Equatorial Forest, Twilight Valley
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.1.25 Interstellar
Janus, Dr. Mbari, and several of the other senior gatherers clustered around the field examination table. The creature Janus had captured was breathing steadily, purple and orange striped ribs rising and falling shallowly.
“What is it?” a senior gatherer asked.
“I have no idea,” Mbari admitted. “Janus?”
“I wonder if its scales are fire-retardant,” Janus said, tempted to reach out and touch the creature, but he did nothing of the sort. For all he knew, this thing liked the Chitimacha plants because it was poisonous, too. “Did I tell you the flames kept burning in water?”
“Only a dozen times on the way back to camp,” Mbari said, smirking.
Janus laughed. “Sorry. I guess I’m a little bit excited.”
Because Krandermore was tidally locked, only a small portion of it was inhabitable without special equipment. The Twilight Valley was the strip of land, only a couple thousand kilometers wide, where liquid water and, therefore, life could exist. Coldsiders had retained their ancestors' trappings of technology to survive in the airless and sterile night, but on the sun-side of the valley, fortunes and fame were made of zoological, biological, and chemical discoveries like this one.
Janus could see the envy on the others’ faces.
It made him suddenly feel cold. He was several hours from Cofan, far from clan law and friendly witnesses. If Dr. Mbari decided to bury him out here and take the creature for herself, no one would know.
“How are we going to write this up?” one of her senior gatherers asked.
“We?” Mbari said, raising an eyebrow at her subordinate. “Have we included Janus in the team’s finds in the past?”
The senior gatherer blushed. “No, doctor.”
“Then it’s only fair he should get the credit for something he did on his own.”
“Yes,” the man said regretfully. “It’s just… I… Yes, Dr. Mbari.”
“It’s all right to feel sad about it. This could be an important find, and it would normally belong to all of us,” Mbari said, slapping the gatherer’s back. She turned to Janus. “How would you like to proceed?”
Janus could see that, in spite of her easygoing demeanor, the statement had cost Mbari. Unlike Lira, his other teammate from Irkally, Janus was no diplomat, but he knew this was a sensitive moment. His every word and gesture would be reported to others, creating gratitude or resentment, and while Dr. Mbari had all but guaranteed his rights and his safety—to her great credit—it would be a shame to make enemies over an animal whose study might not, in the end, yield commercially viable applications.
But what Mbari had told her team members about it being an important find was also true, and Janus wasn’t going to give up a discovery of this magnitude just to make friends. “I’d appreciate it if I could borrow a specimen cage to transport it back to Cofan. It will take some time to study it, and I’d like to do that in the labs.”
“Of course,” Mbari said, hiding her disappointment much better than the others.
“There is another thing, though,” Janus said, giving her a sympathetic smile. “It’s just a hypothesis, and I wouldn’t be able to prove it on my own, but I think the environment around Cofan may be adapting to humans faster and to a greater extent than we realized.”
Mbari’s eyes widened as he explained about the Chitimacha, and about how it created an area that even research teams avoided, let alone the average Krandermoran.
“Do you think you could help me with the experimental design, and maybe with the study itself?” Janus said, finishing. He was almost certain there were other adaptations to be discovered, just as he was certain the project was too big for him to lead.
The senior members of the research team looked at each other and laughed. Any regret or resentment evaporated. Not only would the theory, if proven, have academic weight and implications for all sun-side settlements on Krandermore, but the first teams to account for the bias would reap a treasure trove of new species and materials, and that wasn’t counting the favors that could be traded in the endless shuffle of clan politics. “We’d be honored to help you, Janus Invarian,” Mbari said, and he could tell she was sincere. “We’ll need to draw up a contract, though. I want to make sure you get credited and paid for everything that comes out of this.”
“I’m the one who’s honored, Doctor,” Janus said, making sure to include all the senior gatherers in the statement. Because research teams were organized by merit rather than clan affiliation, all three of the main sun-side clans would benefit. There would always be unseen traps in a clan society, but it was as close to a no-downside deal as he could think of.
Lira would be proud.
“Coldsider?” one of the gatherers said, approaching.
“What is it?” Mbari asked, a faint look of irritation making the gatherer hesitate.
“Apologies, Doctor, but the coldsider has a call from Cofan.”
Janus frowned. He rarely got calls in the field. “I’d better get that. Could you pack up the specimen?”
“We’ll take care of it,” Mbari said. “And Janus? Thank you. You handled that as deftly as any clan member. I’ll have the contract prepared.”
“Thanks,” Janus said, already jogging toward the comm station near the camp’s parking area. He could count the number of times he’d been contacted in the field on one hand, and it had always been because Mick or Lira was in trouble. A lump formed in his throat. He couldn’t shake the feeling something terrible had happened.
He’d made some friends here, on Krandermore and in Cofan in particular, but losing Mick or Lira would crush him. They were the last pieces of Irkalla he had left.
When Janus and the others were exiled, they hadn’t just lost access to their friends and families. They’d lost the records of their lives up to that point. The wrist implants they’d carried since they were children were forcibly removed and replaced with blank ones.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Videos, stills, messages, and haptic data, their entire lives, all gone, along with the special virtual intelligence Janus’s parents had programmed for him.
That loss had been immense.
Losing Mick or Lira would be worse.
Janus was panting and hot by the time he reached the comm station. “I have a message?” he asked the operator as he neared the camp’s transmitter. Any long-range communication on the planet’s surface required one or more relays through antennas placed higher than the tree canopy.
“Patching you in now,” she said.
Janus’s wrist comm received a connection request, and he accepted it. The implant translated the digital stream into an image, projected onto his retinal implant, and Lira Allencourt appeared in front of him. “Janus? Finally. I’ve been trying to get through to you for the past twenty-minutes.”
“What’s wrong?” Janus asked, relieved and alarmed at the same time. “Is it Mick?”
“What? No, Mick is fine. I’m heading back into a meeting with the elders, but I need you to get back here as fast as you can.”
“I’m three hours away, Lira.”
“Make it two-and-half,” Lira said. “And pick Mick up along the way. He and his warrior friends have turned off their radios again.”
Lira broke the connection.
Janus had to take a few seconds to process what had just happened. There was something urgent going on back in Cofan, something that required all three of them.
He was technically the team leader, but Lira hadn’t felt like she had time to explain.
He didn’t know what the problem was or how Mick’s, Lira’s, and his separate expertises would all be required, but if Lira thought it was that important, that was good enough for him. All he needed to do was get back, and minutes mattered. “I need an ATV!” he said, running toward the motor pool.
Ten minutes later, he was bouncing down the jungle road with his travel kit and the specimen crated and strapped down behind him.
***
It was an hour’s hard driving on muddy roads to Mick’s hunting camp, but that wasn’t a problem for Janus. He was an aspirant, a winner of Irkalla’s version of the Trials. Some of the Cult of the Survivor’s priests called him an emissary, although Janus had mixed feelings about that title and its significance. They seemed to feel like they were entitled to use his team’s talents, or perhaps merely to take credit for them. It was the same title they’d used for Janus’s uncle, Ivan, and having discovered the truth of their shared pasts, Janus understood his uncle’s refusal of the title all too well, even if he struggled to forgive Ivan for what he’d done.
Feelings aside, his experiences during his first Trials meant he could hit the road tired, uncomfortable, hungry, and dehydrated and still maintain total focus while driving as fast as the vehicle could handle the road.
All that, and he could still enjoy the scenery.
The events surrounding the team’s exile had impacted each of them differently.
Janus had been taught a lesson about how precious his people and his past were. He’d kept his promise to learn as much about his new environment as possible, both the written and unwritten rules, but when they removed his wrist implant, they damaged something more fundamental: his trust in anything but the memories he could carry with him. The Cult of the Survivor liked to tell their congregations that strength came through struggle, but Janus had learned they operated by a different principle: that knowledge—especially secret knowledge—allowed the priests to shape that struggle for their purposes.
So Janus paid attention to the little things. He knew the route, the weather, the specs of the buggy he was driving, and even the brand of tires the research camp was using. The road he was on was being kept clear with a defoliant called Namman Phayak, which meant “Explorer’s Oil.” Unlike some of the longer-lasting agents, it broke down plant matter without destroying it or the underlying root structure, allowing the jungle to regrow unless another dose was reapplied. It was used for temporary research camps like this, even though it cost more, because the jungle was the clan’s treasure, and no one wanted to inadvertently destroy a promising species. Namman Phayak roads also tended to hold together better in the rain, even without a chemical binder.
All of that brought together meant Janus could drive ten kilometers per hour faster.
He found the marker for the hunting camp with twenty minutes to spare.
Janus got out of the buggy, locking it down so that if someone broke in, it still wouldn’t start.
The specimen was groggy but awake. Janus watched it through the bars of the crate’s door. He pushed a couple of insect-based protein bars through the holes in the metal carrier, and the animal looked at him suspiciously. It sniffed the lumpy brown and white paste, licked one, then wolfed both of them down so fast Janus thought it would choke. A fiery glow and curls of smoke came from its mouth.
Janus felt an electric thrill run through him. The specimen wasn’t just using fire as a defense mechanism or for hunting.
It was part of its digestive system.
It was cooking its food.
Janus racked his brain for the chemical implications. Gelatinization, protein denaturation, hydrolysis… Beyond simply improving the taste, cooking food broke complex molecules down into smaller, more digestible nutrients. Humans had spent millennia developing increasingly sophisticated ways of performing culinary chemistry, but this creature could do it organically. He wished he was back in the lab to collect and analyze samples, not stuck out here looking for Mick.
“Easy, mate,” a familiar voice said as a spear blade pressed against his throat. “I’ve warned you about watching your back.”
Of the three of them to get exiled here from Irkalla, Mick had changed the least. That was probably because the Hunter lifestyle was the most adaptable to change. He dove headfirst into the sun-sider lifestyle, spending his time with the Cofan rangers and going on long expeditions into unexplored areas.
The Krandermoran environment had almost killed him. Mick wound up unconscious and dying in the Cofan intensive care unit three times in their first month, with Janus and a team of local doctors struggling to keep him alive, all in the name of rapid integration.
That and, Janus knew, because jumping off cliffs was Mick’s idea of fun. It was how he’d lived on Irkalla, on the move and sampling everything the world had to offer, safe and unsafe, legal and less legal.
“That’s why I have you, Mick,” Janus said, slowly raising a hand to the spear haft and pushing it away before turning around.
The trailhead, which had been empty moments before, now contained a dozen sun-side rangers, camouflaged into near-invisibility, and one grinning Irkallan Hunter. Mick had the typical Hunter build: tall, lean, and muscular, like a kickboxer. “Heya, Boss.”
Mick was even paler than Janus. Hunters spent a lot of time out in the dust, traveling only at night, whereas Janus and his parents had been dome dwellers, able to get filtered sunlight on a regular basis. They were both paler than Krandermoran sun-siders. Mick had light-brown hair to Janus’s black, and he over-topped Janus by four centimeters, but Janus was a little wider across the shoulders, with hands made for tightening nuts or knocking heads. “Hey, Mick. We need to go. Lira needs us.”
“What’s in the box?” one of the rangers asked, peering at the specimen crate.
“Jungle dragon,” Janus said, making the name up on the fly. “Careful, it breathes fire.”
“It’s a little small to be a dragon,” another ranger opined. “More like a sparky chicken.”
The other rangers snickered.
Janus was about to explain that there was no such thing as a sparky chicken and how the noble jungle dragon was the mightiest of predators when one of the rangers tapped the cage with his spear tip.
The specimen, whatever its name, responded by lunging at the cage and belching a ball of fire twice the size of its body, making the hardened warrior slip and fall on his tailend.
“Knock that off!” Janus snapped at the man who’d tapped the cage. “It’s a rare specimen, and I don’t want you upsetting it!”
“Sorry, doc,” the ranger said bashfully as he got to his feet.
Mick put a hand on Janus’s shoulder. “Looks like we’ve got two fierce creatures in our midst. Not a jungle dragon, but maybe a flame dog, eh boys?”
There was a small round of cheers.
Janus sighed. The rangers Mick hung out with weren’t bad guys. They spent most of their time patrolling to remote settlements, defending them from raids or wild beasts and protecting supply convoys trying to reach them. If they came back from time to time, got drunk, and engaged in a little chest-beating, well, they’d probably earned it.
“You have a ride?” Janus asked Mick.
“Yeah, mate. Right over here.”
They spent a few minutes clasping arms and saying their goodbyes to the rangers, who were a little bummed Janus was taking Mick instead of joining them, and then the two Irkallans were on the road, driving hell for leather toward Cofan.