The Borehole

Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge

4454.2.3 Interstellar

There was a ritual aspect to trekking across the surface of Lumiara. Janus walked with walking poles—what the other trekkers called wanderstöcken—both to put his full body into the motion and to warn him of patches of deep powder or unseen and deadly ice crevasses. He kept a steady five-kilometer-per-hour pace, stopping every hour and taking a longer break every four. Fury pulled the sled, happy to have something to do, and the egalitarian food supplies allowed them to push on without having to stop to fish or hunt.

There was life on this frozen planet. It was scarce, but it was there. Cult-seeded lichen formed patches on the pristine ice and snow. Shallow lakes formed under the ice in places where the planet’s unpredictable geology or human manipulation created pockets of warmth. From those building blocks came a host of hardy lifeforms, from scrub grass and tumbleweeds to rodents and amphibians, that could either bear the cold, go dormant under adverse conditions, or produce their own heat, like Fury. When he caught sight of it, either a hare darting across the snow or a shadow under the ice, Janus would go still, sometimes for minutes at a time, allowing himself to feel the wonder of those rare moments.

But while the surface of Lumiara was home to millions of humans and thousands of accidental or carefully crafted biomes, it paled against what was going on below the surface, under the sometimes kilometers-thick sheet of ice. When the loneliness of these long trips got to him, Janus would sometimes feel those cold waters beneath him, dark and turbulent, as hungry as the void and perhaps deadlier.

Soon, he promised the freezing dark. All that training, all that physical hardship, and all the sacrifices of the last years had been leading to this moment, and Janus wouldn’t stop until the threat the compartmentalists posed to his people was over.

Janus knew he was getting closer to home because it started to snow. Fat, mushy flakes fell through the early morning fog, and a light breeze blew some of them into his face. He pulled his hood up and put his goggles on. Fury snapped irritably, letting out a gout of flame that lit up the heavy air, illuminating a delicate ice spire that seemed too intricate to be natural, too alien to be sculpted.

Janus pushed on, the promise of good food and the company of family and friends, perhaps for the last time in a long time, quickening his steps.

Soon, the morning sun burned off the fog, and Janus saw the raised edge of the Borehole near the horizon, like a puckered scar, a wound the Cult had inflicted on this world.

Even after a year of living here, the Borehole was still hard for his brain to come to grips with. For reasons that escaped even the Cult’s understanding, the core of Lumiara wasn’t just liquid. It was a dark ocean with wild temperature gradients, fast currents, and shifting islands of floating ice and rock, like ice cubes swirling in a glass. Most of the Cult’s population lived under the ice sheet, which ranged from ten to twenty kilometers thick in places, but they also needed regular access to the spaceport and its flow of interplanetary resources.

In the name of efficiency, they’d used a ship-based particle beam to cut a passage a kilometer wide and twenty kilometers deep through the ice. Living there was a constant reminder of the Cult’s power and how far humanity had fallen since the days of the Second Interstellar War.

It was only three kilometers to the edge, but Janus stuck to his schedule. He fed the last of the fish to Fury, and he spent a little time chasing her and throwing snowballs for her to catch. As much as he looked forward to seeing the people in New Prometheus, he’d spent at least half of the past year traveling across the surface, and half of that with no one but Fury for company. This was also the last time in the foreseeable future he and the jungle dragon would be alone, and it was more than possible they wouldn’t make it through alive. The grief of that realization had been building in Janus for a while, but now it hit him in full, bringing tears to his eyes that froze against his cheeks. He sat there for a moment, hugging Fury to his chest and letting himself feel sad and angry for everything that had happened and was going to happen.

“Are you okay, Janus?” Anika Invarian asked. “Your cortisol level is spiking.”

The hologram of his mother showed in his retinal display as if she was crouching next to him in the snow. “I’m okay, Mom,” he said, giving Fury a kiss on the head and a vigorous rub on the side. “I just needed to get that out before the others see me.”

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“It’s okay to be sad, Janus,” his mother’s recorded image said. “Setbacks are part of what we all go through on our path to progress. I know your father and I aren’t here for you, but wherever we are, we love you very much.”

“I know,” Janus said, closing the program.

His mother and father had recorded a series of adaptive holos for him before the fall of Prometheus Base. It wasn’t a common thing to do, but while the strength of the Cult’s opposition to their research had come as a fatal surprise, life on Irkalla had always been hazardous, and his parents had wanted to make sure they took care of him and his sister, no matter what.

Part of the agony of opposing the Cult during his first Trials had been losing these recordings—the Cult had been unsure of what information he’d held, locked in his wrist comm’s hard storage, and so they’d callously removed it, taking with it two decades of stills, recordings, messages, and memories.

Part of the triumph of joining the Cult after his second Trials had been getting his wrist comm back. After all, there was no one on Lumiara he could infect with forbidden knowledge, and the secrets of Promethean ion drives were trivial compared to the AG tech he had in his boots.

Fury barked and squirmed out of his arms.

“All right, all right,” Janus said, smiling and getting to his feet. “Let’s go home, girl.”

He hooked her back up to the sled, and they walked the final kilometers to the edge of the world.

***

Janus pushed his hood back and undid the top of his jacket. The air near the Borehole was warmer—still freezing, but closer to the point where liquid water could exist on the surface. A fresh coat of snow lay on the ground—warm moisture frequently caused abnormal weather patterns, including rain at least twice a year. That was why the ground sloped up toward the edge, and it was also why he suddenly felt hot. The area around the Borehole was a haven for extremophiles. They filled every crevasse and clung to every rock. He could have spent a year studying them, logging his findings in the New Prometheus databases, and communicating with other Cult of the Survivor labs doing the same. He missed the luxury of academic research, of feeling clever for seeing things others didn’t. He missed his time in the jungle with Dr. Mbari and the Motragi research teams, as well as his small home in Cofan, but that wasn’t something he could have fixed by simply letting himself go.

A drone zipped by overhead, hovering briefly over the Borehole before descending to deliver its cargo. There were about a dozen of the black transporters coming and going from the megastructure, like bees into and out of a hive.

As he approached, the sense of scale increased until Janus felt completely dwarfed by the thing. Within two hundred meters of the edge, his eyes couldn’t take in the whole structure at once. The hole was so big it swallowed the ground two-thirds of the way to the horizon, at least in his perception. The rim of the Borehole was actually its most advanced feature, a ring of ceramic and advanced composites, layered with cooling systems, that was meant to stabilize the interface between warm, moist air from below, the cold atmosphere of the planet, and the ice. It was constantly self-monitoring and adjusting, built at an orbital scale that was seldom seen in Standard gravity.

As Janus approached it, he felt a subtle shift in the local soundscape and reacted instinctively, drawing his chem-pistol in a smooth motion and ducking into a gunslinger’s crouch.

He caught the edge of a shadow, and then the sun blinded him.

The hard muzzle of a gun jabbed him in the side. Janus got ready to turn and fight. There was never a good way to be held at gunpoint, but he’d learned enough to know how to give himself better than even odds.

“Easy there, mate,” Mick said, laughter in his voice. “You were really gonna go for it, weren’t’cha?”

Janus let out an exasperated sigh and turned to face his friend. “When are you going to grow out of this?”

“Never,” Mick said with a grin. “You like my new trick?”

“Yeah, actually,” Janus said. “What the hell was that?”

“It’s called sun ghosting. Learned it from a group of ice nomads,” Mick said, lowering his rifle. He frowned. “Speaking of ghosts, where’s—”

Fury clambered back over the rim and pounced. Mick barely had time to turn when she slammed into him from the side with her full weight. Mick took the hit on his cybernetic arm, laughing and slipping her claws as the jungle dragon tried to bite down on his shoulder. Janus smiled and watched the two of them spar, Mick bobbing and weaving in a blur like a boxer on amphetamines and Fury roaring in mock aggression. Mick finally let her catch him, wrapping his arms around the big animal and giving her a hug while Fury licked his face. “All right! I give! I give!”

Fury chirped happily.

Janus crossed his arms and shook his head.

A drone broke from the traffic pattern and zoomed over, its twin jets roaring, and Syn’s voice came in over the comm. “If you three are finished, there’s actual work to do in the colony.”

“You’re working?” Janus asked, incredulous.

Syn’s deep laughter sounded in his ears. “I didn’t say I was working. I said there was work.”

A new voice cut in, firm and business-like. It was Lira. “I’ve got work for all three of you. Get down here. And Syn? Stop hacking the surveillance drones.”

“Stop hacking the surveillance drones,” Syn repeated, then the drone flew off.

Janus looked at Mick. “Lira sounds tense.”

Mick wrinkled his nose. “Lira takes on too much, but there’s a lot to take.” He ruffled Fury’s head scales, then said. “Come on. Let’s see if she needs our help.”

Janus ran his hand through his hair. “I kinda hope she doesn’t. I could use a break before the Alignment.”

“Better think that over twice, mate. There are worse things going on in New Prometheus than a few chores from an old friend.”