle,” Janus said. He walked back to the room he shared with his sister, Callie, and found her sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, goggles on, hands waving like a band conductor for an orchestra only she could see. With most kids, Janus would have assumed she was playing a game with her friends. Not Callie. She’d been a quiet child and grown into an overly-serious teenager, and a top-tier student who’d been moved into Prime Dome’s best academic program on merit alone. She’s going to be so much more accomplished than her uncle and big brother. It broke his heart and made him proud enough to burst at the same time.
He waved a hand in front of her face to make sure she was fully immersed before tickling her mercilessly.
She squealed as she ripped off her goggles, and Janus laughed.
“Janus! I hate when you do that! I'm going to kick you in the shins next time you try to get me.”
“Is that any way to talk to your favorite big brother?”
“Fine. I’m going to kick you in the nuts.”
Janus grinned and ruffled her hair. “That’s my girl. You have breakfast?”
“Don’t have time. Important project, people counting on me.”
She went to put her goggles back on, but Janus grabbed them out of her hands. “Beat it, squirt, unless you want to watch me change.”
“Gross,” she said, grabbing her goggles back and stuffing them into her bag.
“Also, you can’t work hard on an empty stomach!”
She stuck her tongue out at him and closed the door behind her.
Janus pulled a clean set of coveralls from his storage locker and carefully took off and bagged the dirty ones. Once he was dressed, he made sure he brushed off the legs of the new coveralls and his boots, then headed back to the main room.
“What’s the new project?” Ivan asked Callie.
“I can’t talk about it,” Callie said around a mouthful of rehydrated mush..
“Why not?” their uncle asked.
“It’s confidential,” Callie said with the seriousness of a tenured professor instead of a fourteen-year-old kid.
Janus set the bagged coveralls in his uncle’s chair and accepted a second bowl of mush from his uncle’s hands. “Thank you.”
His uncle slapped him in the arm, although it was hard to tell if the gesture was meant to be reassuring, challenging, or forgiving by the craggy expression on the man’s face. “Do you know what your sister’s working on?”
“I’m probably not smart enough to understand it, even if I did,” Janus joked.
Callie frowned. She never liked it when he talked himself down..
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Heard you had a run-in with the lead candidate and his second,” his uncle said, taking a drink from his mug.
“What?” Callie asked.
“It was nothing,” Janus mumbled, eating a spoonful of mush.
“Aspirant candidates have a lot of pull, right before the Trials,” his uncle said. “Some might say more than they deserve.”
“It was Lira, wasn’t it?” Callie said with a teenage girl’s undisguised venom.
“She’ll be leaving for the Trials soon, anyway,” Janus said.
“Maybe she won’t,” Callie said with a sneer. “Maybe she’ll make a mistake, and die, and someone better—”
“Callie!” Janus snapped.
“And someone better will take her place!” Callie said, unashamed. “Being an aspirant is supposed to be about being careful, fixing things, and doing what’s best for the dome. You should have applied!”
Janus bit his lower lip and set his bowl down. He wiped his hands. “The Trials aren’t for people like us, Bug.” His uncle looked like he might have something to say about that, but Janus cut him off before he could speak. “You going to work a shift today?”
His uncle crossed his arms and leaned back.
Didn’t think so, Janus thought.
Then he felt bad. His uncle had saved them, pulled them out of Promethean Base and managed to get two kids across the open dust on foot, but either the trip or the ghosts of his sister, his brother-in-law, and the friends he left behind had broken him.
It was the paradox of Janus’s vanished childhood. His uncle had taught him so many small, practical things he used to do his job and stay alive, but his uncle was also the reason Janus worked two shifts. Nothing escaped Ivan’s notice except the way he was slowly drinking himself to death and losing his nephew’s respect.
“Come on, Bug. Grab your things. We’re going to be late.”
***
Janus took Callie as far as the Sector Six border before giving the kid a hug—under protest—and letting her go. It spoke to Callie’s unheard-of aptitude scores that she was allowed to move between dome sectors to go to school; it spoke to their family’s status as pariahs that they weren’t allowed to live in Sector One, where her program was and where the other prodigies’ families lived. That’s fine, Bug, Janus thought, watching her pass through the checkpoint. Prometheans don’t climb mountains to hobnob and live easy. We climb to steal fire from the gods.
Callie turned back at the last moment and waved at him, and Janus broke out into a smile as wide as the sky. Doing two shifts and swallowing a little abuse meant his kid sister wouldn’t have to, and he’d take that deal any day.
With his sister on her way, he hurried to make it to his job at the recycling plant. The streets and walkways were emptying out, and the dome had gone full dark as the sun rose, signaling the start of the day’s battle against heat buildup. The temperature had already climbed past 20°C. It would be closer to 30°C by midday, and Janus was grateful to duck inside the somewhat cooler interior of the plant when he arrived ten minutes later.
“I clocked you in,” Barry Medina, the plant manager said without looking up from his book.
“Thanks. Anything pressing?” Janus asked, grabbing a handheld terminal.
“Sorter on line three is kicking more rejects. I think it’s the lenses.”
“How much more?”
“Two percent,” Barry said, looking up from his reading.
“I’ll check,” Janus said and headed out into the plant proper to do his job.
Unlike Janus’s early-shift supervisor, Barry didn’t care about quotas because his responsibility was the overall productivity of Recycling Plant Six and only Recycling Plant Six. When Janus first started working there, it hadn’t taken Barry long to notice the machines Janus worked on broke less often, and the plant manager had summoned the freshly graduated mechanic to his office. Janus had thought he was getting fired, or sent back to school for retraining. Instead, he became the plant’s youngest quality assurance technician.
“Hey, Janus!” one of the line managers said. “Barry tell you about the sorter on line three?”
“I’m on it!” Janus said cheerfully.
Forty-five minutes later the sorter on line three was back up and running, lenses polished and nozzles cleared. Janus made a note to check the reject rate over the course of the next week to see if that fixed the problem, and he moved on.
He liked his job. It was straightforward, and while the people on the plant floor had initially balked at his promotion, they’d mostly come around to Barry’s point of view. Janus worked down his list of tasks by order of priority, taking the time each needed, knowing some of them would need to be pushed to tomorrow where they’d merge with and get sorted against the next day’s task. Sometimes he only checked the readouts; another time, he helped manually clear a shear blade jam on one of the balers because that line was shorthanded.
It didn’t make up for where he came from, but while he didn’t often get invited for drinks with his coworkers, they were almost always happy to see him down on the factory floor, and Janus felt as valued, trusted, and fulfilled as he thought he had a right to be.
By the time the middle of the shift rolled around, he was well past the morning’s events and even slightly ahead of schedule. He took a thirty-minute break to inhale some noodles and document his tasks and observations, then it was back to the factory floor for another four hours before the end of the shift.
Janus was swapping out a micro-motor on one of the robotic arms when Barry put a hand on his shoulder. “Need to see you in the office.”
“Okay,” Janus said. He handed off the task to one of the younger mechanics, making a note for the evening shift QA to check the work before the arm went back into operation, then made his way to the plant manager’s office. It was close to the end of main shift anyway. He could deal with whatever Barry needed, head home, and maybe see if Ryler wanted to come over and grab a beer and a holo in the poor part of town.
“Have a seat,” Barry said as Janus closed the door behind him.
From the slumped shoulders and tired look on his boss’s face, Janus knew this wasn’t going to be good. “What’s up, Barry?”
“I just got off the comm with station admin. You haven’t been hitting your quotas.”
Janus felt a shock run up his spine. “Is this about early shift? I told Meg—”
“Your main-shift quotas,” Barry said. “Some squint up in admin pulled up your maintenance tasks per hour and decided you were behind.”
Janus felt panic wrapping its hands around his throat. “But the lines are all running at capacity.”
“I know,” Barry said.
“PMP’s pushing eighty-seven percent, and we’re taking extra capacity from the other plants!” Janus said, his voice almost cracking. “You showed me the numbers!”
“I know what the numbers say, son,” Barry said testily, and Janus sat back. “Look, they’ve got it into their heads that we’re a great team and you’re the weak link. I tried to explain that we are a great team, and you’re a big part of that, but they only care about the tasks per hour. I’m sorry.”
Janus didn’t know what to say.
“I think it’s a timing thing,” Barry said, looking down at his clasped hands. “Some important wayfinder walked in from the dust with a bunch of Beta Station refugees. They need habs and jobs, and dome admin is just shaking things up.”
“So I’m fired because they want to shake things up?”
“I didn’t say you were fired, Janus,” Barry said, meeting his eyes. “It’s my plant; they can’t make me fire anyone. But there’s a senior QA technician in the group that was assigned to this sector, and they are making me give him your job.”
A lot of things went through Janus’s head, right then. The pay drop from QA tech to journeyman mechanic would make things tight around the hab, but he could still take care of Callie even if he had to spend more nights at home. No more booze for his uncle; maybe that would be a blessing. “I’ll make it work. Give me a couple months on the line to get my tasks per hour up, give them the numbers they want—”
“Janus,” Barry said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“I have to bust you to manual sorting. I’m sorry. It isn’t fair, and I’m going to fight it. I just can’t fight it right now.”
Hopelessness crushed the air out of Janus’s lungs.
It didn’t matter to him that manual sorting was unskilled work for mech dropouts, or that it was dirty and dangerous. Janus always did what he had to. Hell, Ryler did it for fun sometimes when he was looking for new materials to process, or maybe it was a form of worship for him. It was hard to tell with the Cult of the Survivor.
But manual sorting knocked him down an entire grade in the dome’s allotment system, and that meant…
“Go home, Janus,” Barry said gently.
Janus looked at Barry pleadingly, but there was only regret and finality in the other man’s eyes.
Callie was going to lose her scholarship.